- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
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If they are dying, I’d say nothing of value is lost.
it’s not because there isn’t a desperate need. it’s that they are predatory and make a hard thing fucking impossible, and have a vested interest in making it impossible and charging for the solution, but not a good enough solution to invalidate needing to keep using it.
Good riddance
I’ve paid for a few to see if it helps - It does and I feel like it was worth it up until 2 years ago when they changed how matching works. But you know what doesn’t work, people telling the truth on their profile. So great, I had better matches or in my case on bumble, better choice for matches based on who liked me. But damn if Jeni from the town next door loved “hiking” when really she just loved watching tv and one day wanted to “be more active”. She also told me she wanted to move to Spain one day… guess who also wanted to move to Europe ( Spain, wherever) - me! But I got the job and she’s pulling the “well not yet!!!” and in the end just wanted to visit and knew I have money to do this. P.s. I live in Spain now.
Each profile is a crafted (and truth bending) aspect of your life for others to review and I hate how it doesn’t capture the truth of who you really are in person. I went in being honest and found women who liked the same, but yet they were never really who they were on the app. I found my best matches when I wasn’t truthful or bent the truth a tad but yet I never stayed together long.
Best girlfriend so far, met her organically on the beach because my dog went over to say hi by licking her face. She’s a bit over the top, has tattoos everywhere including a funny phrase on her ass, but she’s the most compatible woman I’ve met so far.
Is the phrase
Live, Laugh, Love
Written in comic sans
They were a silly concept to begin with. If they worked well, they’d kill their own business model. To stay economically viable they therefore have to use all kinds of tricks and produce mixed-at-best results, and cognitive manipulation to keep their user base entertained. Glad to see them finally collapse
I think, it’s a myth that matchmaking has to be bad to survive. We see that in gaming all the time. The problem is just that physical world matchmaking is optimized to get recurrent customers instead of finding good matches. And that inevitably tanks the reputation. The first dating platform with good matchmaking will be the last one standing because it will suck the competition dry.
There is a market for good matchmaking. It’s just not as big as the imagined market for bad matchmaking (which we see now isn’t actually that big once people realize that the service sucks).I never really believed that montra of if they were successful they lose a customer. I met my wife on a dating site over 13 years ago and told everyone I knew about it and how good it was. Many of the people that I told tried the site. It’s a great way to spread your business if anything then through natural word of.mouth you actually kinda weed out people who are looking for the wrong things. Unfortunately the one I used ok cupid was bought by the big conglomerate and they change it so it was just like all the others. The other place I see it working is if governments offered the service because they want people to be matched up. I get people might not trust the government to match them up but why would you trust a company to do it then.
From my own experience: dating apps all suck. Everything is staged, way too focused on visuals instead of inner values, etc. People get so lost in their and other peoples’ appearance. Furthermore, the profit incentive makes the platform milk desperate users. Don’t ever pay for otherwise free apps. They use you. Give you hope just as your subscription runs out, etc.
What I can personally recommend: dating subreddits like r4r. Reddit, I know, but the community on Lemmy is too small. You can meet people at your own speed and there is no profit incentive that ruins the platform for users. The algorithm treats all users more or less fairly, too.
Good
why? didnt find anyone? Ive had great success tbh - married, 2 kids not sure if its just luck or incidental or what
“Monopoly fucks up the entire market, news at 11.”
I am currently developing one and what I can see is the following:
- people get treated like cash cows. It is almost not possible to successfully date without spending money
- people are burned out. The low quality swiping, matching, just to get ghosted, is hurting the motivation.
- people have other problems nowadays. COVID reshaped us completely. We don’t want to spend 2h a day on a dating app. 2h a week max and then they want to continue in real life.
Those are pain points introduced by big corpos (e.g. Match.com) and the fact, that they have launched their apps before COVID.
I have addressed those pain points.
Dating apps are scams. Either a scammer in Hyderabad is conning you or a scammer in a boardroom is selling your data and forcing invasive ads on you. Did you discover some other way of funding your project aside from the ads or making people pay for sex but pretending it’s classier when an app does it?
Do they have to be scams though? Why or why not?
What is the potential of a dating app that isn’t a scam?
Good point. Men usually get contacted by a lot of “gold diggers” and content creators. Women often are targets from scammers or crypto bros.
Scammers can be avoided by using a mandated verification process. But here I don’t rely on a third party service, as privacy is a really important topic for me. I wouldn’t want users to be forced to upload sensitive data to Persona for example. This is why I have developed a small verification service, that applies some algorithms that have been working quite well according to the research papers. It will not be impossible to catch all scammers, but if 95% are cought, that’s already a big win. As for the other problem with people just trying to sell content, a working reporting system should help. The reporting systems of the current apps are majorly flawed, punishing legit people while protecting scammers. The reason is also gender based. The more women a dating app has, the more men are attracted, so women tend to get extra protection. That hurts the whole community.
As for the funding, this is such a difficult topic. The system costs money, so I need to get a bit of money back. I didn’t want any of the “pay to win” features. I also don’t want ads, not even sponsored content. As a video gamer, I tried then to figure out why free games such as Warframe or Path of Exile were earning so much money. It comes down to two things people are willing to pay for: Cosmetics and time-savers. So that’s what I now implemented. Decorate your profile with paid cosmetics. I don’t know how to implement the time-savers yet, so for now it is just cosmetics and an optional “buy me a beer” donation I offer.
It’s not just women being targeted. My roommate got conned for dick pics. He’s not very intelligent so he believed the scammer was going to send his nudes to friends and family. I had to explain to him it’s a scam and if he wants the guy to go away, take the power away. Let him send whatever he wants.
This situation isn’t uncommon. There are plenty of other people being conned on these things. It’s such a problem that most people who contact you on these apps are scammers so you are just wasting time feeding them. It’s more depressing than just staying single.
As long as the data is centralized it will be abusable too, especially in 2026. You could go decentralized to reduce costs and lighten the load, but that has its own risks for abuse and criminal activity.
The web is retracting.
Oh that scam happened to me personally, too. It is not just annoying, it is damaging people.
There is no option to go decentralized, as I have no incentive for others to spend computing power. Decentralized services are ideal for communication and I have also developed a fully peer-to-peer, end to end encrypted Discord alternative. I just didn’t want to release it yet, until someone verified the security layer. Other than that, I kinda need to have everything centralized to foster the community and to set the rules for that community.
As I am not investor backed and also don’t want to be, I focus on releasing in very specific locations at first to create revenue with small investments. It takes a bit longer, but the growth is more stable and more organic.
But decentralized is kinda perfect for this. Webtorrent is a standard now so you might not even need an app. Just have users seed the service. More users, better service, though webtorrenting the entire site would likely eat data so splitting the different where accounts sort of mesh messages within their area would make more sense than just tossing sniffies in webtorrent.
I worked customer service for match for almost a decade, so I can give you a few pointers.
People leave when they’re the only ones in an area. So giving them something to do is important to retain people. The best idea I’ve ever saw was having a forum where people can discuss any topic. I think Match also tested public chatrooms and streams, but i didn’t really dealt with those. You’ll have to deal with forum drama and moderation, but some people will be very engaged.
Speaking of, moderation will take lots of time and effort. People sick. Make sure that moderation tools are as robust as the matching ones.
I think those are the general ones. Best of luck!
Thanks a lot for sharing. I have a Community Manager background and also was a moderator at Jaumo. Having a place to engage can be fun, but I am not fully sure yet if people really want to do that, when they just want to date. I have to think about it and maybe I will add something as an optional feature.
One of the things I am doing is launching with a wait list, so that an area can populate first, before opening the gates. This avoids the problem of feeling alone.
You’ve missed the big one. Those aren’t people.
They are AI fronts for orgs of various size that will scam you for whatever opportunity they may discover.
You can’t fix that. Try developing something that helps people instead of another platform to use them.
You want to help people meet? Open a bar.
Hard to argue this isn’t a good thing, given how they’ve driven young people apart on purpose for profit.
I’m blessed to have experienced pre-algorithm tinder back in the day.
Thank God
It’s fascinating how different women’s experiences with these stupid things are than men’s…
Yeah it’s wild.
All of my female partners have at about 20 likes for every 1 that I, a male get from females.
I think I prefer to be on this side of the fence to be honest. Having more than a handful of people to chat with at once would be overwhelming.
How so?
I’m a man who originally met women on these apps, but after a certain point everybody seemed to be a bot and the app seemed to be completely gamified, even when I used paid apps. Other people might have different experiences.
I really never found bots to be a problem. Maybe 1 of 20 matches and one gal I actually met started the chat with me saying she knows her profile looks like a bot but she is real and then asks me to meet her later this week for coffee. 😂 im not hot by any means, but she was… sadly it didn’t work out but damn good 45 days.
Mine has always been truth of person. No one seems to be who they really are on their profile.
I turn my profile visible for about 24 hours. As a late 30’s woman, that gets me about 300 likes in a medium sized European city. (I pay for it, it’s impossible to use otherwise.)
I then go into my list of likes and use filters to start left swiping based on hard cutoff criteria (wants kids, Christian, etc). That drops it down to ~100 people. I use an app that has good filters.
I then go through reading profiles and looking at who is attractive for me (pictures and bio). That leaves about 25 people. I then match with all of them at once. Usually leads to 5 or so good conversations, and a few dates. Give it a shot, repeat if necessary.
If I leave mt profile visible for more than a few days I have thousands of likes. I match with most people I see swiping. It’s just not a feasible way to do it. And I’m not even attractive.
It’s just a flood and it’s nearly impossible to manage. It’s such a broken, asymmetrical system. I hate it so much.
From what I understand, women are deluged with mobs of low-effort fuck boys and men are mostly ignored, which creates a feedback loop where men swipe on anything just for the hope of a match, which only makes things worse.
It’s really fascinating from a systems perspective. But it used to be better before enshittification, in my limited experience. The reality is that quickly finding a new partner you are ideally matched with is the very last thing these companies want you to do.
One of my friends, who is a woman, once showed me her dating app to show me why she found it so exhausting. I tell you, I’m ashamed of my fellow males. She got so many cheap messages from horny guys, to the point where she found the app useless.
For me, last time I used a dating app, I found it very hard to strike up a meaningful conversation with my matches. It was like I had to carry the whole conversation and they took forever to respond. So in that retrospect, it might be why some guys don’t put in much effort when contacting women. But most of the massages my friend showed me, where absolutely just mouth breathing horny guys.
My last runthrough with the apps, I’d carefully read everyone’s profile and craft an interesting introductory message. It took quite a bit of time and was rarely rewarded with a reply, much less a conversation, much less a first date. My messages got shorter and shorter until eventually I was just mass swiping. And, just as far as a use of time goes, if all that matters is a woman likes your profile, it’s more efficient to roboswipe and filter the women who match back.
Also, the emotional toll of serially declaring “I like you” and asking “do you like me?” only to be greeted by rejection after rejection is pretty devastating.
Anyway, very happy with my current girlfriend whom I randomly ran into at a store while looking for an accordion.
Gay dating apps are bad too. It’s no better with only men involved. On sniffies, for example, you get on and start texting with a cock pic. Want to have a conversation, get to know them, figure out if they are worth your time, hell, even if they are safe to be around and it’s treated as heretical. It’s just perverted goons.
Guys on these apps lobotomize themselves. They shouldn’t be breeding.
it could be worse. she could have gone on a date with one and they say something really sad like “all the women on there just want sex. I want something meaningful”
oh honey…you have been hitting up all the bots.
there is a point where most people go “this might be a scam” but there is a special few that go so far to give it a whole backstory.
quickly finding a new partner you are ideally matched with is the very last thing these companies want you to do.
Exactly. That’s the gamification. They want to keep you grinding against bots and employees, otherwise they won’t make money.
EDIT:
I’ll add that men are probably the customer here, and that might make women seem like the product, the company can actually swap out real women for bots and employees, making real women obsolete to the business model of dating apps.
Oh, men are definitely the customers. There was a website with a pornstar backer… Madison something or other. It was billed as a place to meet horny married women looking to have an affair–just sex, no attachment. It got hacked and, surprise surprise, it was entirely men talking to bots.
Edit:
Annalee Newitz, editor-in-chief of Gizmodo, analyzed the leaked data.[46] They initially found that only roughly 12,000 (0.22%) of the 5.5 million registered female accounts were used regularly.[47][48] The vast majority of accounts had been used only once — the day they were registered. Newitz also found that many women’s accounts were created from the same IP address, suggesting there were many fake accounts. They found that women checked email messages very infrequently: every one time a woman checked her email, 13,585 men checked theirs. Only 9,700 of the 5.5 million female accounts had ever replied to a message, compared to the 5.9 million men who would do the same. They concluded, “The women’s accounts show so little activity that they might as well not be there.”[47] In a subsequent article the following week Newitz acknowledged that they had “misunderstood the evidence” in their previous article and that their conclusion that there were few females active on the site had been based on data recording “bot” activities in contacting members. Newitz confirmed that Ashley Madison had created more than 70,000 female bots to send millions of fake messages to male users. Still, they note that “we have absolutely no data recording human activity at all in the Ashley Madison database dump from Impact Team. All we can see is when fake humans contacted real ones.” They noted that the site seemed to keep track of human-to-human contact but that the Impact Team had not released this data.[49]
Removed by mod
User name checks out.
Constantly. Show me the lie.
I mean, they suck for everyone - don’t get me wrong.
But being able to see them as an ego boost, or having the frustration be that you get low quality matches, as opposed to the punishing experience of “80% of the matches you get at all are catfishing bots” is very different.
Good. Dating apps have never worked for me, and maybe this is because I’m demisexual, but I’m just never able to feel a connection online and I end up swiping left on everyone, and I’m pan so that’s a lot of people.
Oh no! Where will I find an AI girlfriend?
