'It's quite soul-destroying': how we fell out of love with dating apps

&gt; &quot;people are more magic in real life&quot;<p>I CTO&#x27;d a fairly successful dating site for 4 years. I think a lot of the critiques of dating sites&#x2F;apps miss the mark. The &quot;they only stay in business by keep you single&quot; sort of comments.<p>Instead, i think dating sites&#x27; issues are more fundamental. Thought experiment: write a dating profile for yourself in the 3rd person. Then have you 5 closest friends and family members each write one on your behalf. Now have everyone vote on which of the 11 profiles is the most &quot;you&quot;. Do you believe yours comes in first? How about top 5?<p>When we fill out profiles, we naturally try to highlight some parts of ourselves and hide others. Your friends and family see you as you present. Only you see yourself as you intent.<p>The result of this all is that our dating profiles are a limited, and often misleading, approximation of ourselves. Any matchmaking app is thus matching my &quot;Online Dating Approximation&quot; with your &quot;Online Dating Approximation&quot;. The hope is that if our approximations match, we can extrapolate us matching? Weak connection in my experience.<p>I think this is why Tinder and Bumble have had so much success with their frankly superficial model. At least the online vs reality is closer than more in-depth matching schemes. But we still hear tales of cat&#x2F;hat-fishing, so maybe they suffer the same issues.<p>None of the dating apps ive seen have really keyed into the &quot;monkey brain&quot; side of love. The subtle things that make us truly love a person. To be seen if any get there, but there is just no substitute for getting to know someone in person vs flipping through people online.

I have a theory that contemporary life causes many people great despair, relating both to dating&#x2F;relationships and career, because our culture is not very supportive or accepting of personal growth.<p>So, if you get off to a good start in your dating life and career from your late teens and early 20s, you get plenty of approval and validation and compounding success as you progress through life, and acceptance that you deserve the success you&#x27;re having (&quot;they were always a high achiever, ever since school days&quot;).<p>Whereas if you&#x27;re not in the top tier of &quot;chosen&quot; people and experience a few painful rejections and setbacks, you&#x27;re made to feel that&#x27;s just what you deserve and what you&#x27;re stuck with, and there&#x27;s not much you can do to improve your lot. I suspect this has become more of an entrenched belief since the discovery of evolution&#x2F;DNA, and the generally accepted belief that most of our life outcomes are predetermined by our inheritance.<p>I think the dating apps (and employment recruitment platforms&#x2F;techniques) intensify this further, by filtering based on a few simple characteristics, some of which really are genetically predetermined (height) and others that are downstream consequences of having had a blessed start in life (income&#x2F;education level&#x2F;job seniority&#x2F;state of health).<p>Society generally, including&#x2F;especially the dating&#x2F;employment spheres, don&#x27;t seem to offer much support for people who really sincerely trying to undertake a journey of personal improvement (outside of mainstream accepted practices like conventional fitness training and education). You&#x27;re just expected to be &quot;good to go&quot;. Someone who may have been dealt a rough hand in life but is trying very hard to improve themselves, including their social skills, their emotions, their health&#x2F;fitness, their career prospects - all of which will lead them to becoming better romantic partners over time - can find themselves getting little support and encouragement along the way, and indeed can get a lot of discouragement from some quarters (including friends and family members).<p>I think a lot about how the world would be better if more people were encouraged and empowered to go on long-term journeys of deep personal growth, and what kinds of social platforms, including dating and employment platforms, could emerge out of that and bring much more opportunity and satisfaction to people who currently feel the despair of being left behind.

In dating apps, the first approximation is that women rate men based on attributes that follow the power law (such as social status), whereas men rate women based on attributes that follow the normal distribution (such as looks, age etc.). The same dynamics applies to many animals when they choose their mates.<p>It directly follows that on these platforms, the attractiveness of men is much less evenly distributed than the attractiveness of women, but there is &quot;rich get richer&quot; or Matthew effect which skews the popularity of most men.<p>This point is almost never mentioned in such analysis. But that is the basis of the different experience average men and average women have on current dating market.

I&#x27;m so happy that I dated pre-dating app era, between 2005-2010. There were dating apps but not that mainstream. I walked up to my wife and her friend with some BS reason at a club, kept on the conversation and boom 10+ years together.<p>I&#x27;m average looking, she has a beautiful face and has been dancing since the age of 4. I&#x27;d have 0 chance with these kind of girls on dating apps. Absolutely 0.<p>Another good thing, that time social media have not yet screwed up people&#x27;s self esteem and that helped a lot -&gt; she has not overrated herself, I have not underrated myself.<p>We&#x27;ve been dating in person for a couple of billion years, we are hard-wired for that as body language tells a lot more in a fraction of a second than any made up profile text and over edited photos.

I&#x27;m pretty interested in Breeze as an alternative <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;breeze.social&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;breeze.social&#x2F;</a><p>* There&#x27;s no endless swiping. Users can only see a handleful of matches, each profile stays visible until users say yes&#x2F;no on each profile, and the profiles are only topped up twice a day.<p>* All chatting is in-person, which is much more human than trying to text online. If users match, they can&#x27;t chat. They both put down a deposit (about double the cost of a drink in a bar), pick a day &amp; time they&#x27;re avaliable, and Breeze automatically makes a reservation at a local bar (the first drink is free), or a park for a walk.<p>* Since dates require a deposit, and there&#x27;s only so many days in the week(!), and users can&#x27;t make new matches without first planning current matches, users don&#x27;t get overwhelmed with connections - the existing contacts are prioritised.<p>* They&#x27;re not owned by Match.com - which for me is a big plus! More disruption of their monopoly is a good thing.

Ivan Illich seems relevant, here:<p>&gt; As Illich saw it, the rise of universalizing social technologies — that is, institutions managed by strangers — transgressed the traditional bounds of diverse vernacular communities and harnessed human endeavor to a trajectory of limitless growth, creating a “radical monopoly” over the ways and means of living that blunted any alternative to industrializing the desires of consumer society. In the process, persons and communities alike were deprived of the practical knowledge to shape tools according to their own defined needs and choices. Robbed of such competence, they became servants to the logic of those institutions instead of the other way around.<p>&gt; His greatest insight was that when conviviality is swapped for productivity, monopolizing institutions that chart a singular path at mass scale become counterproductive to their original intent beyond a certain threshold.<p>&gt; In his book “Energy and Equity” Illich illustrated this point in terms all could easily understand. As anyone who has driven on a freeway would agree, individual mobility turns into collective congestion when everyone has a car.<p>From <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.noemamag.com&#x2F;a-forgotten-prophet-whose-time-has-come&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.noemamag.com&#x2F;a-forgotten-prophet-whose-time-has-...</a>

Darren Brown once had an interesting experiment, where he created a psychological profile and shared it with a broad room of people. Everyone agreed that it was a perfect approximation of their personality. ie. People don&#x27;t really have a sense of who they are. (The few that do, are exceptional and don&#x27;t need dating sites). Profiles are probably not the right artifact to use to determine a match.<p>Social cues will always be more valuable than personality, or kindness. For men, that is status and wealth and physical attractiveness. For women, it is beauty and age. Regardless if you like that or not, it may be what is missing in these utilities.<p>Further, I like how the Japanese make group dates. 3 boys and 3 girls go out on a date. Gokkon. Maybe this is something the West should consider. Safer, far more interesting, and allows people to broadly consider each other.

I don&#x27;t like dating apps (and I&#x27;m happy that I&#x27;m in a relationship and don&#x27;t need to use them).<p>I think it&#x27;s because I can&#x27;t flirt on cue. A dating app is a very clear social situation (like a singles night, or speed dating, ...) where both sides know what they are looking for (be it a relationship, sex, romance...). But you can&#x27;t &quot;fall with the door into the house&quot; as they say here. You have to navigate certain rituals of dating, you have to impress but but be natural, show interest but not too much, etc..<p>Contrast with how it worked before dating apps, you met people from your extended social circle. You had some non-romantic interaction first. There is a certain amount of ambiguity in the beginning. You can flirt and express interest without being on a formal date, and then ask them out. It can also be stressful and anxiety-inducing of course, but IMO much less than on the bazaar that is a dating app.<p>I think dating would work much better as a side-function of a regular social network app, than as a dedicated app (and I know quite some friends who met over the internet but not via dating apps). But alas, there is no business model there...

The dating app model has rarely worked, but it&#x27;s a fascinating thing that happened, and there should be more research into why these companies were so successful in peddling it.<p>Simply, it&#x27;s not workable if it has contributed to real success (happy ever after) occasionally, while simultaneously causing greater damage in other areas, like making cheating on existing relationships easier or discouraging meeting people in the old ways.<p>For instance, last I heard is that there&#x27;s a ratio of 10 to 1, men to women, on them. Necessarily, this isn&#x27;t published (to sell &quot;superlikes&quot; etc). Completely absurd setup.<p>But it speaks volumes about modern culture. That there&#x27;s been no education on the best ways to successfully meet a good life partner, honestly factoring in things like your rank, regarding attractiveness and socioeconomic status and so on.<p>The best model is most likely: maximising your meeting of friends of friends. But who&#x27;s out there touting that? Parents are asleep at the wheel.

Okcupid used to be really good, then they got bought out and turned into Tinder. Now it&#x27;s just a wasteland out there, especially for guys.

I met my wife on eHarmony after a few unsuccessful years on the apps. We have been happily married for 3 years. eHarmony was far better than any app but I can only attribute that to the fact that it is a paid for service with no free option, everyone there has to pay and that means people are more engaged and serious about a relationship.<p>It occours to me that the incentives are skewed. If the dating apps do a great job they lose users. This means the apps will (conciously or not) be designed to keep users using and that means, not finding a suitable partner. Even worse they actually put features that will help you find a match behind a pay wall, even more incentive to tantilise you but not deliver.<p>It&#x27;d be interesting to see a service that you only pay once you&#x27;re in a relationship with someone from the service. So the company only gets paid when they find good matches. It&#x27;d become really good at finding matches or die.

I have always said that commercial dating apps have the wrong incentives. We need a non-profit to create a dating app. I see this as a similar problem to signal or wikipedia, people don&#x27;t want to pay for those services.<p>I also think the app should severely limit the number of people you are exposed to and reduce the waste of time. I tried the friend section of those apps and that&#x27;s the only time I felt the sense of overwhelming with having too many likes. Both those goals are contrary to profit via ads.<p>IMO those apps are very similar to social media apps. We have studies that show they are not good for us the way they are currently structured as they just want to grab our attention for as much time as possible.

“People are so much more magic in real life.” - I agree with that wholeheartedly.<p>It’s wonderful to meet new people, whether you’re looking to find a partner or not. But some life situations make it easier to do that than others. I met the love of my life at Uni - she wouldn’t have given me a second glance on a dating app, but the environment of University allowed us to be friends, and then evolve into more.<p>How do you emulate the Uni vibe in “adult life” though, with thousands of people having lots of things in common that they can start chatting on,with activities involving people they know and don’t know that they can dip in and out of, and with parties where they can let go of inhibitions?<p>Yes, people are much more magic in real life, and oftentimes the magic happens from being in different situations with them.

As much as articles lament the alienating despair of algorithmically processed dating-app and social media culture, the popularity of these apps never declines. In fact, year after year they become more popular, even among those who claim to hate the apps, hate social media, and hate the way they&#x27;ve become a slave to a machine that commodifies their personhood.<p>Humans crave hierarchical signaling. Instagram, TikTok, Match group, the entire industry have invested millions of dollars into implementing every cutting edge brain-hack they can think of. They&#x27;ve nurtured in us a dependence on their contorted, amplified presentation of society and our sociosexual value. Year in, year out, just as the house always wins, the dopamine sink always leans in their favor.<p>It&#x27;s primally addicting to seek concrete quantifiers of status or worth: how many DM&#x27;s you get, how many likes, how many matches. As complex as the human social brain is, its measures of meaning can often collapse on single numbers because they signal something irreducible: just exactly how cool, hot, likable, valuable or important you really are. The end game of all gossip is to glean something close to these numbers, in one way or another. In real life there&#x27;s always layers of illusion and nuance, but online we are presented the truth, unflinchingly.<p>I think people really have to grapple with something often hard to accept: there&#x27;s no reason why the human social consciousness <i>has</i> to be good, ultimately kind, or benign. There&#x27;s a possibility that the essential elements of our psyches that apps and social media have exploited aren&#x27;t really all that pleasant when laid out in the open. Maybe all our whims and lusts can end up being very bad to many people through no fault of their own. Maybe there is an essential, evolutionary ugliness to human nature behind the façade of cordial, inoffensive pleasantries. In the end, we become miserable, because our mental heuristics have been granted power they never should have. Algorithmic bliss has allowed us to be far too human.

I feel like these apps are fundamentally opposed to having users form healthy relationships. The apps make money from searching, not finding.<p>I’m not very familiar with “the apps” but it seems like unless you are using grinder or tinder, someone trying to find a meaningful relationship and companionship would be a bad customer for dating apps, so they would want to both avoid those customers and even damage relationships in order to make more money.<p>Like how facebook and twitter make more money from angry, non-friends than from good friends connecting.<p>It does seem like a good problem for the “original internet” as there’s a lot of matching and filtering needed to present opportunities. But it’s hard to find communities based around a temporary status.<p>If I wanted to find a meaningful relationship, I’d probably want to be part of some large organization that has a section of the org for single people. So maybe a church or social club or something like that. But the organization would need to be huge to have a meaningful amount of people to make matches.

Most dating apps are owned by Match Group. Aside from being ridiculously expensive to get full functionality out of, their full functionality has misfeatures, bugs, and huge gaps of missing features.<p>Also, the premise of finding love online has been flawed from the start, so that doesn’t help.<p>Lastly, particularly in the US, body size and fitness&#x2F;health have become so bad that the visual-first approach that online dating is necessarily built upon has even less potential.

Everything we do online is soul-altering. The online world is a different place. Vastly bigger in some ways and ridiculously narrower in others. We are the guinea-pig generations. We rushed into it without much preparation and simply figure out what works and what not by trial-and-error, paying with our life coins.<p>What complicates things enormously is that these altered realities reallocate wealth and power. The mental and emotional health of users was not the first priority. But we are now past the first phase.<p>From social media and search to dating apps and everything else online, now people asking probing questions about how the new tech has been put to use and for whose benefit.<p>Will there ever be better &quot;dating apps&quot;. Its a good question. The answer will depend on if we ever harness the economics behind technology to server people rather than the other way around

Swiping killed dating apps for me.<p>It feels too final, too brutal, too spur-of-the-moment. Maybe these people are lovely, maybe they will change their profile and I will change my mind. What if they swipe yes for me and I miss out on meeting a wonderful person.<p>I&#x27;ve tried, but I just can&#x27;t do it. By forcing me into making a quick choice you have forced me into choosing not to choose.

How do people here even make time for dating in the first place? At least for me atm, doing part time graduate school, job, and interview prep, I feel so burned out after it that I don&#x27;t want to do anything<p>And I&#x27;m probably not even in as deep as some people here, some of this computer stuff is so ridiculously time consuming. I&#x27;m not even working on anything remotely hard, but still: how the <i>hell</i> do you make time? Without sacrificing your own projects?<p>It&#x27;s something I&#x27;ve been thinking about for a while now. How do all of the people maintaining all of this hard, important shit get to where they are and still manage to have some semblance of a life? Not only just maintaining the stuff, but learning all of the background necessary to get there

It&#x27;s not just the dating apps.<p>Things that require low effort are usually low quality.<p>There is nothing wrong with deciding some part of your life will be filled with low quality things. We can&#x27;t make efforts on every single parts of our life.<p>But if you do this for entertainment, and dating, and food, and the rest, your life is filled with bland yogurt.<p>Netflix is no substitution for a hobby. Ready-made meals are no substitution from cooking vegetables. Chats are no substitution for IRL human interactions.<p>It&#x27;s crazy we even have to say it, it should be obvious.<p>I guess it shows how much humans are biased toward quick rewards. It&#x27;s very hard to say no in a world of abundance of those.

I think the reason is more prosaic: The Dead Sea Effect.<p>People do meet partners on dating apps <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;bayarea&#x2F;comments&#x2F;17fr0hy&#x2F;anyone_who_successfully_met_someone_in_bay_area&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;bayarea&#x2F;comments&#x2F;17fr0hy&#x2F;anyone_who...</a><p>The majority of well-matched people rapidly exit. The population begins to trend to weaker participants. And the longer the duration the more unhappy and therefore weaker the participants become.<p>New dating apps capture representative populations and rapidly all the good participants exit.<p>Ultimately some of us suck at dating apps. The apps would be legitimately better without serial failures on them. I would have been better off in the real world, where I met my wife at work.

Found my partner via dating apps. So did most of my friends. I don&#x27;t think &quot;hey I just met you&quot; dating will ever be trending after COVID, #metoo and how everything is eaten up by digitalisation. Articles like these are just pissing against the wind.

I think they buried the lede a bit there:<p>&quot;The new rules of dating mean approaching strangers in public is more frowned upon than it was previously&quot;<p>I wonder if dating apps have helped promote this viewpoint to boost business?

The fact that apps are &quot;algorithmic doom barrels&quot; comes from unaligned incentives in many of them. &quot;The Apps&quot; reward continued engagement, not finding the best partner. That subscription money disappears if a longer term partner is found, so that&#x27;s obviously not the goal; regardless of what their marketing&#x2F;ad department says. &quot;Hook up&quot; Apps, somewhat align but are being be pushed on individuals looking for something else, leading to frustration, dissatisfaction and disillusionment.

I&#x27;m surprised I haven&#x27;t seen any push by a dating app to do the modern version of an old-fashioned matchmaker. Heck, it&#x27;d be a great space for AI buzzword stuff and not even all that unethical if LLMs can do a better-than-random success rate at matching up profiles.

What I find weird is how the Guardian always likes to blame &#x2F; crusade against (target, basically) anything in society except it&#x27;s readers.<p>&quot;Dating Apps&quot; are just another way to find and meet people.<p>If you have to continue to use the app you are either very bad at this -- or actually like something about the app, such as swiping profiles on a Tuesday after work to relax.<p>A third option is that people just don&#x27;t want to choose -- the perfect profile might be around the next swipe.<p>The dating apps THEMSELVES are not responsible for anyone&#x27;s lack of success in dating, though. That is up to each and everyone of us.

As a counterpoint to the other comments on here… I had a great experience with Tinder as a late 30s divorced single dad. I was able to date a different attractive women every night if I wanted to, and found someone I’ve really liked, and we have been together happily for 2.5 years now. It works so well because you get to see so many possible people, and can find a better match than any matchmaking algorithm or real life chance.<p>My take is that 99% of the men on there are immature man children whose life is a mess. I have many women friends and the guys they end up dating on Tinder, etc are a low bar- dress sloppy, no purpose in life, etc.<p>If you want a good partner you have to be one. An app can’t do it for you. Learn to be vulnerable and emotionally supportive, build a career that is interesting and has meaning to you, dress well with a unique sense of fashion, learn to cook well and eat healthy food, get fit, make friends and have fun hobbies. With all of that you will be happy even if single, but you will also be unusually attractive.

Perverse incentives may be at work as well — if these sites are successful in a traditional sense, the numbers of repeat customers will shrink. Growth in sales &amp; services are what investors want, &amp; the current model of shopping-for-a-date brings with it the dissatisfaction needed to keep people trying again &amp; again along with the temporary hope &amp; dopamine hits needed to keep them from giving up (though that will always diminish over time). The current model is conducive neither to happiness nor long-term relationship success.

It doesn&#x27;t help that all the dating apps get bought up by the same company. Almost feels like a space that needs a non profit to run it, so it can be focused on making good relationships rather than hawking subscriptions to desperate people.

I wonder why there isnt space in the market for a more text based service similar to the old OKcupid: a website that asks multiple mandatory questions and takes effort to build your profile (eg. list your favorite films, or books).<p>Men are unhappy with photo-based websites, because if they are not the top 20% looks they will receive very few likes. So for men the strategy is to like nearly every woman.<p>At the same time women are flooded by likes from men - and all they see are pictures and low quality chatter.<p>With a text based website that also gives recommendations: men would have a chance that someone even reads their profile, while women would only read profiles that interest them.<p>There is really no money in that since nobody wants to spend 30 minutes to setup a profile?

The site seems to be down now but mysinglefriend.com had a nice angle, you had to be recommended by other users.<p>Or what about the old fashioned match maker that knows all their clients personally?

One of the biggest problems is fake profiles. You can go through a batch, especially on Bumble or Tinder, and just swipe left and mutter “fake” non-stop.<p>This makes me believe the membership numbers are inflated with fake or marketing profiles to entice you to spend money.<p>OKCupid was one of the better ideas because if someone didn’t answer at least 100 questions, you could just skip them as probably fake.<p>I think meetups are the answer. Join activity groups that you’re interested in and just be yourself. Love will find you.

One major problem with the dating apps is that their search is terrible. Searching just doesn&#x27;t work how you want it to work. It gives way too many results that don&#x27;t fit your criteria. I think this is deliberate? They don&#x27;t want you to search, they want you to use their &quot;algorithmic&quot; matching. (This seems reminiscent of how social networks want you to use an &quot;algorithmic&quot; timeline rather than your own self-curated reverse chronological list.) For example, I live in a medium sized city, and I only want matches within the metro area, but the apps will give matches throughout the state and in a neighboring state, with no way to filter them out, as if I&#x27;m going to spend hours driving just for a date, and then start a difficult long-distance relationship. And I also got &quot;likes&quot; from way outside my geographical range. I got likes from other states and even other countries, WTF? The irrelevance is frustrating. It&#x27;s like trying to find a needle in a haystack.<p>And of course the ghosting is frustrating too. You manage to wade though the terrible search results to find someone who seems compatible, make the effort to write an intelligent, personalized message to them based on reading their profile, and then... nothing. It appears that a lot of people sit on the dating apps indefinitely for whatever reason, and they become &quot;black holes&quot; where no light ever comes out, while still clogging up the search results. If you have no feeling of urgency to meet people, then why bother being on the dating apps? The &quot;freemium&quot; model may be partly to be blame here, because it&#x27;s free to have an account forever, as long as you don&#x27;t use the &quot;advanced&quot; features.<p>I&#x27;ve seen it claimed that eHarmony is better about this, but I tried eHarmony, and it was absolutely not any better than the other dating apps. They all seem to be basically the same now, and are equally terrible.

This seems like the fear&#x2F;problems of dating apps are just another aspect of how modern communication systems are alienating us.<p>Social circles are indeed shrinking: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.americansurveycenter.org&#x2F;why-mens-social-circles-are-shrinking&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.americansurveycenter.org&#x2F;why-mens-social-circles...</a><p>I&#x27;ve read in multiple places about the tendency to seek out instant gratification on the phone instead of just allowing yourself to get bored, and seek out doing something with other people.<p>Relying on apps for finding a love connection seems like a facet of this somehow. Instead of spending the time around other people, building up a social circle, most just try to &quot;see what the app brings&quot; because they&#x27;ve just lost the ability to find connections other ways.

I found this modelling really good. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=x3lypVnJ0HM">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=x3lypVnJ0HM</a> TLDR: Once you have a two to one ratio of straight men to straight women. Men get matched 1&#x2F;2 as much, respond by lowering there standards and spamming women. Women start off with twice as many matches, but get choosier and match even less. Women feel overwhelmed and get chased off the apps. Men quit from not getting any interest.

Who was ever in love with dating apps? They were used because it was becoming impossible to meet people outside of them. People used them and loathed using them from the start. You would come up with stories together on how you &quot;actually&quot; met as it was embarrassing to say, &quot;a dating app&quot;.<p>The only people who enjoy using them in the slightest are people who see relationships as transactions and are looking for something specific: sex for the night - or a kid, but certainly not love. If no other avenues are available, dating apps seem like a useful tool.

Related: The Tyranny of the Marginal User [1]<p>A possible explanation on why dating apps suck.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37509507">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37509507</a>

A theoretical optimal dating app would make less money as engagement would drop off and the acquisition cost of customers would exceed the value that could be extracted from them.<p>The dating market is not efficient, it is a bit like a lemon market, and switching costs are vastly underestimated for a variety of reasons. It doesn&#x27;t help that people are readily encouraged to leave their partners by third parties with no skin in the game. I see it as a general multi-armed bandit problem with a exploration–exploitation tradeoff dilemma with pretty noisy rewards. If the switching cost was more accurately measured then people would naturally do less exploration and more &#x27;exploitation&#x27;. I think tradition helped find this balance with an emphasis of overestimating switching cost versus a natural tendency to underestimate switching cost (hope springs eternal) - tradition is a way of handing down the results of previous &#x27;exploration&#x27; done by others to a new generation so they don&#x27;t have to learn the population statistics independently from scratch and at great cost.

One of the things not touched here is “what’s the alternative?”<p>Yeah, we talk about touching grass and meeting people in real life. Have you noticed how hard it is to meet people in real life and form any kind of connection? Men are lonelier than ever because they have nowhere to go to meet people just for friendship - let alone romance.<p>There are a severe lack of third spaces for all of us to congregate at. People start suggesting “hobbymaxx, bro! Rock climb, raves, CrossFit!” But completely ignore that some people don’t have existing hobbies or interests that align with these suggestions. I love motorcycles and sports cars. I’ve done group rides and whatnot. It’s <i>all</i> dudes. There has never been even one woman who has shown up even with groups of 50. A lot of these other hobbies are completely swarmed with men as well and then you have the status element of it - which takes years of grinding to achieve. You’re not likely to meet someone and go on a date in your first month of CrossFit or rock climbing. Maybe after 5 years of going 3-5x&#x2F;week, establishing a name, and really getting involved in organizing and whatnot. Even then, might still just be too many dudes or it doesn’t attract the type of women you’re into! Hobbymaxxing advice is worthless for people who aren’t inherently interested in the activity and would do it anyway. It’s mostly people with survivorship bias that are advertising hobbies.<p>Our society is so atomized and individual. You can blame cars or whatever but even here in nyc, it’s hard to chat women up because they’re all getting increasing amounts of stranger danger. Creepy dude just hit on her last week in an impolite and aggressive manner making her feel really unsafe. Homeless dude just chased after her on the street a couple days ago. The guy manning the bathrooms at the club catcalled her while she’s going to the bathroom just now. This is a real example of a woman I know - not made up shit. If you had to deal with the level of harassment that attractive women get in places like NYC - you’d probably have your guard really high too. And only the most amazing of circumstances might ever lower their guard - which means your odds are real bad.<p>Point is: our culture sucks and the way we’re allowing a lot of men in real life to treat women is not helping women get out there more. We need to get rid of this violent homeless epidemic, get rid of these creepy aggressive dudes hitting on everyone and not taking no for an answer, and get rid of shitty people who just want to say stupid shit to any woman at all. I thought with me too at least two of these would be gone but not at all - especially in nyc. It doesn’t take much for most women to be traumatized and have severe dislike for going out btw. The woman I described is incredibly uncommon in her resilience.

I agree dating apps are soul-destroying, especially for those of us who want a serious relationship but don&#x27;t want children.<p>Here&#x27;s an alternative I saw today: Manifold markets launched a dating app, so markets crowdsource on which couple would last 6 months.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;manifold.love" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;manifold.love</a>

It seems like both genders in aggregate report dissatisfaction with the current state of dating apps.<p>It reminds me of this survey(<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pewresearch.org&#x2F;social-trends&#x2F;2020&#x2F;08&#x2F;20&#x2F;public-attitudes-about-todays-dating-landscape&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pewresearch.org&#x2F;social-trends&#x2F;2020&#x2F;08&#x2F;20&#x2F;public-...</a>). In the survey both genders reported that they felt it harder to date in todays landscape (2020) than in the past. And women reported it more often than did men.<p>Even if individual men and women enjoy having a lot of partners and a lot of attention. It does not seem that the majority of the population shares this opinion.<p>I wonder if this problem is intrinsic to dating app or to the breed of dating app that the match Group manages. Maybe finally applying anti-trust laws to them could improve it.

I’ve met amazing people through these apps but that was when I was younger and earlier in career. Nowadays, I hardly find time to respond to important texts let alone respond to some person 5km away about how my day went.

On the &quot;misaligned incentives&quot; thing, I wonder if you could have a dating site that works as follows:<p>- The user chooses a charity of their choice.<p>- All subscription charges are kept in &quot;escrow&quot;.<p>- If after two years the user has spent at least one year in a long-term relationship as a result of the app, the app gets the money.<p>- If after two years there&#x27;s no success, the money goes to the charity.<p>That way, the app has an incentive to get users into relationships that can at least last a year. But the user has no incentive to lie (they can never get the money back, for example).<p>Details might need tweaking, but you get the idea.

You can&#x27;t get good stuff without putting in the effort. Period.<p>If you want a successful dating life, you need to put in the effort to get to know people and build relationships. If you want to eat healthy, you need to put in the effort to cook and meal prep. If you want to have a fulfilling life, you need to put in the effort to pursue your hobbies and interests.<p>It&#x27;s easy to get sucked into the world of instant gratification, but it&#x27;s not worth it in the long run. The things that require the most effort are usually the most rewarding.

My single friends tell me the dating apps are way too expensive. I think if these apps were only five dollars a month or less, they would get much more traction.

It&#x27;s funny to think of the Stranger Things guy (David Harbour, had to look it up to place a name to face) on a dating app but good for them.<p>In my opinion people put too much pressure on dating apps, I&#x27;ve thought them of a way to just meet people you may not come across in day-to-day and who knows what will happen. Have a pretty long-term close friend I met on a dating app, we were never romantically involved but am happy we met.

I found my current partner of 2 years on bumble. I was on the site for a month.<p>I sometimes wonder if people just have too higher expectations, waiting for &#x27;the one&#x27;. Relationships are hard. You have to work through differences, you can&#x27;t expect to find someone where differences are absent.<p>I&#x27;m not pro marriage per se, but I think we need more, work on the relationship you have, rather than ending it and looking for something better.

Just to say the obvious…dating apps have a massive incentive problem.<p>If two people get matched on the app and get married, they “churn” out of the dating app.<p>Dating apps are structurally incentivized to help people go on lots of dates (MAU++!) but NOT to help them get married.<p>We shouldn’t be surprised when people on apps find themselves in a seemingly endless cycle of dates which go nowhere.

The writing style, especially the introduction anecdote is so off putting I could barely stomach the article.<p>However , I agree with the sentiment of most readers that the problem with dating apps seems to be the quantity &#x2F; quality problem——without being able to accurately portray quality on most of these platforms.

The majority of my friends met their better&#x2F;other halves at the office. But now the in-person office culture is far less. From a pandemic keeping us physically distant to this current stay-at-home office worker, seems like some sort of phone-based option is where we&#x27;re at now.

At this point dating apps have such a broad influence over society that I&#x27;m surprised that there&#x27;s not even a mention of gov regulation.<p>I don&#x27;t want the fine technocrats that brought us cookie banners to exert their control, but some more transparency for the public should be mandatory.

Reading this and the comments here make me so glad I got married before online dating became (mostly) the defacto standard. I have a lot of sympathy for folks who have to deal with it because it sounds extra hard to date nowadays (not that it was ever truly easy).

Dating apps are great if you like finding serious partners or hookups that way. Find the one that suits you. Yes they all have different flavours and yes it does take work to make them work for you. Go for it!

AI can solve this problem very well I predict. It asks you a series of deep questions about your personality and values and then goes searching for matches for you. No swiping.

&gt; At least the online vs reality is closer ...<p>&quot;Filters&quot;. Also known as &quot;electronic makeup&quot; or &quot;automatic photoshop&quot; makes a severe mockery of that though.

The reductionist argument is that everyone wants to feel &#x27;good&#x27;, and that life is solely is about chasing a chemical high from natural dopamines, endorphins, oxy, etc that are produced by the body.<p>Both males and females want the hottest, wealthiest and most interesting person they can pair up with, regardless of their own attributes.<p>To state the obvious - people who are ugly, fat, poor and boring (as in way below average) have it rough, as they may not be chosen as a long term partner by someone they consider ideal or even acceptable.<p>For those people, single is better than settling.

I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s the fault of the apps. I think it&#x27;s US culture being very money focused because there is no safety net for people. You&#x27;re always 2 weeks from being homeless. So women naturally adapt to the situation.<p>I&#x27;m using Bumble and Tinder in Croatia and in just 2 months I&#x27;ve met two amazing down to earth women.<p>The apps reflect the culture of where they&#x27;re being used.

I cannot begin to express how dumb most comments are in this thread.<p>It&#x27;s simply dumb to believe that you can change the way of living which was going on for all of human history and still have people undisturbed, without friction with their very biology, and in peace.<p>Humans don&#x27;t evolve in a century or two.<p>This doesn&#x27;t only apply to relationships either. Cities, technology, everything.

Maybe it&#x27;s not the apps, maybe it&#x27;s just the users?<p>Let me know when tech turns everyone into models

Ya gotta put yourself out there. Get some evening hobbies that get you out of the house.

One element of dating apps that breaks it: it requires no bravery and no effort to approach a girl. So the dynamic is broken from the very first second and it&#x27;s fairly difficult to fix.

I have not used dating apps myself (have a single partner for 15y+ and generally was always meeting romantic interests through friends), but ~half of my friends got their partners through Tinder 5-10y ago. They were very happy with it - though this was in Europe, not in a tech hub.<p>Two of my close friends who don&#x27;t have partners and still use Tinder said that in the last few years, they became useless unless you are a spending whale (enshittification). Full of bots, full of people keeping to make new accounts to take advantage of boosts at the beginning of the profile, needing to spend money to get <i>any</i> matches after this start period. Basically bait-and-switch model and pay-to-win, but with romantic life and self esteem - sounds absolutely cruel.

I would rather have an app that would help me deal with the lows of a marriage - trust me, EVERY married couple has those.

I love the idea of dating apps.<p>You are exposed to such a great and infinite pool of potential partners that you would not be able to get in real life, especially in SF Bay Area. Which changes the problem from - how to meet someone, to a better problem - how to filter out those that you definitely do not want to meet.<p>Even more, it is not replacing your real life meetups but compliments them.<p>My issue with dating apps is that the number of matches is large and all of them are very similar, hence the challenge is how to filter properly.<p>As many people here, I love 10 year old version of OKCupid where you needed to fill a lot of information, answer questions and invest in the profile in general.<p>Even if we forget about this extra information, fact that person invested in filling the profile told me that she was serious about meeting someone which is a strong signal in itself.<p>I believe that online dating industry is a great achievement of the humanity as it drastically expanded our choice of partners, but existing implementation is waiting for the disruption.<p>Personally, I would love if dating apps added:<p>1. Tags for conversations, similar to labels in gmail.<p>2. Ability to search - when you have hundreds of conversations, it is hard to find one that you are interested in.<p>3. Option to add more information to profile, say I loved questions at OKCupid.<p>4. Id and age verification. Feels like every second lady lies about her age. (One my female friend who is 49, uses 36 in online dating. I do not think that such a difference is that common, but still)<p>5. Somehow force people to use photos that are less than a year old. Very unpleasant come to a date and meet a girl that is not even close to be as fit as she is in her pictures. They are also very surprised when you do not go on a second date and, I suspect, complain to their girlfriends that &quot;online dating is not working for them&quot;. I do not blame them - misleading with photos is so common -&gt; she needs to mislead to be in that competitive market (I was told that men lie about their height as well). I believe this could be addressed or at least mitigated on the platform level. (Being fair - having video chat before the date helps to address this issue to some extent)<p>6. Showing stats. Communication, flirting, building comfort in online dating is a special skill, quite different from doing the same in real life:<p>[6a] It is happening in asynchronous way<p>[6b] Information channels are limited - you do not have voice, intonations, appearance, body language, face expressions, in the beginning it is just text<p>[6c] As conversation may be stalled or end at any moment both sides increase odds by having many conversations happening at the same time.<p>these limitations change everything and force to learn new communication skills from scratch.<p>If we were shown metrics like: yours and average in your geography and age range stats for open rate, reply rate, length of the conversation, number of matches, number and percent of conversations that lead to a meeting (Hinge these days asks if you met in person.), etc it would help people see what their limitations are and focus on addressing them - same as in sales as sales and online dating are similar in many ways.

Two things, first, while I think monogamy is probably good for society in that it gives average men&#x2F;women a chance to meet each other when all the most desirable mates are taken off the market, in actual fact I think it also causes a bunch of these problems. People in their 20&#x27;s are told &quot;find someone to spend the rest of your life with&quot; so its this super risky high stress situation rather than being a &quot;lets hang out until we are tired of each other&quot;. Partially forced by western civilization largely trying to make little atomic families rather than making child rearing a community&#x2F;extended family effort where a parent can continue to fully participate even if they don&#x27;t happen to be sleeping with the child&#x27;s other parent. So, IMHO marriage as this big social function is really dumb, and unneeded for two people to shack up. These days its largely a &quot;we are going to make a family party&quot;, except when it isn&#x27;t. And given humans seem to be a serially monogamous species, it probably should take that into account.<p>Anyway, part two of this is sorta related, but the attitude of the lady in the wheelchair I find stunningly toxic and lacking any kind of self awareness. I have a feature that everyone always notes and asks about too, but long ago I realized that people rarely if ever were looking to be rude or prying or anything like that. Its largely a conversation point, but particularly around dating, it might seem a bit forward to ask if she is sexually functional, but no more so than questions like &quot;do you want kids&quot;. Sure it might be better saved for some future date, but I&#x27;m guessing two things. First very very few people are going to be looking to date&#x2F;etc someone who isn&#x27;t sexually functional, and its probably a good idea to clear the air on something like that early, but also I suspect few people ask it in such a crass way. Which is suggested by the wording where the woman infers that is what they are asking and blocks them.<p>So, i&#x27;m guessing few people are trying to denigrate her, they just are touching on a subject without their brains fully engaged to the idea she might be sensitive to that topic. Or maybe some of them are just trying to get to know her and understand her situation in life from an empathetic stance. Which means the problem is really her sensitives. People are expressing interest in her despite her problems, and to block them because they dared ask a question is what is toxic. Unless your goal is to be single until you find someone who isn&#x27;t a bit clumsy everyone needs to give potential partners a bit of slack. Even without the wheelchair its impossible to find that perfect person, people screw up, etc. Excluding people with negative traits they are unwilling&#x2F;incapable of fixing is one thing, but that isn&#x27;t displayed by a question that many people would consider one of the more important parts of dating.

&quot;enshitification&quot;

Turns out, that capitalist enterprises that rely on connecting people sexually over subscriptions over mate match have a ficudiary reason to keep from long relationships from forming.<p>A long relationship is a cancelled subscription. So they would inevitably search to find hot flings that do not work out in the medium or long term.<p>To do otherwise would be to limit the pool of people who pay.<p>Yet another strike against capitalism - it&#x27;s not about solutions, but rent seeking behaviors.

The people are a way worse problem than the apps. I&#x27;ve gotten hundreds of dates and three sort of relationships.<p>And they all fucked me over.

&gt; <i>The 55-year-old social worker now spends her weekends on the dancefloors of illegal.... “Recently, I met a younger man with an amazing body. It was probably the best sex of my life.”</i><p>In dating app you can filter out old people. So this old person would not have a chance there!<p>Her only chance is in night club, where she can rape drunken guys! People who drink alcohol can not give a consent! And that guy wery likely regrets it, when he wakes up in the morning!