A lot of dunking going on in here, and fairly so, if nothing else because there is no good business model for an app like this unless they build it into dating apps (who's going to manually enter data from Tinder into this thing?).
But the dunking seems to overlook the genuine problems with modern dating that didn't exist in the past. I find that it's very easy to mindlessly swipe a thousand people on an app and suddenly end up with more matches than I have the energy and attention span to process. If there was an easy way to turn this "inbox" (which is really just one step above my Gmail spam folder) into an actionable database, that could have real value in a world where dating happens stochastically through apps.
Separately, it isn't weird at all to keep some sort of track of your dating life. Past generations had the "little black book," basically a romantic rolodex. I've never used one but who's to say I couldn't benefit from a digital version that lives in my phone?
Most of all, a commenter here that is since deleted said something I think is apt: "I think the number one problem with online dating is not managing all the people. It's forcing yourself to keep the number of active pursuits low enough to manage. If you don't kind of commit to seeing if someone is going to pan out, then they won't." This is of course the actual solution to the problem I experience with modern dating. The only downside is that, unlike downloading an app, it requires that I change how I think and behave.
I agree completely with your "number one problem." There's a lag in between using a dating app and going on an actual date, so if you're single and on dating apps, you end up with a strange periodic behavior. When you're not getting dates you swipe a lot. A few weeks later those turn into dates and now you've either found someone good or you're just too overwhelmed to bother swiping. Things don't work out with those people (probably because everyone views everyone as disposable), and now you're lonely and swiping again. It's similar to when I was contracting and would mostly only try to get clients when I wasn't under contract. The only solution is to constantly keep the top of the funnel going, but that's a very dark pattern when it comes to relationships.
> It's forcing yourself to keep the number of active pursuits low enough to manage. If you don't kind of commit to seeing if someone is going to pan out, then they won't." This is of course the actual solution to the problem I experience with modern dating.
This problem is solved in a culture where friends and family suggest matchups. Of course, this requires a decent and somewhat large network in the first place, but each agent is incentivized to show matches that are somewhat in each other’s leagues (for the agent’s reputation), and each single person is incentivized to not burn their reputation in the network so they avoid churning through possible matches in pursuit of a “better” match.
You also get a somewhat reasonable background check via the agent proposing a possible match since they might have a cursory knowledge of the proposed match’s history and family and whatnot.
not sure about bidirectional data flow though -- maybe you can do that via accessibility interfaces?
Also possible that OSes will offer standard chat UX in the future, making it simpler to hook plugins into conversations -- ios already does this to some extent with imessage plugins, but 'tinder for imessage' is the opposite of 'imessage for tinder' so this is most useless bc of lock-in
But the dunking seems to overlook the genuine problems with modern dating that didn't exist in the past. I find that it's very easy to mindlessly swipe a thousand people on an app and suddenly end up with more matches than I have the energy and attention span to process. If there was an easy way to turn this "inbox" (which is really just one step above my Gmail spam folder) into an actionable database, that could have real value in a world where dating happens stochastically through apps.
Separately, it isn't weird at all to keep some sort of track of your dating life. Past generations had the "little black book," basically a romantic rolodex. I've never used one but who's to say I couldn't benefit from a digital version that lives in my phone?
Most of all, a commenter here that is since deleted said something I think is apt: "I think the number one problem with online dating is not managing all the people. It's forcing yourself to keep the number of active pursuits low enough to manage. If you don't kind of commit to seeing if someone is going to pan out, then they won't." This is of course the actual solution to the problem I experience with modern dating. The only downside is that, unlike downloading an app, it requires that I change how I think and behave.