Dating

I’ve been working on building a dating service for Oxford students (Oxheart) this year, but as a friend pointed out, I’m not creating a product which is precisely tailored to what I’d like to have exist. Whether that’s sensible as a ~startup strategy isn’t the subject of this post. Rather, it’s an assortment of thoughts I’ve had about dating apps as a user of them, and what I would change if I were building one from the ground up.

Observations from Hinge

• I find that pictures on profiles don’t really help me to figure out what someone’s like, especially beyond the first couple.
  • Physical appearance isn’t particularly important to me.
  • The types of photos that people upload are all fairly similar so don’t give that much away about the person either.
    • Totally anecdotally, the clusters are maybe something like lots of clubbing & balls vs doing sporty things vs holidays abroad? But I don’t know which of these clusters is most correlated with the things I care about anyway. (Or if I care about the clusters in their own right.)
  • I want to avoid making judgements about people based on stereotypes and assumed associations (based on, e.g, whether they’ve used filters on their photos; the kind of clothes they’re wearing; whether they have any group photos; how smiley they look). But without doing that, I can’t conclude much at all from photos.
    • To be clear, those details can be informative. Choice of clothing is an extremely useful way of communicating with people – if someone has dungarees and lots of pin badges, you can fairly reliably draw inferences about them that are different to those about someone in a hackathon hoodie or finance firm t-shirt. But clothes come into their own when you’re scanning a large room to decide who to talk to: they work for communication over a distance. By the time I’m looking at somebody’s dating profile, however, they have my attention already; there’s no need to attract it with lower-fidelity but further-travelling non-verbal signals.
• The text content is extremely sparse.
  • e.g. from an arbitrarily-chosen recent profile, the sum total of what I learned was that the person likes Wagamama and Najar’s, enjoys running, and thinks Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is great.
  • When I’m deciding whether to like a profile or close it, I almost always feel like I have no idea about what they’re like as a person.
  • I think this is because I don’t know much at all about their values: most profiles try to be funny & sarcastic, with brief flashes of personality coming through only in the form of interests/hobbies.
    • The thing is, interests and hobbies are relatively unimportant to me as features of a partner, I think.
    • If a prospective partner is into video games and animé, well, that’s fine. Whereas if they think the future is certain to be terrible and we can do nothing but complain about it, then no thanks.
• The whole experience is extremely unenjoyable and rather draining.
  • Given that I’m hoping to find a life (or at least long-term) partner, maybe this is worth it to find someone whom I really love.
  • It would definitely be more romantic to meet someone on an Austen-style walk round a country park, or after a long exchange of thoughtful emails (or handwritten letters!), but I don’t think either of those are particularly likely. So, it’d be much better if the slog of scrolling through dating apps could be made more pleasant.
  • Being on Hinge requires a very different kind of emotional effort to the dealing with the exciting/paralysing nervousness you get from spending time around someone you want to ask out: rather than dreamily imagining what might be, you end up wondering whether anything will ever happen at all.

Questions I’d ask

As noted, I think profiles on Hinge aren’t that informative about the person. Of course, you can get to know someone better by messaging them (so long as it’s not pure small talk) or going on a date, but I certainly wouldn’t have the energy or motivation to do that with everyone I don’t rule out from their profile alone, precisely because profiles are so uninformative.

More bluntly, if you think that dating is mostly a numbers game – that is, that you just need to look through enough potential matches for there to be a reasonable chance of you finding someone really great – then you’ll want to avoid spending your limited dating effort budget on matches that are unlikely to work. Since I think finding love mainly is about looking widely enough, I would very much like to apply a strong initial filter that not many people pass through.

On my side of things, I’ve tried to make my profile opinionated and specific, to help other people decide if they’re interested in me. This doesn’t help with me deciding about what profiles I’m interested in though. If were designing the app from scratch and tailoring it to suit me, then I’d make people answer the following questions in their profile, as a way of eliciting their values/priorities/projects.

• Are you vegan? If not, why not?
• How often do you do things you're not supposed to? What kind of thing? Give a recent example.
• What are your daily habits? Which of these do you endorse? What do you aspire to have as habits? Why don’t you have them already? Is there a plan to cement them?
• Where do you want to be in 30 years? Or if you’re not sure, what will make you satisfied looking back on your life?
• What’s something you’re learning at the moment?
• How much time / money do you donate to charity? How do you decide where to give it?
• Do you want to be virtuous? What does that look like?
• Do you use LLMs on a regular basis? What for? If not, why not?
• What’ve you changed your mind on?

Features I’d add

Something I made a big deal about in my Emergent Ventures application was the idea of friends-as-matchmakers, inspired partly by manifold.love. Basically, the idea was that dating apps massively underutilise existing social networks and the “insider information” they contain from friends about what their peers would like in a partner. Incorporating this directly (get people to suggest matches for friends) or indirectly (encourage people to have input onto their friend’s profiles, or augment profiles in the backend with information gathered straight from friends) might help produce higher-quality, better-curated matches. Even without implementing this idea fully, there’s a few simple things that could be done to make it easier for friends to collaborate in their quest for romance.

One friend was keen helping me improve my profile, but this isn’t something that Hinge natively supports. In fact, you can’t even share your profile with other people! I had to take screenshots of it all. A few sharing use-case examples:

• You want to ask for advice on your own profile
• You find a profile of someone you’re potentially interested in and want to see what a friend thinks of them
  • This might be open to misuse, and make things like the “dating app screenshot” more common.
  • But you could limit it so that the profiles can only be disseminated within-platform, to specific friends, rather than letting people share them more widely.
  • Also, as a matter of fact, Hinge doesn’t restrict screenshots (not sure about other apps), so it seems like people probably don’t expect a huge amount of privacy from their profiles. (Maybe my ideal app would stop screenshots?)
• You see a profile you’re not interested in but think would be great for a friend
  • Maybe the platform implements some sort of gamification/incentive for this sharing case, to reward you for making good matches.