Dating App Idea: The Council
Consensus seems to be that the dating apps are not ok.
Interactions are shallow, atomised, impersonal. People ghost and flake, conversations die. Bots and scams and spam. People put in the minimum possible effort, and when you try to put in effort yourself, people make you wish you hadn't.
Perhaps a better designed app might help. So here's my (sadly extremely heteronormative) idea:
When a man matches with a woman, he can be put into a chat, not with her, but with a Council of 3 to 5 of her most trusted advisors. If he can impress them enough that they vote to let him talk to her, he’s in.
Why is this good for women?
I expect women’s experience of using this app would be much better than with most dating apps.
Much less harassment, for one thing. Most harassing or abusive messages would never be sent in the first place, because why would you send that kind of thing to a group-chat of gatekeepers? And if it does happen, facing it as a group makes it much easier to deal with.
The general standard of one on one conversation you experience on the app would be much higher, because you’re never one-on-one with a random guy, you only talk to people who your Council has voted to send on to you. You don't have to deal with a deluge of losers and time wasters, they’re filtered out for you by your Council. In fact I expect most of them would be filtered out even before then, by being unwilling to use this app in the first place.
So, less hassle in the app, talking to higher quality guys, and thus having better dates.
But also, the dates themselves are probably better, even holding the guy constant, because your Council can ask all the questions you'd want answered early on, but which you'd find awkward to ask. You probably don’t get nearly as much information on a first date as you’d like, because, well, you want to go on a date, not conduct a job interview. But first dates often end up being kind of job-interview-y anyway. If your Council conducts the job interview for you ahead of time though, that part is mostly over with before you're even really involved, the guy has already passed the test, and the first date is free to just be a date.
“But I don’t have 3-5 people who I trust / who know me well enough!”
Honestly I would probably try to fix that before trying to date.
Why is this good for men?
Look, if you want to properly date a woman, you're going to have to win over her friends anyway, so you may as well get that out of the way at the start.
Facing down a group of judgemental gatekeepers can be intimidating, but this is easily dealt with by not being a fucking coward. Did you expect to achieve romantic success without risking social discomfort? Faint heart never won fair lady, get in there and prove yourself!
That said, I expect the experience of using the app would actually be more fun and interesting than the average dating app - certainly more exciting, and probably much less corrosive to the soul:
For one, there’s far less ambiguity and uncertainty. You won’t wait hours for a reply, not knowing if she’s ghosted you - there are like 5 people in this group chat, someone will talk to you. You’ll basically never get kinda-ambiguously-pseudo-rejected by The Council - if they vote you down, 3 to 2 or 4 to 1 or unanimously, you know where you stand.
Plus, you’ll get a lot more feedback! The Council has no reason to be afraid to tell you exactly why you didn’t make the cut. The feedback might be hard to hear, but I’d rather have uncomfortable honesty than a blank featureless wall and no guidance on how to improve.
The Council also keeps you from wasting a lot of time on women you’re not compatible with. If the relationship is going to fail, it should fail fast. And this way, it fails before you have a chance to get attached.
And it’s a two way street. There’s a lot of information you can get about a woman through her Council which would be much harder to infer from her dating app profile. If the Council’s questions are all about kids, that tells you something. If the questions are all about your income, that tells you something. If they’re all about your politics, that tells you something. If a woman is looking for something that I’m not, I want to know that as early as possible.
So being rejected by a Council on those kinds of grounds shouldn’t feel too personal. If it’s super important to a woman that you share her politics, and you really don’t, that’s just saved you both a lot of hassle.
"Jesus, I don't want to run a gauntlet and meet a girl's whole social group, I'm just trying to get laid!"
That's ok! This app is not for you.
Why is it good to be on a Council?
Aren’t you tired of your awesome friends, who deserve all the romantic success in the world, making bad choices and dating assholes and losers? Don't you wish you could help them find a suitable boy?
Does it not sound fun to have a group chat where you all judge guys who want to date your friends? Be real, do you not already kind of have one? But what if you could grill those guys yourself? And you don't have to be chill and polite, you can ask the hard questions and make sure your friend doesn't get her time wasted.
Talking to randos on dating apps is not fun. Judging randos with a group of your friends is fun as hell.
Ok, but another dating app? Would it even catch on?
The viral potential is high - each woman who signs up needs to get 3-5 other people to be on her Council. That’s extra friction of course, but it also means 3-5 people will make accounts and be using the app regularly. It's natural that some of them might then want to start using the app for themselves, and appoint their own Council, and so on.
I don’t think it will be at all difficult to persuade people to sign up to sit on a friend’s Council. I’ve been led to believe that friends tend to enjoy hearing about, and involving themselves in, one another’s love life decisions.
And a Council Seat is obviously a position of high esteem, a strong signifier of trust and closeness. People will want to be on their friends' Councils simply for the sake of having been deemed worthy of the role. I imagine there will be considerable interpersonal drama about Council Seat appointments. All of this is excellent for the app's mindshare.
Isn’t this whole idea kind of horrible?
In a way yes, but it’s importantly a very different kind of horrible than the existing dating apps.
Plus we can licence that Spice Girls song for the ads.