> generic loser pile

Yes, the observation from someone in the industry is that the top 10-20% are "date bacon" and have no trouble meeting people, and everyone else is a loser.

Then there's the spam problem.

In my brief recent experience in the app world, spam wasn't a huge problem. Maybe it's worse for men, but the spam accounts and messages I saw were all vapid normies who I'd never click on. I got much less of that than weird (but unfortunately real) aggro dudes who wanted me to see their dicks. (Often by insisting we move to another messaging platform with less consent control)

OkCupid was great in those years. I remember how each person felt like a nuanced individual and not like the elevator pitch of a person.

Since then I've only been meeting people in real life. I agree that using tindr felt miserable and probably still does.

I have not used any dating app in the past decade. OKC was last platform, while in graduate school. I LOVED the "percent match" but across multiple profiles (over a few years) I learned how "to game" their system by only answering certain impactful (but not damaging) questions.

If you have not read Christian Rudder's "DATACLISM" book (he is a co-founder of Match group, writing on their data analytics blog), it is FULL of "human condition", via charts/diagrams/analysis.

My past two relationships have been via dating neighbors, which I do not actually recommend (as more successful).

OkCupid was awesome. I met my wife there ten years ago. We were a 93% match! Had many of the same (or similar) answers to the personality questions.

Interestingly, a few months before meeting my now wife, I dated a girl I met on Meetup who also happened to be on Match. Our relationship only lasted a few months. We were a 72% match or something like that. Go figure!

+1 for OkCupid. I met a lot of the most important persons there who even stayed friends. It is one of the sad examples of MBAs destroying an app they don't understand saying the "UX ix too tedious".

There was a post on HN once by a former OkCupid person who, as I read it, took a more nuanced view along the lines of: the market moved to cellphones and that kind of long form entry (or reading) isn't viable on a few-inch screen with point and grunt input.

Beyond an insider sharing the view, I find it compelling because it didn't require anyone to have been an idiot. I've certainly seen other effects that look like the widespread usage of cellphones dumbing down the internet in disappointing ways. ... and it explains why someone doesn't just recreate the magic that OkCupid had: they can't. For classic-OkCupid to exist the public needs widespread access to a communications tool suitable for sending things more nuanced than dick pics.

I think what also people miss - is that by OkCupid requiring long form essays. the demographic would tend to be educated college folks - quirky gals studying humanities, chemistry etc.

so you literally have a crowd of people who like reading, and are critical thinkers etc & most likely to be high earners too.

but like every thing - the power of the lowest common denominator rules ie endless swiping on who you think is hot.

this doesn't end with apps -- with forums gone -- you can hardly find places online where civilized discourse happens.

now everything is just for the 'gram. or to go viral on tiktok.

Competition is supposed to give us choice. Instead, when one competitor discovers a cheap trick, the rest have to follow suit to stay alive, or at least believe they do. Hence there are a half dozen dating apps that all offer the same fucking swipe right garbage. OKCupid was pretty good, before the ubiquity of smartphones.

In case of dating apps, the issue is that match.com owns all of them.

smartphones aren't the problem, it's that the same company owns all of them and has an incentive to milk their customers.

match.com doesn't own the local bar, and that's why it's probably a better way to get laid

The cheap trick is to buy your competitors

OkCupid was great in the early 2010s when you used it mainly on a website and before it was bought and enshittified by the Match group just like all other dating sites.

It seems like it would be easy to recreate that magic -- it's just a website after all -- but getting the requisite network effects would be pretty much impossible. And if by some miracle you did succeed, Match group would just buy it and ruin it.

Another +1 for okcupid. I met my wife through it.

Plenty of fish was the only good one. It sucked and did no matching at all. That meant there was an expectation that you basically exchange 2 messages and then meet in person. All the rest is bs: people are not the same in person as online, so the main job of a dating app is to get people in chairs in person asap

I tried that one in my last foray into online dating. It was how you describe: simple, no b.s. Only, it was pretty much dead and I quickly met up with the two active people on the site and abandoned it. (Slight exaggeration, I'm sure)