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.

There was a point in relatively recent history where, once people met in the workplace, the woman would be expected to leave. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_bar

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.

Workplace used to be where people mostly met their partners? It occasionally happened, but I do not think it was THE place for it. The place for it was that people socialized in person and your partner was part of extended friends group or otherwise originated as acquittance from some activity.

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.

It's just another example of social change which was made for good reasons but has resulted in negative outcomes. Companies wanted to reduce the risk of accusations of workplace misconduct in the wake of #metoo. This reduced misconduct, but at massive social cost.

Another example is that most economists admit that as women entered the workforce en masse, prices settled higher for the same goods and services. Now survival requires two incomes instead of one. It was a massive net loss to society, but we also agree that women should be free to work if they would like, without barriers. We see similar things with women becoming educated. The more educated women become, the fewer children they have. That's really bad for society, but we also want women to be free to become as educated as they like.

Sadly I see no easy solutions here because it requires weighing individual and societ-wide rights. Companies aren't going to risk higher rates of misconduct to benefit society broadly. These are collective action problems, and unless we find ways of individualising the problem, they're only going to get worse.

> This used to be the workplace ... making workplace dating something frowned upon

because the owner of the business do not want relationship frictions to affect people's work.

Singapore isnt exactly a cheap place to have a lot of hobbies or have anythihg at all outside of a job.

Malls are very much illusion of socialization since businesses there have no incentive to keep you around - spend the money and go away.

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.

There's an asterisk on this, which is that the traditional approach would often be hired by and answerable to the parents, who would not necessarily want a love match but one of appropriate social and economic status.

It still happens that way today in certain communities.

And problems we think we've automated but actually made worse with automation.

That is caused by the normalization of domestic violence in those cultures.

>the future of the West looks like a lot of angry, bitter, single, childless, lonely people

In the short term; longer term that culture will die out and the future will be evangelicals, ultra-orthodox Jews, the Amish and whatever other high-fertility subgroups migrate in in large enough number. Natural selection applies to culture just like it applies to genes, and cultures that don't produce enough children will be replaced by those that do.

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Single women are basically the happiest demographic category.

The way our society developed with the immense pressure on women to marry and general lack of autonomy led to the situation that given a choice they would often prefer to avoid this.

Huh? Why wouldn’t you want to maximize compatibility considering how expensive divorces can be, both financially and mentally?

Humans, no matter how unique and self-important they might be, can certainly be broken down into personality traits to come up with a model that projects the likelihood of a lasting marriage. It likely won’t be perfect or precise, but it can be done, so I’m not sure what your point even is. As people age, it’s just the fleeting expressions of themselves that whither away, but they have a core personality founded on their values and goals, which stand the test of time. That’s not the sort of thing that you can just mix with someone else who has a different set of values and goals.

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.

The Government already knows, always has known.

> If you have a phone (or other device that connects to mobile networks), your government knows your daily routine anyway.

Because of this reason, quite a lot of people

- don't actually own a mobile phone,

- formally own a mobile phone, but only carry it around if the likelihood is very high that they will need it

- if they need to be available via mobile phone for job reasons (and are thus survived), they prefer to use a feature phone or if it must be a smart phone, they don't install any additional apps or remove the additional surveillance functions from the operating system as far as easily possible

As somebody who met my spouse on there, I can confirm that their algorithm was amazing back in the day.

Though it definitely wasn’t income proxies as the only criteria, it probably was a decent part..

I also met a couple other people that I had good relationships with on that site. All in the 90%+ range of their compatibility scores. There weren’t many people in those tiers for me though. Any time a 90% match appeared was a big deal, there were only ever a few!

Anyone I met in the 80% range was usually also pretty great

Go much below their 80% match score and meeting in person didn’t usually go so well.

> Similar/compatible education level? Just a proxy for income.

This clearly does not hold in Germany. There, you often can earn much more money with a vocational training than with a humanities degree, in particular in the current messed up job market.

On the other hand, people with different education levels often have very different psychometric traits (similarity here is very important for the relationship to work).

> Similar/compatible hobbies? Guess what, also a proxy for income!

There do exist some hobbies that are somewhat correlated to social classes (think of who plays soccer/tennis/golf (replace "soccer" by a different sport if you live in the USA)), even though these associations are much less pronounced than in former days.

On the other hand, for example, a person who loves sports climbing or parachuting will likely have very different psychometric traits from people who are into stamp collecting.

Thus, in many cases, hobbies are thus rather a proxy for some psychometric traits.

Or income is a proxy for, say, intelligence.

Both can coexist. Smell/compatibility might not be noticeable until you’re already initiating the romantic relationship (kissing, intercourse, sweat smell).

Every country has comparable parties and usually a few more, such as a left-wing party, a libertarian party, and a "green" party.

>importing millions of unskilled adult migrants

There is no Western country importing unskilled immigrants.

The "yield" from crying babies is not 100%. Some will die before their productive years, some will succumb to disabilities, addictions, delinquency, or simply choose not to study and work.

Importing an immigrant cuts away all that "shrinkage", at zero cost to the receiving country (their country of birth bore that cost). It's such a good deal it's a no brainer, basically a tree that grows money. Not to mention it's immediate. Crying babies have a 18-22 year lag time.

Also, government incentives to have children usually stimulates immigrants and poor people anyway, if your argument is purely ethnoracial. You may as well take the 23-year-old Indian or Algerian dude. There is very little the government can do to make a white couple in Connecticut have babies.

Believe me, if you ask the locals there they would mostly say the same thing about their government too.

It's sad and hard to admit that we're shaped by our government and the result is 1984-ugly.

There are really fringe perspectives out there that imagine capitalism as a living entity of which we individual humans are simply parts of the whole. Governments that represent the economy over the people are exactly what you'd expect if that were true.

The same immigrants that started 50% of all American unicorns?

> 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

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.

This is an insane leap of logic

Apps like you describe exist. They usually show you tons of fake profiles and "15 hot women want to message you - subscribe to read messages!"

Why wouldn't they? In this day and age, if we're them, I'd be buying all the third party advertising data I could, and correlate users in order to find the answers to your questions, so I know who to serve which advertisments to. Girlfriend posting angry things about boyfriend to Instagram? Perfect time to drop an ad for her to come back to Tinder.

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

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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.

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.

> configurations), the applicant is going to have the least favorable one among the different pairings.

I don’t understand why this would always be true. In your example, Google may indeed like Alice, so they both get their top choice.

The big assumption here is that people are either proposers or receivers and never switch roles.

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.

Why will B propose to X first if their first choice is Y?

Korea is close to that with the looks/weight social obsession. Not free, but trivial to get with close to no checks -vs- required medical reasons in other countries. But on the other hand... it's fueling the looks/weight social obsession, which has its own downsides longterm.

GLP-1s, while being pretty miraculous as a whole, do come with risks like every other drug. There’s plenty of 1 in 10k or 100k side effects.

Kurtzerkag has a good video about it: https://youtu.be/TYhNHX372ek?si=5ESz3ykXykyUcmYg

GLP-1 has the tradeoff of hindering enjoyment of the food you do eat, which is understandably a dealbreaker for many.

Birthrates decline is unrelated process which is just stronger than those incentives.

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.

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?

In history having children wasn’t decision based like it is now.

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.

I don't think you're forced to file jointly?

You’re not forced to file jointly, but you don’t get the same benefits of 1 high earner and 1 home maker experiences.

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.

the sustainable population is 3 billion for earth. we are already way too much.

>How do you propose to solve the population crisis ?

by accepting that it is unsolvable. you will not fix it with incentives, disincentives, and government-funded nagging. fixing the population crisis requires undoing urbanization and education. good luck with that.

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.

For casual dating, I would say yes, and not just white liberal women.

As a man who happens to meet those criteria, and has participated in a few hundred hookups over the last 10 years, I'd say a significant portion of the women either directly or indirectly try to discern answers to those questions before meeting or agreeing to casual sex.

Wikipedia renamed the article on April 26, 2025. They are always vigilant for thoughtcrimes.

Not just one party, but one family.

Hardly benevolent. I'll take every social problem America has 10x to avoid being an extremely boring "utopia" like Singapore.

It's literally the antithesis of "cool", whatever your definition. The most square people on earth.

Whoever governs Singapore must have that iron in him.

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.

Singapore is the case when you can just rely on your government to do its job and they will do the job properly!!!!

Can't remember when it was last time you could rely on western government to do the right thing

Australia doesn't have those either, despite many people assuming we do (including most people who live here).

> 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.

UK? France? Germany?

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.

"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."

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...

this is pretty much exactly what I would have said too. they could fix these things but it would cost a lot of money and/or impact the economy and defense and they just dont want to boost the birth rate that badly.

only thing I would add is the size of HDBs - they've been shrinking which I'm sure puts psychological pressure on young adults to not have kids.

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.

I know a fuckload of women who would happily bear children if you gave $15 an hour for 40 hours a week for it. The only thing stopping me personally from taking that deal is a lack of a uterus, and I don't even want to have kids.

Reagan spent years screaming about "Welfare queens" who were supposedly doing just that for a pittance in comparison, so it sure is funny how many people now insist that it can't even be possible, since so many people were so convinced it was happening for $400 a month in food stamps, at scale.

I also know a lot of women who wanted kids but couldn't afford it without, essentially, a tech industry husband. Or people like my sister, who has made raising kids her life's work since she was 16 but couldn't afford to have kids herself until she fell ass backwards into a nearly free house, from her now husbands family.

Everyone in my large friend group who wanted to start a family, literally wanted the traditional family structure and setup and "being a dad", had to wait a decade to get a home and a career that supported it. This includes the fact that having a child without good enough healthcare to support it or getting unlucky means medical bankruptcy.

It's not culture that people with lower understanding of finances and risk have kids still when having a kid is a serious drain on your finances. It's "duh".

If you want people who have an educated and mature understanding of risk to take that risk, it has to be worth it. Suck it up. You don't get to benefit from an uneducated populace anymore.

Not often countries want to degrade their culture like that by importing other cultures to have children with their women

Maybe the europeans are an exception

This seems to raise the question of why there is a clearing problem.

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

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.

Well, also the dating market is illiquid, with high transaction costs and incomplete information.

> the problems with the dating market are not a matching problem but a clearing problem.

> In markets, it can mean buyers and sellers aren’t being matched at the expected price/quantity.

> 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...

While technically correct for Western-aligned nations, not all governments are for the people and by the people.

I see a party here who is not behaving as they should and it's the one I am replying to.

Men are evolutionary wired to seek money and status. When they find ordinary routes to these blocked, they discover that violence is a shortcut. That this is the same the world over across every income and culture indicates an underlying equilibrium rather than a specific case.

> Nobody goes to bars

Where do you live? Because I've never, ever lived anywhere that this was true. I go to bars. They're always busy, unless it's a shit bar on a Tuesday night or whatever.

It’s only a problem if those women don’t settle for the men they date. If they would, the balance would always be restored:

Top 20% of men settle with 20% of women. A new top of men takes over replacing the old one.

The main issue is that relationships don’t last. And that has to with the 20% of men not wanting to settle as they have free and abundant access to sex, which has been historically the primary reason for men to settle.

On top of that men are at their prime way longer than women: easily between 25 and 45. Women lose perceived value as sexual partners after 30/35 by many men.

Go recheck your calculations, you'll notice something about their incentive in the case where you pay.

Thank you, I just learned a new word.

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.

FYI, Meetup got acquired by Bending Spoons and it seems it's being de-enshittified.

>Meetup got enshittified years ago already

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.

Back then you could have 10 wives and start a population of people named Khan.

Humans are naturally polygamous like the other great apes and mammals. When men (as in, male humans) realised this, they concluded that women were entirely to blame for it and sought to control their behaviour. This eventually got woven into their religions and for some time women's behaviour was controlled, or at least became shameful and taboo. Many things have happened more recently:

* Feminism,

* Decline of religion,

* Rise of state and law, particularly around male responsibilities towards children,

* Effective contraception,

* Dating apps.

Take all of this together and we're basically reverting back to our natural polygamy, but without all the pregnancies.

The second factor is access to birth control, most women just dont want to have children unless in very specific circumstances

Historically they were compelled

I too have the same skepticism here. If you're using dating apps then you're at least motivated to seek physical relations.

However, I'm surprised nobody has bought up porn yet (and other equally addicting digital habits).

It was practiced by the literal 1% of men, unless we talking about Khan specifically, it's a insignificant number.

Like which cultures?

They are well kown many years old okcupid numbers