agreed. i've always thought that an interesting idea to try would be to create a (mostly) zero sum dating system where you have to respond to people in order to initiate conversations with others.
it de-incentivizes sending rapid-fire copy/pasted messages as well as completely ignoring messages. levels things out a bit.
Yeah probably. I'm wondering if there isn't a way to incentivize actually taking the time to have a conversation with someone you're not immediately attracted to. Maybe like a conversation-length gate or rewards based on message recipient ratings of the message you send?
Alternatively something like a monthly allowance of credit and then an auction style messaging system would be interesting.
I like that, and it could be marketified/gamified too. People could put themselves forward as potential match-makers, i.e. moderators who screen introductory messages, and they can stake a certain number of points on whether they think the recipient will like the message. (They could also review abuse reports after the fact, including ghosting).
Over time, certain match-makers with a track record for finding good matches would be highly valued, and they could be given a free premium membership (giftable to friends) to reward them. I suppose the downside is that people who do a bad job at screening messages would end up having to pay more as a consequence, and the community might end up relying on a minority of users to do all this extra work.
i'm just kind of throwing this out there, since its similar. feel free to take any ideas and use them (just give me a high five if you use them):
i was mulling over the idea of a dating site that was more anonymous/private than the standard version. no searching allowed, no direct profile access allowed.
you're given a list of maybe 5 profiles that the site thinks you might like. you're required to interact directly (email style messages only) with at least one of them, and then give anonymous, private feedback on that person. the feedback is used to generate new, better matches, improve the algorithm, and weed out people who are spammers/jerks/etc.. you don't get new matches until you interact with people both ways, initiating with people on your list and responding to someone who has you on their list.
messages work somewhat like tokens. you get X number to start, they replenish over time, but sending a message costs you 1 token, and receiving a message gives you 1 token. this prevents spam, mass "lol ur hot" messages, encourages you to interact with people in a way that warrants them talking back to you, and encourages you to respond to people that you might not have been so hasty to respond to on other sites. but it still gives you the leeway to ignore people.
this is just a very brief bar napkin overview of something different from the standard way of doing things. thoughts?
You could limit who can contact each user based on the requirement of filling out a "dating checklist" this means that women won't get inundated with messages and will actually respond to those who fit her requirements.
Hey, there's your startup...video speed dating! lol
I had an idea at one point that the current sites go about it the wrong way. They charge money to talk to the people, encouraging the catalog effect. My idea was that you charge a reasonable fee to join, and then the system makes some guesses (not any of the "compatibility stuff", but provide a list of reasonably close matches so you'll have at least one thing in common) and provides you the list. You can't see anything except their username and initials at first. You then have "correspondence levels," basically, after x exchanges it reveals a little more about the profile (say, list of hobbies), and so on. So you don't really know much about them at first, and it's after having to communicate that you can see what their profile.
As for the group outings one, I just had an idea about that, too. Most people have difficulties finding people they click with, and getting that initial conversation going. I think a 6 person semi-speed date would be a way to alleviate that. Essentially, 3 guys, 3 girls (or however their preferences lean, match it so there's 3 and 3) and they rotate through. Each guy would get 15-20 minutes with each girl. And during the "date", they have two coaches, one being a guy, and the other a girl. It's encouraged for the coaches to interrupt and pull someone aside to give them a brief bit of advice, etc.
this sounds like a problem to solve. i'd like to see a dating site that doesn't involve browsing profiles like a catalog, and encourages people to respond to messages a bit more.
kills two birds with one stone, if you have it based on a smarter matching algorithm that requires you to give private feedback on people you interact with, to help hone your personal recommendations. also makes fake profiles and spamming a much tougher prospect, and would probably give it an overall safer feel.
I've thought about making a new dating app. The existing apps suck for 2 reasons: in most markets men are at a significant disadvantage because of how men and women differ in the way they approach dating (and there's also a significantly unfair male:female ratio in many markets). Additionally, none of them are really designed to get people off the app, but rather they're built to increase engagement and keep people on the app.
One idea I've had is to disallow conversation in the app, and instead focus on making date plans if there's a match. Another idea is to introduce a payment aspect to make spamming economically unviable, except that the payment goes to the recipient instead of the platform. Some apps have tried things like this, but they kind of suck because it's not real money so it's not useful.
The issues isn't the activity choice, it's the assumption about the goal of the meeting. I find that constraining.
By the way, I just thought what I'd like to see in dating websites: (one, stop making them about dating, let's just make it 'meet people) when you get a message, add a button somewhere that says "the sender is being obnoxious". This (quietly) blocks the sender from messaging you (at least for some time), and adds to the user's obnoxious stat. Let's say that a conversation that involves more than 5 messages in a week adds to "interesting" stat. Once you messaged enough people (say, 10), and your obnoxious/interesting stat exceeds some value, you get told that up front, and won't be able to send more than, say, a message every two days until the stat improves.
What would be much smarter would be using user chat histories plus match scores to simulate initial small talk between users which leads either to a simulated rejection, ghosting, or escalation to further steps. Then suggest escalated matches to each side and if mutual interest lead each into the post-small talk conversation to pick up from there providing an inherent ice breaker.
If it's not Match, it will be someone else, but this is definitely going to be the future of online dating. Simulated speed dating.
Tinder already did that. I think I saw a screenshot once from the olden days of OK Cupid, where men could and were expected to send a message to any woman they found interesting. I think there were hundreds of messages per day or something.
Solving the 'chicken and egg' problem has lead to a catastrophe in large dating markets:
Abandoned accounts and men->women spam.
I think a smaller dating site would prosper quite well if it could eliminate wasting people's time. eHarmony has a good practice in this regard, but eHarmony is also marriage, christian, straight focused - and excluded all others.
A dating site that disabled user accounts that hadn't logged in or responded, initiated conversation eHarmony style, and somehow limited the spam that men send, well... that'd be worth checking out. It would drastically raise the signal to noise ratio.
For spam: perhaps you can only send one message per day to new people, and one message per person per reply. Choose wisely.
Also, for every uploaded picture, grab the date it was taken and put that on the page. Might not stop hackers, but that's a small minority.
Other effects to combat: the ego inflation effect, where having many virtual 'options' makes you more selective.
Maybe even a 'ask a friend' feature, where you email a reply history to a friend and ask their advice (helps with network effects).
There's LOTS of room for innovation here, essentially.
That kind of reminds me of Slashdot's Karma system. I think it would work, I think the concept would have to be weighted towards dating, but not 100% a dating site. Something that's as much about being social as it is finding a partner. So maybe encourage people to email people they find interested on a "just-friends" basis.
Maybe instead of marking your profile with your intentions, you mark each individual email, ie, "New Friends", "Short-Term Dating", "Activity Partner".
I was thinking of adapting xkcd's robot9000 to dating sites on the other day. Instead of searching duplicate messages from 1 user, you search for duplicates across the entire database, with exponentially increasing ban periods if your message is not original. It would definitely force men and women to write meaningful messages.
I had an idea for a dating app a while back, in which the basic idea is that you pay the service to message someone (above a free weekly limit of say 1 msg).
The pricing would be reactive - as popular attractive people get more messages, the more it would cost to message them, growing exponentially in order to limit incoming messages to approx a few a day. Unpopular people who got few messages would have a price that would go down to zero. This would hopefully solve the problem of women getting hundreds of messages a day, and men getting neither any incoming messages nor any replies to their outgoing messages.
It shouldn't be much of a problem to get women on board, as they rarely send messages anyway and it would always be free just to put up a profile and receive messages. And for men it would hopefully be a fair an transparent way to have confidence that their outgoing messages would be received and read (and have fewer immediate competitors), rather than just lost in the noise.
I don't have time for it now, but it's always been something on my mind.
Edit: Thanks for your comments. This is interesting. Lots of hypotheses worth experimenting.
My immediate thought is applying this to okcupid messages. Okcupid can figure out what kind of messages is likely to generate responses for each person, and can probably charge the sender for the ideal writing style recommendation.
That sounds pretty good to me, the most annoying part about these dating apps is that people match with dozens of other people and then don’t message or respond.
it de-incentivizes sending rapid-fire copy/pasted messages as well as completely ignoring messages. levels things out a bit.
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