Project Starflash is an, in development, social network for romantic and platonic connections. The twist is that connections are done between people of the opposite gender.
I wholeheartedly believe that people of the opposite gender can meet up and do things without feeling the need to check your back. The focus always turns towards a woman needing to feel safe totally forgetting about a man's experience with dating apps. Men have been beaten, robbed and even killed by females and their accomplices on dating apps. I can see how men specifically would feel disregarded by the system enough to "take" the blows like a "man". Yeah, yeah f**k off and go say that to the other gender and what response will you get?
Match Group and Bumble have given up on making things better though arguably Match Group has always been vultures. Bumble's founder is married, is she even qualified anymore to run it? I would think that someone who isn't married should be running these dating apps. Like how do you even experience the apps if you don't have a good reason to run it on your phone anymore. How do you know the app works the way you want anymore.
Dating apps are shit because of the gender pendulum. Bumble swung the pendulum in the opposite direction, but how has that made dating, actually meeting people, better? The whole point of dating is to get to know the other and have fun. Why isn't it fun because people tend to be fickle little sh*ts when there is no punishment for their actions. Uber ushered in an effective way to gain an idea of your driver with ratings, reviews and compliments. This forced drivers to act more appropriately or else their income could be threatened.
As online dating continues to be the way that people meet, it is harder for people to meet people offline. This means that there is definitely a market with an enhanced online dating experience. Project Starflash will offer solutions to the problems of online dating.
For example, bans are unnecessary harsh on dating apps, so a proper process aimed to tamp down on people's stupidity and aggression, if they'd like to stay on the service, would mitigate these issues.
Burnout isn't something that is tackled on dating apps since they want you to engage all the damn time outside of botting activity of course. Men are thirsty beasts for women, I get it. There are better ways to give men an experience. Women tend to burn out with picking men who want to quench their thirst. That's what happens when you have too much choice and algorithms designed to serve you the most attractive guys rather than the best fit men.
Dangers of meeting up can be mitigated somewhat with an established user and user base. It's a tough problem that not the likes of Uber has solved, but has been better mitigated than with Taxis. Verification, background checks, 911 on speed dial, meet up in a public place are some of the ways to mitigate problems. I think there are some interesting ways to tackle this problem technologically that will be implemented in Project Starflash. Uber has it easy since they can forcibly get drivers to submit to verification processes. With dating apps, there can be a choice by both sides given transparency of verification. The idea is that if the other person isn't verified then another person should factor that into the "would meet" criteria.
Rejection is another aspect of dating apps. I think shifting responsibilities to one side is better. It's just objectively better. It is more about spreading the mental load of the aspect of the pick and choose phase.
Some bad behaviors stem from dating apps serving as promotional advertising or emotional validation for people where they will date but do it just to do it just because it makes them feel better about their life. I absolutely hate seeing and hearing about these experiences. Promotion is only of those things that go under 2 strikes policy, 1 warning then ban for life. The emotional validation experience is only of those things that have to be self reported by people. The threshold for this though would result in immediate ban. I want this to be 3 strikes, but if someone is doing it on purpose then they are degrading the experience and ultimately pushing them to other apps is better for the service and its users.
Anyway, mockups. Been using Figma to design how the app looks along with app flow. It looks really f**king good and I would definitely use it. Like I wish I had it on my phone already because it looks so good.
I hope to deliver a proper solution to some of today and tomorrow's online dating problems. Dating subreddits are valuable sources of information that help a lot. Future posts will include more details about general features and security features that will used to tackle the issues above and others. Expect another post maybe in 2-3 weeks.