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

Post by firefax » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 2:27 PM UTC

twalla wrote: post #53

nl wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Is this a SF thing? I'm maybe a 7/10 and I've never had trouble getting dates in any city I've lived in or traveled through. I just put some effort into sound interesting, make sure my pics are the best I can find and it's fine. But I've never tried dating in SF and I've heard the gende…

Women get an absolute deluge of interest - when I was dating it wasn't uncommon for me to see women with inboxes with 10k plus messages/likes. There's definitely an aspect of "just pick the hottest 2 or 3 people you're shown and close the app" because you're overwhelmed and over half of the profiles are poorly filled out/sending low effort or vulgar messages. I think most men do poorly because they don't understand t…

Post by firefax » Tue, Sep 08, 2026, 2:29 PM UTC

Conscat wrote: post #49

dreamcompiler wrote: post #36

The Match monopoly buying you out is one problem. A bigger problem is that dating sites have to have a lot of users before anybody wants to use them. (They especially need women users.) This conundrum is a huge barrier to entry in the space. The temptation to pad your user base with fake accounts, scammers, and sex workers is tremendous. If you do that, you boost engagement for a few months and then you die. Yet anot…

> If people find a life partner they drop off the site, and you constantly have to find new users to replace them ... As a result, some of the less-scrupulous sites purposely make it less likely that you will see people who seem like great matches I've often heard this sentiment, but I'm very skeptical. Firstly, most users in my experience seem to prefer casual relationships even if that's not what their profile indi…

Post by ChiperSoft » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 4:09 AM UTC

firefax wrote: post #78

ChiperSoft wrote: post #60

The people who can innovate in this space either don't have the mental and/or capital bandwidth to do so, or don't want to deal with the absolutely massive amount of moderation that it would require. I met my wife on OkC in 2006, years before the Match acquisition. I have long been furious about what Match did to the site after they bought it in 2011, and have long fantasized about creating something that could retur…

>absolutely massive amount of moderation that it would require. Wow, this thread blew up -- I think you hit on the core issue, and one that I hadn't thought enough about. Moderation doesn't scale and is very difficult. >You have age verification laws, payment gateways that will stop processing if they get even a whiff that sex workers might be using your site to advertise, and bigots who will DDOS you I don't believe…