Japan's capital will launch its own dating app as early as this summer as part of government efforts to boost the plunging national birth rate, a Tokyo official said Tuesday.

Users will be required to submit documentation proving they are legally single and sign a letter stating they are willing to get married.

      • aeronmelon@lemmy.world
        21·
        5 months ago

        The good news is there are already a lot of subsidy programs for people marrying and starting families, and those programs are expanding to include more people and offer more money.

        It’s not as good as it should be, but it’s better than it was a few years ago.

    • vividspecter@lemm.ee
      7·
      5 months ago

      And that fundamentally many women don’t want to have children, which plays out in every society where women have some level of rights. In addition, wealthier and more developed nations in general tend to have lower birth rates.

  • eee@lemm.ee
    36·
    5 months ago

    Nothing sparks romance like legal documentation and state sponsored matchmaking

  • HelixDab2@lemm.ee
    303·
    5 months ago

    TBH, I like this idea. A problem with Tinder, et al. is that they don’t give a shit about you matching, they want to make money off you. So they’re invested in keeping you on their app as long as possible. An app that has no profit motive because it’s fully funded already eliminates that entirely.

    Will it work? Maybe, for the people that want to meet someone and start a family, and are currently having a hard time meeting other similarly minded people. Will it be a major shift in culture? Probably not.

    • BertramDitore@lemmy.worldEnglish
      133·
      5 months ago

      I completely agree. It’s why I’ve never been on the apps, how could I possibly trust them when they clearly don’t want to succeed at their function? It’s also probably why I’ve been single for years…

      A fully non-profit transparently administered dating app is a great idea, and I would sign up immediately.

      • HelixDab2@lemm.ee
        51·
        5 months ago

        Honestly, I think that you could probably even make something work if you had a one-time-only up-front fee, no advertising, and identification verification combined with criminal background checks (e.g., you couldn’t use it to cheat on your existing spouse, and all the people are real people). Heck, you could even set it so that if someone tried using it for advertising (OnlyFans or similar), you could permanently boot them off, since they’d need to prove identity to sign up in the first place.

        Data security though… That would be a bigger problem. You def. would not want to have any kind of data breach once you had that kind of PII in your database.

  • Aniki 🌱🌿@lemm.eeEnglish
    161·
    5 months ago

    They also need to report income which makes this again a non-starter as people in Japan are fed the fuck up with the class bullshit.

    • ramble81@lemm.ee
      71·
      5 months ago

      At least the government already has most of that info as compared to a random 3rd party that wants to harvest and sell your data to make a profit (trying to find some silver lining)

  • callouscomic@lemm.eeEnglish
    10·
    5 months ago

    Headlines: “Dating apps are a privacy nightmare.”

    Also headlines: “Government to launch dating app.”

    Hmmmmm

  • fubarx@lemmy.ml
    1·
    5 months ago

    “Use this app and all your child’s expenses will be covered until they graduate from college.”

    Problem solved.