You might be one of the many people out there endlessly swiping, wondering why it never works out for you. You might even be one of the chumps paying for one of tinders ever growing list of increasingly pricy, increasingly worthless premium subscriptions.
You might be swiping right thousands of times only to end up with a handful of matches, or you might be a girl swarmed with thousands of low quality matches that you have no interest in and are ready to throw money at them to get higher quality matches and finally find someone who’s first message isn’t “wanna fuck?”.
You might be wondering why it is that these dating apps have been around for decades now and yet they somehow are less effective at actually matching people than when they were first invented. And theres 2 very good reasons for that.
#1: They’re ineffective by design.
#2: They’re all owned by the same evil megacorporation.
Yes, you heard that right. All of the dating apps you know and hate are owned by a single conglomerate: Match Group.
You see, back in the day, Match.com gobbled them all up. It violated anti-trust law, and created the single largest conglomerate that controls what goes on between your legs and singlehandedly became the gatekeepers of what is and isn’t acceptable in dating online, and how people should and shouldn’t go about it. They progressively overhauled every single one of the dating apps they own to model them after Tinder’s mindless strategy, and implemented a slow boil of micro-transactions, year on end, to amplify the disparity between the genders and intentionally cause distrust and break down discourse.
Why? For Profit.
They had the data that showed the more they kept people on the treadmill and amplified the disparity that keeps men desperate and women self assured, the more they would profit. They knew that if they left men starved for choices, they would throw money at Match group in an attempt to gain more choices and swipe right on everything that moves, amplifying the second prong of their strategy, to pit those men against the women and overwhelm them with choice overload.
Knowing that those women would gladly pay for a premium subscription to filter those matches to get them the superior man they truly deserved… A false notion that was created artificially by a sea of thousands of men in their inbox creating a sense of value, that would instantly be shattered the moment any one of those men should be expected to pay attention to them for more than a text or 2.
I remember it very clearly, a conversation I had with a woman in London, as she begged me to have sex with her after I told her to fuck off. She told me she had 1000 men in her inbox and could only pay each one so much attention; I told her those men mean nothing to me and I deserved better than to be treated as 1000th of a man. She valued me as much as the relative worth of one swipe, instead of the worth of one man, and when she realized her mistake too late, she had already lost my respect, and my interest.
Too many women go down this road, thinking their biggest mistake is having sex too soon because a man loses interest the moment he has it. But the truth is, the man was never that interested to begin with, he was just forced into a situation where desperation caused him to jump at any chance he could get, and when the desperation faded away all that was left is the disappointment of being left with the prospect of a woman who doesn’t value his time, energy, and is generally unenjoyable to be around, with the added disappointment of often unenjoyable sex that doesn’t make the time investment worth it.
One of Match Groups current subsidiaries, Okcupid used to publish data before they were acquired by match group, and the statistics are enlightening. Unfortunately, the only way to see that data now is through the wayback machine, because Match Group has suppressed it knowing if people knew the truth, their insidious business practices would be exposed. But Match group has been gaslighting their entire user base, both men and women, for over a decade.
DESIGNING THE IDEAL DATING APP FOR THE 2020s
Its clear that to fix this problem, we need more than just an algorithmic overhaul, we need a paradigm shift in the way people do dating. We need a return to a more personal touch, as a new generation is growing up without any memory of how dating used to be before the internet, and lacking the social skills that comes with trial and error of approaching members of the opposite sex from outside your own bedroom. Ideally, we’d need an app that replicates this personal touch in the digital sphere and disallows the kind of mentality that feeds into the algorithmic sink designed to destroy our interactions with each other and leave us all just a statistic instead of an actual person.
My solution? Remove texting altogether. Create an app where people can actually be heard, by removing the ability to do anything else. Voice notes only.
WHY WILL THIS WORK?
No more copying and pasting the same lazy message to 1000 women.
No more onlyfans girls and spambots bothering you with suspicious links.
No more gender swapped catfishes, at least ones that aren’t gifted impressionists.
No more low effort messages, or responding with “lol” or “k”. You have to actually take the time to respond. But in return, you get to be treated like a human being.
If you want to say something pervy or gross, you have to actually hear how stupid it sounds out loud from your own message, before you send the message.
And most importantly of all, you get to actually hear the persons voice, get a feel for their personality, and establish empathy for them as a human being.
SO HOW LONG WILL IT TAKE AND HOW MUCH WILL IT COST?
I’ve already been developing this app in React Native for a while. There will be an app for iOS, and Android as well as a mobile web app. I plan to make it free and donation funded, but there is a large overhead that comes from sending voice notes which obviously require a much higher volume of data transfer than just texts. I may need to put some limits on it or monetize it in some kind of way since servers cost money, but I don’t want to do so in any way that detracts from or limits the success rate of users since I find the idea of paywalling love and sex to be disgusting.
As for an ETA on release, expect it to take a while. Like everything I do, I have so many projects on the books both personal and client based, so I have very little of my own free time to dedicate to stuff like this. If you are a React Native developer and are interested in helping out because you believe in the concept, feel free to reach out. I’d love all the help I can get on this.