New US lawsuit claims dating apps designed to turn love seekers into addicts

Match having a monopoly over the dating industry is problematic, worse because they gamify all of the apps in the same way.

I could write a book on how dating apps should be designed. They’ll all fail though because:

1. If you charge for an app, nobody will use it.

So all the apps use this elaborate conning system to goad users to pay exuberant app fees. It’s the classic whaling tactic that’s become the norm of the enshittification trend. It’s easier to convince one person to spend $20 than 20 people to spend $1.

So if you’re not already familiar, here’s the technique all the apps use:

1. When you initially sign up your profile is boosted in visibility, so you get a lot of inbound likes.
2. You won’t be able to see these inbound likes unless you pay for the app subscription. This is the first grift to get you to pay.
3. After about two weeks your profile visibility is throttled. This is the second grift to get you to pay for visibility boosts.
4. Once your subscription expires, your profile is boosted again, this is the most egregious grift if you ask me.

So there’s some other scummy stuff that happens with these apps as well to take into account:

1. Those likes are often incompatible matches. Spam and bot accounts, people sending likes out of their league, or long distance and foreign users. You can generally setup filters for who you see in your stack, these likes are pretty much everyone outside of your filters. OK Cupid is the worst about this—it’s alike a symbiotic relationship between them and the foreign scammers (that are actual people which just makes it even weirder).
2. The majority of likes go to the minority of users that are the most attractive. These are the top users, and they tend to always be in a boosted status.
3. It seems straight women tend to get inundated with inbound likes, while anyone seeking women get absolute crickets.
4. There’s an awful culture of creep-o men.

It seems the experience is just high stress for everyone involved, and there’s not a clear way to use the apps without needing to take on and off breaks to mitigate burnout.

The only recommendation I have for anyone using the apps is to be patient. Limit your use to Sunday or Monday evenings when traffic is at its peak. Remind yourself that finding a partner is like looking for a lost item, it’ll always be in the last place you look no matter how hard you search.

It's one of those weird scenarios where the optimal outcome for the user makes most business models either unfeasible or unprofitable. Like healthcare, the optimal scenario is the user never needs your services in the first place. And if they ever do they want to stop using them as quickly as possible. Which as a revenue model is really unattractive. So what we have instead is this insanity.

I found my ex-wife on OKC in 2011. Then she became my ex and I fired up OKC and several other dating apps for the first time in a decade and discovered they were all pretty much exactly the same micro-transaction bullshit. Fortunately this time I lucked out and found a very lovely nerdy lady a few months into using them and deleted them all and haven't looked back.

I get about 3 notifications a day on Bumble. Not for matches or anything like that...just different reasons why I should subscribe.

Here’s a copy of the complaint and a friendly reminder that complaints contain alleged facts.