a few interesting ideas in here, but also a few weird ideas and ideas i don’t think are going to work at all. (also i’m not sure it’s actually possible to build a “good” dating app.)
What sets the app apart from the rest of the dating app scene is that After requires users to share why they have unmatched a person before they are allowed to keep swiping. The idea behind the feature is to get rid of abrupt disconnections and confusion.
If two people match on After and start a conversation, but one person stops replying, they will be nudged to respond. If the person still doesn’t message the other user, the match expires. Before they can use the app’s features again, they need to choose a reason why they let the match expire.
Users can choose from a list of reasons to explain why they decided to stop responding. For instance, they can say distance was an issue or that the vibes didn’t match. After will then create a kind message and send it to the other person, and remind them that this isn’t a representation of who they are or their worth.
After will soon include opt-in mental health check-ins where you can reflect on your mood and feelings. And if the app thinks you have been using it too much, it will suggest that you take a break.
This app fundamentally misunderstands the problem. Your friend sets you up on a date. Are you going to treat that person horribly. Of course not. Why? First and foremost, because you’re not a dick. Your date is a human being who, like you, is worthy and deserving of basic respect and decency. Second, because your mutual friendship holds you accountable. Relationships in communities have an overlapping structure that mutually impact each other. Accountability is an emergent property of that structure, not something that can be implemented by an app. When you meet people via an app, you strip both the humanity and the community, and with it goes the individual and community accountability.
I’ve written about this tension before: As we use computers more and more to mediate human relationships, we’ll increasingly find that being human and doing human things is actually too complicated to be legible to computers, which need everything spelled out in mathematically precise detail. Human relationships, like dating, are particularly complicated, so to make them legible to computers, you necessarily lose some of the humanity.
Companies that try to whack-a-mole patch the problems with that will find that their patches are going to suffer from the same problem: Their accountability structure is a flat shallow version of genuine human accountability, and will itself result in pathological behavior. The problem is recursive.
I have in my life met a number of people to whom you might want to explain that this was how they were supposed to behave.
really good thoughts and write up that you linked, thanks
Glad to hear it!
I think you make a good point. But the tech doesn’t have to formalize or understand the complexities of human relations or state. The platform and environment are something you can shape even without an established or physical community. The way information is presented and interactions happen does influence how people use and communicate. Not reaching the same degree doesn’t mean it’s a complete failure.
Totally agreed. I didn’t mean to say that it’s a failure if it doesn’t properly encapsulate all complexity, but that the inability to do so has implications for design. In this specific case (as in many cases), the error they’re making is that they don’t realize the root of the problem that they’re trying to solve lies in that tension.
Again, couldn’t agree more! The platform is actually extremely powerful and can easily change behavior in undesirable ways for users, which is actually the core thesis of that longer write up that I linked. That’s a big part of where ghosting comes from in the first place. My concern is that thinking you can just bolt a new thing onto the existing model is to repeat the original error.