Join us at the Mercurius Club, the birthplace of the next dating revolution.

We lead the charge against traditional dating！

🛸To promote freer communication, we challenged the consensus and stereotypes of the dating app industry.

Never before in history has a disciplinary and punitive tool been as prevalent as the goal-oriented dating culture created by Web1 and Web2 dating platforms. This culture has established a panopticon of monocultural values：

• Dating has become a search not for a partner, but for a graduate of a prestigious university with a six-figure salary
• Being interested in sports doesn't necessarily mean that you're "sporty", unless it involves going on a surfing trip to Hawaii.
• Images are heavily processed with filters and Photoshop.

<aside> 🤨 In the pursuit of algorithmic simplicity, individuality is sacrificed to accommodate hashtags and labels: on match.com, marriage is reduced to age and income, while on Tinder, love is reduced to sex appeal in profile pictures. The top 1% of users receive 99% of the likes, while the needs of the majority are often overlooked.

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✊And here come the rebels…

Chris Olah, a software engineer and former Thiel Foundation analyst, believes that traditional online dating is suboptimal. Instead, he has proposed the use of "Date Me" docs, which are essentially Google Docs with lengthy self-introductions. While some AI engineers, software engineers, and physicians have adopted this approach, it has yet to be widely adopted.

<aside> 🤔 It is obvious why this fails to be adopted: Date Me docs are sincere but excessively verbose. It does the job of self expressing, but lacks interaction and can be seen as somewhat condescending. Anyway, Date Me docs are not the solution.

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In our search for a solution, we took a close look at hundreds of social media apps that allow users to meet strangers, and found that mainstream dating apps are strikingly similar, with six key features: swiping, personal profiles, chat, reporting, user verification, and subscription. Additionally, we also discovered unspoken understandings about the efficiency of matching, gender ratios, algorithmic secrets, and more.

We examined each of these elements through the following questions: Why do they exist? Can they be eliminated? Do they make sense?

🤐We decided to create an online dating application where users do not judge each other

MerC is an anti-Tinder dating app：

• We won’t judge the way you live. We won’t have controls around your images.
• We won’t sacrifice your uniqueness and your profile picture will not be full of hashtags.
• No more alienation. Matchmaking will resemble real-life social interactions.