OKCupid had a model that increases the likelihood of matching with someone and ...never using OKCupid again.

Match.com realizes that fundamental flaw. For their business to survive, they HAVE to be bad at the service they purport to provide. They don't want people to have long term relationships, they want people to use a dating site.

There are "societal good" functions that companies might provide, for which a profit motive is wholly un-applicable without destroying the function itself.

There are some things that you simply CANNOT express in a "free market" because the measure of their success cannot be expressed in market terms.

That was OKCupids claim, but was this claim ever proven through data that directly affirmed that as an outcome?

Often these websites have tiered profit schemes that can milk a user for $100+/m. Sometimes they gamify it, like loot boxing, to make it more lucrative. I don't remember OKCupid being any different.

But if OKCupid drags this process out so you only get n matches per month, they maximize revenue while maybe encouraging people to appreciate each other's differences.

Like getting a "crappy" CD from Columbia House...might as well listen to it. Maybe it'll grow on you!

Sure you can. If you want to measure the success of your matchmaking company in market terms, you could charge users for your matchmaking service and then return their money if they don't get married. You put your money where your mouth is by betting on the success of the couples you suggest.

I think companies don't try this strategy because it would be too expensive for the end user. You would need to charge thousands of dollars to make up for the hard work of matchmaking and the risk of bad matches. Not something an internet startup can do at scale.

Also, if the relationship is abusive and the abused spouse is beaten into a marriage, are they owed a refund upon divorce? Death? Incentivizing speedy marriages, as opposed to good matches, is unambiguously bad for individuals and society at large.

There's not really a way to do rent-seeking on matchmaking without breaking matchmaking, so maybe don't seek rent on the matching itself? Just let your revenue stream be advertising. It's fine.

It’s not really unlimited and people tend to take less overall

That's a good idea. In this hypothetical app, if a couple stays together for a couple of years they should forfeit the right to get their money back even if they later break up. This reduces the amount of cash the company has to keep, at the cost of merely promising years-long relationships instead of marriages.

> Incentivizing speedy marriages, as opposed to good matches, is unambiguously bad for individuals and society at large.

How is that unambiguous? It seems to me like an empirical question. Are people taking too many risks with their relationships, or too little? The answer is different for each person, or even for the same person at different stages of their life. Very ambiguous stuff.

If you're telling me that more abusive marriages is better for society, I don't think we have enough common ground to discuss this.

0. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/meet-catch-and-keep/...

1. https://www.ucdavis.edu/curiosity/news/covid-19-isolation-li...

Also the free market still needs a central authority for any proofs.

There are other online services like Uber and AirBnB in which it is much easier to cheat by communicating with your counterpart outside of the app, that way you don't have to pay commissions and so on. It's a serious problem for them.

But this hypothetical online service marries people. Fraud is much riskier there, because divorce can be extremely expensive if your partner-in-fraud doesn't cooperate.

> the free market still needs a central authority for any proofs

Isn't marriage a relatively centralized institution? The central authority that marries people can easily provide proof that they indeed married some people.

No online service can possibly promise to be more thorough in their due diligence than the actual humans who chose to marry each other.

That said, firms exist with that model.

So here I am, downvoting my own posts.

I will say that your idea is trivially gamed. What startup is going to keep the legal staff on retainer to sue every person who "breaks up" with their partner, gets their refund check, and uses it to buy an engagement ring?

So if A wants to date B and bids 60 and B will pay 40 to date A the match will cost A 20 plus fees.

This would cut to the chase amazingly fast, which isn’t what people want.

Sorry but I have quite a viscerally bad reaction to such a proposal. Sure it could work in some sense of finding value price pairs or whatever where people's preferences aren't clear.

But it also seems extremely dystopian and horrifying, particularly applied to the dating market. It would be similar with finding friends. People do this naturally and normally on their own for free no problem if you put them in a big room together. It neeeds no incentive

I dunno. I kinda look forward to the news stories about the Economic Collapse of 2035 being due to the market finally realizing that too many supposedly AAA Date-Backed Securities were actually Non-Investment Grade Junk Dates, and the subsequent revaluation of the Date Market caused the entire banking system to become insolvent because all the dates they were holding on their books as marked to maturity are in fact never going to be anything but immature, and consequently must be marked down to their actual market value of Zero.

I mean, it's a pretty realistic economic threat. Who doesn't have a story of something they anticipated being a AAA Rated Date turning out to have junk date status? Definitely a lot of mismatched incentives all the way around.

I think you just reinvented sex work, but somehow made it more icky?

The main and big problem with this if anyone would consider it for dating for real, which probably they wouldn’t so no big worry, is what is in the price? So A just paid 20 dollars for the pleasure of having a date with B. What did A buy? Does B have to stay at the date for a set time? Is B obligued to listen enthusiastically to A? Does B have to laugh at A’s jokes? Even if they are lame? And then of course what happens when A thinks they paid for sex and B thinks not?

Or possibly expensive engagement/wedding rings in non-jewellery form.

On a separate point, some of my socialist (and in a few cases literally communist) friends assert that the issues at the intersection of sex work with consent also apply to all other work under capitalism; I don't have a strong counter-argument to this.

Money is fundamentally unnatural, so it's not surprising that it feels wrong and icky in a lot of situations.

I think that is only sometimes true, usually in situations where relationships are mainly economic decisions. As prosperity increases and pay/power differences between genders shrink, it is becoming less frequently true, and less true on a per-relationship basis, over time.

Revenue sources would include:

- Ads for local businesses, classes, and events.

- Annual subscription which is cheaper after the first year and gives you discount codes to events and restaurants.

Once you get the site to work for date nights, let people be open to getting matched based on similar activity interests. Then you can solve the problem of two users finding a specific joint activity.

Would this solve the problem of finding people to have sex with? No, but computers are bad at sex.

Would this solve the problem married couples have of picking a place to eat? Hopefully.

No photos until just before the event started, because photos turn things into a beauty contest and people start judging on looks, which is where, IMHO, all my competition in the same space went wrong.

Events were scheduled for as little as 4 hours out, and only up to 72hrs in the future. The entire app flow was designed to be as close as possible to a "I am bored, entertain me now" button.

Investors hated it, two sided marketplaces are apparently something they like to avoid due to difficulties around execution.

People were desperate for this type of service though, for one marketing campaign my user acquisition cost dropped as low as 15 cents per user.

This is a fantastic project. I also briefly worked on something similar, but left when I learned more about my coworkers.

Bootstrapped, COVID hit right before the launch date.

Infra costs were ~$200 a month to support 10k DAU. I'd just come off of working on embedded, so I was used to writing really efficient code. :)

> At what scale would you be able to support your burn rate?

Just needed to cover my living expenses mortgage and salaries!

Obviously to scale money was needed for ad campaigns, but people are lonely and offering to solve loneliness has a high conversion rate!

I burned through my savings and was ready to launch in earl 2020.

Oops.

Yeah the final end goal was either to make lots of deals with local businesses (hard to scale) or to license an ML personality matching model to companies.

The app had a handful of personality questions that I copied over from research done at one of the Nordic universities (I forget which one) on what makes people get along together in a casual setting. The American universities have mostly done research on group cohesion in corporate settings, which maybe hints at what is wrong with American society at large!

Cruise liners and casinos would pay a fortune to know what guests would vibe together.

I had a partner website that allowed for self onboarding, but of course b2b2c is never that simple. :)

The operating costs were so absurdly low (~$200 a month per city it was running in) that letting people create their own events for free was in the near term road map, no reason not to.

Back in the early 2010s there was a dating site that was based around this premise. You would post a specific activity and see if someone wanted to join you for it. I didn't personally use it (as intended) but it was a great place to get fun date night activities with my partner. I think they realized that use case (date night planning) and eventually added this as a feature. I don't remember the name of the site unfortunately, someone else might. I would be surprised if it's still around.

edit: Found it! it was called HowAboutWe.com.

https://techcrunch.com/tag/howaboutwe/

https://archive.nytimes.com/bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/07/1...

With this one, however, you defined the qualities you were seeking and the times and part of the city you were available for a date. They would match people up based on the time, location and OkCupid match rating (mostly, I think) and would ask if you wanted to meet the person. It gave you just their basic info and a distorted photo.

I used it for a while and don't remember why I stopped but it was one of the best dating apps I've used. None of the dates went anywhere, but it was a really simple and easy way to meet new people.

My friend didn't meet her husband on it, but she did meet her future husband's roommate.

Are they? I thought hookup sites like Tinder and Grindr were very popular.

Always get paid upfront. Net-anything just gives others time to find a way to cheat you.

If you don't constantly redesign your site or feel compelled to use the most expensive hosting possible, or cosplay as google it doesn't even have to be that expensive. A single actual physical computer could serve a hell of a lot of people for a modest amount of money. The $20 OK cupid charges per user could trivially pay for the oh so complicated task of allowing people to find and message like minded users.

A doctor doesn't need to work around the market economics of not making people sick so you can cure them they have agency they can choose just to be a good doctor and most of them do.

Companies hollow out (or enshittify) their products because it is easy and because it guarantees results at least in the short term. There are other ways to grow, and they tend to require imagination and long-term planning. Don't blame the stock market for entirely voluntary choices of taking the easy way out.

[1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/03/at-apple-shareholder...

Sure, but VCs and big companies want to maximize profit, not just be profitable. When a profitable startup sells out, that's the founders also saying "profitable isn't enough for me".

Or just "I'm done with this shit". It's remarkably difficult to run a small (software) business in the US. Section 174, multi-state income tax filings. It's a bloody pain if your goal is not just to operate the business and be overhead, but to actually do stuff. Regulatory/tax complexity thresholds depending on business size would be a welcome improvement.

So yes, it have to work, at least for their reputation, but it also have to not work that much.

A casino with no physical upkeep ?

And if it succeeds in getting people to match, they definitely stop using it.

"Likely to stop using it" is the better outcome for them in terms of customer retention

The logic goes for a lot of service type situations like auto-repair post-warranty period.

Though I'm not optimistic about either its ability to fund healthcare or assess its quality.

Dental problems are two fold, genetic and habitual.

There are people who brush and floss 2x a day and have miserable teeth, their personal biome and genetics have screwed them.

Then there are people like me, I skipped the dentist for 2 years and when I went the dentist said my teeth looked perfect. (Though being on a keto diet for that time might have helped, one dentist I had said keto is the perfect diet for dental health! :) )

This was in the early days of keto, back when you couldn't find any keto products at the store and it was just a small subreddit that spread by word of mouth.

I described my diet to my dentist (no carbs at all, no sugar, lots of green veggies, healthy meats and fats, all home cooked), and she instantly approved of it.

IMHO Keto has gone off the rails, no true scotsman and all of that. In the early days keto shared a lot of dietary stuff with paleo in regards to no processed ingredients, everything from scratch, and I think that made a real difference in how effective it was.

Before if I wanted keto ice cream I had to make keto ice cream. Now I can just buy it at every local grocery store. Well excess calories are still excess calories...

Also the prepackaged keto stuff isn't as satiating as from scratch keto food, and half of the benefit of keto is the food is supposed to be more satiating.

/rant

Not really. A dentist fixing your dental cavity doesn't stop you from gettinga new one in 10 years.

Sometimes you don't even need that.

If you ever want to feel depressed, go to your city's subreddit and search for "what business will you never go to again?" I remember one popped up on my city's sub recently, and it made me incredibly thankful for my dentist. The sheer amount of shit some get away with (while having ritzy offices in expensive neighborhoods) is incredible. And sure, such a thread is bound to attract people who have had negative experiences, but the sheer quantity of complaints some places had (with nobody chiming in to defend them or say something to the effect of "I've never had any problems like that") spoke for itself.

The more you commit to, the more priority the algorithm gives you as it wants you to get married asap.

This could be easily gamed as the users could just commit to absurdly high amounts and never get married - while getting prioritized by the site.

Seeing as I have a "face for radio", I doubt I would ever manage to date seriously on "swipe right/left" platforms.

This wasn't necessarily true. I actually met my wife on OkCupid, all the way back in 2007 originally, and she wasn't even the first long-term relationship I ended up off of the site, which was back in 2004. OkCupid used to have social features, allowing you to maintain a personal blog and follow other user's blogs. A whole lot of us had a pretty nice community, couchsurfing, visiting each other when we traveled for work. That was even how I met my wife, through the blogs, not by direct solicitation of a date. We didn't even live on the same coast when we met, but eventually moved to the same city by chance and ended up together.

When Match Group bought the site, they killed these features and there was no longer any reason to stick around, but a lot of us had stuck around long after pairing off and marrying. For a long time, we even stayed in touch via other means and continued meeting up in person when we had the chance. Unfortunately, Facebook was the main place they all settled, and I did not want to stick around on Facebook, so mostly I've lost touch with these people now. But we had a nice community for a long time, even a nearly global community, with people in the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Australia.

Heck, even the reason I originally joined OkCupid wasn't with the intention of finding dates. It was because of an old vBulletin forum I was on for Armenians in Los Angeles where a bunch of people took the personality tests and compared results, so I joined to do that. But things were different enough in 2004 that I didn't need to seek out dates. Women just messaged me and asked me out because they weren't yet overloaded with spam and jaded from the Internet turning to shit.

The Internet was different in a lot of ways back then. OkCupid was founded by nerd grad students that mostly wanted to prove they could apply math to romance. But then they discovered math could actually make them rich, and Match Group never gave a shit and only cared about money from the start. I suspect much of what eventually became shit started that way. Larry and Sergey were probably legitimate math nerds, too. Mark Zuckerberg probably just wanted to hot-or-not his classmates. But then they all discovered they could get rich and investors killed the fun.

Maybe a dating site actually would make for a good social service... Assuming that what we'd gain in terms of the stability and happiness of the population is worth more than what it would cost to run the service it might not be a bad idea. Especially in areas where dating is uniquely difficult like Iceland where apps exist to make sure you're not dating someone closely related.

I guess more anti-trust in tech would probably be good, but the reality of network effects & the advertising economy mean it's actually nontrivial for government to intervene in a way that's clearly net good for users. Google has gifted the world amazing free-to-use software that gives me probably thousands of dollars of consumer surplus yearly. Had OKCupid stayed separate they might have had to tinderify anyways just to survive. Same with YouTube and Instagram had they not been acquired.

If I had to point my way to a solution it would be something at the protocol or operating system level. Apple, for example, mostly doesn't make money from ads and could set up their OS in a way that makes apps compete to satisfy user intentions rather than hijack their attention.

I never used them but I did read their blog and my sense is that they leaned a bit towards that demographic anyway.

As I wrote elsewhere, a lot of people jump to the conclusion that a company was ruined by a buyer or that a company let themselves stagnate. But I'd argue (agree?) it's often the case that the "marginal user" (or mainstream audience) have no real interest in what appealed to the early adopters.

And the early adopters may have moved on as well. I was pretty into eBay as an auction site at one point and I mostly lost interest.

Nobody uses Google because they have to, they use it because it is the best.

DuckDuckGo and Yahoo both use Bing's search index. (Which sucks whenever Bing randomly removes your website for no reason.)

Brave Search is a very recent addition, just within the past year or two.

Oh yeah, you sure its not because its the default browser on Android ?

If Google Search, as the default search engine of Android, wasn't good enough, nobody would use it.

I recently helped a group look at launching a dating app over a six month period. Here are a few take aways:

1. Nobody really likes the dating app experience. Most users have a few dating apps installed at any given time.

2. Therefore, it's relatively easy to break into the market. You start with a single geography and a single niche, and use marketing to gain a pre-launch group of a few thousand individuals.

3. The MRR is not great, and churn is around 2 months. Therefore, it's a hard market to scale into effectively without a lot of money.

4. Beyond the financials, the ethics are interesting. You're either selling your users to advertisers, or you're you're nickel-and-diming your users for low-value features.

Ultimately the group we were involved with decided to invest their money and time into other projects.

That all said: Match.com has a monopoly because most startups want a quick exit, and not actually solve the core problems. If someone like Facebook really wanted to enter the market and win, they could crush Match.com, IMHO. (Not saying that would be a good thing, just pointing out it's possible.)

https://andrewchen.com/why-investors-dont-fund-dating/

and the HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9606572

Its an article about the negative impact of catering to every use case. Not about why OKcupid sucks. Which makes your comment rather off topic.

https://old.reddit.com/r/LokiList/comments/s0a0w6/why_i_made...

Also:

> we took pairs of bad matches (actual 30% match) and told them they were exceptionally good for each other (displaying a 90% match.)

https://archive.ph/O2AF1#selection-421.14-421.145