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Comment by mblevin | Hacker News Reader

Two words: Double opt-in.

As simple as it seems, that is the primary driver of the success of Tinder, helped generously by a smart on-campus initial seeding strategy for the customer base.

Every other dating site allows members to contact other members at the initiating member's will. All it takes is a few people with a dearth of tact and an overabundance of time to completely blow up (mostly women's) inboxes.

Basic free-rider problem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_rider_problem

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Tinder is considered a success? I've used it and maybe I'm just a loser, but my experience and I believe the general consensus is that it is mostly for hookups. I am highly doubtful that women are meeting men that are actually interested in a long term relationship. There are a lot of issues with Tinder that have already been mentioned in this thread, such as 20% of the guys (I'm betting on less) get most of the likes and that women are the gatekeepers; which is good for them not having to trudge through spam, but it perpetuates the problem that guys already have IRL at social scenes and just keeps the women playing into the players' hands.

No dating app is going to solve the problem that 80% of the men on the app are unappealing to 80% of the women. That's a fundamental social issue, and there's no magic fix for the 80% of men having trouble finding success on these apps.

Taking the decision of who is appealing away from women (and men, as if the 80% ever had any selection power) by using matchmakers seems like a promising fix to me. Although women still have the power to reject the date, they at least might be relinquished of the power to all go after the same guy (much to the chagrin of the guy who wants to fool around with all those women). Too bad I currently have so many other issues in my life more critical than wasting time in the dating scene, or I would try this one out.

But the truth is, in society, 80% of the men and women do find each other. So the problem isn't that its impossible for apps to match these people to each other as it never happens, rather how to facilitate it on dating apps, what happens in real life.

Right, but a large majority of the 80% of men and women finding each other have done it for millennia without the need for dating apps. In general, dating apps have a higher percentage of traditionally "unappealing" users than the real world, for obvious reasons. Because males are generally the aggressors, in the sense that they compete for attention from females (from an evolutionary biology perspective), obviously there will be more males on dating sites. And if there are a) more males on dating sites, b) more "unappealing" users on dating sites than the real world, then it follows that there will be a lot of unappealing males on dating sites. Not exactly a winning proposition for women.

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