RFC: Let's Disrupt Dating Apps - <AUTHOR> https://dvt.name/2020/02/24/rfc-lets-disrupt-dating-apps/ <comment><USER2> It's impossible to build a good dating experience on an app at scale. Let me explain why.

Dating markets are lemon markets. The classical example of a lemon market was the used car market - most people who bought "lemons" (unreliable cars) would exploit information asymmetry and sell them on the used market, and over time the reputation of the used car market deteriorated to the point where it was affecting the value of new cars. The car manufacturers solved the problem by introducing gatekeepers - certified used car programs, that certified that the cars weren't lemons.

So who are the "lemons" on dating markets, which bring down the reputation of dating markets for the rest of the players? People who aren't in an emotionally healthy place to make commitments; people who are "players"; people who are violent; etc. It is our experience dealing with the lemons who stay on the dating market that ruins the reputation of the entire dating market and makes dealing with the market difficult.

So the solution is to introduce a gatekeeper. What does a gatekeeper look like? A clinically trained psychologist-cum-matchmaker (pun not intended) who can certify that the matches you are set up with are people with a track record of dealing honestly (for your personal definition of honest) in the dating market. Don't like your gatekeeper? Pick a different one.

So far as I can tell, healthy dating markets are limited to scale by the need to hire such competent human gatekeepers. If anyone has an idea how to automate the gatekeeping in a humane way - you're sitting on a gold mine.

<comment><USER3> Wouldn't a simple rating system for dates help a ton?

<comment><USER4> If you assume honest usage, a high number of ratings becomes a _negative_ signal. That is, it signals someone who doesn't want to stop using the app or is excessively selective.

So a good signal is probably someone with few ratings. Which would seem to defeat the point of a rating system, as a five-out-of-five rating is now a bad sign.

Anecdotally, this does comport with my experience back when OKCupid would tell you how old someone's account was. It was _far_ easier to make contact and have a conversation with a new account than with one months to years old.

<comment><USER5> An app that matches people, gets feedback on dates, and then if they couple up, gets regular feedback on how they are in relationship / during a break up. Then that score comes with them back into the dating app.

Truth is, an app isn't going to solve for people's insecure attachment styles and malAdaptive coping strategies.

Perhaps an app that matches based on symmetrical childhood traumas would be a hit.

<comment><USER6> > An app that matches people, gets feedback on dates, and then if they couple > up, gets regular feedback on how they are in relationship / during a break > up. Then that score comes with them back into the dating app.

What incentive does anyone have to keep using the service to provide such "feedback" if they find their match, leaving aside the creepiness factor of a service asking for such information? (And please, don't _create_ such an incentive.) If they find their way back into the service, then (ignoring relatively rare cases) something didn't work out.

<comment><USER5> Communication within a relationship is a big deal.

So, a service that helped people gain awareness of their patterns and provided a mechanism for mutual feedback would be useful to someone who is interested in improving the skills of love and relationship.

There already exist apps that people use for feedback and communication in romantic relationship.

And, most relationships end (they all do eventually to mortality). How they end is very telling of the success of the next one.

The problem isn't really the matching algorithms, it's that people lack the understanding and modeling of how to have healthy adult relationships, they carry a lot of unprocessed trauma, and they don't have a context or tools to work through those old patterns.

It's like making an HR app to match a lot of aspiring kindergartners to AI jobs or the space program.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Avoid ELOs and other ranking algorithms.

Why? What would the outcome of that be? You want to create a 2-sided market where you troll people by matching them with low quality partners?

> Enforce a 50:50 ratio

OK, so if there are 1000 women and 10,000 men, how do you choose which men to let in? Random? Rank the men and let the top 10% in? Oh you said no ranking.

> Don't call it a "dating" app. The app should be labeled as a "singles" app.

This doesn't sound like it would make any difference, or if it would I don't see why.

> Organize occasional group events. Without becoming a meetup app, the app > should push events — concerts, hikes, movie nights — with groups of 6-10 > people.

As far as I know this already exists, but it's probably even worse than the 1-1 matching problem. Random people are nervous around each other to start with, and the group dynamics of 3-5 mutually unknown men competing for women sounds like it would suck. As a male I wouldn't go anywhere near it.

But with this point, can you explain what success would look like? Why would anyone want to have a night out with strangers who are also competitors?

> Have a vetting process with a zero-tolerance policy for bad apples > (harassers, catfishes, etc.).

This doesn't actually sound very disruptive. All the dating apps are trying to do this, and there is an arms race between the bad guys and the enforcement. Unless you have a specific insight I don't see how this would disrupt.

In summary, I don't see any useful solutions, though I do think that you've done a good job pointing out problems.

<comment><USER8> > Random people are nervous around each other to start with, and the group > dynamics of 3-5 mutually unknown men competing for women sounds like it > would suck. As a male I wouldn't go anywhere near it.

As a woman, I would frankly be terrified of going to that. It's risky enough to meet up with one man from a dating app. I wouldn't risk meeting up with multiple unknown men.

<comment><USER7> As a woman, what would you want out of a better dating app?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I love your "RFC" post. I'm a SRE by day who dabbles in code at night (Go). I've long wanted to find a co-founder to moonlight on a project together. I am a remote worker, far away from the Bay Area and it seems really hard to meet others interested in this given where I live. I would love to see more "co- founder dating" here on HN (pardon the pun...)

That said, for your app, I'm kind of a doubter because I never had any luck with dating websites for many of the reasons you mentioned. I went on lots of dates and nothing ever connected but finally got some good advice from a friend:

"Take care of yourself and do what you love and she will find _you_."

I did exactly this: started running every day after work... learned how to cook and started making my own food...spruceded up my apartment with some nice furnishings...and lo and behold, my future wife literally (nearly) ran into me. I was out running one night and she almost hit me at a stop sign when I ran across the road. She turned out to be my neighbor and fast-forward 11 years: we have two kids and 10 years of marriage under our belts.

In retrospect, I should have spent the hundreds of dollars on a life coach instead of eHarmony.

<comment><USER10> Survivorship bias dialed to 11

Happy you met someone but there are tons of people who followed a similar path and never met their match.

<comment><USER9> Yes, I agree and understand. Oh, believe me, I was "looking" for years. For the sake of brevity, I left out a lot of other important details, like honest self-assessment, learning listening skills, etc.

But--bottom line--without getting _myself_ on the path to being a better adult, I was unlikely to have any luck with a dating app. I realized (or rather, my friend help me realize) that I had to improve my product before anybody else was going to be interested.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Tinder's big innovation was the double opt in for messaging. Both parties have to "like" the other profile before they can exchange messages. This helps a lot with the problem of women getting overwhelmed with low quality messages.

I was surprised to learn that Tinder has patented this technique. No other dating app can use it, unless that app is owned by Tinder's parent company, the Match Group.

I think not having access to this technique will make it very hard for new apps to compete with Tinder and friends.

<comment><USER12> So, every other dating app is owned by the Match Group? (Bumble, Hinge, Hily, etc)

<comment><USER13> Hinge doesn't follow the double-opt-in pattern. When you "like" someone, you can immediately send them a message, even if they haven't yet liked you back. I guess that's a big enough differentiator to not violate Tinder's patent.

I think Bumble might be differentiated in that once the double-opt-in has occurred, only one party (the women) can send a message.

<comment><USER14> No, you definitely can't. You can attach a comment to your "like" but then it disappears into the ether, and only reappears in your messages section if they "like" you back.

<comment><USER15> That's not true, we can the comment people leave when they like before we like/match them back. The thing is that they can only leave a singular comment/message.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > on Tinder, men outnumber women by 9 to 1.

> Women just aren't using these apps

Couldn't it be that women just don't need to use a dating app to find partners? Was this a problem they faced before the apps existed?

Meeting people through work, school, friends, parties, etc. seems to have worked fine for women so far. The bottle neck here might be the preferences women have, not being unable to meet men without an app. The app would have to address that to solve their problem rather than purely trying to get people to meet which may again be limited by their preferences if they only like 20% of men as cited.

<comment><USER17> This gets a little into the 'things you can't say' territory, but online dating just isn't very good for most heterosexual men due to selective pressures (it's probably better when the population is closer to an even split, but even then there are problems). This does change as men get older and there's less competition (online dating is bad for men in their 20s and good in their 30s).

Dataclysm - Christian Rudder's book (cofounder of okcupid) has a ton of data you can look at to see some of the problems.

One is solved by Tinder, Hinge etc. which is women getting too many messages (making things better for heterosexual women) but the other issue is the response graph itself.

There's a graph in that book that shows number of messages received based on attractiveness, for women there is a massive spike at the right end of the attractiveness scale and it gets lower at the lower end, but is still around 4-5 messages a week. This means there are opportunities to at least go on dates if interested and get better at selection/what you like and don't.

For men it's a flat line at zero until the extreme right of the attractiveness scale where it goes up to 1-2 messages.

For men not in the top 10% of attractiveness online dating is not viable so things trend towards a broken state where women select the same group of highly selected men (which tends to lead to less long term interest on the side of the highly selected men). I think large amounts of men ~80% get very few dating opportunities and so are generally bad at the social skills required for success.

For most heterosexual men (those not in the top 10% of attractiveness) you're better off meeting people in real life where you can make a better impression. These issues are compounded in the bay area where there is a large imbalance of men and women (things are less broken in DC and NYC).

If I had a suggestion for a new type of dating site it would be less about the matching part and more about how to help men get better at the prerequisites for success (social skills, dressing better, fitness etc.). The pairing part is less important.

<comment><USER18> I don't know... I'm absolutely nowhere near the top 10% of male attractiveness, but I've had good luck getting dates on dating sites. From talking with many women about their experience on such sites, I think that attractiveness is far less important than behavior -- the vast majority of men that women hear from, it seems, are very poorly behaved.

<comment><USER17> Where do you live? I think city is highly variable. It also gets easier as you get older (for heterosexual men) which could be a factor.

This is the kind of thing where you can't trust what people say since what they say and how they act are very different (the dataclysm book is good for this).

For the matching case if you get zero matches you can't progress to dates (or even chat). The selection happens prior to that.

You're probably right though that it's not _only_ attractiveness, there's also a selective pressure where men are generally okay dating 'down' economically and women are generally not. While more women become economically successful (good thing) it further constrains the availability on the dating market. The only reason I focused on the attractiveness stat first is that on apps like Hinge/Tinder it's a prereq to even getting to the economic piece.

Diana S. Fleischman (evolutionary psychologist) and Julia Galef discuss some of this and other things on this podcast which I thought was pretty good: [http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/show/rs-216-diana- fleis...](http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/show/rs-216-diana-fleischman- on-being-a-transhumanist-evolutionar.html)

<comment><USER18> My experience has covered a number of different areas (in the US), and I've used such sites occasionally for a couple of decades now. I've not noticed a significant difference between areas or age ranges.

But I'm working with male sample size of one (me), and a female sample size (women I've talked about this stuff with) of a few dozen, so this isn't anything like a reliable study. It's just anecdotal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I worked on a dating website for a while and while the market was fascinating, the motivations and alignment of the site/team vs the customer are completely broken.

It's not in their best interest to give you a great match but someone who is just "pretty good" or - _at minimum_ \- compelling because if you fail on the site, they lose one customer.. but if you're successful, they lose two.

It's the only business model worse than cigarettes.

I lay out some more detail in a post here: [https://caseysoftware.com/blog/working-for-a-dating- website](https://caseysoftware.com/blog/working-for-a-dating-website)

<comment><USER20> Does this mean a business shouldn't aim to ever solve a customer's problem?

Surely, the value of a successful marriage is many, many multiples what a dating app might charge. And surely, a dating app that successfully pairs people into high value marriages will recoup any losses by earning new customers through the word of mouth recommendations.

<comment><USER21> > Does this mean a business shouldn't aim to ever solve a customer's problem?

I don't think you can extrapolate the case for a dating site to all businesses, especially to cases of tangible goods. A car salesman doesn't make a dime until I buy a car.

Dating sites are an interesting business because a happy customer is one that is no longer using their product. So how do you monetize that?

If you charge a one-time up-front cost, and a paying customer uses the site for months and never has success, then you end up with a disgruntled customer.

If you charge a monthly subscription, then you get a perverse incentive to _not_ please your customer, or only please them enough to keep paying, because as soon as they enter a relationship, they stop paying.

Only charging after some sort of measurement of success (Like marriage) would be impossible to enforce.

<comment><USER22> Here's an idea.

Give users an option to put $1,000 in limbo. The condition being, if you date/marry someone for 2+ years that you met on the app, the app gets to keep that money.

In return, you get a badge on your profile. It's a certified stamp that your "money is where your mouth is" and that user either as plenty of disposable income, or is intent on long term commitment.

^ Both are positive signs for the prospective market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> From female profiles, and speaking with my friends, it seems that no one is happy with online dating apps.

> dating apps have created an environment where women are hyper-selective and > where men are hyper-indiscriminate.

I believe this is the key point, and ironic because it's viscous cycle.

This behavior encourages worse behavior that is counter intuitive to the goal of it's users.

The entire premise is flawed from the start, as a dating profile starts with a snap judgement based on pictures, a biography, and key details--such as height, job, education.

At this point, the competition for dates using an app is so high, and the experience is so mediocre, that I am better off spending my effort meeting women in real life.

<comment><USER24> Agree this is one of the most critical points after a lot of thought about this industry.

I think I've pretty much solved it, and am looking for a mobile engineer to partner with. I've got a lot of functionality mapped out.

Shot in the dark to find someone, but if anyone is interested, email is in profile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Okay, assuming your information is correct (women are a hot commodity on dating apps and get lots of attention, and conversely men have a hard time getting any attention), if you put out a hetero-only dating app with a 1:1 men:women ratio, why would women choose to use it, when on Tinder they would have men clamoring over them?

<comment><USER26> The wildly unbalanced gender ratio makes men frustrated, which causes them to invest very little in reaching out to women so that they can reach out to dozens/hundreds/thousands, which makes an experience for women of thousands of dick pics/"hey"/etc, along with earnest high-investment outreach from men who are too ugly/poor/short/whatever to capture their interest.

If there was a system for people in the 25th to 75th percentiles of desirability to have a dating market where the men were only allowed to contact 3 women per month, I think it would be very popular among women.

<comment><USER27> Theres a dating app kind of like the idea you are proposing: Once. You get one (!) suggestion per day and you can decide whether to like or dislike. The basic idea is quality over quantity. But as such an app is not good at guessing what you like, you mosten often just press the dislike button.

<comment><USER28> The chance that you'd want to date a given randomly selected person, or even an algo-selected person, is small. The "Once" app sounds like navigating deep space in hope of one day reaching a habitable planet.

<comment><USER29> If you don't expect 30 matches a month to include a reasonable flow of date- worthy people, I think you've encountered exactly the problem the app is trying to solve. Your standards have been skewed unreasonably high by the constant availability of one more match, and some of the people you're not willing to date would make you perfectly happy if you did.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The only idea worthy of pursuit IMHO opinion in this post is organizing in person events; this forces people to invest a bit more time in engaging with another human (an evening) vs a few seconds on a photo before a swipe to another human (or short conversations that die out in app). That in person time is the opportunity for organic chemistry, generating interpersonal closeness, to occur between two people.

TLDR _The problem is the app_. People get Uber for dating, which results in the dysfunctional marketplace demonstrated by Okcupid, Bumble, etc because chemistry, love, and relationships are not the same as on demand ride or food delivery services.

<comment><USER31> True, but hookups _are_ that way, and you get more repeat users by optimizing for hookups than for romance.

<comment><USER32> I had a good friend who said he thought dating apps only work for people who are attractive. Looking at my own friends in my life who have had successful relationships from dating apps and those who are frustrated by them, I'd say my friend was wrong. Dating apps only work for _very_ attractive people, 7 out of 10 guys and up (6/10 and up for women).

The market graphs in the article are really apt.

<comment><USER30> "It was determined that the bottom 80% of men (in terms of attractiveness) are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men."

[https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments- ii-g...](https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-guys- unless-you-are-really-hot-you-are-probably-better-off-not-wasting- your-2ddf370a6e9a) (Tinder Experiments II: Guys, unless you are really hot you are probably better off not wasting your time on Tinder — a quantitative socio-economic study)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> ...Maybe 'hetero singles who want a monogamous partner' is not the best group for a dating app.

Based on discussions with therapists, 'consensually non-monogamous, regardless of orientation' seems to be the market to go for specially if the app found ways to emphasize the 'consensually' part and women's safety in general.

<comment><USER4> Not to be negative, but isn't this the current positioning of OKCupid?

It's my understanding that "consensual non-monogamy" may currently be experiencing some concerns of the addressable market size persuasion. I would love to be wrong. Can you help me with anything I may have overlooked?

<comment><USER33> My understanding of OKCupid is that it caters to 'free for all'. The site choices they made was to increase TAM by stating their addressable market is 'YES' (this is not a dig on the choice).

I have not heard about consensual non-mog/poly/name du jour had a TAM problem-- can you point me to sources? My sources of 'not a problem' suffer from geographic and socioeconomic biases.

<comment><USER4> [https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10508-018-1178-...](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10508-018-1178-7)

4% seems like it could be a difficult market to function in, especially since that cannot be assumed to be a random sampling from the background population. I'll assume that anyway, for the sake of simplicity. That limits you to a TAM of ~12 million Americans, of which you would do well to get 10% as users and 1% as paying customers.

120,000 paying customers isn't a vast customer base. That's an upper bound, meaning any app is going to come in well below that for a variety of geo-demo- socio-economic reasons. Or just because getting high market penetration is difficult.

Again, I would love to know if there's something I've overlooked that changes this significantly.

<comment><USER33> Well, I trust the Kinsey folks at IU, the origin of the data set. That TAM could be valid and indeed a problem specially if wanting to set up a very large user base. I do wonder about the relationship between quality and quantity in this space.

The study is only 2 years old,(pub data 2018) but the data set is indeed 'old' (2012). The survey is muti-wave, would be interesting if they ran the data from 2014-18 through the same statistical tests as this paper.

It is very hard to believe the findings in this abstract based on my connections with US therapists serving alternative communities, primarily in the East and West Coast. Maybe the center of the country is very different (possible and probable). I have no comment on the 4%, although one model change I'd suggest is that, contrary to monogamous dating, non-monogamous folks will come back to the app for more partners even when successfully dating. Here the number of total partners is not the limit, but the allocation of free time and personal energy.

<comment><USER4> I've noticed that a lot of alternative lifestyle communities cluster aggressively, so I also wonder how evenly distributed the demo here is.

As for ongoing usage, that's an excellent point! If you could grab a solid quarter of the potential userbase willing to pay and keep them paying $10/mo forever, that puts you at $300,000 MRR ($3,600,000 yearly). That's enough to cover AWS bills, a small office (think Regus), and probably a handful of employees in the SF Bay. Or Bay-grade pay for a 100% remote company. Get the 120k number and you're grossing 12 mil / yr. Nothing to sneeze at for sure.

I think it would be a challenge to make much more than a lifestyle business out of this, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> There was a YC company in W12 called Grouper that basically implemented all of the grab-bag of ideas. It was a 3-on-3 blind date at a pre-determined spot. Each person had to pitch in $20 to participate, which meant $120 revenue for each date. It seemed to be going well - I wonder what happened to them.

<comment><USER35> I loved Grouper. Met a lot of cool people and had a lot of fun. My guess is it was an operational nightmare to scale. There was a lot of manual effort on Grouper's end in selecting the venues, matching the groups, making the reservation, and paying for the first round of drinks (the model was you pay $20 per head to Grouper but it covers your first round).

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> > Don't call it a "dating" app. The app should be labeled as a "singles" app.

Not a bad idea from a marketing perspective, but I'd put this last.

> Focus on having a good time. The "conversion" shouldn't be a match, it > should be having a fun night out.

This is where you'll limit your audience. Unfortunately, in my opinion, a lot of people today are timid about going out to meet strangers. This is partly because it's so easy to escape reality into Netflix and Reddit or Discord, but we're becoming more and more of a risk-averse culture. When I was growing up, adults would often overemphasize the dangers of adulthood, and I can't imagine things have gotten better since.

> Enforce a 50:50 ratio. This might bring DAUs down, but without enforcing a > M:F ratio, you end up with asymmetric markets.

I think I like this.

> Organize occasional group events. Without becoming a meetup app, the app > should push events — concerts, hikes, movie nights — with groups of 6-10 > people.

I like this, too, and I think that something like this might be made possible programmatically. I'm thinking the kind of matchmaking used in multiplayer games but used to organize meetups.

> Avoid ELOs and other ranking algorithms.

At the very least, don't go down the road of MBTI and other forms of fake psychology.

> Have a vetting process with a zero-tolerance policy for bad apples > (harassers, catfishes, etc.).

I wonder what the abuse rate would be for something like this.

\---

Here are some ways I think this could be made better:

\- People can only be discovered if they are online. If they haven't been active in 30 days, their account is kicked out and they have to reapply and wait in line if there's a waitlist to maintain the 50:50 ratio.

\- The photos you use must be taken at a designated photography studio. Users cannot upload their own photos. They're free to wear makeup and nice clothes, but no filters or obnoxious facial expressions are allowed.(obviously the studio can airbrush out zits and simple things like that) The studio can also be a place where random singles can meet in person. Accounts are activated upon completing this, and I think that will help prevent bots, making them nearly impossible.

\- If you don't initiate any conversations within a period of time(not sure what that should be), this should result in a warning, and if the warning isn't heeded by a certain point, the user is kicked back into the waitlist or is suspended for a short period of time.

<comment><USER37> >The photos you use must be taken at a designated photography studio. Users cannot upload their own photos. [...]

This is probably the top idea in this whole thread so far.

<comment><USER36> Admittedly, the problem is that this limits the app to being regional. Either the company would need to open offices in major cities, or studios could contract with the company. I think it's feasible, but would limit the audience.

The benefits for the user would be incredible, in my opinion. One of the reasons I quit online dating years ago was because I was already wasting tons of time on them, but I felt like I was having my face spat in every time I scrolled/swiped through photos and half of them were annoying instagram filters, or duckface, or people sticking out their tongues, etc. Of course there's people who don't look like their photos. Moderating this in-person eliminates these issues. It's also a revenue model for the dating service, as I'm sure there could revenue could be shared between studios and the service.

I also like the idea because it would reduce the number of users who aren't serious. You'll always get people who use online dating because of ego- stroking or because they think it's "funny", but fewer of those people will bother if they have to get their photos taken.

<comment><USER37> It's only gotten worse since.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Unfortunately, you can't isolate your app from the broader environment of dating apps. For instance, take the "No ELO" suggestion. Implementing this feature means you'll attract a lot of users who don't like ELO (typically, less attractive users) and won't gain any users who benefit from the ELO system (attractive users). If you can't get attractive users, you can't get any users (Why would I join the app that only has unattractive users?)

Fixing these dating app issues is impossible because your users always make their decisions knowing that other dating apps exist.

<comment><USER39> What is ELO?

<comment><USER40> > What is ELO?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system)

In this instance, it's presumably a measure of a person's holistic attractiveness - say the average willingness of prospective partners to accept another date.

<comment><USER39> Thanks - I've learnt something today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Let's talk brass tacks: what kind of money is this going to make, compared to industry margins?

It's all well and good to talk about "disrupting" dating, but for the consumer, dating is a personal thing. It isn't like buying clothes or a new gadget, where you're not buying the product so much buying into the lifestyle you think the product will give you.

No dating app is going to solve whatever issues, traumas, predilections etc brought them there in the first place. No amount of in-app engineering is going to change a person's inner mindset regarding dating. That mindset is often the root cause of why dating apps suck; the "hi, how are you?" intro messages, the ghosting, the cookie-cutter profiles, etc.

So why would people pay for this?

</comment><comment><USER42> How about the first meeting not be any sort of date, and no chatting options ahead of time.

You sign into an app to indicate you are available for a spontaneous introduction.

If two matched users are within the vicinity of one another, then each receives a notification that someone they have been matched with is nearby. If both agree, the introduction is arranged at some public space. This does away with all the stress of an actual date, plus no actual time commitment.

(Note that I'm not addressing the matching process.)

One point I didn't see or missed in the article is that for men who have no problems getting dates offline, why would they go through the huge PITA of online dating? What does that do to the pool?

</comment><comment><USER43> Here's a random idea I find interesting:

Dating is a filtering problem with highly varied solutions. Therefore, a dating site should be a platform with highly varied filtering solutions.

Create a broad, uniform spec for dating profile content (bio, interests, etc), and a great UX for populating it. And then open it up as a platform. Restrict nothing. Want to filter by height? weight? race? Have at it. Give users a few basic, somewhat customizable frames for searching and filtering the userbase.

But search filters are like microapps / facebook games: developers can build their own search plugins, so one global userbase can serve as content for a million different kinds of dating apps. Hikers, metalheads, people who are afraid to eat fruit, whatever.

Queries cost money (perhaps as low as a fraction of a penny), and the first message from each party costs a bit more (but still trivially cheap, probably sub $1). There's a base monthly cost like $5. If you don't use your whole budget, credits roll over. If you overspend, you get charged pro-rata. A portion of these fees go to developers to incentivize building useful applications. There is no free plan.

There are interesting things to be done with rate-limiting/sliding scale pricing. Perhaps first messages get expensive if you try to send them too fast, so it's trivially cheap to message 2 people per day, but extremely costly to message 50 people per day. Something has to 1) protect women's inboxes from a deluge of low effort garbage and 2) encourage men to be selective upfront rather than indiscriminately shotgunning messages and waiting until response to filter.

I'm not confident that this is a profitable idea, especially compared to something like tinder, but it would be neat.

<comment><USER44> I like the filtering idea, although people will probably just end up putting in false entries and you would just be scrolling through people who don't actually fit those categories. It feels gross to objectively exclude people on things they can't control like race and height, but I think that is what people want more control over. And yeah income, occupation, are all actually really important.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> These academic takes on app-dating are generally out too lunch.

In particular, there's been a ton of effort to try to figure out personality and make matches, and they've all failed.

OkCupid has tons of interesting questions that they ask, and they've found that almost zero of the questions are relevant in terms of predicting outcomes. Funny enough I think there were only two questions, one of them was 'do you like watching horror movies' ! Literally of all the questions about politics, marriage, income, alcohol etc. - the question 'do you like horror movies' was a subtle predictor of compatibility.

In general, there's a crude correlation between overall profile ranking mostly determined by attractiveness, i.e. lining people up by their super-ballpark estimation of overall attractiveness would be a very rough good start, but even then, it's a crapshoot.

In reality, dating is by far mostly a game of 'meeting people' and that's it. All of the questions, implications, descriptions, photos - almost none of it makes up for spending a few hours with a person in some interesting context.

I don't believe that any of the analysis offered in the article really amount to that much.

From a business perspective, it's also about creating critical masses. POF, a self-funded business with one of the most original and ridiculous UX's imaginable, was as successful as OkCupid, with some of the most thoughtful UX. But POF did the basics: photo, profile, message the person, which is 99% of what the value is.

I don't think there will be any special sauce in online dating. It's just a way to filter out some very obvious mismatches, but otherwise, really meet people and the reality can hit the road only at that point.

</comment><comment><USER46> I think there's an opportunity to build a dating app that treats dating as an assignment problem[0], rather than a browsing experience. Assume we have a heterosexual and monogamous dating pool of 50 men and 50 women. If they were to rank or rate each other some people will be objectively attractive, but there will also be subjective differences based on individual preferences. Using an algorithm it should be possible to come up with the best combination of couples that maximizes each male/female's subjective attractiveness to each other.

Of course an actual dating app would need to be a bit more complicated than this, but I do think there's the potential to build a something around this concept.

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assignment_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assignment_problem)

</comment><comment><USER47> Imagine thinking the answer to a vast societal problem involves making yet another app for your ipotato. A vast societal problem more or less directly attributable to apps on the ipotato.

Put your imbecile phone down, leave the house and talk to people, you gibbering goons. Pay attention to others, not your nerd dingus: you might notice things. Better yet, leave your dystopian shit hole American city hellscape and find people who don't require a nerd dildo for self validation.

<comment><USER48> So how do you do this then? My circle of friends obviously consists of people similar to me, I would have to go two or three hops to find any women.

To visit the Philippines seems a bit drastic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> What if - dating apps are not the answer?

We are irreversibly addicted to various forms of information consumption that keeps us isolated with our attention glued to a screen. Pretend for a moment that you could live in a time pre-television. How would a 20 year old spend his/her time after work? From reading classic english literature - it seems like going out and socializing and interacting with other people was the norm (or, society of that era was often portrayed like this in their popular literature).

Now, we can't go back to that era - However, for the people who choose to break out of this addiction, literally the only option out there is meetup.com That option isn't even a very good one. But a lot of people actively use that platform (myself included) despite several obvious flaws because there is nothing else like it out there. It's the most effective way to meet interesting people.

My hypothesis is that there exists a market for an institution that serves as a meeting ground for socialization. A place where you would dress up to go to, a place where you would go to socialize with like minded people from similar demographics and a place that provides meaningful ways for strangers to share a long dialogue together. A place that isn't home and isn't work. A place where you can grow to know people really well over time. A place where it is socially acceptable to present a friend as "being single" in polite conversation to a group of people.

I don't know what such a place would look like. In my head, I think of a library-coffee shop with a tennis court in the back yard - but that's probably not it. My point is - dating apps try to solve an absence of IRL human connections with the screentime addiction that caused the isolation in the first place. The answer should probably be some brick-and-mortar business that serves a community around it.

If dating apps really were the answer, why not go all the way and build an app that permanently matches up two people as their virtual spouse - you only interact with each other by updating your digital avatar and sending text messages. Think of an anime girl/guy on your phone that you can interact with - but that person maps to a real human somewhere in the world. You can pretend-love each other all you want till you decide you actually want to go and meet real people in the real world.

</comment><comment><USER50> The author misunderstands the business model here. It is precisely this market asymmetry that makes the platform any $$$. Otherwise what incentive do guys have to spend money on advertising their profiles.

If anything, the evidence presented would suggest that the market is _skewed in the favor of men_ already. Otherwise women:men would be 1:1.

I propose disrupting the space with even more aggressively Darwinian design. Who wants to join me? (only half joking—seriously reach out)

<comment><USER43> > I propose disrupting the space with even more aggressively Darwinian design.

I'm curious what you'd do to make these apps more darwinian than they already are.

I'm only going to use Tinder as an example since I think it's the most market- efficient by far, and I'm going to assume for the sake of argument that the stereotypes about gendered market forces are true. A few hypothetical ideas, in order of extremity.

1) all women get gold features (see who likes you, unlimited swipes, etc for free)

2) only men are subject to double opt in (eg women can message without having been liked by the recipient)

3) double-opt-in is based on something ELO-ish. The height of the contact initiation barrier is proportional to your attractiveness as determined by the crowd (although this creates some extremely perverse incentives for large- scale deception).

I think all of these rules would exacerbate the existing dynamic, and I'm unconvinced that's healthy for either side. As others in the thread have pointed out, I don't know any single women who are having the time of their lives on dating apps, despite the 80/20 hypotheses etc. They may have a huge statistical selection advantage, but in practice that seems to be like hunting for the single best meal of your life on a 10 mile long, all-you-can-eat buffet of food you mostly don't care about.

Which is the source of my pet hunch:

All dating apps are effectively identical, having converged on a pitifully vanilla product that's easy to monetize and scale, and that prioritizes volume over fit. This is good for companies, but bad for individuals. Large scale online communities erode the advantages of actual individuality in favor of performed individuality in a way that ends up feeling dehumanizing for everyone.

Look at reddit: the popular subreddits have a monoculture that's predictable, uninteresting, and easily gamed, and so people game it, making it worse, until it's parroted itself into a tired caricature. Meanwhile, tiny subreddits exist with smaller tribe dynamics and have much more robust, varied, and interesting experiences.

IMO the thing we actually need is subreddits for dating, so that people can self-select into smaller, higher-signal tribes, rather than pretending that everyone should have to card sort everyone in their metropolitan area.

In a way, this is a different kind of darwinian: encouraging finches to lean into divergence.

<comment><USER50> > 1) all women get gold features (see who likes you, unlimited swipes, etc for > free)

> 2) only men are subject to double opt in (eg women can message without > having been liked by the recipient)

> 3) double-opt-in is based on something ELO-ish. The height of the contact > initiation barrier is proportional to your attractiveness as determined by > the crowd (although this creates some extremely perverse incentives for > large-scale deception).

These are all great suggestions. Yes, they should be implemented. Yes, they will increase the female:male ratio and bring in more dollars.

The economics of it is to find a balance between selectivity and availability. You can make the world's most exclusive dating app, but then you have no users. You can make the world's easiest dating app (extreme example: people automatically match at random), but then you can't monetize the male users and female users leave. These constraints create the vanillaness of popular dating apps you mentioned. They all converge to the same business model.

I don't think it is completely efficient though. One thing to optimize for would be reducing the chance of a failed date. I would suggest additional next gen screening mechanisms like potentially a full 3D reconstruction of a person's body/skeleton, maybe some AR, use your imagination, there's a lot of ways to go with this with varying levels of dystopianism. For one mild example, if someone's height in person is a dealbreaker, then the AR ghost would reveal this in spite of a likely frauded height stat.

> This is good for companies, but bad for individuals

I'm speaking from an business/marketing perspective. Obviously this is not "good" for the users. The objective is to get more men to press the Pay button --there is literally no other reason to make a dating app. The "good" thing for people is to not use dating apps, get married young, and have children. You have leave your morality at the door, like AAA game dev or high frequency trading. Nobody _should_ waste their life playing video games or gambling in financial markets, but if they do, let's oblige them and do business.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> 8f2ab37a-ed6c I'm actually surprised it took so long for companies like Tinder to start monetizing their male audience more.

With a 9:1 ratio, it seems like a ripe opportunity to enable progressively more pay-to-play options for men with disposable income (or despair) to try to stand out, by paying their way to the front of the profile advertising queue. They recently introduced the super boost, which is $50, I believe, but IMO that's not going far enough.

You have cities of many frustrated, but wealthy bachelors like San Francisco where men would gladly pay their way into a date.

Ethics and morality aside, there should a platform out there that allows men to bid hundreds, or thousands, on going out with someone, and the highest bidder wins the first spot in line. Of course the woman should not be obligated to take the offer, but it would send the signal that 1. the man is affluent and successful and 2. the suitor is truly committed to getting to know her. This gets somewhat close to the Seeking Arrangement turf, which may or may not be a good thing.

<comment><USER33> whatsyourprice.com Also asymmetric market.

<comment><USER51> Paying someone to go on a date with me just seems weird. Either you're keen to go on a date or you're not, but if I have to pay someone then I'm not even interested.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> I kind of think that agreeableness is a major factor in seeking intimacy that isn't captured well enough in online dating. People are afraid to meet people that disagree with them and actively ridicule people with differing values/opinions/lifestyle. Religions, sports teams and other mass clubs obfuscated a lot of the concern away. But without those people need other groups and tools to trust a stranger to agree with them over time.

</comment><comment><USER53> Why has nobody mentioned Grindr?

<comment><USER50> The gay community has flawlessly foreshadowed the culture of the general populace for hundreds of years. People ignore this for stupid ideological/emotional reasons. If you want to see what the future Tinder looks like, look at Grindr today.

<comment><USER54> I really really don't think that's going to work...

Women have enough issues being harassed on the dating apps as it is...

Grindr conversations are very... forward (and would be seen as harassment by most Woman I have chat with about Grindr)

In reality the only reason the Grindr way "works" is because there is no societal power difference between everyone on it vs a hetero focused dating app.

<comment><USER55> It has always amazed me how well Grindr works, and yet every dating app catering to lesbians is a complete trainwreck. No hetero power dynamics on Her either but everyone on there seems more than a bit unhinged (as compared to the crowd on Tinder/Bumble) and the entire user experience is terrible. But on apps that allow hetero dating there are sooooo many men posing as lesbians by changing their gender settings or "bicurious" women who aren't actually looking to date women but changed their settings to show their profile to women just for fun because they like swiping and there's such a low barrier to entry. In case anyone reading this works there: I know I'm not the only one who really wishes Grindr would create a women-only clone of their app!

<comment><USER56> The same type of technical app may still turn out quite differently if it's for a vastly different demographic; it may be worth comparing outcomes to some relevant baseline metrics, such as the female divorce rate being >2x that of the male divorce rate in homosexual marriages in most countries [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divorce_of_same- sex_couples](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divorce_of_same-sex_couples)

<comment><USER55> Very true. Based on personal experience I'm convinced that the female/female divorce rate is so much higher not because women have worse relationships with other women but because women have a tendency to rush into "serious" relationships that ultimately don't last. This would certainly lead to a different dynamic than you see on Grindr. The lesbian dating style is very much:

1\. meet girl you like

2\. almost immediately become exclusive

3\. date "seriously" for several months, effectively skipping the early phase of the relationship where straight couples tend to play mind games or continue casually dating other people

4\. break up

5\. repeat

My gay male friends tend to casually sleep around a TON until eventually settling into a very serious long-term relationship, while straight couples are somewhere in the middle and have a much longer casual dating phase before making relationships official (at which point the relationship is more likely to last). When you take men out of the dating equation, the vast majority of women become serial daters who hop from one semi-serious semi-long-term relationship to another. It makes sense that a number of those couples would get married and then quickly get divorced before an equivalent straight or gay male couple would even get married in the first place.

It's actually quite interesting to observe these dynamics IRL; makes me feel a bit like a dating anthropologist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> The stats I remember reading about dating apps show that conventionally unattractive men fail miserably at using them and conventionally attractive men tend to reap tall the spoils. I think this was a study done by okCupid based on their data. Overall, this is generally true in the real world. The problem with scaling dating apps actually lies in the fact that the majority of the population, particularly the male population, will not succeed. They lose interest and leave the platform eventually. There are many intangibles in a relationship that you miss when you using dating apps. Maybe you make up for your lack of a chiseled jaw line by being hilarious or good at something. Maybe you end up being attracted to someone because you have a really deep connection due to similar interests.

I actually think dating apps are generally doomed to repeat the same mistakes because they just don't allow you the important element of organic real life connections.

</comment><comment><USER7> If I was going to try to disrupt dating, I would look at ways to please the women on the site. The women are the limiting factor, it's important to get more of them.

I think this will look like harsher and more invasive prescreening of the men. Make an app that watches a man do 50 pressups. Work out how get the mens' financial info. Work out some AI-based test of confidence that's really hard for the man to fake.

The problem with this approach is that unfit, loser-ish men are the profit centre for these apps, so the app wants to string these guys along just enough to get money out of them. Still, it might work as a nonprofit or something.

Another angle that might work is trying to provide a credible commitment mechanism for people who want commitment. Marriage used to fulfill this, but it has its problems. A sort of "digital marriage" system that punishes people for going back on their commitments, particularly men stringing women along or women divorcing men later.

</comment><comment><USER58> The problem is that current dating apps consist of choosing people whose in- person behavior (as well as resources in some cases) you care about based on self-selected photos and their ability to write text messages, so it's pretty obvious it doesn't work very well.

</comment><comment><USER59> Most dating services are little more than ad platforms; you advertise yourself and you can pay to have your ad shown to more users (though their prices are ridiculous with no indication of effectiveness, and border on scams that actually _hinder_ matches unless both people are paying, especially Tinder with its severe nickel-and-diming and predatory dark patterns.)

A true _match-making_ service would automatically match people based on their criteria, preferences and shared interests.

Of course, if a dating service is truly effective then its users will no longer need it. :)

</comment><comment><USER31> > Does not limit sign-ups to keep a balanced M:F ratio. You see this in Vegas > all the time: to make sure the ratio isn't skewed too far female or (more > likely) too far male, the hottest club in town is going to have a line.

This isn't just a balancing mechanism, it's also a revenue model. I'm really surprised that "free for women, men must pay a weekly fee" isn't more common.

<comment><USER60> > free for women, men must pay a weekly fee

Would this be allowed in the US? In the EU it would probably be forbidden as discrimination.

<comment><USER4> Depends on the state. It's barred in California, for example: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unruh_Civil_Rights_Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unruh_Civil_Rights_Act)

<comment><USER61> Interesting that the supreme court ruled on this specifically

> The California Supreme Court also decided that the act outlaws sex-based > prices at bars (ladies' nights): offering women a discount on drinks, but > not offering the same discount to males. In Koire v Metro Car Wash (1985) 40 > Cal 3d 24, 219 Cal Rptr 133, the court held that such discounts constituted > sex stereotyping prohibited by this Act.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> I'd like to highlight: this is a problem that's on topic for us at VC3 ([https://vc3.club](https://vc3.club)). We're a group of contributors seeking to produce actionable research in the area of technology for social connection.

If this sort of thing interests you, we would love to have you join the discussion!

</comment><comment><USER63> Have the 'dating app company' organize small group dates, and broadcast on FB live or similar. Turn it in to a reality show. Well... not FB live - you could only watch if you're a service member (or perhaps paid?)

<comment><USER64> Thankfully not on dating apps anymore but this sounds horrifying (to someone like me at least).

Between the narcissists and attention seekers of the "reality TV" crowd and the thought of having a potentially stressful and awkward (or, at best, intimate and personal) meeting broadcast on freaking Facebook sounds like something out of Black Mirror.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> From the half-bakery, but what if you could get an indication of how many messages each user was receiving? And the number of users you could message was limited each day?

</comment><comment><USER66> Even if you build the perfect dating app, ultimately it will be sold off to Match or some other monstrosity, and then it will go (more) downhill.

</comment><comment><USER67> we had similar experiences in this market for a company now nearly a decade ago.... the problem is that most of the potential features identified by the OP exist in the form of community organizations / adult sports leagues / social clubs

as a start-up, it's nearly impossible to scale the hyper-local focus (partnering with coffee shops/bars) across multiple regions

</comment><comment><USER68> While David Brooks and I don't agree on much, his discussion of "relationism" vs. "individualism" and his "weave" program is the ultimate disruption to the way families and communities are built today. IMO it is the actual disruption for dating and relationships in the US.

I'd go further than what Mr. Brooks offers in his assessment of the situation, but like all things ideas exist on a continuum. I would much rather try to build a tribal group than try to find dating partners.

</comment><comment><USER69> I looked through 302 comments on this thread and couldn't see a single commenter identifying as a woman. I can't help but think if we could get women more involved in the design of dating apps we might have a chance of creating something that works.

</comment><comment><USER70> How will a zero tolerance policy for harassers be enforced?

<comment><USER70> legitimately don't understand why this comment is being downvoted. Is this not a fair question? Help me understand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> Badoo and Bumble are made by the same company, lol

</comment><comment><USER72> As a LGBTQ person this article is so creepy

<comment><USER25> "are the straights okay?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> It feels like there are a bunch of irreconcilable issues.

I had a discussion about improving dating sites at a local dev meetup. I was told by the 30 something women in the group the only thing important is the person's face. Nothing else matters on a dating site.

Of course that's only a few data points (small meetup) but was very frustrating to hear and if true then all this is pointless. It's certainly not true for me personally though.

Random thoughts

* video: In the 80s there was video dating. You'd go into the dating service office, look through notebooks of profiles, then ask for the videos of the people you were interested in. Is that just not possible anymore? I get that people were shy of the internet before but in 2020 with Instagram and TikTok are videos not viable?

* AI video interviewer: could you make some interview system where a selection of pre-recorded videos of an interviewer asking questions asks you interview questions so you actually get a reasonable interview out of the user? (vs just having a "record button" and leaving it entirely up to the user)

* Encouraging better profiles: Similar to the AI video interviewer, how can you encourage users to create an interesting profile? I have no idea for the men but for women, making these numbers up but it feels like 30% write nothing. They just put their picture (Tinder, OkCupid, Bumble, CoffeeMeetsBagel). 65% write something so generic as to have no value like "I do yoga, like travel and eating out, dancing, and movies". I have no idea how to fix this. One is use TalkToTransformer.com to make up a random profile and tell them to fix it or else. another might be text-to-speech from the AI video bot (yes I know that's not likely to work). I also know most people or at least some large percent of women don't want to put in the time to fill out a profile. They just want to sign up and look around. Maybe their profile should stay private until they've added enough content. Maybe some deep learning could rate how unique their profile is and they stay private below some threshold or tell them it sucks and they aren't going to get any good matches unless the level it up with lots of suggestions.

* Better Interests: One service (probably patented) lets users create public interest groups. An interest group = name of group and single photo (icon). Example of groups "Raspberry PI Lover", "Fan of George Clooney", "Chocolate is the 5th food Group", "Seeking Soulmate", "Dad jokes are hilarious", "Zelda Love", "Dogs > Cats", ... The plus is a user can just select 5 to 500 of these interests which many find easier than writing a profile. So, on the user's profile a list of these icons show up. Clicking an icon also shows all the other profiles that added that interest. Most dating sites have a boring and useless set of 10 to 50 categories. The user created ones are much better at helping find people with similar interests. I suspect this feature would need serious moderation though so people don't make trolling or rude interests.

* separating services into DTF, LTR, etc...: Right now it feels like on all the major systems everyone is mixed together, both the people that just want something for tonight and the people looking for a soulmate. The mix doesn't work IMO because the DTF men disgust the LTR women and so the LTR women leave. How to fix that I have no idea. One idea is if you're on the LTR site and someone asks DTF you can flag them and get them moved to the DTF site (with enough flags and/or moderation).

* better activities: There was a service "How about we..." were your profile was just suggestions of activities "How about we go to disco bowling together". "How about we try stinky tofu"... etc. How can that be expanded? Partner with AirBnB experiences to sign people up to local event? Partner with entertainment venues for live performances? There's a service called "Dine" which was supposed to be "pick a restaurant, one of 3, from a person's profile, which then automatically sends them a message, so-and-so would like to take to you (name of restaurant), choose a time..." In my experience the site lacked any women even close to my age but it did seem like you could charge a premium and potentially partner with restaurants to try to making actually meeting in person in a safe venue as frictionless as possible.

* group activities? I know match.com had their stir.com initiative. I don't know if it went anywhere. I tried a couple of events. Too few people. Not good matches (odds of matches low). Still many people say they really only have had relationships with people they've known for a while so how do take that feedback into account?

* How to get people to pay and take it serious and still get users. Most of the dating services are free or free for women. This fills the site with non-serious people which is not actually helpful for those that actually want to meet someone. On the other hand any paywall = no users? Although I know that's not always true. The #1 site in Japan is pay only, $120-$180 a year, at least for men.

</comment><comment><USER74> There is nothing to fix or disrupt. The vast majority of women don't need or care about dating apps the vast majority of men won't get anything out of them. Women want the fittest men, men will bang anything that moves. Thats the root issue and how to fix it or if it even should be fixed is far beyond the purview of a better engineered dating program. At most you'll make it slightly less predatory or more monetarily profitable. A lot of people (men) will still be left out in the cold.

<comment><USER75> > how to fix it or if it even should be fixed is far beyond the purview of a > better engineered dating program

You've laid out the problem. You say you don't see a solution. It's a non- sequitur to claim that no technical solution exists.

> A lot of people (men) will still be left out in the cold.

Looks like we can't have an ideal world, here and now?

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> Two things he downplays but I think should get more attention. As someone who has been there way before dating apps it was pretty obvious to everyone that the 80/20% is pretty accurate. Every group of guys had those guys who would get most of the women, it is just the way it is. Dating app just made it even more extreme, maybe 90/10.

The second thing is what he calls 2nd and 3rd tier apps. For all those 80% those apps give some alternative. If you don't get matches in Tinder you can still message people in POF for free and if you got good text skills it works much better than tinder for people who are average looking. So I wouldn't call it second tier but rather the solution to some of his complains.

The solution he suggest is what society in more conservative societies always did, vetting by parents and family and a matching system that gave a chance to every male in society to find a woman by matchmaking with end result of one to one. All of that only works when you accept the scarcity of marriage and it is enforced socially by people, legally by the state and sometimes also by religion. I am afraid this is not going to work in our society of today unless we all accept on ourselves more conservative values.

</comment><comment><USER74> Bumble is not a 'decent' app. Its whole schtick is taking a dump on the group that keeps it in business (men) and how horrible they are and how women need to be protected from them. Thats not fair to men or sustainable.

<comment><USER77> They are clearly responding to a real market signal (the belief, at least, that too many men behave poorly on some of these apps) that at least some women respond very favorably to. I guess if they remain successful that tells us something about both that signal and the sustainability.

<comment><USER74> If you don't like a person don't swipe on them. If they behave badly, unmatch them. I fail to see how women are systematically oppressed under this system vs the one Bumble provides.

<comment><USER77> It doesn't really matter what you or I think about it individually - if enough women are unhappy with the experience (whatever it is) on other sites that they move to this one _and then find it superior and stay_ it's a pretty strong market signal. If it fails, that's another signal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> Unhappy incels

</comment><comment><USER79> The apps are asymmetric because dating is asymmetric: most women do not want to date most men.

Likewise subtle prostition is common because it's part of heterosexual dating: men are expected to provide resources.

You may disagree with the morals of this, but it is very clear this is how dating works, not a new thing created by the existence of apps.

</comment><comment><USER80> This whole "disruption" simply sounds like someone who can't get a date on the current apps.

Apps are simply a number game. You get to contact a larger amount of individuals than you could in person.

Steps to getting a date: 1 - match with someone 2 - ask a question related to their profile 3 - have non creepy casual conversation. Every answer or statement you give should be followed by a question 4 - ask to Meetup for a drink or coffee in the new 3 days

I don't know if that counts as a true date but it's a start. Step 3 is incredibly important</comment>


ScribbleLive: Two Guys In Canada Launch Sweet Liveblogging Platform - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/22/scribblelive-two-guys-in-canada-launch-sweet-liveblogging-platform/

<comment><USER2> Is liveblogging something that people outside the Web2.0 group pay attention to? I think I'd rather see video and a transcript and fuller comments afterwards.</comment>


Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP - <AUTHOR> http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/5335 <comment><USER2> > The same is true at the software level, since programming environments > consist of gigantic libraries with enormous functionality. According to > Sussman, his students spend most of their time reading manuals for these > libraries to figure out how to stitch them together to get a job done.

You don't need an MIT education to do that kind of programming, and do it well.

There was an interesting lecture Theodore Roosevelt gave in 1911 at a small vocational school in Pasadena, California called Throop Polytechnic Institute. He said:

ROOSEVELT> I believe that the most important work for us in America today, in the way of education, is to train men so that they can do the most efficient possible work in the vocations they undertake; and I also regard it as of the utmost importance to train the exceptional man on a purely cultural basis. In other words, I want to see institutions like Throop turn out perhaps ninety- nine of every hundred students as men who are to do any given pieces of industrial work better than any one else can do them; I want to see those men do the kind of work that is now being done on the Panama Canal and on the great irrigation projects in the interior of this country---and the one hundredth man I want to see with the kind of cultural scientific training that will make him and his fellows the matrix out of which you can occasionally develop a man like your great astronomer, George Ellery Hale."

A few years later, that school changed its name to California Institute of Technology, and made it its mission to concentrate on Roosevelt's "hundredth man".

I think SICP is the kind of preparation that a hundredth man needs for programming.

</comment><comment><USER3> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11628080](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11628080). Unfortunately we have to have a base case for this recursion, which is to treat this as a duplicate.

</comment><comment><USER4> SICP changed the way I think about computing. Despite being a book intended for freshmen, there's lots of interesting things to learn about even for experienced programmers, and the footnotes are terrific.

</comment><comment><USER5> It may have lost relevance at MIT but all around London, companies are still using examples from SICP in their programming interviews and tests. Does this mean these selection schemes are stupid and irrelevant or does SICP still possess the power to sway and influence? Just not in the way the authors expected?

<comment><USER6> In my experience, SICP's main effect was developing "analysis" muscle. I remember reading first 3 chapters and realizing that we are starting to write fairly complex stuff but still our language doesn't even have assignments let alone for loops or other bread and butter of programming. It's that moment, it dawns on you what computer program really means. It's not prescription of step-by-step instructions, but set of ideas that come together, compose with each other and make a whole that is far bigger than sum of small pieces. In SICP, you actually start at "atomic" level to build real world objects. I think this exercise is still relevant at least in that way and chances are that SICP readers are better at grasping and using abstractions.

<comment><USER5> Yes, I agree - I think this is why so much was also used in the Coursera Scala course to build up the student's understanding of the functional aspects in composing software. Must revise SICP sometime soon.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Random Daily Art – Have the Museum and Art Gallery Come to You - <AUTHOR> https://randomdailyart.com <comment><USER2> Great idea. It's like Morning Brew, but for Art!

</comment><comment><USER3> Does look interesting and cute. So the daily email contains nothing else, but an image? No text or ads or pitches?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry for the late rely. Yup, that's pretty much it. Just an image and a description and the name of the artists.</comment></comment>


It's Not Too Late to Save the Internet - <AUTHOR> https://www.namebase.io/blog/its-not-too-late-to-save-the-internet/ <comment><USER2> We definitely need to save the internet... from useless blockchains & cryptocurrencies claiming to be revolutionary.

Also, how is this different from Namecoin?</comment>


Bitcoin Backlash: Back to the Drawing Board? - <AUTHOR> http://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.com/2017/10/bitcoin-backlash-back-to-drawing-board.html <comment><USER2> Orthogonal, but related: Bitcoins are used in illegal arbitrage and they are traceable to the current holder. Why shouldn't a Bitcoin holder worry that their local government won't compel them with laws to relinquish their Bitcoin?</comment>


Ask HN: Should remote worker salaries be based on location? - <AUTHOR> I am hiring remote at the moment and finding it very difficult to decide what I should be paying for a specific role - experience combination.
Some people argue; why does it matter where I live?
If this is true, what is the global remote rate? <comment><USER2> I haven't made my mind on this yet tbh. I tend to not agree with the argument that workers are bringing the same value to the company no matter their location. What about doctors that live outside major cities. Should they be compensated the same as the doctors in the centre of NY? I think that's a utopian state where it just can't co-exist with the current way of how markets work.

On the other hand, I totally agree with Sid (from GitLab)[1]:

> "If we pay everyone the San Francisco wage for their respective roles, our > compensation costs would increase greatly, and we would be forced to hire a > lot fewer people. Then we wouldn't be able to produce as much as we would > like," Sid explains. "And if we started paying everyone the lowest rate > possible, we would not be able to retain the people we want to keep.

> "So you end up in a place where the compensation is somewhere in between. > And that would cause us to have a concentration of team members in low-wage > regions because it's a better deal for them. They're getting more than the > market rate, so they're more likely to apply and accept an offer. And > they're more likely to stay regardless of how happy they are, which is not > healthy for them or the company."

That makes sense! Both company and the employees are equally happy. I don't find anything wrong with that.

I think choosing an "above the local rate" rate to pay your employees is the way to go. Rate them based on the criteria you think it's best and put that in perspective against their local rate and the rate ofc that they want. They are going to be some that live in Greece and want to be compensated with SF rates. That's fine and they are probably able to do it. But that shouldn't affect your own strategy.

1: [https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2019/02/28/why-we-pay-local- ra...](https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2019/02/28/why-we-pay-local-rates/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the reply.

This makes sense, however it does mean you will end up hiring mostly from low wage regions. Which may not be a bad thing for the company, however it will be for people in higher wage regions.

<comment><USER3> This sounds like a positive consequence of that policy.

People move to lower rage regions, they spend less time commuting, the have more money available for other expenses (as rent is not a big chunk of their income).

In the end, this pushes to a decentralized workforce and may reduce the cost of living on highly populated areas (NYC or SF)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It should be of no concern to the employer where I live; that's my decision and deciding my salary based on that is nothing but pure discrimination, no better than discriminating based on race or ethnicity. If you can afford to pay a certain amount of money to someone living near you then you can afford to pay the same amount of money to someone living in Romania. There's also the issue of calculating the cost of living - why should I trust a US based employer to be able to correctly calculate my cost of living if I live in Saudi Arabia?

<comment><USER5> This is not the same as discrimination on race or ethnicity. Most of the legally protected attributes are not something you choose to be or can change. Even religion, while being a choice, is protected because a person's religion is regarded as a strong moral conviction and is widely accepted as a concept.

Within the United States, the choice to live in a low cost of living area could easily be changed by moving. Millions of people move each year in the US, many of them due to work. In fact, I had to move from a low-cost area that is considered depressed in order to find a job.

Now I can see that living outside the US can bring challenges to moving, like visas, and national origin is a protected trait. But if their policy is to pay local rates, then that does not discriminate based on anyone's individual traits and is wholly based on the market.

Does it suck? Sometimes. I would have gladly stayed in my low-cost depressed area if there was a job for me there. The best play for me would be to move to an expensive area (done), make a lot of money (I wish), and move back to the cheap area to retire early. But my wife doesn't want to ever move.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Don't listen to what others think. As the hiring manager or business owner, you ultimately decide what's it worth to you. Also, not all candidates are equal. Just because someone is remote doesn't automatically make them special and vice versa.

Decide based on merit of the candidate. If they are remote BUT are worth paying $x/Year, pay them. If they are not worth paying, their location doesn't matter. If that $x/Year s good enough for both parties, who cares what the number is compared to say US salary or Silicon Valley.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree completely, but a benchmark is needed, as a business owner with (currently) small reserves and no revenue you always want to pay low.

You need a frame of reference.

<comment><USER6> I should have worded my 1st sentence better. I agree with you. But my point remains. You decide how much you want to pay and if you want to use local market/areas in your consideration, go for it. Let's say you are hiring a developer in Poland. Do research on average developer salaries there and also check based on areas. Then, make an offer that you are comfortable with. Ideally you should pay at least the average salary in Poland for that role/level of experience but pay more if you want to. As long as that developer is happy and you are happy, who cares.

Bottomline is: Don't let the candidate dictate what you should and should not do. If they don't like the offer and you don't think they are worth more than that, capitalism baby. You move on. Until then, keep negotiating.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think paying less than you would pay locally based on the location is kind of a discrimination.

In fact, simply paying your local salary to remote workers opens a pool of really experienced people from all over the world for you. In many cases probably even superior in experience than you would be able to find locally with your local average salary. So you are already winning big here, why would you want to screw that by assuming their worth based on where they live?

How can one even calculate that? For example, cheaper/poorer countries might have a worse healthcare system without insurance, so people would need additional money saved aside for health emergencies (like cancer or similar) for themselves and their family. And this is just one example.

</comment><comment><USER8> Selfishly, no, you should offer to pay what you think is fair for the exchange of service you receive. If you get the same quality work from a person who lives in NYC as a person who lives in Ohio, the pay should be equal.

But, as a business person, you should pay the lowest amount you possibly can while maintaining the level of quality you require. People who live in LCOL areas are more likely to accept a lower bid to do the same amount of work, which opens the pool of labor up enormously for a lower price point.

What you absolutely shouldn't do imo, is set up a job req for a price point, then negotiate a candidate down because of where they live.

If you can only pay 80k / year, then offer 80k. If you get a candidate from somewhere that 80k is above average, isn't that just a win/win?

<comment><USER9> > But, as a business person, you should pay the lowest amount you possibly can > while maintaining the level of quality you require. People who live in LCOL > areas are more likely to accept a lower bid to do the same amount of work, > which opens the pool of labor up enormously for a lower price point.

Wow, that hurts. You treat all your employees as slaves? What about investing in people to produce better quality and commitment?

I always thought that it is better to have one Gilfoyle who can afford a new Lamborghini every month no matter where he lives, than having 50 miserable copies, because someone wants to save a few pennies. And guess what? At the end they cost you more...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Pay based on location & candidate, I have been doing it this way for years, it works and is the most fair and proper method. That doesn't mean you lowball people or that you don't pay fair wages or that you overpay, it simply means that you are taking into consideration the local economy and cost of living differences in areas. It is an unrealistic notion to say everyone gets the same pay regardless of location. Basic economics tells you this is not a sustainable model.

Buffer and Gitlab are pretty open about their methodologies, where they use pay bands for a position and then the do a location & experience adjustment. Essentially this is how I have done it in the past (typically as the team gets larger), you set pay bands per country per position, then do location & experience based adjustments. You can see how gitlab does it if you check out one of their open positions there is a salary calculator and it shows you the basics (they even show how options work). That said, you shouldn't rule someone out just because their pay request exceeds your defined band/location/experience calculation if their experience/expertise justifies their ask. To me the banding is there to set a starting point and make things open and transparent to the best of your abilities without publishing peoples individual pay rates.

<comment><USER11> From the opposite PoV: you bill Bay Area clients with Bay Area rates.

<comment><USER10> Not sure I agree.

When I ran my consultancies I priced my contracts as either a fixed weekly rate or a value price. So it didn't matter where the client was located or my employee(s). When we billed weekly rates it was a specified rate for a specific project role regardless of who the client was. When it was value based deal I didn't care if the client was in SF or Kansas, I based the price on the value it brought to the client and what I thought was fair but lucrative enough to take the project.

I do know there are freelancers that change their rate based on the client but I honestly don't agree with it, typically to me it means you rate is too low or you are pricing improperly. Your rate should be moving up as you gain experience but it shouldn't vary much by client, unless you start value pricing or when you start dealing with enterprises who demand insane support and hand holding.

<comment><USER11> OK, but now imagine if a Bay Area client tells you to lower your rate by 20% since you're based in Oklahoma and it should be more than enough for you...

<comment><USER10> I see your point and respect your position but disagree with the logic.

In one example you are an employee, in the other you should be running a business and the two are not equivalent in pay, process or responsibility, so trying to treat them as they are is improper.

IMO freelancer is just a label for an employee with no benefits, no protections and full tax liability. Consultants (or dev shops etc) generally build real businesses and are treated considerably different.

<comment><USER11> Those (including 400K employment) are just different names for what is essentially a business deal between two parties - as long as you provide the value satisfying the second party, and as long as the second party pays the agreed amount - it shouldn't matter whether any of you live in Thailand or rent a duplex on Manhattan.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Why should it be? The work I do and the value I provide is the same regardless of location. Oftentimes, remote work is even more valuable in terms of productivity gains so they should be paying me even more than locally.

</comment><comment><USER13> this is obviously a divided topic. I think that the most important things that you ensure you are paying a fair wage. one advantage to location-based income is that you can provide a more than fair wage in lower income areas. it's hard to know how much to pay if you do this, I have been musing about better understanding living expenses with respect to region. I think finding a stable location under the currency of your employment is an interesting way to look at this. living expenses under the US dollar for Delaware grow very slowly and steadily. you can fix an income and a raise rate to that area, then determine projections to other areas by your preferred method. this may mean that certain regions become prohibitive. The major downside, is that this is considered an invasion of privacy. many of the remote workforce don't want to have to ask their employer before moving. you will have to change their wage when they move if you adopt thes sorts of method.

</comment><comment><USER14> I think the first question is:

\- Do you want to pay fair

\- do you want to maximize value for your money

\- or do you want to hire from the pool of the top 10% world wide?

max value: you hire for little money from poorer nations

top 10%: you adjust to local rates

fair: here it gets philosophical... I'll probably go with you pay everyone the same, which probably again means you'll not hire from rich countries.

</comment><comment><USER11> Compare not absolute numbers but the _quality of life_ \- aim for the equality of it.

E.g. if you pay local market rates for someone based in Seattle and another one based in Zimbabwe - I'm pretty sure that former's quality of life will be _much_ better.

</comment><comment><USER15> It's all about base living costs and how much change is left over as an approximate percentage of income.

</comment><comment><USER16> Are you going to pay them more later if they then choose to move somewhere more expensive?</comment>


Ten takeaways from ten years at Retraction Watch - <AUTHOR> https://retractionwatch.com/2020/08/03/ten-takeaways-from-ten-years-at-retraction-watch/ <comment><USER2> I do have two anecdotes on this - came across two papers in my exact area of combinatorics that had incorrect results; but they had been submitted to IEEE conferences. So presumably the referees just glanced at them and waved them through.

I wrote to the conference organizers explaining in very simple terms that it could be easily shown the results were wrong (i.e. "please send this to the original referees" \- easy, you would think ...) One of them was sympathetic but said it can't be withdrawn from IEEE, and the other was like "get lost, I don't care". It was quite an eye opener. You really don't know what this is like until you've tried it.

I eventually wrote to the author and his work (Porton Down) saying the same thing and the author reacted quite well. Still, the IEEE site for the papers doesn't say anything. Just my comments on pubpeer. And that doesn't come up in a google search. So there are still people wasting their time reading a result known to be wrong.

[https://pubpeer.com/publications/9842D9E91821B0F7CADE333BE9D...](https://pubpeer.com/publications/9842D9E91821B0F7CADE333BE9DC7B) [https://pubpeer.com/publications/BF67542504DA9118ECBE8869EAF...](https://pubpeer.com/publications/BF67542504DA9118ECBE8869EAF627)

The only (obvious) red flag for a potential reader is of course - it was supposedly a very big result, so why was it at an IEEE conference instead of a top combinatorics journal?

<comment><USER3> The norm for conference-driven fields, I think, is that formal retractions of proceedings papers are really only for outright misconduct, like plagiarism or fabricated data, not for mistakes, oversights, bad experimental design, etc. The proceedings are seen more as a record of an ongoing conversation that continues annually [1]. If you find something wrong, misleading, incomplete, etc. in a conference paper, the normal solution is that you write a reply conference paper criticizing/correcting the earlier paper. This does mean that if you dig up a paper from 10 or 20 years ago, you need to look through more recent literature to see if anyone's published criticisms.

[1] This happens in practice in some conferences more than others of course. There are lower-tier conferences where people just dump papers and no kind of actual conversation or intellectual exchange is happening.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > It's not Big Pharma that's responsible for most retractions

This is not at all surprising to me. Big Pharma has teams of professional statisticians, writers, copy-editors, fact-checkers, etc. and have much more rigorously enforced standards than most academic research institutions. Their bias comes out more in how they frame the study and in the choice of things they study, but I think in general I would trust Big Pharma to be more accurate in reporting their study results than academic labs.

<comment><USER5> Enjoy your thalidomide. Pharma has absolutely no intrinsic interest in scientific integrity or integrity in general. They exist solely to make money, and any cultivated appearance of good will is exactly that. They gobble up scientific talent as a means to that end, but R&D will always be a cost center for them. I would argue the massive profit-driven incentives to reach certain results are more insidious than a small research group nearing the end of a grant cycle. Given the historical context, it seems more likely that pharma is just better at concealing misconduct.

<comment><USER4> I don't think we're disagreeing, and I agree that profits rather than human benefit drive pharma's research agenda. I'm just saying that if a paper from Big Pharma says a factual statement like "Reference X says Y" or "X% of patients had blood pressure of Y", I would expect Big Pharma research teams to have done a thorough job of checking to make sure they got it right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > doing the right thing pays, which is why we created a category to recognize > such actions and even helped start a now-moribund award, called the DIRT, to > honor good behavior.

If the incentives are wrong, do your bit to change the incentives!

Retraction Watch is a worthy contribution to the repositories of shared knowledge that are of so much benefit to all of us.

</comment><comment><USER7> Is anyone aware of a "false positive" retraction?

Meaning a retraction that was later found to be in error, resulting in re- publication (or whatever)?

I imagine the bar for retraction is so high it would never happen, but it would be really interesting if it ever did.</comment>


Spokane police spend approximately $320,000 on body camera storage per year - <AUTHOR> https://www.krem.com/article/news/investigations/spokane-police-spend-approximately-320000-on-body-camera-storage-per-year/293-1a9d05ef-42f1-4c11-805a-1219ad9456e2 <comment><USER2> Is that too much? How much is it worth to us to have at least a chance at oversight for peace officers? I think if it saves one life, it's worth it.

<comment><USER3> The product they seem to be using is Axon enterprises "Evidence.com" which details some features here: [https://www.axon.com/products/evidence](https://www.axon.com/products/evidence)

I think that there is some potential for oversight, but I don't see any clear language denoting citizen access or FOIA compliance. What I do see is tools for metadata tagging and procecutorial access.

What concerns me is that these huge centralized services will grow to be something akin to license plate scanners, but for faces and with the ability to walk around and into private spaces.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That doesn't sound that outrageous. AWS S3 would come to close to $50k/yr for that amount of data and presumably this body camera footage storage company provides some additional value beyond just raw data storage that is encapsulated in that cost.

<comment><USER5> An extra $270k in additional value?

<comment><USER6> Video transcoding and a UI to scan through, categorize, tag, etc. sounds pretty valuable.

Who knows - it might integrate with case tracking software and do speech to text and semantic search etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Spokane's history of recent, overt racism and brutality from its police force earned them need for such an expense. Otto Zhem, racial profiling, and a cover up culture essentially mandated the body cameras.

</comment><comment><USER8> The video is landing in Azure storage. I'm sure Evidence.com is making a good margin on the service. They were offering free body cameras to police forces, in the old razor/blade model.

</comment><comment><USER9> Why not use Google Drive ? It offers unlimited storage for businesses.

<comment><USER10> Unlimited doesn't mean what you think it does.

<comment><USER11> It's unlimited until you abuse it in most cases

<comment><USER10> What do you think storing PBs of video for an entire police department is?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Doesn't seem so bad...it provides a lot more than "dumb storage" for $89 a month.

[https://axon.cdn.prismic.io/axon%2F4f80e99a-b5d6-414e-bcd8-d...](https://axon.cdn.prismic.io/axon%2F4f80e99a-b5d6-414e-bcd8-d5fb3d5d52da_program+card+-+axon+plans.pdf)</comment>


Show HN: Videos with Science Activities, Engaging for Both Kids and Parents - <AUTHOR> https://youtu.be/JZWFKcKJXOs <comment><AUTHOR> I am a stay at home mum of twins & previously a scientist. I spend many hours trying to teach my twins through play & the part I struggled the most, is the long preparations. I tried watching Youtube videos with science activities together with my kids. The idea was that we will be watching the videos together, and follow their instructions to setup and play our own science activities! But we failed to this as well! The videos we found were: _Too long and therefore not so interesting for my 4 year olds_ Not fun enough to keep young children's attention _Requiring too many or complicated items that we usually didn't have at home OR_ Not accurate enough for us to replicate the experiments quickly and easily

So, I I did a Youtube channel with videos designed especially for parents & young kids to watch together. Its a channel where you can follow along, together with your child, to prepare and play easy, fun, STEM activities using household items. Encouraging kids to prepare their own activities is benefiting both: parents and children. Parents avoid long preparations and kids learn to follow simple instructions: a useful skill in life!

Here, is a link to my latest video. We use household items to build an un- spillable tray where we can carry and spin toys in full circles without dropping them! When they practice enough, they will also be able to spin their favorite liquids in circles ! It's a super fun craft that you can easily do with young kids and they will be able to play independently afterwards! Just change the toy which is swinging, add a challenge to it (such as: spin three full circles without dropping it etc) and make it even more engaging! This video & craft teaches kids a lot such as a super simplified explanation of the concepts of inertia, centrifugal and centripetal force. It also allows kids to practice knots, develop focus & improve fine motor skills. .

If you like, please check it out and let me know what do you think...</comment>