I’ve been thinking quite a lot about the problems of dating apps and had some ideas and would be interested in talking about it.
There’s a general problem with people who are a bit clueless / don’t have much intimate experience acting in a cold way and sending odd and offputting messages. This can be a vicious spiral where it’s hard to connect and get the experience to improve their social skills.
There’s a problem of creepy and aggressive people sending horrible messages and unwanted nudes, they may be just clueless as above or they may be malicious.
Sometimes on dating sites the gender ratio is skewed and men can end up being ignored and women can end up being flooded with messages as soon as they put a profile up. Both of these are bad experiences.
I’d suggest a dating site that improves these things in the following ways.
The sign up / onboarding process is quite long. You pay some token fee, answer quite a lot of questions to fill out a reasonable profile and there’s quite a lot of explanations and tests about consent, emotional awareness and the culture of the site. I like the channel “sexplanations” on youtube for instance for this kind of accessible, easily digestible, educational material.
If one of the partners in a chat requests it the mods are allowed to read all messages that are sent on the site. This needs to be flagged up front and consented too, however it gives the mods a lot of power to remove people who send creepy or aggressive messages. It would also be expected that people wouldn’t share contact details outside the site early on.
When people are introduced they are “introduced” in a managed way. It’s a 1 on 1 pairing where both profiles match relatively well and each person has indicated they are ready to meet someone new. This means people won’t get flooded and can meet new people when they want to and properly evaluate a reasonable match.
I feel like this could lead to an experience which is quite heavily managed and structured which is great for people who maybe aren’t so confident and aren’t sure how to go forward. I think it would be great if one of the main goals was teaching people the skills of building great relationships rather than just assuming that if you connect people that’s enough for it to all work out on it’s own.
I like your suggestions about the dating site, however, what you describe sounds a lot more like a matchmaking service. Those do already exist but are usually quite expensive. As I understand it, usually they sign on clients for a hefty fee, analyze them, and proceed to introduce them to other clients they think would be a great match. Then the two date and see if it works.
I don’t know what kind of methods they use, but I guess using ML and psychology might be able to reduce the costs of such a project significantly.
Yeah I think there is some similarity there. I think I was assuming that the matches are made algorithmically, it’s just that they are made at a sustainable pace rather than in a flood at the beginning.
I’ve been thinking quite a lot about the problems of dating apps and had some ideas and would be interested in talking about it.
There’s a general problem with people who are a bit clueless / don’t have much intimate experience acting in a cold way and sending odd and offputting messages. This can be a vicious spiral where it’s hard to connect and get the experience to improve their social skills.
There’s a problem of creepy and aggressive people sending horrible messages and unwanted nudes, they may be just clueless as above or they may be malicious.
Sometimes on dating sites the gender ratio is skewed and men can end up being ignored and women can end up being flooded with messages as soon as they put a profile up. Both of these are bad experiences.
I’d suggest a dating site that improves these things in the following ways.
The sign up / onboarding process is quite long. You pay some token fee, answer quite a lot of questions to fill out a reasonable profile and there’s quite a lot of explanations and tests about consent, emotional awareness and the culture of the site. I like the channel “sexplanations” on youtube for instance for this kind of accessible, easily digestible, educational material.
If one of the partners in a chat requests it the mods are allowed to read all messages that are sent on the site. This needs to be flagged up front and consented too, however it gives the mods a lot of power to remove people who send creepy or aggressive messages. It would also be expected that people wouldn’t share contact details outside the site early on.
When people are introduced they are “introduced” in a managed way. It’s a 1 on 1 pairing where both profiles match relatively well and each person has indicated they are ready to meet someone new. This means people won’t get flooded and can meet new people when they want to and properly evaluate a reasonable match.
I feel like this could lead to an experience which is quite heavily managed and structured which is great for people who maybe aren’t so confident and aren’t sure how to go forward. I think it would be great if one of the main goals was teaching people the skills of building great relationships rather than just assuming that if you connect people that’s enough for it to all work out on it’s own.
I like your suggestions about the dating site, however, what you describe sounds a lot more like a matchmaking service. Those do already exist but are usually quite expensive. As I understand it, usually they sign on clients for a hefty fee, analyze them, and proceed to introduce them to other clients they think would be a great match. Then the two date and see if it works.
I don’t know what kind of methods they use, but I guess using ML and psychology might be able to reduce the costs of such a project significantly.
Yeah I think there is some similarity there. I think I was assuming that the matches are made algorithmically, it’s just that they are made at a sustainable pace rather than in a flood at the beginning.
Thanks for the comment :)