OkCupid was bought by Match Group (who run almost all online dating sites, including Match, eHarmony, and Tinder) in 2011 and took down this post not long after.<p>EDIT: the purchase was Feb 2011 [1] and the post was removed sometime between Jan 2011 [2] and Mar 2011 [3]. The rest of the blog was still up at the time [4].<p>[1] <a href="https://www.npr.org/2011/02/03/133456140/The-Last-Word-In-Business" rel="nofollow">https://www.npr.org/2011/02/03/133456140/The-Last-Word-In-Bu...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20110113034228/http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/why-you-should-never-pay-for-online-dating/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20110113034228/http://blog.okcup...</a> up<p>[3] <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20110301161329/http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/why-you-should-never-pay-for-online-dating/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20110301161329/http://blog.okcup...</a> down<p>[4] <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20110301161329/http://blog.okcupid.com/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20110301161329/http://blog.okcup...</a> different post up
Related personal anecdote:<p>I am experimenting with Tinder subscription at the moment, and it feels incredibly exploitative. When you make a profile, matches are frequent and you can tell that you show up for people. However it gradually falls down with time, and the only predictable and obvious way to get back up is to pay for Boosts and/or Priority Likes.<p>Right now my 6-month old profile gets ZERO likes outside of the time it's Boosted ($3 a pop or something). I get plenty once I'm boosted, so the profile attractiveness doesn't seem to be a factor.<p>It feels like the app's algorithms are rigged to gradually push you towards paid subscription options. There must be a huge invisible market of Tinder whales given how exploitative it is, gambling addiction, loneliness, and desperation for dates are correlated traits and I would absolutely bet on Tinder exploiting this heavily.
The problem really happens when you do algorithmic price setting, which incentivizes you as the developer to get people addicted to the experience of swiping, regardless of whether or not the swiping has the desired outcome for the end user. A user base with just the right levels of dopamine from interactions and loneliness will probably end up buying one of the weekly promotional deals.<p>That's why when you first start on any dating service, you're (typically) inundated with activity, so that you can always chase that high, and when you can't get it, you try to pay for it.<p>Online dating is a tough problem to solve, tougher still when profit incentives misalign with user success incentives! I'm not even sure what an equitable <i>but also successful</i> dating service would look like, because there's this fundamental mismatch in values.
I don't get it. Why does no government anywhere run a non-profit dating site from tax-payer money when this is becoming the most popular way people are meeting?<p>All the options people have are using toxic apps which entire business model is to undermine the self-esteem of young men and scamming them out of their money. And then people wonder where the mental health problems and mass shootings come from.<p>I really don't understand how this stuff is still not regulated anywhere, it's a dangerous scam.
You, as a user of a dating app, are forever in a Nash Equilibrium with the dating app. When you find the love of your life, you delete the app forever. Therefore, everything the app does to help you find that person works directly against their own goals (user growth, “engagement”. subscriptions).
OkCupid used to have great engineering blogs often with an embedded and nuanced social commentary regarding the haves vs have-nots when it comes to the dating world. I believe at one point they divided users, or rather let them self-classify as A-team and B-team. Some would never even pass each other in the hallway based on this score and designation.
Counter-point: always pay for online dating (as a guy). (Everything that follows is anecdotal.) I used Tinder off and on for years. When I was active I’d swipe for 10-30 mns a day and I think I estimated I could get through 100 right-swipes (“Yes, I want to match”) per day. Even with that I would only end up with 1 or 2 matches a week. Which predictably when you include the chances of them being a bot, of them not responding, or not being serious about going out on dates meant I was basically going on at most 1 date a month with Tinder.<p>At this point, I had refused to pay for a subscription because it felt cringe/sad as a reasonably attractive guy who doesn’t have <i>terrible</i> luck dating in real life. At some point I got over my dumb ego and paid for the highest tier subscription—cause, hey, why not? I kid you not the number of matches I got went up 10x. I would swipe on someone and match within 30 mns vs 1 week 1 month later. I had multiple dates a week, more dates than I’d ever had in my life. And eventually met my current girlfriend.<p>My point: the game is <i>clearly</i> rigged. Nothing about me changed. My behavior using the app, my physical appearance, my bio were all the same. As soon as I gave them my money Tinder flipped a switch and my profile which was likely barely being placed in front of women was now pushed front and center.
Related:<p><i>Never Pay for Online Dating (2010)</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26945413" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26945413</a> - April 2021 (116 comments)
Related:<p><i>Never Pay for Online Dating (2010)</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25055501" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25055501</a> - Nov 2020 (265 comments)<p><i>Why You Should Never Pay for Online Dating [cached]</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15260785" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15260785</a> - Sept 2017 (1 comment)<p><i>Cached OkCupid Article: Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2170998" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2170998</a> - Feb 2011 (80 comments)<p><i>Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1842557" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1842557</a> - Oct 2010 (32 comments)<p><i>Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1277626" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1277626</a> - April 2010 (9 comments)
They also had an amazing blog post about how dating profiles came down to ~85% how attractive you are (both men and women).<p>Most people look at 3-4 images and pass, this probably was the inspiration for Tinder.<p>One example of this was personality score, which they ended up removing. "In short, according to our users, “looks” and “personality” were the same thing". In this example it was just a profile picture with no text...<p>Whole bunch of interesting knowledge from this:<p><a href="https://archive.ph/QNCbf#selection-513.0-513.79" rel="nofollow">https://archive.ph/QNCbf#selection-513.0-513.79</a>
I think, OKCupid did rather well. They question approach was a bit broad, but if you just answered around 100 very niche questions, you'd get good matches.<p>But to be honest, I did online dating for almost 20 years and got like 10 dates from it, 2 of which turned into a relationship.<p>Some of my friends did much better, though. You know, the tall, buff guys with beards, etc. Had at least one date a month. So, even with the "show personally via questions" kind of stuff, looks are still king in online dating.<p>I did much better with offline dating. Talking to a interesting person is more exciting than just reading about it, I guess.<p>So, if you wanna go the online route, hit the gym and eat well.<p>If you're prepared to meet people offline and date at parties, meetups, etc. Then you can get away with a less helathy lifestyle, haha.
Paying for online dating was the reason I met my wife.<p>I had been using several dating apps and had paid subscriptions to all of them. I was getting burned out by the experience and decided to let my subscriptions expire and take a break from dating, so I wasn’t actively checking the apps anymore.<p>A paid feature of one of the apps I was paying for (Coffee Meets Bagel, for the curious) was that it notified me whenever someone liked my profile. One day I got one of those notifications, checked her profile and arranged a first date.<p>And now here we are, happily married :)
OkCupid was awesome.<p>Can someone please make another one? We need a site dedicated to Test Taking! OkCupid wasn't just about dating; it was about the tests you could create and take. It was awesome.<p>The dating was also based on tests and archetypes OkCupid created and they were pretty good. We need something pure like that from the early 2000s.
Aside: I'm in my late twenties and have used various of the currently popular dating apps on/off over the last few years. Whenever I see one of the old OKC blogposts around the internet, it's kind of striking how different the pictures look from what you'd see on the apps today. It's possible/not unlikely I'm overinterpreting based on the different style/fashion alone here, but it just all seems a lot less posed & staged, and like there's much more variance than with the pictures you see today, and even the extremely attractive examples seem much more natural.
I once googled the screen name of a Plenty of Fish date I had setup. Exact match comes up on a 'weird' forum, with city and state matching in the info under the username.<p>One fake account later (required to view attachments), I saw pictures of her dog doing her in... Uh... various ways.<p>I stopped online dating for like 5 years after that.
If someone reproduced what OKCupid was before the Match acquisition, that would disrupt the dating app market. Dating apps as a whole have been a race to the bottom thanks to Match.
I paid for OkCupid to get advanced filters to find my wife, shortly after this article was written.<p>I paid for a single month of premium back in the day. So this article is odd.
Personal anecdote:<p>Bought a Bumble Premium with a one time payment of ~120 EUR. In three months got only one match which led to a date. But what a date! We are in love now and I am quitting all dating apps I have used before.<p>My match was ONLY possible due to a Premium subscription. These 120 EUR were the best spent money of my live.
My fair warning / PSA is[1] never pay for "roses" (super likes, other premium ways of indicating you like them "more"). They don't work. And the worst of it as an antipattern they essentially work against you (because the app lets the recipient know they received a rose).<p>Here's why -- On average, matches are essentially trying to maximize the ELO score they match with, someone with a maximized score across many variables like social aptitude, wealth, future prospects, looks, (and many other attributes). Now, obviously people have their own weighing function for each aspect but some of them are simply universally valued -- for example healthy is near-universally preferred to someone who is critically ill. So What do you indicate to a match that you most likely _needed_ to use a rose to attempt to match with them ? You reveal that the app generated Elo score is actually too low to be presented them in normal swipes. (Especially in hinge which has a weekly rotation of people you cannot swipe/match with except if you rose, perhaps in other apps but I'm less well versed in their mechanics).<p>[1]: at least as a man, idk if a woman would ever send a rose to a man, and if they'd work even if they did. Women will get a match >50% of the time w/o a rose, so why pay?
I think the unstated issue is that there are predominantly hook-up apps that people also use to find life partners because good alternatives don’t exist.<p>With the assimilation of the ecosystem into Match some sort of alignment was inevitable, and a hook-up service is a ‘good’ SaaS service by classic metrics, while a matchmaking service does not fit the model well (at least yet).
There’s a good TikTok addressing why it’s impossible to escape paying for online dating. Basically, it comes down to the reward cycle. When you first sign up, you get a bunch of matches and success. Then it tapers off, giving you the option to pay for the initial success, which it happily gives you. Repeat.<p>That’s the core reason these apps print money.
So the main complaint here seems to be that eHarmony and Match.com only let subscribers talk to other subscribers? Is that still true? If so, that does indeed sound like a pretty terrible way of doing things. If I'm a paying customer I should be able to initiate a conversation with anyone who's willing. I don't want my prospective date to have to pay money just to talk to me!<p>In terms of the larger point about the overall incentive structure of dating sites, it seems to me there are a few possible solutions:<p>1. Sites should only allow "lifetime" subscriptions, eliminating the perverse incentive to keep people from having successful relationships.<p>2. Some sort of system for paying per successful match. Something like "I'll pay you $1k if I meet my wife through your service." That seems way harder to enforce, but would align the incentive structures almost perfectly if it could be achieved.
If you take the view that users should be paid for viewing ads via microtransactions (like through a browser like Brave), then isn't it reasonable to expect the same rewards for users using dating apps? Wouldn't it make sense to pay the user instead of the service for their time and attention?<p>It seems to me that microtransactions and dating apps are a perfect match, and I wonder why no one has done this yet? Is it because it's too closely associated with ideas of prostitution? It's only a stone's throw from the concept of OnlyFans, but instead you pay for attention instead of exhibitionism. Why should Tinder/OkCupid get paid for "boosts" when you're really just buying the attention from your target demographic? Seems like crypto would fit nicely into this sector.
I honestly view online dating as a low-yield random effort. My last gf was on Match. I’ve been on dates from the other sites, though Hinge seems to trend too young.<p>The cost isn’t prohibitive to me so I just go with it.<p>The one thing that should be clear to everyone is that no matter what, the most important aspect of dating is to be as geographically close to your perceived dating pool as possible.<p>So figure out the two or three basic requirements you have (politics, culture) and try to live where those things are common. No amount of effort online or not is going to improve your chances of meeting viable partners if you live too far away. I think you really need to be within 15 minutes or less. As a man, I firmly believe this is a top filter for women when looking at profiles.
A funny anecdote: back in the day there was an app called Flamite that used the now defunct tinder api and you could use it to automate matchmaking. what i did is to yes <i>everyone</i> and then i waited a week. i had 200 matches. I then checked all profiles and removed 120 that i didn't like. i wrote to the remaining 80. i had good chats with 20 of them, met 3 of them and now I'm happily married to one.
To add my own personal experience (and to echo the headline),<p>I met my wife while using PlentyOfFish. We have been married for 12+ years.
I would never pay for a dating app/site.<p>If you can't find somebody on the free sites, join a forum where you might find somebody with similar interests/hobbies/skills. Be a kind, polite person and once you have developed a friendship, then see if it can expand into more.<p>Most of these other apps are more geared to hook-ups, (hump-and-dump); and not towards long-term relationships anyway.
This may have been true 12 years ago, but years later OkCupid added "last active", which was a search criteria to weed out old profiles. At least, was there in 2015 when I met my current partner.<p>The gist of the article seems to be combining two different things: why you should pay for online dating, and false advertising. I don't think the OP joins those arguments very well. Plus, again, this was 12 years ago. I think today OKC might be guilty of the same thing they are pointing fingers at back then.
Nice article but not sure I follow the argument here. The problem of messaging into the void can be solved by changing the settings to only show you paid members. If they don't give the option then don't use them. Paying members are more serious so it makes sense to not spend your time on non-paying members. BTW, at least on Tinder I know that everyone can message back regardless if they are paid members. Maybe in 2010 things were different and the article made more sense then.
One way to make it align is to run dating platform voluntarily instead of for profit. This way you really want your effort to be helpful to the community.
This reminded me about a fun talk done by Amy Webb - how she played with dating.<p>Just posted it for everyone to
- enjoy <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dt3LAaq8XKY" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dt3LAaq8XKY</a>
- discuss <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33164287" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33164287</a>
Met my wife on OKCupid, we have kids now and have been happily married. I thank God for OKC and it's impact on my life.<p>eHarmony told me I was unmatchable and match.c was worthless- I agree with this article reply rate was nil. OKC reply rate was awesome and people were much more chill to just IM for a bit and have real exchanges. I met my wife in under two months on the OKC platform.
Relatedly: Has there been any new dating apps that haven't been acquired by Match and are trending upwards? I feel like just as Hinge was getting popular and people were talking of its success - it fell off <i>hard</i> due to acquisition by Match in the following couple years.<p>It seems like you have to always go to a newer app to find success before Match ruins it.
Apps like Tinder and Happn kind of escaped this by being places more suited to hookups and One Night Stands than the place someone goes to find a long-term partner.<p>By focusing on quick relationships too, both Tinder and Happn can be more liberal about message limits for free tier users, at the same time making sure that man derive value from a paid subscription.
>As a founder of OkCupid I'm of course motivated to point out our competitors' flaws. So take what I have to say today with a grain of salt.<p>I really appreciate this kind of self-awareness, and find it incredibly lacking from a lot of things that founders, CEOs, et. al. post, whether it's on a blog, an HN comment or on Twitter.
app idea: if anyone watches Indian Matchmaking, the matchmaker gets "paid' during the wedding (or through other gifts and influence). so there is a huge incentive to marry (if that was the only end goal to dating). also you don't really get many choices (maybe only 3 over a few months) so there is a lot of hopefulness, openess, compromises (and expectations, that makes for the drama in the show. )<p>if traditional matchmaking has worked, why not just apply new tools to what humanity has been doing?
Who wants to build a better dating website? Free and open source without any bots run by donations. Dating website is a human right. People are lonely and this dating websites are taking advantage of the situation.
The fact that incentives of online dating platforms and their users are not aligned is anything but new. But it makes me wonder: Maybe a not-for-profit organization would be a better model to run an online dating platform?
Don't pay, network! Livejournal was free for me (early 2000s, what do I know about it today), and via friends of friends feature I met my wife. Of course those relations came from people I met on IRC...
Actually with Seeking paying works out to filter low income men. You can pay $100-300 a month and the quality and responsiveness of women there is superior to any other platform right now.
Here's an interesting probable side effect of the spread of dating apps:<p>> "According to Rhode Island's Department of Health, the numbers for STDs rose drastically between 2013 and 2014. Syphilis cases increased by 79 percent, newly identified HIV infections increased by 33 percent, gonorrhea cases increased by 30 percent — and it's mostly young adults (along with African-Americans and Hispanics) who are becoming infected at these higher rates."<p><a href="https://www.techtimes.com/articles/55888/20150527/tinder-dating-apps-increasing-spread-stds.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.techtimes.com/articles/55888/20150527/tinder-dat...</a><p>Now if we look at the majority shareholder ownership of say, Gilead Sciences (a major provider of STD pharmaceuticals) and Match Group (owner of Tinder) on Yahoo Finance, the overlap is fairly large. (This of course is true for most corporations in the USA, so it's perhaps not as much of a plot as it might seem).<p>But still... it makes one wonder about investment capitalism. It's always finding a way to create value and improve people's lives. A nice square deal. Make money promoting risky sexual behavior when they come in the front door, make more money treating the resulting STDs when they leave via the back door. Rather similar to pushing the soft drinks and junk food on the kids, and then reaping profits from the high hospital bills a few decades later. Gifts that keep on giving, right?
The biggest problem with current dating apps is that they limit swipes behind a paywall.<p>Sure, you can pay to get the opportunity to swipe on more profiles, but you <i>can't</i> pay to give everyone else the opportunity to swipe on yours. That means paying for more swipes doesn't really get you more matches.<p>Dating is a numbers game, and Tinder/etc. are rigged not to play.