Mutual

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  Not sure what this "YHack" is, going to ask another question

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  Scrolling through profiles.

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  Oh they matched with me!

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  Answering questions myself

It's pretty obvious that there's something broken with how dating apps work, the only question is what that thing is. AI agent dating app take one guess: that the app simply doesn't know enough about you. My intuition was that this is still fundamentally wrong, and so I decided to investigate the question and settle it.

Dating apps, agent-based or not, work on the following idea: You know yourself, all the information about you, and you compress who you are down into a profile that's supposed to summarize you. Profiles can then be matched together. This completely breaks down for three reasons together:

1. Human beings are extremely complicated, so the summary always has to be extremely lossy -- you're going to have to choose which parts of yourself to highlight
2. You don't know what qualities of you people are interested in, and so you choose the wrong ones!
3. Your preferences are complicated and hard to articulate, and so ever attempt at writing them down fails. Everyone is "I know it when I see it" with regard to the person they want to date.

Agents don't address either of these issues. First, every single person on Earth could have a slightly different idea of what they want to know about a person before they go on a date, and you couldn't possible provide all that information upfront. Second, because every single person's preferences are very nuanced, you couldn't possibly ever explain to an agent how to find the one for you -- few people can even explain that to a human being.

The solution becomes obvious once you understand the problem, and the solution makes things radically simpler rather than more complicated. Instead of your profile "templates" being designed by you, they're designed by the people interested in you. This is the solution to problem #2 -- instead of guessing what others want to ask about you, just let them ask you in the first place! You then answer those questions, which solves problem #1 -- you always make the right choices of what to highlight, because you never had to choose in the first place. With these solutions in place, algorithmic matching becomes unnecessary, which is the solution to problem #3 -- creating a fully accurate (or even good) matching model is impossible, and in this system becomes unnecessary in the first place.

So the design of the app follows directly from this: two tabs, one for swiping through profiles (lists of question-answer pairs. All questions asked by anyone are visible to everyone, so anyone asking anyone a question benefits everyone), and one for answering questions directed at you. When looking at a profile, you can either choose to ask the person another question ("I'm interested, but need more information to make a decision") or choose to match with the person ("I like your answers to peoples' questions and want to meet you").

So really, all this design does is add concurrency and memoization to those awkward starter conversations you have on the first date, where you decide if you want to keep meeting that person or not. It does so little, but that's the actual load-bearing issue in dating and we can target it with software like this.

Built With

• axum
• react
• rust
• sql
• typescript
• typeshare
• vite