1. Dating apps/sites are a rich-get-richer market. Most people go where everyone else goes, because everyone else is there.

2. The more work you ask your users to do up front, (e.g. answering a bunch of survey questions, taking high quality photos, paying up front) the fewer highly desirable people you'll have, because they can easily find people wherever they go without doing all that work.

3. Swiping is more fun (more addictive) than answering survey questions. OKCupid switched to swiping when A/B testing showed that swiping retained people better than survey questions.

1. Dating apps/sites are a rich-get-richer market. Most people go where everyone else goes, because everyone else is there.

I get that this is true for social networks in general, like messaging platforms, there's a first mover and network effect.

However for dating apps specifically, there is not truly a network effect, all you need to find is one person, and for monogamous relationships (which incidentally are more common among heterosexual couples, whereas Tinder and its descendants, coming from grindr heritage, tend against) it's even more true, as in the ideal scenario each user finds one other user, there's not a huge amount of network interaction.

I also think that both in the general and specific course, there's a lot of incentives for niches, subcultures, alternative cultures, often times part of a culture is to avoid the monotonizing mainstream tropes and memes.

You also have a self-selection effect: users willing to fill out more involved surveys may pair with each other at a higher rate than the overall background.

There exist hundreds of fly by night matchmaking apps, but most people can only name about half a dozen off hand.

There's a hack: if the platform appeals to some of the most sought-after women, it can win, since the most sought-after men will follow, and the marjority women/men will follow chasing the first two groups. (same dynamic is used to fill empty nightclubs).

Bumble did this to Tinder. Coffee Meets Bagel is currently trying to do it to Bumble.

> for monogamous relationships (which incidentally are more common among heterosexual couples, whereas Tinder and its descendants, coming from grindr heritage, tend against)

Describing everyone who isn't straight as "tending against monogamy" is bigotry. I'm aware that there's a 0.1% PP difference or whatever -- still absurd.

There's no suggestion of that in the quotation. The author is suggesting that Tinder was designed as a straight hookup app inspired by grindr, the gay hookup app. This is not really true in the specific but certainly isn't implying non-straights are "tending against monogamy".

There isn't an offensive imputation contained in being called non-monogamous anyway, unless you in turn have a prejudice against polyamory etc.

Describing accurate statistics is not bigotry. Abusing people based on it is

Not sure if it helps, but I mean male homosexuals. Lesbians are more monogamous, so it's not a matter of being homosexual that makes one less monogamous, it's more that men are more hypergamous.

This is true in almost all species, as there is an evolutionary benefit for males to mate in excess of one partner, as each subsequent mate increases the chance and amount of offspring. Whereas females have little benefit to mating in excess of 1 partner, as she cannot have more than 1 child in that period.

So if anything I would be sexist against males (of any species)? Or sexist against women? It depends on whether you consider monogamy virtuous or not. Or maybe pointing out any difference, even if morally neutral, between two group of people is enough to be a bigot, in which case I would avoid speaking about protected classes of people, which doesn't sound great.

I don't know what the rules for bigotry are, (but I know it when I see it). But I'd dare say that even pointing out negatives of a protected class can be fine. If we are talking about basketball and I point out that the Japanese team is too short, that's not bigotry. That a comment is tangential instead of central to an argument is probably also relevant.

As for the accuracy of the claim, I won't cite a study, some truths are accessible by simpler, perhaps more social means. If you know gay people, talk to them, ask them directly if they feel comfortable and you care about it. Also take a look into the history of dating apps, is it a coincidence that Grindr was originally gay only? Is there an equivalent Lesbian hookup app?

Also, I'm sorry if you are gay and found this offensive, I just assumed you were straight and were just being offended in the name of someone else. I don't think many gay people would question that men are less monogamous, but I may be wrong..

You don't need to overexplain

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 return to what it offered. Problem is, I don't think you could do it.

OkCupid in its heyday was a product of the golden age of the web, when social networking was new. It thrived because it predated doom scrolling, so taking quizzes and answering surveys was still a fun way to use the web. Now we're in a post-twitter landscape, where dopamine comes from a flick of a finger.

OkC's forums were one of the first mainstream online spaces for conversations about sexuality and non-monogamy. That role has now been subsumed by subreddits and facebook groups.

When OkC was independent, the majority of moderation involved keeping things pg-13 and enforcing the terms of use. You could crowd-source it all right within the site itself. Today you have AI agent swarms bombarding any site with a userbase, just hoping to get eyeballs. 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 if you dare to cater to the needs of minorities.

And all that to wade into a battle with a billion dollar juggernaut.

The future will be an AI that acts as a matchmaker via a chat interface.

"Hi, I'm looking for someone in my area age [x-y], has a professional role.."

"I have Claire on my list. She's X years old, works as an accountant, and her requirements seem similar to yours. Shall I ping her and see what she thinks?"

The Product Manager on Facebook Dating already beat you to this...

Are there any documented instances of “bigots” using ddos for services catering to the needs of minorities?

>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 you on the sex worker part -- I think I went on a few "dates" where folks were being polite because I didn't understand some of the language and phrasing used in their profiles. (Also sex worker is a broad term, and dancers camgirls etc want to find true love too.)

It can be hard, dating in a big city like SF. And I probably had a "garbage in, garbage out" experience with the site since I lied and said I was straight and some people filter "the straights" out.

The twenty aughts were incredibly homophobic, and if you're a 2 on the kinsey scale -- someone who only wants to hook up and not date the same sex -- it was a lot simpler to just not bring it up because a lot of people will drop ten twenty match points if you admit you've had sex with a man while fronting as progressive.

Finally, since some of the language and phrasing I see you using reminds me of internal Google mailing lists folks have given me a peek at, I'd like to say here, in public, that I went on a lot of dates in the Bay Area with extremely privileged people who don't seem to get that on a long enough timeline if you're scared shitless of my hacking skills on a date but doubt me in the interview room, that's going to be radicalizing... a persistent pattern of being told if I won't slam a baby into someone they won't accurately attest to my skills, a persistent pattern of being gatekept into precarity that did not make me feel like I had any allies or friends in the technology space and I was grateful SF had a thriving arts scene to keep me sane.

Anyways, the world is darker -- I got trolled at one point when I reactivated OKC. Like, legit "I'm not even sure if this is a real person" level troll, something I never used to encounter online dating. (Woman said she wants a man who loves her like she loves Bibi, splits her time between Israel, and... has no idea what the black flag movement is? Felt like I was being baited into going off on someone who might not really exist.)

>bigots who will DDOS you if you dare to cater to the needs of minorities.

I've had the sites hosting essays about my childhood DDoSed as I was shopping around a sequel -- there's a war going on out there to shape our media landscape that the normies don't see or sense.

The amazing thing is that people still cite the old stats they published as that remains the only significant body of insight into the dynamics of human behavior in this realm.

the reality is that those stats were flawed in numerous ways. this is expected, they were never subject to peer review.

for example: ok cupid and tinder, during the times that christian rudder was blogging about them, never reported on the actual ratio of active male to active female users. this made it impossible to do any comparisons over time, it's like reporting only numerators in the absence of denominators.

a second example: when tinder's 2018 interracial dating stats were compared to okcupid's 2011 stats, there was no change, despite real preferences having shown that something like 40 percentage points more people were comfortable with non-same-race dating over that decade. rudder kind of failed the obvious interpretation, that the apps and/or data collection were broken, and instead talked about some conspiracy of the surveys being wrong.

i think there was a lot of other stuff broken with it.

As a young adult that data analysis blog post seemed like cool shit, and today I'm horrified because it seemed like cool shit. They make for "cute" PR soundbites, and back then the data analysts likely didn't know better, but they are terribly biased and reductive by virtue of the structure of the platform, and can't be used to support anything essential or fundamental about human romance.

I became single in 2013 and cupid was definitely where the cool kids were. But it was a desktop thing. You sat at a computer and engaged. You invested. Tinder and swiping are a phone thing. No real investment.

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

> 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?

Uh... my now-wife. Not ex.

Okcupid still exists and operate in this manner. So do other platforms. The reason why it does not proliferate like it used to has to do with the short attention span of the population, and in general, the attention economy. You can’t have people answer 1100 questions anymore.

You can, however, put pretty people on the app for them to swipe left or right, and that drives people way more than Doing work to get a match. Unfortunate but true. So the people who opt in to this difficult end are not enough to drive the platform anyways. At least, it could never be anything like when You and I used it ages ago, when everyone was down for the cause (and had the attention span for it too)

They dumbed it down for the masses.

What if the app asks one question per swipe?

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

Anyone serious is willing to fill that stuff out, and I did when I was single. Those sites aren't popular because they don't work very well.

can you describe what wasn't working very well about them?

From what I remember 9-11 years ago... The algorithm was either bad or very gamed in ways that can't really be fixed, so instead you have to find people manually and reach out. The websites were bloated, so there were several different inconvenient ways to reach out to people, in ways that they probably don't notice.

I switched to Tinder and its clones back then. It was so much simpler and actually led to matches. It's not even shallow really; there is a bio, which is already more than you see meeting someone IRL. Every app that tried to "make it more wholesome" or whatever just made it worse, even though I was only using those for serious dating.

Nothing, just The Match Group buying everything as soon as it becomes popular and incentivizing keeping people using the apps over successful long-term matches.

Yeah, I'm surprised no one has spun up a competitor that combines evidence based match questions with the rich profiles okc was famous for -- OKC's only failing was you might find out you have someone you're a big match with who does NOT return that sentiment.

I also think we've lost the ability to do things like man up and ask out the barista knowing full well you're switching coffee shops for at least six months if you read that one wrong... when I was like, 20, I used apps because I didn't feel capable of just... talking to people. The MRA stuff is insane, but there's something to be said for being able to ask for what you want.

That's begging the question!

If The Match Group is a steady supplier of startup exits in this space, that should incentivise more people to start. So we should see more people trying to resurrect old school OKCupid, not fewer.

Though I suspect the answer isn't that people aren't trying, but that these trials don't succeed enough for OP to notice.

Every site requires enough people using it to make it worthwhile. This is especially hard outside of major cities. The more apps there are, the smaller the pool in each one. This is a problem for having too many app, and also a problem for the early days with any new app.

For users, these apps exiting by selling to Match is a bad thing. I’d want an app with a very stubborn founder who hates The Match Group and wants to take them down by making a better product. Anyone starting with an exit in mind has already failed in my book.

> For users, these apps exiting by selling to Match is a bad thing.

Yes, I didn't argue against that!

I said that Match Group reliably buying upstarts would make it easy to found and fund these upstarts.

> Every site requires enough people using it to make it worthwhile.

You can solve user acquisition via VC money; which you could get relatively easily, if Match Group were to reliably buy upstarts.

> Anyone starting with an exit in mind has already failed in my book.

I am trying to work out why we aren't seeing more startups in this space (VC-funded or otherwise). That question is independent of whether we think they are morally worthy.

It's not just dating platforms that have changed, it's also the users. Online dating used to be a niche you had to actively seek out, which meant that the users were naturally self-selected, had more interesting (for better or worse) personalities, and were (on average) more genuine.

Online dating today is far too mainstream for those qualities to remain. Any new dating platform that gains enough popularity to be useful will be quickly flooded with less-differentiated "normies" that dilute any quality in the platform's demographic, and the "optimizers" who game the platform at the cost of other users' experience.

With the disclaimer that I've never operated in this space, I would imagine that a significant barrier to the creation of new dating sites is that most people who care enough to try to build a good service are spooked by the liability involved (hosting boatloads of personal info, getting entangled legally when things go wrong, keeping creeps at bay, etc). At least from my standpoint as a layman it looks like an absolute minefield compared to a nice boring spreadsheet SaaS or something.

It’s in the same vein as saying, “Why don’t we bring forums back?” Vast majority of people 'enjoy' the quick dopamine hit of swiping, matching, and trading cheesy pickup lines, even if they claim otherwise. They may complain, but that doesn't necessarily mean they want to explore alternatives. It doesn’t really matter that the older way may have been saner. Dating apps have been around long enough to become deeply ingrained, which makes it hard for any alternative paradigm to take hold, especially ones that have already faded away.

The only exception I’ve seen work is marriage-focused apps and services. This may be very India-specific, but the dating market felt far more balanced and serious in the matrimony space, provided you’re comfortable being evaluated on things like salary and eating preferences.

Is Jeevansathi really that different mechanically from a casual dating service? I don't think it has a literal swiping motion (many dating apps don't either) but I've heard complaints that modern matrimony apps are even too similar to dating apps before.

I actually prefer the swiping apps. As a man I’m expected to make the first move and on apps like OkC it’s easy to waste a lot of time and effort messaging people who are not at all interested in me. The swiping is a signal that there is at least some mutual interest there before I put effort in.

But the main problem with the dating apps is the business model. Their job is to help you find love, but if you find love you delete the app and they don’t make any more money. So they’re incentivized to keep you single forever. I don’t believe Hinge at all when they say they want you to delete their app as quickly as possible.

> The swiping is a signal that there is at least some mutual interest there before I put effort in.

I think you vastly overestimate the "interest" a swipe represents. A significant number of people swipe out of boredom and a lot of swipes are mistakes.

My wife and I met on original okcupid. Not much to say other than the system worked! It’s sad to hear they become tinder-y but I guess it’s hard to compete with the immediacy and dopamine prospects of swiping.

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.

> What is stopping someone, aside from patents, from making a match based dating site to compete with the current market?

Demand.

Old-school dating was like cocaine and the swiping-oriented apps are crack. It doesn't mean there would be no demand for an old-school OKC clone but it's a niche play and given Match Group's dominance, the capital you'd need to invest to compete would be significant.

Supply also. It's insane how many dating apps there are now, way more than when Tinder debuted. Plenty of them are somewhere closer to the OkCupid style.

Who is this "we" you talk about?

There are hundreds (thousands?) of dating sites. The problem isn't the technology, it's the fact it's a two sided market place, and cold starts are hard for two sided marketplaces.

I much prefer the swiping apps to something that tries to capture the essence of me in a survey.

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?

I think it's a good idea but in this space, that's probably a smell. I met my wife there, been married 15 years now. 97% match, we've basically never had a big argument.

There's an article somewhere (read it many years ago) with the story about the first days of Tinder. The way they got their first users was to send (IIRC) the marketing strategist (a woman) to talk to attractive young women in bars and parties, show them how easy it was to use, and convince them to install the app themselves.

I would say that this points to the real issues: that OkCupid was something one did on their desktop at home while Tinder sold itself as something one does for fun at the bar, and that most people are laser-focused on looks in detriment of everything else. Last time I used Bumble (which was supposed to be "deeper" than Tinder) I'd yell in frustration, scrolling profile after profile without even the tiniest bit of information, eventually reaching the conclusion that people just don't want to read or write profiles.

A new OkCupid would have to position itself as the "eat your vegetables" alternative in a world full of candy. There is a market for that, sure, but it will remain a niche at best.

From what I can tell, people ARE starting these kinds of projects. They just don't get popular enough for you to notice.

If we search “dating app” on an App Store, wonder just how long it’ll let us scroll. Past a dozen apps with OP’s idea presumably.

You could also have a website, not only an App.

OkCupid's algo wasn't any good. The swipe thing actually made sense, and idk why it took so long to get there.

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 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."

No woman alive would agree to this.

And, I'm sure there are women who sign up for dating apps for an ego boost and that's why they don't reply, but most are just overwhelmed by the shotgun approach some men take and end up not taking any of their responses seriously. Women often quit dating apps because of bad experiences, they're not going to agree to a date where they don't get to do their own vetting of the person they're meeting.

> but most are just overwhelmed by the shotgun approach

That’s the whole point of this approach — women don’t get drowned in spam from men.

Instead it’s the equivalent of a trusted friend or relative setting you up with someone they know will suit you.

Evidence is that that works out better.

"Instead it’s the equivalent of a trusted friend or relative setting you up with someone they know will suit you."

A random dating app is a "trusted friend or relative" now? Sorry, that's not a reasonable expectation.

I mean, go for it, if you think it'll work. It's easier than ever to spin up an MVP. But, if I were a betting man, my bet against this working, especially with women, would be very, very, large. Not only do I think it's not viable, I would be genuinely surprised if you got one (1) paid sign up from a woman.

> if you think it'll work.

It would, at scale, where there's sufficient data to train some decent embedding models to accurately judge partner compatibility. As a machine learning exercise, this is "easy". Heck, Facebook does it, possibly without even "trying" to implement dating specifically! I regularly get spammed with "suitable single women" as friend suggestions by Meta. I'm not single, but as dating suggestions go, they're actually not half bad! If I was single, I'd reach out to some of the recommendations for sure.

They've clearly implemented this exact feature, but they bootstrapped it by having a billion+ people in their system and trillions of interactions between them already. They didn't start out as a dating site.

Similarly, I've heard that LinkedIn is now more of a "single professionals dating site" than a career-making / job-seeker site, at least for a decent fraction of its userbase.

This is eminently solvable, and people do use these systems to find partners.

The nigh-insurmountable challenge is boot-strapping a dating-only site from scratch.

You've listed off a bunch of examples of why it would work, but none of them do what you've suggested or anything like it. None of them try to force a date to happen on penalty of a large fine for not showing up. None try to get a woman to meet a stranger without her making the decision to meet them based on her own assessment of the person and pay $50 for the privilege.

I'm not saying online dating can't work, and I've said nothing about whether data about people makes matches better.

I am saying you have presented an absolutely batshit crazy and dangerous idea of how it ought to work.

Edit: It sounds like you've designed a dating app optimized for angry men who feel shorted by women on dating apps. But, there's never been too few men interacting on dating apps. If you're optimizing for men's comfort on a dating site, you have failed to learn the lesson of "ladies night" at bars. If your site is full of single women, men will show up. The opposite is not true, if it feels punitive and risky to women.

Btw Tinder did seem to have a hotness score, at least when I was single in college. Higher score meant being shown higher up on others' stacks. You hurt your score by swiping right on people who don't swipe right back.

It was possible to game because it didn't matter as much how many people swiped right on you total. There were ways to tell who liked you ahead of time, even before that became a paid feature. I got myself to the top. All the other guys in those slots were 6'4" gigachad athletes/lumberjacks.

That might sound good in theory, but no one is going to sign up for that. Who will want to pay $50 to not meet up with the creep some algorithm has set them up with? Honestly, it's kinda dangerous.

I think they're separate things --

Penalized for not matching with what you say you want to match with.

Charged $ for not appearing for a date you had already agreed to.

> 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 gender balance can make it harder?

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 the female gaze and they don't take the time to create a profile with half decent photos that communicates who would want to date them and why.

It's SF and also age. I've been on both ends. But even when men have the advantage in serious dating, women on hookup apps get more attention because those aren't 1-1 pairings, if you know what I'm saying.

On Tinder and some other sites, it's unclear whether it's for hookups or dating. This led to some awkward dates for me back when I was single.

For dudes, you just pay. They boost you and give you a bonus boost when you first start.

The tinder strategy is simple. Sign up, make profile, swipe, stop, come back in a week. Then upgrade with in app purchase, hustle to get 2-3 contacts, and churn the subscription. Repeat if needed with a different app and rotate as needed.

You’ll get a date with this method and the rest is up to you.

Look around, hot girls are with toad looking guys all of the time. You need to manipulate the platform so you are front and center.

A man trying to design a dating system to force women into dates is hilarious. One problem you seem not to have considered: what's in it for the woman? Why would she ever agree to this?

To say nothing of how you would be excoriated in the media the first time a woman was assaulted and reported that she had bad vibes but felt pressured into it by your app. And that's if you didn't just create the perfect serial killer pipeline. This is literally the worst PR nightmare of an idea I've heard in my entire life. And, just, you know, bad from an actual human perspective too.

How do you deal with bots?

I've been waiting for AI matchmakers. Not just for dating, but for p2p sales, now that ebay has discouraged low-volume sellers and everything has moved behind the facebook wall with facebook marketplace.

One of the problems with OKCupid was that they never got the tests to be very predictive in matchmaking. An AI matchmaker could simultaneously be shopping every member of a site to every other member, devising and administering and evaluating the effectiveness of tests itself, and acting as a go-between before people wanted to make direct contact. The main thing is that it wouldn't be a matter of seeing a "match percentage" (which often led to disappointment because sometimes he just likes blondes and she just likes tall guys) but something more opaque and optimizing, responsive to feedback.

Likewise with facebook, an AI sales matchmaker could be given accounts to your messageboard, discord, mastodon instance, etc., follow "thing wanted" and "thing for sale" threads and conversations, and initiate and mediate contact between likely matches (across different points of contact.) The fantasy about this is that it gets the commissions down to 4% again - I think ebay is pushing 15% at least, for doing less than it ever did. Ebay has also figured out its format fairly rigidly, where an AI matchmaker could be more flexible and interactive - ferrying and even anticipating requests for more info.

AI employment matchmakers have to be around already.

I've been expecting to see some of this stuff pop up, and have been surprised not to have.

Because people were less cynical in the 2010s and there's no way to bring that back.

>Because people were less cynical in the 2010s and there's no way to bring that back.

We were only one year out of the Bush administration. I got a lot of lectures on third way neoliberalism from women who in the same age bracket who today are all stone cold socialists.

Maybe you should have tried a Christian or conservative dating site? OKC was fabulously non normative.

They seemed plenty 'normative' to me, in the sense of professing strong opinions on eg 'I would never date a Tory voter'.

I didn’t know OKC was international. Duh. Of course it is! Where I live in the 2010s you could be pansexual or poly. That was unique for dating sites. At least in the US.

Could it be argued that people were cynical about different things? I think a lot of culture is just people uncritically repeating ideas theyve heard.

I agree... it's very easy to have strong opinions about things you are sheltered from the consequences of. And strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding.

Was she in favour or against neoliberalism?

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 another problem is churn. If people find a life partner they drop off the site, and you constantly have to find new users to replace them. This is one way a dating site is fundamentally different from e.g. Facebook. As a result, some of the less-scrupulous sites purposely make it less likely that you will see people who seem like great matches, or they interfere with your ability to message those people, just to keep you using the site longer.

Jump-starting the initial chicken/egg issue in an ethical way is AFAIK an unsolved problem. In the post-OKC era, Bumble is the only one I know of that semi-succeeded because they made it woman-centric from the start.

Finally (yeah, I've thought about this a lot), the modern mobile app-only approach can be a distinct turnoff for people like me. Mobile apps make it difficult to write much text about yourself, which was something OKC encouraged. Apps also present a safety issue: Apps often require location permissions, which means employees of the site can stalk women. (This has happened.) There's no good reason dating apps should require location permission, but most do for the same reason most apps of any kind do: Location gives the site owner personal info they can sell to advertisers. All that having been said, the vast majority of the market probably prefers mobile apps to web sites.

The whole space seems like a cesspool of bootstrapping problems coupled with extreme incentives for unethical behavior. Sorry if I sound pessimistic but you asked what's stopping this from happening. This is my take.

> 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 indicates. Dating apps are also one of the highest vectors for cheating today, and one man even confessed to me on our second date that he has a wife in Rajasthan.

But I think the fact that the major apps' user bases all grow over time indicates they have a naturally healthy replacement rate. People turn 18 every day and desire a partner. People break up every day, etc.