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Comment by Sytten | Hacker News Reader

I have always said that commercial dating apps have the wrong incentives. We need a non-profit to create a dating app. I see this as a similar problem to signal or wikipedia, people don't want to pay for those services.

I also think the app should severely limit the number of people you are exposed to and reduce the waste of time. I tried the friend section of those apps and that's the only time I felt the sense of overwhelming with having too many likes. Both those goals are contrary to profit via ads.

IMO those apps are very similar to social media apps. We have studies that show they are not good for us the way they are currently structured as they just want to grab our attention for as much time as possible.

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> I have always said that commercial dating apps have the wrong incentives.

What if commercial dating apps actually had their incentives aligned with their users?

I'm imagining an open clearinghouse of profiles that can be be consumed by multiple apps. The owner of each profile puts up a bounty. When a app proposes a match that causes the owner to go inactive for more than say a month, the app claims that bounty.

Obviously, there's some details missing here, but directionally, this incentivizes apps to propose good matches, so they can claim the money. It also allows head-to-head competition, forcing the whole market to improve.

A not for profit dating app is a genuinely good idea. If you decide you’d like to pursue this and would like some help, I’ve got experience starting/funding a not for profit and I build software for a living. I’d be a heck of a good slave to a project like this.

Dating is a hard market because if you solve the problem, your users churn. Consequently, for profit dating apps operate in this weird space were they need a certain amount of successful users to help with acquisition, but if the success rate gets too high it’s a bug. I can’t think of many problems where solving the problem can be a product feature but a business bug.

A not for profit might be able to flip that.

This is a wild read cause I was discussing this just last night with some people at a bar! We had a never-ending conversation of "if we have kinda non-profit Wikipedia for information democratization, we should have non-profit for dating". Then more into "who would be determining the rules, how we can make it less skewed for one sex or the other, how would we deal with liability, what do we do with spam, how to ID verify to minimize catfishing" and etc.

One thing that's a bit hard though, how would we minimize the whole "numbers game" that's basically the main part of the apps. Guys try to get as many matches possible, girls try to find the "best match" out of "matches", so you still have the whole problem of unmatched men and women. But I guess, that comes after figuring out how the non-profit would work.

See my other comment, I thought about a multi-step process. Basically forcing slow dating in the app.

The guys trying to have too many matches is easy to fix IMO, you basically limit the likes. The feeling you could have "better" for women comes from the fast that you see too many profiles ("what if the next one is better?") and receiving too many likes. That is harder to fix, but I think not showing an infinite queue of people that liked you is a first step.

My proposed process solves both issue, basically you recreate the real-world limits of the number of people you can realistically meet BUT you increase the likelihood of a match by doing a machine filter based on your preferences.

I just posted on the FUTO chat since I didn't really know where to get the discussion going (https://chat.futo.org/#narrow/stream/38-project-ideas). I think I would like to participate in the creation of something like that.

In my head there are a couple problems a new app would need to address:

- Stop the meat grinder that is the current swipe model

- Feeling of overwhelming resulting of too many likes

- Waste of time due to low quality propositions of matches

- Most likes being based on looks

Here is the process I had in mind (I invite criticism):

1. You are presented with 10 profiles without picture that are the closest to your own reported preferences (similar to what ok cupid did a while ago with the questions). You select 3 out of those 10. TBD what would actually be displayed to the user.

2. Repeat step 1 until you have 3 profiles that also liked your profile (with a timer in-between each selection)

3. You now see the full profile (still without picture) of the 3 people that liked you back, you select one

4. You have access to a couple pictures (max 3 or something) and you decide to match or not

5. If you match, you can only talk to this person. To return to new matches you have to decide to unmatch your current match.

I figured that this process would require minimal content moderation / bot detection since we limit images and they are only shown later (same with the full profile). There are probably some flaws that need to be worked out in my process.

I agree with the general goals, but I think it would be fighting hard against the current culture trends. I'm not gonna comment how I feel about them, but depended on age groups, people have different wants and needs. For example, I can comment for people in their 20s, it is completely normalized to be in "talking stages" with multiple people. Not sure how "a person can only talk to one person only" would work in this scenario. Not even talking about you match, but the other user doesn't use the app for whatever reason, so now the person is wasting their time.

I guess, my main question is, whether this hypothetical non-profit is supposed to replace Tinder/Match group as is but remove the behavioural UX that optimizes for profit, or actually try to affect the culture trends (which would need to be discussed first, before figuring out the "gameplay").

I'd also be down to volunteer for this (i'm a software person)

> We need a non-profit to create a dating app.

I noticed this project on F-Droid the other day, they focus on making everything open source but it's not clear what kind of organization is behind it: https://alovoa.com/

IMO it doesn't solve the problems of the dating applications, it is still profile based with pictures, unlimited likes, etc. It is a good thing that it is OSS and free but it would need more than that.

OkCupid at its best was when it was a non-profit.

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