Still not entirely certain this isn't just a really impressive parody, but for my sanity I am hoping it is.
I think this says a lot about the "attention economy" way all the various dating and social apps take up your time to use them, and how we've digitized the process so much that people unironically see the appeal of a CRM system for managing contacts. Classic case of "new tech to solve the problems of all the other tech", where the other tech is actually the source of the problem, and probably shouldn't be relied on in this way.
I am sure it is not a parody. I have witnessed co-workers getting professional photographs and using spreadsheets to track dates/matches, all to carefully optimize their dating app success.
It reminds me of the early 2000s "pick up artist" stuff, I had a few friends who read the books and would actively hit on women anytime we went out. It was horrible haha.
As for the maker of this app, if it fills a need and gets widely adopted who knows?
>It reminds me of the early 2000s "pick up artist" stuff, I had a few friends who read the books and would actively hit on women anytime we went out. It was horrible haha.
In the early 2000s only "professionals" used CAD. Now (almost) everyone with a 3d printer or a shed they want to build uses CAD. It's trickled down.
The pickup artists are on the bleeding edge of the "craft" if you can call it that. It shouldn't be surprising that the stuff they do (or at least the stuff that works) filters down.
> The pickup artists are on the bleeding edge of the "craft" if you can call it that. It shouldn't be surprising that the stuff they do (or at least the stuff that works) filters down.
I had a friend who used the "craft" and had enough success with it that he was utterly convinced he could get literally any woman to sleep with him. He failed to notice that all of his "marks" could be grouped into roughly two sets of women:
- Those who were unaware of the game being played. They were highly insecure and not intelligent or not socially aware enough to realize they were being manipulated.
- Those who were aware of the game, and were playing it themselves. They were consciously looking to get laid, and they would sit in judgement of their suitors, sleeping with whoever could navigate their "shit tests" and put on an impressive enough performance. An odd sort of "game recognizes game" fencing match.
Personally I thought these performances were an embarrassing dog-and-pony show, but there's no accounting for taste.
Anyway, my point is that some of this stuff really does "work", but it's not nearly as universal as its practitioners like to believe, and the men who practice it are often being gamed themselves. Anyone who is aware of the game (even subconsciously) and not interested in playing it is immune.
> The pickup artists are on the bleeding edge of the "craft" if you can call it that.
A lot of people are picking up on how PUA types are actually annoying grifters who think bullying women is flirting, or even that some forms of PUA are actually blatantly sociopathic.
A lot of them are pretending like they have some special insight beyond the fact that they a.) are conventionally mostly attractive b.) are at least a tiny bit charismatic c.) had enough self-confidence to try doing literally anything at all.
I hate having to deal with the aftermath of endless men approaching me at random who think "being an asshole" is flirting. It's so annoying.
I have some sympathy for the dating problems of women but I have less than zero sympathy for the dating problems of any woman who is young/attractive enough to be hit on when out and about. You are the seller of what is fundamentally a scarce resource. To the other ~80% of society (i.e. basically all men as well as the large fraction of women) this just comes across as a first world problem.
>even that some forms of PUA are actually blatantly sociopathic.
It of says a lot, and none of it good, that adopting sociopath behaviors and then spray and praying them is an effective way for men to keep the big end of the sales funnel full.
>A lot of them are pretending like they have some special insight beyond the fact that they a.) are conventionally mostly attractive b.) are at least a tiny bit charismatic c.) had enough self-confidence to try doing literally anything at all.
The pool of women that will entertain the idea of sleeping with any given man is small. The pool of men that will sleep with any given women is large. Women don't need to put any effort into identifying this pool. Men do, that's what all this spray and pray PUA crap is about. Men need to identify this pool before expending any filtration effort on other criteria. And at the other end of the funnel pool of women any given man is compatible enough with is large. Women have a much smaller pool of men they're compatible enough with so they try to filter by this first, much to the chagrin of every man who has to deal with it (the same way you're annoyed by getting hit on by men you're not interested in).
Oh, and I hope you noticed the perverse incentive for both men and women to fudge the things that are under their control in order to pass the filter of people who are otherwise out of their league or incompatible...
I’ve done that spreadsheet thing for a year or so, around 15 years ago when I just had started using online dating sites (which where different back then, and non-algorithmic)
I really hope it is because I get maybe 1 person every 8 months to write back so if the average person has so many dates they need an app to track them all that's just seriously depressing that I'm so far off the norm.
I had the same problem as you. I had the same reaction to this post. It sucks man. Dating apps were not good for my mental health, so I got off them before I could become a bitter person.
I eventually found a gf outside of the apps, entirely by chance. I still do not see how I could’ve found her aside from pure random chance, so unfortunately that doesn’t help you at all.
The more you put yourself in social settings (online, offline, whatever), the more you increase the surface area for finding someone through "pure random chance". Just adding a more optimistic bent to things.
Exactly, dating apps are just one tool in the toolbox, and one that doesn't work well for a lot of people at that (in my experience, the types of people that I would be interested in dating generally aren't on dating apps, so I stopped using them.)
The trick is to find out where you're likely to meet the types of people you are interested in: interest groups, college campus, gaming Discords, climbing gym, etc. I think in dating, diversification is key, because the types of people you will find in any given environment can be highly autocorrelated in terms of preferences and personality.
The other trick is to actually flirt with people when you like someone. A minority of people might not take it well, but it actually brightens a lot of people's days when done respectfully and it's the only way to have a chance at getting somewhere.
You’re right. As a hetero man, I was not doing activities that included many women. But I still don’t know what I could’ve done differently, because doing activities involving women that I don’t enjoy, so that I can be on the lookout for potential dates… doesn’t seem very enjoyable, and also seems a bit creepy. On the other hand, going to activities I don’t enjoy and not looking for dates seems rather pointless.
You’re always going to be seen as creepy until some woman doesn’t. That’s just the norms we have in society right now. You’re a threat until proven otherwise.
Most social activities that involve strangers are also full of men. This is because most men aren’t interested in going out and meeting new people they have no social connection with. Women go to parties, outings with other friends, etc. Men go to things alone like bars, clubs, gyms, sports, etc. to meet new people and bond with absolutely complete strangers. Most women don’t do this at all.
I did that. I had plenty of friends, but no girlfriends ;)
I realized that increasing the surface area mostly only matters if you’re increasing the surface area of meeting the kind of person you want to date. As a hetero man, I was not doing activities that included many women. But I still don’t know what I could’ve done differently, because doing activities involving women that I don’t enjoy, so that I can be on the lookout for potential dates… doesn’t seem very enjoyable, and also seems a bit creepy. On the other hand, going to activities I don’t enjoy and not looking for dates seems rather pointless.
That's the key. You need to get more random chances by doing more things that get you to interact with other people.
Well, that and optimize your attractiveness as best you are able. That can take a large variety of forms depending on your target audience and who you want to be personally.
The problem is almost certainly that your profile is bad. I'm happy to provide feedback, or you can check out some of the subreddits where people provide tips.
The truth is that most men get nothing from dating services. It’s only the top few percent of men who are getting substantial attention. Even then - of the friends I know who are getting some attention, they say it’s a huge mental drain because they have to be a jester to entertain so many women in order to get anywhere. These are above average men but not very good looking men. The good looking men don’t even have to try - the mental effort is low.
All the websites I'm aware of have app counterparts now. I suspect he's talking about the ones that didn't start off as apps and allow more detailed profiles, like Match and EHarmony. And yes, they're pretty much dead. Match is somewhat viable but far less active than it was five years ago. EHarmony is extremely expensive and almost completely dead. There are maybe a dozen new sign ups per day in my entire state, and most of the profiles are dead and can't see or send messages because people balked when they saw the price, which isn't shown until you complete the (rather lengthy) personality questionnaire.
On top of all that, they're all slowly changing to the swipe mechanics of Tinder and the like. Personally I hate that model, but apparently it's "won".
I was thinking about something similar, but less cringy. More like: hey you haven't messaged your friend in 6 months, maybe you should ask them how they are doing. A priority queue but to help keep friendships alive.
I remember moaning about twitter reducing the number of characters people sent, and then yo! came out, and it was down to a single bit of data. That made me think 'what would even lower information content messages look like in a social network, perhaps half a bit or even less?'. I figured that a half bit of data would be where a social network sent some sort of hello message automatically with the same frequency the human user sent one manually, so given a message, it'd be 50/50 whether it was sent automatically or manually. Although I got to it theoretically, in the end, I thought it could be pretty useful practically, as a way of sparking conversations again when you haven't spoken to someone in a while, etc.
Maybe combined with ChatGPT we could even make those automatic getting-back-in-touch messages indistinguishable from the manual ones.
Maybe you could also "reduce" the bit in a different way, where it would be 50/50 if a message would actually be sent upon clicking the submit/reply button.
Like if you'd walk on a noisy street, see someone you know, and greet them half-heartedly and wouldn't really mind if they didn't hear you.
Oh man, the thrill of not knowing if this message will actually be sent when I hit the "reply" button!
> combined with ChatGPT we could even make those automatic getting-back-in-touch messages indistinguishable from the manual ones
extending this bit further - we might as well reply with chatGPT. then it's chatGPT all the way down, who needs human interaction when we tick the boxes of "I called them" and "I replied"?.. :)
In this situation, neither party need be aware that the other party is 'antisocial' in this regard. The way I see it, the following situations apply for a tool that produces communication indistinguishable from the user's own writing (AI)...
"AI" for the following cases would be beneficial:
Social -> Antisocial
Social <- Antisocial
"AI" for the following cases would be net neutral:
Antisocial -> Antisocial
Antisocial <- Antisocial
And finally "AI" would be inapplicable (since neither party would use it) in the following cases:
Social -> Social
Social <- Social
In this drastically simplified model, there aren't any cases where the existence of a sufficiently competent AI would be detrimental to any party involved, while still providing value for those who choose to use it.
The half-bit you actually send means more to the recipient than the 160 bytes you don't.
I'm more unsettled by the automation part. At least the half-bit received came from someone who consciously thought about you enough to send it. Once you emulate that part, all you have is a MITM initiating conversations between strangers.
To be pedantic, this is not a single bit of data. This is zero bits attached to an event. The event is not discrete however, so I'm not sure what form of information theory would be appropriate to describe it.
Half a bit... yeah. I read a good description of a bit (I think in The Information by James Gleick) as "a yes or no answer to a single unambiguous question. I'm misremembering the quote but that's close enough.
So half a bit would be like hearing "Umm..." in response to that same question?
"Probably" is more than one bit, not less, no? It conveys both uncertainty and an opinion on the answer.
"Is this tree deciduous?"
"Yes" - one bit
"Is this tree evergreen?"
"Probably" - one bit (they don't know), another bit (their guess)
But I'm way off any formal understanding of this, and it can be rigorously defined.
Meta comment: "half a bit" was clearly a joke, and so was my response; now I'm taking your reply at face value and debating it seriously, while admitting that I haven't got anything close to firm enough ground under me to actually debate it :)
I meant based on definition of a bit as "a yes or no answer to a single unambiguous question".
"Umm..." definitely carries some kind of information, but it doesn't actually help answer the question.
Based on the information theoretic definition of entropy we'd need to go from 50:50 to 89% certainty to get half a bit of information, and I'd probably qualify 89% certainty as "probably"
Monica is an excellent "Personal CRM" as people are describing. It strives to achieve exactly the goals GP describes.
Personally, I would just like to see a contacts app that doesn't suck, and actually supports having both "companies" AND "people" as contact without treating them exactly the same. If I want to call some hotel or something, why does it have to be "First name: Holiday Inn" in order to even show up correctly...
MacOS/iOS Contacts supports this, for what it's worth.
You can enter a 'Company Name' and leave fname/lname blank, and it'll give it a different default icon, as well as show it as the company name in lists/sorts.
I've thought about similar problems like rewatching your favorite movie, and concluded that treating it as a priority queue or trying to watch it every _n_ days is the wrong approach; you want to instead be reminded when you've forgotten about your friend Alex or what _The Leopard_ is about, so you can then ping them & catch up or rewatch that movie with a near-fresh mind. (If you ping Alex while you remember them, then maybe there's another actually-forgotten friend you could've pinged instead who would be more valuable to get back in touch with.)
It is, in other words, the exact opposite of 'spaced repetition', where you want to review right before forgetting to strengthen the memory the most; in this use-case, 'anti-spaced repetition', you want to review only after you've forgotten it. (https://www.gwern.net/Statistical-notes#program-for-non-spac...)
There have been several iterations of this sort of idea — a personal CRM — and the main issue I have is they should automatically scan my emails, texts and chats to figure out my friends and suggest that I reach out.
> should automatically scan my emails, texts and chats
Great, easy to integrate one service with the APIs of a bunch of others!
> Also, want it to be 100% local and privacy first.
...but in combination? Never going to happen.
Ask yourself: who's signing up for the API keys to enable the client-side service to talk to all these services? Is it the end-user, or is it this software's developer?
If it's the software's developer, then they're effectively leaking all these API keys by embedding them into the software itself — where not just the end users, but anyone else could come along and reuse these keys for anything they like. The service providers will find this out, and block these keys. (No, you can't avoid this by proxying requests to some gateway, operated by the service-provider, that holds the API keys. Then you lose the "local/private" aspect.)
If it's each end-user, then the aggregate traffic from all the instances of this app running at once, will look exactly like a bot that's trying to evade API rate-limits using a "residential proxy cluster" like https://www.zyte.com/smart-proxy-manager/... and so the services will block these keys.
---
Mind you, in theory, you could do this on the OS level, using OS accessibility APIs to effectively "read" the messages off the screen. But 1. is there any third-party ISV — who isn't a certified accessibility-software provider — who you'd trust enough to allow their software the ability to constantly "read" everything on your screen? That includes your passwords, you know! And also, 2., the messages need to be on the screen for accessibility software to read them. An accessibility-API-driven CRM can't load your chat history unless you also grant it the ability to literally take your mouse and scroll through it for you.
Or, alternately, coming at this from the perspective of the Operating System vendor themselves, you could do this "in" the OS, by forcing emails/text/chat message handling to go through system APIs that can see these as special document types, and so do things with them. IIRC there was at least one pre-iPhone mobile OS that did this (BlackBerry OS, maybe?), enabling all of these types of messaging-app traffic to be muxed together into a single first-party app that did indeed manage all conversations with your contacts in a multi-channel way.
That presumes the client stores anything locally + in plaintext. Clients like Facebook Messenger, Slack, and Discord have no local storage other than (opaque, fragmentary, useless) cache databases, because they're just "webapps in a can"; while many of the more modern native chat clients like WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, etc keep all their synced state encrypted-at-rest on disk.
Also, that presumes you're on desktop. On mobile, you just can't poke into another app's sandbox/container that way (unless the target app hasn't explicitly granted made some part of its container-filesystem externally accessible; and there's no reason these apps would.) And many people only have a mobile device.
If you're okay with a partial solution, a far easier one would be scraping the data out of the few clients that have web-app versions through browser extensions that read the state out of the page they're running in.
Lots of attempts over the years at this personal crm problem space but no success to date. I did one on Facebook platform in 2008-09 called Socialfly, our tagline was ‘be twice the friend in half the time’.
Problem is there’s a lot of input and upkeep which limits appeal, the most important social data sources (text & phone) are not accessible via api, its a personal tool that you don’t necessarily want to tell others you use which limits distribution & scale, and even after all that in general it’s hard to scale personal authenticity.
I think the problem needs to be approached from a different angle along the lines of a personal assistant rather that an explicit data management tool. And it likely has to come from those with access to privileged social data sources like Apple or Google or Facebook.
Oh cool, so great to hear from a user after all these years! Some of our users were suuper invested, like keeping up with hundreds of people - far more than we anticipated. I think our top user was a pastor in Australia who kept up with like 700+ people.
We would have continued a while longer but the 08 recession really burnt us. We were raising $$ in the weeks where banks were literally failing. RIP Good Times era. Our iPhone app was just about ready to ship and we were going to start building integrations like email next, but no runway. We had an angel lined up who’d have gotten us about 4-6mo of runway but I didn’t want to burn that relationship in such an uncertain environment, we were all pretty down about prospects then.
Fun fact tho: the app continued to work for years after. FB took a long time to deprecate API and our code was pretty solid.
Numbers yes, when you last contacted no. Core value prop of personal CRM is ease of keeping up w/ people, which means smarts of reprioritizing people based on several factors sort of like a personal assistant would, which means system should know when you last spoke/texted/emailed/etc. Ideally it'd even have ease of access to transcripts (chat/email logs) so you could jog your memory.
The goal is to avoid just a dumb timer saying 'its been 4 weeks, why don't you chat with X'. That's how Socialfly worked, and it was pretty high friction in practical use.
I want one for remembering stuff about people for personal and business networking.
For a while, I was going to a weekly event where I'd meet people, but I'd never remember their name next time because I'm terrible with names.
So I started jotting down notes after it was over. Like, today I met person X who is really into this one hobby and just moved here from such and such city. And person Y who is looking for a new apartment. And Z who came with Y.
Then before going next time, I'd review the list, and if I saw X, I knew their name and could ask how they're adjusting after their move. Or I could ask Y how the apartment search is going.
At first I thought if people saw this list they might think it was a little weird. And maybe, but I'm OK with it since it's a way of making an effort. As long as it's genuine and your motivations are good, people like that you remembered stuff about them. (I'm not doing it to impress people, etc.)
Anyway, I didn't have a good way to organize it. I stuck it all in a document, which didn't work great.
I've been building FriendApp the past year. The core feature on iPhone right now is to just group people into lists, and preserve messaging integration with whatsapp, text etc. Trying to make it super simple. Also has ability to sync for recent contacts list. Would love feedback, and thoughts on the next features to iterate on.
This combined with the only useful feature FB had for years (people's birthday).
Integrate a scraping and keyword search for public facing social media postings to alert to people in distress, perhaps. Or just a general "you should check on X" feature. Not with automated messaging, that's too much.
I signed up for https://infrequent.app/ when it was a Show HN just to try it out and it actually worked (probably about as well as a "non-busy" TODO in my calendar app with an alert). Enough to remind me to call 1 or 2 people that I like to talk to but often leave for too long, anyway.
> I was thinking about something similar, but less cringy.
Well, if you are worried about it being cringy, you probably shouldn't watch the 2022 Salesforce Dreamforce (their annual convention). It's cultish and shows the unbelievably arrogant confidence they have in their own importance - along with the most inexplicably childish moments for a professional conference I've ever seen. (Let's put foam rabbit ears on our "co-CEOs" to entertain the "trailblazers" as we gather around a fake wooden stage imitating the outdoors with faux trees, won't that be funny?)
> hey you haven't messaged your friend in 6 months, maybe you should ask them how they are doing. A priority queue but to help keep friendships alive.
This is what social media and messaging apps should innovate on.
But, without VC money, without ads, without feeds drive by algorithms that optimize for engagement. Without dark patterns and antifeatures that make our lives worse. Just a non-profit that churns out open source code and is supported by monthly recurring donations from a % of the userbase.
This is where I'd like to go with FriendApp. Would love if you wanted to check out where we are right now with our iPhone app. https://www.friendapp.com/
Wow, managing one's dating life with a crm app has got to be the most distopian thing I've seen in a while.
I probably need to point out that I'm not dissing the app. If it succeeds, the creators are obviously filling a need in the market, but confirmation of such a need would indicate dating as I define it is horribly broken
Socializing as a whole is broken, triggered by the disappearance of third places, the dissolution of communities at the altar of the nuclear dual-income family, live-at-work jobs and "hustle culture" (Veblen entrepreneurship), and the unlimited streaming doom-scroll.
With nowhere to go but work and home, good luck finding anyone to date or befriend via a nonexistent organic social network.
A sizeable group of us don’t have a meaningful second place either anymore. I work remote and there is really no social aspect to it in any meaningful sense, just pointless meetings and an endless Jira backlog. My home and my work are one and the same.
In the last three years the closest I came to a viable third place was VRChat, it was the best social experience I’ve ever had. I don’t think I need to say much more about that, it speaks for itself.
While what you are saying is very true, dating so many people at once, plus having dated so many in the past that you need an app to keep track of them all is a whole other level of broken
The issue is that whereas in the past you could use "knowing somebody as an acquaintance and/or by association with an acquaintance" as the first stage of your "should I date somebody" funnel, you now get "here's a list of all the people in your who have signed up for a dating service, the marketing blurb they wrote about themselves, and some broad demographic filters; Have at it" as your initial filter.
Recently an article described an extreme case, a woman in her thirties wasting 10 years "swiping" and dating "at scale". She'd check over a 100 profiles every single day for 10 years straight without even an attempt at forming a relationship.
Pure addiction, like a slot machine. The original purpose all but forgotten.
Dunno if this was intended as a joke, but I find the whole presentation of the site to be hilarious. Well done!
As others have said, if you were able to find if Hinge, Bumble, Tinder, Grindr, etc... have open APIs that you could connect to your app? Same goes for things like Eventbrite or Meetup.
"I met so-and-so through (dating app) on (date/time) and we hit it off well. We then met up again via (event app) and continued meeting up regularly, and I was able to keep notes about so-and-so on the app - their favorite bars, foods, music, etc... as they revealed it to me, and the app was able to provide me with info as to when I was last in touch with them, when there's availability at their favorite restaurant, a music act at their favorite bar, etc..."
As much as I love this idea, part of me read this and thought "Great, one more reason for women who aren't interested in me to feign even more interest, because big event xyz is coming up and it's 'revealed' to them I can afford it so it's 'revealed' to me they want to go."
Might be a good opportunity here to integrate events, restaurant bookings, and other paid "experiences" for some upside.
Does this integrate directly with the dating services/apps themselves? Seems like a lot of work to plumb in and keep up-to-date the status and latest information on each profile.
Also, if this is a legit service you should be extremely careful how you store all this data. Exposing a bunch of dating profile data via a security breach will land you into hotter water than anything Marc Benioff could throw at you :)
Then for dates in the funnel who told you things like "too busy", "not ready for dating" etc. you could schedule automated messages for things like reminding them to circle back when they're ready, checking if they're available to get on a call to show them new features you've added (as a person), etc.
I assume this is humor, since a lot of people will use these responses to say "No" without having to come out an say it (the "Nonconfrontational No", if you will - "I don't want to date you" invites a direct conflict, but "too busy" can't really be argued with).
So, building on your humor, I'd like to suggest a feature/service we can sell to the victcoughother person. When they respond with "too busy" they can also set a flag in the system indicating whether they'd actually like to _not_ hear from the person operating the funnel. We get paid, the vict^H^H^H^Hdate doesn't get hassled in the future, and the person running the dating funnel is none the wiser because our software never notifies them again.
> Hi (Name), are you getting the best experiences on your dates? We've been chatting for a while, and I wanted to share some news with you before I update everyone else. I've found some new exciting dating spots and you're going to love them! (Insert sales pitch) I'd love the chance to chat about my new dating spots. Shall we arrange a meeting to talk you through possible restaurants, bowling alleys or what movies we can watch together? Let's book a call today and get things started.
When I was dating, I kept track of all this manually, in a notes app. I wouldn't mind inputting the same data here, manually, since this has the added benefit of organizing it for me in a way I couldn't do with mere notes.
I fortunately found a life partner before dating apps took the foothold they have now, but from speaking with younger relatives and friends, I think virtually all of them (at least the male ones) could only dream of ever even being able to use something like this. It seems to me the far more common experience is for, at any given time, their number of active prospects through those apps to be on the order of 0. Or are all my friends/family just ugly?
No. They're all probably pretty good looking. The problem with the apps is the selection bias exhibited by males and females. If you look at the selection stats for men, you'll see they swipe right for about 80% of women. If you look at the selection stats for women, you'll see they swipe right for about 0.5% of men.
I've no idea why this is the case, but the results have held out over a number releases both private and public.
A lot of dunking going on in here, and fairly so, if nothing else because there is no good business model for an app like this unless they build it into dating apps (who's going to manually enter data from Tinder into this thing?).
But the dunking seems to overlook the genuine problems with modern dating that didn't exist in the past. I find that it's very easy to mindlessly swipe a thousand people on an app and suddenly end up with more matches than I have the energy and attention span to process. If there was an easy way to turn this "inbox" (which is really just one step above my Gmail spam folder) into an actionable database, that could have real value in a world where dating happens stochastically through apps.
Separately, it isn't weird at all to keep some sort of track of your dating life. Past generations had the "little black book," basically a romantic rolodex. I've never used one but who's to say I couldn't benefit from a digital version that lives in my phone?
Most of all, a commenter here that is since deleted said something I think is apt: "I think the number one problem with online dating is not managing all the people. It's forcing yourself to keep the number of active pursuits low enough to manage. If you don't kind of commit to seeing if someone is going to pan out, then they won't." This is of course the actual solution to the problem I experience with modern dating. The only downside is that, unlike downloading an app, it requires that I change how I think and behave.
I agree completely with your "number one problem." There's a lag in between using a dating app and going on an actual date, so if you're single and on dating apps, you end up with a strange periodic behavior. When you're not getting dates you swipe a lot. A few weeks later those turn into dates and now you've either found someone good or you're just too overwhelmed to bother swiping. Things don't work out with those people (probably because everyone views everyone as disposable), and now you're lonely and swiping again. It's similar to when I was contracting and would mostly only try to get clients when I wasn't under contract. The only solution is to constantly keep the top of the funnel going, but that's a very dark pattern when it comes to relationships.
> It's forcing yourself to keep the number of active pursuits low enough to manage. If you don't kind of commit to seeing if someone is going to pan out, then they won't." This is of course the actual solution to the problem I experience with modern dating.
This problem is solved in a culture where friends and family suggest matchups. Of course, this requires a decent and somewhat large network in the first place, but each agent is incentivized to show matches that are somewhat in each other’s leagues (for the agent’s reputation), and each single person is incentivized to not burn their reputation in the network so they avoid churning through possible matches in pursuit of a “better” match.
You also get a somewhat reasonable background check via the agent proposing a possible match since they might have a cursory knowledge of the proposed match’s history and family and whatnot.
not sure about bidirectional data flow though -- maybe you can do that via accessibility interfaces?
Also possible that OSes will offer standard chat UX in the future, making it simpler to hook plugins into conversations -- ios already does this to some extent with imessage plugins, but 'tinder for imessage' is the opposite of 'imessage for tinder' so this is most useless bc of lock-in
I'm happily married for nearly 22 years and thankful more than ever I don't have to date in today's environment. This sounds awful. Like dystopianly awful.
Can someone chime in why this hasn't worked in the past?
It seems a personal/portable CRM could be highly useful.
The second aspect is the vertical aspect (professional or "personal")
One thing I keep hearing from people that have sold companies, exited etc. is that they are having a hard time operating within their networks without the CRM.
Yes. Having been in this space for a bit, there are a few reasons why it hasn't worked (yet):
1. The problem of deduplicating contacts is tough (but solvable). If you don't solve it well, then the utility of personal CRM goes wayyyyy down and you're getting notifications about the same people with different email / WhatsApp / Instagram addresses and that gets annoying.
2. People haven't shown a big willingness to pay very much for this (so far), despite everyone saying they want it. So we're left with the open source solutions that don't solve the problems very well.
3. People are SUPER concerned about privacy. See a comment above about someone who wants the system to automatically scan email, etc. and extract contacts, but that it must be 100% local and privacy-centric. You can't have both of those - to intelligently extract contacts without duplicates (and figure out that @mybestie on Instagram == mybestie@gmail.com == my.c.bestie@corporate.com) you need a big database of who's who to match against.
Everything is solvable I think - we're not talking cold fusion here. But it's tougher than it might seem on the surface.
One problem I've had adopting such a system is that you want the system to help manage some load of work, e.g. maintaining your personal relationships. But using the product is itself work: you need to set it up, remember to use it, keep it up to date, etc. So, just as you've procrastinated keeping up with old friends, you procrastinate using the tool. And, of course, the tool doesn't reduce the workload of keeping up with friends. In fact, done successfully, your work has increased as you need to talk to your friends more often. So you're basically adding work (using the tool) to do work you didn't have the energy for in the first place (talking to your friends).
Everyone loves the idea of talking to their friends, conceptually. But, given ample time and opportunity, many choose not to keep up with friends. It's almost as if people only "want to want" to keep up with friends, rather than actually want it.
Yes yes absolutely 100x. That's another problem with the existing tools - they're a lot of work! You can say "we'll solve the duplicate contacts problem by ignoring it and letting using de-dupe themselves" welllll that's a lot of work!
And then there's the empty-database problem. I installed Monica a while back and the first thing it prompted me to do was.....input all my contacts. No Facebook import, no LinkedIn import, etc. Are you kidding me? I'm not rebuilding my friend graph from scratch. So I ditched the tool immediately (note: I haven't looked at it in years so it might have fixed some of those issues in the meantime).
And absolutely yes - there's the actual work of being in touch with people that you can't (or shouldn't, in a non-dystopian world) automate away. I'm sure someone will figure out how to rig up GPT-3 to do that but ughhhh...shiver please don't.
Could you expand on what options exist currently? You say you are in the space, does that mean you have been keeping an eye on it, that you are working on something, or ?
I'm in the space in that I co-founded a company called Connect The Dots (ctd.ai) that certainly has the potential to solve this problem, but we're not focused on the PRM space right now (see point above re: unwillingness to pay). Perhaps down the road.
I believe a plugin (e.g. in Obsidian, Notion, Superhuman) could work better than Monica. In fact I think Superhuman has the bets oppportunity to create this product.
> Can someone chime in why this hasn't worked in the past?
Because spreadsheets and notes are free and good enough.
I used to be a full time shitty cheap car flipper. I used to be single. They're about the same level of communication work. The ROI of a proper CRM isn't there because in both cases your customer is just not that serious about the interaction when they're in the part of the funnel a CRM helps you with and even then it doesn't really help you with the bulk of the customers, it helps you with the long tail. When you're a one man shop squeezing out an extra 1% or whatever a CRM gets you isn't worth the time vs focusing on other areas. (These days I work in a client facing role with a proper ticketing system and integrated CRM so I do have something to compare to.)
CRMs work at scale by selling to executives who are not the end users but are in control of budget. They then have their sales managers enforce data fidelity amongst the sales team who, to keep their jobs, are incentivized to make sure data in the CRM are up to date, or whatever the closest approximation to that is.
So for a personal CRM to work, you'd need to sort out, at minimum, the monetization piece and the data fidelity piece. If you open source it, you still need to make sure people keep the data up to date and that's actually pretty hard.
Executives also want to take the rolodex with them, hence they have an incentive to keep a personal CRM so that they keep their contacts after they leave.
Superhuman sold to executives for $30/month - which is a relevant (high) price point.
I'm not entirely sure what the first point has to do with the second - can you help me understand what Superhuman has to do with anything? It's just a gmail client at the end of the day, isn't it?
My understanding is people who want to keep their contacts have 1) a lot of them in the actual inbox 2) have their Linkedin to fall back on 3) can always fall back to exporting all their contacts when they leave.
Apropos of nothing, $30/month/user is roughly the base price of Salesforce, and they have 3 more tiers significantly above that. High for a consumer, but pretty cheap for professional tools, and they don't sell licenses one at a time.
I've been working on FriendApp the past year. I think it hasn't worked in the past because the average person doesn't realize that they could really benefit from this solution. It hasn't necessarily felt like a burning problem. I think it has to add some value beyond just classifying and adding additional metadata to contacts.
My goal is to develop features that also facilitate sharing of activities, upcoming events that I'm attending that I want to share with people I know. Things I want to do, and making that visible to select groups of people.
I think it simply would need a lot of discipline to keep up to date and without a manager nagging or bonuses being dependent upon updating it, most people lack that discipline.
In a world of increased diversity and expectations (you can't assume the 2.5 kids in the suburbs of your local city anymore or that marriage is even a goal) of what a relationship looks like, I am not sure of the alternative. I am happy that I am happy single though, as it does sound exhausting.
This reminds me of the main character in Along Came Polly who puts his new girlfriend and ex-wife into a Risk Assessment tool to decide who he should stay with :D. Naturally, it doesn’t go well once the girlfriend discovers it!
Don't you have a pipeline with girls you're going to cold-call, and a dating life manager that breathes down your neck when you haven't taken at least 10 girls out this month?
A dating life manager is a contradiction in itself.
In order to be an expert at dating, it's reasonable to assume that you've been on many dates. That pretty much means you actually suck at dating as the very point of dating is to stop dating (for most).
hah I love this comment - when I hear mid-30s men calling women "girls" I always cringe. Even worse when they actually call mid-20s women "girls" since they've never dated a women in her 30s..
I laughed when I read this but then I thought more and... wouldn't that be fun? Like, if it's their hobby and they're good at it, why would the date be bad?
Gardeners like their plants to grow big and healthy. Fishkeepers obsess over the health of their tanks. Musicians want to play more challenging music with better bandmates for bigger audiences on higher profile stages.
So if you were on the receiving end of a date orchestrated by a dating hobbyist, it'd be fun, probably unusual, definitely well organized. There are worse things to experience while dating. And, just maybe, you make a connection and form a relationship. But even the base case isn't _bad_ per se.
I have never heard that definition of "hobbyist" before. I don't see how it's even remotely related to what I wrote. But whatever. Get some rest, maybe tomorrow will be a better day for you.
Interesting start, but missing the "powered by AI" element that analyses each date and computes compatibility and chances of things moving to the next level, suggests next step, auto-generates your text/voice script, etc.
(Also, tried to sign up by calling support but got an endlessly looping `We are experiencing higher than usual call volumes, one of our dating expert associates will be with you "shortly" (but remember that your call _is_ important to us)`
I'm not sure if a database exists that's robust enough to handle the massive, massive quantity of dates that my life entails. /extreme sarcasm (or is that a DIVIDE_BY_ZERO error?, haha)
If you need something like this, then it's probably safe to say that dating is not your weak point.
But, just as every multi-millionaire probably has an accountant, because they have more wealth than they can easily manage, so too must the dating conquistadors suffer, I guess.
This post is probably way past the front page. As a dude who had to do the dating scene in his 40s after a divorce - this would have been pretty cool. On the other hand, despite personally having a pretty concerted effort here it's not like my set of leads was... large. I ended up winning the internet dating game and am very happy. My somewhat sad memory of this time was lots of cold calls via OKCupid and working every lead I got. hard work.
I recommend keeping track of your encounters with friends in your notebook or notes app. After you hang out with them write down updates on their family (their spouse's & kids' names, are they starting school, playing sports?), their health updates, ventures , hobbies– anything worth remembering.
Remember that person you met that was so good at remembering everything about you? most likely they are just good at journaling.
Dating has a large emotional aspect. Using heavyweight management software for this kind of thing is ridiculous. If you need CRM to remind yourself of the emotional impact you had on a date, then some part of this process has gone horribly wrong.
Honestly, this sounds like the gulf between men’s experience dating and women’s, and neurotypical vs neurodivergent. Some ND people like helpers like this; and, women get so many suitors that a system to help them may be actually beneficial.
SalesForce is business - leaking business data is not that problematic. This, is about storing extremely delicate information about people. It better has top notch protection against data breach massive fines will be coming soon.
Only problem with this is you either has nothing to fill in, or just when it would start to matter the dates you are forgetting about are not really the ones who worth it.
The problem with dating is that we enforce a 1:1 relationship while nature encourages 1:N. Am I the only one seeing this? or we shouldn't talk about it to not risk getting canceled?
Thing is it has nothing to do with how some exec feel about the product.
Corporations don't like stuff like because they don't want to deal with clients who don't understand the joke being playing with their brand. OP isn't going to be the one who has to do damage control when this blows up and some percentage of people start to to believe it's actual Salesforce behind this product.
I'm really surprised at how poorly received this is! I did something much simpler for tracking dates, a google calendar with a short biopic and some snips from conversation. At my peak, I had 18 dates in 21 days. For me, it was a way to keep names straight. After date seven in a row, you may struggle. I formalized dating a bit, since I was a long termer before and was new to online dating. (Didn't exist in previous relationship finding time.) This is probably try hard, but w/e I had fun!
My pseudocode:
- Dress up, show up, shut up. Collared shirt, clean jeans. Be on time. Ask person questions, and listen. The bar is incredibly low for men.
- Same bar, same time. xyz @ 7pm. This means a bad one goes to MAYBE 8/830, and you're out. If you're an adult by yourself, this means you have time to run your life when 5 out of 7 days in a week are dates. You can still workout, make a food, clean your place.
- Guy makes the plans, decisiveness puts you head and shoulders over other possibilities. Interest is everything. It's in the delivery: "I know a really great cocktail bar where we can chat more, xyz @ 7pm on wednesday sound good to you?" Don't waste their time, get to the meet!
- Drinks over dinner every time. Mocktails are fine. Activity date is fine too, but remember you don't know each other. If it turns out to be a bust you are now stuck (looking at you dinner!). You can always say: "Hey I'm feeling kind of hungry how about you? I know xyz spot near here we can go for a bite and keep talking..." decisive decisive decisive, yet still asking what they think. Coffee in my area is perceived as you aren't interested, so don't bother. I have also heard reviews that coffee is not a real date, so you may be perceived as low interest.
- Don't play day favorites, just queue em up.
- No more than 1.5w in advance, if they're busy or hesitant just drop them from the queue, and see if they follow up later. Don't go nuts about this, people's interest is everything.
Remember, the purpose of online dating is to MEET IN REAL LIFE, not message for weeks until someone CRACKS. (this is how I formalized it, if you find a new meme friend, idgaf what you do with your life :D )
My findings:
- App signal to noise ratio is: hinge, bumble, tinder, ok cupid, plenty of fish. Hinge was the highest quality matches both in terms of chatting up, and general partner coolness(?). My guess is because the messaging in Hinge forces you to interact meaningfully . Bumble was good, most women I met said they didn't like it because it forced them to engage. Tinder was fine, got picked up a couple of times on that one. Didn't bother with the other two after week one, quality was terrible.
- THE BAR IS INCREDIBLY LOW FOR MEN. If you are employed, and can speak to other people without being an asshole, you are ahead of the game. Don't believe me? Ask your next date what their worst experience is. I assure you it will be 10x worse than yours. Anecdote from my partner: guy: "oh you like dogs? let's go drink in a dog park!". He shows up already drunk, and then BLACKS OUT at the park. She ends up dumping him into a lyft and she goes home. 0/10. Same guy tries to match her 6m later.
- Men think paying for apps is a scam? I paid for the top three, and kept my queue full as long as possible until I found someone I kept around for 3w, then deactivate.
- Aggressively tune your profile. Less is probably more. Details are for the date. No negative things. This is not build-a-bear. You want your profile to INCLUDE, use your swipes to EXCLUDE. You choose who you go on a date with! This means you can exclude people that won't work for you.
- Guys get very uptight about "the algorithm" and will swipe right on everything. Let it work for you, and swipe left on anyone you wouldn't meet up with. Remember, the point is to MEET IN REAL LIFE.
- Dating can be expensive, but it doesn't have to be. You set the budget by where you go. Scale accordingly. You will mess this up once, and then not again.
I had a a total over 60ish dates, three longer term partners (>1m), picked up maybe five times, was a boy toy for a couple people. Overall, fun adventure, happily paired up for 3y now as a result of online dating.
Online dating is different things for different people, but those are my findings and how I approached it. This software sounds cool, I probably would have used it. :)
Sorry for the info dump, but I love hearing stories and helping people with their online profile. I used to be a kind of lightning rod for single dudes at bars and help them sort their profile out while also making friends with them. Two of the four of them got married to people from online dating, one is in a long term still, so I count that as a massive success!
While I appreciate the long write out. The bar isn’t low for men. The bar is high. Swiping data alone shows this, man.
I’m paying $250+/session for a dating coach just for online dating because the bar is so high - even though I’ve done all the usual advice from dating advice places. At this point, I have to spend another $5k on a pro photographer following me around for a few days and taking photos/videos of me at various events/hobbies with friends/animals/etc because that’s the level it is for men who aren’t naturally photogenic/good looking. Same for having the coach actually write out the profile, write comments, etc. I can’t even do it because it requires someone who does this as their full time job in order for an average looking guy to be remotely successful. I wish just liking a person with an average profile that isn’t holding any dead fish was enough but it isn’t. Women want more.
Not even joking. It’s bad for most men - you’re part of an exceptional few because you’re naturally good looking and won’t have to put in anywhere near the effort the rest of us do.
A good left-brained friend of mine was dating heavily in the late 2000s as he was in "wife finding mode".
He had a spreadsheet -- called girls.xls -- where he kept track of important details about each woman he went on a date with.
We were sitting around musing about how hard it must be to keep track of the key details given all the dates he was going on, and he let drop that he had a spreadsheet.
He never showed it to anybody and it didn't sound creepy - it was genuinely a tool he used in good faith given the volume of info he was trying to keep track of.
I don't really consider myself left-brained, but I've always had a hard time remembering names. Partially because I'm not great at empathizing with folks I just meet, and partially because I genuinely don't care that much. Around college, I discovered this is absolutely not a great trait to have (incidentally, also most applicable when meeting women), so I started a Names file in my phone. I have hundreds of names in there now in the format "First Name - small salient description."
People are amazed at how great I am at remembering names and details. It's become almost a super-power, it's weird how writing things down can completely change how people perceive you. It's really cool to scroll through the names and see people I met years ago: the cute barista that moved away right after COVID, an old neighbor's boyfriend, a coworker's dog (I extended the list to also include pets). Brings back good memories and often makes me smile.
I do the same but without writing down anything. I just keep it in my head. I always joke with how creepy I feel when I coincidentally meet someone for the second time after months, at a party or something and start to bring up details about that person into the conversation we are having. For now, everyone has been happy and kinda flattered that a pretty much unknown guy is able to remember precise details about their lives but I feel like a psycho.
I did this a loooong time ago before there was really internet dating. Had a decision analysis tool I wrote in excel 97. Married a match in 2002. She was a crazy narcissist and made my life misery for 18 years until I divorced her.
Beware the tools you create, for the input corpus isn't necessarily valid over time. People change.
Even better, in the original novel, the mice's guess for the ultimate question of life, universe, and everything is "how many roads must a man walk down?"
I kept a note on my phone with details about my girlfriend (now wife) that I would otherwise easily forget. Favorite flowers, songs, restaurants, etc. As I got to know her family I briefly had a few lines for her parents and siblings but now that we're married I can just bug her for info instead.
I was probably 24 years old before I realized dating multiple people was even a thing. I figured you talked to and dated a person until you either decided you weren't having a good time or you married them.
Note that it's not universally true around the world. In the US, yes. If you do this in the UK, it will result in an evening where you end up ordering a taxi and slipping out the back door while two women are pulling each other's hair extensions out outside a pub and trying to beat the opponent with a shoe.
I think it depends on expectations. I can't imagine how anybody raised in the west would expect exclusivity a) after a couple of dates and b) without a conversation.
As a 24 year old, that honestly just sounds stressful. I feel like many 24 year old have a lot going on, personally i don't understand how people would have the time.
Is there AI-powered communication as well? The profiles can let AI communicate and receive a message when GPT-3 has determined that an actual date should occur.
I think this says a lot about the "attention economy" way all the various dating and social apps take up your time to use them, and how we've digitized the process so much that people unironically see the appeal of a CRM system for managing contacts. Classic case of "new tech to solve the problems of all the other tech", where the other tech is actually the source of the problem, and probably shouldn't be relied on in this way.