[caseysoftware]

I worked for a dating website a long time ago.. and it's key to understand their business model:

- If you find good matches but not great matches, you stick around.

- If you get frustrated and give up, they lose one customer.

- If you find love and get married, they lose two customers.

Which one will they optimize for?

My writeup: https://caseysoftware.com/blog/working-for-a-dating-website

[solatic]

People who have difficulty on dating apps want to find a scapegoat, so they scapegoat the app.

The truth is that dating markets are lemon markets. People who are "dateable" tend to find success quickly, and people who are "not dateable" tend to stay on the market. Hence over time, the market will be dominated by "not dateable" people. No dating app on the planet will magically make you a "dateable" person.

To find success on dating apps, you have to work on yourself first, and only afterwards make sure that work shows through both in your profile and in your texting.

Source: was on the apps, undateable for eight years (depression and low self esteem), went to therapy, after making huge changes to my life and getting to a point where I felt like things were going well in everything but being single, a month later I found my girlfriend (now two years together).

[anal_reactor]

> you have to work on yourself first

I hate this phrase because it's a generic catch-all that says nothing but shuts down any discussion. If I'm friendly, responsible, honest, not poor, do sports, learn new things, keep the house clean, then the fuck more you want. Can we admit that social dynamics have completely changed and the value of "a relationship" dropped through the floor? 200 years ago bad relationship was better than no relationship because have fun trying to farm land on your own, but nowadays it's literally more convenient to live single than to deal with the inconvenience of living with another person.

Also, personally, I'm a minority within a minority, and I'm not going to cheat the statistics even if I shower twenty times a day.

[DanOpcode]

> If I'm friendly, responsible, honest, not poor, do sports, learn new things, keep the house clean, then the fuck more you want.

I think you are describing a person who has worked on himself. Like doing sports, that's good. I think too many guys continue with their teenage hobbies like playing computer games, and that's generally not attractive to women.

Of course, there are no guarantees. There's no magic checklist that you can fulfill and be guaranteed to find a partner. But I think there's always more you can do to make yourself more attractive.

[anal_reactor]

I'm gay, so I don't care about impressing women. But besides this... I don't understand what's wrong with incorporating teenage hobbies into adult lifestyle. Sure, nobody wants to marry a mental teenager, but if I do have adult self-development hobbies, then I see no problem that next to that I'd also have teenage hobbies. I find it very sad when guys completely discard their personality just to keep wife happy.

It's just that, at current point of my life I think I'm ready for a relationship. My daily life loop is satisfactory for me, the only thing I'm missing is someone to be with.

[lucyjojo]

forsaking what you enjoy just to impress women seems extremely sad and counter-productive (do you really want to be with that woman?).

i play games with my wife and kids, life is good!

[Suppafly]

> If I'm friendly, responsible, honest, not poor, do sports, learn new things, keep the house clean, then the fuck more you want.

I know people like this, but they also are unlucky in love because they also have negative attitudes about women and life that they refuse to become more enlightened about.

[solatic]

> friendly, responsible, honest, not poor... keep the house clean

Even assuming I take you at your word, this describes a good roommate, not a good romantic partner.

> do sports, learn new things

Has negligible if any effect on romantic relationships. Both fat and stupid people still find romantic partners (and sometimes end up happy with them nonetheless).

> Then the fuck more you want

Somebody who is fun to be with, who makes me feel good, warm, and fuzzy inside, who at times makes me feel safe and at other times dares me to go farther. Somebody who is willing to go to new depths of vulnerability together, so that I can trust that they see me, the whole me, even the crummy parts, and I can see them, the whole them, even the crummy parts, and be loved and accepted nonetheless.

> The value of "a relationship" has dropped through the floor

This is transactional language. Strong, fulfilling romantic relationships are not transactional. Part of working on yourself is learning how to develop non-transactional relationships without getting hurt / getting exploited in your attempts to do so (i.e. by lemons on the market).

> more convenient to live single than to deal with the inconvenience of living with another person

I highly disagree, assuming that you find the right person to live with, which is the whole challenge. Living with another person who you enjoy living with, economically speaking, means splitting at least rent and electric bills (water bills are more linear with the number of people in the house), sometimes splitting a car payment (if you are a one-car household); when you split rent, you split the rent of the kitchen, the bathroom, the living room, and at least one bedroom, that are all shared. You eat better by cooking for two and sharing. The absolutely most economical arrangement is usually Dual-Income No Kids (DINK).

[anal_reactor]

> Somebody who is fun to be with, who makes me feel good, warm, and fuzzy inside, who at times makes me feel safe and at other times dares me to go farther. Somebody who is willing to go to new depths of vulnerability together, so that I can trust that they see me, the whole me, even the crummy parts, and I can see them, the whole them, even the crummy parts, and be loved and accepted nonetheless.

Cool. If I had stated that I am like this, then someone else would've complained that this is overly romantic view and in reality a relationship is built with someone who can help with boring everyday tasks like doing the laundry or watching the kids. The point is, even if I were Jesus Christ himself, someone would find a flaw that makes me undateable in their opinion.

> This is transactional language.

Because all relationships are transactional. Welcome to adulthood. I don't really have time to argue with someone who still believes in Santa Claus.

> Living with another person who you enjoy living with, economically speaking, means splitting at least rent and electric bills (water bills are more linear with the number of people in the house), sometimes splitting a car payment (if you are a one-car household); when you split rent, you split the rent of the kitchen, the bathroom, the living room, and at least one bedroom, that are all shared. You eat better by cooking for two and sharing.

It's strange to me that you tell me not to be transactional, but then you point to money as an example of an advantage of being in a relationship, not emotional support. Also, there's a huge difference between "without a relationship, I'll literally starve to death" and "without a relationship, I'll go on holiday once a year instead of twice a year".

Something tells me that your view of relationships is incoherent at best.

[solatic]

> The point is, even if I were Jesus Christ himself, someone would find a flaw that makes me undateable in their opinion.

Well yeah, Christ isn't really dateable because he would never be able to be vulnerable with you (after all, if he died for your sins, you can't really repay the favor, can you?). People want to take celebrities to bed, they don't want to date them. It's a different kind of relationship - more shallow.

But more to the point, a flaw is not what makes somebody undateable. We all have flaws. I have flaws. My partner has flaws. Some kinds of flaws make people undateable, others do not.

> Someone who still believes in Santa Claus

I mean, my partner makes me happier than Santa Claus ever did, and I don't have to wait until Christmas for her to pay me a visit, so....

> point to money as an example of an advantage of being in a relationship, not emotional support

Emotional support was literally the first example I gave ("feel good, warm, and fuzzy inside"). I added the economic argument to address your framing. The emotional aspect is the #1 most important reason and I would be in my relationship for that reason alone, even without any economic benefits; the economic benefits are a silver lining and insufficient on their own to justify a relationship. But no, I'm not going to pretend that the silver lining doesn't exist.

[roenxi]

> If you find good matches but not great matches, you stick around.

I dunno, I have difficulty seeing how the dating sites could singlehandedly pull that off in the average case without the site users really leaning in to help. It would seem to run into the basic reality that men and women historically pick the best match from a fairly small pool of people. A dating sites can't do worse than that even if they're trying. If people are willing to use the same standards as all their ancestors then they'd pair off quickly.

It seems more likely that there is just a natural dead-sea effect because of that where the people on the sites over the long term are not the sort of people you'd settle down with, and there is also this subtle idea that the dating site is there to find someone a perfect match (probably doesn't exist to start with). Those are design issues that go a lot deeper than any algorithm the sites might be using.

[chongli]

That's because "matches" are the wrong criterion to look at. In aggregate, matches don't matter. What matters is the population of marriageable (or otherwise amenable to long-term relationships) people. And that's what the dating app calculus works against. Every time 2 marriageable people get together, they remove themselves from the pool. If there is not a significant influx of new marriageable people then over time the marriageability of the pool will decline. As it drops, the concentration of "serial daters" goes up.

In a high concentration of serial daters, no one wants to pair off because there isn't anyone worth pairing off with around.

[Retric]

> If there is not a significant influx of new marriageable people then over time the marriageability of the pool will decline

That seems to be extremely unlikely, people have finite lifespans and are only in the marriage pool for a small fraction of that. More importantly your website could easily be targeted to an even smaller pool say 25-45 and ignoring deaths and divorce your already ~10% turnover per year if you own 100% of the market. Actual numbers depends on what percentage of the pool starts married, becomes a widow etc but their’s plenty of new people to make up for any couples. Further, happily married couples are great advertising.

[mahirsaid]

1 The number of people using these apps. 2. The age group using the apps 3. the type of people using the apps 4. the culture that it has replaced and infiltrated 5 It is the social norm by now to be asked if your on TiXXXr or some other app

The modern interaction have eroded, it is awkward or weird to be approached in public, every middle aged woman or elderly woman has her purse on while shopping at a grocery store, locking the car 6 times and looking back while doing it as if its a James Bond movie. I live in middle class neighborhood and this is the things i see on a daily bases. it is sad.

[crazygringo]

> Every time 2 marriageable people get together, they remove themselves from the pool. If there is not a significant influx of new marriageable people

But there is. It's all the people aging into the dating apps. That's how it works. The rate of people leaving is balanced by new people arriving.

[chongli]

No, they aren't. If you're in your 40s you aren't looking to date people in their 20s. Where's the influx of other people in their 40s to date?

[echelon]

> If you're in your 40s you aren't looking to date people in their 20s.

My building is full of divorced 40-somethings dating younger. You see it all over media too. Leonardo DiCaprio is famous for this, and he's hardly the only one.

Women date younger too. My wife's TikTok is full of women empowerment videos; the number of videos on her feed that talk about this is not inconsequential.

Plenty of people to date.

[crazygringo]

What do you mean? From recently divorced people, of course, if you want to look at that age bracket. But it's the same principle.

[wojciii]

Younger women wanting older mature partners is as old as time.

There is even a subgenre of romance writing with this as a theme .. age gap.

[kelipso]

But where’s the growth?

[imiric]

It's a truly sad state of affairs that human relationships are reduced to this clinical technobabble.

Technology was promised to solve our problems, yet it has created so many more.

[arjie]

It's just a reinforcement loop where the more of something you have the more it accelerates. It happens in many places: bank runs (as soon as people start taking money out, more start doing so), the dead sea effect (where the best people leave and people start leaving as the median quality of coworker drops), hiring (where the more capable you are the more likely you are to get hired, so it gets harder and harder to hire the later you are to the game - most obvious with when you're interviewing interns or whatever), and so on.

[crazygringo]

This assumes that dating sites are able to give everyone great matches, but are somehow holding them back.

That's not the case. They don't have much idea at all who you're going to hit it off with. And most in person first dates don't lead to second dates, much less leaving the site.

So no. The reality is that dating sites really are trying to give you the best matches, but it's just a numbers game. So they make money on the numbers -- to see more profiles or send more messages you need to pay more.

That's all it is.

Because if they really could reliably make high-quality matches all the time, they could charge $$$$$ for that and make much more money in the end. But they don't, because the algorithm just doesn't exist.

[Dr_Birdbrain]

I don’t work at a dating company, but I do work in machine learning applications.

My best guess is this: they are not optimizing for good vs great matches, and they are probably not even building a model of what that would even mean, not even trying to represent the concept in their algorithms.

Most likely they are optimizing for one or more metrics that are easy to measure and hence optimize, and these metrics have the side effect of producing an excitement for the user without actually pairing them up.

Example metrics: - time spent on the site

- times they “swipe right” or whatever

- messages sent

- money spent

[Onavo]

But the end result is effectively the same. If you throw in the constraints of what GP mentioned about customer retention, at the Pareto frontier it boils down to the same optimization, just that instead of manually optimizing the specific variables they become latent variables. There is no difference in the resultant enshittification.

[crazygringo]

No, it's precisely the opposite.

If they're optimizing for engagement (the same as Netflix and everyone else), that comes from the the number of active conversations you wind up having. If you're swiping a ton but matches never message you, you'll give up and try another app -- that's not engagement. The more engagement you have from real back-and-forth messages (not spam), the more real-life dates you go on (if you're doing it right). And the more people you meet, the more likely you are to leave.

It's not "enshittified", dating is just hard. People are picky and it's difficult to get a good read on people from just their online profiles. The dating apps just want to keep you engaged and spending money. They don't need to make finding matches harder because they're worried you'll leave -- finding matches is hard enough to begin with. Trying to make it harder is the least of their concerns. They're trying to give you as good of a service as possible, while getting you to pay. So they limit numbers of matches to get you to pay. They're not limiting quality of matches.

[smelendez]

I’ve wondered about this. Presumably they have some idea of who you will initially match with?

Maybe they have enough data to say things like “when someone like user x matches someone like user y, they are relatively likely to both stop using the app within a month?” But that has to be so noisy.

[xigoi]

> This assumes that dating sites are able to give everyone great matches, but are somehow holding them back.

From what I’ve heard, OkCupid used to be really good at finding compatible people, then it got deliberately nerfed when sold to Match Group.

[crazygringo]

It's not true. OkC gave the appearance of being really good at finding compatible people, because people would fill out lengthy text profiles, and answer hundreds of survey questions, and you'd get a match score like 85% or 97%.

But if you actually used it, the reality was that a match on paper says next to nothing about chemistry. And overlapping interests or survey questions don't say anything about personality. Except for a few dealbreakers like gender, age range, religion, etc., they didn't actually tell you much.

So OkC switched to prioritizing swiping on photos shortly after Tinder exploded, simply because they're the most effective thing there is for gauging chemistry. At the end of the day, it's way better than the supposed "match score" based on survey questions, or reading lengthy profiles. Not because they were bought by Match, but because it worked better at finding matches.

[y0eswddl]

I thought getting bought by the Tinder people is when OkC became more like Tinder.

And OkC was the best at finding people I'd at the very least be friends with - which is foundational to me anyway. And Hinge loves hiding those profiles behind roses.

[crazygringo]

Its switch to a swiping interface didn't happen until a couple years after Match bought it. And everything became like Tinder, not just Match apps. Because it genuinely worked better.

And yeah I can totally see how the long profiles could be useful for finding friends. But that's not what the site was ever primarily meant for.

The reality is that OkC basically started out for grad students in Brooklyn to be able to find each other, the kind of person who loves writing and reading profiles. But that's not most people, and so as they expanded across the country they shifted to the format that worked better for most people.

[Xeago]

What about an alternative business model, pay-per-date? There's an application in NL that charges €7.50 to arrange a dinner, disallowing chat until 2 hours before the arranged date for practicalities. They partner with restaurants and you each get a 'free' (you paid for it..) drink; but with the commitment that your date also paid for it and will therefore show up.

This removes a lot of the meat-grading and endless swiping; with the platform prompting you why you're not working to scheduling your existing matches. Whilst I have no experience with the absence of any scheduled matches, this gives the platform insight into whether you're a worthy date (remember, each date is profit!).

One date on tinder/hinge/bumble in a 5+ years to a finding my partner in a few months. Paying for the actual date experience was so much less and so much more fun than the footing the subscription on the other platforms - even accounting for the cost of food.

[bradlys]

This exists outside NL now too. However, it’s possibly the most shallow app possible. You know literally nothing about the individual except what they look like. For a country like NL where there’s high homogeneity, probably works out. For the US, this is a disaster.

In the US, you’d only get matched if you were a hot guy. It was more brutal than tinder, hinge, etc. Women in the US aren’t gonna spend a single cent on a guy unless he’s mega hot.

[Suppafly]

>For a country like NL where there’s high homogeneity, probably works out.

Except there is also a way higher probability of being related to a random person there.

[samrus]

This is really interesting. The platform's incentive in engineered more towards finding you a match than to keeping you looking

I guess this is still corruptable. The paltform could make more money by getting you matches thay look good but dont work out. But id imagine thatll only be a problem once they scale and ROI becomes a larger priority

[anal_reactor]

Can you tell me more about it? I live in NL and I'd be curious to try it

[quantummagic]

That doesn't account for the good-will and word-of-mouth generated from any successful matches, which presumably could lead to many more customers than those lost due to marriage.

[raincole]

Very anecdotal, but in my experience people have no attachment to or enthusiasm for dating apps. I've heard (acquainted) couples say the met on dating apps. No one ever said which ones.

[rkomorn]

My counter anecdote would be that almost every time I mention my spouse and I met on a dating app, people ask me which one.

Edit: people ask me which app, not which spouse.

[hobs]

I think the difference is are they people asking in a relationship or not - asking which app is categorically asking where they can find someone to hook up with.

[rkomorn]

Or it's curiosity (genuine or polite). Maybe, for some people it tips the scale into trying the app either because they were already thinking about trying some/any app, or switching away from their current one.

I don't know if anyone who's asked me has started using the app as a result, but I think it (anecdotally, again) supports an idea that a successful results for one app organically helps its name recognition.

Edit: unless you meant the difference was between people asking which app vs which spouse.

[hobs]

No, you understood me exactly as I meant it - which app. I met a partner of five years on the apps and people often asked how we met but they never asked which app (Tinder) - we actually saw each other on multiple apps but she did not respond on Bumble because it forced her to send the first message, which I thought was interesting feedback.

[xigoi]

It doesn’t matter which one because they’re all owned by a single company and converging toward each other.

[dpe82]

That's a very difficult metric to measure whereas "did this user return and continue paying" is easier. The tyranny of metrics in action.

[samrus]

Man i hate metrics sometimes. Important things that are hard to measure are just left by the wayside

[bawolff]

I feel like that kind of word of mouth is not enough to compensate. Like how many customers is word of one sucessful match expected to attract?

[JambalayaJimbo]

“I met my husband on hinge” is something that gets people to download the app right away. I’ve seen it happen tons of times

[derektank]

I mean, one wedding can draw in over a hundred people, and the specific dating app in question gets name dropped not infrequently. The last wedding I went to, Hinge was mentioned in at least one of the speeches.

[smelendez]

I feel like dating apps almost exclusively take off via word of mouth. It doesn’t have to be marriage, though, just people finding matches worth meeting.

Almost every dating app is scammy, buggy, heavily paywalled, and barely used. If you see an ad for a dating app, it’s usually in that category.

[bitshiftfaced]

Pie in the sky idea: users sign up and deposit to an escrow. If after x years, the user has been married to another user on the site for 1 year without being divorced, the matching site receives the funds. Otherwise, the user receives their funds back.

Might also work with using the users' registered home addresses instead of marriage. There are ways to game it and ways to make it less game able, but you get the idea.

[dang]

There was a thread about that one:

Working for a Dating Website (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34368601 - Jan 2023 (196 comments)

[t-writescode]

It’s really disappointing because, a human matchmaker, on the other hand, *does* optimize for “losing 2 customers”. Wouldn’t it be way better for the company’s long-term-health if they charged an appropriate price for making, actually, great connections?

“I found my wife on FindLove” is one hell of a marketing campaign for *future* sales. It’s not like people never break up, and it’s not like people don’t continually enter the dating market or move or whatever.

[ergocoder]

Number 3.

Imagine if you can advertise that 50% of the matches on your app leads to marriage.

[hikkerl]

You might found out the hard way that a lot of people say they want that, but very much want to avoid it.

The main allure of these apps to young women is all the attention from far more attractive men (relatively). Take that away - show her men who might be her "equal" in terms of marriageability, men who might be willing to commit to her - and your service will soon be dismissed and abandoned for only showing ugly men.

You need to sell the fantasy, sell the delusion. Sell hope. The reality hits too hard.

[pwdisswordfishy]

Like, lying? You can already do that.