There are a lot of apps with different spins on dating like this. For example I think one (Bumble?) only lets women send messages, to try and combat the problem of men just spamming every single woman on the site. The article treats apps as all basically the same though.
The core problem you're going to have with bringing back text is that a lot of people no longer have / use regular desktop computers at home, they only use smartphones and have no interest in changing that. But phones are terrible at text input. Talking to your phone keyboard never took off for some reason, and entering lots of text on a glass screen is still hard despite lots of investment in making it better.
If you look at the trend of the internet over time, it has been consistently towards less text:
- Mid 1990s, text heavy websites with a carefully defined organization. Dating sites expect you to fill out complex text based profiles.
- End of 90s/early 2000s, blogs (text minus the organization). Profiles get less text heavy.
- Mid 2000s, social networks appear. Text+image posts, where text is only a few paragraphs at most. Character limits mean you are forbidden from making high effort posts. Text is still the primary element in a timeline object though, and images (if any) appear underneath it. OKCupid appears and the text profile here is largely an afterthought, it gets popular due to the quizzes and match percentages that are computed from them.
- 2010: Instagram. Achieves huge success by de-emphasizing text even more. Now the image is the primary thing and the text is either missing entirely, or a sentence/few words at most.
- 2012: Tinder does the same move for dating and also enjoys huge success.
- 2016: TikTok. Words are finally banished for good.
Fundamentally most people are not writers and don't want to write. When the internet required you to be a writer to take part it was restricted to small numbers of articulate people with good typing skills, and the silent majority that just consumed content. Dating sites were practically synonymous with long distance relationships because so few people used them. With the rise of smartphone cameras content creation became available to everyone and now it's taken for granted that a good dating service should have so many people you can't even reach the end, and that they will come from a wide cross-section of society. The cost of that ubiquity is getting rid of the words.
So yes, you could make such a site. It would have very few users and would need to be marketed as primarily a way to make long distance relationships.
To fix that you'd have to change the game in some way, for example, convincing people to talk to their phones out loud, at least during the setup phase. Modern speech recognition and TTS is so good that combined with LLMs maybe you can actually pull that off, but that's where the focus would have to be.
Suppose profile creation is possible (and marketed to) only on a desktop browser and messaging on mobile is with voice messages, no TTS needed. Do you think this could work?
The niche is small, this won't be a next Tinder, but in absolute numbers it's still a large number of users.
The core problem you're going to have with bringing back text is that a lot of people no longer have / use regular desktop computers at home, they only use smartphones and have no interest in changing that. But phones are terrible at text input. Talking to your phone keyboard never took off for some reason, and entering lots of text on a glass screen is still hard despite lots of investment in making it better.
If you look at the trend of the internet over time, it has been consistently towards less text:
- Mid 1990s, text heavy websites with a carefully defined organization. Dating sites expect you to fill out complex text based profiles.
- End of 90s/early 2000s, blogs (text minus the organization). Profiles get less text heavy.
- Mid 2000s, social networks appear. Text+image posts, where text is only a few paragraphs at most. Character limits mean you are forbidden from making high effort posts. Text is still the primary element in a timeline object though, and images (if any) appear underneath it. OKCupid appears and the text profile here is largely an afterthought, it gets popular due to the quizzes and match percentages that are computed from them.
- 2010: Instagram. Achieves huge success by de-emphasizing text even more. Now the image is the primary thing and the text is either missing entirely, or a sentence/few words at most.
- 2012: Tinder does the same move for dating and also enjoys huge success.
- 2016: TikTok. Words are finally banished for good.
Fundamentally most people are not writers and don't want to write. When the internet required you to be a writer to take part it was restricted to small numbers of articulate people with good typing skills, and the silent majority that just consumed content. Dating sites were practically synonymous with long distance relationships because so few people used them. With the rise of smartphone cameras content creation became available to everyone and now it's taken for granted that a good dating service should have so many people you can't even reach the end, and that they will come from a wide cross-section of society. The cost of that ubiquity is getting rid of the words.
So yes, you could make such a site. It would have very few users and would need to be marketed as primarily a way to make long distance relationships.
To fix that you'd have to change the game in some way, for example, convincing people to talk to their phones out loud, at least during the setup phase. Modern speech recognition and TTS is so good that combined with LLMs maybe you can actually pull that off, but that's where the focus would have to be.