this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2025
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A confounding issue is the apps themselves have gotten worse over time. Like, old okcupid you could search. You could type in like "final fantasy" or "the Mets" and find people who liked those things enough to put them on their profile.
Now you're limited to whatever the app decides to give you. Well, the app doesn't want you to leave so that incentive doesn't line up.
A lot of the more popular ones, okcupid included, all got bought up by Match Group and almost immediately started trending anti-consumer in their updates or removal of features. They want you paying, they don't give a shit about success.
100%. Match group should be broken up.
It's an especially insidious type of monopoly to me because it deals with relationships, they can manipulate millions of people, affecting the creation of their families and kids.
Surprised that the religious right haven't put them in their sites.
Close, they actively fight success. Legally obligated to, even. It’s their fiduciary responsibility to keep you using the app.
So capitalism is incompatible with dating apps. Who woulda thunk?
That's not really how that works.
I’d love for you to be right. Please elaborate.
“Rather than require specific outcomes–such as achieving maximum share price–fiduciary duties are largely about conduct, process, and motivation”
You don't have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize profit, or anything like that. You have a responsibility to act in accordance to company rules and guidelines, and to act in the company's interest, not your own.
There is no requirement to burn to company down to maximize short-term profits, like some people think. That's usually at the expense of long-term profits anyway, so it could be better for profits to do something better for the customer.
You're only required to act "ethically" and keep the company's interests above your own.
If the company has a goal to make more money every year, then you can justify a lot of actions in that pursuit. And once they have a monopoly you kinda don't have many options, so they can push more.
Saying they have a responsibility to keep you on the app may sound silly, but app user churn is most likely measured and has some goal around it. And if a goal is set around that churn then they very much have an obligation to keep you on there as long as possible.
OkCupid used to actually work rather well at finding compatible people who were actually honest about what they were looking for.
Then it got bigger, got acquired, and the matching model of the whole industry was intentionally modified to be more monetizable, and to keep giving matches that are close, but not close enough to be truely long term compatible.
You aren't using the app/website anymore if it works and gets you a successful long term match.
You are using the app for a longer time if you keep getting close but just missing the mark.
...
Do people not think their dating app is tracking... how many matches and text exchanges they have?
How much time elapses between you matching, chatting, leaving... and then going back to swiping?
And then multidimensional matrix comparing that to every other definable variable about you?
Including whether or not you say you're looking for something long term, or serious... but you actually keep cycling through people?
These algos, these things... they know exactly to what extent you lie to yourself and others, and they weaponize that to keep people in a sort of optimal (for the app, not you), constant disappointment loop.
...
Everything digital is now way beyond 'if its free, you are the product'.
The model is now entirely attention, addiction based, and manipulating your emotions in as close to real time as possible is absolutely integral to all this.
People forget that over a decade ago, Zuckerberg said his dream was to be able to predict with high accuracy what any given Facebook user would post next.
Nearly a decade ago, Netflix CEO or some such stated 'our primary competitor is sleep'.
People largely do not realize the extent to which these corpo fucks have been running highly precise and targeted manipulation of every aspect of human behavior... all to drive goddamn ad revenue and market share, ie, entrench themselves as institutions the modern world is no longer imaginable without.
I'm just confused as to how there isn't a dating app that is better.
short answer:
Dating Apps/Sites are basically social media sites, they only really work via the network effect, by being so huge that they necessitate significant financial investment.
...
long answer:
A dating app is only broadly, mass appeal successful if it can scale to have a wide selection of people, users, ideally, in as many places as possible.
This requires a large amount of servers.
A large amount of servers requires a large amount of money.
A large amount of money requires investors.
Investors require as much profit as possible.
...
A conventional dating site/app, as we think of the big ones today... its a social media platform.
Just with a different, more constrained feature set, a different UI... but roughly similar levels of network infrastructure and overhead.
...
You could actually make a reasonable argument for running a non profit, or ... some kind of collectively owned and operated dating service that is restricted to say a city or small region, or maybe a neighborhood in a larger city.
(Indeed, many of the older ones kind of began this way, pitched more like a ... a club that you join and pay membership dues for, thats how they were marketed in the late 90s / early 00s... though these of course were largely actually privately owned, but the marketing angle was that of 'exclusive community')
The technicals of exactly how to do that, legally and financially, might end up being impractical though... and if the government is directly involved, well... 10, 20 years ago I would say thats a rather serious privacy problem, but at least in the US right now, I am sure Tinder will sell your info to a data broker who sells it to the FBI if they want to investigate you, so.... yeah.
The other obvious problem is that the best dating app is the one you use the least... so... some kind of unconventional payment structure would have to be figured out, to counteract this massive and glaring incentive conflict between app and user.
Maybe high upfront fixed costs to the user, but if you don't find a good match after a year, 75% gets refunded to you?
Not sure. Could be legal nightmare.
...
Other than that, privately owned and operated dating communities can work fairly well without huge server overhead... if they are precisely targeted at a pretty specific kind of people, be it a religion, or a bdsm community, or a specific ethnicity, who knows... those can at least theoretically work at a larger geographic scale, because that kind of scale doesn't also massively ramp up user count.
But there's nothing stopping them from being bought out if they get too big.
...
Bonus!
Job application / recruiting sites are also basically dating apps/sites.
Its just person vs job instead of person vs person.
Broadly, guys on dating sites have been flooding women with match requests for years now, women have been overwhelmed by the volume and believe they can be very picky.
Now replace 'guys' with 'job seekers', 'match requests' with 'applications' and 'women' with 'companies'.
Both scenarios result in wasteful amounts of energy going into 'match-making', which is horrendously inefficient.
You also had decent profiles where you could write more texts about you. That could give you an idea of who that person is. There is a difference between "Tea or Coffee? - Tea." and "Tea or Coffee? - I like green teas but also some black teas like assam. I sometimes bake scones to eat with the tea." A lit of modern apps don't even give you the option to show your personality more.
I met my husband on Plenty of Fish 7/8 years ago. This baffles me, they don't let you type your own content to show your personality? How are you supposed to get a feel for someone then?
Fetlife is like that too. “Find people with the same interests as you!”… select an interest: 120K people! Okay, let me filter by location? No. Filter by age? No. Filter by sex? Guess what, also No. So instead you have to hand scroll through all the entries. I don’t want to spend a lot of time connecting with someone with a common interest if they’re on the other side of the world.
I just got so sick of using the apps and their crappy interface. I can never remember if left is good, or right is good. Who designed that was a good idea?
The interface literally tells you as you do it which is which...
They are making a mentally ill frankenspecies.
Fuck me that's bad, last I used it was in 2019, and even then it wasn't fantastic.