“According to Greek mythology, humans were originally created with four arms, four legs and a head with two faces. Fearing their power, Zeus split them into two separate parts, condemning them to spend their lives in search of their other halves.”
― Plato, The Symposium
The pursuit of love is like the need to eat, sleep or exercise; without it, people often feel lost and alone, so why not build an app to profit off those carnal desires?
The following is a comprehensive guide on how to do just that!
Sell people on an idealised version of love and romance. Incept everyone into thinking that their insecurities and vulnerabilities can dissipate by meeting their one true love! Make sure they abandon the rest of their social circle in the process.
Use black magic to create portals to another dimension. Transport all of the lost and broken souls that you’re selling the dream to.
Maintain a thin glass veil between everyone in the space, so they get a vague sense of who everyone is but don’t feel fulfilled by real connection.
Collect as much data as you can about your users; construct digital versions of them using information about their attachment style, love language, personality, usage, interests, vulnerabilities and desirability.
Use that data to feed machine learning algorithms specialised in getting your users as addicted to your service as possible. Bonus points if you can prey off their self-esteem and deepest vulnerabilities. Space out likes strategically to get the user’s to spend more money on microtransactions and subscriptions. Promote their profile to as many other people as possible immediately after you con them; this will reinforce the idea that spending money was a good decision, taper off the rewards at an undetectable rate.
If a user is deemed desirable and can help keep the other users on your platform, expose them to an abundance of choices. This will fill them with an intense fear of missing out and will freeze them from choice paralysis.
If they are deemed undesirable, drip-feed them rewards and double-down on trying to get them to spend money.
Ensure that your platform incentivises people to dehumanise each other; reward them for treating it as a marketplace.
Use cultural bias to train your matching algorithms and reinforce stereotypes of what society deems attractive.
Track your user’s dates so you can send notifications to them while they are out with their potential love interests. This may ruin their date by increasing the likelihood that they will respond.
Ensure that you don’t let compatible people stay together; this is detrimental to the success of your platform. When this happens, promote their profiles to as many other users as possible. Hopefully, this will cause them to be bombarded with matches and abandon their love interest.
If a user deletes your app, send advertisements to them on the other services that they use, such as Spotify.
Become a monopoly by crushing your competition through a combination of smear campaigns, copycat features and buyouts.
Make sure the people you recommend to your users are good short term matches, but terrible long term matches. This will fill them with a sense of validation whilst ensuring they return time and time again.
Optimise your algorithms to spread an ideology of casual sex and hedonism throughout society. An example of how this may work is shown below:
The wisdom and/or madness of crowds
If you do this well enough, you’ll even make people in long term loving relationships second guess how happy they are, leading to an increased user base.
Enjoy the enormous wealth you’ve amassed off the hopes and dreams of your users.
