Cute. Of course, beyond basic deal breakers, neither do people know their preferences (but they think they do), nor do the majority of preference categories actually matter.
This is a common problem with all dating apps. Specifically, interests, hobbies, daily routines, objectives, etc. have nothing to do with compatibility.
“We like the same things!” is the compatibility signal of a naive 22-yr old…
IMO the largest problem is that there is an enormous amount of friction to go from getting a match on an app to actually meeting them in real life. Which means it just doesn't happen that often. What we need is physical spaces where people can meet in person for a low or zero cost. That eliminates the friction of actually seeing someone because they are already there in front of you.
I think that varies by experience. I had a few matches back in the day that took forever to get to a physical meet and greet but most folks weren't there to relive the AIM experience. I met my current partner of 10+ years within maybe six messages between the both of us? And I'd say less than a dozen messages was my median
It helped that I was a bit of a foodie back then and knew some really good holes-in-the-wall that not even your most prolific Yelpers. And therapy too - never had any first date jitters thanks to a nice learned set of coping mechanisms. I knew a lot of dudes who just agonized over what to say next, as if there was an optimal response or something. Turns out, treating the person on the other side like a real human who you're interested in getting to know because you may want to spend a lot of time together is a much better frame than 'How do I convince this person that I'm so super cool or hot'
I'm curious how much feedback traditional matchmakers actually get about whether their matches were long-term good or not. It seems like a "wicked problem" in which any feedback is delayed and unclear, which means even people with experience might just be developing superstitious habits/generalizations rather than truly learning from success and failure.
If you have a phone (or other device that connects to mobile networks), your government knows your daily routine anyway. And in Singapore, we have pervasive CCTV and face recognition.
In principle this can be a lot better than regular dating apps.
Tinder doesn’t know if they were successful or not. They just know you stopped opening the app. In fact they are incentivized not to make matches that lead to marriage, because then you will stop paying.
The government knows whether you got married and stayed married, and given the social cost of divorce, they are pretty incentivized to keep people married.
> Tinder doesn’t know if they were successful or not. They just know you stopped opening the app.
Great point, Tinder has to train on data where they don't know the target variable (whether a match was ultimately successful or not).
Here's a bet I make with zero knowledge on the topic: I bet tinder could get that info (i.e. whether a user is married or not) from data brokers for 99% of users, and probably trivially.
So on the one hand it's nice to see when a cool algorithm or framework is used IRL.
On the other hand, actually applying a 'stable marriage algorithm' to people makes a bunch of assumptions which are worth interrogating:
- Do people actually know what they want even in the short term?
- Do people's preference change meaningfully over longer periods of time?
- Does your preference _upon reading people's profiles_ have any strong relationship to your preference after spending any amount of time with them?
The property that right after being matched, no one could have matched with someone whose profile they preferred more does not mean that this will create stable relationships.
Least they are using an algorithm that has the intended purpose of matching people. For profit dating apps are more interested in keeping you coming back then they are in creating successful relationships
This is an extremely common sentiment I see online - that there is some conspiracy to keep people single to reduce subscription churn. I have run two dating apps (my own apps, not working for a company), and what I found through trial and error was that no matter how many levers you pull and tweaks you make, a lot of it is simply user-behavior problems, not a tech or product design problem. There is no reliable way for a dating app to only serve users non-committal matches for example. The reason someone's matches aren't committal is because they don't want to commit.
The thought experiment I usually pose is to ask what you think a free, open source, and community supported dating app would change. The answer is "not much".
You ran not one, but two, dating apps that were your own apps, and were not part of a company?
Which apps were these? What were your user metrics?
Seems somewhat suspect to extrapolate from your personal experience to what the large dating apps are allegedly doing if you are not approaching their scale. You've mentioned your personal experience as some kind of authority a few times now in this discussion, why not name the two apps directly? Apologies if I missed it but I don't see where you gave any indication that this appeal to authority is credible.
They weren't Tinder sized. They were only published in latam. The first (Mil Besos) flopped and my second attempt (MiAmor) got to a several hundred thousand downloads and I sold it for not very much because I was tired of the moderation. Neither exists anymore. This was more than 10 years ago. There used to be A LOT of dating apps around 2014-2018, I mean hundreds of them on the Apple and Play Store. There has been a lot of consolidation because almost the only thing that matters for dating apps is giving users optionality, which means having more user profiles the other ones.
I'm not claiming I'm an expert, but just sharing personal insight. It doesn't take many users before statistical observations of behavior make themselves apparent. Start producing 5-10k matches per day on your platform and you will see what people want and don't want really quickly.
I don't wish to belittle you but, if I were you I would certainly not be in this discussion saying things like "Source: I used to build and run dating apps" (you said this in another comment in this discussion) when making claims about the major dating app companies if these were the two apps in question.
Certainly not in the manner you conveyed your experience. The market dynamics and design problems of these apps are very well known. Given the scale of your experience, I would suggest your invocation of it as some kind of authority was superfluous at best.
Congratulations on your sale though. Have a nice day.
Note that it's possible for dating problems to be user behavior problems in a way that is suits the profit motive of dating sites, without any conscious intent from anyone in the ecosystem.
Model a world where everybody's self-perception of their mating value is just a little bit higher than their actual value - in other words, one not too far off from reality. Some segment of this population will drop their standards in the face of repeated rejection, and then eventually find a partner because of this. Their "lowered standards" become an accurate self-perception of reality. But some segment of the population will be unwilling to do this. They have a problem - they cannot find a partner no matter how hard they look.
A problem creates a market. People who can't find a partner turn to dating apps to find a partner - some may pay, and a lot more will click on ads. There's a decent chance that dating app management isn't consciously optimizing for failure in dating and success in clicking on ads. However, all the apps that are good at finding partners for their customers find that their customers disappear, while the apps that are good at getting people to click on ads generate huge amounts of revenue and take over the market. Which is entirely composed of people who don't actually want to find a partner, anyway, because those people who care more about the outcome of finding a partner will usually drop their standards enough to find one.
The same dynamic applies in many other markets. Evolution and selection bias > intent and intelligent design. The market ends up composed of people who can't achieve the ostensible purpose of the market, largely through their own actions, because people who can drop out of the market. Happy people often go through life with very few transactions: they might change jobs a couple times early in their career before finding a boss and job they're happy with and staying there until retirement, or they date around a little and then find a partner they marry for life, or they might rent a couple apartments before buying a house, renovating once, and then staying in it for 40 years. The transactions are overwhelmingly composed of people who are dissatisfied, because that's why they're buying things.
I am interested in creating my own dating app/website, but the problem I foresee is getting users - a Catch 22 problem.
I would like to create a service that opperated like OkCupid used to before they sold out. Visible compatibility percentages and being able to search profiles. No curation/algorithms or swiping.
I'm interested in helping people, not taking their money.
Getting users to dating apps is probably easier than you think. Because men will go to where the women are so you only need to work on attracting female sign ups. It's actually that simple. The best way to launch is with a waitlist of warm users in 1 large city. I've seen a lot of people pining for the 2010-era OkCupid so you probably would have plenty of people willing to give it a try.
Yeah, this seems to be a truism along the lines of "scammers intentionally use poor English to filter for stupid people". It gets repeated a lot because it resonates with people, but there's no evidence it's actually done deliberately. Sure, they're making UI and other decisions to maximize for time on the app, but in order to avoid serving you the best matches for a long-term relationship, they'd have to know what those are, and still serve you only plausible, appealing matches that are somehow bad (if they were too bad, you'd quit using the app). I don't think they have this much insight.
*I came very close to falling for a scam that was written in perfect English, formatted convincingly, and appeared to come from an organization I was expecting to receive a message from at the time. Believing that scams will always be obviously stupid increases your chances of falling for one that isn't.
> There is no reliable way for a dating app to only serve users non-committal matches for example
While that certainly sounds difficult, it sounds feasible for e.g. Facebook.
> The thought experiment I usually pose is to ask what you think a free, open source, and community supported dating app would change. The answer is "not much".
That sounds more like a framing problem. If the ultimate goal is promoting long-lasting new romantic relationships, and it's developed without any profit motive, I'd imagine a general social network that primarily organizes in-person social gatherings.
My take is that it isn't about serving non-committal matches and withholding promising matches or whatever, it has more to do with whether you feel like there are better matches on the app if you just keep lookin or waiting. I can see how and app using the stable matching algorithm could really make you feel like you're getting the best match you're going to get, which I think could have a real impact on commitment.
"it has more to do with whether you feel like there are better matches on the app if you just keep lookin or waiting."
Yes, the FOMOism in dating app user psychology is extremely real, but this isn't a product problem, it's a human psychology problem. In theory, you could make an app with, say, a lifetime number of swipes to prevent infinite FOMOism, but it would fail to be a viable product model because the #1 thing that I found users wanted -- more than everything else -- was optionality. And if you don't offer it, they'll go to someone who does.
Hinge actually already uses Gale-Shapley and it doesn't seem to be producing meaningfully improved outcomes.
I don't know... mid 2010's pre-match.com OkCupid and PlentyOfFish seem to get a lot of love. Not saying they didn't have problems but they did actually match a lot of happy couples and online dating didn't feel like nearly as much of a wasteland as it does today
the stated vs revealed preference problem is very big when it comes to dating, and it's made worse that a lot of people have confusion and even shame about what their preferences actually are. And a lot of preferences are mimetic, which means demand for certain things is always outstripping supply. So it's really not even worth it to figure out someone's preferences if there is literally no one out there to pair them to.
The productive question would be to figure out how far outside someone's preferences they can go while still settling happily.
I think what you should be doing as a dating app — much more so if a government one — is some kind of RL based on length of actual marriage.
At least, you should have some algorithm estimating marriage length / likelihood of divorce based on your (non-app) statistics, and then use that as one factor for your in-app calculations.
Just to call out, you're implicitly assuming that strictly lower divorce rates is the correct end-goal. This may not be what you really want, eg you might find many abusive pairings where the weaker partner is too scared to leave. In the style of "The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero" [1], I'll claim that the optimal amount of divorce is non-zero.
The match is whoever wants to start on the journey with the user, at that moment, and the algorithm is there to give the potential couple a better starting point. I guess at any rate that’s better than leaving it to hope and chance.
Gale-Shapely provides the best possible stable outcome for the proposing side.
You’re never going to match with people who aren’t actively looking.
You’re only ever going to match with the people who are looking at the same time as you.
Your criticisms are true of real life without apps. That’s why we have this thing called “divorce”.
Comments like these always seem to miss the point. They aren’t trying to solve marriage. They are trying to create social lubricants to get young people more interested in dating. This algorithm tries to ensure that at the very least your core values at the time match up.
Depending on the which gender does the initiation; the result is either male optimal (males get the best he can get, females gets the worst among those she would tolerate) or female optimal. I wonder which version this one is.
I left another comment with the minimal example, but intuitively:
- proposers descend from their 1st choice, while recipients ascend according to their offers; the outcome can't be recipient-biased, because recipients ascend only when proposers are forced to descend
- a matching is stable if each pair contains at least one party that cannot find a strictly better match
- in particular there are multiple distinct matchings, and if proposer-biased, recipients have no recourse to break the proposer-favored pairs
Imagine you are the proposer. You will start at the top of your list and work your way down only if rejected. So you are guaranteed to the best you could possibly do.
Imagine
A ranks X,Y,Z in that order
B ranks Y,X,Z in that order
C ranks X,Y,Z
X, Y, Z rank A,B,C in that order.
A will propose to X and match.
B will propose to Y and match.
C will propose to X and get rejected.
C will propose to Y and get rejected.
C will propose to Z and match.
Y will never get a proposal from A. Z will never get a proposal from A or B.
(A,X),(B,Y) as the proposals is fine for the point being made. The issue is if we reverse which group is the proposer, we still end up with the same matching, because (A,X) strictly prefer each other.
The minimal example with 4 participants is if each person P has unique preferences and P's 1st choice has P as 2nd choice. So in this case just flip X:
A:XY
B:YX
X:BA
Y:AB
If A,B propose you get AX,BY. If X,Y propose you get BX,AY. Both are stable because the proposers are getting their first choice.
I know there's a cold-start problem for adding a new competitor to dating apps, but I wish one would show up. Maybe I'm naive, but I think I would like this. To be fair, I think Hinge is already pretty good. Not sure why it feels so much better than Tinder.
Begging economists and dating app designers to understand that the problems with the dating market are not a matching problem but a clearing problem. It's very tempting to think that if one could devise a sufficiently clever algorithm they could solve these problems but it's simply barking up the wrong tree.
Perhaps then the government could spend money producing propaganda to convince people to lower their standards. Maybe they could fund TV shows about unattractive people with no money having a good time together - I think China is doing something similar.
It's tempting to think of the problems of a dating market as a matching problem because men and women are almost equal in numbers so we just have to match them all up. A clearing problem occurs in markets, (even markets with ~equal supply and demand) when the reserve price of the transaction is not met. For example, the reason I don't own a Ferrari isn't because there isn't 1 Ferrari out there for sale, it's because I don't have enough cash to clear the transaction. Building a more powerful car sales website won't fix this problem. The reserve price is not met.
The dating market is similarly full of people who would like to clear transactions (economist speak for form a relationship), yet cannot because they do not meet the reserve price of those they want to date.
I hope my Ferrari analogy helps to illustrate the core concept, but you have realize that dating markets are even tougher than car markets, because dating is a barter market. For a transaction to clear, there needs to be a double coincidence of wants -- you can't simply use a medium of exchange like dollars to cut the transaction in half. Imagine if to buy a Ferrari you had to find a seller who also happened to need $350k worth of Linux sysadmin work done.
More specifically, they would rather be single than pair with any of the options that are realistically available to them. Hence, the market fails to clear.
I agree. I sure hope their government will not step in at that point and offer too many incentives to get married and disincentives to stay single, but I would not rule out this is exactly part of the plan...
Maybe part of the solution for any country dealing with low marriage rate is to ban all private dating apps and only government issued apps are allowed.
Private ones will always prioritize profit which means they want you to keep using the app which means they don’t want you to find a partner.
Modern dating apps makes it so that an average woman will have unlimited choices but the average man will have next to none. Before dating apps, they could have been a good match. But with dating apps, the woman has unlimited higher value men. How could these average women marry an average man if she’s being taken on dates constantly by top 5% men?
The problem is that these higher value men will not commit because they also have unlimited options.
Even if she marries an average man later in life, she will feel resentment towards him. Therefore, these women just choose to stay single. This is especially viable now because women often are more educated and have good income.
Now we can see why young men are increasingly becoming far right and longing for far more conservative world.
Modern dating apps are just manifesting natural instincts on steroids. I don’t blame either party. Just an observation.
Especially since populations are potentially in decline with fertility rates below replacement rates. It seems like an existential problem for the government if they want future taxpayers.
o__O my url bar doesn’t currently say Reddit? This argument feels red pilled and not curious nor productive. Women have plenty of valid frustrations with the dating pool. I don’t live in SF but the last woman whom I talked to there told me many of y’all just have mattresses on the floor and like no bed frame. There are places to improve fellas
Yeah, dating apps are problematic. No, nobody here is going to fix that with another stupid app. But I think a lot of these “meet with a group of strangers at dinner” biz concepts are cool and gonna try some soon.
It certainly doesn't help that the app conveniently targets those between 21 to 35 years of age, which is just before advanced maternal age (also the age where single Singaporeans qualify for public housing).
Positive eugenics never stopped and there's nothing wrong about it. Also there's nothing wrong with the government promoting the creation of stable families with children born before DS risk exceeds 1/100.
I mean, it sucks if you're a taxpayer over 35 that wants to use the service, especially considering that DS is easy to screen for using modern tests of a mother's blood and Singapore has a reasonable abortion policy
Well that's not really different from any other age-limited policy where the govt sees the biggest bang for the buck, like state-funded uni under 35, dental for kids etc.
"6 feet, 6 figures, 6 inches" is Eugenics too. The modern Affluent White Female Urban Liberal (AWFUL) is a massive Eugenicist, even if and especially if they loudly proclaim that they are not.
It's also known as being one of the very few countries actually capable of using state capacity to overcome serious social and economic problems. Godspeed.
Sometimes a benevolent dictatorship is better than a perverted and corrupt democracy. Democracy isn't the perfect be-all and end-all form of governance that will work well for everyone, a fact even ancient greeks recognized. Letting the masses decide the future of a country just because they're the majority is like letting the passengers fly the plane because they outnumber the crew.
While many countries in the west have a two or multi party system due to historical reasons, on certain issues they often just function as controlled opposition, making your vote worthless anyway, with political battles between parties now being mostly and ideological circus to keep the unwashed masses distracted and divided while they get robbed blind, rather than focused on actually fixing things for the working class.
If Singapore can skip this expensive time consuming circus and just get shit done, then good for them, but I don't want our western leaders to take the wrong lesson and move us to a dictatorship as the promised solution to fix things, which is what I feel they're trying.
Benevolent dictatorship is probably always the best form of government. I would even say a benevolent dictatorship is superior to a functioning democracy. The main (and unsolvable) issue is that there is no reliable mechanism to ensure they are and that they stay benevolent.
Australia, New Zealand, and the UK are all competing with each other on who can be the most authoritarian anglo nation. "Oi, you got a loicense for that opinion M8?"
The UK are at least vaguely equal opportunity authoritarians, and their police will arrest both the angry dad posting on Facebook about immigrants and the pensioner peacefully protesting in support of Palestine all the same
France has a constitutional right to free speech since at least the 18th century, not sure what you mean. There is a Declaration of the Rights of Man, which is still part of France's constitution. France is also bound by the EU Convention on Human Rights. Why would you compare France to Singapore in this regard? That's strange.
Google any of these terms to see examples of people who were actually fined for speech in France, after 1950, and well after the 18th century:
- Hervé Eon Sarkozy fine
- Éric Zemmour 3000 fine
- bardot degenerates 20000
- Je me sens Charlie Coulibaly fine
None of these were threats or incitement to violence. Just insults.
And you talk about a constitutional right to free speech since the 18th century, but mocking Catholicism could be prosecuted until 1881 (i.e. in the 19th century).
> basic freedoms, like free speech, freedom of the press, etc.
How is that going for us in the west?
Like, I believe in these rights. But I also think we should be open to questioning them when we’ve got anti-vaxxers and Holocaust deniers finding popular purchase among an increasingly and proudly illiterate population.
Until the stupid are in the majority and start curbing your rights. That's one of the main problems with freedom of speech and with democracy as well: they both contain the seeds of their own undoing.
the kind of issues that Singapore has been fairly effective at, getting people to speak the same tongue or not spitting on the street, what you could put into a bucket of 'public discipline' measures I think is over-romanticized.
The country has been effective at it but so was Prussia or England. Singapore has increasingly complex social issues you aren't going to solve with a cane, and government organized marriage likely will go as well as government cheese
It has achieved the highest global GDP per capita is just a couple dozen of years, starting as a small bit of swamp forcibly kicked out Malaysia. I think it's unfair to say that people are over-romanticizing these sorts of accomplishments.
Starting out at the second richest city in Asia after Shanghai, you mean.
The PAP likes its "fishing village in a swamp" trope, and post-war Singapore certainly had its share of problems, but it was already a wealthy trading entrepot long before Lee Kuan Yew came along.
Correct - this isn't new, it's how it works there. Single new grads in the 80's & 90's were being offered government funded beach holidays on graduation where they were paired with selected dating partners.
China is a cultural and diaspora behemoth. Completely apples to oranges comparison.
What about countries similar to Singapore's size and wealth? An interesting thing to look at: how many US electeds are Singapore, Israel, Hong Kong or Taiwan 1st-generation heritage or born? I like this number because you cannot fake it (unlike so many things, like statistics reported by countries that are not free), you cannot buy an election or run a PR campaign to pretend you had a successful election, and it measures a real notion of power (something the CCP aspires to have): Singapore 0, China 9, Taiwan 11, Hong Kong 4, Israel 7.
Anyway I don't really buy into this line of thinking but it is interesting to me to look at a place that isn't really free, like Singapore, and figure out how it affects me.
"In 1992, Deng exhorted CCP cadres to “learn from the world, especially from Singapore”, touching off a “Singapore fever” in PRC political and academic circles."
Stable marriage algorithm or stable matching algorithm?
> In mathematics, economics, and computer science, the Gale–Shapley algorithm (also known as the deferred acceptance algorithm,[1] propose-and-reject algorithm,[2] or Boston Pool algorithm[1]) is an algorithm for finding a solution to the stable matching problem.
I was sure I had read of this year's ago on Wikipedia as the stable marriage problem (originally heard of it in a podcast), but a couple days ago I saw the wiki page said stable matching problem...
There is a very simple solution to the problem. Just add a tax to single people and childless couples or reverse give huge tax break to married and couple with kids.
In past the motive for marriage was sex and companionship which was frowned in society if out of wedlock. Now it is not frowned upon. The old constraint is gone and we need to add new constraints if we want to solve the problem.
A very funny but evidence backed policy would be free GLP-1s for women. A recent study showed GLP-1 use resulted in a 29 percentage point increase in the likelihood of a woman finding a relationship. A woman converting to conservative Protestantism for comparison results in a 2.7 percentage point increase.
One of the best things you can do on this planet is not asking it to support another person, at least not with a comfortable lifestyle which I'm sure we'd all want. Why'd you try to soft-force people to have more children?!
As a secondary problem, people (traditionally women, but with a two-income household it could be either party) often already can't leave a relationship because they can't support themselves and their child(ren) without the other half and so they're stuck in relationships that might either not work for them or that are downright abusive. With a big tax on leaving your partner... oof, why in the world would you want more lock-in?! Is this a manosphere control thing that I'm not aware of?
How do you propose to solve the population crisis ? Given a choice people will always want the position of less responsibility. As a society we have agree to give sacrifices so that we can have next generation.
History will disagree. People used to have multiple children with far less resources and education. It is a well known phenomenon that more affluence lead to less children.
The idea is interesting, of course, but I think the user experience won't be much different from a classic dating app, plus it inevitably requires an analysis of many nuances
It's about prioritizing candidates for the costly initial audition, and breaking symmetry for the introduction, something particularly useful for people who can't just approach other at random in a social setting.
This could work for that purpose in a pinch. You do actually get other matches afterwards, you just don’t get an infinite feed of other candidates and can focus on having great time with the one you’ve got.
Meetup got enshittified years ago already, and the changes drove away the small communities that once made up so much of the site; the only groups which prosper on it now are mainly large for-profit ventures.
In places where there is a healthy ecosystem of casual, non-rapacious meetups, that is overwhelmingly organized via Facebook, not Meetup.
Citation needed. Not my experience at all. And it has the major benefit of being independent of the tech giants, who already know too much about your social graph.
A reminder that Singapore has plenty of history with government-sponsored dating, notably the Social Development Unit (SDU), aka "Single, Desperate and Ugly".
Created appropriately enough in 1984, it had explicitly eugenicist goals (discussed at length in Wikipedia), since Lee Kuan Yew was quite worried about the Idiocracy scenario where the lower classes out-procreate top talent and lead to societal decline.
this is their third attempt at a government run dating service I think :/
it's low key kind of funny how they keep reaching for the quick fix to their collapsed birth rates instead of changing the things that would cost real money or make them less desirable to foreign investors.
Because most countries aren't actually trying anything nor can the government do much in that regard when the issues are cultural and emotional.
The low-birthrate couples who can't/don't want kids aren't suddenly gonna want them if you give them 3 months of paid maternity leave and a monthly stipend or other such welfare perks.
And those who do have kids because of government welfare perks, were having kids anyway, they're now incentivized to have even more.
3 months of leave or a small welfare payment are not sufficiently compelling alternatives to a career. Pay them at the level of a career and see if that changes the numbers - I feel like at least some people would be interested in that. (Say, median national income? Spitballing here)
The countries that do try seem to fall short of actually replacing even a few years of serious career work and offer no way to go back to that career after taking care of children for a while, so you just need to do that.
Unironically Mao/Nixon and Henry Kissenger almost put us into a hilarious world where we (the USA) would have "imported" ~10 million Chinese women. Mao unironically proposed this and his argument about why it would have hurt us is that they "have too many children!":
"Chairman Mao: (Laughing) Those are honest words.
Dr. Kissinger: This is our position.
Chairman Mao: Do you want our Chinese women? We can give you ten million. (Laughter, particularly among the women.)
Dr. Kissinger: The Chairman is improving his offer.
Chairman Mao: By doing so we can let them flood your country with disaster and therefore impair your interests. In our country we have too many women, and they have a way of doing things. They give birth to children and our children are too many. (Laughter)
[Page 132]
Dr. Kissinger: It is such a novel proposition, we will have to study it."
Yeah the world is in a 60 year trend in declining births. An app isn't going to fix anything
Increase women's education, labour participation, reduce infant mortality, have good access to birth control, and make life expensive...You're not going to get babies
Trying to fix falling birth rates with an official government dating app shows they don't understand the problem in the slightest, as dating apps are one of the main causes of declining birth rates in the first place.
Will Tinder be blamed for the sudden decline in fertility rate? Is there any other plausible explanstion to South Korea’s sudden and dramatic drop in fertility rate to 0.8? No matter how bad the housing market is or the job market is, there has never in history been such a drop in population.
The only new variable in the last century of humanity is birth control. All others (hypergamy, economic mobility, migration, etc.) are recurring and have not impacted birth rates significantly in the past.
Population density and infant mortality had changed a lot too in the last 100 years. Income disparities, working hours, and climate too in the last 50.
Male hypergamy and polygyny has been practiced by many cultures historically. They had many problems, but low birth rates wasn’t among them. I don’t think dating apps are a sufficient causal explanation alone for low birth rates
This is a common problem with all dating apps. Specifically, interests, hobbies, daily routines, objectives, etc. have nothing to do with compatibility.
“We like the same things!” is the compatibility signal of a naive 22-yr old…
It helped that I was a bit of a foodie back then and knew some really good holes-in-the-wall that not even your most prolific Yelpers. And therapy too - never had any first date jitters thanks to a nice learned set of coping mechanisms. I knew a lot of dudes who just agonized over what to say next, as if there was an optimal response or something. Turns out, treating the person on the other side like a real human who you're interested in getting to know because you may want to spend a lot of time together is a much better frame than 'How do I convince this person that I'm so super cool or hot'
So not much of an extra loss in privacy.
Tinder doesn’t know if they were successful or not. They just know you stopped opening the app. In fact they are incentivized not to make matches that lead to marriage, because then you will stop paying.
The government knows whether you got married and stayed married, and given the social cost of divorce, they are pretty incentivized to keep people married.
I think they're more concerned about their fertility rate and labor force. A 0.87 total fertility rate for 2025 [1] is pretty bad.
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-12/singapore-low-fertili...
Great point, Tinder has to train on data where they don't know the target variable (whether a match was ultimately successful or not).
Here's a bet I make with zero knowledge on the topic: I bet tinder could get that info (i.e. whether a user is married or not) from data brokers for 99% of users, and probably trivially.
On the other hand, actually applying a 'stable marriage algorithm' to people makes a bunch of assumptions which are worth interrogating:
- Do people actually know what they want even in the short term?
- Do people's preference change meaningfully over longer periods of time?
- Does your preference _upon reading people's profiles_ have any strong relationship to your preference after spending any amount of time with them?
The property that right after being matched, no one could have matched with someone whose profile they preferred more does not mean that this will create stable relationships.
The thought experiment I usually pose is to ask what you think a free, open source, and community supported dating app would change. The answer is "not much".
Which apps were these? What were your user metrics?
Seems somewhat suspect to extrapolate from your personal experience to what the large dating apps are allegedly doing if you are not approaching their scale. You've mentioned your personal experience as some kind of authority a few times now in this discussion, why not name the two apps directly? Apologies if I missed it but I don't see where you gave any indication that this appeal to authority is credible.
I'm not claiming I'm an expert, but just sharing personal insight. It doesn't take many users before statistical observations of behavior make themselves apparent. Start producing 5-10k matches per day on your platform and you will see what people want and don't want really quickly.
Certainly not in the manner you conveyed your experience. The market dynamics and design problems of these apps are very well known. Given the scale of your experience, I would suggest your invocation of it as some kind of authority was superfluous at best.
Congratulations on your sale though. Have a nice day.
Model a world where everybody's self-perception of their mating value is just a little bit higher than their actual value - in other words, one not too far off from reality. Some segment of this population will drop their standards in the face of repeated rejection, and then eventually find a partner because of this. Their "lowered standards" become an accurate self-perception of reality. But some segment of the population will be unwilling to do this. They have a problem - they cannot find a partner no matter how hard they look.
A problem creates a market. People who can't find a partner turn to dating apps to find a partner - some may pay, and a lot more will click on ads. There's a decent chance that dating app management isn't consciously optimizing for failure in dating and success in clicking on ads. However, all the apps that are good at finding partners for their customers find that their customers disappear, while the apps that are good at getting people to click on ads generate huge amounts of revenue and take over the market. Which is entirely composed of people who don't actually want to find a partner, anyway, because those people who care more about the outcome of finding a partner will usually drop their standards enough to find one.
The same dynamic applies in many other markets. Evolution and selection bias > intent and intelligent design. The market ends up composed of people who can't achieve the ostensible purpose of the market, largely through their own actions, because people who can drop out of the market. Happy people often go through life with very few transactions: they might change jobs a couple times early in their career before finding a boss and job they're happy with and staying there until retirement, or they date around a little and then find a partner they marry for life, or they might rent a couple apartments before buying a house, renovating once, and then staying in it for 40 years. The transactions are overwhelmingly composed of people who are dissatisfied, because that's why they're buying things.
I would like to create a service that opperated like OkCupid used to before they sold out. Visible compatibility percentages and being able to search profiles. No curation/algorithms or swiping.
I'm interested in helping people, not taking their money.
*I came very close to falling for a scam that was written in perfect English, formatted convincingly, and appeared to come from an organization I was expecting to receive a message from at the time. Believing that scams will always be obviously stupid increases your chances of falling for one that isn't.
While that certainly sounds difficult, it sounds feasible for e.g. Facebook.
> The thought experiment I usually pose is to ask what you think a free, open source, and community supported dating app would change. The answer is "not much".
That sounds more like a framing problem. If the ultimate goal is promoting long-lasting new romantic relationships, and it's developed without any profit motive, I'd imagine a general social network that primarily organizes in-person social gatherings.
Yes, the FOMOism in dating app user psychology is extremely real, but this isn't a product problem, it's a human psychology problem. In theory, you could make an app with, say, a lifetime number of swipes to prevent infinite FOMOism, but it would fail to be a viable product model because the #1 thing that I found users wanted -- more than everything else -- was optionality. And if you don't offer it, they'll go to someone who does.
Hinge actually already uses Gale-Shapley and it doesn't seem to be producing meaningfully improved outcomes.
https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2021/09/30/hinge-and-its-...
...that many businesses exploit for profit.
The productive question would be to figure out how far outside someone's preferences they can go while still settling happily.
At least, you should have some algorithm estimating marriage length / likelihood of divorce based on your (non-app) statistics, and then use that as one factor for your in-app calculations.
[1] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...
You’re never going to match with people who aren’t actively looking.
You’re only ever going to match with the people who are looking at the same time as you.
Your criticisms are true of real life without apps. That’s why we have this thing called “divorce”.
Comments like these always seem to miss the point. They aren’t trying to solve marriage. They are trying to create social lubricants to get young people more interested in dating. This algorithm tries to ensure that at the very least your core values at the time match up.
- proposers descend from their 1st choice, while recipients ascend according to their offers; the outcome can't be recipient-biased, because recipients ascend only when proposers are forced to descend
- a matching is stable if each pair contains at least one party that cannot find a strictly better match
- in particular there are multiple distinct matchings, and if proposer-biased, recipients have no recourse to break the proposer-favored pairs
Imagine A ranks X,Y,Z in that order B ranks Y,X,Z in that order C ranks X,Y,Z
X, Y, Z rank A,B,C in that order.
A will propose to X and match. B will propose to Y and match. C will propose to X and get rejected. C will propose to Y and get rejected. C will propose to Z and match.
Y will never get a proposal from A. Z will never get a proposal from A or B.
Edit: I think I fixed it.
Maybe 4 participants is too few to clearly see what happens.
The minimal example with 4 participants is if each person P has unique preferences and P's 1st choice has P as 2nd choice. So in this case just flip X:
A:XY B:YX X:BA Y:AB
If A,B propose you get AX,BY. If X,Y propose you get BX,AY. Both are stable because the proposers are getting their first choice.
Which may be largely true for many people but it's definitely not a fixed thing!
When I was dating, I initiated with a lot of women, but the woman I wound up marrying messaged me first.
And doesn't something of the same kind happen in real-life, in some societies or countries or cities male-optimal and in others female-optimal ?
The dating market is similarly full of people who would like to clear transactions (economist speak for form a relationship), yet cannot because they do not meet the reserve price of those they want to date.
I hope my Ferrari analogy helps to illustrate the core concept, but you have realize that dating markets are even tougher than car markets, because dating is a barter market. For a transaction to clear, there needs to be a double coincidence of wants -- you can't simply use a medium of exchange like dollars to cut the transaction in half. Imagine if to buy a Ferrari you had to find a seller who also happened to need $350k worth of Linux sysadmin work done.
Is it fair to say a clearing problem is a missmatch of expectations?
It seems to me that people are simultaneously becoming more specific and demanding, while simultaneously seeking risk aversion and comfort
> In markets, it can mean buyers and sellers aren’t being matched at the expected price/quantity.
More specifically, they would rather be single than pair with any of the options that are realistically available to them. Hence, the market fails to clear.
Private ones will always prioritize profit which means they want you to keep using the app which means they don’t want you to find a partner.
Modern dating apps makes it so that an average woman will have unlimited choices but the average man will have next to none. Before dating apps, they could have been a good match. But with dating apps, the woman has unlimited higher value men. How could these average women marry an average man if she’s being taken on dates constantly by top 5% men?
The problem is that these higher value men will not commit because they also have unlimited options.
Even if she marries an average man later in life, she will feel resentment towards him. Therefore, these women just choose to stay single. This is especially viable now because women often are more educated and have good income.
Now we can see why young men are increasingly becoming far right and longing for far more conservative world.
Modern dating apps are just manifesting natural instincts on steroids. I don’t blame either party. Just an observation.
Yeah, dating apps are problematic. No, nobody here is going to fix that with another stupid app. But I think a lot of these “meet with a group of strangers at dinner” biz concepts are cool and gonna try some soon.
I’m not blaming anyone. I think all parties are behaving as they should.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics#In_Singapore
It certainly doesn't help that the app conveniently targets those between 21 to 35 years of age, which is just before advanced maternal age (also the age where single Singaporeans qualify for public housing).
While many countries in the west have a two or multi party system due to historical reasons, on certain issues they often just function as controlled opposition, making your vote worthless anyway, with political battles between parties now being mostly and ideological circus to keep the unwashed masses distracted and divided while they get robbed blind, rather than focused on actually fixing things for the working class.
If Singapore can skip this expensive time consuming circus and just get shit done, then good for them, but I don't want our western leaders to take the wrong lesson and move us to a dictatorship as the promised solution to fix things, which is what I feel they're trying.
It's literally the antithesis of "cool", whatever your definition. The most square people on earth.
Can't remember when it was last time you could rely on western government to do the right thing
- Hervé Eon Sarkozy fine
- Éric Zemmour 3000 fine
- bardot degenerates 20000
- Je me sens Charlie Coulibaly fine
None of these were threats or incitement to violence. Just insults.
And you talk about a constitutional right to free speech since the 18th century, but mocking Catholicism could be prosecuted until 1881 (i.e. in the 19th century).
How is that going for us in the west?
Like, I believe in these rights. But I also think we should be open to questioning them when we’ve got anti-vaxxers and Holocaust deniers finding popular purchase among an increasingly and proudly illiterate population.
The country has been effective at it but so was Prussia or England. Singapore has increasingly complex social issues you aren't going to solve with a cane, and government organized marriage likely will go as well as government cheese
The PAP likes its "fishing village in a swamp" trope, and post-war Singapore certainly had its share of problems, but it was already a wealthy trading entrepot long before Lee Kuan Yew came along.
China is a cultural and diaspora behemoth. Completely apples to oranges comparison.
What about countries similar to Singapore's size and wealth? An interesting thing to look at: how many US electeds are Singapore, Israel, Hong Kong or Taiwan 1st-generation heritage or born? I like this number because you cannot fake it (unlike so many things, like statistics reported by countries that are not free), you cannot buy an election or run a PR campaign to pretend you had a successful election, and it measures a real notion of power (something the CCP aspires to have): Singapore 0, China 9, Taiwan 11, Hong Kong 4, Israel 7.
Anyway I don't really buy into this line of thinking but it is interesting to me to look at a place that isn't really free, like Singapore, and figure out how it affects me.
https://jamestown.org/fortnight-end-singapore-model/
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/607615/summary
https://www.thinkchina.sg/politics/construction-singapore-mo...
https://www.fairobserver.com/economics/china-and-its-mentor-...
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/singapores-success-cont...
https://www.fpri.org/article/2019/12/the-odd-couple-singapor...
> In mathematics, economics, and computer science, the Gale–Shapley algorithm (also known as the deferred acceptance algorithm,[1] propose-and-reject algorithm,[2] or Boston Pool algorithm[1]) is an algorithm for finding a solution to the stable matching problem.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gale–Shapley_algorithm
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_matching_problem
https://github.com/abhchand/stable-matching
It’s an effective yet simple algorithm. Also widely used in North America to match medical students with their residency of choice.
https://aphrodite.global/
The project was partially started by some students/scholars from there.
In past the motive for marriage was sex and companionship which was frowned in society if out of wedlock. Now it is not frowned upon. The old constraint is gone and we need to add new constraints if we want to solve the problem.
Kurtzerkag has a good video about it: https://youtu.be/TYhNHX372ek?si=5ESz3ykXykyUcmYg
As a secondary problem, people (traditionally women, but with a two-income household it could be either party) often already can't leave a relationship because they can't support themselves and their child(ren) without the other half and so they're stuck in relationships that might either not work for them or that are downright abusive. With a big tax on leaving your partner... oof, why in the world would you want more lock-in?! Is this a manosphere control thing that I'm not aware of?
Good wages, enough free time, affordable housing, free child care, universal healthcare.
That’s the better way.
There plenty of people who want to marry and get kids but they don’t have enough time and money.
Basically all dating apps are optimized for enabling casual hookups at this point.
>All the apps I know suck.
Do ALL the apps suck, or are you maybe not appealing enough for being picked for casual hookups by the users on the app?
Dunno, @beeforpork sounds hawt
If they don't have your interests, feel free to start a new group?
In places where there is a healthy ecosystem of casual, non-rapacious meetups, that is overwhelmingly organized via Facebook, not Meetup.
Rapacious
ADJECTIVE
1 given to seizing for plunder or the satisfaction of greed.
2 inordinately greedy; predatory; extortionate.
a rapacious disposition.
grasping, voracious,
Synonyms:
ravenous
Antonyms: generous
3 (of animals) subsisting by the capture of living prey; predacious.
Citation needed. Not my experience at all. And it has the major benefit of being independent of the tech giants, who already know too much about your social graph.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Development_Network
Created appropriately enough in 1984, it had explicitly eugenicist goals (discussed at length in Wikipedia), since Lee Kuan Yew was quite worried about the Idiocracy scenario where the lower classes out-procreate top talent and lead to societal decline.
it's low key kind of funny how they keep reaching for the quick fix to their collapsed birth rates instead of changing the things that would cost real money or make them less desirable to foreign investors.
Because most countries aren't actually trying anything nor can the government do much in that regard when the issues are cultural and emotional.
The low-birthrate couples who can't/don't want kids aren't suddenly gonna want them if you give them 3 months of paid maternity leave and a monthly stipend or other such welfare perks.
And those who do have kids because of government welfare perks, were having kids anyway, they're now incentivized to have even more.
The countries that do try seem to fall short of actually replacing even a few years of serious career work and offer no way to go back to that career after taking care of children for a while, so you just need to do that.
https://www.reddit.com/r/aznidentity/comments/1s184vi/cdc_da...
Unironically Mao/Nixon and Henry Kissenger almost put us into a hilarious world where we (the USA) would have "imported" ~10 million Chinese women. Mao unironically proposed this and his argument about why it would have hurt us is that they "have too many children!":
"Chairman Mao: (Laughing) Those are honest words.
Dr. Kissinger: This is our position.
Chairman Mao: Do you want our Chinese women? We can give you ten million. (Laughter, particularly among the women.)
Dr. Kissinger: The Chairman is improving his offer.
Chairman Mao: By doing so we can let them flood your country with disaster and therefore impair your interests. In our country we have too many women, and they have a way of doing things. They give birth to children and our children are too many. (Laughter)
[Page 132] Dr. Kissinger: It is such a novel proposition, we will have to study it."
- https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v18...
Increase women's education, labour participation, reduce infant mortality, have good access to birth control, and make life expensive...You're not going to get babies
Crash the economy and reduce people's purchasing power
Make them poor, and the birth rate will rise (Japan birth rate is rising) =)
Edit:
Share of all likes received according to ChatGPT
Top 1% 16.4%
Top 5% 41.1%
Top 10% 58.0%
Top 50% 95.7%
Bottom 50% 4.3%
Historically they were compelled