A core feature of any online dating platform is the ability to send messages between users.

When it comes to messaging in a decentralized online dating platform, the user is presented with undeniable advantages, but they come at considerable costs. This article will highlight the disadvantages of the status quo centralized messaging system. It will also introduce a solution to the challenges encountered in the decentralized environment, including an exploration of how the economics of decentralized platforms have the potential to improve the overall quality.

The Status Quo

Most legacy dating platforms (and messaging apps in general) act as the intermediary to your messages. When you send a message, it is first recorded in a centralized database and only then served out to the recipient. Many legacy dating apps keep a record of every message you’ve ever sent. The platform typically takes ownership of this database of information, using it to derive profits through targeted advertising. The silos containing these messages become prime targets for hackers, exposing platform users to the nightmare scenario in which their private conversations suddenly become public. If you think this is a minor concern, consider that the 2015 Ashley Madison hack resulted in numerous cases of blackmail, netting extortionists untold millions. Users who had their information compromised suffered serious consequences including loss of relationship, loss of job, and even in several cases, loss of life (suicide).

Decentralized Peer-to-Peer Messaging

In a decentralized environment, messaging is conducted on a peer-to-peer basis. From the user’s perspective, the main benefit of this is that they can be sure no one else has access to their messages. Since there is no central server to collect, store, and distribute messages, there is no opportunity for the platform owner to eavesdrop on the users. In fact, there is no “owner” to speak of. There are also no silos of valuable information to be targeted externally by hackers, enabling privacy and ensuring the security of users’ information like never before. But messaging in a decentralized environment is not without challenges.

The Challenge

In a truly peer-to-peer messaging system, since messages are not stored by an intermediary, both participants must be online at the same time in order to interact. While this may be acceptable in certain use-cases, it is a limitation that must be overcome in order to facilitate the fluidity of communication needed for building relationships between strangers in the online dating platform, especially in a mobile environment.

A solution to this problem has been proposed by the Status project through the use of the Whisper V5 protocol, which has the ability to delegate nodes to do offline inboxing (storing messages while clients are offline). This means that as soon as both parties are online in the network, messages are exchanged and the history of the chat is updated. Nodes offering this service would by extension have the ability to support push notifications. The end result for users should be the same fluid chat they are accustomed to, but with the added benefit of unrivaled privacy and security enabled by encrypted decentralization. Technical details of the open-source Whisper Protocol can be found here.

The Opportunity

Direct peer-to-peer messaging can be done at no cost (except the system resources of the peers themselves). However, the ability to synchronize the sending and receiving of messages and enable push notifications as users drift between online and offline states in the mobile environment, requires the employment of nodes to temporarily store the information. This service will incur a cost.

At first it may seem that users accustomed to completely “free” messaging will never switch to a system that incurs cost, no matter how small that cost may be. However, it can be argued that in the online dating environment, the introduction of a small fee results in a better platform for all users in several regards. Here’s how:

Improved Quality of Messages

In the world of online dating, the value of each person you interact with is small by comparison to the value of people you interact with in the real world. In the real world, we must take care not to offend the people around us because doing so has real consequences. There is also a limit to the number of people we can offend before we are considered social outcasts. In the online world, however, with a seemingly unlimited pool of potential partners, why would you care about offending a single person? It’s easy enough to jump from one interaction to the next.

Attaching a cost to a message, no matter how small, has the effect of making people think more carefully about the messages they send. This should result in a higher chance of more meaningful relationships being formed. An additional happy side effect of having a small cost associated with messaging is the elimination of spam.

Meaningful Matches

Most legacy dating platforms suffer from the problem of matching. Typically a small percentage of the most attractive people are flooded with contact requests, leading to a situation where these high status users ignore most of the requests they get. While high status users are overwhelmed, lower status users are left with little to no interactions, leaving all parties unsatisfied.

The socio-economics enabled by a decentralized system have the potential to alleviate this disparity. By introducing a system where higher status users become increasingly difficult (expensive) to contact, a more even distribution of successful contacts can be obtained. Higher status users in this system would be defined as those who receive a lot of contact requests (thus indicating their popularity among the population at large).

One could still contact a “higher status” user, but a message to that user would be lowered in the queue unless extra incentive (token) is added. This would mean that just like in the real world economy of face-to-face interaction, people – not algorithms – are still in charge. If you really believe that you are perfectly matched to a person of “higher status” you would still have the opportunity to contact that person. It would just cost you a little more.

For a detailed examination of the numerous problems associated with legacy online dating platforms and how they can be solved with a decentralized platform, check out the Picky Whitepaper.