Programming

Thank you for the interest. Sorry to leave you hanging there, Cyn. (Funny, I knew a Cyn once.)

Not sure I follow your distinction between goal and rules there. It is certainly based on values and ideology more than a vision to become rich off of it. Some examples of how values look in concrete terms:

• filters are bidirectional, so if for instance your filter says "no smokers" then you obviously won't see any smokers - but also, your profile won't be shown to other users who are smokers;
• if you've set a geographical range (say, 50km), we won't sneak in users who are thousands of km away from you (and certainly no ads in your feed);
• you'd pay a fixed price to get access to everything for 30 days. Furthermore, you are free to pause/resume your account if, for instance, you only want to be active on the weekends or every other week, and those 30 days will only "tick" on active days;
• I want to support people of every ilk, I'm doing research on how to make minorities feel seen, safe, and supported;
• in fact I'm doing several kinds of research and meta-research to find out what actually works for users wrt. getting quality matches (as opposed to what works for user retention and addictiveness);
• I want to specifically recreate a lot of the liked features that other apps have lost over the last few years, such as quizzes and photo phomts;
• the entire thing will be developed and hosted from within the EU. It's easier to leave the app than to sign up for it. There's a one-click "hand over my data" GDPR button. I would rather close the whole thing down than ever sell out to Match Group.

I know, this is just words on a screen but still, those are my values.

About the geo restriction, good question. The plan isn't to actively restrict users, but to launch with a focus in one area (say, Amsterdam). The thing is, it can make a lot of sense to host a little tool on github and have six people find it useful - but for a matchmaking app, what you really need is user density and in that regard it helps to focus on a smaller area to begin with. Six users on each and every continent aren't going to find great matches.

I like my account. I like the communities I'm in. I'd hate to be seen as a sleazy ad-monger or product peddler. I'd rather go slow and learn where such "hey by the way" conversation is not just acceptable but even encouraged.