this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2024
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I've been thinking for a bit now that the only way to make a dating app that actually worked for its users would be one that you pay a single fee for up-front. Then there's no incentive to keep people on it forever: you already got their money. You'd actually want people to have good experiences on it so they get their friends to sign up.
The fee would probably have to be somewhat large, both because it would have to cover operating costs for the foreseeable future, and because it would discourage catfishers.
It might still work as like, a yearly subscription, which would mean more sustainable revenue. I wouldn't do any less than that. And no a la carte options to nickel and dime people with.
You'd also want to come down hard on account sharing and reselling, for obvious reasons.
Problem is, if you go to any venture capitalist with this idea, they'll probably fund it, but then immediately sell out to Match Group the split-second they make an offer, and then the enshittification would begin.
The only way to prevent that would be to entirely crowdfund it, or have some sort of collective ownership and governance so no single greedy bastard can sell out.
That would make business side incentives more aligned with the user side, but I could never see anything with a high barrier of entry accumulating enough users to actually be usable.
Maybe its free at first and as it grows in size and activity the cost goes up? That feels kinda sketchy
You could make it a location based service, and prices increase as the number of users in the area increases. This incentivizes people to sign up when there's not a lot of active users in your area because it's cheap/free. Then as more people in an area sign up, new users pay more to reflect the added value of the app.
But if your app was truly so great then the number of users would always be decreasing in a given area.
There's always people growing up and entering the dating pool
Not at the world's current replenishment rate...