Apologies for the delay in getting back to you. I am very carefully trying to find a space to share with people what I’m building … I don’t want to be blocked for selling things (I’m really not), but I hope to find a place to start a conversation about what an actually user friendly offering could look like.

I cannot believe that these existing offerings must be so expensive, and so enshittified. Where is the open source mentality?

Here’s a short and very incomplete list of things that could be done differently:

• be priced reasonably
• have one tier that includes everything
• not have tons of dark patterns, anxiety traps, and addictive or just shitty behaviour
• have better tools to manage the deluge of likes and messages (esp. a problem for women)
• not remove features that users were happy with
• not inject fake scarcity
• mechanics to pause your own account, and cull inactive users
• not enable mindless mass-swiping
• let users filter on what’s in people’s profiles (again, without paying extra)
• respect filters (eg. don’t show me people from 7000km away when I’ve set a 15km radius)
• have filters be symmetrical (don’t show me smokers when I ask not to - and also don’t show me to smokers)
• be radically transparent about user base, statistics, traffic, etc.

I’m still far from an alpha product and haven’t even secured a domain yet. Still laying the technical groundwork and reading research papers.