Alternatively there's a good business here in creating a cookie-cutter dating site concept with the intent of selling all of them to Match.

Or take it one step further and sell turn-key dating-site startups. "Optimised for a quick Match Group acquisition".

It's the method that was employed successfully against Standard Oil as they were initially building their monopoly. Wildcatters would strike oil and look to dump their oil into the market, which would drop and or destabilize the price of oil. It was understood they could 'ransom' Standard Oil using this tactic and get sums far beyond what their operations would otherwise be worth. Rockefeller in his letters talks about buying up the worst possible operations, in rickety condition, for princely sums to prevent the wildcatters from tanking the price of oil by dumping supply. It apparently was quite the annoyance to the extremely frugal Rockefeller, the monopoly could more than afford it of course.

I’ve never heard of this. Anywhere I could read more on this?

That doesn't really benefit the customers though. It just makes the problem worse.

Presumably it'd eventually make Match Group's strategy of buying up all the competitors un-viable after some time, as there'd be an ever-increasing stream of dating apps driving up the customer acquisition costs by competing with each other and Match, while making Match effectively pay for the same customers over and over again as customers get convinced to try yet another new dating app and Match has yet another acquisition target.

This entire space is really hard to make work well for users, though, because users interests are so at odds with the service providers, in that anything that helps you meet someone quickly reduces the amount of chances they have to upsell you. It's in their interest that you remain frustrated.

> users interests are so at odds with the service providers

So the real innovation that's needed is a new incentive structure.

I'm sure some site has tried to implement a system where you pay only if you end up in a long term relationship, but that seems hard to enforce once two people have each other's contact details.

Another approach that's been tried is for the government to run the site, on the basis that families are beneficial for society, while profit-seeking monopolies and incompatible silos of users are not efficient.

What I don't think has been tried yet is some sort of federated system, perhaps based on ActivityPub, where different providers all share the same distributed pool of users, and therefore can't lock you into their unreasonable pricing scheme.

The success of Mastodon shows that this service could be offered at scale for people to enjoy at zero cost. Possibly there would be an expectation that if you did find someone you really liked, you would make a donation to the one or two sites that you and your partner's profiles were hosted on, and perhaps give a testimonial at the same time.

I assume the difficulty of implementing this is that people don't want bots spamming them with private messages, nor do they want their profiles to be part of some bulk download which a rogue node tries to get away with.

People are understandably quite sensitive about what they write on dating sites, and who gets to see it, and although the safety of traditional dating sites is probably somewhat illusory, a system for moderating interactions is likely to be harder to implement well in a distributed system, and harder than moderating a microblogging service.

> Another approach that's been tried is for the government to run the site, on the basis that families are beneficial for society, while profit-seeking monopolies and incompatible silos of users are not efficient.

That sounds like a minefield. I have an additional idea: what about a dual-purpose site, one that has value for couples too? Saying this makes me realize Facebook, although their thing is new, might be able to cormer this actually...