That never worked out well for me: I'm a person of words, and while I really do want to meet, I'm unlikely to click with somebody who doesn't love conversation enough to chat before that. So I stopped meeting women who weren't interesting online; it seemed that the hope that they might be interesting in person never panned out. I hope they met somebody more to their taste.
Meeting strangers is dangerous, but if you arrange it in a public place, that's reasonably safe. And probably at least as good as trying to feel out whether they're dangerous via chat.
I guess it's just a lingering bias that makes us think "dating app people are creepy" even though today the people you meet in a bar are probably all on dating apps too.
Consider the "social contract" of both situations.
With the bar situation you can literally leave immediately with no social expectation that you should have to interact with that person again.
With the "date" typically they're alone (i.e. she cannot bring friends, unlike a bar) and there's a social expectation to stay at least for whatever constitutes an entire date.
I think it is less irony and more that we have complex social expectations.
There are plenty of first date options that make this easy. I was fond of minigolf because it goes relatively quick and you can either opt to play more rounds or hit the eject button with a half decent excuse.
Meanwhile, a date you eject from still consumes most of your evening. ...And it's extremely uncomfortable and emotionally taxing to be in that position for both people.
That said, I think almost everyone would be better served if they shot out a "wanna grab drinks at X at 8:00?" much earlier into the conversation. The sort of "Tinder convo" I see on r/tinder is almost exclusively men sabotaging themselves instead of making a move.
I mean, once you've established you're not one of those "send pic of vagene sex sex sex pls" people, I'm not convinced there's all that much more rapport you can build over text.
Then again, I imagine men who are able to talk themselves into a hole over Tinder chat are sending useful signals to women.
Couple possibilities I can think of there. First and foremost, it could be that the people being described before the comma, and the people being described after the comma, are not the same population. There may be some overlap, but I can at least say that the friends I have who've used (non-Tinder) online dating services in any sort of serious way were also very much not the kind of people to go to bars to meet people.
Another is that talking to a stranger at a bar is most decidedly not a date. Evidence: Once upon a time, I did that fairly regularly, and my partner didn't mind at all. (I think that there was only ever one person who was obviously only interested in a hook-up, and, it being a bar, it was pretty easy to gracefully exit that conversation.) I think they would have felt very differently about me signing up for OkCupid.
But as soon as you walk into a bar, every woman in that place is taking in broad bandwidth data on you. Do your mannerisms look natural? Are you acting aggressive? Are you friendly? What are you wearing, and are your clothes clean? Do other women seem comfortable around you?
All of those assessments are based on very finely honed intuitions that they rely on every single day to stay safe.
You can easily do a social proof check on a stranger in a bar by checking out their friends. That’s why it’s such a successful strategy to go on the pull with a wingman/winggirl.
https://www.thegoodtrade.com/features/best-dating-apps-for-w...
Talk to women sometimes about how they approach personal safety, and how many scary situations and too-close calls they've already had.
It's a law of truly large numbers thing. Even if a tiny tiny minority of guys are actually dangerous, over the course of even a relatively young life the average woman has encountered quite a few of them. They make life decisions accordingly, for understandable reasons.
The app could certainly facilitate "safe" dates by helping guide people toward certain places. That could even be the business model where you would book reservations at certain restaurants, coffee shops, or wherever through the app.
Frankly I don't think gatekeeping a person's comfort level when meeting a stranger is very constructive. In fact I think it would invoke quite a negative reaction (justifiably).
Meeting strangers may not be a high risk for you but it is for other people.
While you can't guarantee a good date, you can at least eliminate the worst and unsafe-est dates by a little messaging.
I dated for a while on various services before choosing OKCupid and sticking with it. I talked to and dated several women before I met the woman who is now my wife.
That included some chat up front, then picking a safe, public location to meet and do something. I'm lucky to live in Orlando, so it was very often a theme park. If either of us were unhappy, we could just go our separate ways and be done. (Thankfully that never happened to me.)
Creeps have a hard time hiding the fact that they're creeps. If I'm talking to a guy on a dating app and he immediately tries to steer the conversation towards sex, my body, how horrible women are, and shows zero interest in actually getting to know me then I know he's someone to avoid.
Even taking a shower, putting on decent clothes, and showing up in person to a bar is a massive filter that dating app conversation doesn't have. This is one of the fundamental trade-offs of meeting people online vs in person.
As an added bonus, you also get to screen out all the people that don't really care enough about their potential date's feelings to exchange a few messages, and all the people that are saying yes to too many dates to even notice conversation threads never mind show up.
You should likely run this idea past a few women. The typical reason they want to converse before meeting is security: Meeting strangers is dangerous and they want to "sniff test" to see if it is safe enough to even go that far.
Your app idea largely seems to exist to solve issues men have with dating apps but it doesn't really address why women avoid them/prefer direct social interaction.