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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   1506 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 3, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I had an idea for a social media app involving an actual social network, with reputation effects and stuff.

This started as me trying to figure out how to solve online dating. Because it's garbage, random people just pop up and say whatever they want and then are jerks and ghost people. Nobody trusts anybody, nobody is well-behaved. And to a large extent this is a problem in modern dating as a whole. In the past, people lived in smaller communities and you didn't just start dating some random stranger who none of your friends knew. Well, people sometimes did, but it was frowned upon. Anyone being a creep or making false promises permanently ruined their reputation, and the reputations of their friends who vouched for them.

So I was thinking of ways to try to adapt this into an online dating platform, where people would chat with each other and then give ratings which would build reputation. Even if you ultimately don't want to date someone, you could still say "this person is polite and kind, and didn't ask for bobs and vagene after one message" and then the app would match people based on similar profile interests AND reputation levels. So all the good people would only see each other and all the bots and trolls would only see each other, making a better experience for good-faith participants.

Then I started thinking about how people could game and exploit this, and bad-faith ratings could tank people who did nothing wrong, and also only interacting with people of the opposite sex would skew ratings while realistically you also want same-sex recommendations (a woman who is not sexually attracted to but trusts the judgement of these five men should pay attention to a man that all five of them also like). And if people are political then everyone of the same politics will like them more but people of the opposite politics will like them less, but you could maybe filter this into bubbles dynamically. And in fact, maybe it's a good thing if you enhance and enable filter bubbles where similar people pair up together. And in fact you could even build entire makeshift communities this way. And you could actually encourage trying to game the system... And the idea continued to evolve.

THE SOCIAL NETWORK APP

We start with something like a cross between omegle and a pen pal app. You fill out a profile of interests somewhat similar to a dating profile, but more focused on topics that would be interesting to talk about rather than dating specifics. Each day, you get paired with a random person, with weights towards your interests but still allowing some variance. You chat with them for the day, and then at the end of the day you're unmatched, and you rate each other on a couple of axes. How much you liked them and why. And the algorithm takes that into account. And you get xp for more chats and getting a better reputation score. You can see how you were rated but it's too late because you're unmatched and will likely never talk to them again.

And the algorithm weights it to pair you more with people who are similar to people you like. And people who people you like, like. And it can try to set these up on purpose. Maybe day one it pairs A-B and C-D, day two it pairs A-C, B-D, then it has information about their pairwise compatibility. If A liked B and/or C, and they liked D, then it knows A is more likely to like D (and vice versa). And it can do anti-pairings. If A hated B and B hated D, then maybe A and D can bond over the shared experience (maybe the app even tells them that they both hated B as a conversation starter). It can do the thing where people of generally high reputation pair together, but also locally cluster by doing math on an actual social network.

Then we can add more features to make it less volatile. Like when you level up you unlock a week slot. At the end of the day, in addition to rating them you can vote to upgrade them, and if both of you do this then you are penpals for a whole week and can talk longer. But you've only got one of these slots so you can't just do this to everyone, you have to prioritize, and get longer deeper engagements. And maybe if you level up more you get a couple of these slots. And then maybe the app occasionally re-matches you with someone you liked in the past and you can talk about what's happened since you last talked (if you remember them). Balancing the desire for novelty with the ability to build deeper connections. But the idea being that, unlike a forum like Reddit or themotte where people just kind of drop in and out of conversation threads when they get bored, you have a clear finite 1-1 communication to get to know someone, and then rate them and exploit big data towards building reputations and social networks and stuff.

I dunno, maybe I'm just a math nerd who likes the math part of socializing more than actually socializing. I don't know if this would actually appeal to normal people. I just thought it was a cool idea.

Each day, you get paired with a random person, with weights towards your interests but still allowing some variance.

In a previous career stage, I tried several apps that do things like this, and joined networking groups that do it low-tech. The thing this proposal hasn't considered is MLM schemes and similar sales-motivated people. Which people are most motivated to talk to new people everyday? You've got your founding population, or a parasite group that will move in very quickly (see also the death of Clubhouse).

The reputation and rating system is supposed to handle this, because if you try to scam people and 90% of them figure out what you're doing then they rate you horribly and you fall into troll/spam/bot hell and the sales people end up pairing with each other. But I guess there are risks of

A: Naive people who are sympathetic to salespeople and don't rate them horribly might end up getting paired with them more often, which is precisely their target audience. and B: If people just make a new account they get paired with other people who made new accounts and it might end up making the default neutral reputation landscape equivalent to the troll/spam/bot hell, with only high reputation people being able to avoid it.

But it's not like I haven't thought of this. One of the main points of the reputation system is to prevent misbehavior in a similar way to how social networks do that in real life.

Every time I see a smart person come up with an idea of how to make a better dating app, what they're really describing is how to create a dating app that will only appeal to other like-minded smart people. The problem is that, in order to stay in business, dating apps rely on unintelligent slobs forking over money because they think that they'll get more action by paying a third party. (While I have noticed certain odd behavior, I don't have enough to go on to chalk it up to anything other than coincidence.) Do you really think that most people are going to be willing to take a survey about every person they talk to? We already live in a world where the most trivial of commercial interactions requires a customer satisfaction survey, and ratings on these things are like eBay seller ratings in which anything less than 4.8/5 is considered a red flag. So even in the absence of bad faith everyone gives straight 5s to all normal people just to avoid tanking their ranking.

Beyond that, why the hell would anyone want to have text conversations with people for a day who they'll likely never talk to again? And then do homework about it? If I want to have a conversation with a random person I might not see again, I'll go to a bar like a normal person, thank you very much.

dating apps rely on unintelligent slobs forking over money because they think that they'll get more action by paying a third party

That's why a dating app should be made by the government with tax dollars. It is in the government's interests to get people in a relationship since couples with kids overall spend more money than singles or couples with no kids. And are just better long term.

That's why a dating app should be made by the government with tax dollars.

Seize the means of reproduction!

I actually agree in an ideal world, but I can already see the bitter political fights over dating site policy, and get really really sad.

Every time I see a smart person come up with an idea of how to make a better dating app, what they're really describing is how to create a dating app that will only appeal to other like-minded smart people.

Yeah, and? Smart people like dating and are likely to want to date other like-minded smart people. If the normies with no attention span don't use it then that's just another filtering mechanism to weed them out.

If I want to have a conversation with a random person I might not see again, I'll go to a bar like a normal person, thank you very much.

Sounds like effort. I think you're overestimating the length of survey: like 1-3 numbers you rate on a scale from 1 to 10. People like upvoting people on Reddit, it doesn't need to be much more than that. I'm talking like numbers for an algorithm to dump into a mathematical function, not comments that a human is going to read.

like 1-3 numbers you rate on a scale from 1 to 10.

The problem is that most users would rate everyone they like “10” and everyone they dislike “1”, thus making the data very coarse and rather useless. Very few people actually have the inclination to rate basically anything on a meaningful scale.

You can get a lot of info out of even just a “thumbs up, thumbs down, neutral” rating. If you’re combining it with background info on the rater and ratee then you’ve got yourself a pretty good set of data.

What if you don't like "dating"? I want to be (and am) in a relationship. Dating apps should try to build long term relationship, or ideally offer both, short term flings to those that want those, and long term to those that want that. And in a way to isolate each group from each other.

I've also thought about this dating app idea lot, and wanted to write a post about it, but I'll try and post one eventually.

One of the big problems with dating apps is that they succeed when somebody stops using them, which makes them really hard to monetize. Honestly I think the best hope we have is for someone rich like Elon Musk or Bill Gates to donate a ton of money to a non-profit that just focuses on making a good app for relationships with no monetization so that it doesn't have any perverse incentives. Maybe have a donation link and encourage people who end up happily married to donate to show their appreciation, but otherwise just make a good product for the good of society and accept that doing the right thing is going to lose money.

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