I don't see why it wouldn't, considering there are conservatives of all sexual orientations, and one has nothing to do with the other.

It's a small app serving a niche on a saturated market and gay people are (most likely) underrepresented in that niche. So it might make sense to skip it rather than just having the section mostly empty.

People are conservative because of their upbringing, community, and their own personally decided values. People are gay because of their genetics.

Thus there are many people who are both conservative by choice but gay by nature. No doubt they would love to meet other gay people who share their politics.

It’s possible this app would be perfect for them. The only downside I thought was that since they may not be openly gay, they wouldn’t want to take the chance of being outed but the apps messaging seems to revolve around the idea that conservative are an embattled minority so it may have the appearance (and maybe reality if features are built in) of protecting user privacy.

Gay is not binary, you can be on a spectrum. Now, the following is conjecture, but I'd assume that slightly gay republicans are far less likely to try a homosexual relationship, especially when compared to those on the liberal side. I'm also pretty sure that mostly gay republicans are far more likely to not be openly gay or to have switched their political orientation due to receiving contempt and no support.

Sure, there are openly gay republicans and I don't want to ruin their chance to find love, but I'm very sure that people that are both openly gay and openly republican are quite rare. To make matters worse, to like the idea of a dating app specifically for your political orientation, you'll most likely need to be quite invested in it - someone moderate to slightly right will not be particularly pulled by this concept. And openly gay die-hard republicans are even rarer.

Lastly, there's also a deterrent effect. I'm not saying that republicans are necessarily homophobic, but I'm pretty sure that quite a bunch are at least not thrilled by the concept. If the app provides gay dating and therefore implicitly promotes it, it might drive away some of it's core demographic and, given that they're niche as-is, this might not be worth the tradeoff, especially when accounting for network effects.

Apps like this seem to have trouble attracting competent developers. They keep forgetting that incremental IDs make scraping easy.

There are conservatives of all sexual orientations, and anti-gay sentiment of various degrees is a popular subset of conservative ideology. These don't preclude each other, and the question of whether a conservative dating app will allow gay couples is legitimately interesting and could go either way.

people on the left seem to conflate Republican moderates, religious zealots, libertarians, fiscal conservatives, right wing nationalists, etc.. All right wingers are "the same".

It's the same straw-man b.s. the right does to the left.

Not all conservatives are against homosexuality. There are several prominent gay Republican groups, iirc, though they tend to be more libertarian than socially conservative for sure.

Half of all U.S. conservatives do not think homosexuality should be accepted by society [1], which presumably includes accepting homosexuality in dating apps.

That's a pretty big segment of your target market to alienate.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2017/10/05/5-homosexual...

That is probably just more related to conservatives being older on average than liberals. If you compared same aged conservatives to same aged liberals, acceptance, I bet the numbers would look more similar (the article does ideology and age, but not ideology and age together).

Sure, but GP's point was that conservatives are accepting of homosexuality, despite the stats otherwise.

If you're going to say that older people tend to be conservative and tend to not to use dating apps, then that forces the question: Why even make this at all?

They are making the app for young conservatives, who are more likely to have non-straight preferences. So while perhaps there are fewer young conservatives than young liberals, they still make up a market that can be served.

I’m sure Thiel and company are smart enough to do appropriate demographic research, even if there are only half as many of them, they still make up a large enough market.

You are presuming conservatives think like progressives - where ideology is paramount - it's NOT and they DON'T. Read Jonathan Haidt's book about this.

>You are presuming conservatives think like progressives - where ideology is paramount - it's NOT and they DON'T.

One has only to look at recent events [1][2][3] to see that is not true at all. I think the main difference is that conservatives do not consider their opinions to be ideological, but fact, as is evident with Covid vaccination statistics.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/us-organizers-plan-co...

[2] https://www.npr.org/2021/12/06/1057344561/anti-vaccine-activ...

[3] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-sports/trump-ur...

I don’t think progressives consider themselves to be ideological either.

On all the topics where progressive values have won out (abortion, trans and gay rights) progressives view themselves as being unbiased and damn near apathetic (e.g. the messaging of it doesn’t affect us, thus we don’t care to make laws against it).

What about the age structure? I would expect that anti-gay conservatives are, on average, older and less likely to even consider using a dating app.

Even if I accepted your "statistic" (which I don't), this line of logic would assume that half of conservatives also reject every other dating app. It would also call into question whether that segment the market would ever use a dating app in the first place.

Not to mention the discrimination lawsuits which would be immediately filed forcing them to add options for same sex couples, as happened with eHarmony...

Not quite. New brands that advertise X feature tend to attract audiences that identify with it, meaning any behavior counter to X feature would alienate them. It's one of the reasons why mainstream dating apps avoid doing such politicization.

For a case example, look at Voat [1] which advertised being a free speech platform but alienated their target market when their lawyers made them censor harassing speech.

[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/gy4gzy/founder-of-voat-the-c...

Conservative just means someone is very keen on conserving something, it can be traditional marriage, the environment, or economic practices.

Ideally we'd have a society so good that everybody good be a conservative, however utopian this is.