Five Years That Changed Dating
I think the 80&#x2F;20 problem - the top 80% of women matching with top 20% of men [1] - is a major issue preventing dating (not hookups) with current apps. Most of my guy friends who use Tinder swipe right very generously because they don&#x27;t match frequently, while my girl friends swipe conservatively since they match pretty much every other guy (or when they need a bit of an ego boost, they can just spam right swipes for a string of matches).<p>I believe the key problem is the high visibility of profile pictures, which makes it easy to stick to unrealistically high expectations for the physical attractiveness of people you&#x27;re willing to talk with. This is reinforced by the constant stream of pictures - when you&#x27;re swiping right on the couple of really attractive people every 15-20 profiles, it&#x27;s much easier to swipe left on people who aren&#x27;t unattractive to you, but just don&#x27;t reach that level &quot;ok this person is super hot&quot;. In other words, &quot;super interesting and decent-looking&quot;, while traditionally a good combination, probably doesn&#x27;t do particularly well on dating apps.<p>The 80&#x2F;20 problem, then, comes from the fact that guys swipe right more often than girls, so girls end up matching with a ton of top 20% great-looking guys and feel no need to swipe on the other 80% of guys even though they often never have conversations that go anywhere (at least that&#x27;s my impression from seeing the smokin hot dudes that my girl friends match with). To be honest, this seems fine for hookups, where you mostly care about physical appearance &#x2F; attraction. But for longer relationships, I think there&#x27;s a real lack of effective &quot;modern&quot; options.<p>What I&#x27;d like to see is an app where you don&#x27;t get to see any pictures until you&#x27;ve initiated a conversation (of some minimum length) with a person. So while browsing profiles, you just get a short bio and some demographic information. I also personally think it&#x27;d be nice to filter for certain broad categories (education - for example, same school for college-age folks, income, ethnicity, etc), because intuitively I think people tend to end up with people from similar overall backgrounds - but I can see how that could cause problems. Regardless, I think an app where you at least don&#x27;t see photos of the person you&#x27;re talking to until a certain amount of conversation would be great. It would deal with a number of issues:<p>1. the 80&#x2F;20 problem with respect getting any kind of conversation going is largely solved, as I believe that stems from people having profile pictures to quickly decide yes&#x2F;no<p>2. by showing photos at some point, you still take into account the importance of physical attraction, but this time a person&#x27;s image is backed by some level of existing rapport<p>3. you make a higher commitment to each person you talk to since you have to talk a certain amount to see what they look like<p>4. you&#x27;re more likely to match with people who have shared values and interests since you have to actually talk with them<p>5. people are more likely to send messages since without pictures, there&#x27;s never a feeling of &quot;oh this person is out of my league, no point sending a message&quot;<p>It&#x27;s not perfect but I think it&#x27;d be a good start for non-hookup dating apps compared to the current choices. (if you agree with my thoughts and have some spare time pls feel free to make something like that haha)<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@worstonlinedater&#x2F;tinder-experiments-ii-guys-unless-you-are-really-hot-you-are-probably-better-off-not-wasting-your-2ddf370a6e9a" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@worstonlinedater&#x2F;tinder-experiments-ii-g...</a> (not really a rigorous study but the reasoning makes sense)