Ask HN: What is wrong with dating in 2022?

Some governments have tried to solve this by offering their own dating apps for their citizens, but another approach would be a community-run dating system, built on the Fediverse. Unfortunately searching across instances and stopping people from scraping all the profiles on an instance, are two hard problems with that architecture, although there are probably creative solutions to both.

Another approach that could be tried is limiting the number of introductions a user could make per week, to prove that someone is really prepared to invest time in a relationship. That might also discourage people from wasting their introductions on the most superficially desirable profiles they find, since those people are likely flooded with introductions anyway.

Finally, to add AI into the mix (and maybe generate some hype and investment offers), what about having "AI matchmakers"? A user could be required to converse with the AI for a few weeks, answering questions, taking personality tests, reacting to simulated date scenarios, and the AI could apply some super advanced proprietary algorithm (which might be just staff choice and a random number generator to start with) and then give one "match" per week for you to go and get to know properly. The feedback given by each user on their suggested match could also help refine the AI's matching process.

I’m surprised none of the existing comments contrast the unproductive on-line dating of today with the very successful OKCupid model of the mid 2000s to the mid 2010s. Practically everyone I know ( myself, siblings, and more college friends than I can count on one hand) met their spouse on OKCupid during this time period. The old OKCupid where people filled out quizzes and the software just gave them a compatibility score ( based on their answers ) worked exceedingly well.

OKCupid got sold to the match group around this time, and they started aggressively removing features, such as search and messaging. This made it effectively a tinder clone, which works for nobody.

Trying to “solve” human behaviors is effectively equivalent to trying to dehumanize humanity (even though it isn’t fun, of course , to be on the receiving end of some of the behaviors called out as problematic in the OP, it’s part of life).

The term “problem” has become so overused in the digital age, and, in fact, I think it causes engineers to ignore the reality of what they’re doing sometimes (e.g. in the case of building a dating app you’re solving the very small, already solved problem of giving people a communications platform, which is about 10% of what you are doing, the 90% of what you’re doing is making the nth dating tech company execs rich off a niche/fad by providing a slightly different flavor of stuff that already exists).

It’s easy to ignore the potential negative consequences of what you’re doing when you cast it as “problem solving” which is generic enough to suppress all your alarm bells and has an inherent tendency to bias you toward thinking you’re doing good (nobody like problems right? But that’s the problem with ‘problem’—what exactly are we designating to be a problem in the first place? It’s not always cut and dry).

There’s plenty wrong with dating apps. Each of these apps are designed to be toxic. As in the company puts an effort to make the experience toxic and sluggish. You have to spend hours uselessly. You have to get frustrated.

Limits are usually designed in such a way that it hurts one sidedly.

In in person dating at least to some extent you could expect “you take a step, I take a step”, but on dating apps you’ve to do everything - especially in the beginning and this pressure is almost entirely on one gender.

Usually you’ve one shot and that too for a fraction of a minute of just few seconds to pitch your deck.

You have to be a funny person, a stoic, a wise person, playful, mature, all probably in one message; while coming across as athletic, well groomed but not full of yourself, maybe homely, and down to earth as well in your pictures. You’ve to take the initiatives and also develop a radar to read minds.

This is more gender specific than usual: if you’re lucky enough to meet people you are supposed to be a feminist who believes in equality but also a chivalrous person who opens doors and shit.

Then you get some response and it is so limited that you try to trudge along with whatever you get but sooner or later realising “fuck, all this effort for such low quality interactions?” and then the disappointment and rut sets it with a fatigue where you don’t want to do it anymore but you keep doing it anymore.

They do nothing for spam, harassment pretty much. Quality and veracity of profiles is deliberately left unchecked to increase the volume.

Tricking and messing with users with dark patterns (in some cases even fake profiles).

Among things listed ghosting is the only one I consider something that has remained almost same from the non-dating app dating (and tbh it just needs to be dealt with in one way - that there’s nothing worth doing anything there). Everything else is either new with this trend or much worse.

From my personal perspective this pandemic made it worse when too much audio and text started happening without meeting in person and you started building connections (sometimes breaking) without interacting with the other person physically/in person.

All this just pushes the two groups apart and slowly it spreads as the dating is moving more and more to the online world.

I think limiting the number of matches (at a time), not just daily matches can be a good start - you only get more if are done with your current matches - aye or naye, but that would look bad on the PMs’ clickstream dashboards.

Biggest drawback is - designed to be completely opaque in everything! And that too after having so much of your most personal data.