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Comment by SwellJoe | Hacker News Reader

"I had the idea that the way this could work is a totally automated match making system akin to Uber where you are penalised for not accepting matches made by the system. You don’t have to get married or anything, but if you don’t both turn up at the same GPS time space coordinates it counts against you.

Similarly, the system should require an up front ~$50 fee from both sexes per date. You don’t get it back if you stand up a date."

No woman alive would agree to this.

And, I'm sure there are women who sign up for dating apps for an ego boost and that's why they don't reply, but most are just overwhelmed by the shotgun approach some men take and end up not taking any of their responses seriously. Women often quit dating apps because of bad experiences, they're not going to agree to a date where they don't get to do their own vetting of the person they're meeting.

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> but most are just overwhelmed by the shotgun approach

That’s the whole point of this approach — women don’t get drowned in spam from men.

Instead it’s the equivalent of a trusted friend or relative setting you up with someone they know will suit you.

Evidence is that that works out better.

"Instead it’s the equivalent of a trusted friend or relative setting you up with someone they know will suit you."

A random dating app is a "trusted friend or relative" now? Sorry, that's not a reasonable expectation.

I mean, go for it, if you think it'll work. It's easier than ever to spin up an MVP. But, if I were a betting man, my bet against this working, especially with women, would be very, very, large. Not only do I think it's not viable, I would be genuinely surprised if you got one (1) paid sign up from a woman.

> if you think it'll work.

It would, at scale, where there's sufficient data to train some decent embedding models to accurately judge partner compatibility. As a machine learning exercise, this is "easy". Heck, Facebook does it, possibly without even "trying" to implement dating specifically! I regularly get spammed with "suitable single women" as friend suggestions by Meta. I'm not single, but as dating suggestions go, they're actually not half bad! If I was single, I'd reach out to some of the recommendations for sure.

They've clearly implemented this exact feature, but they bootstrapped it by having a billion+ people in their system and trillions of interactions between them already. They didn't start out as a dating site.

Similarly, I've heard that LinkedIn is now more of a "single professionals dating site" than a career-making / job-seeker site, at least for a decent fraction of its userbase.

This is eminently solvable, and people do use these systems to find partners.

The nigh-insurmountable challenge is boot-strapping a dating-only site from scratch.

You've listed off a bunch of examples of why it would work, but none of them do what you've suggested or anything like it. None of them try to force a date to happen on penalty of a large fine for not showing up. None try to get a woman to meet a stranger without her making the decision to meet them based on her own assessment of the person and pay $50 for the privilege.

I'm not saying online dating can't work, and I've said nothing about whether data about people makes matches better.

I am saying you have presented an absolutely batshit crazy and dangerous idea of how it ought to work.

Edit: It sounds like you've designed a dating app optimized for angry men who feel shorted by women on dating apps. But, there's never been too few men interacting on dating apps. If you're optimizing for men's comfort on a dating site, you have failed to learn the lesson of "ladies night" at bars. If your site is full of single women, men will show up. The opposite is not true, if it feels punitive and risky to women.

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