OkCupid was different, before it got bought by match. The single best thing that could be done for the dating world and fertility rates would be to hire the MIT/Harvard math guys from the original OkC and restart it as a not-for-profit dating app.
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People have tried making original OKCupid style apps, and they fail. Tinder et al are almost definitely worse, but they are also easier. It is always going to be hard for the better-but-harder option to win against the worse-but-easier option. This is exacerbated by the fact that dating apps are perhaps the service that is more reliant on network effects than any other thing. Even if one individual decides that they are willing to do the work for the better-but-harder thing, if not enough other people make the same decision, it will fail.
> People have tried making original OKCupid style apps, and they fail
That's why you need the original founders to make it again. OkCupid was a site made by 140 IQ dudes in Boston for 100+ IQ types. It was not an easy problem. It succeeded because the match % was uncannily accurate. Loss of the site (acquisition and tinderification by Match) was like the sack of Rome.
I too really miss the old OKCupid. I was on it from near its inception (around 2003 I think) until they started requiring phone numbers (2020 I think) and I agree its decline was tragic.
That said, I think the world has changed in ways that would make it difficult to replicate now. For one thing, imagine all the AI bot profiles that would exist. For another, the legal environment has only gotten worse in the sense that entities like Match will try to sue you for infringing on some bogus patent.
Also, let's not forget that the takeover by Match was a deliberate choice: those "140 IQ dudes" chose to sell out their nice product to a big evil company although it was pretty foreseeable they were going to ruin it. Who's to say that wouldn't happen again?
That's why you gotta make it a not-for-profit.
OKCupid, back in the day, was stunningly good. Back in 2011 I spent a huge amount of time filling out my profile, and OKC found me 5 matches with >98%.
I married one of them and 2 of them are still close friends.
Arranged marriages would be a step up from dating apps for most people, I think.
There's something to be said for a traditional matchmaker. It's one of those hard things that might not scale.
It wouldn't do a SaaS company hockey stick growth, but one easily imagines a concierge service where theres a network of shadchante/ aka yenta that gets to know you, enters you as a person into the database, and the system figures out a good set of matches to introduce people to each other. The limitation is in measuring human beings. That makes people really uncomfortable.
The era of rebuilding chesterton's fence.
A lot of our preferences and strategies in the reproduction game were formed over many generations and are encoded in our DNA. Modern day inventions have definitely changed the rules, things like DNA tests, Apps, birth control, throwing a lot of previously successful strategies into disarray. It's going to take a while for our DNA to catch up.
manifold.love, which is heavily modeled on the old-school OKCupid, is back from hiatus as of March 2025: https://sinclairchen.substack.com/p/manifold-love-is-back
Sadly not very active or funded, right now.
Didn't all those guys go to Match and make it the company it is today in the mid 2010s?
No, Chris Coyne, Max Krohn, Christian Rudder never joined Match. I don't know where you're getting that from. Match was already a behemoth before buying OkCupid. You can check their linkedin's. Wide range of ventures like Keybase.
OKStupid suffered from the "less space than a Nomad, lame" levels of cluelessness because it tried all this math stuff matching on statistical models of personality, rather than the one criterion actual humans use to select a partner: are they hot?
That's why Tinder won. It's an easy way to filter out the unsexy.
I would prefer to date an averagely-physical-attractive person whom I enjoy spending time with than a very physically attractive person whose personality I dislike.
Many women are hot or at least have some attractive features while only few men have a good appearance so we would be extinct by now if it worked this way. At least for selecting men there should be some other criterion.
For much of human history it has worked this way: the king got many wives, nobles got a few, but most men didn't marry at all. They labored and fought and died without getting to pass on their genes. This is also why men are such status seekers and risk takers: our ancestors had to prove their worth for a chance at getting laid. The risks were great, but the payoff was huge and if you failed, it's not like your genes gained any advantage by playing it safe.
I doubt it is true, at least in Russian history a typical peasant had a wife and children. Not being married was considered bad and there were arranged marriages. Also poor men probably had a low chance of "getting laid" as girls were interested only in lifetime long relationship.
I even tried to verify this by looking through old registries available online (where marriages and births were recorded), some of which are digitized and OCR'd by Yandex, but it seems that they do not have a list of unmarried people. Although the birth records typically mention whether a child is "legally born" (within a marriage) or not.
> > For much of human history [polygyny]
> I doubt it is true
GP is correct. Human history spans hundreds of thousands of years. You are talking about the most recent ca. 5000 years of enforced monogamy through the social/cultural institution of marriage, but this era has come to an end and we are reverting to the natural state of affairs (polygyny) again.
It's just a mismatch of goals: are you looking for a partner, or a date?