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

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.

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.

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

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.