One of the most common complaints I read about dating apps is how many bots there are, so yeah, for sure add AI into the mix. That’s definitely what people want. Also, if you have to use AI to start a conversation, what are you gonna do when you meet someone in person? Match has really done the most to ruin online dating over the last several years, though, so this just seems like another step on the same path.
all Tinder cares about is keeping you swiping, with your eyes on the screen.
Yeah they failed at that, at least for me. I deleted my one account over a year ago and can’t see myself ever going back. Apps are borderline useless at this point and I’d rather die alone than slog through one ever again.
They don’t need to retain users for very long, they just need to keep you around as long as possible.
There’s always new single people aging into the dating pool, and thanks to Apple, the ones aging into it now are too tech illiterate, susceptible to lock-in tactics, brand loyal, and resistant to trying alternatives if it’s even marginally less popular or well known. All of which guarantees a steady flow of new singles to milk dry.
The dating app scene is honestly one of the best examples out there of how fucked this unregulated app market is. Any time an app started to grow, started to chip away at the entrenchment of Match, they just bought it. It provided zero benefit to customers to let it happen, in fact it has made it all demonstrably worse.
They make money with people looking for dates, not with people having found them.
You could wear your Apple Vision Pro on the date and use Tinder AI to get live prompts like a modern Cyrano de Bergerac.
It used to be bots. Now it’s one-time profiles of chicks adding their Instagram and OnlyFans.
As always, there is a relevant XKCD.
Bots now have a higher success rate with captchas than people.
There honestly is an XKCD for everything
“If only there was a way to make online dating MORE of a dystopian hellscape”
“You’re not gonna believe this…”
Hunger Games! … it starts with 20 random players and the last two remaining individuals of any sex or orientation are paired off as a happy couple
Hang the DJ?
While you can’t date a chatbot, I’m certain it will fill a certain sexting niche where no real meeting is expected.
For me it would depend, of course, on how good that chatbot is at discussing SW EU, Middle-Earth, Honorverse, Babylon V, SG-1, a smaller fantasy series not sure if translated from Russian, and a few historical periods I’m interested in, Dao De Jing, Jewish religious philosophy (I suck at it, but love voicing my opinions), some poetry united not by genre, but by some feeling hard to detect, POV-Ray, Unix, some other things in computing, and maybe a few other things.
Or I could man up and text that girl not yet ignoring me and complimenting too often, but that wouldn’t require Tinder, so I dunno.
Go Hadjar go
It’s that black mirror episode about the dating simulator.
I’ve been thinking for a bit now that the only way to make a dating app that actually worked for its users would be one that you pay a single fee for up-front. Then there’s no incentive to keep people on it forever: you already got their money. You’d actually want people to have good experiences on it so they get their friends to sign up.
The fee would probably have to be somewhat large, both because it would have to cover operating costs for the foreseeable future, and because it would discourage catfishers.
It might still work as like, a yearly subscription, which would mean more sustainable revenue. I wouldn’t do any less than that. And no a la carte options to nickel and dime people with.
You’d also want to come down hard on account sharing and reselling, for obvious reasons.
Problem is, if you go to any venture capitalist with this idea, they’ll probably fund it, but then immediately sell out to Match Group the split-second they make an offer, and then the enshittification would begin.
The only way to prevent that would be to entirely crowdfund it, or have some sort of collective ownership and governance so no single greedy bastard can sell out.
I think you’re describing professional match makers?
He is describing what professional match makers should be.
But they’re more like life coaches in real life. A total scam.
Pretty much, but in app form, yeah.
That would make business side incentives more aligned with the user side, but I could never see anything with a high barrier of entry accumulating enough users to actually be usable.
Maybe its free at first and as it grows in size and activity the cost goes up? That feels kinda sketchy
Yeah, I thought about maybe making it free for women, but besides being sexist and exclusionary, I think that would just open it up to the scams that plague all other dating apps.
At the end of the day, people don’t realize how much they spend on stupid shit throughout the year. A full year of Netflix or Spotify or a WoW subscription (assuming you’re not taking advantage of long-term commitment discounts) comes out to $150-200, and those add up if you’re going in on multiple services.
The price point I had in mind was like $99/year. Shit, they’re wanting to charge about that much for new AAA games now. I’d have to do more math to figure out if that’d actually be viable, but it’s the number that popped into my head. I think it’d be doable in the $100-200 range, and I actually have a bit of experience with how much it costs to run a platform like this.
Paying for a dating app definitely feels wrong, like you’re hiring an escort or something, but people spend money on their love life all the time: buying clothes, going out to bars and clubs, paying for cover charges and drinks, dumping money on OnlyFans creators in the hope that they’ll pay the slightest bit of attention to you, etc.
I think if the value proposition is clear and obvious, like a dating app where you know everyone there is serious about it because they paid to be there, it would have a decent chance of working out.
There is the question of how to get people on the platform in the first place, because you’re definitely right in that there is a chicken and egg problem. Why pay for a dating app that no one is using?
Firstly, there should be some sort of money-back guarantee if someone literally can’t get any matches, to avoid people thinking they got scammed. Maybe a no-questions-asked policy for the first couple weeks, like with Steam. A good user experience would be paramount for the success of the platform, so even if someone doesn’t have any luck they should ideally still feel like the platform gave them a fair shake.
Additionally, I think it should be open to sign up for free before full launch, to seed the user pool. I have some thoughts on how users can help keep scammers off the platform by verifying each other, and that would be the only thing they can do before launch. This could also be a way for users who can’t or don’t want to pay to earn access to the platform after launch. And to incentivize users to keep helping out, they could get a boost in search results if they helped verify a handful of users every day.
Also, if the project was crowdfunded, that should definitely come with either a year or lifetime membership, so that’s another a source of users who are invested in the success of the platform, and who are going to be excited to use it day-one.
This is a fairly big departure from what you proposed here but your comment made me think about it:
If you had one time / every 5 year payments, you could charge a fairly sizable amount and then use a portion of that money to hire people to vet, interview, and take professional photographs of every user for their profiles (which they could of course combine with their own pictures, though those would be unverified). I’m thinking like $500+, to be clear - but for that you get:
- great pictures taken of you
- more confidence that anyone you see or match with is actually the person they say they are
- ability to have your interview used for determining compatibility, such that anyone you’re introduced to on the app is much more likely to be into you and someone you’re into
I have no idea how to best present all that you said at the right time and places to capture enough grassroots attention to actually take off, but man. That really does all read like the perfect "disruption (pardon the tech bro term) to Match’s model.
There is a dating website for millionaires. I wonder how their revenue stream works but they advertise that they don’t accept men under a certain net worth. I guess a high barrier of entry could work for that market.
Sugar Baby dot com?
Found it: https://www.millionairematch.com/
You have to prove your net worth. Sugar daddy/baby are prohibited.
Meet 5,587,701+ High-Quality Singles and Build Serious Relationships
I highly doubt it has that many real users. My guess is that’s just the total amount of created accounts.
2,033,000+ Monthly Conversations
Yup, no way in hell 5m users would generate so few chats. It’s either less than 1 match per month for those 5 million, or more like 1 million active monthly users having 2 matches on average.
I also can’t register because I live in a poor country, lol
Removed by mod
Just wait til AI makes decisions about your worthiness as an individual. Need a loan? Consult the Demon Box. Need an organ transplant? Demon Box. Eligible for food stamps? The Demon Box has decreed that you must be eliminated
Is the Demon Box protocol-compatible with the orphan crushing machine?
No, that would not be dystopian enough.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Match Group, the international conglomerate that owns Tinder, Hinge, OkCupid, and almost every other popular dating app, just inked a major partnership with OpenAI.
The company shared only a few hazy details, saying AI will help employees with “work-related tasks.” The dating giant says it long term plan is to squeeze artificial intelligence into “literally everything” in its apps.
However, Match Group has been explicit that it thinks it will be good for its business and the world if just about every part of its users’ interactions is shaped and filtered through the algorithmic lens of artificial intelligence.
And so far, that shift includes a surprisingly tolerant policy towards people plugging AI into their dating profiles and letting it run amok on other users.
At the time, a company spokesperson told Gizmodo that “Tinder and Match Group believe AI is a great tool that we believe will make dating better.”
In fact, Match Group wants to explore building its own AI tools that could perform tasks like writing your conversation starters or suggesting date ideas.
The original article contains 540 words, the summary contains 175 words. Saved 68%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Local AI girlfriend available in your area.
Its just going to be bots making content and shit for other bots to consume.
We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.
I’m pretending to work right now. Well, not really pretending. I’m just not working when I’m supposed to be. Last 10 minutes of the day. Fuck it.
saying AI will help employees with “work-related tasks.”
So, the nonexistent support and moderation teams will be replaced with AI. End users will notice no difference there.
The company says it plans to use the AI for communications, coding, design, analysis, building templates, and eliminating other repetitive tasks.
Yup, end users will match with AI bots, because why not. “Oh, honey, if only you upgraded your plan to PLATINUM DIAMOND BLACK PLUS, I’d be willing to go out with you!”
Match Group has been explicit that it thinks it will be good for its business and the world if just about every part of its users’ interactions is shaped and filtered through the algorithmic lens of artificial intelligence.
Too bad “quantic wishing” (what those “quantic coaches” scammers peddle) doesn’t work, otherwise everything Match Group owns would catch fire real soon.
Yup, end users will match with AI bots, because why not.
Why not? Because that’s fucking stupid, that’s why not. Unless they want to torpedo their business, it’s probably customer support…since that’s what a lot of companies already use AI for.
The press release even has a “quote” from chat-GPT even though it is not an AI so is not capable of making the quote without prompting. This is so so stupid.
So they can replace the manually faked women by AI generated ones?
Free gpt searches when you match
Oh Tinder, how do you always get romance so right? /s
