I miss a crucial consideration in the You’re In the Wrong Place part: Successful places for meeting mates in the past (work, school, club...) in the past were not about dating.
As I have said a few times before: Dating apps are broken because of misaligned incentives (see more in the link).
I think the best dating apps are not “dating” apps—you can’t have plausible deniability if the app has “dating” in the name. But every community or forum app automatically becomes a dating app because people can observe many potential mates and interact with them. If you want to build an app where people date successfully, you
may not call it that!
you need to offer a way to find communities that share some interests (and hopefully locality) and
there should be a path to getting closer incrementally (though this is optional—if people meet in person, there will be ways for that to happen organically.
Of course, this will fail if there is only one gender in each forum, but there may be a plausible deniable way to balance gender at least somewhat.
I miss a crucial consideration in the You’re In the Wrong Place part: Successful places for meeting mates in the past (work, school, club...) in the past were not about dating.
As I have said a few times before: Dating apps are broken because of misaligned incentives (see more in the link).
I think the best dating apps are not “dating” apps—you can’t have plausible deniability if the app has “dating” in the name. But every community or forum app automatically becomes a dating app because people can observe many potential mates and interact with them. If you want to build an app where people date successfully, you
may not call it that!
you need to offer a way to find communities that share some interests (and hopefully locality) and
there should be a path to getting closer incrementally (though this is optional—if people meet in person, there will be ways for that to happen organically.
Of course, this will fail if there is only one gender in each forum, but there may be a plausible deniable way to balance gender at least somewhat.