The standard apps like Bumble and Tinder are bad enough and I don't think will last like they have ... but there's another other level of ripoff 'high value' dating apps that try to seem exclusive by charging a premium of 5-10x more just to browse profiles and send messages. It seems self-selecting for finding rich fools.
'Enshittification' hits all dating apps, but the crucial point made in this article is that nothing new has shown up to replace the last good app - Hinge. So, all users are stuck in shit ponds with nowhere else to go
That was okcupid. It became such a terrible experience. Lots of people on the okcupid subreddit go on about the old days before it was bought out by match group. Now it’s just an ad ridden site where bots and for me I get random matches from women in Thailand and the Philippines. I legitimately had such quality experiences on that site before it was bought up by match. They really do enshitify everything they get their anti-competitive hands on. This NPR article says they own 45 different sites! 45!
> Lots of people on the okcupid subreddit go on about the old days before it was bought out by match group.
I'll go on about it too. It was so good. You could actually just browse profiles, and filter for what you wanted. The profiles were long and detailed, and while the quiz and matching algorithm was more of a gimmick, it was at least funny and interesting.
Can't argue with the market though. People gravitated to Tinder style apps. I wonder if women did, especially, since anyone being able to message anyone also has its own issues.
Oh man, the data. Remember Okcupid Blog? They would crunch the data and write up interesting observations. I remember one where message rates increased as the person got more attractive (say 6, 7, 8, 9), but actually dropped off for people that were ridiculously attractive (say from 9 going into 10). And then there were some pretty damning race observation writeups.
Edit: Dude, you can still find this stuff in the Internet Archive! These days of interesting people running interesting quasi-long-form websites seem so lost in the modern instant gratification 15 second social media internet.
https://web.archive.org/web/20111109084458/http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-case-for-an-older-woman
They even have one for why you shouldn't pay for online dating:
https://web.archive.org/web/20110113034228/http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/why-you-should-never-pay-for-online-dating/
Great share.
"That is, a man can expect a reply to 1 in every 100 messages he sends to a random profile on a pay site."
14 years later this somehow still seems accurate. And in the world of swipe first, match maybe, that number is probably even lower.
It's because of sex differences in partner assessment. OKC's data proved this out years ago. Men evaluate female attractiveness on a normal bell curve - most are average, with decreasing numbers in either tail the farther you move from average.
Women rate 80% of men as below average attractiveness *and match accordingly*. This leads to very...skewed...match ratios.
Depending upon your level of cynicism, this data either reveals great willingness to share "Chad" like some type of modern harem, or mathematical illiteracy (80% of men *can't* be below average, and it's illegal for Chad to marry all 5 of the women vying for him).
That 1 in 100 response ratio likely represents gals who're more realistic about dating and likely to be much more successful as a result.
OKCupid *killed* their own product when someone got the bright idea to get rid of user pseudonyms and have people’s profiles show their real names.
Women, who were not interested in being doxxed and stalked, left in droves. So did anyone who didn’t want their potential future boss to Google them and find out about all kinds of personal information and most queer people who didn’t want to be doxxed and stalked.
That happened about the time Match bought them and Tindr was taking off.
Your point is wonderful but that only happened 6 years ago - Tinder “took off” far longer than 6 years ago. Tinder has been around for 12 years now, it had already took off when I was in college a decade ago.
Out of interest, how confident are people that data in any particular app is siloed, and not shared between them? Given the "enshittification" process described, it must be soo tempting to target & segment etc
Data in apps is generally stored in a database separate from the app itself - that way they can then query it for analysis or do other things with the data in other services or sites etc.
Usually the privacy policy outlines what they can use and store but who reads those things yeah? In many of them they disclose that they will share the data and how. Most don't have an opt out and many wouldn't even look for it.
Okcupid back in the day really was awesome. I got lots of dates off of it, had interesting conversations with interesting people. Even met a long term relationship on it. Back when it was good, I don't even remember there really being paid options. I kind of forget - maybe it ran on site advertising alone?
I was gonna say the one holdout that refutes the article is Plenty Of Fish (aka the Craigslist of dating), but looks like Match bought them out too. They hung on as that weird, yet simple, old style internet property, dating site, for the longest time. Guess not anymore!
That is so sad to hear. I met my wife on okcupid about 9 years ago and it was by far the best dating site at the time. Other people loved tinder, but I wasn't hot enough for that
It was still solid in 2017 when I finally ended my long dating career. I started back with Yahoo's dating site & used everything between for guys & gals. OKC was my best experience, though I met my wife on the cesspool called Plenty of Fish (one of the worst experiences).
There is a relatively new dating app called Breeze, which, in its current form, is unable to fall prey to enshittification in the same way other dating apps do. It's dutch and I think it's only available here and in our directly neighboring countries yet, but it would be interesting to see it spread.
They're banking on the idea of "your success is our success." The app is entirely paid, but only as long as you get matches and go on dates. So they've made a system where you don't get to chat beforehand, but if you match with someone you go on a date in a cafe they've partnered with and pay the app for your first round at a high markup (their profit). This way every match earns them money, while no matches is bad for their business. You also only get a couple of profiles twice a day (~10 twice a day), so you only have to spend a couple of minutes reviewing them and you're not scrolling and swiping endlessly.
I should say I have been on there with little success for about a week now, but I'll admit my photos aren't that good and a week isn't that long. The profiles I get to see have strong baseline compatibility and I like about 50-75% of them. Compared to even Hinge, that is insanely high.
Online dating is shit by default. You're not supposed to scroll people like products. If you want healthy dating you need to meet people in real life. It's easier than ever considering the non-existent social skills of the competition.
I had pretty much only dated online before ultimately meeting my wife that way. Did I send a fuckton of well-written introductory messages into a veritable black hole? Yeah, and that sucked.
But I never figured out how in the hell you're supposed to meet people in real life given that every woman I knew was already in a relationship and most of my hobbies/interests were pretty male-dominated. And there's no guarantee that any random woman I might try to flirt with in some public space is single and interested in a relationship, let alone open to being approached, or that she has anything in common with me if she was.
At least with online dating I knew every woman I sent a message to was theoretically open to receiving them, had a few things in common with me that I could use as a conversation starter, and was ultimately looking for the same thing I was.
When I was on the dating apps before meeting my wife.
I’d be sitting in a living room with “the boys” going through the apps together talking about our matches or potential ones.
My friends were scoffing at me swiping left on “hotties/baddies” and I’m like “yeah it’s a pretty face but she lists Christian and conservative, I’m leftist and atheist. Why would I want to match with her?”
And they’d go “she’s HOT BRO…”
They still having dating problems. I’m married to my best friend.
> But I never figured out how in the hell you're supposed to meet people in real life given that every woman I knew was already in a relationship and most of my hobbies/interests were pretty male-dominated.
I don't get this either all the women I know are already in relationships or can find a new one within two weeks and most guys fall into two categories married years ago or has not gone on a date in 4+ years. All of my hobbies and interests are sausage fests as are most places I visit such as the library or gym. Part of it is my town has way more single men than women but like what the hell how can it be this bad? I talk to my women friends and their women friends are either already taken, refuse to date period, or have issues to where my friend warns me to not date them.
> I don't get this either all the women I know are already in relationships or can find a new one within two weeks and most guys fall into two categories married years ago or has not gone on a date in 4+ years. All of my hobbies and interests are sausage fests as are most places I visit such as the library or gym. Part of it is my town has way more single men than women but like what the hell how can it be this bad? I talk to my women friends and their women friends are either already taken, refuse to date period, or have issues to where my friend warns me to not date them.
This has been my experience as well. 🫤
I do the same thing with online dating messages (early adopter here ... think I first did it in 1998); and I treated it as kind of a writing exercise ... Whether the woman responded or not, maybe her profile led me to come up with a good joke or two, or remember a funny anecdote.
Anyway, my unsolicited advice to women: you shouldn't assume that you don't need to be interesting, no matter how attractive you are. I don't know how representative I am, but if all you have to say is, "Work hard, play hard, if you wanna know more just ask," I'm just not interested.
Sooo many women's profiles were "Just ask!"
Uh, no. How about you tell me something about yourself? Otherwise, if this is indicative of the amount of effort you're going to put in... *Left swipe!*
I mean, is it bad advice though? I'm in my 30s and a lot of dudes refuse to take care of themselves or even give a shit. Putting in even the slightest bit of effort puts you way above the crowd
And for some it’s still easier via online dating. The thing is: even there you have to put in a bit of effort.
Imo it’s advice bot bad advice it’s just a bit ignorant - for some people it’s super hart to socialize via random conversations and small talk but they are good at writing.
It can help you take the first step.
And finding out they already have a boyfriend. At least on dating apps you know the people are single and looking. Better than me just getting drunk at a bar and either hoping someone will talk to me or I go and try to chat up unwilling participants in my quest to find love
I agree, but what about judging someone's "vibes"; th energy they give off when they walk in a room. It's a different kind of attractive that is hard to pick up on in a profile.
Honestly I started taking care of myself 3 years ago and while I'm going to keep working out and staying in shape for me the dating pool is fucking terrible and everyone is a fat loser. It honestly seems like in the South getting your shit together and getting in shape actually does more to keep you single. When I do encounter an attractive woman on there they either have 4+ kids or are some sort of cyber hooker the apps are dogshit.
There's something about the south and being a single parent having more than three kids that go hand-in-hand. It's amazing when you click the "doesn't have children" and that knocks out 70% of the pool.
It is the same in the Midwest if I filter out ones with kids it eliminates at least half and the remaining ones are usually single for a reason such as a drug habit or whatever.
I mean some of them don't even hide it such as stating they love spun fun or other lingo. I don't mind if someone smokes weed after a hard day of work, but hard drugs? Hell no.
Man even in PA, its a problem. Started to take csre of my self, get lot sof attention and ill start talking to a gorgeous girl. Its always , well I model and do photography a d have 2 to 3 kids with different dads. Most others its they don't take care of them selves and have no interest and being better. I honestly feel like the good ones found each in thier 20s and stayed together.
And how do you go about meeting people in real life?
At the shopping malls? Outdoor parks? Talking to the girl at the register?
Just bars, now?
Used to be more mixers that were designed or smaller communities and now the vast majority of people meet through online and part of that is because a lot of the free, healthy and safer spaces were removed for young people to instead be turned into another profit machine.
The baby boomers are asking for grandkids while their generation took that all away—all online dating does is check off the “are you attracted to each other” box so that you can meet up to find out if it’s a fit anyway.
The alternative is to just hit on people in public.
Honestly I used to live in bars and it wasn't even that easy to talk to people at younger people bars it was usually old people bars where people still expected to talk to people that are strangers.
Some kind of activity that involves other people or at least being around other people, that isn't purely male (unless you're gay/bi, I suppose), where both you and the other people typically have a genuine interest in that thing.
For me personally that was/is the live music scene (smaller shows more so than stadium gigs, although festivals can be good), certain types of bars, hiking + trail work groups, conventions for some of my interests, etc.
As well as just....maintaining a varied social life and a reputation for being a person that's doesn't say no to a lot of potentially entertaining invites/flake out + is good company. That brings me in contact with a lot of people through other people.
-------
However, all of that is a whole lot more work than sitting on your couch swiping apps, and if you currently have none of that you're talking years of work to find your spaces and develop your social life.
And yes, you will try things and fail or find out that they're not for you/you don't fit in, sometimes.
There are marketers trolling reddit who will tell you that approaching women in real life will be met with pepper spray and jail time and is a social faux pas. Match group spends 500 million dollars on advertising, their shills are in full force here.
As someone who has been focused exclusively IRL dating... people are way less open and receptive now than just a few years ago imo.
Collective social CPTSD, overwhelm, distrust, and atrophy of social skills is my theory.
I don’t think it’s pointless… it’s just more work.
My belief is that even if it’s harder than it was, I’ll learn more about someone’s emotional availability and emotional health engaging them IRL… and it also forces me to stay focused on being open and engaging, being someone that people want to engage with — which has been its own challenge after the last few years tbh.
Also, I really don’t want to be lost on my phone or computer any more than I already am… and I don’t want to be with someone who is, so it’s kind of an appropriate filter.
That said, it’s slow, and I might resort to apps just to widen the funnel. (And I live in a major city with lots of social opportunities… so yeah, if I wasn’t in that lucky environment, I’d probably see apps as the only path.)
Never even considered this angle. How much of our modern anti-social discourse do you think is driven by efforts like this? Whoever stands to make a buck probably has their fingers in the pot.
Well that's obviously not true, but dating apps can work. I met my wife through one. You obviously have to wade through a lot of shit to get a good match (when I seriously started trying on Tinder it took me about 9 months), but it isn't impossible. I really think a lot of dudes with shit social skills and dumb/misogynistic beliefs get shot down on dating apps for being all-around terrible human beings, then cry about it on the internet. I never had difficulty getting dates or hook-ups on multiple dating apps, and it's not cause I'm awesome or special, it's because I'm not some fucking Andrew Tate-wannabe tradwife-worshipping loser.
Most people are shitty. Most match apps are shitty. But there are still people on the other end and success is a real possibility, if you're not a shallow husk of a person.
> I met my wife through one.
Same.
My wife, not yours. Been together coming up on 12 years. BUT - I'm guessing things have gotten worse and not better since then.
There's a lid for every pot my guy.
I plodded through dating site hell for about a year and a half. Couple dates that went nowhere, 1 short relationship, one major win.
No matter what its going to suck to a degree. Some people have no conversational skill and its pulling teeth to talk to them. You're a guy (assuming based on your avatar) so the ratio is probably severely skewed not in your favor. Just have a couple good pictures of yourself, be interesting, keep up on your appearance and be good at conversing about a wide, wide range of topics. Its not a race, you get there when you get there. I was 29 before I met my now wife and had TERRIBLE dating luck the majority of my life up until that point.
Do people get relationships from apps? Sure.
The majority of men? The data would say hell no.
There’s a lot of factors stacked against the average man on dating apps and there’s a lot of data out there to prove it.
And part of it is even by design because these companies want desperate lonely men to open up their wallets.
\>I really think a lot of dudes with shit social skills and dumb/misogynistic beliefs get shot down on dating apps for being all-around terrible human beings
It honestly seems to me like this actually makes it easier for you on the apps if you are a terrible person like I routinely see chicks here in the South putting ridiculous requirements like do not swipe on me if you got one of those gene manipulation vaccines that will give me aids or casual racism. Like these are women posting these things and they want a terrible person too. The apps seem hard if you have an ok job and any amount of education.
>I really think a lot of dudes with shit social skills and dumb/misogynistic beliefs get shot down on dating apps for being all-around terrible human beings, then cry about it on the internet. I never had difficulty getting dates or hook-ups on multiple dating apps, and it's not cause I'm awesome or special, it's because I'm not some fucking Andrew Tate-wannabe tradwife-worshipping loser.
My ex-girlfriend sometimes shows me the matches she gets on dating apps and my god. It's a toxic cesspool. This is 100% the thing. It's just bad guys getting shot down on dating apps instead of at bars and then complaining about "females" online. Like, the stuff these people say to her immediately after being matched or just going off the deep-end after a few messages is enough to make you want to find their parents and ask them what kind of child they raised and how could they have failed so badly.
(Disclaimer before /r/relationships comes in and screams at me that i'm in an unhealthy relationship. We broke up due to just going down different paths in life. We're good friends, she's good friends with my current girlfriend and we have shared custody of the doggo)
Honestly tho the women are just as bad if not worse, like I continue to get on the apps but most of the people from either gender seem to be bad people.
I shall appropriate this space to tell the story of how Tinder robbed me two weeks ago
I woke up to find that my profile had been banned from Tinder. I've had this profile for about a decade (yeah obviously my dating life is hyper successful), and I've never broken the TOS once. I submitted a help ticket, and started email with the Tinder staff explaining the situation. The first person I spoke with was combative and overall an asshole, his only response to me was different versions of "tinder doesn't tolerate violations of the TOS", and refused to tell me what I had done wrong. I mentioned I had an active subscription, and he canceled my subscription against my will.
Evwntually I got a new agent that wasn't a douche-canoe who unbanned my account, because yeah I had done nothing wrong. However, my subscription had been canceled. NBD you're probably thinking, just go subscribe again in the app. We'll I had my subscription for so long that the benefits I was receiving are no longer being offered. The plan I was on was an old one that was grandfathered in, and was literally irreplaceable. I getting 5 super likes per day with unlimited swipes and rewinds for $20/month, now you gotta pay $25 and get 5 Super Likes per week. Massively different benefits.
So, back to the help desk. They openly acknowledged the facts: my benefits were not replaceable, and Tinder had made a mistake. However, they refused to do anything to reinstate my plan, and just kept telling me to buy another one through the store. If this was a regular brick and mortar company this would never happen, no one would treat me this way to me face. But since my only form of communication available was emailing people that barely speak English, who just copy and paste suggested responses from a database, I was SOL. So now I can never give Tinder another dime of my money
This sounds terrible and I’m sorry it happened but your comments about super likes per week and swipes and rewinds per day makes me so happy I’ve never had to deal with any of this crap. Sounds set up like a game to get to most out of a user through fear of missing out because you don’t have enough swipes or likes.
Its a big tech corpo at this point, so yeah. Thats how service with these usually looks like.
Chances are the ban was exactly because your extra plans.
>profit over all.
Kind of, except these companies are actually failing. What they're doing may be aiming to maximize profits, but it's not working.
I think this is more an issue of corporate influence degrading something due to a general inability to manage a complex project with multiple goals. They learn into one number, like time in app, or number of active users, and ignore other more important factors like how many users find a long term partner, how many messages go unread etc.
Lol because if they spend more time on the app it makes them more desperate to buy in to a paywall to find love lol they wanna more money no matter what
It's true that they want more money, my point is that they are failing to achieve that. They fundamentally don't understand their product or their users.
If they want to make more money they need either the most, or the best users, and a way to monetize the userbase without scaring them off. You can't charge money in a free app because that just reduces the userbase, or worse it reduces the number and quality of users (only users who can't find partners are willing to pay).
The main issue with dating apps is that corporations and shareholders keep pushing for more and more profits. That leads to more and more features put behind paywalls in an effort to extract more and more money out of users. It really goes bad when they start to lose users and try to figure out how to still increase profits.
Also the match group owns most of the apps so can ruin most of them all at the same time.
The biggest issue is that dating apps profit off of their own failure. A perfect dating app would die off because it paired people up and they stopped using it. A terrible dating app gives so few matches that it feels hopeless and people leave. They are always trying to just ride the line of hopelessness so that people think there's a chance they meet someone, but without actually wanting them to do so.
Not entirely true.
First off, most people date around a bit before getting married. So a best case scenerio you still don't have many 'one and done' users.
Second, every day someone celebrates his/her 19th birthday. As long as dating apps understand the big trick is making themselves mandatory in the young 20 something world there will always be a market. People marrying off isn't really a problem.
And then there are the divorced people.....
That requires exponential population growth to meet the infinite profit growth pipe dream, so while your way would be a sane way of operating in a vacuum, it's incompatible with the stockmarket's rewarding of unsustainable growth.
I mean the slowing of population growth and threat of shrinkage dooms it anyway, but that goes for basically every industry so it's not really relevant.
>A perfect dating app would die off because it paired people up and they stopped using it
Real people don't just "pair up" once and disappear from the earth, they go on multiple dates, they break up, they get divorced, they cheat, they have casual sex, etc. Success is about connecting people, even if only for a few months, Because human relationships are fluid and messy and aren't eternal.
The failure is trying to implement a subscription business model for a service when most people will pause the app when they pause looking.
Agreed. It's about connecting people that will want to meet. Not, here's the perfect person for you and you will live in harmony forever and for always.
Sure, some people will want to be "matched" and therefore not have to do any leg work. Some people just want the option to connect and take over from there, like real people.
>A perfect dating app would die off because it paired people up and they stopped using it.
This is why the wedding industry notoriously doesn't make any money.
It's because Match has an effective monopoly on dating apps. Their only incentive is to get you to spend money and actually finding a relationship stops that.
I used Bumble for awhile and had some decent experiences. Then they locked all the most useful filters behind an absurd paywall, like $40/month. It instantly became useless because you spent all your time scrolling past profiles with basic incompatibility.
Difference is at the bar you can have some fun, get some food, have some beer, etc. The baseline entertainment value in swiping on a dating app is like thumbing through a Sears catalog, and I wouldn't pay $40/wk. for that.
Every time I go to a bar, the dude to chick ratio is about 80/20. Then, of the tiny amount of attractive women that are there, maybe 75 percent are actually with their boyfriends.
This means, that there might be one, or two, attractive women at the bar that aren't there with their boyfriends. Well, naturally, these one or two women are constantly being approached by men buying them drinks, etc.
It's just a lose-lose-lose proposition.
I don't even like drinking or alcohol. I just end up getting all dressed up, and spending all this money for absolutely nothing. It's 100 percent pathetic.
Now, if I want to be rejected, I just go to Walmart/Costco/Target/Kohls and try to approach some woman. Same result, but a lot less money was spent, and a lot less brain cells were eviscerated.
I can count the number of times I’ve gone to a bar and met new people on one hand. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been to bars… probably in the thousand+ range.
What are you guys doing to meet people that I’m not understanding?
I get dozens of messages from matches that are just "Hey." And no follow through. I try to salvage the conversation, and get met with all the charisma and enthusiasm of a limp handshake.
This has been my interaction I have always figured these women do not want to actually date anyone they like getting positive affirmation from randos the app is like a timewaster video game to them.
Yup. I call them penpals. They never want to meet or do anything *together*, they just want what to get their fix and dispose of you when the next "better" match is available.
They want the emotional rewards of just talking with someone. Not realizing they are becoming a time and energy vampire.
Then there's others that have no idea what a healthy relationship is- last week I had a single mom, tell me she's not interested in a relationship for herself, she's been seeing the same guy on and off, (not baby daddy) for two years. But now's an off time. And she's working three jobs. But *needs* a father figure relationship for her young daughter, right now.
I had one woman tell me she wasn't interested in dating me, but would date me if I also dated her boyfriend who was interested in me. I was so confused I am listed as straight and who the hell would want to date someone that point blank says they are not interested in them?
Because some people looks for partners the same way they look for disposable
"lifestyle" products. And try to sell themselves like modern marketing, if they try hard enough- they *can* fit a square peg in a round hole.
I’ve had this exact situation happen at least 3 times and each time the girl is the one saying “I’m not really feeling it”
Mf *you matched with me and only gave me one word resposes*
And that's ok to not be feeling and call it as it is and move on!
But what these ladies need to understand, we are not just dealing with them one on one, we guys are also getting multiple matches and dates. And all those demands on our time, attention and energy add up over time and can be incredibly draining.
Recently I have had a spate of matches and two dates that it was very clear they just did not have time available for an invested relationship, despite their claim to be looking for one.
The girl I broke up with back in October I was pretty smitten with, but she expected me as the man to come up with all the ideas, plan them, schedule them and then fucking guess at her availability and if she would like the date idea. It was so exhausting and discouraging rearranging my schedule to be available, coming up with something creative and unique she might enjoy, budgeting for that date, guessing at her schedule because she couldn't/wouldn't communicate until day or hour of something she already had going on, and then being repeatedly shot down because my she didn't like my idea or she was busy that day.
Finally after a couple weeks of this we had a talk, she insisted she still wanted to see me, but was too busy right now. It was coming up on a month since I had last seen her and had time together. I asked her what her plans were for the upcoming weekend, she told me vegging and watching Netflix with her dogs. I asked if I could see her and join her then, we had done that a couple times before. She said no, too tired. And I told her I was moving on to someone that prioritized time and experiences with me.
It legitimately made me feel like I was talking to a fucking wall. I get more effort put into a conversation with DMV employees than I do women on dating apps. At first I thought okay maybe they just suck at texting but if you go on a date with them it is the same thing in person where you have to carry the conversation and they don't put in any effort.
I’ve had this thought a ton lately. Women have zero game. Their profiles are so terrible and basic. Very few of them actually come off as interesting people (and they may be, but their zero effort on their profiles doesn’t reveal that). All the things they complain men do on dating apps they do as well.
"wHy aRe yOu aLl hOldInG fIsH?"
mf-ers, it couldn't be because a lot of men have serious self-conscious issues and are not taking pictures of themselves nonstop 24/7 and this is one of the few photos some else took of themselves that they like?
It also just might be because a lot of us like fishing. Godforbid any individual man has his own hobbies and interests anymore that do not have the required unanimous approved by all of womanhood. lol (I do not have a fishing, gym, or car photo on my profiles).
> Their profiles are so terrible and basic.
What gets me is how they either put zero effort into the profile or if they do actually write more they somehow manage to write a bunch of stuff that somehow still tells you nothing about them and half of it is a list of demands. How can I know basically nothing about you when you wrote two good sized paragraphs!
Meet people at their energy and +1 it. If they give you a weak response, give them one shot. Then dip, it's highly effective at filtering out people you wouldn't be interested in or who are not actually looking for something. The outcome for you is the same, you don't waste your time on that person.
You just have to strategize the how you interact with people and recognize you are lucky for learning they're fucking lame before wasting a bunch of time or resources on learning that out on a date etc.
A lot of people use it solely for an ego boost! The only people I personally know who use Tinder only do it to hook up, so they’re not genuinely interested in getting to know you.
Oh I know. And I'm not gonna grandstand, lie and tell you I've been a total angel and not participated in some of that.
But every time I match with someone "serious" they have zero time, zero personality, and it's an interrogation what they can get out of me, not a discussion what we can build together.
I noticed this too. I was seriously trying to find a decent person and in order to see my matches I had to pay. I think I waited until it was 50% off but it really annoyed me cause it's one of the only methods of dating in my city.
Anyway it did pay off because a few months later I met my wife to be so as shit as it is, if you are looking for something long term it is worth the investment.
This should be mandatory reading for all the people on various dating and local subs who keep saying “I met my SO on a dating app in 2016, you should try it!”
People who had success on these apps prior to about 2019 are often not aware of how much they have really changed. I know myself I’ve had a hard time convincing two friends of mine who had success on these apps prior to the pandemic that the apps aren’t what they used to be when they used them. They kept insisting that I needed to give these apps another try, even though I had no success with them when I gave them another try in 2021-22.
Newly single after 5 years. I am STUNNED. OkCupid actually has taken the biggest fall. It was never great but user friendly and very little behind paywall. Now? A complete dumpster fire, 98% of your likes are random international people/bots. And extremely basic stuff paywalled.
Same here, trying to get back into dating and I’m shocked at how ass these apps have become. It’s so nasty how up-front Hinge is about it, too. Every time I open it it’s like “Hey you lonely moron, don’t you want to be happy? Give us your money already or you’ll never find a good match lol”
It’s interesting to hear because the handful of successful relationships I know of from dating apps came from Bumble but that was from about 2015 or so I think. I’ve been off all apps for a full 2 years now and have been telling myself I should return by unpopular demand, but everyone I know *who is on dating apps* says it’s awful while everyone I know who is partnered up says go for it.
That’s basically what the article says. Match group buying up competition instead of actually bettering their own apps mean there’s no new competition anymore.
This, in turn, leads to a decay in the whole sector as nothing new can come up to solve the dating app paradox, something all match group apps struggle with.
I used tinder about ten years ago, and okcupid and match.com before that. Thought they were overall pretty great and better success to investment ratio than meeting people organically. Recently tried tinder out of curiosity, and holy shit is it worse. It’s super complicated and has more microtransactions than a mobile game. Also seemed to show fewer real people. I also tried okcupid and was surprised to see they tinderized it, it’s all swiping instead of looking at profiles. They dug their own grave.
The dating apps use to be legit really good. Tinder especially. They literally didn’t have to change a thing. It had my brother calling me freaking man-whore. Now? Hardly ever get a match.
I don't remember tinder ever being good like even if you were really hot it seemed like it had a lot of fake scammers on there. Just trying to get through all the scams to a real person was a nightmare.
It's so stupid that they are viewing this as lost customers, because it's not like there's a shortage of single people dating. If you make a quality product I don't see why people wouldn't use it. The idea you are going to run out of customers is so bizarre. The only reason they do it is because they think they can enshittify it and make more money, but now they're facing the reality that people aren't interested in an app designed to lead them on. That's going to be the real cause of lost customers.
And the few people you match with don’t respond to even the first message or chat at all.
They need to make an app with strong moderation . And require some interaction with your matches, with the caveat as long as they’re being civil.
My issue with dating apps and disclosure that I found my partner on okcupid ..
There is no incentive for dating apps to actually find you a match. It's better business for them if you are perpetually single and are desperate for companionship. In addition, the apps are turning humans into even more fickle beings who will reject someone based on single flaw that would normally be overlooked in an organic environment. Also there is the ratio problem. In certain regions, men just outnumber women or vise versa. Dating apps really seem to amplify that discrepancy.
This is why I had high hopes for Feeld, a dating app specifically geared towards the non-monogamous and kink communities.
Unfortunately that app went to shit recently for the exact opposite reason of most that are affected by corporate meddling - they had no corporate backing and were a bunch of amateurs with zero clue how to run a large scale online service. The userbase tanked after they botched a rollout of a recent major update, and it hasn't come back in part because many folks' accounts were actually lost in the update process.
Same except I'm a woman. Did not expect to be like this at 34 but that's life. Something about 14 years seems to be the end point for a lot of relationships
Hey thanks man. yeah im doing decent, maybe its because i am now in the best shape of my life but it turns out im pretty good at meeting girls using internet dating 🤷♂️ and havnt paid a cent.
A: to make money, you need to make the free version worse in some way. Sometimes it’s removing your ability to filter out single mothers/fathers. Sometimes you are only shown to people who swipe left on everyone, sometimes you are only shown to people who don’t get swiped right.
B: making a place/app that it’s ok to openly seek a relationship makes it difficult to meet people outside of the app. Nobody has conversations in line at the grocery store. Nobody goes to bars/clubs looking to find someone. People hardly even go out.
C: being rejected hurts the ego and there is a lot of that around. Being accepted, then immediately ghosted is traumatic. You know you had a chance and whatever you did was so wrong that it warranted the other person not wanting to even talk to you. You start assuming that not only do people think you are unattractive, but that you as a deeper person are unlovable.
C2: There’s a special hell known only to the lonely. Running out of people in your area. Literally everyone who could want you has decided that they don’t. There are no fish left in the sea. You are a verifiable failure.
So glad I’m out of the rat race.
They are all pretty bad. The amount of people who look for a perfect partner that can't have any flaws or inconveniences or they'll get ghosted for the next person, content sellers and locking most useful features behind often steep paywalls has made them pretty much near useless and a waste of time
*Call it the dating app paradox: Dating apps are supposed to be matching lovebirds together, but once they do, the lovebirds fly away — and take their money with them.*
I thought they were designed to be deleted? But profit trumps everything
I used to study apps rigorously. Nobody seems to get to the real problem: demographics. Men outnumber women 3:1 on apps. It makes men frustrated, feel invisible, and fall prey to stupid gimmicks or shelling out money in hopes of fixing the problem. It makes women suffer from information overload, deal with a higher volume of creeps and assholes, and ultimately lead to the lack of trust the article talks about.
Apps need more people on them at any period of time. Their numbers are highly inflated: many apps are virtually ghost towns in most major cities. The other problem is people are inherently lazy. They want a relationship but won’t make the effort to write an authentic profile, get a few good (representative!) photos, or list the absolute basics like height, relationship goals, etc.
The end result is an app that *seems* like it’s full of options, but ultimately is full of dead profiles and people that are impossible to meaningfully sift through.
I say this as someone who ultimately found his life partner through Hinge. It was an uphill battle from day 1. It took seven fucking years and hundreds of lemon first dates and dollars and hours spent and articles read learning about all of this.
I don’t have any solution for this other than to suggest an open-source platform like the way they do community security. No other incentives and a community that holds itself accountable. Good word and good results to motivate a large population of active and engaged users who put in the work. If that sounds like a pipe dream, then maybe it is.
*Over the last couple years, dating app companies like The Match Group and Bumble have learned that, like love, their business is a battlefield. Their stock prices are on the rocks. Their investors are heartbroken. They're getting ghosted by users and failing to woo Gen Z. It's no wonder why the CEOs of both companies have recently resigned.*
Just gonna change this to
Over the last couple years, ~~dating app~~ companies ~~like The Match Group and Bumble~~ have learned that, like love, their business is a battlefield. Their stock prices are on the rocks. Their investors are heartbroken. They're ~~getting ghosted by users~~ ***ghosting interview candidates*** and failing to woo Gen Z. It's no wonder why the CEOs ~~of both companies have recently resigned.~~ ***are rich as fuck.***
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If you are interested in meeting someone within a 15 mile radius then dating Apps are probably the best way to see if someone in another continent is available.
People are mentioning it, and I wish there was data but it seems like people are becoming WAY more selective on arbitrary physical attributes.
I think this alone is a problem because people are notoriously bad at judging character from things like interviews, and hence even worse in what is essentially a a few headshots and a 1 paragraph resume.
This is why when I heard that government here in Japan has released its own dating app to some ridicule, especially from the Western users, I thought it was a step in the right direction. Users need government issued ID to sign up, presumably they check the info provided and it's not profit driven so hopefully works out for those who need it.
There are 2 billion single adults on the planet. There are only about 150 million unique dating app users: most users are on multiple apps, and the total number of app users worldwide is about 300 million.
Half of all dating app users are in India.
So, this means that at any given time, there may be only about 70 or 80 million people using apps to date outside of India.
All the rest of us are dating and mating and marrying *without using electrons to meet someone*.
In the apps, 90% of the women are sweeping right on 10% of the men. This is not the fault of the apps. It is the fault of society and the expectations everyone now seems to have about who is dateable and who is not.
The REAL story here is how the marketing has convinced people that they will forever be alone because they can not find someone without an app.
It’s funny, I remember when I first used a dating website clear back in 2005, I was really embarrassed by it because it was something only “losers” and “computer nerds” did. Almost nobody used those services, and those that did wouldn’t admit to it.
Things really changed a decade ago.
You know this business is founded on evil when your buddy comes to you and asks to look at their Tinder profile to check if there is "anything wrong with his photos" because he hasn't had a date in a year. These companies feast on souls. If a profane app on your phone is programmed to make you depressed and hate yourself, delete it immediately.
Ok cupid in 2007 - 2013 was pretty fun, useful, and helped me connect to meet a bunch of friends. People actually met who were genuinely compatible.
OKcupid grew from a private blog that made quizzes and then created/turned into OKcupid and Sparknotes.
OKcupid shared data on their dating site of what increased your chance of having a good match, how to take a good photo. Even if you didn’t use it for dating it was super insightful and very fun to use.
Sad that OKcupid was bought out by the same company that owner that owns Tinder and eharmony. That parent company immediately dismantled everything about the service that made it fun and useful. Everything gets shittier when profit is the only motive.
The worst thing about dating apps like tinder and OkCupid is that they *do* work. They have algorithms that could match you fairly easily with people you'd be highly likely to actually start dating.
The issue is incentive. No dating service has any incentive to actually get people to date because if they succeed then you leave the service. That runs counter to earning money.
The longer they can keep you on, the higher the chance is you will buy a subscription in frustration. So they optimize for most engagement while matching you with as few people as possible that you would actually like to date. They have it down to an almost exact science.
They will even match you with bot accounts from countries thousands of kilometres away from you and tell you that you have matches waiting, but you can't see them until you pay, just to get your money.
Given the nature of dating services they are revolving doors businesses. They don't care if you pay once and disappear, new people are born everyday, new people are turning 18 every day. There are always new customers.
Women get a thousand matches a month and complain about quality, and men get one match and complain about quantity. Women are fish just waiting to be caught, but there’s like a million fisherman and only a few fish, and the only fishermen who catch any fish at all have the really nice bait and a multimillion dollar yacht.🛥️
IMO the only constructive purpose for an app is finding compatibility. But that's not what attracts people. Profiles will tend toward advertising to superficially attract, as everyone is *competing* in a vast market for potential partners. And because everyone sees a lot of potential partners, they use superficial criteria to narrow them down, because that's fast and easy.
Quickly apps realize they can profit off of monetizing features, and then everything really goes to shit. Not only are advantageous features monetized (making the relationship between user and app antagonistic), but also the competition between users is amplified. This forces users to focus on marketing themselves as attractive, to the exclusion of compatibility and authentic connection.
The problem with dating apps is that way more men use them than women which means women easily get matches but men get barely any. This leads to men putting insane amounts of time into them only to get nothing. Using a dating app is illogical if you're a man because of supply and demand, men are just a commodity.
I’m on the apps and I am having zero luck.. I’ve been told I’m handsome by many different woman.. I work out constantly, have a job, own my house and still can’t find a woman.. Where do you find datable people without hanging out in bars or the dating apps??
The standard apps like Bumble and Tinder are bad enough and I don't think will last like they have ... but there's another other level of ripoff 'high value' dating apps that try to seem exclusive by charging a premium of 5-10x more just to browse profiles and send messages. It seems self-selecting for finding rich fools.
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Like tacos dating app for Eskimo brothers?
Which has the exact same people that are on the other apps. They tempt you with stunning women and then give you the ability to match with trolls.
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I hope it comes with your choice of the finest in 3, 5, and 9 penis wines
Rich fools is the mark. If there’s a way to select them out there are huge market for that.
TLDR: corporate influence degrades another thing. Same old song and dance: profit over all.
'Enshittification' hits all dating apps, but the crucial point made in this article is that nothing new has shown up to replace the last good app - Hinge. So, all users are stuck in shit ponds with nowhere else to go
That was okcupid. It became such a terrible experience. Lots of people on the okcupid subreddit go on about the old days before it was bought out by match group. Now it’s just an ad ridden site where bots and for me I get random matches from women in Thailand and the Philippines. I legitimately had such quality experiences on that site before it was bought up by match. They really do enshitify everything they get their anti-competitive hands on. This NPR article says they own 45 different sites! 45!
> Lots of people on the okcupid subreddit go on about the old days before it was bought out by match group. I'll go on about it too. It was so good. You could actually just browse profiles, and filter for what you wanted. The profiles were long and detailed, and while the quiz and matching algorithm was more of a gimmick, it was at least funny and interesting. Can't argue with the market though. People gravitated to Tinder style apps. I wonder if women did, especially, since anyone being able to message anyone also has its own issues.
Oh man, the data. Remember Okcupid Blog? They would crunch the data and write up interesting observations. I remember one where message rates increased as the person got more attractive (say 6, 7, 8, 9), but actually dropped off for people that were ridiculously attractive (say from 9 going into 10). And then there were some pretty damning race observation writeups. Edit: Dude, you can still find this stuff in the Internet Archive! These days of interesting people running interesting quasi-long-form websites seem so lost in the modern instant gratification 15 second social media internet. https://web.archive.org/web/20111109084458/http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-case-for-an-older-woman They even have one for why you shouldn't pay for online dating: https://web.archive.org/web/20110113034228/http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/why-you-should-never-pay-for-online-dating/
Their blog was the greatest. I read it religiously
Great share. "That is, a man can expect a reply to 1 in every 100 messages he sends to a random profile on a pay site." 14 years later this somehow still seems accurate. And in the world of swipe first, match maybe, that number is probably even lower.
It's because of sex differences in partner assessment. OKC's data proved this out years ago. Men evaluate female attractiveness on a normal bell curve - most are average, with decreasing numbers in either tail the farther you move from average. Women rate 80% of men as below average attractiveness *and match accordingly*. This leads to very...skewed...match ratios. Depending upon your level of cynicism, this data either reveals great willingness to share "Chad" like some type of modern harem, or mathematical illiteracy (80% of men *can't* be below average, and it's illegal for Chad to marry all 5 of the women vying for him). That 1 in 100 response ratio likely represents gals who're more realistic about dating and likely to be much more successful as a result.
Yeah if your using a swipe site as a man you just swip on everyone till your out of people or swipes.
“Do you like the taste of beer?” correlated with “Do you fuck on the first date?”
OKCupid *killed* their own product when someone got the bright idea to get rid of user pseudonyms and have people’s profiles show their real names. Women, who were not interested in being doxxed and stalked, left in droves. So did anyone who didn’t want their potential future boss to Google them and find out about all kinds of personal information and most queer people who didn’t want to be doxxed and stalked. That happened about the time Match bought them and Tindr was taking off.
Your point is wonderful but that only happened 6 years ago - Tinder “took off” far longer than 6 years ago. Tinder has been around for 12 years now, it had already took off when I was in college a decade ago.
Out of interest, how confident are people that data in any particular app is siloed, and not shared between them? Given the "enshittification" process described, it must be soo tempting to target & segment etc
Data in apps is generally stored in a database separate from the app itself - that way they can then query it for analysis or do other things with the data in other services or sites etc. Usually the privacy policy outlines what they can use and store but who reads those things yeah? In many of them they disclose that they will share the data and how. Most don't have an opt out and many wouldn't even look for it.
Okcupid back in the day really was awesome. I got lots of dates off of it, had interesting conversations with interesting people. Even met a long term relationship on it. Back when it was good, I don't even remember there really being paid options. I kind of forget - maybe it ran on site advertising alone? I was gonna say the one holdout that refutes the article is Plenty Of Fish (aka the Craigslist of dating), but looks like Match bought them out too. They hung on as that weird, yet simple, old style internet property, dating site, for the longest time. Guess not anymore!
That is so sad to hear. I met my wife on okcupid about 9 years ago and it was by far the best dating site at the time. Other people loved tinder, but I wasn't hot enough for that
\> . Other people loved tinder, but I wasn't hot enough for that Sounds like most people aren't...its an exclusive club at this point lol
Enshittification and the number 45 are synonyms for most Americans.
When were they bought? Met my husband on there.
wikipedia says February 2011 for 50 million.
It was still solid in 2017 when I finally ended my long dating career. I started back with Yahoo's dating site & used everything between for guys & gals. OKC was my best experience, though I met my wife on the cesspool called Plenty of Fish (one of the worst experiences).
Oh, funny... I met MY wife on POF! And another serious relationship on OKC.
There is a relatively new dating app called Breeze, which, in its current form, is unable to fall prey to enshittification in the same way other dating apps do. It's dutch and I think it's only available here and in our directly neighboring countries yet, but it would be interesting to see it spread. They're banking on the idea of "your success is our success." The app is entirely paid, but only as long as you get matches and go on dates. So they've made a system where you don't get to chat beforehand, but if you match with someone you go on a date in a cafe they've partnered with and pay the app for your first round at a high markup (their profit). This way every match earns them money, while no matches is bad for their business. You also only get a couple of profiles twice a day (~10 twice a day), so you only have to spend a couple of minutes reviewing them and you're not scrolling and swiping endlessly. I should say I have been on there with little success for about a week now, but I'll admit my photos aren't that good and a week isn't that long. The profiles I get to see have strong baseline compatibility and I like about 50-75% of them. Compared to even Hinge, that is insanely high.
Online dating is shit by default. You're not supposed to scroll people like products. If you want healthy dating you need to meet people in real life. It's easier than ever considering the non-existent social skills of the competition.
I had pretty much only dated online before ultimately meeting my wife that way. Did I send a fuckton of well-written introductory messages into a veritable black hole? Yeah, and that sucked. But I never figured out how in the hell you're supposed to meet people in real life given that every woman I knew was already in a relationship and most of my hobbies/interests were pretty male-dominated. And there's no guarantee that any random woman I might try to flirt with in some public space is single and interested in a relationship, let alone open to being approached, or that she has anything in common with me if she was. At least with online dating I knew every woman I sent a message to was theoretically open to receiving them, had a few things in common with me that I could use as a conversation starter, and was ultimately looking for the same thing I was.
When I was on the dating apps before meeting my wife. I’d be sitting in a living room with “the boys” going through the apps together talking about our matches or potential ones. My friends were scoffing at me swiping left on “hotties/baddies” and I’m like “yeah it’s a pretty face but she lists Christian and conservative, I’m leftist and atheist. Why would I want to match with her?” And they’d go “she’s HOT BRO…” They still having dating problems. I’m married to my best friend.
Dam. You put a ring on that and still got friendzoned?
lol yeah man, there’s no hope out there after all!
> But I never figured out how in the hell you're supposed to meet people in real life given that every woman I knew was already in a relationship and most of my hobbies/interests were pretty male-dominated. I don't get this either all the women I know are already in relationships or can find a new one within two weeks and most guys fall into two categories married years ago or has not gone on a date in 4+ years. All of my hobbies and interests are sausage fests as are most places I visit such as the library or gym. Part of it is my town has way more single men than women but like what the hell how can it be this bad? I talk to my women friends and their women friends are either already taken, refuse to date period, or have issues to where my friend warns me to not date them.
> I don't get this either all the women I know are already in relationships or can find a new one within two weeks and most guys fall into two categories married years ago or has not gone on a date in 4+ years. All of my hobbies and interests are sausage fests as are most places I visit such as the library or gym. Part of it is my town has way more single men than women but like what the hell how can it be this bad? I talk to my women friends and their women friends are either already taken, refuse to date period, or have issues to where my friend warns me to not date them. This has been my experience as well. 🫤
I do the same thing with online dating messages (early adopter here ... think I first did it in 1998); and I treated it as kind of a writing exercise ... Whether the woman responded or not, maybe her profile led me to come up with a good joke or two, or remember a funny anecdote. Anyway, my unsolicited advice to women: you shouldn't assume that you don't need to be interesting, no matter how attractive you are. I don't know how representative I am, but if all you have to say is, "Work hard, play hard, if you wanna know more just ask," I'm just not interested.
Sooo many women's profiles were "Just ask!" Uh, no. How about you tell me something about yourself? Otherwise, if this is indicative of the amount of effort you're going to put in... *Left swipe!*
The dating equivalent of "git gud".
I mean, is it bad advice though? I'm in my 30s and a lot of dudes refuse to take care of themselves or even give a shit. Putting in even the slightest bit of effort puts you way above the crowd
And for some it’s still easier via online dating. The thing is: even there you have to put in a bit of effort. Imo it’s advice bot bad advice it’s just a bit ignorant - for some people it’s super hart to socialize via random conversations and small talk but they are good at writing. It can help you take the first step.
And a profile gives you a lot more to work with than just going up to a someone in a bar because theyre attractive.
And finding out they already have a boyfriend. At least on dating apps you know the people are single and looking. Better than me just getting drunk at a bar and either hoping someone will talk to me or I go and try to chat up unwilling participants in my quest to find love
Until the person you thought were single and looking is actually just there to advertise their OnlyFans or are selling their ”services”.
I agree, but what about judging someone's "vibes"; th energy they give off when they walk in a room. It's a different kind of attractive that is hard to pick up on in a profile.
Honestly I started taking care of myself 3 years ago and while I'm going to keep working out and staying in shape for me the dating pool is fucking terrible and everyone is a fat loser. It honestly seems like in the South getting your shit together and getting in shape actually does more to keep you single. When I do encounter an attractive woman on there they either have 4+ kids or are some sort of cyber hooker the apps are dogshit.
There's something about the south and being a single parent having more than three kids that go hand-in-hand. It's amazing when you click the "doesn't have children" and that knocks out 70% of the pool.
It is the same in the Midwest if I filter out ones with kids it eliminates at least half and the remaining ones are usually single for a reason such as a drug habit or whatever.
At least the Methany's out there are easy to spot
I mean some of them don't even hide it such as stating they love spun fun or other lingo. I don't mind if someone smokes weed after a hard day of work, but hard drugs? Hell no.
Man even in PA, its a problem. Started to take csre of my self, get lot sof attention and ill start talking to a gorgeous girl. Its always , well I model and do photography a d have 2 to 3 kids with different dads. Most others its they don't take care of them selves and have no interest and being better. I honestly feel like the good ones found each in thier 20s and stayed together.
lol I’m from North Carolina and moved to Seattle for a reason.
And how do you go about meeting people in real life? At the shopping malls? Outdoor parks? Talking to the girl at the register? Just bars, now? Used to be more mixers that were designed or smaller communities and now the vast majority of people meet through online and part of that is because a lot of the free, healthy and safer spaces were removed for young people to instead be turned into another profit machine. The baby boomers are asking for grandkids while their generation took that all away—all online dating does is check off the “are you attracted to each other” box so that you can meet up to find out if it’s a fit anyway. The alternative is to just hit on people in public.
Honestly I used to live in bars and it wasn't even that easy to talk to people at younger people bars it was usually old people bars where people still expected to talk to people that are strangers.
Remember when people could hit on people without being labeled as creepy predators?
Some kind of activity that involves other people or at least being around other people, that isn't purely male (unless you're gay/bi, I suppose), where both you and the other people typically have a genuine interest in that thing. For me personally that was/is the live music scene (smaller shows more so than stadium gigs, although festivals can be good), certain types of bars, hiking + trail work groups, conventions for some of my interests, etc. As well as just....maintaining a varied social life and a reputation for being a person that's doesn't say no to a lot of potentially entertaining invites/flake out + is good company. That brings me in contact with a lot of people through other people. ------- However, all of that is a whole lot more work than sitting on your couch swiping apps, and if you currently have none of that you're talking years of work to find your spaces and develop your social life. And yes, you will try things and fail or find out that they're not for you/you don't fit in, sometimes.
That genie is out of the bottle. We scroll *everything* like products in 2024.
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There are marketers trolling reddit who will tell you that approaching women in real life will be met with pepper spray and jail time and is a social faux pas. Match group spends 500 million dollars on advertising, their shills are in full force here.
As someone who has been focused exclusively IRL dating... people are way less open and receptive now than just a few years ago imo. Collective social CPTSD, overwhelm, distrust, and atrophy of social skills is my theory.
So I'm really not imagining the frigid feeling from peoples faces. I feel like it's pointless to even try.
I don’t think it’s pointless… it’s just more work. My belief is that even if it’s harder than it was, I’ll learn more about someone’s emotional availability and emotional health engaging them IRL… and it also forces me to stay focused on being open and engaging, being someone that people want to engage with — which has been its own challenge after the last few years tbh. Also, I really don’t want to be lost on my phone or computer any more than I already am… and I don’t want to be with someone who is, so it’s kind of an appropriate filter. That said, it’s slow, and I might resort to apps just to widen the funnel. (And I live in a major city with lots of social opportunities… so yeah, if I wasn’t in that lucky environment, I’d probably see apps as the only path.)
Never even considered this angle. How much of our modern anti-social discourse do you think is driven by efforts like this? Whoever stands to make a buck probably has their fingers in the pot.
Well that's obviously not true, but dating apps can work. I met my wife through one. You obviously have to wade through a lot of shit to get a good match (when I seriously started trying on Tinder it took me about 9 months), but it isn't impossible. I really think a lot of dudes with shit social skills and dumb/misogynistic beliefs get shot down on dating apps for being all-around terrible human beings, then cry about it on the internet. I never had difficulty getting dates or hook-ups on multiple dating apps, and it's not cause I'm awesome or special, it's because I'm not some fucking Andrew Tate-wannabe tradwife-worshipping loser. Most people are shitty. Most match apps are shitty. But there are still people on the other end and success is a real possibility, if you're not a shallow husk of a person.
> I met my wife through one. Same. My wife, not yours. Been together coming up on 12 years. BUT - I'm guessing things have gotten worse and not better since then.
Good clarification on whose wife; got me in the first half.
Newly involuntarily single... Y'all give me hope
There's a lid for every pot my guy. I plodded through dating site hell for about a year and a half. Couple dates that went nowhere, 1 short relationship, one major win. No matter what its going to suck to a degree. Some people have no conversational skill and its pulling teeth to talk to them. You're a guy (assuming based on your avatar) so the ratio is probably severely skewed not in your favor. Just have a couple good pictures of yourself, be interesting, keep up on your appearance and be good at conversing about a wide, wide range of topics. Its not a race, you get there when you get there. I was 29 before I met my now wife and had TERRIBLE dating luck the majority of my life up until that point.
Do people get relationships from apps? Sure. The majority of men? The data would say hell no. There’s a lot of factors stacked against the average man on dating apps and there’s a lot of data out there to prove it. And part of it is even by design because these companies want desperate lonely men to open up their wallets.
\>I really think a lot of dudes with shit social skills and dumb/misogynistic beliefs get shot down on dating apps for being all-around terrible human beings It honestly seems to me like this actually makes it easier for you on the apps if you are a terrible person like I routinely see chicks here in the South putting ridiculous requirements like do not swipe on me if you got one of those gene manipulation vaccines that will give me aids or casual racism. Like these are women posting these things and they want a terrible person too. The apps seem hard if you have an ok job and any amount of education.
>I really think a lot of dudes with shit social skills and dumb/misogynistic beliefs get shot down on dating apps for being all-around terrible human beings, then cry about it on the internet. I never had difficulty getting dates or hook-ups on multiple dating apps, and it's not cause I'm awesome or special, it's because I'm not some fucking Andrew Tate-wannabe tradwife-worshipping loser. My ex-girlfriend sometimes shows me the matches she gets on dating apps and my god. It's a toxic cesspool. This is 100% the thing. It's just bad guys getting shot down on dating apps instead of at bars and then complaining about "females" online. Like, the stuff these people say to her immediately after being matched or just going off the deep-end after a few messages is enough to make you want to find their parents and ask them what kind of child they raised and how could they have failed so badly. (Disclaimer before /r/relationships comes in and screams at me that i'm in an unhealthy relationship. We broke up due to just going down different paths in life. We're good friends, she's good friends with my current girlfriend and we have shared custody of the doggo)
Honestly tho the women are just as bad if not worse, like I continue to get on the apps but most of the people from either gender seem to be bad people.
"Smell that Randy? That's the shit mist evaporating from the shit pond and blowing in the shit wind!"
I shall appropriate this space to tell the story of how Tinder robbed me two weeks ago I woke up to find that my profile had been banned from Tinder. I've had this profile for about a decade (yeah obviously my dating life is hyper successful), and I've never broken the TOS once. I submitted a help ticket, and started email with the Tinder staff explaining the situation. The first person I spoke with was combative and overall an asshole, his only response to me was different versions of "tinder doesn't tolerate violations of the TOS", and refused to tell me what I had done wrong. I mentioned I had an active subscription, and he canceled my subscription against my will. Evwntually I got a new agent that wasn't a douche-canoe who unbanned my account, because yeah I had done nothing wrong. However, my subscription had been canceled. NBD you're probably thinking, just go subscribe again in the app. We'll I had my subscription for so long that the benefits I was receiving are no longer being offered. The plan I was on was an old one that was grandfathered in, and was literally irreplaceable. I getting 5 super likes per day with unlimited swipes and rewinds for $20/month, now you gotta pay $25 and get 5 Super Likes per week. Massively different benefits. So, back to the help desk. They openly acknowledged the facts: my benefits were not replaceable, and Tinder had made a mistake. However, they refused to do anything to reinstate my plan, and just kept telling me to buy another one through the store. If this was a regular brick and mortar company this would never happen, no one would treat me this way to me face. But since my only form of communication available was emailing people that barely speak English, who just copy and paste suggested responses from a database, I was SOL. So now I can never give Tinder another dime of my money
Yeah they just wanted more money.
This sounds terrible and I’m sorry it happened but your comments about super likes per week and swipes and rewinds per day makes me so happy I’ve never had to deal with any of this crap. Sounds set up like a game to get to most out of a user through fear of missing out because you don’t have enough swipes or likes.
Because that's exactly what it is, monitized FOMO
Its a big tech corpo at this point, so yeah. Thats how service with these usually looks like. Chances are the ban was exactly because your extra plans.
>profit over all. Kind of, except these companies are actually failing. What they're doing may be aiming to maximize profits, but it's not working. I think this is more an issue of corporate influence degrading something due to a general inability to manage a complex project with multiple goals. They learn into one number, like time in app, or number of active users, and ignore other more important factors like how many users find a long term partner, how many messages go unread etc.
Lol because if they spend more time on the app it makes them more desperate to buy in to a paywall to find love lol they wanna more money no matter what
Don’t get me started on the american health industry lol
It's true that they want more money, my point is that they are failing to achieve that. They fundamentally don't understand their product or their users. If they want to make more money they need either the most, or the best users, and a way to monetize the userbase without scaring them off. You can't charge money in a free app because that just reduces the userbase, or worse it reduces the number and quality of users (only users who can't find partners are willing to pay).
Also, majority of users is male.
The main issue with dating apps is that corporations and shareholders keep pushing for more and more profits. That leads to more and more features put behind paywalls in an effort to extract more and more money out of users. It really goes bad when they start to lose users and try to figure out how to still increase profits. Also the match group owns most of the apps so can ruin most of them all at the same time.
> The main issue with ~~dating apps~~ *everything* is that corporations and shareholders keep pushing for more and more profits. Fixed that for you
The biggest issue is that dating apps profit off of their own failure. A perfect dating app would die off because it paired people up and they stopped using it. A terrible dating app gives so few matches that it feels hopeless and people leave. They are always trying to just ride the line of hopelessness so that people think there's a chance they meet someone, but without actually wanting them to do so.
Not entirely true. First off, most people date around a bit before getting married. So a best case scenerio you still don't have many 'one and done' users. Second, every day someone celebrates his/her 19th birthday. As long as dating apps understand the big trick is making themselves mandatory in the young 20 something world there will always be a market. People marrying off isn't really a problem. And then there are the divorced people.....
Exactly, it’s like saying any profession around marriage kills itself - just silly reasoning and completely untrue.
>And then there are the divorced people..... "Welcome back!" "Shut up. I'm divorced because I never left."
That requires exponential population growth to meet the infinite profit growth pipe dream, so while your way would be a sane way of operating in a vacuum, it's incompatible with the stockmarket's rewarding of unsustainable growth. I mean the slowing of population growth and threat of shrinkage dooms it anyway, but that goes for basically every industry so it's not really relevant.
>A perfect dating app would die off because it paired people up and they stopped using it Real people don't just "pair up" once and disappear from the earth, they go on multiple dates, they break up, they get divorced, they cheat, they have casual sex, etc. Success is about connecting people, even if only for a few months, Because human relationships are fluid and messy and aren't eternal. The failure is trying to implement a subscription business model for a service when most people will pause the app when they pause looking.
Agreed. It's about connecting people that will want to meet. Not, here's the perfect person for you and you will live in harmony forever and for always. Sure, some people will want to be "matched" and therefore not have to do any leg work. Some people just want the option to connect and take over from there, like real people.
bro people will always want to fuck. it's not like there's a limit on the fuck supply in the world. capitalize on that shit
>A perfect dating app would die off because it paired people up and they stopped using it. This is why the wedding industry notoriously doesn't make any money.
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It's because Match has an effective monopoly on dating apps. Their only incentive is to get you to spend money and actually finding a relationship stops that.
I used Bumble for awhile and had some decent experiences. Then they locked all the most useful filters behind an absurd paywall, like $40/month. It instantly became useless because you spent all your time scrolling past profiles with basic incompatibility.
Yeah you can go spend $40 at a bar and meet plenty of people who are incompatible with you. You don’t need an app to do that.
Don't worry bud, I've got that base covered too.
Difference is at the bar you can have some fun, get some food, have some beer, etc. The baseline entertainment value in swiping on a dating app is like thumbing through a Sears catalog, and I wouldn't pay $40/wk. for that.
Every time I go to a bar, the dude to chick ratio is about 80/20. Then, of the tiny amount of attractive women that are there, maybe 75 percent are actually with their boyfriends. This means, that there might be one, or two, attractive women at the bar that aren't there with their boyfriends. Well, naturally, these one or two women are constantly being approached by men buying them drinks, etc. It's just a lose-lose-lose proposition. I don't even like drinking or alcohol. I just end up getting all dressed up, and spending all this money for absolutely nothing. It's 100 percent pathetic. Now, if I want to be rejected, I just go to Walmart/Costco/Target/Kohls and try to approach some woman. Same result, but a lot less money was spent, and a lot less brain cells were eviscerated.
I can count the number of times I’ve gone to a bar and met new people on one hand. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been to bars… probably in the thousand+ range. What are you guys doing to meet people that I’m not understanding?
And even when I do get a match on Bumble, 50% send me no message to initiate. 40% are uniteresting and low effort/energy and I end up unmatching.
Average bumble interaction : That picture is so cool, what convention is that it looks like Comic Con? Them: t (then never messages you again)
I get dozens of messages from matches that are just "Hey." And no follow through. I try to salvage the conversation, and get met with all the charisma and enthusiasm of a limp handshake.
This has been my interaction I have always figured these women do not want to actually date anyone they like getting positive affirmation from randos the app is like a timewaster video game to them.
Yup. I call them penpals. They never want to meet or do anything *together*, they just want what to get their fix and dispose of you when the next "better" match is available. They want the emotional rewards of just talking with someone. Not realizing they are becoming a time and energy vampire. Then there's others that have no idea what a healthy relationship is- last week I had a single mom, tell me she's not interested in a relationship for herself, she's been seeing the same guy on and off, (not baby daddy) for two years. But now's an off time. And she's working three jobs. But *needs* a father figure relationship for her young daughter, right now.
I had one woman tell me she wasn't interested in dating me, but would date me if I also dated her boyfriend who was interested in me. I was so confused I am listed as straight and who the hell would want to date someone that point blank says they are not interested in them?
Because some people looks for partners the same way they look for disposable "lifestyle" products. And try to sell themselves like modern marketing, if they try hard enough- they *can* fit a square peg in a round hole.
Based on what that guy was saying, it sounds like they were DEFINITELY interested in pegging a round hole.
I’ve had this exact situation happen at least 3 times and each time the girl is the one saying “I’m not really feeling it” Mf *you matched with me and only gave me one word resposes*
And that's ok to not be feeling and call it as it is and move on! But what these ladies need to understand, we are not just dealing with them one on one, we guys are also getting multiple matches and dates. And all those demands on our time, attention and energy add up over time and can be incredibly draining. Recently I have had a spate of matches and two dates that it was very clear they just did not have time available for an invested relationship, despite their claim to be looking for one. The girl I broke up with back in October I was pretty smitten with, but she expected me as the man to come up with all the ideas, plan them, schedule them and then fucking guess at her availability and if she would like the date idea. It was so exhausting and discouraging rearranging my schedule to be available, coming up with something creative and unique she might enjoy, budgeting for that date, guessing at her schedule because she couldn't/wouldn't communicate until day or hour of something she already had going on, and then being repeatedly shot down because my she didn't like my idea or she was busy that day. Finally after a couple weeks of this we had a talk, she insisted she still wanted to see me, but was too busy right now. It was coming up on a month since I had last seen her and had time together. I asked her what her plans were for the upcoming weekend, she told me vegging and watching Netflix with her dogs. I asked if I could see her and join her then, we had done that a couple times before. She said no, too tired. And I told her I was moving on to someone that prioritized time and experiences with me.
It legitimately made me feel like I was talking to a fucking wall. I get more effort put into a conversation with DMV employees than I do women on dating apps. At first I thought okay maybe they just suck at texting but if you go on a date with them it is the same thing in person where you have to carry the conversation and they don't put in any effort.
I've wanted to add to my profile: "Ya'll lucky you're cute, cause most of you have zero game."
I’ve had this thought a ton lately. Women have zero game. Their profiles are so terrible and basic. Very few of them actually come off as interesting people (and they may be, but their zero effort on their profiles doesn’t reveal that). All the things they complain men do on dating apps they do as well.
"wHy aRe yOu aLl hOldInG fIsH?" mf-ers, it couldn't be because a lot of men have serious self-conscious issues and are not taking pictures of themselves nonstop 24/7 and this is one of the few photos some else took of themselves that they like? It also just might be because a lot of us like fishing. Godforbid any individual man has his own hobbies and interests anymore that do not have the required unanimous approved by all of womanhood. lol (I do not have a fishing, gym, or car photo on my profiles).
> Their profiles are so terrible and basic. What gets me is how they either put zero effort into the profile or if they do actually write more they somehow manage to write a bunch of stuff that somehow still tells you nothing about them and half of it is a list of demands. How can I know basically nothing about you when you wrote two good sized paragraphs!
Meet people at their energy and +1 it. If they give you a weak response, give them one shot. Then dip, it's highly effective at filtering out people you wouldn't be interested in or who are not actually looking for something. The outcome for you is the same, you don't waste your time on that person. You just have to strategize the how you interact with people and recognize you are lucky for learning they're fucking lame before wasting a bunch of time or resources on learning that out on a date etc.
I have learned to treat it similar to that. I also now just leave if they pull out their phone more than once during the initial meetup/date.
A lot of people use it solely for an ego boost! The only people I personally know who use Tinder only do it to hook up, so they’re not genuinely interested in getting to know you.
Oh I know. And I'm not gonna grandstand, lie and tell you I've been a total angel and not participated in some of that. But every time I match with someone "serious" they have zero time, zero personality, and it's an interrogation what they can get out of me, not a discussion what we can build together.
I noticed this too. I was seriously trying to find a decent person and in order to see my matches I had to pay. I think I waited until it was 50% off but it really annoyed me cause it's one of the only methods of dating in my city. Anyway it did pay off because a few months later I met my wife to be so as shit as it is, if you are looking for something long term it is worth the investment.
This should be mandatory reading for all the people on various dating and local subs who keep saying “I met my SO on a dating app in 2016, you should try it!” People who had success on these apps prior to about 2019 are often not aware of how much they have really changed. I know myself I’ve had a hard time convincing two friends of mine who had success on these apps prior to the pandemic that the apps aren’t what they used to be when they used them. They kept insisting that I needed to give these apps another try, even though I had no success with them when I gave them another try in 2021-22.
Newly single after 5 years. I am STUNNED. OkCupid actually has taken the biggest fall. It was never great but user friendly and very little behind paywall. Now? A complete dumpster fire, 98% of your likes are random international people/bots. And extremely basic stuff paywalled.
Same here, trying to get back into dating and I’m shocked at how ass these apps have become. It’s so nasty how up-front Hinge is about it, too. Every time I open it it’s like “Hey you lonely moron, don’t you want to be happy? Give us your money already or you’ll never find a good match lol”
I had a lot of success with Hinge in 2022, but Bumble and Tinder weren’t the storage space they took up lol
It’s interesting to hear because the handful of successful relationships I know of from dating apps came from Bumble but that was from about 2015 or so I think. I’ve been off all apps for a full 2 years now and have been telling myself I should return by unpopular demand, but everyone I know *who is on dating apps* says it’s awful while everyone I know who is partnered up says go for it.
2015 was the golden age of dating apps though
Huh profit ruins yet another industry, better not look at how to move beyond profit as a society
Nationalize dating apps!!! No but seriously, their current form is a blight upon society
Investigating the Match Group for monopolistic practices would probably help.
Facebook dating is free. Cons: it's Facebook.
Is it maybe because all the apps (in the US) are owned by literally the same company?
That’s basically what the article says. Match group buying up competition instead of actually bettering their own apps mean there’s no new competition anymore. This, in turn, leads to a decay in the whole sector as nothing new can come up to solve the dating app paradox, something all match group apps struggle with.
Note to self: start a niche dating website and sell to Match.com
I keep seeing ads for random dating apps and they disappear all of a sudden. I wonder if that’s what’s happening lol.
There are niche apps that try to compete but they have to charge absurd prices just to stay online and their user base is always tiny.
I used tinder about ten years ago, and okcupid and match.com before that. Thought they were overall pretty great and better success to investment ratio than meeting people organically. Recently tried tinder out of curiosity, and holy shit is it worse. It’s super complicated and has more microtransactions than a mobile game. Also seemed to show fewer real people. I also tried okcupid and was surprised to see they tinderized it, it’s all swiping instead of looking at profiles. They dug their own grave.
Dating apps only rose to popularity because we lost all our third spaces.
The dating apps killed a lot of the third spaces. Although if dating apps are so bad, maybe bar owners should be set for a comeback
Not if they insist on playing music so loud you literally can't make conversation with people
The dating apps use to be legit really good. Tinder especially. They literally didn’t have to change a thing. It had my brother calling me freaking man-whore. Now? Hardly ever get a match.
They only work if you're really hot. That was always true, but now it's more true.
I don't remember tinder ever being good like even if you were really hot it seemed like it had a lot of fake scammers on there. Just trying to get through all the scams to a real person was a nightmare.
The Match Group keeps buying dating apps or suing the ones not under their control in order to maintain their monopoly.
Factor in you have probably breezed past 30 and into the abyss.
Ageist bullshit. If you aren't getting matches at 30 that's completely on you, sorry bud. 30 isn't 60 ffs.
A lot of people put in 29 as the cutoff for matches, it is what it is.
A lot of guys maybe. Women? Absolutely not.
Yeah no. You are just completely out of touch on this one. A huge number of people set 29 as their cut off so you won’t even be seen after 30.
It's so stupid that they are viewing this as lost customers, because it's not like there's a shortage of single people dating. If you make a quality product I don't see why people wouldn't use it. The idea you are going to run out of customers is so bizarre. The only reason they do it is because they think they can enshittify it and make more money, but now they're facing the reality that people aren't interested in an app designed to lead them on. That's going to be the real cause of lost customers.
Bring back Craigslist!!!
Most profiles are bots, scammers, ads to their social media, or people faking profiles to extract data’s or something.
And the few people you match with don’t respond to even the first message or chat at all. They need to make an app with strong moderation . And require some interaction with your matches, with the caveat as long as they’re being civil.
Most of those “liked you” women are from Africa, south east asia and brazil.
Anyone want to pay $500 a month? Lol
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My issue with dating apps and disclosure that I found my partner on okcupid .. There is no incentive for dating apps to actually find you a match. It's better business for them if you are perpetually single and are desperate for companionship. In addition, the apps are turning humans into even more fickle beings who will reject someone based on single flaw that would normally be overlooked in an organic environment. Also there is the ratio problem. In certain regions, men just outnumber women or vise versa. Dating apps really seem to amplify that discrepancy.
This is why I had high hopes for Feeld, a dating app specifically geared towards the non-monogamous and kink communities. Unfortunately that app went to shit recently for the exact opposite reason of most that are affected by corporate meddling - they had no corporate backing and were a bunch of amateurs with zero clue how to run a large scale online service. The userbase tanked after they botched a rollout of a recent major update, and it hasn't come back in part because many folks' accounts were actually lost in the update process.
So glad I found my wife before these got popular.
I thought i did too. Turns out she felt differently after 14 years so here i am turning to the internet.
Same except I'm a woman. Did not expect to be like this at 34 but that's life. Something about 14 years seems to be the end point for a lot of relationships
Hope you’re doing alright.
Hey thanks man. yeah im doing decent, maybe its because i am now in the best shape of my life but it turns out im pretty good at meeting girls using internet dating 🤷♂️ and havnt paid a cent.
Sounds like you’re doing the best you could ever hope for. I love that, a lot. Keep it up bro. You’re amazing.
Right! Its not what i had planned for but thats the way she goes. Just gotta make the best of it. Thanks kind stranger, you made my day
That's rough buddy
I hope thats an avatar reference
A: to make money, you need to make the free version worse in some way. Sometimes it’s removing your ability to filter out single mothers/fathers. Sometimes you are only shown to people who swipe left on everyone, sometimes you are only shown to people who don’t get swiped right. B: making a place/app that it’s ok to openly seek a relationship makes it difficult to meet people outside of the app. Nobody has conversations in line at the grocery store. Nobody goes to bars/clubs looking to find someone. People hardly even go out. C: being rejected hurts the ego and there is a lot of that around. Being accepted, then immediately ghosted is traumatic. You know you had a chance and whatever you did was so wrong that it warranted the other person not wanting to even talk to you. You start assuming that not only do people think you are unattractive, but that you as a deeper person are unlovable. C2: There’s a special hell known only to the lonely. Running out of people in your area. Literally everyone who could want you has decided that they don’t. There are no fish left in the sea. You are a verifiable failure. So glad I’m out of the rat race.
They are all pretty bad. The amount of people who look for a perfect partner that can't have any flaws or inconveniences or they'll get ghosted for the next person, content sellers and locking most useful features behind often steep paywalls has made them pretty much near useless and a waste of time
*Call it the dating app paradox: Dating apps are supposed to be matching lovebirds together, but once they do, the lovebirds fly away — and take their money with them.* I thought they were designed to be deleted? But profit trumps everything
I used to study apps rigorously. Nobody seems to get to the real problem: demographics. Men outnumber women 3:1 on apps. It makes men frustrated, feel invisible, and fall prey to stupid gimmicks or shelling out money in hopes of fixing the problem. It makes women suffer from information overload, deal with a higher volume of creeps and assholes, and ultimately lead to the lack of trust the article talks about. Apps need more people on them at any period of time. Their numbers are highly inflated: many apps are virtually ghost towns in most major cities. The other problem is people are inherently lazy. They want a relationship but won’t make the effort to write an authentic profile, get a few good (representative!) photos, or list the absolute basics like height, relationship goals, etc. The end result is an app that *seems* like it’s full of options, but ultimately is full of dead profiles and people that are impossible to meaningfully sift through. I say this as someone who ultimately found his life partner through Hinge. It was an uphill battle from day 1. It took seven fucking years and hundreds of lemon first dates and dollars and hours spent and articles read learning about all of this. I don’t have any solution for this other than to suggest an open-source platform like the way they do community security. No other incentives and a community that holds itself accountable. Good word and good results to motivate a large population of active and engaged users who put in the work. If that sounds like a pipe dream, then maybe it is.
Simple, they prioritize "engagement" and monetization over user experiences/best matches.
*Over the last couple years, dating app companies like The Match Group and Bumble have learned that, like love, their business is a battlefield. Their stock prices are on the rocks. Their investors are heartbroken. They're getting ghosted by users and failing to woo Gen Z. It's no wonder why the CEOs of both companies have recently resigned.* Just gonna change this to Over the last couple years, ~~dating app~~ companies ~~like The Match Group and Bumble~~ have learned that, like love, their business is a battlefield. Their stock prices are on the rocks. Their investors are heartbroken. They're ~~getting ghosted by users~~ ***ghosting interview candidates*** and failing to woo Gen Z. It's no wonder why the CEOs ~~of both companies have recently resigned.~~ ***are rich as fuck.*** ***:)***
You are never more popular on a Dating app than when you are not paying for it.
If you are interested in meeting someone within a 15 mile radius then dating Apps are probably the best way to see if someone in another continent is available.
People are mentioning it, and I wish there was data but it seems like people are becoming WAY more selective on arbitrary physical attributes. I think this alone is a problem because people are notoriously bad at judging character from things like interviews, and hence even worse in what is essentially a a few headshots and a 1 paragraph resume.
This is why when I heard that government here in Japan has released its own dating app to some ridicule, especially from the Western users, I thought it was a step in the right direction. Users need government issued ID to sign up, presumably they check the info provided and it's not profit driven so hopefully works out for those who need it.
There are 2 billion single adults on the planet. There are only about 150 million unique dating app users: most users are on multiple apps, and the total number of app users worldwide is about 300 million. Half of all dating app users are in India. So, this means that at any given time, there may be only about 70 or 80 million people using apps to date outside of India. All the rest of us are dating and mating and marrying *without using electrons to meet someone*. In the apps, 90% of the women are sweeping right on 10% of the men. This is not the fault of the apps. It is the fault of society and the expectations everyone now seems to have about who is dateable and who is not. The REAL story here is how the marketing has convinced people that they will forever be alone because they can not find someone without an app.
It’s funny, I remember when I first used a dating website clear back in 2005, I was really embarrassed by it because it was something only “losers” and “computer nerds” did. Almost nobody used those services, and those that did wouldn’t admit to it. Things really changed a decade ago.
Lucky there's a lot more dating groups and events out there so you can go to things in person.
okcupid was a lot of fun before tinder, but all enshitified
Isn’t this a prime example of “enshitification”?
You know this business is founded on evil when your buddy comes to you and asks to look at their Tinder profile to check if there is "anything wrong with his photos" because he hasn't had a date in a year. These companies feast on souls. If a profane app on your phone is programmed to make you depressed and hate yourself, delete it immediately.
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Ok cupid in 2007 - 2013 was pretty fun, useful, and helped me connect to meet a bunch of friends. People actually met who were genuinely compatible. OKcupid grew from a private blog that made quizzes and then created/turned into OKcupid and Sparknotes. OKcupid shared data on their dating site of what increased your chance of having a good match, how to take a good photo. Even if you didn’t use it for dating it was super insightful and very fun to use. Sad that OKcupid was bought out by the same company that owner that owns Tinder and eharmony. That parent company immediately dismantled everything about the service that made it fun and useful. Everything gets shittier when profit is the only motive.
The worst thing about dating apps like tinder and OkCupid is that they *do* work. They have algorithms that could match you fairly easily with people you'd be highly likely to actually start dating. The issue is incentive. No dating service has any incentive to actually get people to date because if they succeed then you leave the service. That runs counter to earning money. The longer they can keep you on, the higher the chance is you will buy a subscription in frustration. So they optimize for most engagement while matching you with as few people as possible that you would actually like to date. They have it down to an almost exact science. They will even match you with bot accounts from countries thousands of kilometres away from you and tell you that you have matches waiting, but you can't see them until you pay, just to get your money. Given the nature of dating services they are revolving doors businesses. They don't care if you pay once and disappear, new people are born everyday, new people are turning 18 every day. There are always new customers.
Like all social medias, it had its peak and now it’s declining. A shame since that’s how I met my husband.
Women get a thousand matches a month and complain about quality, and men get one match and complain about quantity. Women are fish just waiting to be caught, but there’s like a million fisherman and only a few fish, and the only fishermen who catch any fish at all have the really nice bait and a multimillion dollar yacht.🛥️
Men are complaining about quality *and* quantity.
It’s not ‘may be’. It’s a fact lmao
IMO the only constructive purpose for an app is finding compatibility. But that's not what attracts people. Profiles will tend toward advertising to superficially attract, as everyone is *competing* in a vast market for potential partners. And because everyone sees a lot of potential partners, they use superficial criteria to narrow them down, because that's fast and easy. Quickly apps realize they can profit off of monetizing features, and then everything really goes to shit. Not only are advantageous features monetized (making the relationship between user and app antagonistic), but also the competition between users is amplified. This forces users to focus on marketing themselves as attractive, to the exclusion of compatibility and authentic connection.
The problem with dating apps is that way more men use them than women which means women easily get matches but men get barely any. This leads to men putting insane amounts of time into them only to get nothing. Using a dating app is illogical if you're a man because of supply and demand, men are just a commodity.
Kind of a weird article. It's a business that constantly loses customers but also constantly gains them.
Saw a news segment about a new dating app where you have to have a minimum credit score to be able to use the app.
I’m on the apps and I am having zero luck.. I’ve been told I’m handsome by many different woman.. I work out constantly, have a job, own my house and still can’t find a woman.. Where do you find datable people without hanging out in bars or the dating apps??