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Comment by derialstrazus | Hacker News Reader

I can see where you're coming from, but I think in practice this is not a great idea. Even if it's not intentional, it's not going to be great publicity when you have an app that shows different women with different price tags.

I imagine it's not great either if, on current dating apps, the number of messages women receive becomes public information. The problem here is less that different women cost different prices to message. The problem is that it's visible. If you can overcome this there might be some merit to the idea. This is just me being open-minded though. It still feels like an icky idea.

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There are probably ways you could make it manageable and less morally repugnant.

1) Let people set their own price. Then it's not the platform valuing you, it's how much you value your own time.

2) Provide "auto-pricing" as an optional feature. Use an imaginary unit - call it "stamps" and provide ways to earn "stamps" on the platform besides just buying them.

"How many stamps should it cost for somebody to send you a letter? Or you can use one of our auto-managers - do you want to receive lots of letters or only a few?"

You could still have some kind of invisible credit score under the hood even for users that don't use the auto-pricer - people with good credit get plentiful free stamps.

Then you'd have to get into a whole Google-style graph-based-ranking but for people, which I assume sites like Twitter are already doing under the hood.

Of course, the problem here is that you'd have a plethora of alts to farm free stamps, which would clutter the search list...

Everything is hard.

And also lots of guys would freak out and get very upset if they perceived someone's price is "too high," which would make the experience more hostile to women.

I've got a better idea. Have a swiping system, but also have a simple indicator to see how often people respond to messages after first swipe. There could also be an indicator for how long those conversations typically last.

Or you could just make it extremely simple: just have something saying "this person is X% likely to respond after a match."

Or an opaque "conversation score" which is hard to game, but indicates whether or not they're actually talking to their matches. You could categorize them as "great conversationalists!" and then allow people to filter out those who aren't.

Of course, that could be gamed too but it would be better than just matching over and over with people who have no interest in actually talking to you.

Pandering to guys who would "freak out and get very upset" and "make the experience more hostile to women" sounds crazy.

Better I would have thought to kick such guys off the platform, raising the level for women, which would in turn make it more appealing for more evolved males.

Women tiptoe around male anger about being rejected 24/7, especially on online dating. Lots of "evolved" males still become scary when turned down and don't handle rejection well. There is no way to filter them out because they all walk among us, they're our friends and brothers, and sometimes us.

Every woman who's gone on online dating can give you a list of stories of creepy, scary and/or off-putting experiences.

My point here isn't to start an online debate about gender equality, but to say: one of the main things that would help bring users to an online dating app is making it safer for women. If the women come, the men will follow.

I too fear the boogeyman.

Deep.

This is a great idea for users, but the platforms would never go for it because it would decrease engagement. People would be dissuaded from sending messages to people who are rated as very unlikely to respond (and rightfully so), which would lead to less time on the platform.

I like the idea (not that I'm in the dating market) but I think any purchase option is going to end up matching wealthy men with attractive women.

Instead, how about a different approach: You get say 10 stamps/day. There is no way to purchase them. Any message you receive can be replied to once with no cost. Also, the cost to send to someone is adjusted by the cost to send to you. (Another poster suggested ELO ratings, which makes sense.)

You have a choice between occasionally contacting the hot ones or fairly routinely contacting those at your level or below. It will make people much more realistic in who they choose to contact, taking long shots means not having any shot at the ones you might actually get.

The app should be tied to your identity (although I wouldn't require real name use in the prospect-facing side) so you can't just create a bunch of accounts to get extra stamps.

>but I think any purchase option is going to end up matching wealthy men with attractive women.

Isn't that how it normally works out anyway?

Then we deploy it without any computer interface and call it Earth!

Yep. I can already imagine The Guardian titles:

- Disgusting new dating app literally puts a price on woman. When will woman objectification stop?

- In this racist dating app it costs more to message white woman than black woman.

It will be a disaster, and the author will lose his job.

Ha! I like how these hypothetical complaints contradict each other...

as reported by Jessica Valenti (sorry I couldn't resist)

I loved The Guardian but it became "world misery and outrage daily, and BTW all men are terrible" in the last year or two.

I haven't been playing close attention but I did notice they seemed to have become more click-baitey over time. My brain has subconsciously moved them into the same category as "Huffington Post", fairly or not.

You could probably also scale the price based on other variables as well. Like scaling on the sending side as well as the receiving side, or based on the likelihood the other side responds or something. I would assume the main idea is to put pressure to limit low-effort, low-likelihood messaging from both sides, more than putting a pricetag on a person.

> I would assume the main idea is to put pressure to limit low-effort, low-likelihood messaging from both sides, more than putting a pricetag on a person.

Exactly.

Yeah, this could help a lot. Scaling based on the past response rate of the sender and how many messages the sender has sent recently would make the pricing more relative, and thus prevent a basic enumeration of "prices of people".

It would also go a long way to not have these prices be listed on a catalog page, but only when clicked into an individual person, so it's less of a feeling of comparison shopping.

The psychology of these UI design things matters a lot.

On the other side it must be weird to think that the people reaching to you have gone through an auctioning system and were the ones willing to pay the most.

It would be all the weirder for first contact messages for instance.

Yes, I think this is by far the biggest problem here. I’m sure there are some women who would enjoy knowing that only those willing to pay the most, would be able to court them. But I would wager that most women would feel differently. Presumably a dating service finds potential mates who are good personality match, not just who are more willing or able to pay.

I don't think so.

The person would not know how much the sender "paid" for the "postage" for that message. From ANYONE's point of view, they are not receiving more than N messages per day, as N+1 would become exponentially, prohibitively more expensive.

This is not an info that you can hide from users for very long.

You will have people who start with a profile in both sides to see how it works. It’s done for fun on free platforms, it will done for research on any paying platform.

If they don’t do it personally they’ll ask friends that will spill the beans.

People will rant online on how much they paid for a single text sent.

It’s just endless, the service will need to be transparent and forthcoming about the system or it becomes a PR nightmare.

Also, the entitlement from men would be off the charts. Can you imagine how pissed someone would be if they paid $100 to have their message ignored?

They can always pay to express their displeasure—even better if a cut of the price is shared with the user (but that would introduce other issues).

Those would be issues as well as enabling the higher bidder versus the best prospect (in her mind). I suppose it could be weighted based on both levels of desirability. I think a similar system without the social and implementation complexity would be to sell tiers of “super likes.” Like daily super likes, weekly (get only one per week, monthly, yearly. Essentially, you only get one yearly like a year, so using it conveys extraordinary interest on paper versus a daily like.

How about remove money and visible numbers and instead make people watch an ad, then have a lootbox style reveal of whether their message is sent. The retry rate is limited by ad playtime. The odds are set as described above. Still icky.

> The problem is that it's visible. I don't want to be that guy, but it's usually already visible, if the service has photos and allows at least basic descriptions.

Humans are incredibly good at putting a price tag to potential mates. It takes milliseconds to form a base appraisal.

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