Are State Run Dating Apps A Solution to Falling Fertility Rates?

https://discord.gg/EGFRjwwS92

In this insightful discussion, Malcolm and Simone Collins explore Japan's government-backed dating app initiative aimed at boosting the country's birth rate. They analyze the app's unique features, such as income verification and relationship status documentation, and compare it to other dating platforms. The couple delves into the evolution of dating apps, the challenges of modern matchmaking, and the potential impact of government intervention in the dating sphere. They also share personal experiences, discuss the pros and cons of various dating methods, and offer suggestions for improving dating app design. This video provides a comprehensive look at the intersection of technology, government policy, and demographic challenges in Japan and beyond.

Malcolm Collins: . [00:00:00] Hello, this is Malcolm and Simone, and we are excited to be talking to you today about a topic of grave pronatalist interest. Specifically, the country of Japan is making a government backed dating app. Now, I know very little about this topic, other than that it exists, and apparently it's a paid app, which sort of seems to defeat the purpose.

But Simone is gonna tell us more.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: So, let's start.

Simone Collins: Yeah, so it's it's actually not live yet. Only a beta version has really been live, but I'm quite intrigued by this. I think it's a great idea for the government to launch a dating app personally, you know, someone's got to make this work and the way that market it.

Based dynamics work. You're not going to see people actually get married based on dating apps as they are dating apps as they are meant for keeping audiences occupied. They're meant for lots of in app purchases.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. This actually reminds me a lot of people. So when we bemoan the fall of dating apps what we're typically before [00:01:00] bemoaning, it's not that dating apps exist.

They used to be quite good. Simone and I met on a dating app. Okay. Cupid was good. Fantastic for meeting nerdy people. But the way that dating apps worked is you would have these full profiles. And you would search by like keywords in the profile or by matching in terms of like answering tons of questions.

And there were different sites that did this in different ways. Then Tik TOK was invented, which brought in the invite of whatever word I'm looking for here of swipe based dating apps. The advent of swipe based dating it. And then all of the apps started to move to this swipe based system. And originally I had thought that this was sort of a malevolent push, right?

So when Tinder got really big and Match Group moved to swipe based dating and then Match Group bought OkCupid and they moved OkCupid to swipe based dating. And I thought they had done that in order to kill OkCupid. So to understand why swipe based dating is so much worse than the old systems dating websites [00:02:00] are environments in which guys are intrinsically on the back foot.

Mm-Hmm. dating websites are environments where guys sell themselves to women. Fundamentally, that's how dating websites work because the vast majority of dating website users, that's like 80% on Tinder and stuff like that are males. Right?

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Well, here's the problem where you can get differential advantage for males and not just have all of the women sort to the top 20 percent of males.

It's when males are being judged on multiple metrics. Yeah. All right. So because you know, you may not be the highest looking guy, but maybe you have a good career or maybe you're witty or maybe you have a hobby that overlaps with this woman's hobby. Multiple

Simone Collins: dimensions on which you can compete.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. So,

Simone Collins: and by the way, I used that dynamic on OkCupid as well. I did not compete based on my photos, even though I did have photos of myself in film grade stormtrooper armor. [00:03:00] I competed based on these weird questions that OkCupid used to prominently feature in a feed so you could camp out in the questions on OkCupid and give really provocative and weird responses and show up in people's feed and engage them really easily.

So you can, I was able to compete based on how my, how hold up sporky I was. I'm not saying it was great. You got lots of

Malcolm Collins: high profile people. I

Simone Collins: did. Yeah. And that's the thing is, is that I not being the most beautiful person in the world was able to still compete on that. I've said that there was that

Malcolm Collins: YouTuber who was criticizing us recently, who was like, Oh, that guy's way out of her league.

You are out of my league. But I, I I thought that was really funny because I'm like, well, I guess she did pretty well using her mechanism of female outreach on dating apps. But hold on. So the point I was getting to is that when you move to a swipe based dating app it intrinsically, Means that you are just judging people based on how they look, which one interestingly is the thing that women care least about except for random sexual partners.

Right? So [00:04:00] you are basically having the dating app replace the nightclub, which we've actually seen in the United States. Nightclub attendance has been like crashing. They are just used for like regular sex now. Like that is the point of, of the swipe based dating apps. But they prevent men like a diversity of men.

From really competing within this environment because they can't compete on any metric other than how they look and the women can't really use them for anything other than random sex and worse because all the women are now sorting to the same few men. Those men don't really invest in those women.

Simone Collins: Well, and

Malcolm Collins: both sides

Simone Collins: are developing wildly unrealistic expectations. That is to say a woman who's a four expects that not only because she can sleep with an eight, she can marry. And it, but also a man who's an eight just gets so flooded with women that he's just never going to ever want to marry even an eight or a nine or 10.

Malcolm Collins: San Francisco. And this woman was like, yeah, I mean, it's a huge problem to find a guy who's not polyamorous, who's like in my [00:05:00] league. And I'm here thinking, I'm like, Well, did you consider that the men who are polyamorous are out of your league and that like, she thinks like, well, I just need a guy who's like this guy who's sleeping with me, but polyamorous, but who's not polyamorous.

Like it's just one weird court. It's like, no, this guy is sharing like 10 women. Like he will clearly date below his league because of that. You shouldn't be benchmarking yourself on the polyamorous guys. You could get to sleep with you, but it's worse than that.

Simone Collins: It's worse than that. Because I think that this shift to image based.

Signaling is now creating this proliferation of filters that is completely like you, you, I have no idea, honestly, what people look like online anymore because they're, they're such heavy filter use that they all look incredible and I'll never forget, like by mistake on an app once I turned a filter on my own face and, oh my God, like I could look genuinely.

Okay. It's, it is, it is astounding. You are

Malcolm Collins: Puritan

Simone Collins: hotness. Yeah, husband goggles. There is