Why Layers
Why dating apps feel like a ranking.
And why people can’t be ranked. A short look at what goes wrong when a whole person is judged in a glance, and what Layers does differently.
A whole person, in a glance.
When a profile arrives all at once, photos first, the first impression is mostly looks. A whole person gets a second, sometimes less.
A yes or no can’t say why.
If an app only records a yes or no on a whole profile, it can’t tell what the no was about. The photos? Their work? Their sense of humour? The distance?
So the easiest thing to learn is popularity.
With only yes and no to go on, the clearest pattern is who gets the most yeses. A badly designed app can end up ranking everyone on a single line, even if nobody meant it to.
A line pulls attention to the top.
If everyone is shown the top of the line first, a small group gets most of the attention and feels overwhelmed. Everyone else starts to feel invisible. It isn’t that people are shallow. The signal is just too thin.
But people aren’t a line.
Someone who loves quiet trails might fall for someone who finds joy in simple days outdoors, while someone else wants a partner for extreme sports. One person’s perfect Sunday is the couch and a series. Another’s is a book, or loud ranked matches online. There’s no single best answer, so there’s no single line.
So Layers splits a person into six.
Layers shows one part of a person at a time, anonymously. Photos appear only in the Portrait. So when you react to someone’s Palette, you’re reacting to what they love doing, not to a face.
Every layer draws a different map.
On each layer, people gather around the answers they share, and the groups change from layer to layer. Someone at the bottom of one line can be at the centre of someone else’s world.
Now picture your own search.
Say you’re looking for someone aged 28 to 35, within 50 km. That’s still a lot of people.
Each layer narrows it to people like you.
Maybe you’re drawn to someone ambitious, with clear goals. Someone who shares your outlook. Someone who loves hiking as much as you do. Every layer has something you’re drawn to, and where they overlap are the people most likely to feel right for you. None of it is a filter you set. Layers learns it from your reactions, one layer at a time.
Looks still count, as one layer of six.
The Portrait can’t receive a Love, so looks alone can’t make a connection. You meet in Resonance only when you’re both drawn to each other by what you actually said.
What research shows
The ladder is real.
Researchers who studied messages on a large dating site in four US cities found a clear ladder of desirability, based on how many messages people received and from whom. On average, people messaged others about 25% more desirable than themselves.
The study covered heterosexual users on one site, using data from 2014. Bruch and Newman, “Aspirational pursuit of mates in online dating markets”, Science Advances, 2018.
What we promise, and what we don’t
No overall score.
Layers learns what you respond to in each layer separately, and nobody gets an overall score. Part of what everyone sees is always chosen at random, so people outside your usual taste still get a look.
No app can promise everyone the same attention, and we won’t. What we can do is stop reducing a person to a single line.