In the weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day, dating apps typically see a spike in new users and activity. More profiles are created, more messages sent, more swipes logged.
Dating platforms market themselves as modern technological solutions to loneliness, right at your fingertips. And yet, for many people, the day meant to celebrate romantic connection feels lonelier than ever.
This, rather than a personal failure or the reality of modern romance, is the outcome of how dating apps are designed and of the economic logic that governs them.
These digital tools aren’t simply interfaces that facilitate connection. The ease and expansiveness of online dating have commodified social bonds, eroded meaningful interactions and created a type of dating throw-away culture, encouraging a sense of disposability and distorting decision-making.
Yet another “perk” of capitalism. Profit is what matters boys, not our feelings :)
That’s like saying that famine and starvation is a perk of communism when someone like Mao fucks up. In both systems, what matters is trying to find the most efficient way to generate and distribute wealth. Profit in capitalism is a byproduct of what matters. It’s important for people to remember this so they don’t fall for MLMs, pyramid and Ponzi schemes.
I fell for Parship. Forgot to cancel after family pushed me to subscribe just for a year.
When I started, I didn’t know what a match unlock was. On Tinder, if you match, you get to chat. On Parship you have to UNLOCK the match first, and you only have a limited amount of unlocks before you have to buy more. So the app that claims to be designed to pair you up makes you HESITANT to actually talk to anyone! It’s like power-up potions in video games!
We all know they’re evil and predatory, but the extent is worse than you think.
Online dating apps sell us hope by exploiting our needs, desires and insecurities.
True for pretty much all social apps.
That’s because a social app that quickly solves the need of making a connection and then perpetually the need of maintaining it was called ICQ. Or AIM. Or other such. They were focused on the part after that hope.
The reason that’s no longer the normal model is simple - weak people are easier to exploit. The “after hope” model doesn’t keep people weak.
Even with XMPP - the classic instant messenger model of adding someone to friends, remember it? You send one invite message, and after it the other side won’t see anything you want to send until it accepts you into contacts. It might never do that. Or it might add you, see you’re sending unsolicited dick pics, remove you.
With dating apps all you need is a search by tags and tags corresponding with truth, and of course ability to choose who can contact you. The former is not hard. The latter is hard when people are interested in putting false tags, but not when the tag social metric, so to say, is commutative. The model where conversations are started by mutual “like” is good, I think. And the anonymized way (like with Pure, have tried using it when decided to become more social, got some insights but no dates, or more specifically one failed date) is good, when those who liked you are shown as anonymous invitations to accept or deny, but also when mutual “like” means accepting that invitation. I think one’s visibility and one’s point of view are something that should both be customizable with logical conditions. One should be able to set they want to only be seen by people without “no less than 20 inches” wish to not be frustrated when those people ghost them, or that they don’t want to see people without photos on their page, or that they only want to see people and be seen by people who like hiking or who like animals, but not both at the same time, or any other set of logical rules, everyone is different. Perhaps a limit on searches is good, though.
And then there is crime. Or mental illnesses. Or bad hygiene. Or conflict. That is, there are situations where outside observers should be able to evaluate who of the two sides is telling the truth about the other side being an abuser or whatever. I suppose some kind of escrow for contacts can be devised. This should be a social thing, a moderator can’t be trusted with correspondence and also with judgement. So - escrow by people trusted by both sides, something like that. To have a rating, it should be possible to tell who’s really spilling tea and who’s doing libel.
And if you were reading attentively, you might have noticed this doesn’t just apply to dating, this applies to everything about establishing contact over social media. Because that’s absolutely correct, dating doesn’t differ in anything from any other social connectivity. In other social events you too want to quickly find and communicate for long with someone. Romance being involved doesn’t change much or anything.
The reason these two purposes have been separated by businesses is pretty transparent - trying to apply general social media to dating shows that they don’t work, and trying to apply dating social media to normal long-term communication shows that they too don’t work. The issue is that what’s invisible still exists. That separation is just hiding what doesn’t work, but it still doesn’t work. A functional social media would function for both dating and daily buddy talk. Like ICQ did.
There was a “Golden Age” period of dating apps (that actually coincided much with the same “golden age” of many other services including streaming), where making money wasn’t the goal, and the services actually served their official goal - pairing up people.
Problem is, any kind of dating app is self-detrimental for revenue, because if they serve that official goal, they’re essentially nixing their own customer base. Because what’s the point of a dating app? To find a person you can date, therefore you wouldn’t need a dating app anymore. If it works as advertised, users spend bare minimum time on the platform before achieving their goals and leaving it.
This simply means that a dating platform is only viable in three scenarios:
- the platform itself is an extension of an existing service, meaning it doesn’t have to be financially successful on its own as long as it helps retain users and user-minutes (aka how much time a user spends on the entirety of the service, dating included). See e.g. Facebook’s dating subsection.
- there’s VC funding, the app is in a growth phase, therefore the goals can stay as-is as long as userbase growth can be shown to the investors. Problem is, once the platform reaches critical mass and those investors want their money back, from then on, enshittification ensues.
- the platform is driven not by VC funding or connected services but by a person’s or a group of people’s genuine interest in getting people paired up. There will be ads, there will be some paid features, but it cannot scale and is therefore doomed to fail on the long run (think pre-dating-app forums specialising on dating/partner-finding)
Most dating apps fall into the second category, and in fact if you do just a moment’s research you’ll notice that some 80-90% of the highest traffic (or most known) dating apps are under a single company. Yep, there’s a literal dating apps monopoly going on that snuffs out competition, or buys them up and shuts them down, and so on.
In fact… I’m a mobile app engineer, and I’ve actually ended up applying to a few dating app startups. The one common denominator between these was not that they wanted to do something new, or wanted to engage people differently than the rest… no. It was that all of these companies were specifically made with a niche idea in mind with the sole purpose of creating a minimum viable product that catches the interest of this dating monopoly and buys the company out. Yup. My job would’ve been “make our company sellable”. You can imagine how inspiring that is, especially when there’s no offer of equity on the table…
any kind of dating app is self-detrimental for revenue
It doesn’t have to be. In the US, about 4 million people turn 18 every year. Let’s say you get all of them signed up and all of them optimally paired off. You still have another 4 million new signups next year. Until the world falls off a demographic cliff, you’ve got an evergreen customer population.
That being said, the well is VERY poisoned at this point. The match group is a cancer on our society.
You know what would be a valuable dating app to me? I have no idea how this would work in actuality, but an app that helps me date my wife in some way. Suggestions of what to do, packaged date nights, flowers, all that shit — except for all kinds of people not just “traditional romance.” River rafting, swinging, sports bars, I mean appeal to all kinds or even people who just want to try things they don’t even know is it’s for them or not. It would be great for singles, but would still be useful after a relationship is in full bloom. But I think that’s something completely different from a dating app.
I would totally go for that! After being together for a decade, it does become quite difficult to find something novel to enjoy together.
And if they are doing their job right, they also won’t lose that many customers.
because if they serve that official goal, they’re essentially nixing their own customer base.
Not if it’s a promiscuous sex dating app. Then it’s more of a social network, thought, just around polyfuck graph instead of kitty photos graph.
True but we’re talking about dating apps meant for the general public, not a hookup/ONS/poly dating app.
I liked dating platforms way back in the days when you could make your own page, had large text fields to describe yourself and could filter by age, location and maybe a few other important things like smoking or wanting kids. Years later I tried the apps and it was just frustrating and nothing else. There wasn’t even really space to describe yourself or show your character.
Been trying Hinge and there’s lots of space and opportunity for it. What I’ve discovered/had validated is thay most people are just painfully cookie-cutter. Some are not, and it’s why I still use it.
Okcupid used to be good, before they sold out. Its where I met my partner. I was sad to hear it had enshittified.
Yep, I met my partner through OKC just before they enshittified. I also had used it to meet folks when I travelled for work. I had a note on my profile that I travelled a lot and just wanted to see new cities and eat good food. Surprisingly, I had far more platonic meetups than creepy guys trying to hook up, which I stated I wasn’t looking for in my profile.
I was a very very early adopter of OKC. I remember when it was more of a social media website with quizzes and badges than just dating. I’m still friends with a few people I met there in the early days.
Same, I met a lot of people through old-school OKCupid. It was great.
Oh someone liked me… Oh I can’t like them back because the system locks 3/4 of people who like you behind a paywall.
Accounts that have more activity tend to get locked down to extract revenue from users.
They’re really optimizing for the income of the people who make the apps. No surprise there.
Most of the apps are trashy and don’t optimize for good matches.
At the same time, many users half-ass using them, or deploy a variety of self-sabotage. (No, it’s not that you’re not tall or hot or whatever. It’s more likely your impersonal message didn’t warrant a response)
These two facts together mean a lot of people have truly bad outcomes.
I feel like it’s hard to craft a bunch of personal responses only to receive no response or a short conversation that dries up quickly afterwards. Talk about exhausting! Might as well start with the bare minimum and engage more if there’s interest back. Otherwise I can’t maintain the energy to keep it up.
Yeah, it can be hard, but many things worth doing are hard. If you start with the bare minimum, the other person’s first impression of you is that you half-assed it. Would you be extra interested in someone who’s too half assed to even read your profile?
Put in the hard work. If you don’t have the energy, don’t use the apps. Half-assing it is just going to make you unhappy.
On essentially all of them, they went to a swipe right to like and a swipe left for no.
Except when actually trying to make a match, it’s more advantageous to literally swipe right on everyone to maximize matches and then unmatch if you match with someone you aren’t interested in.
But if you are swiping left, you will match with significantly fewer and potentially none. It becomes demoralizing. And it takes much longer to make a decision if you are looking at everyone including those that don’t match with you so you go through fewer people to potentially match with.
Wait until you match with someone to look at their pictures and their profile, and only then, decide whether to stay matched or unmatch.
I had quite a few short relationships from tinder and bumble. But some of those wouldn’t have happened if I were more picky at the swiping stage.
Except when actually trying to make a match, it’s more advantageous to literally swipe right on everyone to maximize matches and then unmatch if you match with someone you aren’t interested in.
This isn’t true if their system punishes people for swiping “yes” on everyone. While I can’t be certain that’s the case, it seems very plausible it is. Swipe yes on everyone, your profile is down ranked, you don’t get as many good matches.
Additionally, tinder and hinge only allow you a limited number of yes swipes per day. If you blow them on the first ten profiles, you’re going to have worse results than if you spend a little longer looking at profiles.
Furthermore, on hinge, you can send a message with your like. Your chances of having a conversation and date go way down without a good message.
As a dude, I wasn’t matching while I was swiping often. I’d swipe in the morning and then see what came up through the day.
They may have changed their apps in the… 10 or so years since I used them. But the premise is the same, the more you swipe right on the better the odds of matching someone that swipes right on you. Even if you don’t swipe right on everyone, be extremely generous on your swipes.
This is wild advice, thier algorithm will say “this person is addicted to matches and will literally match with anyone, sell him the unlimited swipes package and downgrade his match chance exposure to keep him hanging on for more”. Based on 5 years since use.
At the same time, many users half-ass using them
Honestly the way a lot of the Tinder-style ones (swiping) are designed it almost feels like they’re meant to be half-assed? You can’t filter by likes, just exclude by dislikes (ex. Don’t include people who don’t want kids, don’t include smokers, etc) because there’s no search anymore. They just show you a profile, and you swipe.
When I was using them I very quickly stopped reading bios before they matched back. I just swiped right on everyone, checked daily for new matches, read those profiles and blocked/messaged people based on what was in their profile.
Speaking on filters, though: They don’t even work. I had men filtered out, and I ended up getting about 25% of profiles being men. Like, the only gender tag they had was “Man,” which lead to a lot of the “Idk why they even showed me to you I have men filtered out” message being sent.
I had that happen to me, too, and I’m a straight man. Never really wanted to do gay stuff, and yet Tinder would constantly throw in gay matches as if to say “are you SURE you don’t wanna do a little experimenting while we watch?”
The top of the funnel I could see an argument for not putting a lot of thought in. You’re just trying to get a pool of potential matches. (The apps are cruel for making you pay for this and not just giving you the list up front)
But once you do have a match, you have to put in some effort to stand out. A lot of people get a match and all they write is “hey”, and then they go right into the trash. Why would I engage with someone who just wrote “hey” when I could instead talk to someone who read my profile and said something personalized?
Also swiping yes on everyone might do strange things to their recommendation algorithm. Unfortunately that’s a black box, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that puts you in some sort of chum bucket shadow ban situation.
And also, yeah, making you pay for basic filters is a trashy design. Match group should be broken up.
Maybe, but it did happen earlier on before I’d started, so I think the filters are just kinda not great to start
.com domain, meaning US? US has next to no market regulation.
I’ve never used a dating app. I think dating apps are mostly used for hookups. At least that’s what I’ve heard, and I’m not interested at all. In this capitalist system where we consume everything so quickly, it’s very difficult to truly find love. A philosopher once wrote a book about how love is gradually dying. The Agony of Eros by Chul Han. I recommend.
I think dating apps are mostly used for hookups
This isn’t especially true. Maybe Feeld and Tinder are less “serious”, but the idea of dating apps is mainstream enough that you find all sorts of people and goals.
The capitalism and for-profit nature does make them all kind of suck, though
I don’t know, they still seem to me like they’re only for short-term gains. Capitalism ruins everything.
Thinking about my friend group, about half the people met their long term partners on dating apps. The other half is a mix of work and large social groups (eg: people who all go to certain kinds of music festivals)
I guess it varies by age and region.
While meeting partners through personal networks is still the most common kind of introduction, about one-in-ten partnered adults (12%) say they met their partner online. About a third (32%) of adults who are married, living with a partner or are in a committed relationship say friends and family helped them find their match. Smaller shares say they met through work (18%), through school (17%), online (12%), at a bar or restaurant (8%), at a place of worship (5%) or somewhere else (8%).
Some other sources I’m seeing say it’s as high as 60% of couples met online.
Interesting 🤔
whose been screwing with the gas chromategraph?!
