On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
I think a story about the way an important aspect of human existence turns into a market response to the collected needs of individuals would gratify one's intellectual curiosity.
BBC Panorama explained why this is the case in a recent investigation.
The basic problem comes down to money. Imagine you have a really good dating site and everyone finds their perfect partner within a matter of a few emails and dates. Thereafter they no longer need the services of the dating website.
Hence to make money from a dating website you need people to not find dates, find partners or marry. Because as soon as that happens they stop paying their subscription fees. Keep them suckered for as long as possible, as in years, offering glimpses of false hope.
Personally I don't see why it has to be this way. If I was a benevolent dictator I would make sure there was a free dating website, make it mandatory for single people to be on there and force the cruft dating websites out of business. Ultimately dating is good for the wider economy, a hopeful date is a no expense spared event for those with expense to spare. Our politicians are forever pandering to families and family values as if they are the only people that need to be looked out for.
This was the same argument given about why Google was foolish to start a search engine. A good search engine should keep you searching longer to show you more ads. In reality people flocked to the search engine precisely because it worked. If a dating site were very very good, it could advertise something like "We're so confident you'll find someone with X months that we only ask you to pay a one time fee to join instead of monthly."
If I'm completely successful with my Google search, I'll be back with another search before too long; If I'm completely successful with my relationship, I will NEVER be back.
That said, it's telling that Google has gone to such great lengths to add other features and services in order to present more adverts.
That assumes owners of (at least some) dating sites know how to make them suck less and choose not to in order to extend subscription times. I don't think that is necessarily the case.
Arn't dating websites make money from Users who are single ? If the dating service is just too effective, won't they be reducing their customer base? Where else will you find women in her 30s paying $90 per month for years for a hope to get married vs. someone who pays just for one month and gets married.
"Rich" is an understatement. This is one of the biggest unsolved problems (or badly-solved problems), potential market size-wise, in the Western world.
The person who does better than Match.com is going to be Zuckerberg-level rich.
I can't believe dating websites are still around. Facebook makes it so incredibly easy to meet random people (at least friends of friends in some degree) and makes easy to flirt with or start conversations with those people.
In one bored night you could start a conversation with the cute girl that works with your friend Sara, your friend Jenny's sister, and your cousin Sue's roomate. Social media makes dating like shooting fish in a barrel.
Maybe I'm just too old to understand, but this seems a little creepy to me. My friend hasn't introduced me to their friend, but I'm going to start chatting to them on FB? How would my friend feel about this? If someone else contacted me this way, I think I might be a little reluctant to say very much. I don't know if this is because I'm older, or very introverted, or both.
I don't think it's possible to "crack that" -- while many people will agree that they suck, there won't be any agreement on exactly how, and why, and what the ideal would look like.
In reality, they suck no worse than any other way of meeting people.
One thing that might help, would be reducing noise that women have to deal with -- e.g. by limiting number of messages users can send per day, or something like that...
But innovation doesn't work like that. It isn't that anybody will decide a good online dating process by committee. Rather, entrepreneurs will keep trying the ideas that they have until one blows up. Like so many things, we'll only recognize it after the fact.
In my experience, online dating has been noticeably way, way worse than other ways of meeting people. Meeting people through activity groups and friends of friends has consistently worked literally infinitely better for me. I.e., I've expended far more effort on online dating over the years, and had zero results (no relationships), and spent far less effort meeting people casually or through friends doing things I was already doing, and had lots of relationships that way.
(1) Judging attraction from a profile is very difficult, so you can go spend a lot of time and energy going on dates with someone who is obviously wrong for you.
(2) Many, perhaps most people, misrepresent themselves in their profiles, making "shopping" all the harder. In my experience this is true of women, but women say that men lie too.
Attraction is much easier to sense in person. Once you're attracted, the answers to a bunch of fact-based questions don't matter so much.
There's a massively skewed ratio of men to women on these sites, probably around 10:1 men to women. As a result, women get spammed with no-content or offensive messages, driving many away. Those who do stay have to spend significant effort sifting through messages to find good ones, and inevitably a lot of good messages from decent men get lost in the deluge. Most dating sites are just glorified personal ads, no innovation at all. OKCupid is an exception with its quizzes and match percentages, but the percentages are inaccurate and OKC is filled with people who are just there for the quizzes.
As other people said: for most sites the model is just broken.
The website needs a large amount of potential matches on the site. So, once you sign up your profile is never removed. That means people looking sometimes have to trawl through dead profiles.
You earn money by charging people money. Sometimes that's for reading messages people send you. Sometimes it's for replying to messages. Many sites send fake messages.
Many sites are run by a small number of operators and they buy and sell profile information among themselves. This would be unacceptable if the profiles were genuine, but they're often fake. So there are huge amounts of fake people sending fake messages to real people on websites just to get them to pay to subscribe.
But even the good sites have problems. See, for example, OkCupid. (which is a very good site.) There's a small number of people on there who have little intention of actually dating. They're just meeting online people. OKC have taken steps to reduce that (really, they should have opened up a pay-for forums, a bit like suicidegirls. SG had "come for the titties, stay for the forums", OKC could have "Come for the dating, stay for the community". (Yes, I'd like a free sub if you ever do that, OKC)
Or people just have wildly unrealistic expectations.
And, on top of all that, you have the regular suckiness of dating.
Sometimes it seems as if HN-users are feeling so guilty about the whole bro-gramming topic, that they up vote anything that has to do with women..