You are looking at it from the point of view of the user if the system is working as desired.
From the point of view of the website, you're not driving clicks. You're not making money. You're not driving growth.
It is also bad for users. You do not drive clicks. Cannot pay for marketing. So your site gains no traction. And with no traction, actual users show up, can't find the people that they know, and then leave the virtual ghost town.
Therefore it sounds logical, but fails in practice.
Now add in a single feature. Add notifications to people saying that X people like them. Now people have a reason to come back. A reason to click on others. You get growth. Your website can make money. And you've become a spam site which completely lost the original idea. But you're a profitable spam site. And will probably drive more actual hookups than the pure form.
And this is why dating sites either fail trivially, or go on to suck.
Interesting points, the chicken/egg issue is a real problem and something I think starting with a targeted community (college is the example in the post) would help alleviate.
You can't tell people that X people like them because it creates a perverse incentive to click on everyone to find out who.
Driving clicks shouldn't be the foundation of the idea, the partnering with local places to meet could help with the value side of things. This is how you also keep people using it (giving them a reason to check in to places) that I talked about toward the end of the post.
The not making money/driving growth part reminded me a little of a meeting Page and Brin had when they were originally trying to sell their algorithm before deciding to start google. They were showing off to a current search engine how page rank returned results that were magnitudes better than the contextual search (which the other site was using). The guy they were showing it to said something along the lines of "This is too good, too fast and the results returned are too relevant. We want people to stay on the engine page as long as possible to click on ads". Sometimes the value of something isn't immediately obvious.
It's more about just solving the problem first and the money would be a means to do that. I think if you can solve a common problem in a better way there is probably a way to create value out of that. For example it'd also probably work well for people meeting each other within a company, but I'd doubt any companies would go for that.
From the point of view of the website, you're not driving clicks. You're not making money. You're not driving growth.
It is also bad for users. You do not drive clicks. Cannot pay for marketing. So your site gains no traction. And with no traction, actual users show up, can't find the people that they know, and then leave the virtual ghost town.
Therefore it sounds logical, but fails in practice.
Now add in a single feature. Add notifications to people saying that X people like them. Now people have a reason to come back. A reason to click on others. You get growth. Your website can make money. And you've become a spam site which completely lost the original idea. But you're a profitable spam site. And will probably drive more actual hookups than the pure form.
And this is why dating sites either fail trivially, or go on to suck.