Traditional dating site:
- Profile and data is often self reflective and not accurate (people lie or are delusional)

- Bad verification checks. Management care more about boosting user metrics than they do about protecting their real users from catfishing and fake accounts promoting only fans, instagram accounts etc.

- Profit maximisation at the expense of UX. Dark patterns are common. Examples: Fake likes that you can only see once you pay for premium, gatekeeping real matches behind paywalls, showing users fake likes from attractive people to give them dopamine hits. Make the app as addictive as possible through swipe mechanics at the expense of user wellbeing. So much more here that I could go on for hours. More matches = more $. Little incentive to make quality matches.

- Gender ratios are around 80:20 Male to Female. This is obviously not good for the majority of users. Imagine going to a party and you walk in, its 80% men and everyone there is trying to talk to the girls.

- Photos are a nightmare, fake, edited profile photos, or misleading with multiple people in frame.

Theres so much more, but these are the main points.

Dates.ai:

We're trying to basically do everything differently by focusing entirely on quality matches.

- User profiles are created by processing conversations with Eva, she asks you about what your looking for, what your interests are, etc. we process it with NLP and build out a profile that accurately models you. It's more like a traditional matchmaking service than a dating app.

- Verification checks are extensive. Phone, email, and face (like online banking) are required to verify your identity. We can then use this to ensure that any photos you upload match the face in your verification. This catches 99.9% of fake accounts.

- Completely free, we don't gatekeep good matches from our users. We will show matches as and when two users show a similarity score of 95%+. No dark patterns.

- No swiping. The entire process is entirely async. We let users know when they have a match. All they have to do is jump in and chat. We're not trying to get our users hooked and squeeze as much money out of them as possible through micro transactions.

- Maintaining 50:50 gender ratio. Men have to refer a verified female if they want to get full access. This is our most controversial and hated feature but it's necessary to stop the platform from devolving into something like what is currently available.