Co-Star, the astrology app, is building a dating app for readers. It is called Readme, it is run by Co-Star's founder with the artist Emily Segal, and it was announced last week into a season of headlines declaring that dating apps are dying.
The tagline is the part I cannot get past.
It is an app for people who read, or want to date people who read.
That parenthetical is doing something enormous and I do not think it is an accident. It concedes, in the product's own description, that reading here is not only a practice. It is an attribute you might want in another person. A quality you can filter for, the way you filter for height.
I have watched people shop for a partner's taste for a living. I want to tell you what happens next, because my industry ran this exact experiment forty years ago and we are still living in the wreckage.
The pause I have watched ten thousand times
I have written before about the second-cheapest bottle on the list, which outsells the bottles on either side of it on nearly every wine list in the world. Not because it is better. Because of where it sits.
There is a pause before that order. The list comes back to the same page twice. A finger lands, lifts, lands one line down. Then a slightly too casual voice says we will do this one.
That order is never about wine. It is a person deciding what they are willing to be seen wanting, in front of somebody whose opinion they have not earned yet.
Now put a bookshelf where the wine list was.
What the founders actually said, which is more honest than the coverage
Segal described where the idea came from. Their friends were constantly in bookstores, and they never once saw anybody have the meme-famous meet cute at a bookstore.
Sit with that. It is the most interesting sentence in the whole announcement.
The bookstore is full. The encounter does not happen. People are going to the bookstore, and what they are doing there is not meeting each other.
A generous reading is that we have forgotten how to talk to strangers, which is true and well covered. The less generous reading, and the one I think an operator has to take seriously, is that a great many people are in the bookstore to be the kind of person who is in a bookstore. That is a complete activity in itself. It does not require a second person. It is arguably ruined by one.
Wine already did this
Here is the part I can speak to with some authority.
Wine spent the last forty years making taste legible. Scores out of a hundred. Critics whose ratings moved prices. Then apps that let anyone point a phone at a label and receive a number and an average.
The promise each time was democratic: now you do not need to be an insider, now the knowledge is available to everyone, now you can walk into any shop and choose well.
Here is what we actually got.
We got people who will not order a bottle without checking their phone under the table. We got restaurants buying to the score rather than to the room. We got producers making wine that tests well young because that is what gets rated. And we got the second-cheapest bottle, which is not a wine choice at all but a strategy for not being read.
Making taste legible did not liberate anybody. It gave everybody a number to be anxious about, and it taught an entire generation of drinkers that the correct move is to reveal as little as possible.
Reading is about to get its Vivino.
The signal and the thing
A wine list and a bookshelf have the same awkward property. They are simultaneously a record of what you actually love and a public statement about who you are.
For most of history those two things stayed roughly honest, because nobody was checking. Your shelf was seen by people already in your house, which is to say people who already knew you.
The moment a shelf becomes a matching surface, it stops being a record and becomes a submission. And a submission gets curated. Not by liars, mostly, but by ordinary people doing the ordinary thing of putting their best foot forward, which is the same mechanism as the second-cheapest bottle and produces the same outcome.
Nobody will list the thriller they actually finished twice this year. They will list the difficult novel they are four chapters into and intend to finish, which is a sentence with more longing in it than any dating profile deserves.
And here is the trap that took wine decades to notice. Once everyone is curating, the honest signal becomes indistinguishable from the performed one, so the reader looking for a real match has strictly less information than before the app existed. Not more. Less.
The normcore problem
One detail makes this genuinely funny, and I mean that admiringly rather than dismissively.
Emily Segal co-founded the group that coined normcore in 2014. The argument then was that difference had exhausted itself as a status strategy. Everybody was performing distinction so hard that distinction stopped signalling anything, and the remaining move was to opt out entirely, to dress like nobody, to decline the game.
Twelve years later she is building a product that sorts people by a taste signal.
I do not think that is hypocrisy. I think it is what actually happens, and it is why I am not sneering at this app. Normcore was a diagnosis that the taste economy had become unbearable. It did not stop the taste economy. Nothing stops the taste economy. The pressure just relocates, and it relocates toward whatever is still expensive, and what is still expensive in 2026 is sustained attention.
Anyone can buy a bag. Almost nobody can finish a long book anymore. The scarce thing is no longer the object. It is the hours, and the intact attention span required to spend them. Of course that became the new display. It is the only display left that money cannot obviously shortcut.
Which is exactly why it will be faked, and faked quickly, and faked by people who genuinely wish it were true about them.
What I would actually tell them to build
I am not going to pretend I know better than people who have shipped a cultural product at scale. But my job is watching what a room does when you give people a menu of themselves, so I have one observation worth the price of this essay.
The wine lists that produce good nights are the ones that make it safe to not know.
A list with a by-the-glass section that is genuinely good, a staff member who will ask two questions and choose for you, and no visible hierarchy of price down the page, produces a completely different evening from a list that is an ordered ranking of what you can afford and admit to.
The equivalent product is not matching on shelves. It is matching on the question. Not what do you read, which is a claim, but what are you actually reading right now, which is a fact and a slightly embarrassing one, and which is the only version of that question anyone has ever answered honestly.
Taste is the currency I have lived on my whole adult life, and the single most attractive thing I ever see at a table is a person saying, out loud, in front of someone they want to impress, that they do not know and would like to be told.
That is not a filter you can build. It is a condition you can design for, and the design is mostly about lowering the cost of being caught not knowing.
The nostalgia underneath
The bookstore meet cute is a memory of a world where taste was not yet a submission. Where the shelf was a record, the stranger was a stranger, and nobody had checked a score first.
That world is gone and the app is selling a return ticket to it. Nostalgia is the new luxury, and the most expensive thing on this menu is the version of yourself you were before you knew you were being read.
I hope it works. I have watched too many people order the second-cheapest bottle to believe the problem is that they never met anybody at the bookstore.