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Dating Apps Are Dying
(time.com)
Dating apps never really served their purpose. They killed themselves.
I met my wife on a dating app, but it was over 20 years ago now. I suspect that like everything they all have evolved to capture your eyeballs as much as possible. Back when I used them, they were about meeting people, they hadn’t yet gamified them with the swipes and so forth.
So, not surprised, a little sad to hear it even, since I can’t imagine being a young person and trying to meet new people these days. Then again, as an aspiring Luddite these days, I hope people find a way to connect in real life.
Good. Dating apps have never worked for me, and maybe this is because I'm demisexual, but I'm just never able to feel a connection online and I end up swiping left on everyone, and I'm pan so that's a lot of people.
"Monopoly fucks up the entire market, news at 11."
Glad I finally am in a position where I'm not on the apps (knock on wood, etc). I was getting dates but I could always tell it was in spite of their best efforts.
And even the person I'm with now, I feel like the app algorithm thought we'd be like an 80%. On paper it doesn't seem like it'd be a long term fit- i have a cat, she has a dog. I like a lot of metal, she likes jam bands. Lot of room for the algorithm to predict we'd have a few dates and then it wouldn't work out.
And as someone else said, most of them are owned by Match group. Even the myths of capitalism require competition for products to be good. Match should be broken up.
I married my wife the year before tinder was first created. I've watched other friends struggle with the apps. I personally experienced it after we briefly experimented with an open relationship. It's a fucking nightmare out there.
I met my wife on tinder 4 years ago
Curious to know which app it was. My partner and I have been together for 12 years now thanks to the og OKC.
This was Hinge, which is owned by Match Group (who own okcupid and many others). It's the least bad, I found, but that is extremely faint praise.
I used to use OKCupid way back. It used to be better. I'm pretty sure you could search. Like you could just type in "Star Trek" or "Dark Souls" and find people who had that on their profile. Nowadays you just take what the algorithm gives you.
We met pre-Match OKC. Glad I don't have to go through all that again.
All of them being opened by a single money grubbing company, which has enshitified them to an accounting degree has not helped
That and who can afford the apps nowadays? Not me.
accounting
squints eyes not sure if typo or not
Also opened instead of operated, so likely autocorrect.
Are they? All my friends in their 30s have more than one app. Or had it, when they were single.
What has really been dying for quite some time is "third spaces". That's what we need to get back really, beyond dating. Just plain socializing and enjoying togetherness.
What they mean is that dating apps have been enshitified to the point that most of them no longer function.
I used dating apps on and off for the best part of 10 years when I was single I never got a single meaningful match. They simply do not work.
You have to follow rules 1 and 2.
The point of the app isn't to get you dates, it's to get you to use the app so they can sell your data.
If you get into a relationship and delete the app, they've lost a customer.
they've lost a ~~customer~~ data source
The system only works with competition, but as we stopped enforcing anti trust and anti competitive laws in any meaningful way, the same company owns most of the sites, and is in a shittrust with the rest to all maximize revenue instead of competing.
You do have to use them correctly. I know a lot of people who use them irresponsibly, who don’t have the emotional intelligence to understand how the experience is going to be different(and therefore manage their emotional expectations*), and who match with way too many people for basically nothing while denying others over trivial things.
*You should be very into people and they should be into you, but how crushes develop from online dates is simply fundamentally different. You will likely not get the same “oh my god who is that?!” moment from someone you’ve already spoken to and who you know already wanted to go on a date with you.
It's fascinating how different women's experiences with these stupid things are than men's...
How so?
I'm a man who originally met women on these apps, but after a certain point everybody seemed to be a bot and the app seemed to be completely gamified, even when I used paid apps. Other people might have different experiences.
From what I understand, women are deluged with mobs of low-effort fuck boys and men are mostly ignored, which creates a feedback loop where men swipe on anything just for the hope of a match, which only makes things worse.
It's really fascinating from a systems perspective. But it used to be better before enshittification, in my limited experience. The reality is that quickly finding a new partner you are ideally matched with is the very last thing these companies want you to do.
Well duh, they earn money when you use their app. And you stop using the app if it does what it's supposed to. Finding the love of your life is the worst possible thing to happen for the company since they lose you as a customer
One of my friends, who is a woman, once showed me her dating app to show me why she found it so exhausting. I tell you, I'm ashamed of my fellow males. She got so many cheap messages from horny guys, to the point where she found the app useless.
For me, last time I used a dating app, I found it very hard to strike up a meaningful conversation with my matches. It was like I had to carry the whole conversation and they took forever to respond. So in that retrospect, it might be why some guys don't put in much effort when contacting women. But most of the massages my friend showed me, where absolutely just mouth breathing horny guys.
My last runthrough with the apps, I'd carefully read everyone's profile and craft an interesting introductory message. It took quite a bit of time and was rarely rewarded with a reply, much less a conversation, much less a first date. My messages got shorter and shorter until eventually I was just mass swiping. And, just as far as a use of time goes, if all that matters is a woman likes your profile, it's more efficient to roboswipe and filter the women who match back.
Also, the emotional toll of serially declaring "I like you" and asking "do you like me?" only to be greeted by rejection after rejection is pretty devastating.
Anyway, very happy with my current girlfriend whom I randomly ran into at a store while looking for an accordion.
Anyway, very happy with my current girlfriend whom I randomly ran into at a store while looking for an accordion.
This could be good for at least a Hallmark movie.
And the grand gesture is me playing Billie Jean outside her engagement party to the business mogul?
No, he did Weird Al's another one rides the bus on accordion outside her window, it was so romantic.
it could be worse. she could have gone on a date with one and they say something really sad like "all the women on there just want sex. I want something meaningful"
oh honey....you have been hitting up all the bots.
there is a point where most people go "this might be a scam" but there is a special few that go so far to give it a whole backstory.
quickly finding a new partner you are ideally matched with is the very last thing these companies want you to do.
Exactly. That's the gamification. They want to keep you grinding against bots and employees, otherwise they won't make money.
EDIT:
I'll add that men are probably the customer here, and that might make women seem like the product, the company can actually swap out real women for bots and employees, making real women obsolete to the business model of dating apps.
Oh, men are definitely the customers. There was a website with a pornstar backer... Madison something or other. It was billed as a place to meet horny married women looking to have an affair--just sex, no attachment. It got hacked and, surprise surprise, it was entirely men talking to bots.
Edit:
Annalee Newitz, editor-in-chief of Gizmodo, analyzed the leaked data.[46] They initially found that only roughly 12,000 (0.22%) of the 5.5 million registered female accounts were used regularly.[47][48] The vast majority of accounts had been used only once — the day they were registered. Newitz also found that many women's accounts were created from the same IP address, suggesting there were many fake accounts. They found that women checked email messages very infrequently: every one time a woman checked her email, 13,585 men checked theirs. Only 9,700 of the 5.5 million female accounts had ever replied to a message, compared to the 5.9 million men who would do the same. They concluded, "The women's accounts show so little activity that they might as well not be there."[47] In a subsequent article the following week Newitz acknowledged that they had "misunderstood the evidence" in their previous article and that their conclusion that there were few females active on the site had been based on data recording "bot" activities in contacting members. Newitz confirmed that Ashley Madison had created more than 70,000 female bots to send millions of fake messages to male users. Still, they note that "we have absolutely no data recording human activity at all in the Ashley Madison database dump from Impact Team. All we can see is when fake humans contacted real ones." They noted that the site seemed to keep track of human-to-human contact but that the Impact Team had not released this data.[49]
this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2026
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