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I remember using MyYearBook back when it was called that (I think it was changed to something like MeetMe or whatever, last I heard), and had a fair bit of fun on that site when I was younger. It was chaotic, super broken, was kind of like a really bloated MySpace, and what really made it fun is that they incorporated a whole plethora of mini-games to match with people in fun ways.
It kind of seems like a lot of platforms now days, both for dating, as well as games want to restrict communications, if that makes any sense? Like in a lot of online games, you might not even be able to open a text chat, and can only communicate through pre-defined gestures. And dating sites seem to want to put abstractions like swiping and questionnaires before any dialogues take place. And maybe for good reason.
There’s just a kind of fun in things like the classic chatrooms that I miss I guess. Just make your profile, do some shitposting until people start dropping ASL’s into your DM’s, and go from there.
Chatroom style ones like Discord can still work okay except for the part where you gotta use Discord.
I guess back to Craigslist’s classified section 😆
website has a persistent AI chatbot overlay, btw
easy avoid, for me
I am currently developing one and what I can see is the following:
- people get treated like cash cows. It is almost not possible to successfully date without spending money
- people are burned out. The low quality swiping, matching, just to get ghosted, is hurting the motivation.
- people have other problems nowadays. COVID reshaped us completely. We don’t want to spend 2h a day on a dating app. 2h a week max and then they want to continue in real life.
Those are pain points introduced by big corpos (e.g. Match.com) and the fact, that they have launched their apps before COVID.
I have addressed those pain points.
I recommend you take a look at Breeze. It is a dating app in the Netherlands (and expanding).
When you match, you get a date planner (after paying for the date). No chatting allowed. A real date or nothing. That is the premise. You pay per date, and you get your money back if the date is cancelled or they don’t show up. So the app earns money from sending people on real dates. People that don’t show up or cancel dates are penalized by the algorithn and they loose badges on their profile. This is good for Breeze, who wants people to go on dates, and good for the users, who want to go on dates.
Chatting is allowed a couple of hours before the date, but this is not intended for conversations, only for practical purposes.
As a result, profiles also matter much more. For both sides. You litterally need to sell yourself, because if someone swippes on you, they may need to pay 10 euro for the date if you also swipe on them.
You also get only a handful of profiles each day. Which makes sense, because you can limit the number of concurrent matches/dates, hence the app is better off distributing the matches, rather than piling them onto the 10% hotest accounts.
This also means you can’t spend more than 15 to 30 minutes a day going over 5 tot 10 profiles.
Meanwhile, the app can provide free accounts, where people only need to pay for actual dates, hence the entry barier is lower than Tinder, where men won’t get seen without paying. Meaning it is easy to get a userbase going.
I suspect the hard part is the logistics of setting up the dates. A spot in a bar or coffee place needs to be organized for each date. If that is no option, the users are asked to choose a meeting spot (talking to eachother via an intermediate person.
You’ve missed the big one. Those aren’t people.
They are AI fronts for orgs of various size that will scam you for whatever opportunity they may discover.
You can’t fix that. Try developing something that helps people instead of another platform to use them.
You want to help people meet? Open a bar.US bars suck too as a way of meeting people. Too ritualized, too fake, often too noisy to have a conversation or the whole thing is set up to be a meat market.
Pubs in the UK are better, but it’s a slower game.
I’ll accept that. People suck in general, but its the only game in town.
I’m perfectly happy to see the entire dating app thing die under a flood of slop and abuse.
Dating apps are scams. Either a scammer in Hyderabad is conning you or a scammer in a boardroom is selling your data and forcing invasive ads on you. Did you discover some other way of funding your project aside from the ads or making people pay for sex but pretending it’s classier when an app does it?
Do they have to be scams though? Why or why not?
What is the potential of a dating app that isn’t a scam?
Good point. Men usually get contacted by a lot of “gold diggers” and content creators. Women often are targets from scammers or crypto bros.
Scammers can be avoided by using a mandated verification process. But here I don’t rely on a third party service, as privacy is a really important topic for me. I wouldn’t want users to be forced to upload sensitive data to Persona for example. This is why I have developed a small verification service, that applies some algorithms that have been working quite well according to the research papers. It will not be impossible to catch all scammers, but if 95% are cought, that’s already a big win. As for the other problem with people just trying to sell content, a working reporting system should help. The reporting systems of the current apps are majorly flawed, punishing legit people while protecting scammers. The reason is also gender based. The more women a dating app has, the more men are attracted, so women tend to get extra protection. That hurts the whole community.
As for the funding, this is such a difficult topic. The system costs money, so I need to get a bit of money back. I didn’t want any of the “pay to win” features. I also don’t want ads, not even sponsored content. As a video gamer, I tried then to figure out why free games such as Warframe or Path of Exile were earning so much money. It comes down to two things people are willing to pay for: Cosmetics and time-savers. So that’s what I now implemented. Decorate your profile with paid cosmetics. I don’t know how to implement the time-savers yet, so for now it is just cosmetics and an optional “buy me a beer” donation I offer.
It’s not just women being targeted. My roommate got conned for dick pics. He’s not very intelligent so he believed the scammer was going to send his nudes to friends and family. I had to explain to him it’s a scam and if he wants the guy to go away, take the power away. Let him send whatever he wants.
This situation isn’t uncommon. There are plenty of other people being conned on these things. It’s such a problem that most people who contact you on these apps are scammers so you are just wasting time feeding them. It’s more depressing than just staying single.
As long as the data is centralized it will be abusable too, especially in 2026. You could go decentralized to reduce costs and lighten the load, but that has its own risks for abuse and criminal activity.
The web is retracting.
Oh that scam happened to me personally, too. It is not just annoying, it is damaging people.
There is no option to go decentralized, as I have no incentive for others to spend computing power. Decentralized services are ideal for communication and I have also developed a fully peer-to-peer, end to end encrypted Discord alternative. I just didn’t want to release it yet, until someone verified the security layer. Other than that, I kinda need to have everything centralized to foster the community and to set the rules for that community.
As I am not investor backed and also don’t want to be, I focus on releasing in very specific locations at first to create revenue with small investments. It takes a bit longer, but the growth is more stable and more organic.
But decentralized is kinda perfect for this. Webtorrent is a standard now so you might not even need an app. Just have users seed the service. More users, better service, though webtorrenting the entire site would likely eat data so splitting the different where accounts sort of mesh messages within their area would make more sense than just tossing sniffies in webtorrent.
Hi, I’m from the EU, I have the right to get all of my data removed from a centralized service using GDPR. How do I do it on a decentralized one?
Leaving aside the whole issue of those companies not being trustworthy about the data deletion, at least my profile won’t be public when its’ been deleted and I’ve got someone to make a complaint about if I have reason to think they’ve lied about it. The fines can be pretty high. With federation, actually getting all copies of your profile deleted is nearly impossible. With torrent style decentralization, it seems completely impossible. Everyone will have access to everyone else’s data and it’ll be trivial to make backups.
Presumably most people would be using this on their phones with mostly their mobile data. An issue with the bittorrent protocol is that to open a connection, one peer has to have a port forwarded. Is this different with webtorrent?
Federation is simpler than true P2P here, but you then still need to trust the instance admins. It’s fine for Lemmy/piefed style media for me because I don’t put my real name, face and other details here.
My personal opinion is that a centralized alternative owned by a foundation rather than a for-profit company would be best of both worlds: No profit motive, just like decentralized. A centralized entity that holds liability in case there’s a data leak or someone starts spreading CSAM. And ability for said centralized entity to moderate said CSAM, scams and other reports.
I worked customer service for match for almost a decade, so I can give you a few pointers.
People leave when they’re the only ones in an area. So giving them something to do is important to retain people. The best idea I’ve ever saw was having a forum where people can discuss any topic. I think Match also tested public chatrooms and streams, but i didn’t really dealt with those. You’ll have to deal with forum drama and moderation, but some people will be very engaged.
Speaking of, moderation will take lots of time and effort. People sick. Make sure that moderation tools are as robust as the matching ones.
I think those are the general ones. Best of luck!
Thanks a lot for sharing. I have a Community Manager background and also was a moderator at Jaumo. Having a place to engage can be fun, but I am not fully sure yet if people really want to do that, when they just want to date. I have to think about it and maybe I will add something as an optional feature.
One of the things I am doing is launching with a wait list, so that an area can populate first, before opening the gates. This avoids the problem of feeling alone.
Not sure if you’re open to collaboration on the app: I was thinking of making one with a few novel takes.
Fun fact: I worked with a guy at IBM who wrote some of the original algorithms for Match.com back in the day.
I was thinking about how I’d like to work on projects like these. Collaboration can be very fun and engaging. For this app, I am basically done already, so the next step is to verify if the features work with real people. If it turns out to be a success, I will come back to you and will open the doors happily, as two brains are always better than one.
Wicked. If you need a tester let me know. I’m familiar with TestFlight, too.
I’ve started planning a mobile OS and a handful of other apps, FOSS primarily. Worked in the industry for about 12 years doing devops/sys eng/ and some software dev. Collaboration can be the secret sauce sometimes.
GL regardless. I love seeing fresh takes on an otherwise saturated and greedy industry.
As they should for good!
it’s not because there isn’t a desperate need. it’s that they are predatory and make a hard thing fucking impossible, and have a vested interest in making it impossible and charging for the solution, but not a good enough solution to invalidate needing to keep using it.
I of of the opinion that these sites commoditize women. They take in profiles, they curate and hoard them. They know that men will pay to get access to them, so they put the best “opportunities” behind their paywall. If you don’t pay, you can see them, but have low chances of getting their attention. I presume the same happens to both sides, but regardless of how they operate, they don’t want you to find someone. They don’t make money if you find someone and quit using the app.
They manipulate a population that is hooked on convenience and pretend to offer the same thing. Be a lazy turd and find a hot woman from your sofa. That isn’t realistic, but that’s the pitch. Nobody starts dating thinking “hmm, I want the chunky person who has no other hobbies than swiping on their phone while Netflix plays in the background”. If these apps were at all helpful, they’d tell you to put on some pants, get off the sofa and develop some appealing interests (no, “hiking” isn’t one of them because you don’t actually do it).
Good fucking riddance if this is at all true.
in essence its just to get men to keep swiping, and become the “product/data” to be sold. thats why its dying.
I used dating apps on and off for the best part of 10 years when I was single I never got a single meaningful match. They simply do not work.
You have to follow rules 1 and 2.
The point of the app isn’t to get you dates, it’s to get you to use the app so they can sell your data.
If you get into a relationship and delete the app, they’ve lost a customer.
The system only works with competition, but as we stopped enforcing anti trust and anti competitive laws in any meaningful way, the same company owns most of the sites, and is in a shittrust with the rest to all maximize revenue instead of competing.
If they are dying, I’d say nothing of value is lost.
Dating apps never really served their purpose. They killed themselves.
Disagreed. OkCupid worked until Match Group destroyed it.
“Destruction of OkCupid as an attack against its liberal-skewed user base”
https://lemmy.world/post/24108120
Hard to argue this isn’t a good thing, given how they’ve driven young people apart on purpose for profit.
It’s so uncommon to see good news these days.
Maybe if they weren’t all about making money off loneliness they might be doing a bit better.
The dating app kinda reminds me of gambling. Gambling is selling the hope of being rich. Dating apps are selling the hope of finding a partner.
Grindr is the ultimate gamble, hahah I was telling me wife my blocklist grows every day. I had a guy solicit me for dirty socks, didn’t even want to buy them just wanted to trade one dirty sock for three clean ones… I had another guy call me an asshole for not responding to them. Not to mention the people who don’t read profiles.
They just throw quarters into the machine and hope one of their bets pays off.
Are they? All my friends in their 30s have more than one app. Or had it, when they were single.
What has really been dying for quite some time is “third spaces”. That’s what we need to get back really, beyond dating. Just plain socializing and enjoying togetherness.
The more people use them, the less they work. That’s kind of the whole model right?
They are inherently all flawed because they keep you away from the single only reliable way to date: growing your social circle.
Even if you match someone, that’s a single date where you may or may not continue to see each other. Whereas if you spend all that time and effort hanging out with your friends, getting to know people that are in your and their orbits, you are growing your social circle exponentially and exposing yourself to far more dating opportunities while looking like you’re not even trying. And even if it doesn’t work, you are still making being single more fun for yourself by having a rich social life.
Just spend that time reconnecting with old friends, hanging out with people from work or joining some club or class. That’s how to be successful dating. Specifically by not “dating”. To me dating is something that just happens naturally, you don’t need to go looking for it. Just be ready when the opportunity arises. Learn to spot them. Its a social skill like any.
But isnt that dangerous in that there are peoole who dont want to date but rather they simply want to make friends and spend time with friends but if you reveal your romantic relationship feelings for these people thatll potentially ruin that platonic relationship you two have?
Yep, so you don’t do that. I’ve never seen anyone confess their feelings and not get met with rejection. What can you expect if you put someone on the spot?
Flirting is about ambiguity and plausible deniability, because you are giving yourself and them ways out of the situation if the vibes don’t match.
But the problem with flirting is that you may be dealing with a complete idiot like me who cannot read signals and youll end ip leaving that oerson in the dark forever aboitbwhat you really feel, or you may send signals to anither party who doesnt want to spoin your friendship, and thirdly it can lead to people eventually shutting down away from all forms of reltionships bith platonic and romantic.
Like you can look up the dozens of stories of where a person , Person A was flirting with another person , Person B, and Person B was completely obliviois to what the hell Person A was doing.
One of my favorite stories was one where a lady would ALWAYS invite the same guy to her college dorm room so they could ‘study’ together. After few months of ‘studying’ tigether (he would always focus solely on studying when she was typically thinking about ither things… ) she said ‘Lets play a game’ . Basically the ‘game’ was that they both take off ALL ctheir clothes as fast as possiblr and hide under her blanket. They played this game for months and months …and… he still didnt pick up on the hint. It wasnt until long after they were both married and divorced to other people that she finally revealed to him what she felt about him. He said he felt the same way about her but he didnt have the coirage to say anything to her. See? Now they both lost out on a relstionship that may not have ended in divorce as their previous relationships had… all because they both didnt have the courage to say anything to each other. And knowing myself? I would also be unable to pick up on a signal like this.
TTheres also a second problem with flirting is that men tend to be so lack of social and ohysical intimacy thst they see ALL positivity and vulnerability shown to them as flirting when in truth the person who is being kind and touchy towarrds them simoly wants to be a kind and huggy friend. ANd there is nothing wrong with being a kind and huggy friend. Humans NEED vulnerability . Humans NEED physical intimacy to relieve our touch starvations. Ive read like a dozen stories of both men and women, but mostly women, who have stopped showing their male friends physical intimacy and vulnerableness or who have stopped naking male friends completely because the males interpret it as flirting . And Im a male and I can agree that if someone showed me ANY kindness I would interpret it as flirting too.
And thirdly , people who have repeatedly misinterpreted kindness , physical intimacy and vulnerability as flirting also have a third problem where eventually they just start ignoring ALL signals because theyre so scared to misinterpret anything. People like this can become so lonely that its like theyre living in solitary confinement
In my opinion sending mixed signals is toxic and should be done away with forever
If yoy feel some type of way about a person ? You must tell them directly or NEVER give them any mixed signalsat all. And if you do tell them you you must do it with full with confidence BUT you have to have two parts to your plan before you tell them: First part of the plan is that you have to have an ‘escape plan’ to cut your relationship with that person or their associates if you feel thst your romantic feelings for this person will interfere with you platonic relationship with them or their associates , second aprt of the plan is ofcourse to tell them and be confident with wjo you are and with accepting rejection. Ive come to realization that mixed signals is a way of a person telling ‘HELL NO’ because if you arent confident enough in yourself to admit that you want to date me or you want to accept my request to date you?.. Why would I want to date you? A person who is confused about their love for me is confised about who they are as a person. That relationship also goes the other way . End of story. I was reading that article from ‘No Nonsense Sel-Defence’ and thy came to this conclusion… and theyre right!
Why would you want to be in a relationship with someone who you can’t understand signals from? It shows your communication isn’t on the same level yet.
Real confidence is not overthinking things. Paying attention is a social skill like any other. I think learning it is the best relationship skill you can give yourself.
You can’t love someone off the bat, it’s something that builds. It’s normal to not be sure at first.
Dating and love is ambiguous and complex.
What they mean is that dating apps have been enshitified to the point that most of them no longer function.
Aldo, users (and bot operators masquerading a users) have gamed the algorithms to the point at which they’re even more useless than they were when they started.
They were a silly concept to begin with. If they worked well, they’d kill their own business model. To stay economically viable they therefore have to use all kinds of tricks and produce mixed-at-best results, and cognitive manipulation to keep their user base entertained. Glad to see them finally collapse
I think, it’s a myth that matchmaking has to be bad to survive. We see that in gaming all the time. The problem is just that physical world matchmaking is optimized to get recurrent customers instead of finding good matches. And that inevitably tanks the reputation. The first dating platform with good matchmaking will be the last one standing because it will suck the competition dry.
There is a market for good matchmaking. It’s just not as big as the imagined market for bad matchmaking (which we see now isn’t actually that big once people realize that the service sucks).Also there are still “for real” matchmaking services — for marriage — in plenty of cultures. This is a pretty normal way for folks to get married in many countries. If these apps had gone for being “the digital version of that” instead of algorithmic enshittification, maybe it would be a different story
That’s BS, the population is literally aging into a new market evey year, but they want to nickel and dime to the point of exploitation their existing base ruining the reputation of the entire industry in the process.
Or arguably it’s the issue with running then as an unregulated business to begin with. It’d almost be better if it was just run as a public/non-profit database service: here’s an anonymised, clinical, filterable list of other people who are looking for a relationship, and a safe way to connect with them. Like all other online services it’d be killed off by bots, trolls, and creeps, but still… If it’s in the public’s general interest for people to be in relationships?
Let me filter the bots, trolls, and creeps myself. I don’t need a rent-seeking middleman for that.
(My wife’s pickup line was trolling the shower curtains in my photo)
I never really believed that montra of if they were successful they lose a customer. I met my wife on a dating site over 13 years ago and told everyone I knew about it and how good it was. Many of the people that I told tried the site. It’s a great way to spread your business if anything then through natural word of.mouth you actually kinda weed out people who are looking for the wrong things. Unfortunately the one I used ok cupid was bought by the big conglomerate and they change it so it was just like all the others. The other place I see it working is if governments offered the service because they want people to be matched up. I get people might not trust the government to match them up but why would you trust a company to do it then.
