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…
Just removing the "another five'll be along tomorrow" effect of the way most dating apps work might help.
25 years married, so pardon my knowledge of modern dating being what I've heard on social media (which is always from people complaining about it, of either gender) as I'm not on any!
As I understand it, for a lot of young men, one of their preferences for settling down is that their partner's list of ex-partners is not longer than their own. (If so, there's is no point debating the gender-political rights or wrongs of their preferences because you're not going to be able to argue someone into falling in love or wanting to marry someone.) On swipe-dating apps, that creates an incentive for neither party to settle down. One party is so successful that the app keeps signalling they should keep their options open (here's more matches, why settle for this one). The other finds that matches pass their visible preferences for dating but not their invisible preferences for settling down with (because not being too successful at the dating game was one of their hidden preferences). The vitality of the market for dating kills the market for marriage.
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.
This used to be the workplace: observing a big group of people over long periods of time when they don't pretend to charm you. Are they kind? How do they treat others? Are they secure? Are they ambitious? Are they hardworking? What do they talk about on the lunch break?
Meeting people from dating apps is quite literally the opposite of that: one person at a time, extremely short period of time, they can pretend, no or little interactions with third parties (how they treat a waiter maybe).
I honestly believe that making workplace dating something frowned upon (or even a terminable offence sometimes) was a huge disservice to society. People spends most of their adult life going to work but are supposed to squeeze the search for a partner into the little time and energy that remains outside of work.
I think safety has also taken a back step in modern dating. Previously you could ask around what a person was like and like you said, observe them passively. Now you are meeting a total stranger, you don't know anyone they know or anything about them.
An awful person gets to just reset their reputation every time, and in turn, people assume the worst by default.
Clubs are still imo one of the best ways to meet people for all the reasons you give. You have at least one thing in common which is a conversation starter and there's opportunity to meet more people.
Also the average person could stand to socialise with strangers more in person.
You get closer, if necessary to the point your lips almost touch their face. What millions of people have done during decades. And that’s the point, yes.
Just in case you were serious I think they meant clubs like a sewing circle, crown green bowling, tennis, the local brass band, civic action groups, etc. In other words associations of one kind or another, in tech. terms special interest groups.
Exactly. Using a dating app is just asking for being lied to.
Also, the whole concept of finding your significant other by ONLY going out on dates is... kinda broken in concept? It's not really that hard to pretend to be someone else for a few hours a week.
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 before we either met up or one of us unmatched
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 you want to get to know because you plan on soending a lot of time together is a much better frame than 'How do I convince this stranger that I'm so super cool or hot'
If you can get to that point, it doesn't matter what space you end up in. Like Frank Herbert once said, a place is only a place
> physical spaces where people can meet in person for a low or zero cost
Singles mixers and speed dating exist specifically for this, but those come with their own problems - one needs to be confident to approach others, social enough to navigate a group environment, comfortable with receiving and providing rejection, which is much less subtle than in apps where a chat just dies, and so on.
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.
Why wouldn't they get feedback? They generally live next to each other as the marriage progresses. If anything too much blame: the relative of the matchmaker in the marriage blames the matchmaker for all the flaws and difficulties that everyone finds in their spouse as time goes on.
Isn’t it the other way around, ie that you might be compatible with just anyone is more likely to be the idea of a naive 22-year old?
As you grow older you’re going to have your own values, boundaries, non-negotiables. Thinking that you can just jump into dating and “open-mind” the singles scene is a huge sign of someone who hasn’t fully developed their sense of self just yet.
Wrong, a relationship that will last over time has to presume those values and boundaries will change. What is non-negotiable for a 20 year old is almost always not the same for the same person at 30 and then 40 and on and on.
Sure there may be some things that don't change (religious preference, etc.) but they are fewer than most people think. And like OP said, compatibility is often not a checklist or algorithm to maximize
I think those things have a lot to do with long term compatibility, the issue is they aren't at all stable for a 22yo and liable to change in 2 years. Those things are pretty stable for a 30 or 35yo.
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.
For anyone who has spent a lot of time in Singapore (I lived there for 5 years, from 2012 - 2017) - the following snippet isn't doing justice:
> pervasive CCTV and face recognition.
I'm willing to wager there is no country on the planet that comes within an order of magnitude in terms of their awareness of precisely where any given resident is to within a few meters.
In fact - I think we would struggle to find a country within 2 orders of magnitude - the combination of incredibly high technology, super density, lack of much in the way of "countryside" (and the jungles/parks have lots of camera's near the entrances) and a general societal consensus that omnipresent surveillance is worthwhile exchange for the world's safest country all come together to create a system in which you don't need to worry about obscuring who you are dating with/sleeping with/associating with.
I would bet Taiwan could compete. In the news, I've frequently seen reports of some delinquent doing something bad and the police are able to use the security cameras to track the person down, even across several cities.
The OkCupid guys figured out that it was (potential) that best predicted stable relationships and everything else was just a proxy for that feature. Similar/compatible education level? Just a proxy for income. Similar/compatible hobbies? Guess what, also a proxy for income!
It can also be a strong compatiblity signal. For example a person who likes to travel and a person who likes to stay home are not going to be happy together.
What would really be good is if more couples went through premarital counseling to help them figure out if they have long-term compatibility or if they are just currently infatuated with each other. Infatuation can go on for years by the way, with the conflict only surfacing after there are kids and then divorce gets messy.
A personal anecdote: I got married in Church and you must take a short pre-marital class, which is of course religious-centered but the dude who ran it was lay. I don't think it's particularly useful in general and I'm not very religious but I think mine was.
Among various things they made us fill out a "values wheel", a kind of spider web diagram with various dimensions like family, status, career, friendship, education, money, kids, religion, etc..
And then the guy pointed out if the wheels didn't look mostly similar it would be better to have a discussion nowz before getting married, rather than after.
One couple found out they had vastly different values, ignored it, and broke up within one year of marriage. Clearly problems pre-existed and counseling might have helped avoiding the mess.
> This is a common problem with all dating apps. Specifically, interests, hobbies, daily routines, objectives, etc. have nothing to do with compatibility.
Of course they do. What you're probably getting it is they have nothing to do with attraction. That's a completely different thing. But you need all three of the following for a long term relationship:
1. You are attracted to them,
2. They are attracted to you,
3. You are broadly compatible with each other.
From a male perspective, there are tons of people who satisfy 1 only. Far fewer satisfy 1 and 2, and fewer still satisfy all 3.
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.
Western governments don't seem at all concerned about this, unfortunately. They no longer represent the people, they represent the economy. And the economy is far more interested in importing millions of unskilled adult migrants from developing countries who are immediately eligible for debt, rent, mortgages, and low-paying jobs to prop up the GDP, rather than a crying baby that will leech on public services for 18 years beforehand. Culture, stability, safety, happiness, long-term prosperity and survival be damned.
I think it is hard to find many places right now in today's environment where people feel their government look after their interests. But you can definitely do a lot worse than what citizens of Singapore actually get...
At the top of my head the only places I can think of where citizens get a comparably good deal are Switzerland, Dubai, Norway maybe Monaco (don't actually know on this one).
Most countries don't import (and naturalize) as many foreigners while expecting the locals to serve national service. There's also this quip from a minister some time ago: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-37627269
What aspect of that do you want them to be concerned about? The bigger concern was population growth, it is nearly impossible for living standards to keep rising if the population is growing exponentially - at some point the number of new mouths overwhelmed the ability to produce food and some sort of underclass has to form. We need at least stabilisation at some point and it seems the easiest way to achieve that is to wobble between growth and decay.
We have all the tools for population decline to work out fine. The economy is run mainly by capital and it seems like we're decoupling military power from number of soldiers.
> And the economy is far more interested in importing millions of unskilled adult migrants from developing countries who are immediately eligible for debt, rent, mortgages, and low-paying jobs to prop up the GDP, rather than a crying baby that will leech on public services for 18 years beforehand.
This is such a wrong idea about immigration and the economy and how it grows that it's almost more funny than sad.
No Western government is growing its economy through sectors primarily staffed with low wage workers. The US, for example has seen much of its growth in the tech sector. And as it's had huge numbers of immigrants to meet the demand caused by tech growth, real wages in that sector have risen for nearly a decade. And they outpace wage growth in many other sectors over that time.
But regardless of that, when an economic sector grows it's able to convert human productivity into returns beyond the pay of those humans. And often that growth allows the return rate over productivity to increase over time, making it more attractive for a business to hire more and raise wages. In such a market, when a population doesn't grow, there needs to be workers from either outside the country or imported in. You can't just have mandated degrowth of growing businesses. That's worse than communism
>In such a market, when a population doesn't grow, there needs to be workers from either outside the country or imported in. You can't just have mandated degrowth of growing businesses.
It's not mandated degrowth, it's natural. The people do not exist, no government is mandating that. You do not just get to import millions of foreigners to grow your slop app.
I would far sooner have natural highs and lows in economic metrics as our population naturally adjusts to its environment than to have a corporatist multiethnic hellscape that holds "line must go up" as its founding truth. My children deserve a homeland, not an arbitrary economic zone surrounded by strangers in which to pay taxes.
If they're concerned about fertility rate and labor force only, then they haven't put even a modicum of thought into this, as nuclear families have significantly better outcomes than single parents. It affects everything from employment outcomes to criminal rates and more.
So, I think I'd need to see some evidence they're that stupid, or this is kind of an insane claim. Like, what are you basing the idea on that they just don't give a shit if the children they bring into the world are even useful citizens?
> 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.
Marriage records are often public. But usually two people don’t stop using a dating app and get married the next day. They will date for months or years after. And that info is not so easy to get.
As far as data brokers I would imagine it’s possible to get info on an individual if you want to. You can even determine someone’s location based on data brokers info. But dating apps will want info on millions of people, which will be messy and hard to do.
It really can't be that hard to derive that data. If there's a match, keywords matching location names, addresses, etc as the last message followed by a large usage drop, you can probably identify 80%+ of longterm monogamous relationships forming
I pretty much deleted all apps as soon as I met someone I thought had real longterm potential - getting to know new people is fun and all (and so is the sex) but if you're on there long enough, you're just going to want to get on with it
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.
I think that source is fine. Not necessarily because running a small dating app gives you the same experience as running a large one; but because it also means you thought long and hard about the space, too.
Definitely more than your average armchair backseat quarterback.
I'm happy to hear from someone who's built 2 dating apps on the topic of dating app algorithms, they probably know more than I do. I appreciate the contribution, and don't think the gatekeeping is necessary.
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.
> 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.
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.
> but in order to avoid serving you the best matches for a long-term relationship, they'd have to know what those are
No? With modern dating apps they can just serve you people who have already swiped left on you. Even if they made it a random presentation of candidates, they will never be incentivized to matchmake for free. If you're not paying then you'll get shown people in the area and that's it. That's all they need for their ad-revenue.
I think we're talking about different populations. You are talking about someone who gets zero matches at all but we are talking about people that get matches, but those matches never turn into relationships. To be fair, both populations of people have the same complaint that "dating apps don't work", but for extremely different reasons.
I don't think that dating apps are showing users profiles that have already swiped left, and if they do, it's not an attempt to get users to convert to a paid subscription. Consumer psychology doesn't work that way. People are far more willing to pay to upgrade a good experience than they are to pay to try to improve a bad one. Further, an unappealing profile that gets zero likes will continue to get zero likes after they upgrade to a paid subscription. This means that user will churn almost immediately after 1-2 months of paying for something that doesn't work. They typically don't stick around paying for years while getting zero matches all the while.
Dating apps DO derank unappealing profiles, but rather than doing it to try to get them to convert, it's instead done to try to prevent high bounce rates. Imagine a user downloads a dating app and is shown profiles in completely randomized order. This user is far more likely to get frustrated and uninstall after a few minutes than if they were to download the app and be shown profiles that are appealing. This rigged ranking may sound like its reducing relationship formation, but they never would have swiped on the unappealing profiles anyway; the counterfactual is they simply uninstall the app in frustration.
I agree with this. In my latest stint on dating apps as a woman looking for a man, I matched with dozens of profiles from guys average in terms of height and salary (when disclosed), and also in a niche of "attractive to me personally but not in the top 10% of conventionally-attractive dudes". So I know dozens of guys got at least one match, and most of the time they liked me first, I hadn't swiped in either direction when they were shown my profile.
Upwards of 90% of matches did not convert to dates, because many did not respond to messages at all, did not or could not carry on a brief "normal human" conversation, or if they did the first two things, never proposed meeting irl. I think you are correct in your assessment that the median user on a dating app is very non-committal.
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 sentiment of the linked post is different than the one you describe. The post is explaining why it's ok to have a non-zero value for a metric seen as objectively bad (like fraud) if there's high confidence that the non-zero value can be traded for a disproportionately larger metric somewhere beneficial (user acquisition).
In this case the undesirable metric is divorce. If the parent comment's feature for measuring marriage lengths and estimating likelihood of divorce were implemented, what disproportionate benefit would allowing more matches with a nonzero likelihood of divorce bring? The app wouldn't be enforcing whether divorces happen, it would just use the estimation of it happening as a matchmaking metric.
> what disproportionate benefit would allowing more matches with a nonzero likelihood of divorce bring
I think one benefit would be the individual participants' self-determination (there may be others). It's ok if you don't find my previous example (abusive relationship) convincing, but in the absence of an objection I'll reuse that. If we could look through all the marriages with a 0% chance of divorce, my bet is that we'd find an abnormally high percentage of abusive relationships. I claim that if a match has _no_ chance of divorce, it probably indicates a lack of self-determination for one of the partners.
Taking a step back, it might be clearer to just argue that length / non-divorce is not what people really want from a marriage. I can't speak for everyone, but I want a happy and fulfilling life, and I seek a partnership to the extent that it supports my desire for a happy and fulfilling life. Yes, I do want the partnership to be long, and I don't want to get divorced. Of course I want my marriage to last forever. But this is not my primary goal in marriage. There are many boring or uninteresting people (apologies to them) who I'm sure I could live with forever, that I'd immediately discard as candidates. Alternatively (making the abuse angle more tangible), I also have a lot of international friends and family that would happily find me an international bride who would never divorce me, and would be happy to marry somebody with a US passport. In fact this is a somewhat common offer, though of course they never say it in those words. You can decide for yourself whether that is abuse, but at least I wouldn't feel comfortable with it.
> I also have a lot of international friends and family that would happily find me an international bride who would never divorce me, and would be happy to marry somebody with a US passport. In fact this is a somewhat common offer, though of course they never say it in those words. You can decide for yourself whether that is abuse, but at least I wouldn't feel comfortable with it.
I'm pretty sure in this specific case, they get an instant green card if abuse happens. So the incentives point in the opposite direction (pro-divorce)
That’s fair, but on the other hand they’re in a new country where they may not speak the language, and know almost nobody. To say nothing of religious/cultural views of divorce
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.
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.
It's funny how the govt in Singapore tries to control and subtly orchestrate everything. from (i) mandating the racial quotas across Chinese, Malay, Indian, in each block of public housing; to (ii) only providing huge housing subsidies to couples while discriminating the singles, to (iii) giving out S$70k in baby bonuses (from birth to 17), and (iv) banning vaping while convincing citizens its not an infringement of civil liberties. I mean many policies are smart and I agree with many of them, but there is a line between human freedoms and govt overreach.
> there is a line between human freedoms and govt overreach.
and they have not reached anywhere near that line.
Compare this to the land of the free, where ICE police can routinely jack an actual citizen they suspect of being an illegal alien, and face zero consequences. Where the president can declare an illegal tariff with zero consequences.
I really liked this analysis - it echoes a lot of the comments here - to wit, as an engineer it's tempting to think that this is an engineering problem, but the program might get better results from funding third spaces and events and letting people match by what they want to do, not by what they think they may like in a person. https://www.singapore-samizdat.com/p/how-singapores-governme...
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.
A cute example of the idea that the state provides basic services, and individuals/companies are free to make money out of doing it better. Water, Comms, transport & housing anyone?
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.
My pet theory is that "in the past" the motive for having kids was having someone look after you in your old age and not simply starve to death. In the modern world we think we have money to take care of that problem. But money is useless without kids to give it to, so nothing has changed.
My solution is to make the age of retirement to be 90 years old, minus 10 years per kid.
The USA has a flavor of this: tax discounts for married couples and kids.
But your proposal really f's over people with real trauma and medical conditions that prevent them from having kids. I've met several people that don't want kids due to the trauma they endured as children or men and women that are just infertile.
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.
What population crisis are you referring to? Usually, the problem is seen as the population getting too high and humanity taking more resources than is good for the planet. The global population is still increasing.
> Good wages, enough free time, affordable housing, free child care, universal healthcare.
Nordic countries did this. Birthrates have been declining regardless. Even Gulf Arab countries which are an even more enviable welfare state, and have considerable religious-cultural emphasis on childraising, too, have seen declining birthrates.
Gulf Arab countries are not expensive for locals. They are provided with housing, a sinecure job. They drive multiple new-model cars. Nearly every family can afford a Filipino nanny, a cook and South Asian coolies for other labor. And food costs are some of the lowest in the developed world, much less than Europe.
You might want to get out more. Climate-change concerns are amplified online like many other kinds of activism, but if you travel countries with declining birthrates, you'll rarely hear people IRL speaking of them.
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.
Because children were an economic good - a source of labor and something that could be exchanged.
Also most children died before adulthood.
If you are affluent with each additional kid the risks more rapidly outweigh the rewards. Since all of us are generally more affluent now it is quite sensible to avoid having many kids.
The history around childbirth is really very brutal and grim. We should be having less kids. It's a positive sign for our species, like having less blood spilled over religious conflicts.
People who have kids because they don't know what else to do with their lives are probably raising children that are going to turn into unpleasant adults. I'm not sure why I would want to incentivize more kids where I would not relish the parents undergoing mitosis either. If someone wants to reproduce have at it, but why should I be excited by this? If "hell is other people" then what are other people's kids?
If we want to recreate those conditions, we need to: Cut the power and Internet for an unknown period, stop the sales of condoms, and give away alcohol.
It's difficult to get animals in captivity to mate, as environmental stressors affect them physiologically or they instictively know that conditions aren't right for raising offspring.
Applies to people as well in many developed societies.
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.
Maybe they estimated the consequences of many 35+ getting married as negative, who knows. Maybe they just wanted better outcomes of the pilot to push on.
"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.
Corporations could just do the same thing. Henry Ford historically had doubled people's salary to get them to have families. This was contingent on a bunch of paternalistic rules and inspections (like participants weren't allowed to drink for example).
From an organizational perspective, really cunning managers understand this: if your reports have kids, they probably aren't going to job hop for more money or better work. It gives significant leverage over employees.
So I don't see why the public sector would need to do this, either the public or private sector could do it. If you lump the US government in with the corporations as two agents which punch down, life in the US could actually be seen as more oppressive than other places. It really depends. The US could accomplish a relatively totalitarian end result with the same form of government just by creating a couple strong economic incentives for corporations. Generally the US govt in its current form prefers delegation to the private sector
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).
it's perhaps debatable, but the European (and French) legal frameworks do not recognize hate speech as protected free speech, so I suppose the concern (e.g. in the Bardot case) is if it was hate speech or not. Americans also do not support hate speech, though perhaps the way these are handled legally are different. I don't think this kind of exception is fairly applied to discredit what I wrote.
I said France does not have free speech, and gave an example of someone who was fined for holding up a small sign with the words "Casse-toi, pov'con" ("Get lost, you sad jerk").
If someone in France is not free to hold a sign that says "Get lost, you sad jerk" then France does not have free speech. That sign contains only words. It does not create any threat. It does not incite anyone to take illegal and/or violent actions.
Regarding the Bardot case you say "I don't think this kind of exception is fairly applied to discredit what I wrote" but:
- that's not the only case I cited, and
- even in the Bardot case, what's the rationale for suppressing speech expressing an opinion? it seems she was prosecuted because her expression of an opinion might cause others to adopt that same opinion. She wasn't inciting violence or illegal acts.
> 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.
Why not? If every society that embraces a right fails in a similar way, that right should be open to being debated. In a world with social media, I’m not convinced American First-Amendment style (in its ideal form) free speech is as unquestionably good as I once thought it was.
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.
> net effect is ultimately positive. Societies are healthier in many ways when people are free to speak their mind
This is currently not empirically sustained. I hope it will be, in the long run. But if Americans and Europeans keep voting for far-right and -left wing idiots, and China and its similars take the mantle of technological and scientific development, there is a real argument that Enlightenment values don’t apply perfectly in a world with social media and AI.
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."
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.
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.
I think this is just too finance brained and that the problem is not that everyone got too good for each other, but that everyone replaced in-person socialization with scrolling social media at home. So people simply do not bump in to each other to actually form relationships.
The nose dive in relationships kicked off when smartphones came in to society. I'm not sure the concept of dating apps is fixable. We need to get people out of the house again.
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.
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.
> they would rather be single than pair with any of the options that are realistically available to them
I don't know if the matching problem has been fully explored enough to ascertain this is the case.
In the western world, people will go out with someone they find undesirable with the intention of reaping the benefits of short term relationships. I think this sometimes sets unrealistic expectations on those undesirable people and further muddies the water. I wonder if there's a way to impose a cost on those who are not in it for the long term.
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...
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...
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.
I don't really like the idea of the state having access to the data of a dating app but there is a part of me that things it should exist in an accelerationist/realist sense. I don't think online dating is going away, and the incentives of the dominant players are clearly not great for users or society. Government has a very strong incentive for people getting hitched.
The problem with this will be something like my preference would be a person who makes home a peaceful place. This isn’t something that can be put on preferences. As if a potential partner is going to tick yes to “incessant nagging” so I can avoid them.
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.
I think the main cause of this asymmetry in modern dating is the disappearance of social shaming for casual sex.
When casual sex is a possibility, many high value men will see it as a desirable option to commited relationships. And since for most men, their standards are very low for casual partners, they're willing to date far below their "level".
That puts women in difficult position because the most desirable partners are far more likely to be looking for only casual sex. But even if women adopt strict strategies to filter out the desirable men who won't commit, the men will naturally adopt deceptive strategies to evade detection as a "fuck boy".
When potential partners largely came from your real social network, the social cost was high for men for "using women for sex" and for women "being easy", so that prevented this problem to some degree.
Now that partners largely come from outside our social networks, there doesn't seem to be any good way to reproduce the social shaming for deceptive non-commitment.
I don't understand how a government app fixes the problem.
I've talked with women about this offline and they usually fire back with: "You expect women to lower their standards?"
Women would rather delay pregnancy until they find a suitable partner, than risk being with the wrong guy.
The only thing I _maybe_ can think of is governments could only show profiles in your 'tier' (looks, social economic class, etc), whereas private dating apps found that showing everyone pretty people keeps people coming back.
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.
The implication that Western nations are different is fairly funny. I'd argue most of the governments in Asia are doing a lot more for the people than many Western governments.
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'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.
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
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.
1/ lower housing costs. Singapore has the same chinese mindset when it comes to marriage: boyfriend needs a house (and car?) before he is suitable.
19 year old Singaporeans within a year of dating must sit down with their partner's families to put a $200k sgd deposit on a house to join the 7 year waiting list so they can get married by the time they are 27.
2/ Singapore does a decent job at this, but further normalize domestic workers. Domestic workers drastically soften the blow women experience in their careers, especially with kids.
If they can push costs down further (like housing a worker is expensive), this would enable more Singaporean women to have more free time to date, get married, etc.
3/ Male Singaporeans have a mandatory 2 year service, which detracts from their time to date. Potentially offer more benefits to marriage or more time off to date.
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
Most of the drop occurred in the late 50s to mid 60s. Fertility in the US peaked at over 3.5 births per woman in the 50s before falling below 2 by the late 60s. It then stabilized for 40 years and even recovered to the low to mid 2s in the 90s and 2000s before falling post-2008 from 2.2 to 1.7.
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…
25 years married, so pardon my knowledge of modern dating being what I've heard on social media (which is always from people complaining about it, of either gender) as I'm not on any!
As I understand it, for a lot of young men, one of their preferences for settling down is that their partner's list of ex-partners is not longer than their own. (If so, there's is no point debating the gender-political rights or wrongs of their preferences because you're not going to be able to argue someone into falling in love or wanting to marry someone.) On swipe-dating apps, that creates an incentive for neither party to settle down. One party is so successful that the app keeps signalling they should keep their options open (here's more matches, why settle for this one). The other finds that matches pass their visible preferences for dating but not their invisible preferences for settling down with (because not being too successful at the dating game was one of their hidden preferences). The vitality of the market for dating kills the market for marriage.
Meeting people from dating apps is quite literally the opposite of that: one person at a time, extremely short period of time, they can pretend, no or little interactions with third parties (how they treat a waiter maybe).
I honestly believe that making workplace dating something frowned upon (or even a terminable offence sometimes) was a huge disservice to society. People spends most of their adult life going to work but are supposed to squeeze the search for a partner into the little time and energy that remains outside of work.
An awful person gets to just reset their reputation every time, and in turn, people assume the worst by default.
I'm sure a lot of couples met through friends of friends but the date with someone you barely know has always been a thing, I believe.
Just in case you were serious I think they meant clubs like a sewing circle, crown green bowling, tennis, the local brass band, civic action groups, etc. In other words associations of one kind or another, in tech. terms special interest groups.
because the owner of the business do not want relationship frictions to affect people's work.
Also, the whole concept of finding your significant other by ONLY going out on dates is... kinda broken in concept? It's not really that hard to pretend to be someone else for a few hours a week.
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 you want to get to know because you plan on soending a lot of time together is a much better frame than 'How do I convince this stranger that I'm so super cool or hot'
If you can get to that point, it doesn't matter what space you end up in. Like Frank Herbert once said, a place is only a place
Singles mixers and speed dating exist specifically for this, but those come with their own problems - one needs to be confident to approach others, social enough to navigate a group environment, comfortable with receiving and providing rejection, which is much less subtle than in apps where a chat just dies, and so on.
Does Singapore lack these spaces? The last time I was there I saw lots of people hanging out in hawker centers, malls, and their pubic gardens.
Malls are very much illusion of socialization since businesses there have no incentive to keep you around - spend the money and go away.
As you grow older you’re going to have your own values, boundaries, non-negotiables. Thinking that you can just jump into dating and “open-mind” the singles scene is a huge sign of someone who hasn’t fully developed their sense of self just yet.
Sure there may be some things that don't change (religious preference, etc.) but they are fewer than most people think. And like OP said, compatibility is often not a checklist or algorithm to maximize
So not much of an extra loss in privacy.
> pervasive CCTV and face recognition.
I'm willing to wager there is no country on the planet that comes within an order of magnitude in terms of their awareness of precisely where any given resident is to within a few meters.
In fact - I think we would struggle to find a country within 2 orders of magnitude - the combination of incredibly high technology, super density, lack of much in the way of "countryside" (and the jungles/parks have lots of camera's near the entrances) and a general societal consensus that omnipresent surveillance is worthwhile exchange for the world's safest country all come together to create a system in which you don't need to worry about obscuring who you are dating with/sleeping with/associating with.
The Government already knows, always has known.
What signals do you suggest? Regardless of whether it's feasible to put them in the dating app.
What would really be good is if more couples went through premarital counseling to help them figure out if they have long-term compatibility or if they are just currently infatuated with each other. Infatuation can go on for years by the way, with the conflict only surfacing after there are kids and then divorce gets messy.
Among various things they made us fill out a "values wheel", a kind of spider web diagram with various dimensions like family, status, career, friendship, education, money, kids, religion, etc..
And then the guy pointed out if the wheels didn't look mostly similar it would be better to have a discussion nowz before getting married, rather than after.
One couple found out they had vastly different values, ignored it, and broke up within one year of marriage. Clearly problems pre-existed and counseling might have helped avoiding the mess.
Some people do, and have been wisely guided to know what to look for.
Of course they do. What you're probably getting it is they have nothing to do with attraction. That's a completely different thing. But you need all three of the following for a long term relationship:
1. You are attracted to them,
2. They are attracted to you,
3. You are broadly compatible with each other.
From a male perspective, there are tons of people who satisfy 1 only. Far fewer satisfy 1 and 2, and fewer still satisfy all 3.
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...
I think it is hard to find many places right now in today's environment where people feel their government look after their interests. But you can definitely do a lot worse than what citizens of Singapore actually get...
At the top of my head the only places I can think of where citizens get a comparably good deal are Switzerland, Dubai, Norway maybe Monaco (don't actually know on this one).
We have all the tools for population decline to work out fine. The economy is run mainly by capital and it seems like we're decoupling military power from number of soldiers.
This is such a wrong idea about immigration and the economy and how it grows that it's almost more funny than sad.
No Western government is growing its economy through sectors primarily staffed with low wage workers. The US, for example has seen much of its growth in the tech sector. And as it's had huge numbers of immigrants to meet the demand caused by tech growth, real wages in that sector have risen for nearly a decade. And they outpace wage growth in many other sectors over that time.
But regardless of that, when an economic sector grows it's able to convert human productivity into returns beyond the pay of those humans. And often that growth allows the return rate over productivity to increase over time, making it more attractive for a business to hire more and raise wages. In such a market, when a population doesn't grow, there needs to be workers from either outside the country or imported in. You can't just have mandated degrowth of growing businesses. That's worse than communism
It's not mandated degrowth, it's natural. The people do not exist, no government is mandating that. You do not just get to import millions of foreigners to grow your slop app.
I would far sooner have natural highs and lows in economic metrics as our population naturally adjusts to its environment than to have a corporatist multiethnic hellscape that holds "line must go up" as its founding truth. My children deserve a homeland, not an arbitrary economic zone surrounded by strangers in which to pay taxes.
So, I think I'd need to see some evidence they're that stupid, or this is kind of an insane claim. Like, what are you basing the idea on that they just don't give a shit if the children they bring into the world are even useful citizens?
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.
As far as data brokers I would imagine it’s possible to get info on an individual if you want to. You can even determine someone’s location based on data brokers info. But dating apps will want info on millions of people, which will be messy and hard to do.
I pretty much deleted all apps as soon as I met someone I thought had real longterm potential - getting to know new people is fun and all (and so is the sex) but if you're on there long enough, you're just going to want to get on with it
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.
Definitely more than your average armchair backseat quarterback.
Considering that population size, wouldn't millions of users have the same behaviors?
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.
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.
*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.
No? With modern dating apps they can just serve you people who have already swiped left on you. Even if they made it a random presentation of candidates, they will never be incentivized to matchmake for free. If you're not paying then you'll get shown people in the area and that's it. That's all they need for their ad-revenue.
I don't think that dating apps are showing users profiles that have already swiped left, and if they do, it's not an attempt to get users to convert to a paid subscription. Consumer psychology doesn't work that way. People are far more willing to pay to upgrade a good experience than they are to pay to try to improve a bad one. Further, an unappealing profile that gets zero likes will continue to get zero likes after they upgrade to a paid subscription. This means that user will churn almost immediately after 1-2 months of paying for something that doesn't work. They typically don't stick around paying for years while getting zero matches all the while.
Dating apps DO derank unappealing profiles, but rather than doing it to try to get them to convert, it's instead done to try to prevent high bounce rates. Imagine a user downloads a dating app and is shown profiles in completely randomized order. This user is far more likely to get frustrated and uninstall after a few minutes than if they were to download the app and be shown profiles that are appealing. This rigged ranking may sound like its reducing relationship formation, but they never would have swiped on the unappealing profiles anyway; the counterfactual is they simply uninstall the app in frustration.
Upwards of 90% of matches did not convert to dates, because many did not respond to messages at all, did not or could not carry on a brief "normal human" conversation, or if they did the first two things, never proposed meeting irl. I think you are correct in your assessment that the median user on a dating app is very non-committal.
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...
In this case the undesirable metric is divorce. If the parent comment's feature for measuring marriage lengths and estimating likelihood of divorce were implemented, what disproportionate benefit would allowing more matches with a nonzero likelihood of divorce bring? The app wouldn't be enforcing whether divorces happen, it would just use the estimation of it happening as a matchmaking metric.
I think one benefit would be the individual participants' self-determination (there may be others). It's ok if you don't find my previous example (abusive relationship) convincing, but in the absence of an objection I'll reuse that. If we could look through all the marriages with a 0% chance of divorce, my bet is that we'd find an abnormally high percentage of abusive relationships. I claim that if a match has _no_ chance of divorce, it probably indicates a lack of self-determination for one of the partners.
Taking a step back, it might be clearer to just argue that length / non-divorce is not what people really want from a marriage. I can't speak for everyone, but I want a happy and fulfilling life, and I seek a partnership to the extent that it supports my desire for a happy and fulfilling life. Yes, I do want the partnership to be long, and I don't want to get divorced. Of course I want my marriage to last forever. But this is not my primary goal in marriage. There are many boring or uninteresting people (apologies to them) who I'm sure I could live with forever, that I'd immediately discard as candidates. Alternatively (making the abuse angle more tangible), I also have a lot of international friends and family that would happily find me an international bride who would never divorce me, and would be happy to marry somebody with a US passport. In fact this is a somewhat common offer, though of course they never say it in those words. You can decide for yourself whether that is abuse, but at least I wouldn't feel comfortable with it.
I'm pretty sure in this specific case, they get an instant green card if abuse happens. So the incentives point in the opposite direction (pro-divorce)
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.
and they have not reached anywhere near that line.
Compare this to the land of the free, where ICE police can routinely jack an actual citizen they suspect of being an illegal alien, and face zero consequences. Where the president can declare an illegal tariff with zero consequences.
- 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 ?
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
But your proposal really f's over people with real trauma and medical conditions that prevent them from having kids. I've met several people that don't want kids due to the trauma they endured as children or men and women that are just infertile.
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.
Nordic countries did this. Birthrates have been declining regardless. Even Gulf Arab countries which are an even more enviable welfare state, and have considerable religious-cultural emphasis on childraising, too, have seen declining birthrates.
Do you aware how expensive Nordic countries are to live in and have social life even counting all the free stuff?
And gulf arab countries are basically even worse in this regard.
Also most children died before adulthood.
If you are affluent with each additional kid the risks more rapidly outweigh the rewards. Since all of us are generally more affluent now it is quite sensible to avoid having many kids.
The history around childbirth is really very brutal and grim. We should be having less kids. It's a positive sign for our species, like having less blood spilled over religious conflicts.
People who have kids because they don't know what else to do with their lives are probably raising children that are going to turn into unpleasant adults. I'm not sure why I would want to incentivize more kids where I would not relish the parents undergoing mitosis either. If someone wants to reproduce have at it, but why should I be excited by this? If "hell is other people" then what are other people's kids?
Now it‘s easy to have sex without the risk of getting pregnant unwanted.
So know you have to provide the right environment so people want to have children.
Back then the choice was much more limited.
Applies to people as well in many developed societies.
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).
https://aphrodite.global/
The project was partially started by some students/scholars from there.
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.
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.
From an organizational perspective, really cunning managers understand this: if your reports have kids, they probably aren't going to job hop for more money or better work. It gives significant leverage over employees.
So I don't see why the public sector would need to do this, either the public or private sector could do it. If you lump the US government in with the corporations as two agents which punch down, life in the US could actually be seen as more oppressive than other places. It really depends. The US could accomplish a relatively totalitarian end result with the same form of government just by creating a couple strong economic incentives for corporations. Generally the US govt in its current form prefers delegation to the private sector
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).
If someone in France is not free to hold a sign that says "Get lost, you sad jerk" then France does not have free speech. That sign contains only words. It does not create any threat. It does not incite anyone to take illegal and/or violent actions.
Regarding the Bardot case you say "I don't think this kind of exception is fairly applied to discredit what I wrote" but:
- that's not the only case I cited, and
- even in the Bardot case, what's the rationale for suppressing speech expressing an opinion? it seems she was prosecuted because her expression of an opinion might cause others to adopt that same opinion. She wasn't inciting violence or illegal acts.
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.
which societies, which failures, which "every" are you referring to, exactly?
This is currently not empirically sustained. I hope it will be, in the long run. But if Americans and Europeans keep voting for far-right and -left wing idiots, and China and its similars take the mantle of technological and scientific development, there is a real argument that Enlightenment values don’t apply perfectly in a world with social media and AI.
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...
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.
The nose dive in relationships kicked off when smartphones came in to society. I'm not sure the concept of dating apps is fixable. We need to get people out of the house again.
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.
I don't know if the matching problem has been fully explored enough to ascertain this is the case.
In the western world, people will go out with someone they find undesirable with the intention of reaping the benefits of short term relationships. I think this sometimes sets unrealistic expectations on those undesirable people and further muddies the water. I wonder if there's a way to impose a cost on those who are not in it for the long term.
> 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
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.
When casual sex is a possibility, many high value men will see it as a desirable option to commited relationships. And since for most men, their standards are very low for casual partners, they're willing to date far below their "level".
That puts women in difficult position because the most desirable partners are far more likely to be looking for only casual sex. But even if women adopt strict strategies to filter out the desirable men who won't commit, the men will naturally adopt deceptive strategies to evade detection as a "fuck boy".
When potential partners largely came from your real social network, the social cost was high for men for "using women for sex" and for women "being easy", so that prevented this problem to some degree.
Now that partners largely come from outside our social networks, there doesn't seem to be any good way to reproduce the social shaming for deceptive non-commitment.
I've talked with women about this offline and they usually fire back with: "You expect women to lower their standards?"
Women would rather delay pregnancy until they find a suitable partner, than risk being with the wrong guy.
The only thing I _maybe_ can think of is governments could only show profiles in your 'tier' (looks, social economic class, etc), whereas private dating apps found that showing everyone pretty people keeps people coming back.
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.
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.
- new python library: 3 comments
- relationships article: 244 comments
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.
19 year old Singaporeans within a year of dating must sit down with their partner's families to put a $200k sgd deposit on a house to join the 7 year waiting list so they can get married by the time they are 27.
2/ Singapore does a decent job at this, but further normalize domestic workers. Domestic workers drastically soften the blow women experience in their careers, especially with kids.
If they can push costs down further (like housing a worker is expensive), this would enable more Singaporean women to have more free time to date, get married, etc.
3/ Male Singaporeans have a mandatory 2 year service, which detracts from their time to date. Potentially offer more benefits to marriage or more time off to date.
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...
Maybe the europeans are an exception
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%
However, I'm surprised nobody has bought up porn yet (and other equally addicting digital habits).
Historically they were compelled