If you live in a Rural area for instance, and work near your home your chances of finding a mate are pretty slim. Especially in those small towns where everyone pairs up in their late teens and stays together. There are people who can go for months at a time without meeting anyone new.

Then there are the people who just can't strike up a conversation or pick up on people. I don't say this disparagingly, approaching someone of the opposite sex can be downright terrifying. Hitting on a taken/married person is not only a bit embarrassing but it's a subtle reminder that you are alone and everyone else is taken (at least that's what you tell yourself).

Finally, on the other end of the curve are those folks looking for casual sex. Dating apps like Tinder are fast and easy, they become a buffet table of human beings you can peruse anytime you want. Without laying any judgement on it you have to admit that it is a problem being solved.

I've been married for many years, but I can easily see myself using Tinder back in my single days. Once you get out of school, meeting people is a lot more difficult.

My experience with online dating wasn't that it "solves" dating, nor does it make dating fun all of the sudden, but the people I met via online dating were better matches than the people I was meeting elsewhere. I've had friends who had the opposite experience. I'd say online dating is worth trying if you are single just to see what it is like.

And, in SF at least, there is certainly no stigma associated with it. Most people I know who are actively dating at least casually use one dating site/app.

ie. willing to and expecting to data

    does dating company/apps actually solve
    any problem that people are having?

[1] Half-jokingly, you could summarize this as a rabidly liberal ivy-educated tenure-track professor, as those are the people with whom I've had the most chemistry.

Even with OKCupid. Women get >10 messages a day and men maybe 10 a year if it's a good year.

I think Tinder is the most innovative one in this sector, because it acknowledges the number-game thing and doesn't bother with unneeded fluff.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20020903191409/http://www.adam4a...

Edit: changed to reflect actual date of a4a going live.

That, and Tinder understands that people prefer being shallow. So it optimizes for that.

But I think Tinder could be optimized for real (long-term?) dating.

I mean 90% of the women on Tinder have nice pictures. But My experience has shown that I have a specific taste, that doesn't have much to do with looks. So if I first choose by photo and later by, lets say, character similarities, Tinder is wasting my time.

Something like the matching of OKCupid would be nice. So I don't "like" 90% of the women there just to find out that only 5% of them were what I wanted.

Plus, as OKCupid demonstrated pretty well, people really choose almost entirely based on photos. Add in decision paralysis and an overwhelming number of choices, and optimizing around anything but incredible shallowness starts to seem silly.

Incidentally, I've tried a series of other dating sites that try to optimize around different things. In general, the userbases are quite small.

I've seen all the Tinder-Swipe Apps, because of this. "Just swipe all women in your area right and choose afterwards"

At the end you sit there and have to talk with 20 women just to find out that only 1-2 of them don't think you're a weirdo. :D

I didn't have the impression that people I talked to cheated on the OKCupid questions.

But I had the impression that most questions are irrelevant.

You might want to loosen that allowance a little bit. I'm sure they meant "intelligent", not literally a professor.

The fact that dating apps were one of the first popular uses of the internet for ordinary people (the big players mostly date back to the dotcom era) says a lot about the value proposition. The problem is, it's very hard to increase the value beyond what the current players already offer.

edit: The "blind dates from your mother" strikes home with me. My own kids are 21 now. It's very tempting to set them up! I was really excited when my daughter got her first professional-in-her-field job recently, just on the off chance she'd meet someone who really shares her interests. Sigh.

Here's an idea for a dating app: Successfully identify what people want in a relationship, match based on that. Alice might be looking for a monogamous relationship, Bob might be looking for a one-night stand. The system should not match the two together unless one of them changes their minds.

For example, regarding a relationship vs. one night stand, there are the questions "About how long do you want your next relationship to last?" and "Say you've started seeing someone you really like. As far as you're concerned, how long will it take before you have sex?". Assuming both parties have answered those questions (and done so honestly) it's pretty easy to get a good idea of what each side's intentions are.

Also, I believe that if you pay for their A-list feature, you can actually filter out profiles based on answers to these questions, rather than needing to compare answers manually.

Maybe it's just Orlando, but most of the gay folks I've talked to were very NOT monogamous, but many pretended to be for the sake of managing perceptions and increasing their chances of being contacted.

It's difficult enough to meet people for me, but even after that you have to find out if you're single and if they're looking to date at all.

On the other hand, I also like the idea that relationships should be natural, but I can definitely see the appeal of using a dating app if you have already decided you want to be in a relationship.

I find this really interesting, as it's a meme that I think most adults still share. I'm interpreting your use of 'natural' as meaning something like 'meeting someone by some degree of chance, in-person, in a scenario where finding a relationship is not, nominally at least, the primary reason for being there.

Looking to meet complete strangers on the internet with the intention of starting a relationship vs looking to meet complete strangers in-person, be that at a bar, work, night-class, sporting activity etc, with the same intention is fundamentally the same concept. Only the implementation details differ.

But there's a big, obvious, cultural difference. I wonder if that difference stems from the fact that one cannot mask one's ultimate intention when going the online route. In the in-person scenario, you always have the convenient social get-out that you were just there to enjoy whatever the activity is, and it's just a happy coincidence that you happened to meet someone whilst doing it. It's coy, relies on chance, and fits in with a traditionally romantic narrative.

With online dating, you admit straight up that your sole intention is to meet people and find a relationship - it's therefore explicitly implied that there's a degree of trial and error, and from the outset it's acknowledged that it's a numbers game with certain attributes - shared traits, hobbies, interests - feeding into a formula that defines whether or not we think a relationship is worth pursuing. I think it's simply this directness, and this exposure, that's seen as course and not fitting with our social/cultural model of how romance 'should work'.

I wonder if it'll always be this way? I'd propose that in the future it will be to some degree, but we'll just be somewhere else on the curve. Perhaps with tomorrow's dating services, we'll look back on today's online dating apps and view them as quite lo-fi and quaint - with their low-accuracy matching algorithms leaving so much to chance, making you do so much of the work, etc - i.e. just how we compare online dating vs meeting people in bars, today.

I guess we'll see how that concept of a 'naturally occurring relationship' evolves over time as societies and cultures shift.

My reasoning has little to do with romance and more to do with practicality. To me, people end up in good relationships because they can't imagine themselves without that person. On the other hand, people who are only looking to cure their loneliness usually end up with poor relationships.

I speculate this is because people who are lonely are more likely to "settle" whereas people who aren't looking but happen to find someone can always just leave the relationship with little difficulty and so if the relationship lasts it's due to compatibility.

I hope that didn't offend anyone, I have no issue with people going to bars or whatever to meet other people. This is just the way I like to live my life.

Personally, I find the lack of ambiguity about intentions to be a plus to meeting people through dating sites.

That's much easier said than done. Maybe it's easy for you, but from most of the people I've seen, including myself, when you have emotional involvement with something it's difficult not to be biased. It's easy to make excuses and convince yourself that you are doing the right thing. I think it was Stephen King who said it best, "We lie best when we lie to ourselves"

I'd actually say that you're way more likely to settle too early for someone you met "naturally" in real life than someone you matched with online or met due to dating purposefully. By purposefully dating you'll meet and "discover" many different people too find the one you're super-compatible with, by waiting to meet someone naturally you're more likely to settle with the first one that you "click" with.

Indeed this is also possible with "natural dating", if we consider natural dating to be the equivalent of online dating. I was trying to say that I'm against the idea of people thinking "I feel like I need to be in a relationship so I'm going to attempt to find someone to fulfill that need."

I think I am just against the idea that everyone needs to find someone or get married. From my experience, when two people who were not even thinking about relationships decide their lives are just much better if they are partners, they have a much higher chance of a lasting relationship or marriage.

Of course, I am fortunate because I am still young, and for people who are sure they want to start a family and are older, I can see why they would feel pressured to find someone, and all the power to them.

Hopefully that made sense. I actually agree that if someone were looking for a relationship, doing it online is much more efficient, especially with all the sites that use some scientific means of pairing people.