54
votes
For a decade, apps have dominated dating. But now singles are growing tired of swiping and are looking for new ways to meet people – or reverting to old ones
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Title
- 'It's quite soul-destroying': how we fell out of love with dating apps
- Authors
- Robyn Vinter
- Published
- Oct 28 2023
- Word count
- 2445 words
Imo, the products all got enshittified to the point it feels annoying and laborious to use them, and that is a deathblow when what you're doing is already loaded with a fuckton of pressures and uneven experiences.
My example is okc. I used that from when it started, off and on, until about two years ago. In terms of being able to meet folks, that never really changed - I can consistently meet people and go on dates, and sometimes those folks end up being truly wonderful. What did change, was that my negative experiences were exacerbated by the fact of how annoying the app became to deal with. A lot of functionality is behind a paywall, functionality you used to have for free. You can't easily find people who match with you if you're not paying for it, and the pricing fucking sucks (all options are recurring payment plans). It serves ads all over and interrupts you with them. And that includes those especially shitty ads that look like parts of the app.
Then you add all the usual shit of dating online, and at least for me the conclusion is simple - I'm just gonna head out and do this on my own. Meeting people IRL is not easy but it's a hell of a lot nicer than "convince this person you are who you say you are and then they'll ghost you, do you want to buy medical supplies?" I come out of the former with new friends more often than not. From the latter I get worse than nothing.
It really went downhill when they got bought up by match group. Which is the common factor in pretty much every dating app.
Dating apps make money off of your loneliness. They have a financial incentive to make sure you don’t find a partner.
Dating apps went from being a matchmaking system to the commoditization of women for a market of desperate men.
The user population statistics alone make them an unlikely place to find a good match for the average person, then add on top of that all of the evil dark patterns the apps employ to keep people at their lowest self esteem and try to force them to pay to even be seen by the people they swipe on.
In other words, a scam. This should be illegal, but Capitalism. Imagine if companies/individuals worked to make life better for others rather than attempting to fulfill insatiable selfish desires like greed, then dating apps and apps in general would actually compete with one another to offer better services.
Oh well, this is moot considering AI is going to obliterate these dumb apps in the near future, especially the open source and free models.
Ya know, I have wondered off and on how difficult it would be to thoroughly outcompete the big dating sites at least in terms of match quality with a non-profit, preferably FOSS competitor. Ask lots of questions, collect lots of feedback about the experiences that past matches generated (i.e. "you matched with this person - how did it go? Why didn't you end up happy ever after?"), then churn all of that through a big old neural network, and out the other end you hopefully get a function that genuinely prioritizes the right things - not corporate profits, but people's happiness.
I'm not single enough nor do I have the right skill set to actually go for this, but if anyone needs help torturing data for such a project, I'd be interested.
I’ve been thinking this recently too. I have the skill set to assist in the building of such a platform but the non profit/business side of it is a black box to me. I’d have more than zero interest in joining this kind of team
It sounds like you just want a matchmaker with a computer database honestly!
I'm sure it's doable. I think the problems of these apps come more from the business model than anything else. Things like okc probably should have been paid products from the jump, but if they were they couldn't have grown the way they did. MatchGroup kept with the model, and here we are.
I think it ought to have a short-answer question worded something like "is there any way in which you are a statistical outlier?", which could be searched for keywords by either the software or manual operator, then used to influence match results. It'd be neat if people could meet over "weird" stuff they have in common, like going barefoot everywhere.
Something open ended like that could, I think, work better than old OKC's endless questions (though I did appreciate the math and sequencing ones it offered).
I swore off dating apps when the 'enshittification' got to be too much. You're right, they paywall most of the features, and a not-insignificant amount of the profiles appear on their face to be fakes. I've never had a good experience with OKC, Plentyoffish or Bumble, which seem to be the big 3.
You forgot Tinder the big one. People consider Hinge to be decent
I tried Tinder for all of a day. It's a cesspit.
It's a matter of skewed incentives. Someone looking for a relationship might pay for a dating app until they find a relationship, but then they'll stop. A success story is someone who stops paying the company. So if the company wants to have strong and growing revenues, then need to find ways to make sure people pay as much as possible for the service without actually ever succeeding at finding a relationship that would cause them to stop paying for a membership. Does that mean that it's not worth paying for? Not at all. But because of the pressures on the company no one can trust that they're going to try to make sure that people are successful as quickly as possible.
How do you know which method they are using? The one that keeps people paying, or the one where people stop paying and tell others of their success? It's not exactly like finding lasting relationships is something that happens right away, success is hard to obtain in general and can be hard to measure compared to the alternatives.
Where for-profit exists with incentives that don't align with your own, if you can't prove which ones are aligned with your incentives, then it makes sense people would rather turn to non-profit options, because there's far less possibility of misaligned incentives and in the event that they are, there's likely to be less power behind it if the misaligned incentive doesn't get amplified by a cycle of increasing revenue.
I am somewhat in agreement with you that the non-profit option likely can't happen at the scale people are imagining, because it does have costs to make an app that hits all the criteria people expect, especially regarding removing bad actors and trying to ensure safety of people using it. So I'm with you in regards to thinking that such an app has little chance of success because of funding issues, but I think it makes complete sense why people are drawn to it when you consider what I said above about for-profit ones.
I wasn't saying "quality apps should be free". I was saying that what was offered got taken away, which is one more piece of straw on the camel's back.
I wouldn't mind paying for it if it improves the quality -- although that doesn't hold for everyone, ad-free subscriptions for services like YouTube, newspapers, etc., from what I can tell get rarely used by people in general, and companies love to chase advertising revenue anyway (and the most lucrative eyeballs to chase for ads are the ones who would opt for ad-free).
But for me the main thing would be trusting that its actually worth it. I've tried the existing dating apps, and except for OkCupid circa the early to mid 2010s, I definitely do not want to give them any money. The service would have to cross a special bar.
On the other hand, that already did apply to matchmaking services before apps took off -- you would pay a matchmaker, and they would find other clients that were good fit and match you together.
Maybe these apps got a lot worse because I got 2 relationships out of Tinder (including the current one, with the mother of my son) and good experiences in between. The last time I used it was shortly before the pandemic started. I don't think I'm that handsome, but I did have some good pictures. It certainly helps that I'm flexible and don't really have a "type".
Or maybe I'm a Tinder wizard. I do remember it was a lot of work, but finding someone is difficult IRL too. I had realistic expectations.
I'm not based in the US, though. Maybe that's a US thing.
As someone that just got off of them, the apps suck, but I don't think they suck because of the way they're designed, they just suck because dating in general sucks, and dating complete strangers who you have zero connection with sucks even more.
When you date a friend of a friend, you already have a ton of common ground. Same goes if you meet someone through college or work. You also both have a pretty strong incentive not to come off as a complete asshole, even if you don't care about the other person's feelings at all (which we've found a lot of people don't).
Even with all of those incentives, dating still sucks. Its stressful to feel that you're being judged about whether you're worthy of another date or not, fretting about whether this person is actually compatible with you, whether you're really attracted to them or just lonely, whether you actually could get along with them long term.
If you add in the fact that people online are complete strangers that you only have a few lines of text to go off of, and who can just disappear on a whim, and the fact that the gender ratio is so skewed, and its no wonder the experience is truly awful.
For what it's worth though, I am a man in his mid 30s that met the most amazing woman ever a few months ago, who I almost instantly and mutually fell in love with, and who I will almost certainly marry, so they do work once in a blue moon.
Exactly the same here. I got together with my wife back in 2010, around when the dating apps were starting to gather a little steam but for the most part people met the old-fashioned way.
After listening to many of my single peers' stories over the last decade, I'm incredibly grateful I never had to wade into the shitty situation that is online dating.
I feel like I got very lucky. I met my SO via OKCupid about a decade ago. So it was right in the "golden age" of online dating.
It had reached critical mass so it was never weird when we mentioned we met online. I have some older friends that met online in the 90s and for a decade had people look at them weird when they said they met online.
My time was also right before the start of the move toward paid services. I have a number of friends that have just given up using online dating apps because they are constantly trying to get you to pay. I'm sure that's pushing a lot of people away.
But I also think a large part of it is that people were cooped up in their houses because of COVID and just want normal human contact. So even people who were formerly a bit shy might be willing to go out and meet people in the real world.
Met my wife on OKC back in 2007. Even then it was still pretty "weird" to meet and date people online and I was reticent to meet her, even though we'd been chatting on...AOL or something for a long time prior.
Which is what seems to be missing now. We weren't necessarily looking to hook up, but I commented on a post she had made and it blossomed into chatting online frequently and then meeting in person. It seems so quaint and slow paced compared to how it goes today.
I was on it about 2005 and to me it seemed like a place of desperate people mostly looking for a hookup and not very many seriously looking for a long term relationship, which is what I was seeking. Although it was slightly better than Plenty of Fish which I mostly saw as entertainment, and had little to do with serious relationship seekers. I attributed that to the fact they were free, and basically you got what you paid for. Internet dating was fairly new, and according to my kids, it was only for weird people who couldn't get a date in real life lol.
I tried a couple of other paid sites and found that having a paid site culled out a large number of the 'not so serious' and shrank the pool considerably. And I did meet and go on a lot of coffee dates with quite a few interesting women.
But I gotta admit, it was damn exhausting. It felt like a second job and there were several times I just paused for awhile because it just seemed like this endless stream of one off dates that were going nowhere.
And then I met my wife online. Actually she found me, and we hit it off by messaging and phone calls and three weeks later I drove 500 miles to meet her - and after 5 years of dating we've been married for 13 years. It made it worth all the work, but damn, I have total sympathy for anyone who has to wade through dating apps in search of real love. Its not for the faint of heart.
For me I think a lot of things go wrong when meeting people through blind dates that are partially arranged by an algorithm that has its own motives. Not unlike how many things go wrong in a body when it isn’t exercised, we throw the baby out with the bath water by moving to the convenience of online dating. On its face it can seem like a good replacement, but I slowly realized there were many things missing that I needed in the getting-to-know-you phase. I think it must be possible to design a dating app that would avoid these issues. I think game theory could help (if it’s mixed socialization, making friends, and dating then the expectations are more flexible). Or even just making it a directory of people with no random swipe feed.
I kind of wonder what it would be like if a dating site would set you up as blind penpals at first and then only show you details after a number of conversations.
It wouldn't get off the ground.
OKCupid, before it was acquired by Match Group and was still run by a bunch of nerds, ran a "Love is Blind" experiment where many profiles had their pictures blacked out.
They turned the lights back on a few days later.
Unsurprisingly, many conversations stopped dead in their tracks.
Yeah I think you do need to start with some photos. But maybe try to recreate the in-person experience where all you know is how each other look and also maybe one shared interest.
"This is <person>. Here is how they look. Both of you like <hobby>. You also both work in <sector>"
I think the dating profile as a resume pattern is negative, and I say that as someone that doesn't feel like his "resume" is bad. But giving just the minimum info to start a conversation would be better. I also think it's critical that a dating app has plausible deniability built in (that's the game theory aspect). Sometimes I've thought a girl was interested in me but it turns out she's not single and the invitation to some event wasn't what I thought. Those incidents have consistently turned into friendships. When doing online dating and there's not the right chemistry I have never seen that turn into a friendship, even though we share a hobby and live in the same area. I think the explicit nature of online dating makes it harder to do that transition. But the range of ambiguity in the real world allows for course corrections.
I'd much rather gain a friendship with a short awkward period where I realize I was mistaken than spend a couple hours meeting someone who I'll never talk with again.
This was basically the idea of Lex for a while. It worked quite well actually, just simple personals.
Of course, then Lex decided that having a nice thing wasn't enough and they had to grow at all costs, so now it sucks. But I think the market is definitely interested in a personals app. If you think about it, the way people use Twitter as a dating site is essentially that.
I'd also recommend decoupling it from 'dating.' The core problem we want to solve is loneliness. Meeting people as an adult straight man is hell. Meeting people as an adult straight woman is a different kind of hell, but still hell nonetheless. If you're queer it's a little less bad but it's still deeply isolating, especially if you can't drive or are disabled or poor. What we actually want is a way for people to find people to hang out with, and then those friendships can blossom into relationships if the people are compatible.
I'm essentially saying I want tildes for meeting people. A nonprofit run by a group of people who actually want to stop loneliness and not just make a lot of money off it. This is something I've had some interest in doing for some time, essentially craigslist personals but properly moderated. The really hard part is there's basically no way to make sure someone is actually decent short of an in-person vibe check, and that's obviously not something that scales.
I've managed to find a social group of ~50 people in San Francisco. It took a while but after I started using my baking skills to make friends there I started getting invites into all of these different events.
I think there are a few key things needed to not be so lonely:
Oh yeah, you can definitely work around it. I'm pretty happy with where my social life is now, but it's taken a ton of work to get there, and I wish it was easier. We all know why; I just wish there was an existing solution.