While Swapcard has been a reliable software to use at EAGs, there are undeniably some features that could be improved in the app. It’s easy to miss notifications in a sea of messages, it’s difficult to propose one-on-one meetings on mobile, and most importantly, the app horribly misses the opportunity to capitalize on low-hanging fruit for improving the dating lives of EAs.
Thankfully, just in time for the start of EAGx Boston, I am proud to officially launch UpDating (promotional video linked). UpDating is an application funded by CEA and designed to be the optimal micromarriage optimizer for any EAG(x). It has all of your favorite features from Swapcard, plus our additional features:
Future updates of the app, which are on track to roll out by EAGL, include:
Find us at EAGx Boston this Sunday in Junior Ballroom hosting our workshop: How to Write a Blog Post that Gets You a Date!
Note: As we’re still in the early stages of this project, we welcome any comments with suggestions for additional features!
There's a natural synergy between this project and infant outreach: people who want children could be matched with others who are running infant outreach programs.
But my biggest criticism is the lack of any prediction market integration. Surely users should be able to bet, for any pair of users, on whether they will start/end a relationship, as well as its average quality? Not having this feature misses a really important source of information.
Strong +1, this could also help with creating a sustainable finical business model.
This is a very good point! We’ll strongly consider those additions in our EAGL app update.
Building off of your ideas of prediction market integration, I think a next step for UpDating could be a developing a community-wide forecasting platform so that EAs could predict the longevity of relationships started on the app. People aren’t well calibrated in relationship predictions and at UpDating we’d like to help with that.
It's amazing you posted this! I started thinking about this topic again last month, and made the decision to build a niche dating site for EAs.
I even think there's a seed of something that makes sense in the idea of prediction market integration. This is something further down the line than what I can build, but if matchmakers could bet on a relationship pairing early, stake a bet on it happening, and then get a financial reward, this seems like a better incentive structure than the current dating infrastructure that wants to keep users swiping.
Impact Island is proud to sign up to be one of the first institutional users of the Updating App. We believe that there is not enough romantic tension and drama within the effective altruism community. This decreases viewership ratings and thus impact. We hope that having a partnership with the premier EAs-only dating app can help change that.