The author misunderstands the business model here. It is precisely this market asymmetry that makes the platform any $$$. Otherwise what incentive do guys have to spend money on advertising their profiles.
If anything, the evidence presented would suggest that the market is skewed in the favor of men already. Otherwise women:men would be 1:1.
I propose disrupting the space with even more aggressively Darwinian design. Who wants to join me? (only half joking—seriously reach out)
> I propose disrupting the space with even more aggressively Darwinian design.
I'm curious what you'd do to make these apps more darwinian than they already are.
I'm only going to use Tinder as an example since I think it's the most market-efficient by far, and I'm going to assume for the sake of argument that the stereotypes about gendered market forces are true. A few hypothetical ideas, in order of extremity.
1) all women get gold features (see who likes you, unlimited swipes, etc for free)
2) only men are subject to double opt in (eg women can message without having been liked by the recipient)
3) double-opt-in is based on something ELO-ish. The height of the contact initiation barrier is proportional to your attractiveness as determined by the crowd (although this creates some extremely perverse incentives for large-scale deception).
I think all of these rules would exacerbate the existing dynamic, and I'm unconvinced that's healthy for either side. As others in the thread have pointed out, I don't know any single women who are having the time of their lives on dating apps, despite the 80/20 hypotheses etc. They may have a huge statistical selection advantage, but in practice that seems to be like hunting for the single best meal of your life on a 10 mile long, all-you-can-eat buffet of food you mostly don't care about.
Which is the source of my pet hunch:
All dating apps are effectively identical, having converged on a pitifully vanilla product that's easy to monetize and scale, and that prioritizes volume over fit. This is good for companies, but bad for individuals. Large scale online communities erode the advantages of actual individuality in favor of performed individuality in a way that ends up feeling dehumanizing for everyone.
Look at reddit: the popular subreddits have a monoculture that's predictable, uninteresting, and easily gamed, and so people game it, making it worse, until it's parroted itself into a tired caricature. Meanwhile, tiny subreddits exist with smaller tribe dynamics and have much more robust, varied, and interesting experiences.
IMO the thing we actually need is subreddits for dating, so that people can self-select into smaller, higher-signal tribes, rather than pretending that everyone should have to card sort everyone in their metropolitan area.
In a way, this is a different kind of darwinian: encouraging finches to lean into divergence.
> 1) all women get gold features (see who likes you, unlimited swipes, etc for free)
> 2) only men are subject to double opt in (eg women can message without having been liked by the recipient)
> 3) double-opt-in is based on something ELO-ish. The height of the contact initiation barrier is proportional to your attractiveness as determined by the crowd (although this creates some extremely perverse incentives for large-scale deception).
These are all great suggestions. Yes, they should be implemented. Yes, they will increase the female:male ratio and bring in more dollars.
The economics of it is to find a balance between selectivity and availability. You can make the world's most exclusive dating app, but then you have no users. You can make the world's easiest dating app (extreme example: people automatically match at random), but then you can't monetize the male users and female users leave. These constraints create the vanillaness of popular dating apps you mentioned. They all converge to the same business model.
I don't think it is completely efficient though. One thing to optimize for would be reducing the chance of a failed date. I would suggest additional next gen screening mechanisms like potentially a full 3D reconstruction of a person's body/skeleton, maybe some AR, use your imagination, there's a lot of ways to go with this with varying levels of dystopianism. For one mild example, if someone's height in person is a dealbreaker, then the AR ghost would reveal this in spite of a likely frauded height stat.
> This is good for companies, but bad for individuals
I'm speaking from an business/marketing perspective. Obviously this is not "good" for the users. The objective is to get more men to press the Pay button--there is literally no other reason to make a dating app. The "good" thing for people is to not use dating apps, get married young, and have children. You have leave your morality at the door, like AAA game dev or high frequency trading. Nobody should waste their life playing video games or gambling in financial markets, but if they do, let's oblige them and do business.
If anything, the evidence presented would suggest that the market is skewed in the favor of men already. Otherwise women:men would be 1:1.
I propose disrupting the space with even more aggressively Darwinian design. Who wants to join me? (only half joking—seriously reach out)