A few months ago I was sitting on a friend’s couch with three other women, all of us in our late twenties, all of us periodically dipping in and out of the casual dating world. One of them works in product. She’d just gotten a new job at a startup that, in her words, was trying to disrupt the hookup space – which is one of those phrases that makes you instantly tired. She asked us, basically as a focus group of free labor, what we’d want from a casual dating site if we were starting from scratch. And we spent the next three hours talking, and almost nothing we said matched anything I’ve ever seen rolled out on an actual platform.
The first thing – and this came up immediately, from all four of us – was safety, but not in the sanitized way that platforms talk about safety. We weren’t asking for ID verification badges or a panic button buried in a settings menu. We were asking about signal. Like: can I tell, before I message someone, whether this person has been flagged by other women on the platform? Not banned. Not removed. Just flagged. Because every woman I know has had the experience of going on a date with someone who behaved weirdly, and then five months later running into another woman who went on a date with the same guy and had the same weird experience, and realizing we had no way to warn each other. The information existed. The platform just wasn’t carrying it.
My friend made a face when I said that. She told me product teams won’t touch any kind of reputation system because it’s a legal landmine. Fine. But that’s a business reason, not a user reason. From where I’m sitting, the absence of any cross-user signal is the single biggest thing platforms get wrong, and they don’t talk about it because they can’t fix it cheaply.
The second thing – and this surprised even me, when I heard myself say it out loud – was about profile filtering, and specifically the inability to filter out the wrong men. Every platform lets you filter for what you want. Almost none of them let you filter out what you definitely don’t want. I’d happily give up filtering by hobbies and music taste if I could filter out men who don’t have a face photo, men whose bios are blank, men whose only mention of women uses the word ‘female,’ and men whose photos are exclusively shirtless gym mirror shots. Those four filters alone would cut my inbox in half and improve the half that remained by a factor of ten.
App designers seem to assume women want positive filters – more, more, more granular tags about what we want. What we actually want is one or two well-placed negative filters that protect us from the lowest-effort end of the user base.
The third thing, and the one I think most platforms get most wrong, is the quality of the first message. On every mainstream casual platform, the modal experience for a woman is opening her inbox to seventy messages that all say either ‘hey,’ ‘wyd,’ or some variation of a body part. Not exaggerating. I have actual screenshots. The platforms know this, because the data is right there in their backend, and they could solve it tomorrow with a basic message-quality filter – require a question, require a minimum length, require a reference to something in her profile. They don’t, because requiring more from male users would crater male engagement, which would crater the male side of the marketplace, which is where the money comes from.
That’s the part nobody on the design side wants to say out loud. The product is optimized for men because men are the paying side, and any feature that would improve the experience for women would friction the male side too much to be worth it. Every casual platform is built on this asymmetry. The ones that pretend otherwise are lying, and the ones that admit it through their feature choices at least have the decency to be honest about it.
That’s why I’ve been telling friends to skip the splash-screen apps and look at smarter casual dating discovery on SparkyMe instead – a curation page that surfaces lesser-known dating options and writes honestly about what each one is actually like once you’re inside it. The framing matters. Reading a write-up that names the trade-offs of each platform is closer to how women already share information with each other than anything inside an app. It’s not pretending there’s one perfect place. It’s telling you where each option lands, and letting you pick based on what your actual life looks like right now.
What I think is most interesting about all of this is that women have actually figured out workarounds. We’re not sitting helplessly inside broken platforms. We’re cross-referencing screenshots in group chats. We’re trading platform recommendations based on which ones currently have the least toxic user base. We’re moving en masse off platforms once they tip past a certain ratio. I’ve watched my friend group migrate three times in four years, all triggered by some specific moment when one platform’s culture became unworkable for us. The platforms barely notice this migration because we don’t announce it. We just leave.
And the part that should worry product teams – the part my friend on the couch admitted she was going to bring back to her team – is that the next platform we move to is almost never selected by an algorithm. It’s chosen by recommendation. A friend texts us ‘try this one, it’s been actually okay,’ and we try it. That’s the whole funnel. No marketing, no ads, no in-app onboarding. A friend with credibility says it’s not garbage, and we go.
Which means the most powerful tool in the entire casual dating ecosystem isn’t a feature inside any app. It’s the layer of trust between women who’ve been around long enough to know which platforms are functioning right now. The internet, in its small wisdom, has started building that layer in public – curation sites and writeups and honest comparison pages that surface what each platform is actually like for women, written by people who’ve been there. Those pages do more for our actual safety and satisfaction than any feature roadmap I’ve ever seen from a casual dating company.
My friend at the startup, by the way, ended up leaving that job within six months. She told me later that the product team kept asking the wrong questions in user research because the answers to the right questions would have meant rewriting the whole product, and nobody wanted to do that. I think that’s most of the industry, honestly. Asking small questions because the big ones don’t have answers that make the business model work.
And in the meantime, women keep doing what we’ve always done – finding workarounds, warning each other quietly, and choosing platforms based on what we hear from people we trust. The app designers will catch up eventually. Or they won’t. Either way, we’re not waiting for them.
