Dating Apps That Could Exist
I Can Deal With That
Instead of a profile that talks about how great you are, your profile consists of the three worst things about dating you, ideally verified by friends and exes. Then you match with people based on who can best tolerate your downsides. Because in a world where everyone wants to date someone smart and funny and beautiful, and everyone has flaws that their partners will inevitably have to put up with, maybe the real underlying model of matching is that you end up with the person whose particular brand of bullshit you're unusually well-suited to tolerate.
It's Just Us
Did you ever play boggle? It's a pretty lovely word game where you try to find words in a randomized grid that other players have not found. Every time you get a word that someone else also found, you both cross it off. You only get points for finding words that nobody else did.
One problem with modern dating apps is that 124245 people write that their hobby is brunch or their love language is sarcasm or they want to go to Japan. This new app would not allow you to enter text (or add an image) that had already been given more than a small number of times by other app-users.
Yes this would alienate 99% of users and make them leave the app but THIS IS A BONUS, the people who are left will be much more interesting.
Content-ment
Ok yeah this one might actually work as a business model, which is sad: your profile is just five of your favorite books/movies/games/etc, each of which link out to an amazon referral.
People would INEVITABLY click those links in order to be able to talk to you about the things you're into, and then we have an ad-free subscription-free dating app that actually makes money.
Choosy
This is kind of depressing and awful but I think it might actually work: instead of seeing just one person at a time and swiping yes/no on them, the app shows you a grid of four people and you can only pick one. The other three are gone forever, you never get shown them again.
I think this would activate some primal part of people's brains that makes us want to feel like we're being competed over, because you're choosing among a selection, even if those four people have not (in fact) already shown any interest in you. Also the monetization model is pretty obvious, users can pay to choose extra matches from a given set.
Proof Of Work
I am also somewhat-serious about this one: dating app swipes are too "cheap", and don't signal anything. In this app, each user would set a multiple-choice question, and in order to match with someone you have to get their question right.