People who have difficulty on dating apps want to find a scapegoat, so they scapegoat the app.
The truth is that dating markets are lemon markets. People who are "dateable" tend to find success quickly, and people who are "not dateable" tend to stay on the market. Hence over time, the market will be dominated by "not dateable" people. No dating app on the planet will magically make you a "dateable" person.
To find success on dating apps, you have to work on yourself first, and only afterwards make sure that work shows through both in your profile and in your texting.
Source: was on the apps, undateable for eight years (depression and low self esteem), went to therapy, after making huge changes to my life and getting to a point where I felt like things were going well in everything but being single, a month later I found my girlfriend (now two years together).
I hate this phrase because it's a generic catch-all that says nothing but shuts down any discussion. If I'm friendly, responsible, honest, not poor, do sports, learn new things, keep the house clean, then the fuck more you want. Can we admit that social dynamics have completely changed and the value of "a relationship" dropped through the floor? 200 years ago bad relationship was better than no relationship because have fun trying to farm land on your own, but nowadays it's literally more convenient to live single than to deal with the inconvenience of living with another person.
Also, personally, I'm a minority within a minority, and I'm not going to cheat the statistics even if I shower twenty times a day.
> If I'm friendly, responsible, honest, not poor, do sports, learn new things, keep the house clean, then the fuck more you want.
I think you are describing a person who has worked on himself. Like doing sports, that's good. I think too many guys continue with their teenage hobbies like playing computer games, and that's generally not attractive to women.
Of course, there are no guarantees. There's no magic checklist that you can fulfill and be guaranteed to find a partner. But I think there's always more you can do to make yourself more attractive.
I'm gay, so I don't care about impressing women. But besides this... I don't understand what's wrong with incorporating teenage hobbies into adult lifestyle. Sure, nobody wants to marry a mental teenager, but if I do have adult self-development hobbies, then I see no problem that next to that I'd also have teenage hobbies. I find it very sad when guys completely discard their personality just to keep wife happy.
It's just that, at current point of my life I think I'm ready for a relationship. My daily life loop is satisfactory for me, the only thing I'm missing is someone to be with.
> If you find good matches but not great matches, you stick around.
I dunno, I have difficulty seeing how the dating sites could singlehandedly pull that off in the average case without the site users really leaning in to help. It would seem to run into the basic reality that men and women historically pick the best match from a fairly small pool of people. A dating sites can't do worse than that even if they're trying. If people are willing to use the same standards as all their ancestors then they'd pair off quickly.
It seems more likely that there is just a natural dead-sea effect because of that where the people on the sites over the long term are not the sort of people you'd settle down with, and there is also this subtle idea that the dating site is there to find someone a perfect match (probably doesn't exist to start with). Those are design issues that go a lot deeper than any algorithm the sites might be using.
That's because "matches" are the wrong criterion to look at. In aggregate, matches don't matter. What matters is the population of marriageable (or otherwise amenable to long-term relationships) people. And that's what the dating app calculus works against. Every time 2 marriageable people get together, they remove themselves from the pool. If there is not a significant influx of new marriageable people then over time the marriageability of the pool will decline. As it drops, the concentration of "serial daters" goes up.
In a high concentration of serial daters, no one wants to pair off because there isn't anyone worth pairing off with around.
> If there is not a significant influx of new marriageable people then over time the marriageability of the pool will decline
That seems to be extremely unlikely, people have finite lifespans and are only in the marriage pool for a small fraction of that. More importantly your website could easily be targeted to an even smaller pool say 25-45 and ignoring deaths and divorce your already ~10% turnover per year if you own 100% of the market. Actual numbers depends on what percentage of the pool starts married, becomes a widow etc but their’s plenty of new people to make up for any couples. Further, happily married couples are great advertising.
1 The number of people using these apps.
2. The age group using the apps
3. the type of people using the apps
4. the culture that it has replaced and infiltrated
5 It is the social norm by now to be asked if your on TiXXXr or some other app
The modern interaction have eroded, it is awkward or weird to be approached in public, every middle aged woman or elderly woman has her purse on while shopping at a grocery store, locking the car 6 times and looking back while doing it as if its a James Bond movie. I live in middle class neighborhood and this is the things i see on a daily bases. it is sad.
> If you're in your 40s you aren't looking to date people in their 20s.
My building is full of divorced 40-somethings dating younger. You see it all over media too. Leonardo DiCaprio is famous for this, and he's hardly the only one.
Women date younger too. My wife's TikTok is full of women empowerment videos; the number of videos on her feed that talk about this is not inconsequential.
It's just a reinforcement loop where the more of something you have the more it accelerates. It happens in many places: bank runs (as soon as people start taking money out, more start doing so), the dead sea effect (where the best people leave and people start leaving as the median quality of coworker drops), hiring (where the more capable you are the more likely you are to get hired, so it gets harder and harder to hire the later you are to the game - most obvious with when you're interviewing interns or whatever), and so on.
This assumes that dating sites are able to give everyone great matches, but are somehow holding them back.
That's not the case. They don't have much idea at all who you're going to hit it off with. And most in person first dates don't lead to second dates, much less leaving the site.
So no. The reality is that dating sites really are trying to give you the best matches, but it's just a numbers game. So they make money on the numbers -- to see more profiles or send more messages you need to pay more.
That's all it is.
Because if they really could reliably make high-quality matches all the time, they could charge $$$$$ for that and make much more money in the end. But they don't, because the algorithm just doesn't exist.
I don’t work at a dating company, but I do work in machine learning applications.
My best guess is this: they are not optimizing for good vs great matches, and they are probably not even building a model of what that would even mean, not even trying to represent the concept in their algorithms.
Most likely they are optimizing for one or more metrics that are easy to measure and hence optimize, and these metrics have the side effect of producing an excitement for the user without actually pairing them up.
But the end result is effectively the same. If you throw in the constraints of what GP mentioned about customer retention, at the Pareto frontier it boils down to the same optimization, just that instead of manually optimizing the specific variables they become latent variables. There is no difference in the resultant enshittification.
I’ve wondered about this. Presumably they have some idea of who you will initially match with?
Maybe they have enough data to say things like “when someone like user x matches someone like user y, they are relatively likely to both stop using the app within a month?” But that has to be so noisy.
What about an alternative business model, pay-per-date? There's an application in NL that charges €7.50 to arrange a dinner, disallowing chat until 2 hours before the arranged date for practicalities. They partner with restaurants and you each get a 'free' (you paid for it..) drink; but with the commitment that your date also paid for it and will therefore show up.
This removes a lot of the meat-grading and endless swiping; with the platform prompting you why you're not working to scheduling your existing matches. Whilst I have no experience with the absence of any scheduled matches, this gives the platform insight into whether you're a worthy date (remember, each date is profit!).
One date on tinder/hinge/bumble in a 5+ years to a finding my partner in a few months. Paying for the actual date experience was so much less and so much more fun than the footing the subscription on the other platforms - even accounting for the cost of food.
This is really interesting. The platform's incentive in engineered more towards finding you a match than to keeping you looking
I guess this is still corruptable. The paltform could make more money by getting you matches thay look good but dont work out. But id imagine thatll only be a problem once they scale and ROI becomes a larger priority
That doesn't account for the good-will and word-of-mouth generated from any successful matches, which presumably could lead to many more customers than those lost due to marriage.
Very anecdotal, but in my experience people have no attachment to or enthusiasm for dating apps. I've heard (acquainted) couples say the met on dating apps. No one ever said which ones.
I think the difference is are they people asking in a relationship or not - asking which app is categorically asking where they can find someone to hook up with.
Or it's curiosity (genuine or polite). Maybe, for some people it tips the scale into trying the app either because they were already thinking about trying some/any app, or switching away from their current one.
I don't know if anyone who's asked me has started using the app as a result, but I think it (anecdotally, again) supports an idea that a successful results for one app organically helps its name recognition.
Edit: unless you meant the difference was between people asking which app vs which spouse.
I mean, one wedding can draw in over a hundred people, and the specific dating app in question gets name dropped not infrequently. The last wedding I went to, Hinge was mentioned in at least one of the speeches.
I feel like dating apps almost exclusively take off via word of mouth. It doesn’t have to be marriage, though, just people finding matches worth meeting.
Almost every dating app is scammy, buggy, heavily paywalled, and barely used. If you see an ad for a dating app, it’s usually in that category.
It’s really disappointing because, a human matchmaker, on the other hand, *does* optimize for “losing 2 customers”. Wouldn’t it be way better for the company’s long-term-health if they charged an appropriate price for making, actually, great connections?
“I found my wife on FindLove” is one hell of a marketing campaign for *future* sales. It’s not like people never break up, and it’s not like people don’t continually enter the dating market or move or whatever.
You might found out the hard way that a lot of people say they want that, but very much want to avoid it.
The main allure of these apps to young women is all the attention from far more attractive men (relatively). Take that away - show her men who might be her "equal" in terms of marriageability, men who might be willing to commit to her - and your service will soon be dismissed and abandoned for only showing ugly men.
You need to sell the fantasy, sell the delusion. Sell hope. The reality hits too hard.
The app didn't work for me. One that was shared right here on HN. I selected 25 miles radius, same ethnicity. Naturally I was matched with a person 700 miles away, of different ethnicity. So we got married... and deleted the app.
We were interviewed as a success story and our faces are plastered on the Internet now. My friends didn't find the same success, I concluded that they didn't know how to date. (wear the right clothes, etiquettes, conversation, navigate ghosting, etc.)
"What if the app could teach you how to do just that?" That's what I asked in our interview. That part was never published.
I think dating apps are a flawed concept irrespective of profit motives. They reduce men to their appearance and the most overt displays of wealth. Then they line them up against the wall, and they ask women to pick who they like best... For the men among us who will be among the most handsome and wealthiest in any given room, it works really well.
But you can become wealthy too, and then pay for a personal trainer, those expensive status signifier items and even plastic surgery if needed. Just need to work harder! /s
My experience building dating apps (I built and launched a couple of my own over the years, I have never worked for a major app):
1. Men will sign up for anything. You barely need to market the app. There are at least 30 dating apps in the play store right now with at least 1 million installs and with what I would guess is around 2% or fewer female userbase. Men will sign up in droves to apps with nothing but bots and scams.
2. This means you need to design the apps in a way that attracts and retains women. You don't have a dating app without them. So men are an afterthought. This, among many different examples, is why you have height filters and not weight filters.
3. The most critical point: People say they want connections and relationships from dating apps. What they really want, shown through relentless repeated behaviour, is optionality. The dating apps that provide the most optionality, or at least the most perception of optionality, become the most popular.
With these three principles in mind, every version of a dating app simple ends up being just like the ones we have available to us now. There are lots of unique ideas about how you can implements rules and such to make an app that creates connection and relationships, (like being charged to a card on file per match, or heavily limiting concurrent matches, or only being shown a few profiles per day, or an AI that matches you) but all of those ideas violate the above principles and thus they never take off. There's a very common cope on this side of the net that it's all Match's fault and the greedy corporation is preventing you from finding love. Sure, they could do things better. Sure, they are profit motivated. But you're kidding yourself if you think an open source community maintained dating app would solve any of the major grievances people have with online dating. It's primarily a user behaviour challenge, not a software design problem.
The last thing I would say about the marriage and dating market in general is that almost every academic (economists especially) and app startup founder treats it like a sorting problem, and if only you could devise a sufficiently sophisticated algorithm, you could improve things. The truth is that it's not a sorting problem, it's a clearing problem. And there is simply no way to improve the efficiency of an unclearable barter market.
Looking from my surroundings, in my circles, women are way more picky than men. Across different races, age groups and etc. According to all of my girl friends, they don’t really need a man, especially of their life is ok right now. They can satisfy their sexual and non-sexual desires much easier without dating.
My guy friends though, they’re less picky and more desperate (in a good way). This basically works out for guys constantly “looking”, but the girls not as much so. So you have an imbalance.
It’s much easier from one perspective in the gay world, because we can satisfy our sexual desires much easier. However, it also becomes complex once we seek something that’s more than sexual relationship.
I look at it as a physiological problem that I can’t see an online solution to. It basically needs to be cultural, where women and men meet each other in the middle ground. But good luck with that in 2026z
With my Hanlon Razor hat on, how much is this deliberate vs. natural emergent behaviour?
It if course true that the incentives on the platform are to prevent permanent relationships. But can they really tell "these two would make a very good match so let's keep them apart, this match here is at best adequate, let's do this one instead"? My gut feeling would be that they cannot tell.
But then of course the whole design of the platform prevents deep connection. About 70-80% of the information is encoded in a photo that is not even guaranteed to be realistic. And the point of the platform is to be a rich marketplace where you keep trying. That's the USP before you get into any further design choices.
Platforms like Harmony Online existed for a long time and IIUC they were optimising for long term matches, and for whatever reason they were not as popular as eg Tinder.
It goes without saying that they are optimizing for engagement with their platform/app and user growth, just like every last digital huckster on the internet.
To keep people hooked while making them feel that the app is working, even though they are not getting their end result.
You have it backwards. The apps aren't training the human preferences, the human preferences are training the apps. There have been a LOT of different dating app ideas, and all have been competed away except for the ones that provide users the biggest perception of optionality.
Dating apps would go out of business if they did their job, because success means leaving the platform. They make more money if they hold out a carrot and make it difficult to succeed.
This is also true of those services that "delete" your data from data brokers. Their entire business model relies on them failing to do their job.
The article does not actually substantiate the claim in its title. All references are simply to articles that (at best) describe how people respond to dating apps.
I would not at all be surprised if some or even most dating apps had a team or org in charge of making the platform “good” for users (using some metrics that really do correlate to what we would think of as a desirable experience); and a somewhat disconnected group of people aiming to increase revenue. This is a pretty standard way of trying to align incentives.
It does not take a genius to figure out that to capture value in the long term requires producing some real value for users.
These should be read by anyone interested in online dating, even if they are wildly out of date.
FWIW, my suggestion for young men (because I was one, and have no advice for women) is to find a third place that you like and meet people there. Church (if that's your bag, it's not mine), climbing gyms, dinner clubs, dog parks, adult education classes, martial arts, etc. My best relationships have come from the climbing gym and the dog park. I would also choose speed dating over online dating. Better to find that immediate spark rather than screw around with messages only to meet and find no chemistry.
Then don't hit on people. Go there with no expectations other than enjoying the activity, it makes you a better and more interesting person anyway. The people who get banned are the creepy ones who go purely for the sake of hitting on people.
Yes, Christian Rudder's old OKTrends blog was excellent and showed real-world data on how people actually behave, and the frequent mismatch with what they claim/ believe/admit to. (Mind you, the OkCupid founders left over a decade ago and it went hugely downhill)
For some reason your post got downvoted and killed.
I loved the oktrends blog and read Christian Rudder's book dataclysm, but these data are over a decade old. A lot has changed (pandemic, atomized culture, manosphere, incels, gym obsession, decline of drinking / going out) I have to wonder how much is still valid. OkCupid was the best dating site ever though.
Arranged marriages are not the same as forced marriages. Your family simply plays matchmaker and it’s up to the prospective couple to decide whether they want to be together.
That's a nice story, but the real story is the near monopoly in dating apps, and why it always ends up in the same hands and why their motivation is counter to their customers.
> Dating apps don't sell love. They sell the feeling that it is one premium upgrade away. The platforms aren't primarily designed for users to find love and promptly delete the apps from their phones. They're designed to keep users swiping.
So they're not very different from porn and Facebook, right? They sell an illusion of the real thing that isn't fullfilling but is addicting.
Does anyone think dating apps sell love? I'm pretty sure everyone who actually uses it within the expected bounds uses it as a way to find people to date, which is very different from love.
I worked for a dating website a long time ago.. and it's key to understand their business model:
- If you find good matches but not great matches, you stick around.
- If you get frustrated and give up, they lose one customer.
- If you find love and get married, they lose two customers.
Which one will they optimize for?
My writeup: https://caseysoftware.com/blog/working-for-a-dating-website
People who have difficulty on dating apps want to find a scapegoat, so they scapegoat the app.
The truth is that dating markets are lemon markets. People who are "dateable" tend to find success quickly, and people who are "not dateable" tend to stay on the market. Hence over time, the market will be dominated by "not dateable" people. No dating app on the planet will magically make you a "dateable" person.
To find success on dating apps, you have to work on yourself first, and only afterwards make sure that work shows through both in your profile and in your texting.
Source: was on the apps, undateable for eight years (depression and low self esteem), went to therapy, after making huge changes to my life and getting to a point where I felt like things were going well in everything but being single, a month later I found my girlfriend (now two years together).
> you have to work on yourself first
I hate this phrase because it's a generic catch-all that says nothing but shuts down any discussion. If I'm friendly, responsible, honest, not poor, do sports, learn new things, keep the house clean, then the fuck more you want. Can we admit that social dynamics have completely changed and the value of "a relationship" dropped through the floor? 200 years ago bad relationship was better than no relationship because have fun trying to farm land on your own, but nowadays it's literally more convenient to live single than to deal with the inconvenience of living with another person.
Also, personally, I'm a minority within a minority, and I'm not going to cheat the statistics even if I shower twenty times a day.
> [...] then the fuck more you want.[...]
You sound frustrated ;) You could work on that ;)
You could work on my dick, then I wouldn't be frustrated
No surprise you are alone.
Hehehe
> If I'm friendly, responsible, honest, not poor, do sports, learn new things, keep the house clean, then the fuck more you want.
I think you are describing a person who has worked on himself. Like doing sports, that's good. I think too many guys continue with their teenage hobbies like playing computer games, and that's generally not attractive to women.
Of course, there are no guarantees. There's no magic checklist that you can fulfill and be guaranteed to find a partner. But I think there's always more you can do to make yourself more attractive.
I'm gay, so I don't care about impressing women. But besides this... I don't understand what's wrong with incorporating teenage hobbies into adult lifestyle. Sure, nobody wants to marry a mental teenager, but if I do have adult self-development hobbies, then I see no problem that next to that I'd also have teenage hobbies. I find it very sad when guys completely discard their personality just to keep wife happy.
It's just that, at current point of my life I think I'm ready for a relationship. My daily life loop is satisfactory for me, the only thing I'm missing is someone to be with.
> If you find good matches but not great matches, you stick around.
I dunno, I have difficulty seeing how the dating sites could singlehandedly pull that off in the average case without the site users really leaning in to help. It would seem to run into the basic reality that men and women historically pick the best match from a fairly small pool of people. A dating sites can't do worse than that even if they're trying. If people are willing to use the same standards as all their ancestors then they'd pair off quickly.
It seems more likely that there is just a natural dead-sea effect because of that where the people on the sites over the long term are not the sort of people you'd settle down with, and there is also this subtle idea that the dating site is there to find someone a perfect match (probably doesn't exist to start with). Those are design issues that go a lot deeper than any algorithm the sites might be using.
That's because "matches" are the wrong criterion to look at. In aggregate, matches don't matter. What matters is the population of marriageable (or otherwise amenable to long-term relationships) people. And that's what the dating app calculus works against. Every time 2 marriageable people get together, they remove themselves from the pool. If there is not a significant influx of new marriageable people then over time the marriageability of the pool will decline. As it drops, the concentration of "serial daters" goes up.
In a high concentration of serial daters, no one wants to pair off because there isn't anyone worth pairing off with around.
> If there is not a significant influx of new marriageable people then over time the marriageability of the pool will decline
That seems to be extremely unlikely, people have finite lifespans and are only in the marriage pool for a small fraction of that. More importantly your website could easily be targeted to an even smaller pool say 25-45 and ignoring deaths and divorce your already ~10% turnover per year if you own 100% of the market. Actual numbers depends on what percentage of the pool starts married, becomes a widow etc but their’s plenty of new people to make up for any couples. Further, happily married couples are great advertising.
1 The number of people using these apps. 2. The age group using the apps 3. the type of people using the apps 4. the culture that it has replaced and infiltrated 5 It is the social norm by now to be asked if your on TiXXXr or some other app
The modern interaction have eroded, it is awkward or weird to be approached in public, every middle aged woman or elderly woman has her purse on while shopping at a grocery store, locking the car 6 times and looking back while doing it as if its a James Bond movie. I live in middle class neighborhood and this is the things i see on a daily bases. it is sad.
> Every time 2 marriageable people get together, they remove themselves from the pool. If there is not a significant influx of new marriageable people
But there is. It's all the people aging into the dating apps. That's how it works. The rate of people leaving is balanced by new people arriving.
No, they aren't. If you're in your 40s you aren't looking to date people in their 20s. Where's the influx of other people in their 40s to date?
Younger women wanting older mature partners is as old as time.
There is even a subgenre of romance writing with this as a theme .. age gap.
What do you mean? From recently divorced people, of course, if you want to look at that age bracket. But it's the same principle.
> If you're in your 40s you aren't looking to date people in their 20s.
My building is full of divorced 40-somethings dating younger. You see it all over media too. Leonardo DiCaprio is famous for this, and he's hardly the only one.
Women date younger too. My wife's TikTok is full of women empowerment videos; the number of videos on her feed that talk about this is not inconsequential.
Plenty of people to date.
But where’s the growth?
It's a truly sad state of affairs that human relationships are reduced to this clinical technobabble.
Technology was promised to solve our problems, yet it has created so many more.
It's just a reinforcement loop where the more of something you have the more it accelerates. It happens in many places: bank runs (as soon as people start taking money out, more start doing so), the dead sea effect (where the best people leave and people start leaving as the median quality of coworker drops), hiring (where the more capable you are the more likely you are to get hired, so it gets harder and harder to hire the later you are to the game - most obvious with when you're interviewing interns or whatever), and so on.
This assumes that dating sites are able to give everyone great matches, but are somehow holding them back.
That's not the case. They don't have much idea at all who you're going to hit it off with. And most in person first dates don't lead to second dates, much less leaving the site.
So no. The reality is that dating sites really are trying to give you the best matches, but it's just a numbers game. So they make money on the numbers -- to see more profiles or send more messages you need to pay more.
That's all it is.
Because if they really could reliably make high-quality matches all the time, they could charge $$$$$ for that and make much more money in the end. But they don't, because the algorithm just doesn't exist.
I don’t work at a dating company, but I do work in machine learning applications.
My best guess is this: they are not optimizing for good vs great matches, and they are probably not even building a model of what that would even mean, not even trying to represent the concept in their algorithms.
Most likely they are optimizing for one or more metrics that are easy to measure and hence optimize, and these metrics have the side effect of producing an excitement for the user without actually pairing them up.
Example metrics: - time spent on the site
- times they “swipe right” or whatever
- messages sent
- money spent
But the end result is effectively the same. If you throw in the constraints of what GP mentioned about customer retention, at the Pareto frontier it boils down to the same optimization, just that instead of manually optimizing the specific variables they become latent variables. There is no difference in the resultant enshittification.
I’ve wondered about this. Presumably they have some idea of who you will initially match with?
Maybe they have enough data to say things like “when someone like user x matches someone like user y, they are relatively likely to both stop using the app within a month?” But that has to be so noisy.
> This assumes that dating sites are able to give everyone great matches, but are somehow holding them back.
From what I’ve heard, OkCupid used to be really good at finding compatible people, then it got deliberately nerfed when sold to Match Group.
What about an alternative business model, pay-per-date? There's an application in NL that charges €7.50 to arrange a dinner, disallowing chat until 2 hours before the arranged date for practicalities. They partner with restaurants and you each get a 'free' (you paid for it..) drink; but with the commitment that your date also paid for it and will therefore show up.
This removes a lot of the meat-grading and endless swiping; with the platform prompting you why you're not working to scheduling your existing matches. Whilst I have no experience with the absence of any scheduled matches, this gives the platform insight into whether you're a worthy date (remember, each date is profit!).
One date on tinder/hinge/bumble in a 5+ years to a finding my partner in a few months. Paying for the actual date experience was so much less and so much more fun than the footing the subscription on the other platforms - even accounting for the cost of food.
This is really interesting. The platform's incentive in engineered more towards finding you a match than to keeping you looking
I guess this is still corruptable. The paltform could make more money by getting you matches thay look good but dont work out. But id imagine thatll only be a problem once they scale and ROI becomes a larger priority
That doesn't account for the good-will and word-of-mouth generated from any successful matches, which presumably could lead to many more customers than those lost due to marriage.
Very anecdotal, but in my experience people have no attachment to or enthusiasm for dating apps. I've heard (acquainted) couples say the met on dating apps. No one ever said which ones.
My counter anecdote would be that almost every time I mention my spouse and I met on a dating app, people ask me which one.
Edit: people ask me which app, not which spouse.
I think the difference is are they people asking in a relationship or not - asking which app is categorically asking where they can find someone to hook up with.
Or it's curiosity (genuine or polite). Maybe, for some people it tips the scale into trying the app either because they were already thinking about trying some/any app, or switching away from their current one.
I don't know if anyone who's asked me has started using the app as a result, but I think it (anecdotally, again) supports an idea that a successful results for one app organically helps its name recognition.
Edit: unless you meant the difference was between people asking which app vs which spouse.
It doesn’t matter which one because they’re all owned by a single company and converging toward each other.
That's a very difficult metric to measure whereas "did this user return and continue paying" is easier. The tyranny of metrics in action.
Man i hate metrics sometimes. Important things that are hard to measure are just left by the wayside
I feel like that kind of word of mouth is not enough to compensate. Like how many customers is word of one sucessful match expected to attract?
“I met my husband on hinge” is something that gets people to download the app right away. I’ve seen it happen tons of times
I mean, one wedding can draw in over a hundred people, and the specific dating app in question gets name dropped not infrequently. The last wedding I went to, Hinge was mentioned in at least one of the speeches.
I feel like dating apps almost exclusively take off via word of mouth. It doesn’t have to be marriage, though, just people finding matches worth meeting.
Almost every dating app is scammy, buggy, heavily paywalled, and barely used. If you see an ad for a dating app, it’s usually in that category.
There was a thread about that one:
Working for a Dating Website (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34368601 - Jan 2023 (196 comments)
It’s really disappointing because, a human matchmaker, on the other hand, *does* optimize for “losing 2 customers”. Wouldn’t it be way better for the company’s long-term-health if they charged an appropriate price for making, actually, great connections?
“I found my wife on FindLove” is one hell of a marketing campaign for *future* sales. It’s not like people never break up, and it’s not like people don’t continually enter the dating market or move or whatever.
Number 3.
Imagine if you can advertise that 50% of the matches on your app leads to marriage.
You might found out the hard way that a lot of people say they want that, but very much want to avoid it.
The main allure of these apps to young women is all the attention from far more attractive men (relatively). Take that away - show her men who might be her "equal" in terms of marriageability, men who might be willing to commit to her - and your service will soon be dismissed and abandoned for only showing ugly men.
You need to sell the fantasy, sell the delusion. Sell hope. The reality hits too hard.
Like, lying? You can already do that.
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The app didn't work for me. One that was shared right here on HN. I selected 25 miles radius, same ethnicity. Naturally I was matched with a person 700 miles away, of different ethnicity. So we got married... and deleted the app.
We were interviewed as a success story and our faces are plastered on the Internet now. My friends didn't find the same success, I concluded that they didn't know how to date. (wear the right clothes, etiquettes, conversation, navigate ghosting, etc.)
"What if the app could teach you how to do just that?" That's what I asked in our interview. That part was never published.
Your story helped them sell hope and thus more customers. Hope sells.
People want hope. They don’t want advice lol. If the latter was the case we wouldn’t live in a lopsided world.
Hope means you don’t need to try. Advice means it’s on you to try.
I think dating apps are a flawed concept irrespective of profit motives. They reduce men to their appearance and the most overt displays of wealth. Then they line them up against the wall, and they ask women to pick who they like best... For the men among us who will be among the most handsome and wealthiest in any given room, it works really well.
But you can become wealthy too, and then pay for a personal trainer, those expensive status signifier items and even plastic surgery if needed. Just need to work harder! /s
My experience building dating apps (I built and launched a couple of my own over the years, I have never worked for a major app):
1. Men will sign up for anything. You barely need to market the app. There are at least 30 dating apps in the play store right now with at least 1 million installs and with what I would guess is around 2% or fewer female userbase. Men will sign up in droves to apps with nothing but bots and scams.
2. This means you need to design the apps in a way that attracts and retains women. You don't have a dating app without them. So men are an afterthought. This, among many different examples, is why you have height filters and not weight filters.
3. The most critical point: People say they want connections and relationships from dating apps. What they really want, shown through relentless repeated behaviour, is optionality. The dating apps that provide the most optionality, or at least the most perception of optionality, become the most popular.
With these three principles in mind, every version of a dating app simple ends up being just like the ones we have available to us now. There are lots of unique ideas about how you can implements rules and such to make an app that creates connection and relationships, (like being charged to a card on file per match, or heavily limiting concurrent matches, or only being shown a few profiles per day, or an AI that matches you) but all of those ideas violate the above principles and thus they never take off. There's a very common cope on this side of the net that it's all Match's fault and the greedy corporation is preventing you from finding love. Sure, they could do things better. Sure, they are profit motivated. But you're kidding yourself if you think an open source community maintained dating app would solve any of the major grievances people have with online dating. It's primarily a user behaviour challenge, not a software design problem.
The last thing I would say about the marriage and dating market in general is that almost every academic (economists especially) and app startup founder treats it like a sorting problem, and if only you could devise a sufficiently sophisticated algorithm, you could improve things. The truth is that it's not a sorting problem, it's a clearing problem. And there is simply no way to improve the efficiency of an unclearable barter market.
Looking from my surroundings, in my circles, women are way more picky than men. Across different races, age groups and etc. According to all of my girl friends, they don’t really need a man, especially of their life is ok right now. They can satisfy their sexual and non-sexual desires much easier without dating.
My guy friends though, they’re less picky and more desperate (in a good way). This basically works out for guys constantly “looking”, but the girls not as much so. So you have an imbalance.
It’s much easier from one perspective in the gay world, because we can satisfy our sexual desires much easier. However, it also becomes complex once we seek something that’s more than sexual relationship.
I look at it as a physiological problem that I can’t see an online solution to. It basically needs to be cultural, where women and men meet each other in the middle ground. But good luck with that in 2026z
With my Hanlon Razor hat on, how much is this deliberate vs. natural emergent behaviour?
It if course true that the incentives on the platform are to prevent permanent relationships. But can they really tell "these two would make a very good match so let's keep them apart, this match here is at best adequate, let's do this one instead"? My gut feeling would be that they cannot tell.
But then of course the whole design of the platform prevents deep connection. About 70-80% of the information is encoded in a photo that is not even guaranteed to be realistic. And the point of the platform is to be a rich marketplace where you keep trying. That's the USP before you get into any further design choices.
Platforms like Harmony Online existed for a long time and IIUC they were optimising for long term matches, and for whatever reason they were not as popular as eg Tinder.
It goes without saying that they are optimizing for engagement with their platform/app and user growth, just like every last digital huckster on the internet.
To keep people hooked while making them feel that the app is working, even though they are not getting their end result.
You have it backwards. The apps aren't training the human preferences, the human preferences are training the apps. There have been a LOT of different dating app ideas, and all have been competed away except for the ones that provide users the biggest perception of optionality.
Dating apps would go out of business if they did their job, because success means leaving the platform. They make more money if they hold out a carrot and make it difficult to succeed.
This is also true of those services that "delete" your data from data brokers. Their entire business model relies on them failing to do their job.
The article does not actually substantiate the claim in its title. All references are simply to articles that (at best) describe how people respond to dating apps.
I would not at all be surprised if some or even most dating apps had a team or org in charge of making the platform “good” for users (using some metrics that really do correlate to what we would think of as a desirable experience); and a somewhat disconnected group of people aiming to increase revenue. This is a pretty standard way of trying to align incentives.
It does not take a genius to figure out that to capture value in the long term requires producing some real value for users.
I’ve always mused with the concept that these companies could, in theory, start covert eugenics programs
What every company is maximizing: profit.
Work backwards from that.
Because it's almost impossible to optimize for love. like how?
That is the companies problem to solve. They are the ones making the product.
As explained in the article, that is not the product.
Probably by finding compatible matches.
They don't need to optimize for "love". They just need to not optimize for dark patterns and extortion. Love happens offline, not on a fucking app.
What is "love" anyway? I imagine using these dating apps is basically the same as applying for jobs.
I found the old OKCupid blog posts via Gwern.net:
https://web.archive.org/web/20140910162626/http://blog.okcup...
These should be read by anyone interested in online dating, even if they are wildly out of date.
FWIW, my suggestion for young men (because I was one, and have no advice for women) is to find a third place that you like and meet people there. Church (if that's your bag, it's not mine), climbing gyms, dinner clubs, dog parks, adult education classes, martial arts, etc. My best relationships have come from the climbing gym and the dog park. I would also choose speed dating over online dating. Better to find that immediate spark rather than screw around with messages only to meet and find no chemistry.
> Church (if that's your bag, it's not mine), climbing gyms, dinner clubs, dog parks, adult education classes, martial arts, etc.
Such places will quickly ban you if you start hitting on women.
Then don't hit on people. Go there with no expectations other than enjoying the activity, it makes you a better and more interesting person anyway. The people who get banned are the creepy ones who go purely for the sake of hitting on people.
Yes, Christian Rudder's old OKTrends blog was excellent and showed real-world data on how people actually behave, and the frequent mismatch with what they claim/ believe/admit to. (Mind you, the OkCupid founders left over a decade ago and it went hugely downhill)
For some reason your post got downvoted and killed.
It's interesting that so many people like these blog posts but they'd be really hard to get an IRB to agree to run a study with.
I loved the oktrends blog and read Christian Rudder's book dataclysm, but these data are over a decade old. A lot has changed (pandemic, atomized culture, manosphere, incels, gym obsession, decline of drinking / going out) I have to wonder how much is still valid. OkCupid was the best dating site ever though.
We should go back to arranged marriages.
And next week you have a wedding with old man. Mazal tov!
Why have arranged marriages when you can have deranged marriages?
Yeah, I don't think you're going to have much luck with that mentality.
Personally, I cannot think of a worst hell than having to be married to somebody who was forced to be with me. Yikes.
Arranged marriages are not the same as forced marriages. Your family simply plays matchmaker and it’s up to the prospective couple to decide whether they want to be together.
Maybe not exclusively but they could definitely have a place
Agreed
https://github.com/Alovoa/alovoa
That's a nice story, but the real story is the near monopoly in dating apps, and why it always ends up in the same hands and why their motivation is counter to their customers.
Very interesting read.
> Dating apps don't sell love. They sell the feeling that it is one premium upgrade away. The platforms aren't primarily designed for users to find love and promptly delete the apps from their phones. They're designed to keep users swiping.
So they're not very different from porn and Facebook, right? They sell an illusion of the real thing that isn't fullfilling but is addicting.
Does anyone think dating apps sell love? I'm pretty sure everyone who actually uses it within the expected bounds uses it as a way to find people to date, which is very different from love.
How is it different?
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