This is a great post. I’m thankful that many of the comments here reminded me why this website’s comments section is not worth reading, ceaseless negativity. Not wasting any more time reading them!
No, they're correct. I was downvoted for a reply to a comment further down. I appreciate it. I visit the site mostly for the comments as well.
Some of the things the post mentions are possible to do and good and some are not. There's much to be grateful for yet there are still many problems to solve if we could focus as a society...
50/50 for me. I've had significantly impactful reads here, leading to experiments with new IDEs, to-do systems, ADHD management techniques, and insight into political ideologies I disagree with.
Whereas on Reddit for example it's just yelling at each other all the time.
I'm not the guy you're asking, but I would agree with "multiple technological paradigms away". We don't know how many, and we don't know what they are, and we don't know of any way to attack any of them yet. So that adds up to "very very far away".
My experience was extremely difficult and I think many people underestimate that unless you get really lucky early on, it’s a lot of work to seriously date.
To be honest I have a lot of the features that people think equal automatic success on a dating app but I would still go weeks, sometimes months without a match. Or worse, get matches but have nobody respond despite taking the time to come up with something funny or interesting to say (not just “hey”).
Something important I realized now that I’m out of it is to take breaks, sometimes long breaks, from any kind of “trying”, whether online or in-person. I took many breaks that were out of a place of being angry at myself for not being attractive or charismatic enough or whatever it was that was causing me to fail. But if I could do it over again, I’d be telling myself that I’m getting tired of this right now, and that’s okay. I’ll put it away for a few weeks or months or even years if I felt I needed that time. Then try again.
After finding my partner on Hinge (following years of dating apps, setups, and in-person approaches), I've reflected on this journey. Despite the countless disappointing dates, the 3-year struggle ultimately proved worthwhile.
However, I'm troubled by how profit motives distort online dating. The business model incentivizes engagement over meaningful connections, creating a system where genuine relationships feel like marketing bait for swipe addiction.
Hinge worked best for me and several friends, but I suspect its designers know how to better facilitate connections—improvements they avoid implementing because they would hurt revenue.
This has sparked my interest in creating an open-source, non-profit dating platform—one designed to address loneliness without answering to shareholders who prioritize metrics over human well-being.
I’m not sure that I’ll ever go through with it but I think it would be a worthwhile project to consider.
I think it's a fantastic idea! Having met 90% of my girlfriends through dating apps, I've watched them all gradually morph into Tinder clones with dark patterns and steep monthly fees ($20-$50). It's terrifying to think you might never meet your future spouse because you accidentally swiped left on a touchscreen.
I used to really like OkCupid. Old school OkC reminded me of Bantr from Ted Lasso, it was more personality-driven. You'd answer hundreds of questions and see compatibility scores with people nearby. Even though that might be a questionable metric (I actually enjoy dating people different from me), it was interesting to sort by inverse and see who I was supposedly incompatible with.
What I love most about meeting through apps is how low-pressure it feels. There's no second-guessing about whether they're interested, if they're single, or worrying that you're bothering them. A dating app that actually tries to help people connect instead of sucking us dry through backtrack fees would be amazing.
I have no knowledge of the non-profit space, how would you initially fund something like that?
A non-profit dating platform probably means you don’t charge much- which initially seems good, but it probably also means you’ll attract a bunch of users who aren’t serious because they have nothing at risk. So the people who are seriously looking for a relationship will be lost in all the casual users. Sure, you could make people deposit a bunch of money to prove they’re serious but you’ll lose all your users.
If you can figure out how to select people seriously looking for a relationship without becoming a pay to play app then it would be popular. But so far nobody knows how to do that. Or maybe someone does know but they won’t do it because there’s no profit in it.
Another idea I had to play a role in solving that issue (not that I’ve really thought too deeply about it yet) is, similar to how the free version of Hinge works, greatly limiting the amount of likes you can send in a day. Perhaps with greater limit for women since all data shows that men need to send many times more likes for much fewer matches. However, there is no paid tier where you get more like or anything like that, obviously. Because then it would be just like every other app.
Is it possible to root out everyone who “isn’t serious”? Definitely not, but I think there’s a lot more that can be done when you remove a profit motive.
Yes. Make it a one time payment that is sufficiently large and you remove the pressure to retain users. In fact, it would be the opposite; find a great match as soon as possible to get the user off your platform.
That is the case, but practically this entire comment section is about how the usual dating apps suck. GP was commenting about how they hoped they could build a better app, and I was pointing out an issue that is likely to keep it from being successful.
I appreciate your empathetic need to help, but the answer is not more tech, no matter how that tech is funded. It's less tech. As a species we have to return to more local life where we grow up knowing those around us, including the opposite sex, and pair off that way. Humans did not evolve to live in gigantic cities of millions of people and be able to select mates from the entire dating app population (I include Facebook and Instagram in that). The way our instincts want to select mates works best in local groups, like how we lived as a species thousands of years ago.
> As a species we have to return to more local life where we grow up knowing those around us
This only works if the local people accept you. I know many LGBT people who aren’t accepted by those around them. Personally, I left everyone I grew up around because I couldn’t find friends or work.
Yeah, having a community of people that love each other and can learn about one person's relative over here who might be a good match for another person's relative over there is a nice way to facilitate such networking.
Of course, those kinds of situations depend on the goodness of those doing the matchmaking, i.e. there must be no money changing hands (to coerce anyone), and the happiness of the potential couple must be the primary goal.
Getting one's selfish motives out of any interaction is a root problem in the human world, especially in many old-world cultures where women's rights don't count for shit. The sooner those old cultures are reformed, the better.
I don’t completely disagree with you but I don’t think that’s very realistic to be honest.
Plus, in my experience, I felt very similarly in that I wanted to meet someone in “real life”. That felt important to me, to have some kind of story about how the relationship began that wasn’t “we met on Hinge”.
But after meeting that person, after so much trying and heartbreak and struggle, I realized how much I don’t care at all how we met. Just that I’m so happy to have them in my life.
Meeting in person is awesome, but having a companion who feels like your person isn’t diminished because you met on a dating app in my opinion and experience.
Not much compared to Patreon but if you watch more than a couple YouTubers can you reasonably be expected to subscribe to every YouTuber’s Patreon?
I don’t doubt any given YouTube premium subscription provides a negligible amount of income to a creator but watching their videos ad-blocked provides nothing.
(I use ublock on Zen and do not make enough money to be a Patron of anyone unfortunately)
I've seen a Linus Tech Tips video where the seekbar was very colorful due to SponsorBlock, someone added all the sponsors, product placement and tangents into it.
I admit I've marked segments on videos, e.g. skipping cringy jokes when I find the presenter annoying.
To clarify, are you saying that these segments were marked incorrectly?
If so, then it is a plain case of internet vandalism. I would just ignore such segments.
But if the segments were marked correctly and there were too many of them in the video, that is the problem caused by the video creator, not by the community which publishes the segments.
They were marked correctly, but I had a feeling someone was sufficiently annoyed with all the fluff in the video, that they went to the trouble. I think it was the only time I saw an LTT video with that many SB segments.
Really? I've been using sponsorblock for years and I don't feel like I've ever seen any of that. It's pretty rare for me to go back and watch something that was skipped, and when I do, I generally feel that skipping it was the right call.
Youtube has recently added a premium feature where if you skip ahead 5s, it will prompt you to skip an entire "commonly skipped" section. It seems like they've picked up on sponsorblock and are making it a feature for Premium users.
I don't think I've ever had it work on my pixel. I tap ahead through all ad reads I've already decided not to buy, and it's much more reliable to just skip ahead 30s/90s/etc than hope the prompt appears. I've seen the prompt maybe 5 times.
> If you're a YouTube Premium member, you won't see ads, so we share your monthly membership fee with creators. Best of all, the more videos you watch from your favorite creators, the more money they make.
Looking at my YouTube watch video, and that creates get about 45%, it tends to be about 50p an hour (I watch about 12 hours a month and pay about £12) so say 10 cents per 10 minute video.
From what I see ad views tend to net about $1-5 per thousand views, or well under 1 cent per video.
Ie a creator makes 20-100 times as much per view from me rather than a typical viewer.
Im not sure how it works if you end up watching music on repeat for 200 hours a month and 10 hours of new content. Probably fairer than the way Spotify distributes my subscription fee.
It’s my understanding that in addition to the cameras it also uses the sensors already built in to the car which would include blind-spot detection, no?
Some cars that have BSD it will work with. My car uses it, but don't forget the lane changes are not automated by default. A user must turn on the blinker and nudge the wheel by default. Positive BSD sensors read on CAN-BUS will be read by OP and it will not perform the rest of the lane change. This is how it works on my car (albeit, I don't run default so I just need the blinker).
It says my car is supported and my car doesn't have any blind-spot detection, nor does the requirements list that as needed, so maybe it's optional but not required?
