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How Singapore's government-run dating service works

255 points · 369 comments · danielfoster

  1. water-data-dude · · focus · HN ↗
    You know, there's probably fewer perverse incentives with a government run dating service. Obviously I can imagine ways it could suck, but when I compare them to how commercial dating services are run it's hard to see how they could do a _worse_ job.
    1. pcthrowaway · · focus · HN ↗
      If people are oriented towards traditional relationships, then pairing people up younger probably leads to higher overall fertility rate in the population, so I could see governments with existentially declining fertility rates (read: almost all of them) taking an interest in actually providing a successful service here (unlike the commercial dating apps).

      Of course, a lack of a match is not the only thing that prevents people from having kids, but I'm curious what the impact of an optimal matching service would be on fertility rates.

      edit: I think governments might do well to provide funding for dating apps (whether privately or publicly owned) based on how many matches from the app actually lead to children. Completely flip the classical incentives on their head. Should be easy enough to ask if newborns were a product of a participating app as part of the birth certification process.

      1. expedition32 · · focus · HN ↗
        What is a traditional relationship? Fathers selling their daughter off?
        1. Retric · · focus · HN ↗
          People having “large” numbers of children.

          The modern trend of most families with 0-2 kids isn’t sustainable. We don’t need to go back to 5+ being the norm but a self stable society needs to be able to offset non parents thus requiring 3+ children families to be quite common.

          1. hypfer · · focus · HN ↗
            For that, one prerequisite would be housing that can house such families.

            Which, in times of working from home, means 4 bedrooms, 2 offices, 1 living room.

            Ideally with walls not built from paper mache, so that they can actually be used for encapsulation of different requirements.

            1. graemep · · focus · HN ↗
              This is very much a worst case. It assumes three children, each with their own bedroom, and two work from home parents each with their own office.

              Why do you need an entire room each for an office? I work in a corner of a bedroom, and have previously had a desk in a living room. I know lots of people who do the same. I know few families where both parents work from home. Where more than one person works from home they can share an office.

              If people work from home to a large extent, less office space is required, so the cost of land should go down. It does not because most people are not working from home.

              1. hypfer · · focus · HN ↗
                Yes, but, as said, there are probably also a lot of people that decide either against children at all or against having +1 of them due to these constraints.

                No one said that one cannot make do. One can always make do.

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