This is somewhat relatable: I’m building a dating app without blackjack and hookers. Well, at least without the blackjack.
Not gonna lie, it’s not a weekend project! And that’s before even considering the eventual launch and marketing.
Will your dating site have a theme?
Is there a monetary goal behind it and if so,
how would you deal with the service becoming a huge success,
while consequently memberships drop?Thank you for asking.
The theme can be answered a number of different ways.
- In one sense, I strive to at least support (if not outright focus on) minorities rather than simply catering to the mononormative.
- In another sense, one goal that doesn’t directly relate to dating is to offer a platform that is independent (of Match Group) and EU-centric in terms of both client focus and technical infrastructure.
- I want to bring back a lot of what has been lost to enshittification in other apps, things I’ve personally been missing and also seen being a common complaint when dating apps in general are discussed online. If you’ve been on, say, OkC more than a year, you’ll probably remember valuable, useful features that just aren’t there anymore.
- If you’ve been on any dating app, you know how icky and frustrating and just straight up annoying the apps themselves are (before you even factor in the behaviour of the users, and their reasons).
Ideally, a dating app should have massive amounts of transient users. If you have users who’ve been there for years, you’re not giving them what they want (but you might be giving them something else in order to keep them hooked…).
So as for the monetary goal, there are many gates that must be passed before finances become a critical issue. I’ve published things as open source, and if six users find you, you have six happy users. A dating app not only requires a massive amount of users, it also requires significant local user density for it to be useful. I am fundamentally aiming for low cost of upkeep with the goal of enabling the app to survive having relatively few users, even if they aren’t paying much.
I can say this much: I’ve done the math and am pretty confident in being able to deliver at a fraction of the cost of any existing offering. My plan is to offer no free tier (huge barrier, I am aware) but then offer a very-reasonably-priced paid tier that unlocks everything. I want the app to be transparent, helpful, and eschewing dark patterns and money-grabbing schemes. I don’t expect you to believe it, but I’m not doing this for the purpose of profit; I just don’t think a dating app that’s entirely free is going to work very well vis-a-vis attracting high-quality participants.
Do I think I’ve “cracked” or “solved” online dating? Absolutely not. There are things I know I will never do, other things I know I’ll be (almost) the only one to do, and a number of topics and issues that I don’t know even can be resolved in any meaningful way.
oooh so sorry, but that’s a meme. -12 piefed score, also your instance is now shadowbanned. Gotta deal with the consequences of your actions chief…
Tale as old as time…I’ve seen it so many times in my professional life and also in activism. Hell, I’ve done it.
Things look so easy from the outside. All the flaws seem like they can be fixed without much effort, why can’t the people in charge see it? Then you rush in and try to do it yourself without an understanding of why things are the way they are and BAM you hit a wall. Suddenly things aren’t so easy. Suddenly you can’t fix all the mistakes. And you are making new ones.
I’m not saying people shouldn’t try new things, but rushing in without trying to take some lessons from the existing systems without judgement is foolishness.
My secret is that I talk myself out of it before I even start : D
I’ve never been able to talk myself out of anything. Like I will have the entire thought process and think maybe it’s a bad idea, and I shouldn’t speak my mind, but I really want to so I do. It has not yielded good results
Fun fact, Rimu takes after George Orwell and keeps lists of “undesirables:”
I’m so insulted by not being on that list!
new life goal
Seems people that post more than comment weren’t on the list, or maybe I am not familiar enough with the others.
I guess to be fair I never actually posted anything on piefed, I just called him out when he came to troll on lemmy.
I didn’t either, lol. Just @'d a certain “history major” social fascist from a Lemmy.ml thread, debunking claims about the 1930s soviet famine.
lmao that’s definitely a bannable offence
For the devout anti-communist Rimu? Absolutely. Here’s the MOG thread discussing it.
CW: Ableism, misgendering
these people just can’t help tell on themselves
Haha wow, I can’t believe I made the list for calling him an asshole that time. I was wondering why there was so much less crap on my feed lately.
To be fair, being banned does not mean you do not see it, just that they do not see you.
Fuck, I gotta post harder
You’ll get there!
Did he miss mine?
What the hell! How am I not on this list! Unforgivable.
Gotta grind those points up!
I thought this comment would have done it.
Fair enough, I would think that would earn you a ban over some of what the others posted.
Fuck, I am not on the cool club list.
Better try harder to get on it for rev 2!
i’m somehow disappointed that i didn’t make the list. lol
We’ll all get there one day lol
i feel disappointed in myself, what am i doing im not on the list…
It’s okay comrade, we’ll all get there eventually lol.
In honesty, I think Rimu just scans certain threads and adds up everyone that doesn’t support them. If Rimu actually spent time checking everyone’s account, way more people would be banned as even comrade @Edie@lemmy.ml is on the list despite being one of the least confrontational people I’ve seen on the fediverse.
im upping the ante to get there comrade -.-7
🧉I am having my morning mate right now
for real? you from latam or syria? there was a big syrian migration to argentina and when some returned to their country they took mate with them. i cannot live without mate.
I’m from Iran but I worked with an Argentinian for a few years in like 2010 and he refused to drink mate by himself so we used to leave the office and sit outside smoking and drinking mate during breaks and I got hooked. Mi favorito es el Rosamonte, pero voy probando otras cosas. Esta mañana estoy tomando Hierbas Silvestres.
lol, yeah, mate has to be shared! si podes proba estancia la merced, tienen distintas “cepas” de yerba que van de lo mas suave a lo mas amargo. my favourite is barbacuá which has a smoky bitter taste.
https://piefed.social/u/Edie@lemmy.ml
This user does not exist.Edie getting caught up in the ban wave 😭
Classic humans projecting their behaviour on cats. There is nothing to worry about.
There are zero hexbear admins on there. I feel ashamed. We have failed. One of the legs of the stankie triad has been broken.
Hexbear is fall.
Millions must post hog
At least slop is represented
How did you do that “emoji”? Is it a feature of some frontend? Seems fun
They secretly love yalls rad pictures. I love your rad pictures but its not a secret.
Pretty sure that’s more because Piefed.social is defederated from Hexbear.net, there are some powerful posters beyond the defed wall Rimu would probably happily add.
The great defed-firewall isn’t designed to keep the bears in the cage. It’s designed to keep us out of your cage.
Pre-emptively as a last resort
Although to be fair, defederation has been used by Hexbear to protect marginalized comrades from more dangerous instances, so this is both justified and still keeping bigots out.
We call those mosquito net firewalls. Those nasty little things carry nasty diseases we don’t want to get transmitted among the community, and also even if they were clean of infectious matter, their nips itch and they annoyingly divebomb our ears all the time at night.
Yep, agreed, some instances would just raise the moderator workload incredible levels to stay federated.
@rimu@piefed.social add us to your list or your a lib
Lmao, who is this guy? db0 is cool, and so is Quokka 🤣 What a cooker. (p.s. will this get me added to the list?)
The head Dev of Piefed, and maybe it will!
Piefed might be a unique online forum where the lead dev is also the lead troll.
Lmao, fair
Does anyone have the list of extremely cool and sexy posters?
I think it’s the same list 😎
Idk, not the list I’d see myself on 😂
You’ll get there!
Two years I’ve been posting communist propaganda straight from Bezos’s mouth, what have I been doing wrong that I’m not on the list 😔
I’m not upset, just would’ve been nice to be recognized
We’ll all get into the hall of fame eventually, comrade 🫡
I don’t actually think that software is necessarily neutral, and that for this sort of thing to be successful in the current landscape it MUST be Marxists who make it. Take Bluesky, for example. Or OpenAI is perhaps a better example. Maybe this breaks some people out of the “Elon bad -> Dorsey good” cycle of analysis as to why lemmy exists and maybe leads them to question the use of the “tankie” perjorative in general.
I agree. “The medium is the message” also implies that the medium cannot be neutral.
Personally I don’t see why the views of those that write software should really concern us, as long as the technical implementation is not biased. It’s open-source and people can take it and do with it what they please. No-one is forcing you to accept certain views or think about things critically (including assessing others viewpoints that may be different to yours). I feel like it’s a bit of a waste of time to worry about these things.
It is, in the instance chooser there is a “defederation score” that is “good” if you have defederated a sufficient amount of instances Rimu doesn’t like.
biases manifest in really strange and unexpected ways and you’ll fail even when you try to intentionally account for them; that’s why things like facial recognition success rate correlates to the darkness of your skin or why successful ai recognition of text/speech is related how different your language is to english or mandarin.
the only way to successfully gaurd against bias in software development is to have developer teams comprised of people can naturally keep each other’s biases in check.
I think facial recognition technology is very different to threadiverse software. The fact that those technologies are trained on predominantly-white data is no surprise, both of your examples are data-based (ML models) where the data itself contains the bias.
I am talking more of the open-source projects, it’s important; as you rightfully call out, that we have a varied group of opinions within the developer group 👍
it’s not just ai or training data for it; it’s developers themselves too, including fediverse ones.
the biggest non-ai/training examples that i can think of came from times before ai was ever a thing like:
-
usps had difficulty validating addresses because the software they obtained assumed euro-centric naming schema
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airlines, health care providers, hotels, and state motor vehicle departments rejected registration/reservations because trans people have to option to select their sex
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health care providers misdosed patients because the software they used didn’t account for highly-athletic/bodybuilding people or people with chronic conditions
there are SO MANY examples out there where the bias clearly comes from the developer instead of the training data and there’s no way that any piefed developer is immune or can even effectively mitigate their biases.
-
as long as the technical implementation is not biased.
Piefed has been baking in biases though, like adding a bunch of leftist/international sources in a huge blocklist labelled ‘qanon’, which if you then want to disable it’s got to be done manually.
Not to mention clear disregard for breaking activitypub interoperability.
Yeah, I’m not a huge fan of it myself and don’t see the need for it really. If that’s right about the baked-in blocklist, then this was the right choice. You should be able to craft your own blocklists, if you so choose to.
Hmm, you’re talking about the little red warning triangle? In theory this could be cool if it was something each instance could configure using custom url-lists (as you know we all don’t agree on which perspective is “right”) but if it’s coming packaged with PieFed, then I would call that inherent bias in the product. 🤨
there’s also a block component to that as well, his ‘qanon’ blocklist is something you toggle on and can manually edit it via ui; it pulls from a github he runs and contains leftist sites like grayzone as well as sites like wikileaks.org.
here’s how the interface works, you either click every button on the list or edit the database/use a different onequoting davel here:
domain blocklist, which is not mandatory on install—though most new instances choose it—and can be removed by an admin with either the patience or the database skill to remove it.
It’s essentially the Media Bias Fact Checker Bot as an integrated feature in the platform.
I’m assuming “tankie” is what liberals call leftists?
And what leftists that support bourgeois ideologies call other leftists.
what happened?
