At the corner of Fillmore and Pixley, just a few blocks from my apartment and along the route of my evening walks, is a building that was recently painted bright red with white lettering advertising a new dating app call Known. In the traditional click-bait style of tech-based hype and obfuscation, the building converted to an ad doesn’t say it’s a dating app, but instead says something along the lines of “one conversation could change everything” and provides a QR code. I didn’t scan.
Their website, has similarly overly-punchy language phrased in short declarative statements pitching their AI dating platform as the solution to eons of dating woes.
Profiles told us nothing.
Swipes and likes became an
endless dopamine chase.Small talk? Exhausting.
Actually meeting someone
drifted out of focus.Known is different.
Built on knowing you first,
not rushing to a date.Not a game.
Not a job.
Not a gamble.This is Known.
“Built on knowing you first” ugghh. I’m pretty sure they ran ten-years worth of news articles on dating through a word cloud to decipher the most common complaints: it feels like a full-time job, it’s a constant gamble, everyone is playing games.
Based on what I’ve read in news articles and some of the feedback I’ve read in the app store, it feels like yet another charlatanesque tech attempt to farm out human emotion and effort to the all-optimizing AI while collecting data on users, etc. etc. etc. Among the curious things I’ve noticed is how several news pieces have pointed out that the founders are Stanford dropouts (perhaps trying to connect them and their promise of a tech-enhanced dating future to other famous Stanford dropouts like Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Snapchat co-founder Evan Spiegel). Personally, I’m beginning to think the world might be better off if Stanford retained their students a little longer – maybe long enough for ethics classes or science technology and society classes to sink in – just saying. But out here in the wilds of Silicon Valley, there is a unique obsession with identifying the next tech unicorn, the next big disruption, the next Venture Capital darling.
And honestly, I’m fine with all of that (ok, not really). It’s how the game is played out here (despite the ad saying “not a game”). What I disagree with is the notion that they (tech companies in general) have user interests in mind or that they have cracked the code of some age old problem. A lot of people would prefer to go back to cable as opposed to subscriptions to multiple streaming services – the same goes for newspapers and substack, etc. etc. In some respects, these companies are so convinced of their originality, self-importance, and innovation that they talk in hyperbole much the same way that reality TV has talked. You could be in season three of a show called “dumb dating on a dime” and they’ll use phrasing like “next episode, get ready for the biggest shock ever in the history of dumb dating on a dime.” My dude, you’ve been on the air for three seasons, in the history of relationships gone south, this probably isn’t Romeo and Juliet type of history making.
I’m old enough to remember dating before Tinder made swiping ubiquitous and turned dating into a game of never-ending and exhausting choices. I met my ex-wife on a dating site in 1999. It was very text-focused, it might have had some profile pictures along with a written profile, and all communication was through email. 17 years later and after the divorce, I became a heavy user of Match before they switched to being much more swipe focused. People on Match had long profiles that could tell you quite a lot. An intuitive person could pick up on the way someone makes jokes in their writing, if they’re chill or serious, or how aggressive or defensive or sincere they might seem.
All of that changed when dating companies focused more on gamifying the experience and less on profile building. Profiles grew shorter – often limited by character counts. Tinder has a 500 character limit, but since it was often viewed as a casual sex hook-up site, who needs bios? Sites have also switched from longer bios in favor of short responses to canned prompts such as “If I’m not at home, you can find me:” or “I know the best sport in town for:”. It’s as if we’ve lost the ability to prompt ourselves or think from another person’s perspective. Hmmm, what might someone want to know about me? I come across a ton of profiles that have no text whatsoever, which leaves you with nothing to say or respond to when or if you match. “Hey, cool pic, super dope that you do yoga with goats.” As such, it’s not surprising that as apps have tried to make the experience “frictionless” and that as we decrease the use of written language, we get shallower profiles and less commitment. If you can’t invest the time to articulate who you think you are or what you’re looking for, is it any wonder that dating ends up being a whole lot of missed connections, ghosting, and awkward silences?
And now we get AI-enhanced dating where the machine creates our profiles based on inputs and matches us with another machine-created profiles based on inputs. From Known’s privacy policy: “Note that part of your AI-generated profile is derived through conversation and you cannot manage your profile manually.” At least when someone had the good sense to realize that their filtered photo with whiskers and dog ears looked silly, they could manage their profile manually.
Meanwhile, fed up with tech and disruption and maxxing or optimizing everything in life, people (and I suspect especially olds like me) are trying to find our way back to simpler times: meeting at bars, joining dinner clubs or running clubs or clubby clubs, and just being out in the slow un-enhanced analog world. I’m always tempted to list on my profile the coordinates of my favorite benches and bars with the instructions: come find me, hang out, I’m a hoot.
I understand the impetus. Dating is frustrating, and lots of people are burned out by it. Moreover, I think there’s a place for apps and tech in the dating scene. I think they can one of several tools people use to meet other people… But, I’ve grown tired of the tech-first solution mindset, and as with so many things tech related (I’m looking at you social media), there is this tendency for tech to further isolate us and cause more problems then it solves. Tinder and swiping seemed like a good idea at the time and look at where it’s gotten us. Encouraging us to put more faith in machines because somehow this time it will be different because… This is known.