The ideal dating app.

TL;DR: Apps are wasting your time. You have to perform a thousand fucking actions to get the actual result. Instead, the ideal app would automate everything and just provide you with whatever you came for in the first place. Just go to physical dates only.

Why are we even doing this?

Think about what actually happens. You download an app. Upload photos. And then you spend hours flicking through faces like a catalog. Swipe. Swipe. Swipe. Match. Bullshit small talk. "Hey." "How’s your week." Three days between replies. Maybe a date happens. Maybe they ghost. Back to swiping.

I personally hate it. The very idea of doing all this bullshit makes me cry. Well, some do enjoy the swiping – they get a dopamine hit – but I don’t see the point. Eventually it’s the process that feels wasteful. Even scrolling endless TikTok is much better than this. I get immediate feedback. I have a cute cat video. I can share it immediately. I can save it. That interaction is fulfilling and has value in itself (somewhat). Compare to those damn apps.

All this – hours, days, weeks – is just the cost of getting to a face-to-face conversation. Why do we accept it? A fucking ritual for results that should be the starting point.

Tinder, Hinge, Bumble – their revenue depends on one thing: you staying in the app. Not finding a partner. Not going on dates. Staying in the app. Every swipe, every message, every "just one more" before bed – that’s the product.

They manufacture fake scarcity – limited swipes, super likes, throttling.

The screen was never where judgment happens. Chemistry, attraction — none of that resolves through a profile and three photos. You can’t know until you’re sitting across from them. The apps pretend otherwise because admitting it would break the loop.

This isn’t how humans naturally dated. We stumbled upon someone. Moved on or connected. The stumbling was free – it happened in the course of living. What if the app just did the stumbling and the boring routine stuff for you?

Your week has a ceiling

Every app invents fake scarcity – limited swipes, super likes, throttling – to keep you coming back.

But there’s real scarcity: you can only sit across from 3 or 4 people a week. Limited evenings. Limited emotional bandwidth. Four to five dates if you’re really pushing it.

Stop asking the algorithm to judge chemistry. It can’t. Feed it a thousand data points – age, interests, music taste – it still cannot predict whether two people click face to face. That only resolves in person.

The app’s only job: eliminate the admin bullshit between wanting a date and having one.

The concierge

Onboarding.

Register. Upload photos. Fill out a real questionnaire – 50 points minimum. Preferences. Values. Life goals. Dealbreakers. Stuff that matters when you’re across from someone for an hour.

Then about a hundred swipes. The algorithm can match on profile similarity, but visual preference is nonlinear – you need to give it data on what passes your base hot-or-not filter. One-time tax. Three-minute game, not homework.

Background matching.

Close the app. Live your life.

The algorithm works in the background: your profile, your visual preferences, your availability, matching against everyone else. You set a rate – "3 dates this week," whatever. It picks candidates, sends invites. You don’t babysit this. You don’t check. It just runs.

Weekly digest.

Once a week, you open the app for maybe five minutes.
What you see: a short list of people who already expressed interest in you.
Someone already said yes first. The algorithm committed on your behalf, did the filtering, sent the proposal. You’re just confirming. Swipes capped – ten, maybe. Yes, no, quick check, approve.

This is a pre-qualified proposal. Someone already saw your profile and said yes. The interest is there already. You just say yes or no.

Schedule negotiation.

Match → background agent starts negotiating logistics. Both sides describe availability in natural language: "weekday evenings, east side, coffee shops." Agent matches schedules, finds overlap, proposes time and place. No "so when are you free" ping-pong. No three days of scheduling. The agent does the handshake. You’re not involved – because there shouldn’t be a conversation yet. The conversation happens at the date. And maybe a quick confirm beforehand.

Notification: "Thursday 7pm, The Corner Cafe, with Alex. Confirm?"
Tap yes. Show up. You barely notice the app. Success is measured by how little you use it.

Two modes, one promise

Personal mode.

Straightforward. Algorithm finds someone compatible. They express interest. You confirm. The agent negotiates time and place. You meet one person for coffee. No pre-work.

Problem is it requires two people to actually connect. It’s more expensive, does more background work, but tends to lead to more personal dates.

However, I very much like the idea of speed dating – you go to an event, meet a whole group real quick, and decide on the spot whether you like any of them at all. Yet it seems to be rather overwhelmingly the American thing. Everywhere I lived I did not see any analogy of it. That’s why I would like to make it worldwide.

Group mode.

Instead of matching person to person, the algorithm matches person to event. It clusters 5-10 people – mutually interested, schedule-compatible, geographically convenient – into a room. You confirm attendance, show up, judge live.

Group mode also plays a structural role: it’s the safety valve. If 1:1 matching can’t find anyone good enough this week – pool thin, schedules don’t align – fall back to "here’s a room of 8 decent-fit people, go find your own quota live."

Both modes feed the same commitment: you asked for 3 dates, here’s 3 slots filled. Three separate coffees or one speed-dating night. You pick the format. The system guarantees the output.

A business model that can’t afford to lie

And the business model is actually beautiful:

You pay for server costs and the agent doing the communication. That’s it. No premium tier, boosts, ads, or data selling.

Weekly subscription. If the app fails to deliver – or does a shit job – you skip and leave. The provider is immediately penalized. No dates? No money. Bad dates? Cancel, they lose revenue.

This is the opposite of every existing app. Tinder optimizes for time-in-app. This app optimizes for dates-delivered, time-minimized. You can’t get here by tweaking a swipe app. Different success metric, day one.

That might feel like bullshit when it would still produce you something. You ask for three dates a week, it may supply low quality picks or bad ones. But well – you ask for this. You still get to vet your invitations beforehand. The algorithm doesn’t need to be perfect — it needs to avoid catastrophically bad matches and get you in the room.

We all already secretly want this thing

Everyone already has an idea of how to automate the dating experience. Just put a bot behind Tinder, have it do the job, and you come for an already ready conversation that actually values your time.

But it’s actually so wasteful and inefficient, and could backfire when you’re hitting bot-on-bot instead of bot-on-human.

That’s why we need a completely new one where humans are removed from much of the cycle and left to do the real things.

Wait, but it takes control from us?

Oh, yes and no. It takes the bullshit kind of control. The kind that requires a lot of actions, a lot of movements, with potentially small and futile results.

The whole idea is to return us to the randomness of stumbling upon people. How we always, over the course of time, have found dates. Saw someone in the park, approached, had small talk, and all that. Suddenly, an appointment for the evening. But we can’t do this anymore. Approaching strangers on the street is a bad move anyway, uncomfortable for everyone. The app solves this because everyone is already willing. They just need a matchmaker to make it happen.

The app that gets out of your way

What actually changes if this exists?

The app becomes a disappearing scheduler. You barely interact with it. You set your preferences once. You get calendar invites. You go to dates. Because that is what you wanted from the start.

Part of a larger whole

Throughout history, we humans have always been forced to interact with others for survival. We have to. Whether we liked it or not, whether we enjoyed it or not, we have to interact with others, because a life without it would be impossible. Now technology gives us greater freedom – we no longer have to perform these interactions. You can work fully remotely. You don’t have to talk to your colleagues to do meaningful work. You can have deliveries and all that. You no longer have to interact to get the basics of life.

And yes, that is a beautiful thing, but some will cry that it just promotes loneliness. I would say it’s actually the natural result of us finally getting a reprieve.
Otherwise, if that weren’t the case, how do you explain why so many people enjoy living alone even when they have money? If people didn’t enjoy being alone, even the rich ones would naturally start co-living, having more shared living arrangements and so on.
No – we are actually benefiting from it, most of us.
So, for once in our time, social interaction is optional, not required for survival. And because it’s optional, we can choose how to be happy – alone or not.

Yes, some people overreacted and withdrew too much, and now they suffer from loneliness. But in practice, people are still choosing to live alone, even when they’re not forced to coexist or co-live with others for financial reasons.

Yet the infrastructure for socialization is broken. Because the change came too fast. Before, we had spaces – the third places – spaces we could stumble upon. Now they are abandoned.
We are enjoying living alone, but we also lack the capacity to find an easy, accessible way to socialize.

I’m speaking from my own experience too. I have no idea where the hell I’d go out. I come to a new city and have no idea what to do.
This app model also proposes a way to get pointers for socializing. You just open the app’s message board – a classifieds board for events – and you tell the agent you want to go out somewhere today. Where do I go? And you’re immediately presented with options: gatherings people organized, or being matched right away with other people who expressed the same thing.
So in the end, we also have to find a new way to get the socialization on demand that we lost. Before, we could only go to one place – a club, a bar, somewhere – and we knew the kind of experience we were going to get. But now we don’t have to settle for that choice, because we could have many – more convenient to us and more diverse at the same time.

I was hoping this module would become our new way to find socialization on demand. We are unlikely to go back to the old way – going to some places, limited places, limited by your physical location, limited by the range of activities you can do and all that. That’s the old way. We just need better tools to make it cool once again. And cool means on-demand, effortless range and variety – and convenience first of all.

If anything, that makes human communication more honest, more valuable, because now we are choosing not only when we are willing, when we are ready, and when it’s convenient and safe for us – but also because it’s cooperation rather than pure stumbling. When you meet through the app, which serves as a shared message board intermediary, you already find the people who want it, rather than risking being in a place where there’s less guarantee that participants came with the same ideas.