Ask HN: Why don't we bring back old school OkCupid?

An interesting challenge with dating sites is that the “bell curves” of attractiveness versus desired attractiveness between men and women aren’t symmetric.

This leads to difficulties running a dating site because women will only say yes to 9/10 or better men, but men will message anyone with a pulse which in turn inflates female expectations.

Many women only ever join dating sites as an ego boost, with no intention to actually go on dates.

I had the idea that the way this could work is a totally automated match making system akin to Uber where you are penalised for not accepting matches made by the system. You don’t have to get married or anything, but if you don’t both turn up at the same GPS time space coordinates it counts against you.

Similarly, the system should require an up front ~$50 fee from both sexes per date. You don’t get it back if you stand up a date.

Etc…

It would be very hard to bootstrap, but once going it would produce many more long term partnerships than “swipe right” style apps.

I've worked for a dating startup in the past and the main barrier is marketing costs. You need to be able to bootstrap a network extremely fast or people will join and bounce within minutes and doing that across any sort of region costs a lot of money since you basically need to blanket advertise. Trying to do that across multiple regions requires serious money.

You can build it and they might come but they will leave and never come back if they aren't seeing people to match with.

Match owns Okcupid now doesn't it?

With how easy it is to build apps now, is it really unreasonable to bring the old one back in a simple/cheap/sustainable way, that shields it off of being bought by those nightmare data brokers?

What if the app asks one question per swipe?

Advanced version: and shows a match with the same answer.

> Funny thing, 12 years later I met my wife on the zombified corpse of cupid. So... go figure.

Must have been awkward. Or were you in an open marriage at the time?