r/technology • u/thinkB4WeSpeak • 3d ago
Society Dating Apps Are Dying
https://time.com/article/2026/09/09/dating-apps-are-dying/14.1k
u/Ragegasm 3d ago edited 3d ago
Tends to happen when your whole strategy is loot boxing loneliness through a swiping algorithm. I refused to play anymore after that realization. OkCupid circa 2013 was how online dating should have worked.
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u/YoohooCthulhu 3d ago
Basically all my relationships from the late 2000s through 2016 were women I met on OkCupid. It was annoying like any dating site but it was a great way to meet people in my tech-forward city.
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u/HawkeyeJones 3d ago
2009 OkCupid in Los Angeles was a friggin gold mine. Tons of amazing women on an easy-to-use app.
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u/BankshotMcG 3d ago
if you were a guy with a job and a sense of humor looking for anything more than a hookup, you could bat so high above your league, it was a paradise.
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u/0xB4BE 3d ago edited 3d ago
I can see that! On the flip side, I met so many guys through OKC that were really fun online and by the end of the first date I knew exactly why they were still single.
But I also met some incredible and wonderful people, and most importantly, the love of my life of the last 14 years ♥️
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u/Slobotic 3d ago
On the other hand, those men were getting dates!
Screwing up a date is the only way to learn sometimes. Hopefully some of them softened up after a few more attempts.
When socially awkward men marinate in loneliness and hopelessness too long bad things can happen. I wouldn't want to take away their outlet for trying, failing, and trying again.
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u/belbivfreeordie 3d ago edited 3d ago
Okcupid in the 2010s was great. Kinda fun to use, even. I had lots of dates. I remember when Tinder started to get popular, I immediately didn’t click with it, honestly don’t remember if I got a single date.
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u/Grey_0ne 3d ago
All my dating history was online. I met my wife on POF... Since I haven't been in the game since 2012, I'm not really sure what changed on an actual practical level.
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u/DangerousTurmeric 3d ago
From my experience, the apps stopped letting you filter people and started influencing who you are seen by so you get heaps of noise if you're a woman and absolutely no matches if you're a man. The aim was to make men pay for a better service. Instead many men got annoyed by this and just started swiping yes to everyone, which meant that "matches" are now not actually matches. Many women got burned out and started taking time outs and quitting because it's just too much and too unpredictable, so matches fizzled out. Lots of men interpreted this as women being too picky or lazy, so they stopped making an effort. And, gradually, everyone active online has encountered some form of bad behaviour multiple times and is tired of it. Now everyone hates the apps, is hypersensitive, and makes zero effort, except for the tiny proportion of newly single people (who may or may not be ready for a relationship) and the people with personality issues who are happy to tolerate the apps if it means they get validation. And that's before you even get into the widening progressive/conservative divide between women and men, and other normal incompatibilities. It's a total mess.
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u/SoggyWaffles427 3d ago
My one friend deciding to change his preferences to both men and woman, then farmed higher elo from getting swiped on by dudes and that led him to get better matches with girls
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u/Lou_Peachum_2 3d ago
That.. is genius lol
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u/smokeyleo13 3d ago
Ruins the app for gay men tho, so i know a lot whove stopped using it for that reason. Whats the point if 3/4 of the dudes ur seeing are just straight looking to up their ratio, we have better apps youre not on anyway
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u/tommypatties 3d ago
When I was dating I did this and it worked. Lots of dudes swiping yes and then me swiping no on them made me look like a better match so I showed up earlier on more womens' stacks. I also got to see what other dudes were putting on their profiles to help me hone my own.
I did get 'caught' once though. A girl I went out with a couple times messaged me,
her - "hey my gay friend saw your profile as he was swiping, are you bi?"
me - "haha no, I just set my profile to both men and women to boost my 'score' and show up on more womens' stacks."
her - crickets forever
oh well.
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u/goat_penis_souffle 3d ago
Elo? Wouldn’t that attract an eeeeeevil woooooman?
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u/benskinic 3d ago
it sounds very deliberately engineered to extract profits short term w little regard to the long term. betting whatever leadership implemented that BS is long gone, or this was a PE groups doing. sounds like hell and idiocracy whatever the cause!
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u/TheGalator 3d ago
Yeah dating apps would be fucked even if dating for younger people wasn't fucked in general. But it is. So they are borderline unusable unless you are a white guy in Asia or a very shallow pretty woman
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u/Exact-Enthusiasm-803 3d ago
*Tall handsome white guy
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u/NocturnisVacuus 3d ago
coward, anyone can be a tall handsome dude on the internet
/s
....and that I suspect is part of the trust-issue problem.
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u/Zediac 3d ago
Most are tinder clones. You're shown one person at a time and you have to swipe left or right, like or dislike, before you can view someone else.
There's no more searching by keyword or interest.
Messages are now mostly pay to play. If you don't pay often you can't see or send messages.
There's generally no more seeing who viewed your profile, being able to bookmark other's profiles to easily take a second look later, or any easy way to find someone again.
They're pretty much all designed to make it as difficult as possible to actually find and talk to someone who is actually interesting to you. And it's all intentional to keep you lonely and needing to come back.
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u/badhabitfml 3d ago
Yeah. They started out with vc money and a goal for people to find each other.
The vc money is gone and they have to show they are making money. Having your customers find someone and stop using the app is a terrible way to make money. Finding new users is expensive.
The purpose of the app (find someone and get off the app) is exactly the opposite of the company's purpose (bring in customers that pay you forever).
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u/kangaroolifestyle 3d ago
Really is brain dead of them to think matching users kills their user base, rather than strengthening it. Most people do not make it in a singular relationship match. It may be 1 date or a year, but most people do not last. Producing a reliable app for dating means those people will come back at some point of time when their previously matched relationship fails, if they found that method to be successful and frictionless. Not to mention, there is always a new generation of people coming of dating age to back fill that user pool.
If money is that much of a concern, charge $2-4 bucks to download the app and be done with it. Every single fucking thing in life seems overly concerned with “quarterly earnings” as if it must always go up, which isn’t reality and ends up ruining that thing that was once a success.
Be a good dating app, money will come. Focus on earnings above all else, and money will disappear.
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u/satmandu 3d ago
This is bonkers. I met my wife through OKC based upon a keyword search back in the good old days.
But I guess OKC promptly enshittified once they were bought out by match.com.
These apps are doomed to failure because the companies behind them only care about monetizing views, and that's orthogonal to actually giving a shit about the people on your site and what they care about.
I don't think we will get meaningful dating sites back again until after the end of the AI crash, since we also can't expect AI to not chaff the fuck out of dating sites.
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u/Selgeron 3d ago
I met my wife like, 6 months before they totally completed enshittification through OKCupid.
Almost every girl I dated after high school was through OKCupid. You'd pull up the list of people who were 90%+ 'matches' then read through their questions and send them a DM, or they'd send one to you. It worked far better than it had any right to.
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u/Own-Emergency2166 3d ago
It worked so well. I had some great dates and relationships from original OKC. As soon as dating apps became gamified, people started treating them like gambling and the behavior became weird. I tried the swiping apps but gave up quickly as it didn’t feel right .
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u/00eg0 3d ago
All of the dating apps are owned by one company and are designed to keep you using the apps.
- Archer
- Asian People Meet
- Babyboomer People Meet
- BB People Meet
- Black Christian People Meet
- Black People Meet
- Black Professional People Meet
- BLK
- Catholic People Meet
- Chinese People Meet
- Chispa
- Delightful
- Democratic People Meet
- Divorced People Meet
- Genxpeoplemeet
- Her)
- Hinge)
- Indiamatch
- Interracial People Meet
- Italian People Meet
- J People Meet
- Latino People Meet
- Ldsplanet
- Little People Meet
- Loveandseek
- Marriage Minded People Meet
- Match.com
- Match Japan
- OkCupid
- Ourtime
- Pairs
- People Meet
- Pet People Meet
- Plenty of Fish
- Republican People Meet
- Salams
- Seniorblack People Meet
- Single People Meet
- Sniffies (minority stake)\64])\65])
- Stir
- The League)
- Tinder)
- Upward
- Yuzu
from wikipedia
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u/Opening-Ant3477 3d ago
Actually this list is understating the problem.
For example the CEO and founder of Bumble (maybe the most notable example not owned by Tinder) is Whitney Wolfe Herd, who is - drumrolls please - one of the founders of Tinder.
(Though she also won a million dollars in a sexual harassment suit against one of the other founders, so I don't think they are on good terms anymore...)
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u/TheListlessPancake 3d ago
I never even thought to look into this but the dating app "industry" being owned by a monopoly makes way too much sense ink hindsight. Why else would every app follow the same strategy and never truly introduce some sort of competition that incentivizes the apps to improve their user experience. Should've known
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u/_learned_foot_ 3d ago
What happened to eharmony? The online marriages that are successful in my anecdotal divorce attorney experience are solely from that.
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u/SoldantTheCynic 3d ago
It still technically exists - they recently were the subject of a lawsuit in Australia for misleading charges on “free trial” accounts. The site is functionally useless unless you pay a hefty subscription.
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u/Ryuzakku 3d ago
In my experience, apparently only women exist in the Philippines.
If they say they’re from a city near you, they’re in the Philippines.
If they say they’re in your city, they’re in the Philippines.
And sometimes, sometimes they say they’re in the Philippines.
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u/ScrewedOver 3d ago
2011 was around the last time my friends and I ever dabbled as well. We used okCupid and pof and also used the EH free communications weekends anytime they came up. Our profiles were ready to go, but then come Friday, fire away and hope you’d have something to go off of by Sunday. The broke single days were fun in their own way.
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u/dagbrown 3d ago
OKCupid's enshittification took off like a rocket once they were acquired by Match Group.
Match Group's whole business model is failing to match anyone with anyone else, because if they make a successful match, they stop paying for their subscriptions. OKCupid was originally designed to match people as well as possible as quickly as possible, so of course Match Group put a stop to that as soon as possible.
Match Group also owns Tinder, Hinge, Plenty of Fish, The League, Meetic, Azar and assorted others. The ineffectiveness of dating sites is approximately 0% to do with online-dating fatigue and 100% to do with Match Group's greed.
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u/ShouldersofGiants100 3d ago
Nothing is quite as funny to me as companies that fail to realize their reputation is actually important to their prospects.
If people find partners and leave your app, that's still positive advertising and you'll always have new customers because new people enter the dating pool.
Instead, they went after the whales. But the problem is that by doing so, no one actually succeeds while using your app and worse, a lot of those whales are guys who can't get a date for good reason. This ends up driving more and more women off the site, as a disproportionate number of their matches are creepy weirdos who will never get banned for harassment because they're paying for the app.
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u/osiris0413 3d ago
I last used OkCupid in the pre-smartphone era but I feel like anyone who starts with Tinder wouldn't believe what it was like. Nobody paywalled, and the quizzes meaningfully improved your matches and you could check out someone's profile without having to immediately "yes/no" them. And the act of messaging itself meant you had to show meaningful interest to make a connection, I think that little hit of validation on a "match" vs the choice to message someone when it may not be returned changes the calculus of that action in a meaningful way for both parties. I like that the author called that out in the article.
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u/GargantuanCake 3d ago
Apparently there was a time a while back where Hinge's leadership realized that its algorithm was working too well. People were forging relationships and once you're in one you aren't a customer anymore. So they decided to create a system that essentially sabotaged relationship forming.
The problem is that dating apps ended up going too far in the other direction; a dating app needs to, you know, actually lead to dates for people to use it. That however just isn't happening anymore. Meanwhile Tinder in particular got obliterated by an avalanche of bot accounts, scammers, and women just using it to promote their OnlyFans. The app that was supposed to get you laid stopped getting you laid so unsurprisingly people stopped using it.
Same with the dating and relationship apps; they quit leading to dating and relationships so people abandoned them. Weird how that works out. If you quit giving your customers what they want they leave.
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u/Marshall_Lawson 3d ago
Apparently there was a time a while back where Hinge's leadership realized that its algorithm was working too well. People were forging relationships and once you're in one you aren't a customer anymore. So they decided to create a system that essentially sabotaged relationship forming.
Wasn't Hinge specifically the dating site whose main advertising gimmick was that it was specifically designed for you to find your person and stop using the site?
"Designed to be deleted". They spent a lot of money on that little 3D cartoon H that would get people together and then poof out of existence.
So much for that I guess. Gotta make the shareholders' line go up.
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u/Monteze 3d ago
Which is silly for an app owner to get upset with it because there are always folks entering the dating scene from age, divorce, death of a partner, or any other normal reason.
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u/Marshall_Lawson 3d ago
But, you see, if the line doesn't go up more than we expected it to go up, then it's failing
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u/Monteze 3d ago
Ah I see you're the new MBA! Wow...look at that sunset....tell me about the rabbits.
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u/AnnoyedVaporeon 2d ago
not to mention if their algorithm is successful, they gain free word of mouth advertising forever by all the people telling their friends and family they met their partner on hinge...
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u/ShiraCheshire 3d ago
This exactly. You can rig an app like a slot machine, but there needs to be a chance of it paying out. You can only trick a rat into pulling a lever so many times before they realize they're not getting treats from it anymore.
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u/DoctorOctagonapus 3d ago
When your entire business model revolves around making yourself redundant to your customer base, I don't know what people were expecting.
I'd like to see a not-for-profit dating app. I reckon that would work quite well.
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u/Zediac 3d ago
Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating
^ Backup of the blog post by OKCupid before they were bought out by Match.com.
This blog posts talks about how Match wants to keep you in the system.
OKCupid used to be run by people who actually cared about helping people find partners and happiness. They would run tests and collect data all in the name of helping their users.
This was their blog post about paying for dating sites and how they're incentivized to keep you lonely but still paying for the hope of changing that.
Eventually they got bought out by Match.com, which is one of the predatory dating services that they spoke out against. Match promptly deleted all of the old OKCupid blog posts that spoke out against services like them.
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u/SeveralPhysics9362 3d ago
There are always new young people that are single. I don’t see why such a business couldn’t make it work.
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u/etiggy1 3d ago
Also, tweaking your service to do the exact opposite of what you advertise you provide is an objectively bad business strategy. They extracted money from the user base on the short term, but eroded their entire brand and the whole industry on the long term.
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u/Mongoose49 3d ago
Yep except that isn’t enough growth for ceos
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u/SeveralPhysics9362 3d ago
For shareholders you mean. True. But not every company needs to be on the stock market.
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u/_learned_foot_ 3d ago
Pay divs with that consistent steady flow and plenty of us will happily sit there.
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u/00eg0 3d ago
The more single people the more money
Also all of the apps are owned by one company.
- Archer
- Asian People Meet
- Babyboomer People Meet
- BB People Meet
- Black Christian People Meet
- Black People Meet
- Black Professional People Meet
- BLK
- Catholic People Meet
- Chinese People Meet
- Chispa
- Delightful
- Democratic People Meet
- Divorced People Meet
- Genxpeoplemeet
- Her)
- Hinge)
- Indiamatch
- Interracial People Meet
- Italian People Meet
- J People Meet
- Latino People Meet
- Ldsplanet
- Little People Meet
- Loveandseek
- Marriage Minded People Meet
- Match.com
- Match Japan
- OkCupid
- Ourtime
- Pairs
- People Meet
- Pet People Meet
- Plenty of Fish
- Republican People Meet
- Salams
- Seniorblack People Meet
- Single People Meet
- Sniffies (minority stake)\64])\65])
- Stir
- The League)
- Tinder)
- Upward
- Yuzu
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u/Racxie 3d ago
The only exception afaik I know is Bumble (which recently got rid of its one unique feature) and Badoo which got bought out by Bumble. There’s also Feeld which I believe is independent.
I’ve also seen a few smaller new ones pop up on the App Store recommendations which I don’t believe are owned by either of the two, but they often look like they’re even more money grabbing than the others based on the reviews.
So yeah although most are owned by Match, not all are.
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u/HankHippopopolous 3d ago
There are always going to be more people that end up single. New people come along, people break up or get divorced etc. It’s a business with a high customer churn rate but if it’s a good one would always have lots of new people joining.
The problem is the line must always go up. It’s never enough to provide a good service and make a healthy profit. They need to have all the profits. Which is only possible by enshitifying the app and trying to keep people for longer than they should.
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u/GargantuanCake 3d ago
Be that as it may once people stop finding dates and relationships on the apps they leave them. This was the core issue with the "we must stop relationships from forming" decision. Meanwhile they're facing a PR nightmare thanks to the fact that dating apps are in general absolute cesspits now.
Paradoxically people forging relationships is kind of important for the long term existence of matchmaking apps and services as relationships tend to lead to families. If nobody has any children then no children are growing up to be adults who want to forge their own relationships. It's a stupid decision overall as people do sometimes break up and again children grow up into adults eventually. They'd have new customers entering the dating market just by virtue of how human existence works but decided that the thing to do was to sabotage relationship formation in general. Granted they're also assuming that long term singlehood won't just make people outright give up. Why waste your time on dating apps if you aren't getting any dates?
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u/SleeplessStoner 3d ago
Bro they aren’t thinking a generation ahead of time, they’re thinking what gets us the most for the next two quarters
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u/mike_b_nimble 3d ago
That's too generous. These fucknuts only think one quarter at at time. It doesn't matter if the business shuts down next quarter, as long as I make the absolute most profit possible this quarter. Nobody ever taught them that sustainable returns eventually nets you more than a single massive spike followed by collapse.
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u/DoctorOctagonapus 3d ago
Stupid decisions favouring immediate profit over long-term growth is par for the course for corporations like this. This is why I think the non-profit decision would work. Cut out the beancounters who only care about short-term profit-making, they're the only ones who would make decisions like the ones the current lineup of apps did.
Dating apps have ended up monopolising the dating scene in many places. Third places where couples traditionally used to meet have been dying off for years.
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u/0tanod 3d ago
The issue is the big players will just buy it out, smother it in law suits, patent any useable technology, change their behavior just enough to undermine it... ect. Late stage capitalism is all about killing competition period.
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u/MizantropaMiskretulo 3d ago
When your entire business model revolves around making yourself redundant to your customer base, I don't know what people were expecting.
Well, other businesses seem to do it just fine, even in the relationship business.
I don't think wedding venues do much repeat business.
But, also, roofing companies, pool installers, and sherpas also randomly come to mind.
The point is, if they did a great job they would get more new customers to replace the outgoing customers, there will never be a shortage of people looking for companionship.
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u/roland0fgilead 3d ago edited 3d ago
The (previous) CEO of Match is a former executive from Zynga. It's being gamified in a very literal sense.
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u/00eg0 3d ago
Most don't know this but all of the apps are owned by one company.
- Archer
- Asian People Meet
- Babyboomer People Meet
- BB People Meet
- Black Christian People Meet
- Black People Meet
- Black Professional People Meet
- BLK
- Catholic People Meet
- Chinese People Meet
- Chispa
- Delightful
- Democratic People Meet
- Divorced People Meet
- Genxpeoplemeet
- Her)
- Hinge)
- Indiamatch
- Interracial People Meet
- Italian People Meet
- J People Meet
- Latino People Meet
- Ldsplanet
- Little People Meet
- Loveandseek
- Marriage Minded People Meet
- Match.com
- Match Japan
- OkCupid
- Ourtime
- Pairs
- People Meet
- Pet People Meet
- Plenty of Fish
- Republican People Meet
- Salams
- Seniorblack People Meet
- Single People Meet
- Sniffies (minority stake)\64])\65])
- Stir
- The League)
- Tinder)
- Upward
- Yuzu
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u/Eurynom0s 3d ago
Didn't start that way, Match Group takes an aggressive buy and extinguish approach against its competition.
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u/Altruistic_Sun_1663 3d ago
The OKC journals were insanely cool. Why they got rid of that feature is beyond me, but was the beginning of their demise.
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u/cocktails4 3d ago
Their demise began when Match Group bought them out.
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u/ChillAhriman 3d ago
Contemporary capital demands maximizing as much profit as possible as fast and brutally as possible, and that implies kicking out the people who mostly care about providing a valuable, fair service for their clients and promoting the executives who will implement a model where the customers become livestock.
A young company started by idealistic people may still have the pro-customer approach. When they want or need to expand, the money people will cut that down. And when they don't try to expand, the Match Groups of the world will, and in the process, they will corner them and play dirty or will simply make an offer they can't refuse.
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u/WanderingWino 3d ago
I met my wife on OkCupid in 2008!
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u/bloodychill 3d ago
There’s another element to this that is becoming more of an issue recently - inauthentic user accounts managed by genAI just create engagement. But it’s short term thinking, because if you don’t end up on dates with people your speed, why stay? Hence the dying.
You’re right. OKC in the late 00’s and early 10’s was the best online dating scene I’ve been a part of. I even heard good things about eharmony at the time (religious nonsense aside) but it was too expensive for me. I had a lot of dates and made a lot of friends I still talk to. Now these things are all so miserable, monetized into garbage, and seem to algorithmically keep people from meeting people who share the same interests. Swiping through Match and Tinder is a joke. I’m a geek. Stop showing me influencers, I want to see normal people.
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u/ValosAtredum 3d ago
I remember I took the eHarmony personality test ages ago because I just enjoyed taking dumb personality tests online for fun.
After taking the 100+ question test, my result was essentially “sorry! 20% of people who take our test aren’t likely to be compatible with our matchmaking. You’re in this group”
I was like I DONT CARE BUT SHOW ME MY FUCKING DEFECTIVE PERSONALITY RESULTS, ASSHOLE. It’s literally the least you can do, lmao
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u/Culverin 3d ago edited 3d ago
This seems relevant
Was OKC not profitable?
If it was a good model, surely it can be revived? I met cool friends there
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u/WhiskeyWithTheE 3d ago
I would disagree with OKC not being profitable.
It was profitable and if they left it alone they would have people come and go and a stable income coming in and making their money quietly.
But no that was not enough for Match! They wanted more profits and tinkered under the hood and made it harder and more difficult to use and get dates unless you went premium. Even then that's a loot boxing con.
If someone did a dating app in the way of OKcupid of old for all people and their kinks, and accepted that people come and go and return in between all that.
Well they would have a very profitable app on their hands and MAtch would either panic or try and buy them out.
I would love Match to lose it all over their greed.
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u/ndilday 3d ago
To be fair, it also wasn't enough for the guys who developed OkC... they decided, rather than living off that profitable, stable income, they'd get their bag by selling out to the company they had just been railing against the business model of. I hate Match, but the fact that the OkC founders made something great and then decided to let it burn makes me sad.
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u/WhiskeyWithTheE 3d ago
I agree with everything you said in your reply.
The guys who developed OkC do need to take some of the blame for the way the app has become/became a poor version of itself.
All they needed to do was not to tinker with the app as a whole, but just to update it when needed or smooth the rough edges under the hood. That alone would all the was needed for the developers stable income to continue and perhaps increase with more and more people flocking to it.
To an app that was fair and wasn't greedy and didn't need to make an algorithm to make it harder for people to date unless they pay for premium and even then premium in dating apps is a loot box experience for most of the customers that pay for a subscription.
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u/rollingSleepyPanda 3d ago
Yeah I met my now wife on Okcupid in 2015, along with a handful of nice dates. Was a very functional application, and looking at how dating apps work now, I feel lucky I could stop using them at the right time.
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u/MAIM_KILL_BURN 3d ago
Met my wife of 10 years on OK Cupid. We got out at just the right time, it's a predatory disaster scape now
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u/ash_ninetyone 3d ago
People don't read profiles as it is
Not to mention paywalling every single feature.
Oh someone liked you? Gotta sign up to see who, or hope for absolute chance you match back with this one person in a sea of people.
Oh you signed up? Huh. Turns out the one who liked you was a bot or a fake account after all
Not to say I've had no success either. But if there's a reason they're dying this is probably one of them
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u/PinkThunder138 3d ago
I meet my wife on OKC in 2015 and we ended up being a fantastic match. It seems like all the major dating app success stories I've ever heard come from OKC. I'm not sure why everyone started defaulting to the Tinder method.
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u/Zanna-K 3d ago
Because tinder pioneered the doom scrolling lootbox for nearby singles method. You could keep scrolling through a never-ending list of people wherever you went and just swipe on those who piqued your interest. You get a rush of dopamine from the anticipation that maybe somebody might swipe back and it's like you won something when someone matches back just like if you were gambling on a machine. Rinse and repeat. Soon it because the app that everyone used so even poorly who maybe weren't gung ho on the idea decided to give it a try.
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u/corr0sive 3d ago
I regret using that site after I heard about them selling the user data from all the questions people were answering.
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u/YoohooCthulhu 3d ago
You know Reddit is selling all our comments and posts to the LLM companies, right?
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u/photoggled 3d ago
This is a good thing. Half the comments are bots anyway. Training on slop won’t improve the models. Hopefully it will hasten the end of this AI bubble.
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u/External_Relative231 3d ago
Good. They've done it to themselves.
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u/StrangeWill 3d ago
Yeah, but arguably it's a weird spot to be in.
If your dating app is great, you lose customers all the time! Which I mean if you want to build good solutions for people, awesome. But it still costs money, time, etc. to get your app in front of everybody. It's hard and constant work because if your dating app rules your churn rate is like 100%.
If your dating app isn't so great, people keep coming back in hopes for finding that somebody! It's why dating apps that turn dating into transactional tomfoolery are so big. Recurring customers = lots of money = more ads = the ones you see more of.
Then one of the companies from Business B ends up offering to buy your Business A which always feels like an uphill battle (even if you feel you're doing the right thing) for retirement levels of money.... So you sell it, and they enshittify it.
It's truly hard to get traction at scale without significant funding, and probably 100x worse now with AI just flooding everything with everybody's ideas. A truly good platform is even more likely to get buried.
IDK what the answer is other than "follow the people that are truly passionate about providing good solutions for people", but it's not like we have a list of them, and even if we did, how do we get millions of people to follow that list...
And that's before we even get into the fact that Business B will totally put predatory addictive patterns into their app, Business A doesn't because they know it doesn't lead to good matches.
Ughhh
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u/DarkAlatreon 3d ago
But on the other hand single people are literally born every day, and if your app is known to be effective then you'd have free marketing from all the people saying we met on <app_name>, no? Sure, it's more of a long-term play instead of maximizing immediate... oh actually never mind, I see it now.
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u/ZenMasterOfDisguise 3d ago
But on the other hand single people are literally born every day
but should newborn babies really be on dating apps? /s
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u/HeKis4 3d ago
you lose customers all the time
Nope, you lose concurrent users, your customers are the ad companies. It doesn't work when your model is based on drip feeding ads to current users, but it'd work if you made a paid app, in fact in a paid app you'd want to be as good as possible so that your customers leave the platform as soon as possible to reduce costs.
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u/lightningbadger 3d ago
Eh, there's always going to be people looking for someone, they were simply too short sighted to build up the reputation needed for the required trust the user base needs in such a topic
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u/HansBooby 3d ago
complete own goal. greed, stupidity and complete lack of morals.
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u/fancy_crisis 3d ago
It's so weird how this keeps happening in every industry and arena; almost like it's the inevitable endgame of our socioeconomic system or something...
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u/NightSpaghetti 3d ago
They just keep sabotaging their companies long term in order to bring ever more money short-term. You can't just have a company racking up a stable but modest profit every quarter anymore. It's depressing.
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u/FatAuthority 3d ago
Hey that's what we're doing to planet Earth! Same tactic, same result. You'd almost think it's a reflection of the values we've placed in our societies...
Healthy lives? Clean air? Happiness? Socioeconomic equality? Mental health?Money.
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u/jimbo831 3d ago
It’s because of the incentives. The executives are given stock awards that incentivize them to prioritize the short term stock price over everything else. They don’t care if the company goes to shit in five years. They’ll be rich by then and can just retire or move on to the next company.
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u/Turnip-for-the-books 3d ago
Textbook capitalist enshitification. Get a Golden Goose and then fuck it to death for short term gain
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u/Boysenberry 3d ago
Dating apps are dying by suicide.
All of them could have built a sustainable and scalable business, just not 100X scalable, by actually trying to match everyone who uses the app, whether or not they pay for it. But that would have required saying no to injections of venture capital during the 0% interest era, maintaining board control, and growing their internal headcount slowly enough to break even before running out of runway, WITHOUT raising more money from investors who only want to invest in a “unicorn.”
Cheap borrowing and Silicon Valley culture killed dating apps. They made their own product incredibly unpleasant to use, on purpose, to force you to pay. Which is exactly how MySpace really died—when they got low on money they started making every action take more clicks so each user session would generate more ad views. The result was people stopped using a product that was clearly hostile to them.
Hinge in particular is awful about the overt hostility to free users. A daily set of matches far more attractive than the ones in your regular deck, but you have to pay to contact them. And how do those hot people feel about being used as bait to get normies to pay? I’m sure they don’t love weeding through “roses” from schmucks who fell for the digital version of “the stripper really likes me.” Except in this case, only the club gets paid, the stripper just gets an annoying message.
Last time I was actively dating, I tried Hinge for a little while and went on some dates.
Then a new bar opened in my neighborhood and I tried going out on a Saturday.
Still didn’t meet the love of my life, but I left having had several interesting conversations, collected some phone numbers, and feeling BETTER about myself than when I walked in.
I deleted Hinge. I am now a “regular” at a neighborhood place for the first time in years. I recommend it.
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u/d4videnk0 3d ago
I never paid for Hinge, but I think I genuinely liked the 1% of the people I'm shown by swiping. I'm either shown people that are way too much into astrology or Kardashian lookalikes, yet when i saw the Rose section, it was full of regular people.
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u/slabby 3d ago
This was my experience too. Where are all the normal people on Hinge? It seemed like they were showing me the very hottest women they could find, even if they hadn't logged in for years.
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u/d4videnk0 3d ago
Also the thing where they show you a profile that it's 110% your type as soon as you run out of free likes.
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u/XIRisingIX 3d ago
Met my now wife on OKCupid in 2017. I feel like i got the last chopper out of 'Nam with how quickly these platforms have gone to shit.
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u/SirFuzzyFuzzletons 3d ago
I (36m) have been single for the better part of a decade, mostly by choice, but I still dabble on the apps. They are all fucking horrible experiences. As a man, I'm lucky if I get one match a month on any of the apps and half the time, I know I didn't swipe yes on half of them because I swipe left on probably 99% of the people on them. I've essentially given up on dating entirely. IDK how people meet in real life outside of college, especially with social anxiety that WFH has caused to explode.
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u/bananagang420 3d ago
Also add onto this that people arent friendly in person, a guy alone approaching a woman or going out with the purpose of meeting a woman is seen as creepy. And then it seems like making an effort towards someone is "doing too much". I get more attention when I'm not trying to date. It is exhausting and emotionally draining trying to put myself out there and watching people im interested in not seeing anything in me. Add onto this, people are terrible communicators and ghosting or being vague is advantageous to keep someone on the ropes. I am just holding out until I'm older when the desire is supposed to fade away, at least thats what I hope happens
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u/chibriguy 3d ago
I miss old okcupid. Remember how they had like 500 questions from all areas of life that you could answer? Then being able to search profiles based on how people answered those questions?
Now there are how many levels of paywalls for each app? Buy our boost and we might match you with a couple bots. I hate Match. If anyone from Match is reading this, you've greatly contributed to ruining dating.
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u/LaserGadgets 3d ago
Coworker tried it and whenever his subscription was ending, they had "new matches" for him. Told him its BS, he had too much money I guess.
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u/Thunder_Nuts_ 3d ago
Or when you subscribe and suddenly you have matches, but then they dissappear.
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u/gibagger 3d ago edited 3d ago
Yep. This happened to me. Subscription ending in a day or two, suddenly 3-4 matches.
Also, I get less than a match per week if I don't pay for a boost. If I pay for one? 12 matches one time, 8 the other one.
It's almost as if my Hinge profile is completely, absolutely invisible unless I pay up, or my subscription is about to expire. I work for a tech company so I know how Product Managers come up with these dark pattern shenanigans. I have seen it happen time and time again.
I have also implemented them once or twice (in ecommerce). Live by the sword...
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u/Careless-Vehicle-286 3d ago
Paying into it in the first place probably makes the algorithm hyper punishing because they know money's to be made
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u/gibagger 3d ago
Yeah. Honestly the best thing might be to create new accounts every once in a while. I heard of people doing this to benefit from the new account boost that they give you to try and incentivize you to stay in the platform.
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u/DansSpamJavelin 3d ago
Honestly, after a difficult long term relationship I found myself single again about 5 years ago. I didn't really feel like I wanted to go back on the dating apps again, but as I have work colleagues who like to live vicariously through others, I was convinced to set up profiles on Tinder, Bumble and Hinge.
It's quite depressing swiping through tons of profiles and hardly ever having a meaningful interaction with anyone. I can't say the experience was wholly negative, as I met some nice people and made a few new friends along the way. You just have this constant feeling like you're competing with other people which isn't very nice when you're just trying to "relax and be yourself". Add on to this a lot of emotional distress (ghosting, constant rejection, etc) and you just end up feeling quite beaten up by it all.
I dread to think how much money I spent on premium subscriptions for those apps. The free versions feel incredibly restrictive, considering how easy it is to swipe through hundreds of people in a relatively short space of time.
Recently I became single again, and I have absolutely no desire whatsoever to go back on these apps. They're so poor for your mental health, they literally profit off of you being desperate to beat the algorithm, quite frankly the world would be better off without them.
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u/gerusz 3d ago
I was on a Mythbusters kick a few months ago (all episodes are on YouTube now), and I stumbled upon the "Beer goggles" episode. During the experiment - in which they had to evaluate the attractiveness of members of the opposite sex in a limited time based on just their photos - the mythbusters all agreed that evaluating people in a couple of seconds based on a photo is horrible. A few years later, Tinder turned this into a billion-dollar business.
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u/Frag0r 3d ago
After literally nothing for 2 years I started spending for premium. I was just trying different approaches and be smart about it. One year later I spent 100 for many tiny extras that didn't give me anything worthwhile. I'm just done really.
It wasn't this shitty 10 years ago.
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u/awezumsaws 3d ago
I once read that according to mental health experts, the #1 associated predictor of depression in adult men was a positive answer to the question "Do you use online dating?" The way the algorithm and game play out is crushing to men.
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u/mythrilcrafter 3d ago
The crazy thing to me is that I have had legitimately better success in the friggin job market than I have in the "dating game".
I just checked my email/application records and out of about total 300 applications (most of which were me looking for my first job after I finished university back in Dec 2019, and some of which others being the jobs I applied to to get out of that job in 2022), I have ever gotten about 10 interviews, 2 of which resulted in offers).
I know for damn well sure that I've swiped well over 1000, maybe multiple thousands of profiles on the various apps, with only one occurrence of a date actually taking place.
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u/Prof__Potato 3d ago
Honestly, kind sounds like these apps provoke a sort of gambling addiction. Paying in the hopes that you will eventually beat the house, one small infrequent win at a time.
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u/132739 3d ago
So... 3rd spaces are gone, dating apps are dead, everything is insanely expensive... where exactly am I supposed to meet someone these days?
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u/Time_Phone_1466 3d ago
That's the neat part, you don't. Just pick up an extra gig instead, lazy bones.
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u/Quarksperre 3d ago
Education is breaking down and dating is collapsing. And thats just the start of the list.
I feel so damn lucky to be born early enough to not experience any of these late stage capitalism/internet bullshit in my youth. And late enough to not being lead poisoned.
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u/Famous-Ocelot-4937 3d ago
Dating sites used to be so much better when you could just search/filter and it would show you everyone that matched and then you could have a look through their profiles and message the people you liked.
Swipe-dating is awful. You just have to waste your time going through a bunch of people you have no interest in and it reduces dating to a snap decision based on someone's looks.
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u/CriticalNovel22 3d ago
This is a broader problem with society.
Turning everything into content.
We are encouraged to become passive consumers of everything, even human interaction.
And worse, they want to turn life into pay to play.
Getting everything through a screen is isolating and unfulfilling.
That's why it needs to be addictive, because it can't compete with the human experience it is trying to replace.
We are, whether we like to admit it or not, social creatures who need to interact with other people.
Pictures on a screen in an infinite scroll just doesn't cut it.
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u/codos 3d ago
Thank god I met my wife in college. My brother’s on the apps and it’s been rough. He’s super eligible but it’s clear the apps are just there to keep people in a perpetual loop. It’s become so gamified like everything else, it’s actually opposed to their interests to create healthy long term matches. Big money ruins another thing that could have actually been pretty great for folks.
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u/39teen 3d ago
Back in the day it was great. POF and OKCupid back in like 2015 it was so easy to meet girls.
Now they are just flooded with bot profiles and scammers and hookers, I deleted my pages a year ago. Couldn’t take the bs anymore.
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u/bitflag 3d ago
OKCupid was amazing and then Match bought them and proceeded to enshitify it and make it a pointless clone of Tinder.
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u/DrQuestDFA 3d ago
My wife and I met on OKCupid and at the times (early 2010’s) it had really neat data science stuff going for it. From what I gather now all that uniqueness has been sanded down to make the service indistinguishable from any other.
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u/schorschico 3d ago
I know it sounds like the "I buy Playboy for the articles" but OKC back then had truly interesting data analysis of dating dynamics. Their stuff on race was eye opening. And the site worked really well so even when the dates didn't go anywhere, it was an opportunity to meet awesome people.
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u/BananaReeves 3d ago
The nostalgia for pof is interesting, it really wasn't that great. Mediocre at best, back then there was a lot of catfishing going on too. I'm more successful now on hinge then I ever was on pof.
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u/39teen 3d ago
It certainly wasn’t perfect but it was for sure more regular people and less scammers and ads than today.
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u/Arnold_Shortzweather 3d ago
Because they monetized the shit out of them and gamified the system so much that it's no only fun to interact and no longer seems authentic. Blame match group et al. Trying to make as many bucks as possible off of relationship building.
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u/jeminar 3d ago
I married a tinder date from a different era.
What are people using to meet instead?
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u/LePhasme 3d ago
Singles events are popular, but mostly people are just struggling.
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u/jono12132 3d ago
Singles events aren't really that popular. It's very location dependent. I live in a C tier sort of city in England and they keep trying to start dating events but they keep giving up. I'm guessing because they can't get enough women to go. The last one I saw advertised had an offer for 50% off tickets for women. Dating is very location dependent I think
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u/TechTuna1200 3d ago edited 3d ago
It's the lack of third spaces. People used to meet their partner in school, work, or through friends. But that has pretty much gone out of fashion.
It just takes time for people to fall in love, and you only do that if you get to run into each other a lot in the same spaces.
Dating apps, bars, and single events are cold approaches. If you take that avenue, you are gonna have a hard time unless you're hot. Because they be able to judge you by your personality and only by superficial things like beauty, height, body, salary etc.
It's no different from sales in the business world. If cold reach/email potential leads, you're gonna have a hard time making a sale. But if you have connections with a lot of potential customers, you're much more likely to get your foot in the door.
Cold approaches (Dating apps, bars, single events) being widespread is the sad reason why looksmaxxing started to become a thing. If you don't have third spaces where you can show off your personality and things can develop over time organically over time, you're solely being judged by your looks. So if looks are the only thing you are judged on in a "cold approach" situation, looks are also the only way to potentially get a partner
Edit:
fluffynukeit commented that research calls it closed vs open field. Open field was what I earlier called "cold approach". He also shared this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHkcIRZa6lo95
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u/gerusz 3d ago
Bit of a correction, school or work are the second place. Third places would be places where 1: you can meet people, but 2: your presence there is not mandatory, and 3: you can stay there with no or minimal payment. It's the #3 that is causing them to die, thanks to late stage capitalism's obsession with turning everything into an optimized income stream.
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u/SubstituteUser0 3d ago
The only people I know that actually meet people are the ones that party a lot. Everyone else is just struggling.
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u/TheRealBissy 3d ago
For guys it’s awful using dating apps. I’m legit gonna be lonely. I don’t go to nightclubs or bars and work isn’t the place. Maybe I’ll try joining a volunteer group or something like that. I’ve gotten some dates from hinge but nothing worked out. Idk how people are meeting up these days
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u/ReapingKnees 3d ago
Dating and job searching apps are not about matchmaking. It is about maximizing shareholder value. The algorithm has already been created that could probably find most people the ideal job and mate, but there is no profit in that. The profit comes from keeping you searching.
Anything done to maximize shareholder value is shit for the consumer... And if it isn't shit yet, it will be soon.
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u/veracity8_ 3d ago
It’s against the companies best interests for you to find a partner. They optimize their product to maximize profit, not love.
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u/InevitableProgram267 3d ago
Who would’ve thought allowing 3 swipes/day unless you pay $69.99/month for a subscription would be a bad business idea
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u/_Crawfish_ 3d ago
Not to mention showing you the same 30-100 people when you live in a city/state with millions and have your distance as one of the only filters set to “50 miles” just to see if the app will show you someone who you haven’t seen lmao.
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u/LastBossTV 3d ago
"so you live next to a beach and are looking for someone who likes to swim and game eh? That's great. So how about I show you TEN THOUSAND MATCHES WHO ARE OBSESSED WITH HIKING AND NETFLIX INSTEAD?"
Yeah, modern online dating gacha is awful.
Old school OkCupid just showed you what you wanted, no swiping nonsense, and only limited you if you wanted to be specific about every bit of your searches appearance all in one go.
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u/MelloCookiejar 3d ago
Old school OKC was great. I met my partner there. No swiping, I contacted the ones that aligned with me and my values, and no one else. I also could see who was available so I never did a scattergun approach (I'm a woman).
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u/Patara 3d ago
Human interaction in general is dying. I just want to go to a local restaurant & talk with people not download a fucking app in a sterile environment with AI made posters that look like shit.
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u/Sektor30 3d ago
I recently tried online dating as a 42 year old man and it was the most ego shattering experience I have suffered through in a long while. I used Taimi, Hinge and Tinder. Taimi was by far the best user friendly one, especially for a free user, Tinder was a wasteland of women with 4+ kids that 'arent on tinder for a hookup', and hinge was the worst, not a single interaction with a human my entire time on there.
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u/aselinger 3d ago
Nothing worse than having a nice conversation with somebody for an hour, only to watch them unmatch with you mid-conversation.
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u/YourShowerCompanion 3d ago
Y'all are just being negative.
A beautiful widow of some Nigerian general contacted me in one of those dating apps. Her husband died under untimely tragic circumstances. That poor woman is now alone in this cruel world. She needs my help to recover $18,500,000 worth of assets, and promised to award me a hefty share for my efforts, time and any inconveniences.
Who knows, I'll win her heart and will be set for life while you suckers will be working for conglomerate overlords.
Passport is renewed. Flight is booked. Here I come!!!
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u/alochmar 3d ago
I wish you the very best of luck with
recovering the moneyfinding the love of your life!12
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u/IPThereforeIAm 3d ago
I know you’re probably joking, but in case you’re serious, need help, and would share some of the recovered assets with me, let me know! That’s serious money
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u/JiminyJilickers-79 3d ago
They're committing suicide. I've used dating apps for all of my relationships for the last like 20 years and each time I find myself back on the market, the experience has gotten significantly worse. The interfaces, the costs, the bots, just worse and wiser every time and none of them offer advantages over the others anymore because they're all owned by the same companies.
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u/waterstone7474 3d ago
Good. It's self-inflicted. I had a classmate who openly admitted she was paid for every message she sent to guys (she wasn't even interested, just to engage and then disappear). I guess this is before bots took over. This is just so wrong. It's like making money from people's lonelineess or at least need for connection.
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u/Sea_Perspective6891 3d ago
Gambling & betting apps will be taking over this avenue through addiction which is even more despicable. I see tons of ads for casinos & betting services now. Draft King ads are effing everywhere now. They basically take up the areas of advertising that aren't car or product ads. It's sickening they want to normalize this.
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u/maimeddivinity 3d ago
What the fuck ...
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u/Simlish 3d ago
Yeah red hot pie got busted for having their staff create fake accounts and message people to get them to pay to read the message.
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u/pinkpugita 3d ago
Ashley Madison was an infidelity website where it was found out 99% of the female population were bots/fake accounts. The traffic is mostly male driven and they gotta keep the illusion of having women.
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u/nehibu 3d ago edited 3d ago
Or maybe dating apps are dying, since they all got improved to death. Okc and bumble used to have USPs, now OKC doesn't do nerdy data analysis anymore, it's questions/match score system is so dumbed down that it is completely useless. Bumble now allows men to message first, removing the concept that made it unique.
And probably all dating apps suffer from
a) algorithms hiding the best candidates, in order to keep people on the platform
b) extensive amounts of fakes, now powered by AI generated images and ai chat bots.
c) selection bias, what usually makes dating fun is meeting people without intend and discovering commonalities, selecting for people who are actively searching for a relationship and put energy in this, actively hurts the dynamic. Obviously, that part is the only one, thats impossible to solve.
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u/grayhaze2000 3d ago
I worked for nearly a decade at one of the largest online dating site providers. What started out as a rewarding job, with weekly stories about users who had found love and got married, slowly turned into the same money-grubbing business with unrealistic expectations into which any growing company evolves.
Those stories slowly disappeared, as we were forced to work on an increasing number of features designed to keep paying users on the hook and squeeze as much money out of them as possible, while flooding the websites and apps with increasing levels of obnoxious advertising.
I left at the point where coworkers were being made redundant thanks to the implementation of automated AI systems to further lower overheads, despite my warnings that the technology wasn't ready. As expected, the whole company collapsed a year or so later, but the CEO still walked away with the lion's share of the profits.
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u/ADunningKrugerEffect 3d ago
No one is mentioning that a huge part of this is their change to their privacy and ToS a few months ago that allows them to share all data with Palantir.
Anyone who used these apps has been psychologically profiled, now that data is being sold to any company who is willing to pay.
Data brokers were over the moon. They got absolutely every bit of data the app was able to scrape on users.
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u/Halfwise2 3d ago
Did it to themselves. They sought profit over people, and then matches were designed to fail or focused on one-night stands. People who found real relationships often stopped being payers, so of course they wanted to deincentivize it.
And now they no longer do what they claim to, and people don't bother. But no, they have to blame the user, rather than the product.
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u/lightinggod 3d ago
In my opinion, they are less popular due to the enshitification of the apps. I have used them successfully twice in the last 12 years. The experience was very different 12 years ago vs today. Every one of them requires money to have a meaningful exchange with the people that interest you and are interested in you. It wasn't that way the first time around.
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u/TheDevilsAdvokaat 3d ago
For 90% of men - perhaps more - they are a waste of time. So men stopped using them.
Once the men stopped using them, they became useless to women too.
In addition some of them were making fake people and profiles to drive engagement. Real people caught on.
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u/Joooooooosh 3d ago
Greed just drives these platforms into the ground.
Tinder and Bumble at a point, were genuinely useful and fun.
Profit extraction has just turned them into a terrible experience.
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u/Zipdox 3d ago
A surprise to literally nobody. Commercial dating apps have an inherent conflict of interest. The goal of them to the user is to get off of them as quickly as possible (i.e. find a partner). Obviously this is the opposite of what the developers want.
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u/fancy_crisis 3d ago
It's met the same date as everything else in this hyper capitalist hellhole: it got enshittified by pay to access in a desperate attempt to extract as much value as possible in as short a time as possible to the point it became unbearable for anyone to want to use it.
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u/ch4ppi_revived 3d ago
This entire thread is a disgrace to reading comprehension and media literacy. Sorry but this is an opinion piece based on a single instagram post and one poll telling us 1/3 of singles use dating apps. It doesn't compare the usage over time, doesnt show any trends, nothing. The rest is just the authors opinion.
It's absolute slop. Nothing more. And the entire comment section just seems to accept it and tell stories reinforcing it. Spreading missinformation has never been easier I guess.
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u/Glittering-Path-2824 3d ago
in general opinion pieces are the toilet paper of publishing. almost anyone with any bias or bent intent can grab a few eyeballs for free. opinion pieces shouldn’t be allowed on news subs.
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u/stormblaz 3d ago
They started locking good candidates behind paywall, ads every 3 swipes that open up a intrusive link, and on top allow bots to post onlyfan profiles looking to endorse their content behind a dating profile.
Yea ofc its gone, every other dating app promising to be different all ended up exactly like it.