Would it be ... profitable?

One of the issues with modern apps is users don't want to pay, so right away you have an issue where you end up tied to advertising dollars and things go down hill from there.

Granted I'm with you, I think the same thing about a lot of apps / classes of apps.

A profitable dating app is orthogonal to what humans need to make meaningful connections.

    As a former dating app cto, i believe the reasons we don't 
    have services that brag about their match or marriage rates 
    is not capitalist greed standing in the way of love. The 
    problem of matching people via an app is a genuinely difficult 
    problem for a number of fascinating reasons.

I met my wife in church, my mother introduced us. I was on a dating BBS with a matchmaker program that asked questions and computed compatibility rates. It didn't work out either, and there were too many men and very few women.

I feel like the only way this could work and NOT be enshittified is if it were not-for-profit and community-driven, such that the basic matching algorithm was known to all, customizable for each user, and not subject to a profit motive.

I'd prefer such a thing be free and open-source with a community of stewards, kinda like Wikipedia, but without as much nepotism and hierarchy as their admins. It would also have to be end-to-end encrypted so individual users don't give up their privacy to some central server. There would have to be some interesting fancy encryption so that matches can stay private (or at least encrypted) as well.

To help pay for network resources, people could voluntarily contribute, say, $10 after a nice date, and maybe $100 if they stay together for at least a year (or whatever).

Implemented poorly, it would turn into a massive honeypot and privacy nightmare :( But I would love to see something that happen, just for the sake of making happier people and families.

-------

I met many of my exes on OkCupid; it used to be a wonderful service before Match.com bought it and turned it into every other swipe-based dating app. But even after that, I still managed to meet my current partner (of 4+ years) on it... I'm not particularly attractive or disgusting, just average, but got lucky and found my person. Many friends met their SOs online as well. For my generation (millennials) it's pretty common. I'm all for these services, I just wish they weren't so profit-driven.

we're building one now. barcrush.app

> The intent of these apps is to keep you single and spending money.

Perhaps a different monetization model would fix that. The ideal outcome of a dating app for you, the user, is that you find someone to marry and spend the rest of your life with, and that means you won't need the app anymore. This means that for apps where the user is a source of ongoing revenue (either paying directly, or through ads), there is an perverse incentive for the app to want exactly what you said. An idea I've heard before would be an app where there's a one-time payment to join, and that's the only revenue ever generated by each user. Then their incentives would be aligned with yours.

    Perhaps a different monetization model would fix that. 
    The ideal outcome of a dating app [...] means you won't 
    need the app anymore. 

The trick is don't use dating apps at all. Do social activities.

I feel like the major defence against enshittification is being more offline.

of course they have made them. OG tinder was phenomenally good. i know many people that met their matches and many one night stands beforehand.

the question you should be asking is why do all good things become bad in any given capitalist marketplace? the answer was asserted by Karl Marx a long time ago.

okcupid was a perfect app before match bought them and ruined it.

> Definition of a good dating app: An app with no dark patterns where you can find dates and relationships.

Yep that's not going to happen. Taking all the dark patterns out is the easy part. But the find dates and relationships part is not a thing you can do on an app. Unless you are like a 9.

Most people are average, and to find a date and have a relationship they have to be in an environment where whoever is doing the picking does not have infinite options and may be open to lower their standards. Like say in a bar where the options are the people in the bar and their standards might be lower because of beer goggles.

In an app people get to be picky and gravitate towards the most desirable end of the bell curve.

1. Dating apps = a monopoly (Match group)

2. User generated content = moderation hell

3. User to user interactions + emotions = Higher chance of crime

4. It is not for dating, it is for revenue source

5. The gender ratios are asymmetric

6. Men swipe right to everything

7. It is a sea of dead profiles, fake profiles, people looking for attention and not dating, etc.

8. Used also by scammers, sex workers, influencers looking for followers.

The number one problem with dating apps is that they position themselves for self-selection and most people fail to select appropriate mates when given a whole shopping mall’s worth of candidates. I would never have swiped right on my current partner (7ish years). Or my first spouse, either. Two highly fulfilling relationships in my life that I never expected or tried to manifest initially.

People can generally identify when they have chemistry with someone, but not when they will have chemistry with someone, and most dating apps are run on the idea that you select whom you want to have chemistry with. Not whom you can or will, but want to have. All dating apps will converge to garbage because they focus on choice in love, rather than chance. They don’t throw you into a room with random people and let the real relationships blossom and the false ones fall away, they tell you to pick from a lineup of people whole you have never talked to (and to be honest probably will never talk to), but in real life we talk to random folks, sometimes that unattainable hottie and sometimes the perhaps homely but amiable passerby, and find out the brute force way which ones make us spark. It’s not about the subscription fees or the with dating apps, it’s about the fundamental disconnect between the freedom of election and the inability to act. The promise of consumption without the serendipity necessary to facilitate it.

The owners censor and discriminate without monopoly regulation. Success depends on many women joining but in my experience they don't enjoy texting. Obviously there's too many scammers.

In the English speaking world, the biggest and most important dating app by far is Instagram.

Match Group should be considered an adult entertainment business, like the old Craigslist personals.

Actually, I just checked the market cap of MTCH, it’s $7.3 billion - about in line with the $8 billion valuation being floated for OnlyFans.

With declining birth rates I wonder if there is room in the market for government backed dating apps, which could potentially make use of data and incentive programs that commercial apps could only dream of.

> So let's assume there is a deficit in the market for dating apps that are actually good. So why hasn't one been made?

What's the market? How are you going to get people to pay for a good dating app?

Fact is people (specifically women, since they're the audience that matters for dating app success) vote with their feet for dark patterns.

Let's pretend you have good dating apps and bad dating apps at the time T. As soon as you find love on a dating app, they "lose" you as a user, you stop paying your monthly fee, and you leave the app. So I have a theory about dating apps. They give you somebody average, somebody that you could like enough, but not for too long, because YOU NEED TO COME BACK TO THE APP for them to succeed. So only the bad dating apps darwinely are being used more and more by people. They have more and more profiles (who doesn't find love).

It's called retention my friend, and it's the key metric for apps.

    As soon as you find love on a dating app, they 
    "lose" you as a user, you stop paying your monthly fee

For the most part, everything in your last point is something you can’t solve with an app. Virtually all of that would be problematic meeting someone in any other way and for the most part is all within your control to change. Sure, there are limits to what you can do about conventional attractiveness but there is a lot within your control for most people. Most of those issues you brought up are things that the vast majority of people don’t want in a partner no matter how you meet them. If you like those attributes about yourself you might eventually find someone compatible but if you don’t, most/all of those are things you can address by going to therapy and working on it.

Dating apps reveal the flaws in the way people reason about sex. Most of the apps are fine, it's the people and the way they're approaching life that's the problem. No one wants to have the conversations needed to fix that though.

Twitter was a good dating app until Twitter was killed off.

A good dating app optimized for relationships would disallow a user from having more than five matches at a time, and it would delist the user from search and further matching while they have five matches. Moreover, if the user is non-responsive to solicitations, if only to reject them, the user would again get delisted until their queue had no more than five pending solicitations. Being inactive on the app for seven days, as defined by taking no action in the app, also leads to a delisting.

Secondly, money would be charged per message, perhaps 50 cents per received and sent message, so a dollar in total, instead of a subscription fee. This prevents wasteful messages and wasteful matches too. A user can at a time send only one message to another user until a reply is received. The cost is meant to force them off of the app rather soon.

Thirdly, humans would at repeated intervals have to prove that they're human by uploading a video of them performing a particular blinking or bodily action, also their ID photo, about the same as was done by login.gov for user registration. Elite users would also be required to share annual STI panel test results, with their matches getting restricted to anything that both test positive for, and in exchange their limits will be increased from five to seven.

These days, pictures can be quite fake, so only videos would be accepted, no shorter than 15 seconds in length, and the app will auto-extract pictures from the videos, also matching them to the ID photo and verification video. Any videos older than one year would be deleted.

> to keep you single and spending money.

You partially answered your own question.

The business model is famously hard. I wonder if you could make a business model out of an explicit matchmaking service, i.e. you pay when you match, not just to exist on the platform, so that the incentives are more closely aligned. Policing it such that you actually get paid, decisions around what constitutes a sufficient relationship to pay, etc, would all be hard.

Similar to real estate in a way (as far as the model goes, nothing else), in that you can have a house on the market for pretty much as long as you like while the agent attempts to find a "match".

Supposedly this sort of thing exits at the very high end of the market, millionaires aren't on Tinder, they're paying large sums of money to be set up on dates by a human who is actually considering the people involved. Making services for the rich more accessible is often a winning business strategy.

A good dating app would be paradoxical. For a dating app to be appealing, it needs a big enough network. But if it’s effective it’s constantly shedding users and shrinking its network.

Even absent economic incentives to monetize users indefinitely with subscriptions, a good dating app almost by definition has awful retention. And that will quickly kill an app that relies on network effects.

If we managed to have decentralized social networks based on ActivityPub (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc.) why can't we have a dating app based on the same protocols?

The fundamental flaw I see is, a "good" app matches people quickly, so they decline their user base.

Essentially its an impossible or non business model.

Some ideas:

1. Profile quality (and honesty) varies wildly. Peacock and dishonest profiles dominate.

2. There is no Hobsons choice mechanism to force rotation among matches.

3. There are no incentives to respond or follow up.

4. Fake profiles benefit the platform but you have a bootstrap problem if you have no users. Plausible AI fakes will make this worse

5. There is no web of trust- if someone meets someone they could assert trust even at a low level. If I trust anyone in their web this would vet against fake profiles.

I could go on...

Because experiencing the actual relationship is done offline and most people have higher standards? Why bother?

This is like asking why nobody has made a delivery app that ensures you never get missing or damaged items. Those things cannot be controlled online. All those issues occur offline.

Random thoughts:

- are there any measurable factors indicating someone is a good match? Okcupid claimed to match people with others who gave similar answers to their questions, but I had some fates with a high match % and still no chemistry.

- speaking of chemistry, check out https://smell.dating/ . No idea if it works, but at least it’s a novel approach.

- people have different goals, from finding love to sex/ friends/ … (and may not be open about this). Can an app take that into account?

- I heard from several girls that guys sometimes open conversations with direct sexual remarks, which violates the mind set of „natch - have a conversation - get to know each other irl if there’s any chemistry“. How to handle this?

Because good dating apps attract Match.

I wonder how well the dating app launched by the Japanese government is doing.

Having a somewhat high fee to enter, seems like a good way to cut those who are not interested in a real relationship.

> Registration costs 11,000 yen ($77), and membership is valid for two years.

https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2024/09/fce6ff5d9216-toky...

I think there's multiple good choices depending on your niche.

>So let's assume there is a deficit in the market for dating apps that are actually good. So why hasn't one been made?

The deficit is in the sidelines.

Imagine you're tinder and also dealing with LGBT. Who get mass reported constantly and banned off the site. So now there's multiple options there who handle that niche.

>A majority of humans aren't compatible with online dating for one reason or another.

I disagree with this. The actual problem is well researched. Women wont date the burger king fry cook. How many dating sites take that into account? Basically none.

How about flipside options that men find important? Basically non-existent on dating sites.

The "deficit in the market" is trivially understood but when the rubber hits the road, why is it no dating sites take care of these?

I was a founding member of a dating app startup and worked there for 10 years until it filed for bankruptcy. I have some insight.

The number one reason dating apps suck is money, or the ability to make money is antithetical to the purpose of getting people together. A dating app is successful when people don't use it anymore, so that user churn is a serious impediment to earning a profit. Thus, the apps are designed to keep you paying that monthly subscription.

In that same vein, apps have to work way harder than websites to turn a profit because of app store fees. Our app would have been profitable if we didn't have to give Apple 30% of our fees, so we had to do way sketchier shit to increase profits to compensate.

Second problem is the wildly unbalanced male/female ratios in users. We had one of the better ratios in the market but it was still 70/30 male to female. Straight men and women simply do not have the same motivations around dating and trying to balance those is a hard problem. There are many videos out there about this problem, no need for me to go into detail.

Third is reach. We spent a lot of time trying to find ways to advertise or optimize for store placement and the restrictions placed on us were almost puritanical. For instance, Facebook wouldn't let us advertise because our relationship settings had "married" in the list, so we were forced to remove that option in order to place ads on Facebook. There were other compromises we had to introduce in order to qualify for other stores or advertisers.

Lastly, the Match Group is the 800lb gorilla of the industry and they buy all the good ones (OKCupid, Plenty of Fish) and grind them into maximum profitability like a hedge fund, thus removing any distinctiveness they had in favour of the Match methods.

What it comes down to is the ecosystem is gamed to make good datings apps impossible.

I don’t want to be a dick but it’s not that dating apps are bad so much that most men are just ugly. The main issue men complain about is not getting matches and almost all these “new dating app” threads come from men. I can’t recall any time I heard a woman suggesting that a new dating app should be made. The main reason is that for most women - the apps work as intended. They get matched and dates and so on. For them, the issue becomes about filtering and being intentional. Which isn’t a problem that’s unique to dating apps - they’ll have this issue in any real life scenario too.

For men, it’s about even getting to a date. I haven’t met many men who complain about dating apps and that get dates. It seems exclusive to men who cannot get matches or dates. These are men that the market doesn’t want. They’re not realizing that it’s not the app - it’s them/society. You might meet someone in another way and eventually find your match but it’s very rare to see men who do exceptionally well in real life but somehow completely bomb on apps. They’re usually correlated.

Apps aren’t the issue. It’s just a society thing. You’re ugly and that’s all there is to it, man. Stop blaming the app and either get surgery or do something else with your life.

Why are they so bad? They want you to keep using them, so they have to be bad enough.

Why hasn't anybody made a good one? Maybe they have, but they are not around for long. It is not a good business: Little growth potential, no recurring revenue.

The first challenge is meeting the "right person." There are hundreds of dating apps for this, each with varying efficacy. As you read down thread, there are a lot of folks reporting that an app is where they met their Ex. or former spouse. That leads us to the second challenge, for which no app can solve: retention.

> The intent of these apps is to keep you single and spending money.

You answered your own question.

A "good" dating app will get the user hitched. At that point the user ceases their interest in the app. How will the app maker make money off this person?

Asking for money up front is a no-go. The user has no guarantee that they will be successful in their endeavours.

Asking for money afterwards is tricky and difficult to enforce at scale.

The really good dating services out there aren't apps, they are more like matchmaking or concierge services. You pay someone a shit-ton of money and they give you access to a network of people that did the same thing, and have the same mindset as you. I'm also not sure how successful these services are, other than being good at extracting money from wealthy single desperates.

Tinder's secret sauce was normalising the DTF lifestyle on a massive scale, giving users an app where they can find their next sexual partner for the coming weekend. Much easier (and cheaper) than going to a bar/festival. Here the model is very much use the app on weekdays, match with a partner, have fun, and come back on Monday for more. Much easier to monetise this with subscriptions, super likes, profile boosts etc etc. The only critical feature they are missing (for obvious reasons) is allowing users to rate one another. This naturally does not work so well for the crowd looking for more long term situations.

I think it really boils down to a fundamental mismatch on incentives. As a service, you want recurring revenue. As a user, you want to stop using this service as fast as possible. The two are not compatible with one another.