Ditto is for students, and only students at your own school, verified. You send it your preferences by Tuesday at 11:59pm. On Wednesday at 7pm it texts you one person over iMessage and books something for the two of you, usually coffee on campus. That is the whole product: one introduction a week, arranged, no app to open and nothing to browse. Eric Liu and Allen Wang dropped out of Berkeley to build it and the site says more than 42,000 students have signed up.
Notapub does the part Ditto is built around, which is being handed a specific person instead of a list, and takes the cap and the campus wall off. You say what you want, once, and the people it fits arrive when they arrive.
This is not a pub. Ages 13+.
The weekly drop is a real design choice and it works on its own terms. Scarcity makes you take Wednesday seriously, and a deadline makes you actually submit something.
It is also the ceiling. Miss Tuesday night and you have skipped a week. Get a poor introduction and you have spent one of your fifty-two. Notapub has no drop and no deadline. What you wrote keeps working in the background, and when somebody turns up who fits it, they turn up, whether that is three today or none until Friday.
Verifying that everyone is a student at your school is why Ditto feels safe, and it is also why it runs out. Your school is a few thousand people, some fraction on the app, some fraction plausible. The pool is finite and you will see the edge of it.
Notapub has no institution behind it, which is a real difference in what you are trusting. What it gives back is that the person who has done the thing you are trying to do is very often not enrolled where you are enrolled. The alum four years ahead in the job you want, the person in the next city with the visa you are applying for, the one who will take your bike frame off you in June.
Ditto arranges a meeting. It is a good product for a general want, which for most students is meeting someone new without any of the work.
A lot of what a student needs is not that. A sublet for the summer. Someone to take the second seat in a car to the airport. A person who has actually sat the exam you are sitting. Notapub takes those in the same box as the other kind, because they are all the same shape: here is what I want, who has it.
Notapub is free, works on iOS, Android and the web rather than inside one messaging app, and stays with you after you graduate, which is the point at which a school-verified account stops being the thing that describes you.
No. There is no school verification and no campus list. Students use it, and so does everyone else, which is most of the point.
No. There is no weekly drop and no quota. People reach you when what you said fits them.
No. It puts you in front of the person and what you do next is between the two of you.