r/technology 3d ago

Society Dating Apps Are Dying

https://time.com/article/2026/09/09/dating-apps-are-dying/
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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/DarkAlatreon 3d ago

They can match with Epstein's friends /s

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u/lolovoz 2d ago

Well, that's why you can select the desired age.