Ask HN: Why don't we bring back old school OkCupid? Trademark issues aside... why do we do this swipe culture crap? Old school OkCupud was darkly beautiful because it told you your best match was -- who cares if they're a mafia princess or work down at the cloud factory or simply have other suitors ;-) What is stopping someone, aside from patents, from making a match based dating site to compete with the current market? |
2. The more work you ask your users to do up front, (e.g. answering a bunch of survey questions, taking high quality photos, paying up front) the fewer highly desirable people you'll have, because they can easily find people wherever they go without doing all that work.
3. Swiping is more fun (more addictive) than answering survey questions. OKCupid switched to swiping when A/B testing showed that swiping retained people better than survey questions.
I get that this is true for social networks in general, like messaging platforms, there's a first mover and network effect.
However for dating apps specifically, there is not truly a network effect, all you need to find is one person, and for monogamous relationships (which incidentally are more common among heterosexual couples, whereas Tinder and its descendants, coming from grindr heritage, tend against) it's even more true, as in the ideal scenario each user finds one other user, there's not a huge amount of network interaction.
I also think that both in the general and specific course, there's a lot of incentives for niches, subcultures, alternative cultures, often times part of a culture is to avoid the monotonizing mainstream tropes and memes.
Describing everyone who isn't straight as "tending against monogamy" is bigotry. I'm aware that there's a 0.1% PP difference or whatever -- still absurd.
I met my wife on OkC in 2006, years before the Match acquisition. I have long been furious about what Match did to the site after they bought it in 2011, and have long fantasized about creating something that could return to what it offered. Problem is, I don't think you could do it.
OkCupid in its heyday was a product of the golden age of the web, when social networking was new. It thrived because it predated doom scrolling, so taking quizzes and answering surveys was still a fun way to use the web. Now we're in a post-twitter landscape, where dopamine comes from a flick of a finger.
OkC's forums were one of the first mainstream online spaces for conversations about sexuality and non-monogamy. That role has now been subsumed by subreddits and facebook groups.
When OkC was independent, the majority of moderation involved keeping things pg-13 and enforcing the terms of use. You could crowd-source it all right within the site itself. Today you have AI agent swarms bombarding any site with a userbase, just hoping to get eyeballs. You have age verification laws, payment gateways that will stop processing if they get even a whiff that sex workers might be using your site to advertise, and bigots who will DDOS you if you dare to cater to the needs of minorities.
And all that to wade into a battle with a billion dollar juggernaut.
"Hi, I'm looking for someone in my area age [x-y], has a professional role.."
"I have Claire on my list. She's X years old, works as an accountant, and her requirements seem similar to yours. Shall I ping her and see what she thinks?"
Wow, this thread blew up -- I think you hit on the core issue, and one that I hadn't thought enough about. Moderation doesn't scale and is very difficult.
>You have age verification laws, payment gateways that will stop processing if they get even a whiff that sex workers might be using your site to advertise, and bigots who will DDOS you
I don't believe you on the sex worker part -- I think I went on a few "dates" where folks were being polite because I didn't understand some of the language and phrasing used in their profiles. (Also sex worker is a broad term, and dancers camgirls etc want to find true love too.)
It can be hard, dating in a big city like SF. And I probably had a "garbage in, garbage out" experience with the site since I lied and said I was straight and some people filter "the straights" out.
The twenty aughts were incredibly homophobic, and if you're a 2 on the kinsey scale -- someone who only wants to hook up and not date the same sex -- it was a lot simpler to just not bring it up because a lot of people will drop ten twenty match points if you admit you've had sex with a man while fronting as progressive.
Finally, since some of the language and phrasing I see you using reminds me of internal Google mailing lists folks have given me a peek at, I'd like to say here, in public, that I went on a lot of dates in the Bay Area with extremely privileged people who don't seem to get that on a long enough timeline if you're scared shitless of my hacking skills on a date but doubt me in the interview room, that's going to be radicalizing... a persistent pattern of being told if I won't slam a baby into someone they won't accurately attest to my skills, a persistent pattern of being gatekept into precarity that did not make me feel like I had any allies or friends in the technology space and I was grateful SF had a thriving arts scene to keep me sane.
Anyways, the world is darker -- I got trolled at one point when I reactivated OKC. Like, legit "I'm not even sure if this is a real person" level troll, something I never used to encounter online dating. (Woman said she wants a man who loves her like she loves Bibi, splits her time between Israel, and... has no idea what the black flag movement is? Felt like I was being baited into going off on someone who might not really exist.)
>bigots who will DDOS you if you dare to cater to the needs of minorities.
I've had the sites hosting essays about my childhood DDoSed as I was shopping around a sequel -- there's a war going on out there to shape our media landscape that the normies don't see or sense.
I'm guessing you're not a fetlife user, then? They have had repeated issues with keeping a payment gateway, since mastercard keeps yanking service due to sex workers advertising on the site.
Did you ever use craigslists personal ads? The ones they were forced to remove after FOSTA passed?
https://www.vice.com/en/article/craigslist-personal-ads-sest...
FOSTA/SESTA make it extremely dangerous to operate a personals site in the US. The bills made content providers directly liable.
https://uslawexplained.com/sesta_fosta#the_anatomy_of_sesta-...
for example: ok cupid and tinder, during the times that christian rudder was blogging about them, never reported on the actual ratio of active male to active female users. this made it impossible to do any comparisons over time, it's like reporting only numerators in the absence of denominators.
a second example: when tinder's 2018 interracial dating stats were compared to okcupid's 2011 stats, there was no change, despite real preferences having shown that something like 40 percentage points more people were comfortable with non-same-race dating over that decade. rudder kind of failed the obvious interpretation, that the apps and/or data collection were broken, and instead talked about some conspiracy of the surveys being wrong.
i think there was a lot of other stuff broken with it.
Funny thing, 12 years later I met my wife on the zombified corpse of cupid. So... go figure.
Must have been awkward. Or were you in an open marriage at the time?
You can, however, put pretty people on the app for them to swipe left or right, and that drives people way more than Doing work to get a match. Unfortunate but true. So the people who opt in to this difficult end are not enough to drive the platform anyways. At least, it could never be anything like when You and I used it ages ago, when everyone was down for the cause (and had the attention span for it too)
I also think we've lost the ability to do things like man up and ask out the barista knowing full well you're switching coffee shops for at least six months if you read that one wrong... when I was like, 20, I used apps because I didn't feel capable of just... talking to people. The MRA stuff is insane, but there's something to be said for being able to ask for what you want.
If The Match Group is a steady supplier of startup exits in this space, that should incentivise more people to start. So we should see more people trying to resurrect old school OKCupid, not fewer.
Though I suspect the answer isn't that people aren't trying, but that these trials don't succeed enough for OP to notice.
For users, these apps exiting by selling to Match is a bad thing. I’d want an app with a very stubborn founder who hates The Match Group and wants to take them down by making a better product. Anyone starting with an exit in mind has already failed in my book.
Online dating today is far too mainstream for those qualities to remain. Any new dating platform that gains enough popularity to be useful will be quickly flooded with less-differentiated "normies" that dilute any quality in the platform's demographic, and the "optimizers" who game the platform at the cost of other users' experience.
This leads to difficulties running a dating site because women will only say yes to 9/10 or better men, but men will message anyone with a pulse which in turn inflates female expectations.
Many women only ever join dating sites as an ego boost, with no intention to actually go on dates.
I had the idea that the way this could work is a totally automated match making system akin to Uber where you are penalised for not accepting matches made by the system. You don’t have to get married or anything, but if you don’t both turn up at the same GPS time space coordinates it counts against you.
Similarly, the system should require an up front ~$50 fee from both sexes per date. You don’t get it back if you stand up a date.
Etc…
It would be very hard to bootstrap, but once going it would produce many more long term partnerships than “swipe right” style apps.
The only exception I’ve seen work is marriage-focused apps and services. This may be very India-specific, but the dating market felt far more balanced and serious in the matrimony space, provided you’re comfortable being evaluated on things like salary and eating preferences.
But the main problem with the dating apps is the business model. Their job is to help you find love, but if you find love you delete the app and they don’t make any more money. So they’re incentivized to keep you single forever. I don’t believe Hinge at all when they say they want you to delete their app as quickly as possible.
I think you vastly overestimate the "interest" a swipe represents. A significant number of people swipe out of boredom and a lot of swipes are mistakes.
One of the problems with OKCupid was that they never got the tests to be very predictive in matchmaking. An AI matchmaker could simultaneously be shopping every member of a site to every other member, devising and administering and evaluating the effectiveness of tests itself, and acting as a go-between before people wanted to make direct contact. The main thing is that it wouldn't be a matter of seeing a "match percentage" (which often led to disappointment because sometimes he just likes blondes and she just likes tall guys) but something more opaque and optimizing, responsive to feedback.
Likewise with facebook, an AI sales matchmaker could be given accounts to your messageboard, discord, mastodon instance, etc., follow "thing wanted" and "thing for sale" threads and conversations, and initiate and mediate contact between likely matches (across different points of contact.) The fantasy about this is that it gets the commissions down to 4% again - I think ebay is pushing 15% at least, for doing less than it ever did. Ebay has also figured out its format fairly rigidly, where an AI matchmaker could be more flexible and interactive - ferrying and even anticipating requests for more info.
AI employment matchmakers have to be around already.
I've been expecting to see some of this stuff pop up, and have been surprised not to have.
You can build it and they might come but they will leave and never come back if they aren't seeing people to match with.
Demand.
Old-school dating was like cocaine and the swiping-oriented apps are crack. It doesn't mean there would be no demand for an old-school OKC clone but it's a niche play and given Match Group's dominance, the capital you'd need to invest to compete would be significant.
There are hundreds (thousands?) of dating sites. The problem isn't the technology, it's the fact it's a two sided market place, and cold starts are hard for two sided marketplaces.
I much prefer the swiping apps to something that tries to capture the essence of me in a survey.
With how easy it is to build apps now, is it really unreasonable to bring the old one back in a simple/cheap/sustainable way, that shields it off of being bought by those nightmare data brokers?
I would say that this points to the real issues: that OkCupid was something one did on their desktop at home while Tinder sold itself as something one does for fun at the bar, and that most people are laser-focused on looks in detriment of everything else. Last time I used Bumble (which was supposed to be "deeper" than Tinder) I'd yell in frustration, scrolling profile after profile without even the tiniest bit of information, eventually reaching the conclusion that people just don't want to read or write profiles.
A new OkCupid would have to position itself as the "eat your vegetables" alternative in a world full of candy. There is a market for that, sure, but it will remain a niche at best.
We were only one year out of the Bush administration. I got a lot of lectures on third way neoliberalism from women who in the same age bracket who today are all stone cold socialists.
Yet another problem is churn. If people find a life partner they drop off the site, and you constantly have to find new users to replace them. This is one way a dating site is fundamentally different from e.g. Facebook. As a result, some of the less-scrupulous sites purposely make it less likely that you will see people who seem like great matches, or they interfere with your ability to message those people, just to keep you using the site longer.
Jump-starting the initial chicken/egg issue in an ethical way is AFAIK an unsolved problem. In the post-OKC era, Bumble is the only one I know of that semi-succeeded because they made it woman-centric from the start.
Finally (yeah, I've thought about this a lot), the modern mobile app-only approach can be a distinct turnoff for people like me. Mobile apps make it difficult to write much text about yourself, which was something OKC encouraged. Apps also present a safety issue: Apps often require location permissions, which means employees of the site can stalk women. (This has happened.) There's no good reason dating apps should require location permission, but most do for the same reason most apps of any kind do: Location gives the site owner personal info they can sell to advertisers. All that having been said, the vast majority of the market probably prefers mobile apps to web sites.
The whole space seems like a cesspool of bootstrapping problems coupled with extreme incentives for unethical behavior. Sorry if I sound pessimistic but you asked what's stopping this from happening. This is my take.
Similarly, the system should require an up front ~$50 fee from both sexes per date. You don’t get it back if you stand up a date."
No woman alive would agree to this.
And, I'm sure there are women who sign up for dating apps for an ego boost and that's why they don't reply, but most are just overwhelmed by the shotgun approach some men take and end up not taking any of their responses seriously. Women often quit dating apps because of bad experiences, they're not going to agree to a date where they don't get to do their own vetting of the person they're meeting.
That’s the whole point of this approach — women don’t get drowned in spam from men.
Instead it’s the equivalent of a trusted friend or relative setting you up with someone they know will suit you.
Evidence is that that works out better.
It was possible to game because it didn't matter as much how many people swiped right on you total. There were ways to tell who liked you ahead of time, even before that became a paid feature. I got myself to the top. All the other guys in those slots were 6'4" gigachad athletes/lumberjacks.
Penalized for not matching with what you say you want to match with.
Charged $ for not appearing for a date you had already agreed to.
The tinder strategy is simple. Sign up, make profile, swipe, stop, come back in a week. Then upgrade with in app purchase, hustle to get 2-3 contacts, and churn the subscription. Repeat if needed with a different app and rotate as needed.
You’ll get a date with this method and the rest is up to you.
Look around, hot girls are with toad looking guys all of the time. You need to manipulate the platform so you are front and center.
Is this a SF thing?
I'm maybe a 7/10 and I've never had trouble getting dates in any city I've lived in or traveled through. I just put some effort into sound interesting, make sure my pics are the best I can find and it's fine.
But I've never tried dating in SF and I've heard the gender balance can make it harder?
Maybe ranking people like that is why you struggle, and not your looks?
Sadly I think a lot of men have untreated eating disorders and body dysmorphia.
On Tinder and some other sites, it's unclear whether it's for hookups or dating. This led to some awkward dates for me back when I was single.
To say nothing of how you would be excoriated in the media the first time a woman was assaulted and reported that she had bad vibes but felt pressured into it by your app. And that's if you didn't just create the perfect serial killer pipeline. This is literally the worst PR nightmare of an idea I've heard in my entire life. And, just, you know, bad from an actual human perspective too.
I've often heard this sentiment, but I'm very skeptical. Firstly, most users in my experience seem to prefer casual relationships even if that's not what their profile indicates. Dating apps are also one of the highest vectors for cheating today, and one man even confessed to me on our second date that he has a wife in Rajasthan.
But I think the fact that the major apps' user bases all grow over time indicates they have a naturally healthy replacement rate. People turn 18 every day and desire a partner. People break up every day, etc.
Bumble did this to Tinder. Coffee Meets Bagel is currently trying to do it to Bumble.
Yes, I didn't argue against that!
I said that Match Group reliably buying upstarts would make it easy to found and fund these upstarts.
> Every site requires enough people using it to make it worthwhile.
You can solve user acquisition via VC money; which you could get relatively easily, if Match Group were to reliably buy upstarts.
> Anyone starting with an exit in mind has already failed in my book.
I am trying to work out why we aren't seeing more startups in this space (VC-funded or otherwise). That question is independent of whether we think they are morally worthy.
I switched to Tinder and its clones back then. It was so much simpler and actually led to matches. It's not even shallow really; there is a bio, which is already more than you see meeting someone IRL. Every app that tried to "make it more wholesome" or whatever just made it worse, even though I was only using those for serious dating.
Perfectly normal photos, kind of thing you'd have as a stock photo on your lab group's page.
Had to tell her sorry but it's just how it is and felt really sad for her.
(Sadly, that one is anonymized because it happened more than once.)
This is true in almost all species, as there is an evolutionary benefit for males to mate in excess of one partner, as each subsequent mate increases the chance and amount of offspring. Whereas females have little benefit to mating in excess of 1 partner, as she cannot have more than 1 child in that period.
So if anything I would be sexist against males (of any species)? Or sexist against women? It depends on whether you consider monogamy virtuous or not. Or maybe pointing out any difference, even if morally neutral, between two group of people is enough to be a bigot, in which case I would avoid speaking about protected classes of people, which doesn't sound great.
I don't know what the rules for bigotry are, (but I know it when I see it). But I'd dare say that even pointing out negatives of a protected class can be fine. If we are talking about basketball and I point out that the Japanese team is too short, that's not bigotry. That a comment is tangential instead of central to an argument is probably also relevant.
As for the accuracy of the claim, I won't cite a study, some truths are accessible by simpler, perhaps more social means. If you know gay people, talk to them, ask them directly if they feel comfortable and you care about it. Also take a look into the history of dating apps, is it a coincidence that Grindr was originally gay only? Is there an equivalent Lesbian hookup app?
Also, I'm sorry if you are gay and found this offensive, I just assumed you were straight and were just being offended in the name of someone else. I don't think many gay people would question that men are less monogamous, but I may be wrong..
There isn't an offensive imputation contained in being called non-monogamous anyway, unless you in turn have a prejudice against polyamory etc.
A random dating app is a "trusted friend or relative" now? Sorry, that's not a reasonable expectation.
I mean, go for it, if you think it'll work. It's easier than ever to spin up an MVP. But, if I were a betting man, my bet against this working, especially with women, would be very, very, large. Not only do I think it's not viable, I would be genuinely surprised if you got one (1) paid sign up from a woman.
It would, at scale, where there's sufficient data to train some decent embedding models to accurately judge partner compatibility. As a machine learning exercise, this is "easy". Heck, Facebook does it, possibly without even "trying" to implement dating specifically! I regularly get spammed with "suitable single women" as friend suggestions by Meta. I'm not single, but as dating suggestions go, they're actually not half bad! If I was single, I'd reach out to some of the recommendations for sure.
They've clearly implemented this exact feature, but they bootstrapped it by having a billion+ people in their system and trillions of interactions between them already. They didn't start out as a dating site.
Similarly, I've heard that LinkedIn is now more of a "single professionals dating site" than a career-making / job-seeker site, at least for a decent fraction of its userbase.
This is eminently solvable, and people do use these systems to find partners.
The nigh-insurmountable challenge is boot-strapping a dating-only site from scratch.
I'm not saying online dating can't work, and I've said nothing about whether data about people makes matches better.
I am saying you have presented an absolutely batshit crazy and dangerous idea of how it ought to work.
Edit: It sounds like you've designed a dating app optimized for angry men who feel shorted by women on dating apps. But, there's never been too few men interacting on dating apps. If you're optimizing for men's comfort on a dating site, you have failed to learn the lesson of "ladies night" at bars. If your site is full of single women, men will show up. The opposite is not true, if it feels punitive and risky to women.