This is a follow-up to this original thread [1]. I have been doing some thinking on how to build a better dating site and I have some unique ideas that I don't think anyone has tried yet.<p>My goals:<p>- I want to keep the spam out<p>- I want to keep non-serious users out<p>- I don't want users to have the dating app installed forever<p>- I want the privacy of the user to be respected<p>- I want to have the same ratio of men and women<p>My ideas:<p>- Invite-only system: sign-up is closed unless being invited by email and an existing user can send one invite a day<p>- Max use time: an email has 3 to 6 months after sign-up to find a match on the platform if they want an extension they can pay<p>- Fake detection: women review men's profiles and men review women's profiles to detect if they a fake or not. You have to review 2 to 3 profiles a day if you want to find new matches<p>- Spam detection: we use AI to detect if the same person is in all the photos and validate the phone number via text<p>- Balance ratio of men and women: new sign-ups of men or women will be blocked if the ratio of men or women is very unbalanced and because a user has a time limit to use the website then the system should self-balance the number of men and women<p>- Profit/financial: I think dating websites should not be "for profit". It should make enough money to have the website feature-rich and pay for engineers but not gamify it to the point of making millions of dollars<p>I am a full-time software engineer, and I have a PhD in computer science but to pull this off it needs a lot of work and I can't do everything. So who is in?<p>My info: LinkedIn [2] and Github [3]<p>[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33172394<p>[2]: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hesamian<p>[3]: https://github.com/amir734jj
A few thoughs:<p>- One invite per account per day seems like it'd greatly incentivize spammers, as they could invite one new spam account a day, exponential growth, where regular users probably would NOT invite one new account every day. You could poison the whole tree if too many accounts in an invite tree were spam, if you had certainty that the fake detection was working.<p>- Requiring reviews of profiles probably will lead to poor quality reviews. What's to stop me from clicking "looks legit to me" blindly?<p>- Detecting fakes with AI: We're rapidly getting to the point where there's little reason to be using the same person's photos across fake accounts.
Is the enforced ratio something that would work? It seems to me all the hotties and the overtly wealthy would get hooked up right away, and for 3-6 months you'd have increasingly homely and unlikeable users. Add in the ones that are "always shopping" and the site could go stagnant fast.<p>The invite system seems unlikely, until you notice that's exactly how Google Mail and nearly every social site got started. So that strategy might actually work just fine. Plenty of Fish is a site that has managed to make dating a very social thing, where invites given to friends and acquaintances wouldn't even feel unusual.