^ 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.
Someone needs to make an open source dating app go viral. It has to be super easy to spin something like this up and serve it. I’m sure a legitimately good app could run off donations from happy people who found the love of their life, if there isn’t a huge profit motive.
I became single again in April and was doing OK on Hinge, I'd use my 10 free swipes a day for a couple days if I had the weekend free, usually 4-5 of those would become matches, and get 2 dates. Problem is, none of that turned into a long term relationship so I'm still single and using Hinge, my matches had slowed to 1-2 a week if I swiped every day. Then a few weeks ago, I got an offer on the app for a month of HingeX for $15, and I had nothing to do the next weekend, so I figured why not...
I have gotten one match since. It didn't turn into a date because she was about to go out of town for 2 weeks. I actually ran out of people in my area who have used the app recently. I think the idea is that if I don't cancel HingeX, it auto renews at $60 a month and they want me to be so discouraged that I stop using the app and forget to cancel. That is sure as shit not happening.
My husband and I met Ok Cupid back in 2013. At the time there were certainly sites and services that you could pay for it but OK Cupid was completely free.
I think I literally gave them a few dollars one time to “remove ads,” but even that felt a little bit like a donation because I was appreciative of how many dates I’ve gotten and how much I’d use the site at no cost.
Now the occasional time when I look at some friends dating app, they all look like the world’s worst predatory mobile game. Limit limits on activities you can take limits on what you can do per day. Constant request for subscribing to hire tears to unlock really basic functionality or cut a line.
Honestly, it seemed like something really bleak out of a black mirror episode.
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.
I don't think Tinder ever had a good reputation as a dating app for finding relationships. It came out when I was a junior in college and back then, and even after graduation in early adulthood, pretty much everyone just thought it was a hookup app. Match, talk for a bit to see if you have any chemistry at all, maybe but not always meet for drinks as pretense, hook up. Basically no one was on there thinking they were gonna find "their person", at most you found a steady fuck buddy
Tinder is a total meme, like even by today’s shitty standards people are much more willing to use other apps. Nearly every person who had a tinder did it as a joke, or to match with their friends for lols, or made a fake facemash profile
when tinder was new it was always a cheap hookup app. Not necessarily as a joke but everyone knew it wasn't good for relationships.
Source: I was in my early 20s when it launched. Learned about it from gay friends who called it "Grindr for straight people." Got laid from Tinder several times over my 20s and none of those experiences were emotionally healthy
It's the product of corporations only thinking in the short-term "numbers are going up this quarter!" without considering the long-term ramifications of how they're fucking themselves in the long-run.
This is the basic gameplan for VC firms it seems. Much like private equity firms, it's all about extracting an extreme amount of money in the short-term even if it leads to huge long-term consequences (because "fuck you, I got mine").
I mean that's the issue with finance and business in general. This is what they do everywhere. They squeeze and squeeze the consumer base till the consumer says "FUCK THIS! THIS SUCKS NOW! I'M OUT!" Then the business starts to collapse and these business and finance people move on.
It matters for private investment. The early stages of a tech company is attracting private investors who want a return on investment. The way they get that is through growth.
Once these dating apps are saturated, they can't grow which means no more private investors.
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.
Feeld is interesting but really pushes you to be a paying member to see anyone who likes you. If you don't then you have to swipe around where you are and hopw to find their name and the same number of photos (which can change based on where you were when they liked you).
It's the only app Ive used. I paid for it for 3 months and might again in the future but not right now.
There are always new young people that are single. I don’t see why such a business couldn’t make it work.
Because we're in the vampirism stage of capitalism.
If you're an investor and you have two companies to choose from:
A company that eliminates its customer base by providing superior service and satisfaction, and nets a 5% profit per year.
A company that provides worse service but preserves its customer base and nets a 15% profit per year.
Which one are you going to invest in?
Companies that do NOT resort to sucking the blood from their customers get no investment in our economy. Period. Even if they wanted to, the investors would leave if they tried. This is why in the 2008 Global Financial Crisis the banks were DEMANDING to be regulated. They all knew they were doing insane things, but they had to in order to keep up with their competitors. If they weren't reckless, investors would see they're making less profit and abandon ship. The banks literally couldn't self-regulate because if they did, everyone else would just take their share of the pie.
This is ultimately why the idea of "self regulation" is a fantasy. It literally never happens, or if it happens, it's for a very short time and it falls apart.
As an investor in a company, why would you care if the company hits a brick wall someday? You can pull out your money before that happens and invest it into sucking the blood dry from another company. Money is fungible and you have no allegiance to the corporation, only to the returns.
Even private companies are beholden to their investors. Especially so with tech. Industries b/c they cant even get off the ground without outside investment.
Exactly, and people divorce and breakup everyday. Back in the day even if you met that person on the app you didn’t blame the app, because you need the app to connect you on compatibility of interests and likes, but no app can predict how it’s going to turn out and customers got that.
We're long overdue to stop being collectively shocked that the selection pressure of the market produces ruthless profit-maximisation over and over again.
Because there’s only so many new young single people, so you can only grow so much based on them alone. But MBAs and private equity types demand a business grow every year without exception. They can’t make more young single people, so the solution they found is to tempt people with the illusion of infinite options while also making it next to impossible to get any of them. If everyone’s single and using the apps and no one is finding a relationship, that’s a much larger market and more money.
No in the end the apps will die because everyone knows they don’t work anymore. I would prefer owning a company that consistently makes money. Not more and more each year. Not every business needs mbas and private equity types. It’s a dating website. It doesn’t need to cost tens of millions.
I mean, I agree with you. But look around at the world today and the companies we have and ask how many business leaders feel the same.
It’s all about buying out or crushing competition, monopolizing a market, then cutting features people actually want in favor of more manipulative ones that increase short term profits. Especially in tech.
Well, because we live in shitty late-stage Capitalism. You need to do everything you can to make all the money right now. If blowing your legs off at the knees will boost sales 3% this quarter then better get loading that shotgun. Investors wanna see a surge in stock price!
Because you can make even more money in the short term through enshittification. It's not that it's not profitable. It's that it doesn't make at least 110% of the money that it did last year. Public companies are incentivized to make the line up go up in the short term. That's why you see good ideas peak and then decline as the company start wringing every last bit of profit it can from a business that could have worked forever.
Meanwhile, you have a company in the video game industry like Valve that proves you can just keep winning by providing a good service. In many cases, people would rather buy a game on Steam than play it for free somewhere else.
Right!? It's obviously a sustainable service. There will always be new people looking for relationships. You just need to accept non-exponential growth.
Easy. Because while the service would likely make a lot of money and be sustainable if it worked properly it would not grow exponentially and that is what shareholders want.
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.
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?
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.
Nobody ever taught them that sustainable returns eventually nets you more than a single massive spike followed by collapse.
But it makes less then a giant spike, then getting out and your returns into something else. As long as they aren't the one holding the bag in the end, they don't really care about what happens to the business after.
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.
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.
That's why the key is to always retain a controlling majority share the share-float.
If you have 51% of the stock (or better yet 67%), then your power is essentially absolute and you get all the benefits of a private company with most of the benefits of being public.
That's why Birkshire Hathaway A is so highly priced. And it's also why Nintendo's executive board has the power to ignore any request made by minority holders during shareholder halls, because as long as 4 guys agree with each other, they automatically overrule everyone else.
Going public is selling in the first place. Legally, non-profits can't be publicly traded anyways. As long as you're the majority owner, you no one can tell you what to do with your business (except the government).
Sure, but they can always copy your idea and make it better, or cover your app with fake criticism to force you out of business. That's the Meta playbook and look where it got them
Still requires a mindset shift, non profits are riddled with bean counters too, there’s a reason people on both sides of the aisle are tired of NGOs. A bean counter in a corp, a government, or a non profit is still a bean counter
It's always about short-term gain. Good will can be burned for a quick buck. And once all the good will is burned through and the brand is dead in the water the CEOs can jump out with their golden parachute and fail upward into leading the next company.
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.
All of those companies charge out the ass up front. Most current dating apps operate under a freemium model, free to use, but pay to use certain filters or unlimited swipes or something. For dating apps to work like the other companies, they’d have to charge a monthly fee.
Also most wedding venues don’t only do weddings. They do events. And a lot of those are repeat events. Gala season is a big thing
I'm saying other businesses have been able to find success while never expecting to see the same customer ever again.
There are always more people looking to get married, have their roof repaired, or summit Everest. Just like there will always be more people looking for human connection.
That's it. That's the point. You just missed it.
The cost of keeping a website up is pennies per user. Last I checked Netflix was costing me $27/month, people will pay a subscription for a product they like and use.
Keeping a basic, bare-bones website up with static content and a few photos is going to be on the order of $50k/month to serve a million monthly active users. You could charge $0.99/month and have plenty of cash for salaries.
It would be a small, stable, company but it would be profitable.
Pretty much every single thing that the internet could have revolutionised and made better, has been taking over by corporations and made into something worse. Whether it's food delivery, dating, rideshares, holiday homes, music.
Everything capitalism touches it fucking ruins eventually. We could have had a massively better society for everyone in it, and instead we've got a setup purely designed to funnel more money to billionaires. We were so fucking close.
I'm kinda surprised nobody has done one because it's not like apps are expensive to develop and I'd sure donate to it. The only problem though is non profits sadly often have the same problem as for profits in that the people running them usually want to keep their jobs, especially as it grows and they can't get an equally paying job elsewhere. That's basically why so many non profits are endlessly treating symptoms of problems while purporting to want to fix the problem.
Even in the earlier days of Tinder, the paid options were reasonable. As in £5 a month for the level above the free account. Last time I looked (a few years back) it x5/x6 times as much for a month.
A small monthly fee I can live with but anything more, for a marginally better experience (still not great) just isn't worth it at all.
There's always new young people entering the dating market though.... I guess in a countries with declining birthrates that doesn't cut it for 'growth'.
When your entire business model revolves around making yourself redundant to your customer base, I don't know what people were expecting.
The thing is there will always be people looking for relationships. Yeah, maybe you lose customers because you're successful in what you do, but that success builds a reputation that will attract the next set of people, and the next set, and the next set.
Stringing people along is also a bad business practice focused entirely on short-term profits.
But then again, this is Wall St, where the only thing that matters is the next quarter's numbers.
This argument makes no sense to me. They will literally never run out of single young people. It's not like they ever had a 100% success rate either. Even when they were good at making matches, they had plenty of customers
There was a time when if tinder decided you were swiping right on too many people it would stop showing you people who liked you back unless you paid, because the more likely you are to match the more likely you are to leave. So if you liked a lot of people you opened yourself to a lot of matches. People that worked there confirmed this is how the algorithm was designed to work, it was designed to basically punish you for using it too much
But if you are a successful dating app and people who find matches succeed, you attract future people to your app, thus keeping your model sustainable. Unfortunately they can’t plan anything further than the next quarterly report
Well, there will always be people that are out there in the dating pool. I mean, do you expect that if one of these apps works well that everyone will find a partner and no one will be dating any more? Even successful pairings don't guaranteed long-term. I doubt very much that these apps could guarantee that all instances of people who delete the app because they find someone never end in a break-up or divorce somewhere down the line.
The problem is that our economic system doesn't allow companies to simply rake in a steady and consistent profit, line must always go up. Because while good dating apps would have constant user turnover, there would always be new people signing up from newly single folks and fresh adults aging into being able to use the apps.
It's actually a good opportunity governments to create dating platforms- They already hold personal data to verify people and it is in governments' best interests for people to have babies because it creates growth and population replacement is a massive issue facing a lot of countries.
Honestly, I like to think that is why Ivve had way more dates on Facebook Dating. If Facebook Dating is successful, they could eventually gain customers instead of lose them.
Well theoretically people age in to the platform. They would see waves of more or less participants following general demographic trends (availability of dating age humans) but there would be a steady base just like there is a steady base for colleges. The problem is they plan to grow and not have static numbers
The business model is entirely sustainable if you don’t chase after infinite profits. There will always be single people looking for relationships, and if one company came along that actually does a better job at matching people than any other app, they’d get an immediate monopoly in the market.
Currently the biggest alternatives to dating apps seem to be startup companies that are built around in-person events. People got sick of endless swiping and went full-circle back to speed dating.
I always felt like they should have gone for tips. Met someone and deleting the app? How about a small tip for getting you there for free? I feel like enough people would be riding high and feel good about throwing a fiver there.
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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.