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"Instead it’s the equivalent of a trusted friend or relative setting you up with someone they know will suit you." A random dating app is a "trusted friend or

"Instead it’s the equivalent of a trusted friend or relative setting you up with someone they know will suit you." A random dating app is a "trusted friend or relative" now? Sorry, that's not a reasonable expectation. I mean, go for it, if you think it'll work. It's easier than ever to spin up an MVP. But, if I were a betting man, my bet against this working, especially with women, would be very, very, large. Not only do I think it's not viable, I would be genuinely surprised if you got one (1) paid sign up from a woman.

jiggawatts 9d ago
> if you think it'll work. It would, at scale, where there's sufficient data to train some decent embedding models to accurately judge partner compatibility. As a machine learning exercise, this is "easy". Heck, Facebook does it, possibly without even "trying" to implement dating specifically! I regularly get spammed with "suitable single women" as friend suggestions by Meta. I'm not single, but as dating suggestions go, they're actually not half bad! If I was single, I'd reach out to some of the recommendations for sure. They've clearly implemented this exact feature, but they bootstrapped it by having a billion+ people in their system and trillions of interactions between them already. They didn't start out as a dating site. Similarly, I've heard that LinkedIn is now more of a "single professionals dating site" than a career-making / job-seeker site, at least for a decent fraction of its userbase. This is eminently solvable, and people do use these systems to find partners. The nigh-insurmountable challenge is boot-strapping a dating-only site from scratch.
- SwellJoe 9d ago
  You've listed off a bunch of examples of why it would work, but none of them do what you've suggested or anything like it. None of them try to force a date to happen on penalty of a large fine for not showing up. None try to get a woman to meet a stranger without her making the decision to meet them based on her own assessment of the person and pay $50 for the privilege. I'm not saying online dating can't work, and I've said nothing about whether data about people makes matches better. I am saying you have presented an absolutely batshit crazy and dangerous idea of how it ought to work. Edit: It sounds like you've designed a dating app optimized for angry men who feel shorted by women on dating apps. But, there's never been too few men interacting on dating apps. If you're optimizing for men's comfort on a dating site, you have failed to learn the lesson of "ladies night" at bars. If your site is full of single women, men will show up. The opposite is not true, if it feels punitive and risky to women.

jiggawatts 9d ago

> if you think it'll work. It would, at scale, where there's sufficient data to train some decent embedding models to accurately judge partner compatibility. As a machine learning exercise, this is "easy". Heck, Facebook does it, possibly without even "trying" to implement dating specifically! I regularly get spammed with "suitable single women" as friend suggestions by Meta. I'm not single, but as dating suggestions go, they're actually not half bad! If I was single, I'd reach out to some of the recommendations for sure. They've clearly implemented this exact feature, but they bootstrapped it by having a billion+ people in their system and trillions of interactions between them already. They didn't start out as a dating site. Similarly, I've heard that LinkedIn is now more of a "single professionals dating site" than a career-making / job-seeker site, at least for a decent fraction of its userbase. This is eminently solvable, and people do use these systems to find partners. The nigh-insurmountable challenge is boot-strapping a dating-only site from scratch.

SwellJoe 9d ago
You've listed off a bunch of examples of why it would work, but none of them do what you've suggested or anything like it. None of them try to force a date to happen on penalty of a large fine for not showing up. None try to get a woman to meet a stranger without her making the decision to meet them based on her own assessment of the person and pay $50 for the privilege. I'm not saying online dating can't work, and I've said nothing about whether data about people makes matches better. I am saying you have presented an absolutely batshit crazy and dangerous idea of how it ought to work. Edit: It sounds like you've designed a dating app optimized for angry men who feel shorted by women on dating apps. But, there's never been too few men interacting on dating apps. If you're optimizing for men's comfort on a dating site, you have failed to learn the lesson of "ladies night" at bars. If your site is full of single women, men will show up. The opposite is not true, if it feels punitive and risky to women.