I am frankly annoyed as to how starkly different the experience of dating apps is between the guys and the girls. The entire concept of dating apps sounds extremely superficial to me, judging people based on their best pictures and cheesy one line bio prompts, I don’t even know how people take these apps seriously. But I guess people are slowly starting to feel this stark difference, and many men I know are already quitting these apps and touching grass irl.
This is a very feeble attempt at thinking of a consumer social app of mine. Introducing DateRight, where you don’t swipe. You find your matches irl, think of it like Pokemon go. An AI algorithm matches you vaguely and a compass like interface points roughly in the direction of your “match”, which you can follow, like a modern day pirate following the red X mark on a map for treasure or something.
Once you are in proximity of your “match”, the UI will spaz out until you both are basically staring at each other, where you guys are supposed to exchange QR codes (app generated) to confirm you guys have met (if you’re into each other, that is). If you really don’t wanna talk to them, then you don’t have to exchange the QR in that case.
If you do end up exchanging, then the app UI will let you chat with each other. But over time the chat interface starts fading, and the only way for you to be able to chat longer is for you guys to meet again and exchange QR codes once again. This incentivizes irl dates instead of sitting on your asses at home and actually making memories. Each date make the fade animation longer.
Pitfalls of this app
There are obviously quite a damn few.
- How does this AI algorithm know what you like and don’t like in the first place when it comes to physical traits? Sure the users could fill a form and that could be enough for the database to vectorize the users and find alignment, but that would only quantify personality, not looks. We are all extremely human human beings after all, so looks do matter. Very hard to take looks into account when matching when the app is never designed to capture your looks preferences. Conventional dating apps do this through swipes, but that’s exactly what I am trying to avoid in the first place.
- What if your loml radar starts beeping and the other person turns out to be a creep? Obviously he/she knows you are close because his/her radar is also beeping, and in the unfortunate case he/she does figure out who you are, he/she will just follow you home and do bad things. Nuh uh. There should be a safe way for it to not come to this. A report button? A button that rejects the match from a distance and both radars stop beeping after? Have to think this through.
- Why the quirky UI which fades after a while? Sure the UI itself incentivizes meeting again, but nothing is incentivizing people to use this chat in the first place, they could always exchange numbers and migrate to whatsapp or something, where the interface doesn’t fade over time. So I need to figure out how to make them keep using the built in fading chat and not move away.