Peter Thiel backs conservative dating app The Right Stuff | Hacker News Reader

Peter Thiel backs conservative dating app The Right Stuff

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24 pointsharambae54 comments

"The right stuff" to me will always be a wonderful 1983 movie about the early US space program.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086197/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0

If you liked the movie, check out the book.

I will never forgive Tom Wolfe, writer of such crazy titles such as "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby", for not calling it by a much punnier name: "The Wright Stuff"

Fantastic book, though, like all of his writing.

The more people self isolate in information bubbles the worse for society. There’s already plenty of proxies for extremists to find like (religion, communities, etc). To continue this trend for the right across all internet properties will only further divide people.

Why does who you vote for have to run so much into every aspect of life beyond it? This is exactly the agenda of those who want political power — devote your life to the “cause” and shun out everyone who doesn’t. What better way to stay in power than have a rabid fan base that thinks about you daily?

Whoever we're referring to with "the right" in this discussion tried this before, and they got, in my opinion, bullied into conforming rather than people trying to bridge a divide. Now that the right wants to create "Safe spaces" free from "persecution" and discrimination, they're being told to not go into bubbles and why are "they" the ones that want to further the divide.

If it wasn't so society-level sad, it'd be comical how the majority flip flops on issues when it suits them. Even your post, I'm sorry, smells of passive-aggressive condescension against these individuals.

Well if it does smell that way, certainly that wasn't my intention. If all you consumed was Fox News, I can understand why you might think certain ways. But keep in mind from the very beginning it's been about us versus them in terms of MAGA -- you're not hearing this from other political arenas in the same way. So it's not like they're being cast into a bubble by the left as you described. It's self-selection as asked for by their thought leaders.

What I was trying to not be passive at all about was my disregard for the Trump/Carlson universe that is actively trying to create a variety of ways to split people at the societal level and funnel them into their own worlds. They're not the only ones to do so, but they're enjoying great success at achieving this by the millions. There is no force that's doing this in terms of actively dividing people... the only other equivalent might be 'cancel culture' that's trying to do it with thoughts, but at least that's aimed at the individual issues rather than who you vote for. A huge component of Fox News is telling you that the 'mainstream media' is lying to you so don't bother listening to them (never mind they're actually the biggest mainstream media source by audience size). Trump will tell you everyone that isn't for him is lying and creating hoaxes so don't listen to them either. Now they're trying to create their own Twitter, dating apps, etc. It's slowly partitioning the world by ideology conformance down to literally who you date from the start. People already self-select enough (homophily is a strong force) -- to lubricate that for political gain will only lead to destruction.

I don't watch Fox or Tucker Carlson. I am however, watching in real time as my opinions are sidelined because they don't fit an accepted or prevailing narrative. Constantly being told that my opinions are hateful while I can see the world ignoring and actively rationalizing actual bad things like racial injustice and legalized discrimination against my group.

What does that have to do with creating an ideological dating app?

While both sides contribute to this divide, liberals contribute more. Liberals are far more likely to discriminate against conservatives in dating:

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/04/24/most-democr...

> To continue this trend for the right across all internet properties will only further divide people.

I agree with this, however I don't see another option for people who want alternatives to the very politicized social networks.

Even if you think these social networks are being fair, they certainty don't, and telling them they are not nuanced, they are getting gaslighted, they should strive for unity, and they shouldn't build their own platforms, it's not going to help.

IMO the way for unity is being truly tolerant of them, not asking them to change and get out of their echo chamber so then we can be unified

It’s not about who you voted for. It’s about prefiltering dates so you don’t have to argue about broadcasting preferred pronouns, what the term “woman” means, listen to her introduce herself as a “strong independent woman” who “doesn’t need a man”, argue over who is going to remove the fallen tree from the yard, who changes the oil, whether NPR will be playing in the background all day, etc.

This is not new. There are dating sites for Christians, Jews, etc. The whole purpose of them is to attract a set of people who can assume a broadly similar background and set of morals. It saves a lot of time, especially if a majority of the people you match with are “keeping it casual”.

I wonder if this app will even have M4M/F4F. It'd be ironic given Thiel's orientation if it didn't.

I don't see why it wouldn't, considering there are conservatives of all sexual orientations, and one has nothing to do with the other.

It's a small app serving a niche on a saturated market and gay people are (most likely) underrepresented in that niche. So it might make sense to skip it rather than just having the section mostly empty.

People are conservative because of their upbringing, community, and their own personally decided values. People are gay because of their genetics.

Thus there are many people who are both conservative by choice but gay by nature. No doubt they would love to meet other gay people who share their politics.

It’s possible this app would be perfect for them. The only downside I thought was that since they may not be openly gay, they wouldn’t want to take the chance of being outed but the apps messaging seems to revolve around the idea that conservative are an embattled minority so it may have the appearance (and maybe reality if features are built in) of protecting user privacy.

Apps like this seem to have trouble attracting competent developers. They keep forgetting that incremental IDs make scraping easy.

Gay is not binary, you can be on a spectrum. Now, the following is conjecture, but I'd assume that slightly gay republicans are far less likely to try a homosexual relationship, especially when compared to those on the liberal side. I'm also pretty sure that mostly gay republicans are far more likely to not be openly gay or to have switched their political orientation due to receiving contempt and no support.

Sure, there are openly gay republicans and I don't want to ruin their chance to find love, but I'm very sure that people that are both openly gay and openly republican are quite rare. To make matters worse, to like the idea of a dating app specifically for your political orientation, you'll most likely need to be quite invested in it - someone moderate to slightly right will not be particularly pulled by this concept. And openly gay die-hard republicans are even rarer.

Lastly, there's also a deterrent effect. I'm not saying that republicans are necessarily homophobic, but I'm pretty sure that quite a bunch are at least not thrilled by the concept. If the app provides gay dating and therefore implicitly promotes it, it might drive away some of it's core demographic and, given that they're niche as-is, this might not be worth the tradeoff, especially when accounting for network effects.

There are conservatives of all sexual orientations, and anti-gay sentiment of various degrees is a popular subset of conservative ideology. These don't preclude each other, and the question of whether a conservative dating app will allow gay couples is legitimately interesting and could go either way.

people on the left seem to conflate Republican moderates, religious zealots, libertarians, fiscal conservatives, right wing nationalists, etc.. All right wingers are "the same".

It's the same straw-man b.s. the right does to the left.

Not all conservatives are against homosexuality. There are several prominent gay Republican groups, iirc, though they tend to be more libertarian than socially conservative for sure.

Half of all U.S. conservatives do not think homosexuality should be accepted by society [1], which presumably includes accepting homosexuality in dating apps.

That's a pretty big segment of your target market to alienate.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2017/10/05/5-homosexual...

What about the age structure? I would expect that anti-gay conservatives are, on average, older and less likely to even consider using a dating app.

Even if I accepted your "statistic" (which I don't), this line of logic would assume that half of conservatives also reject every other dating app. It would also call into question whether that segment the market would ever use a dating app in the first place.

Not to mention the discrimination lawsuits which would be immediately filed forcing them to add options for same sex couples, as happened with eHarmony...

Not quite. New brands that advertise X feature tend to attract audiences that identify with it, meaning any behavior counter to X feature would alienate them. It's one of the reasons why mainstream dating apps avoid doing such politicization.

For a case example, look at Voat [1] which advertised being a free speech platform but alienated their target market when their lawyers made them censor harassing speech.

[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/gy4gzy/founder-of-voat-the-c...

You are presuming conservatives think like progressives - where ideology is paramount - it's NOT and they DON'T. Read Jonathan Haidt's book about this.

>You are presuming conservatives think like progressives - where ideology is paramount - it's NOT and they DON'T.

One has only to look at recent events [1][2][3] to see that is not true at all. I think the main difference is that conservatives do not consider their opinions to be ideological, but fact, as is evident with Covid vaccination statistics.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/us-organizers-plan-co...

[2] https://www.npr.org/2021/12/06/1057344561/anti-vaccine-activ...

[3] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-sports/trump-ur...

I don’t think progressives consider themselves to be ideological either.

On all the topics where progressive values have won out (abortion, trans and gay rights) progressives view themselves as being unbiased and damn near apathetic (e.g. the messaging of it doesn’t affect us, thus we don’t care to make laws against it).

That is probably just more related to conservatives being older on average than liberals. If you compared same aged conservatives to same aged liberals, acceptance, I bet the numbers would look more similar (the article does ideology and age, but not ideology and age together).

Sure, but GP's point was that conservatives are accepting of homosexuality, despite the stats otherwise.

If you're going to say that older people tend to be conservative and tend to not to use dating apps, then that forces the question: Why even make this at all?

They are making the app for young conservatives, who are more likely to have non-straight preferences. So while perhaps there are fewer young conservatives than young liberals, they still make up a market that can be served.

I’m sure Thiel and company are smart enough to do appropriate demographic research, even if there are only half as many of them, they still make up a large enough market.

Conservative just means someone is very keen on conserving something, it can be traditional marriage, the environment, or economic practices.

Ideally we'd have a society so good that everybody good be a conservative, however utopian this is.

This is interesting, I wonder how the trend will play out. I remember the days when there would be apps like, "It's uber, but for lawn care / hair cuts / etc ...".

Now we are heading into a future where you'd say "It's like Tinder, but for Republicans / some group / some other group".

Is this bad? I have no idea. It seems like it might solve a real problem. I live in San Francisco, and for science I've asked some of my friends questions like "Would you date a Republican?" or "Can you be a good person and vote for candidate X/Y/Z?", and the responses, well, let's just say that it is not favorable.

Jdate, blackpeoplemeet, Christian mingle, farmers only. All Tinder for X and most of not all of them predate tinder

This is the consequence of having dating apps for any specific group of people. ChristianMingle, there's one (or was I think) for farmers, there are dating apps specifically for women, or for any race or sexual orientation. As much as Conservatives have exasperated me lately idk why anybody would be upset or angry about this. If they don't already exist I suspect (hey maybe show HN) we'll see dating apps for libertarians, communists, anarchists, skiers, mountain climbers, dog owners (ugh), #vanlife (Because it gets lonely on the road) and more. Hell maybe you can make a dating app for sports and then just have someone turn on/off the sport they want to date around (so you show idk, 100 sports and someone picks skiing as their sport and the app only matches them with other skiers).

All this noise around Peter Thiel is irritating too. But I guess it gets clicks for the conspiracy-minded who think he's Darth Sidious instead of just some smart rich guy who happens to like Trump. Maybe the Gawker saga will just cause him to be a person of interest for all time. Or maybe the stakes in our society are so low and we have so little to do that this is what we resort to.

Yea this only noteworthy because of how horny HN is for anything Thiel does. This will probably end up getting acquired by Match Group like every other dating app.

Or just fail miserably like every other 'conservative' dating site.

> But I guess it gets clicks for the conspiracy-minded who think he's Darth Sidious instead of just some smart rich guy who happens to like Trump

This is... not why people dislike Peter Thiel.

It is essentially what it boils down to for everyone I have chatted with about it. Your mileage may vary.

If this were shark tank I would pass. very saturated market, not much margins or growth.

Nice!

I've noticed on most dating apps, if you turn on the conservative filter, the matches/results become more attractive as well. Hope this pans out.

Not just you. I've noticed that too. In my area, anyway.

That and mental health as well.

OKC allowed users to filter for (covid) vaccinated people, but not for unvaccinated people. By making the default supposedly neutral sites lean left politically, it naturally creates a market for those unserved by those offerings.

That is gross! They used to be a cool company releasing a lot of data points on their users. I miss the metrics...

That all fell away when they were bought by the same people who bring you every other dating site like match, or so I've read.

wow. There are 5 men for every woman on Tinder. I wonder what kind of ratio there would be at this app, I imagine young male conservatives outnumber female consertives by a huge number.

We have a funny situation in Poland with dating apps. The government banned abortion which massively pissed young women. Two conservative parties got a heat and some time ago about one third of profiles had in there bio, that if you support those parties you can swipe left (dont contact them). Basically having a sex strike on conservative people, altough not coordinated

I know quite a few women who are disgusted by the number of men just looking for short term gratification that tinder and the like attract.

If anything, I would expect it to mirror the ratio found on sites like eHarmony- basically more long term / marriage / family oriented than Tinder would be.

That said, it is a dating site- men outnumbering women is practically guaranteed.

For young conservatives, short term gratification is just as much of a problem as for liberals.

> I know quite a few women who are disgusted by the number of men just looking for short term gratification that tinder and the like attract.

Why are they disgusted? Tinder seemed to be a direct clone of Grindr early on, and was focused on “here are people near you, looking for casual sex”.

When it got popular, the new influx turned it into a dating site, but it’s whole interface and design is for hookups. Getting mad at men for looking for hookups on Tinder is like getting mad at someone on Uber only wanting a lift somewhere.

The sex ratio doesn't really matter if he and his friends get preferential treatment in the app.

That's the usual reason for starting / financing a dating app.

Where did you get this info from?

quality over quantity is always better for those looking for an LTR

> There are 5 men for every woman on Tinder. I wonder what kind of ratio there would be at this app,

Among humans, the sex ratio is about .5. If you are noticing a different ratio, you have a selection effect at play.

> I imagine young male conservatives outnumber female consertives by a huge number.

Speak for yourself!

I personally find very disturbing than male geeks assume I must be some kind of leftist. Hell, no!

OTOH, I appreciate they announce their colors so easily. It makes avoiding them much easier for me.

> Among humans, the sex ratio is about .5. If you are noticing a different ratio, you have a selection effect at play.

Yes, neither “people who identify as conservative” nor ”people who choose to use dating apps” are random samples of humanity, both have significant biases on many axes, including (in both cases and in the same direction) gender.

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