I've used Hinge a lot as a heterosexual male, and it's pretty obvious they want dudes to pay for Roses to message attractive girls. For me and most of my friends who have used it, the disparity between the normal, free feed and the "Standouts", for which one must use Roses, is comical.
I don't see how that's too mysterious, and, for the most part, I don't hold it against Hinge, which has to try to make money.
edit: also, the other thing I forgot to say, is that I have also just keep deleting and recreating my account for every dating app. I don't do that to "game the algorithms" for these apps, though that may be a secondary benefit. I do it because I get tired of them, find them toxic/unhealthy, etc. I kind of just assumed most people did that, and I bet if the author's friend just shrugged and did that in the first instance instead of alleging foul play and conspiracy, they would have had a better time.
IIRC, Hinge always starts off by showing a good number of very attractive people in the main feed regardless, which I always assumed was partly to impress a new user with how worthwhile the app is, as well as trying to figure out how attractive the user is by seeing if attractive people respond to them.
I'm too old to have used dating apps, but IIUC the conspiracy theory is not just that you have to pay a premium to message the attractive girls, but they're actually paid by the dating app itself to interact with you. (I'm too old for dating apps, but I'm not too old for certain types of "clubs" whose business model was the same).
Plenty of Fish wouldn’t exist without bots lol. Think about it if you’re trying to grow a new dating network and you don’t have users the best thing you can do is try to simulate users until you have some.
That's easily solved by just meeting the girls. If you're dating anyways -- it's your main goal.
In Asia for all the popular sites like Tinder, Badoo and OK Cupid -- I've never had a girl not show up where there wasn't mutual interest. Continued after yes or no -- that's just a human problem. But the girls are real for sure...
I think the standouts are generally people who are highly liked/rated. Id see a lot of people there before & after I saw them in my normal feed. Roses just give an escape hatch for pay to play but they’ll show up in your feed normally if the recommendation system thinks so.
> and it's pretty obvious they want dudes to pay for Roses to message attractive girls.
Pretty much every dating app makes its money off (thirsty) men. Average women get hundreds of matches a day; ten a week is a very good rate for the average man.
Look at the incentives. Dating apps want you to keep paying. That means they don't want you to meet someone worth entering a long-term rrlationship with. They want you to have just enough success to stay a customer. The occasional, not-awful date.
Like playing the slots: you get occasional, small payouts, and you hear about other people winning jackpots (oops, they slipped up), so you keep putting money in.
A believable service needs to align its interests with yours, in some believable way.
This erroneously believes that the owners think the following:
1- it is possible to completely tap the dating market and long term customers are necessary
2- customers all have a similar threshold at which they are just-successful enough to stay engaged long term
Neither of these things are true. The more people "win the jackpot", per your analogy, the more people will use the platform. The market is big enough they don't need to fool you into paying to be unsuccessful.
Not if they don’t believe that customers will be able to tell the difference between stringing along and honestly trying.
The problem is hard. It can’t be deterministically solved. Any likely statistical improvement is unprovable in a marketing sense (a competitor that is as good as possible at finding matches cannot prove it to the market that they are actually better at finding matches than a method that strings people along).
Your points are only true if there isn’t an information asymmetry, but there is.
I don’t think they are necessarily stringing people along on purpose, but they don’t have incentives to tell people they can’t help them, and they don’t have incentives to improve the product for those who aren’t successful. Those who are successful are probably going to be successful regardless of the platform they are using, and those who are unsuccessful aren’t going to be successful anywhere. And fixing that (rather than just milking money from the unsuccessful) isn’t really worth anything to them.
> 2- customers all have a similar threshold at which they are just-successful enough to stay engaged long term
Don't they just create fake bot accounts to draw you back in when they detect you've abandoned the app? I'd imagine the app is tuned to maximum scam based on the individual user not using a single set of values.
that doesnt make sense, there would always be a new generation entering the dating age. Otherwise the marriage industry would be optimizing for divorces too.
> that doesnt make sense, there would always be a new generation entering the dating age. Otherwise the marriage industry would be optimizing for divorces too.
Don't they? I mean, maybe not intentionally, but it certainly evolved to be that way.
The more they can get you to pay for a once-off party, the less money you have entering your marriage. The less money the man pays, the more encouragement is bride is given to be bitter. This results in entering a marriage with less financial stability than you'd otherwise have.
They sell the message constantly that it's okay to forgo things like home ownership as long as you get the "perfect" (i.e. most expensive) marriage.
There's ever more useless things added to the ritual, resulting in an ever more stressful time due to more friction and more bitterness afterwards. They have spoken rules about how much you should spend based on a multiple (not a fraction) of what your income is.
They don't care, and often even encourage, allowing the future in-laws to make a loan so that the couple can get the best marriage. That certainly looks like optimising for divorce to me.
They sell it as a once in a lifetime experience, but they already know from their own experience that it's 50/50, if that.
To me it looks like they are optimising for revenue, which indirectly means optimising for divorces.
When I used Hinge, I never saw a reason to pay for it. Match is basically useless without paying and for Bumble it also helps to pay. Not so much with Hinge.
This is a bit paranoid - if no one found good matches through these services, no one would ever use them. It definitely sucks if you are on the losing end of the dating spectrum, but some of those people seem to have some sort of belief that they are entitled to dates, when they aren't. If you weren't getting action in real life, I don't think it's likely that people are going to be more desirous of you online. I've used these services and have had plenty of matches and luck, without ever needing to pay for it, with some of the matches working out for years(I don't blame the dating apps that we didn't get married), so I can't really agree with your perspective at all.
Many of the popular dating apps are all owned by Match group -- Tinder, Match.com, Meetic, OkCupid, Hinge, Plenty of Fish, OurTime, etc. etc. It was a huge private equity play under IAC for awhile and then they spun out and IPOed but the universal dark patterns and enshitification isn't coincidental.
It's like Expedia owning many of the familiar travel brands: in reality they are all serving up the same content, but with different marketing, yet many people think it's a different company. You might think a brand is different and it might appeal to a different clientele but underneath its the same entity making all the decisions. It allows the brand to target different people without confusing everyone with a single brand saying different things; yet still allow for economies of scale. Great business for them, may seriously suck to be a customer since the alternatives are potentially no better if you don't like one.
> It allows the brand to target different people without confusing everyone with a single brand saying different things; yet still allow for economies of scale. Great business for them, may seriously suck to be a customer since the alternatives are potentially no better if you don't like one.
It also allows them to capture the money of disgruntled customers. Someone who has a terrible experience with (say) Tinder may swear it up and start using a "competitor" like ... OkCupid.
IIRC, this is also a strategy in home appliance space. My understanding is most home appliance brands are owned by just two companies: Whirlpool and Electrolux. They've really cheapened their designs, but if you get pissed off your washer breaks after 3 years and decide to go with a competitor, there's a good chance you may end up buying literally the same model, from the same company, with different branding and styling.
Relatedly, there has been a controversial dehumidifier recall recently due to how likely they are to catch fire. The recall impacts every dehumidifier made by Gree Electric Appliances between 2011 and 2014. That company sold the same basic dehumidifiers under the surface under at least 42 models under 5 different brands. Many of them look very different from each other, but functioned the same and exhibit the same fire safety issues of the recall.
At least twice investigators thought they found all of the models and brands in play and then discovered even more. Plus, an older/related recall also still exists covering even more brands and models between 2005 and 2014.
One supplier, hundreds of models across dozens of brands. "Competition" at its finest.
I've been thinking of late that we need to add some sort of five year sunset rule about brands and acquisitions to antitrust laws. So after an acquisition the buyer has a couple of years before they have to stop using the acquired companies name and brand.
There used to be advertising transparency laws that advertised products had to mention the parent company of a brand.
These days you mostly see it voluntarily done when a company is afraid to sunset an ancient brand with good history but also wants their brand noticed and associated (things like "Columbia Pictures, a Sony Corporation"), but some of those sorts of disclosures in the past were required for certain forms of advertisement (even if just in fine print) and maybe it is time to go back to enforcing that sort of thing.
There is the "Lenovo strategy", where some of the companies do sunset the original brands once licenses become too expensive and they've established their own brand. Lenovo went from "IBM ThinkPad by Lenovo" to "Lenovo ThinkPad" over a relatively few years. I'm still curious if, among others, "GE Appliances, a Haier Company" is a short-term play of this sort with the end goal to drop the "GE Appliances" name and logo in a few years or if Haier is less confident in their own brand and will stick with the mouthful (and GE licenses) long term.
(The other example of Sony would probably be too much for American consumers if they killed Columbia and/or TriStar brands. There's a deep-seated stickiness to the old Hollywood studio brands. Amazon seems to have learned this lesson real quick post-MGM acquisition and backpedaled quite fast on dropping MGM branded stuff for the Amazon Studios brand. They've even backpedaled so hard that they resurrected the Orion brand decades after MGM mostly let it retire. It weirdly blew my mind seeing an Orion Pictures logo on a 2023 trailer for an upcoming film.)
(Though today with tools like Wikipedia more information of that sort is "easily" researchable than ever before. But truth in advertising laws have always said it is better to save the advertising reader/viewer the research work than to trust people will do the research.)
Wouldn't that just lead to the brands themselves being sold off or licensed? Or, if such things were prevented somehow, many sorts of things being terribly confusing.
Like, needing to go down to the "Yum! Brands" to get take-out, no not the pizza one, the chicken one. Other chicken one. Reverse-mergers would be a nightmare too.
I wonder how dating apps will fit into society in 10+ years - they are dominant now as the way for young people to find romantic partners, but from the accounts I've heard (all second-hand, I haven't used one in ~5 years) they appear to be getting worse and worse for people who are anything below average attractiveness (or perhaps are just bad at making an appealing profile). It makes me wonder if there will be a correction in the opposite direction where those people go back to meeting in bars, work, school, gyms, etc while the "very attractive" crowd remains in the dating app pool instead.
I have no data to suggest this will happen aside from the fact that there's a large segment of the population that is having more and more trouble finding partners this way due to algorithmic changes forcing them out of eligibility to talk to people they find attractive. I've had at least one friend get permanently banned for violating a rule she didn't violate on Hinge, and their policy was essentially "tough luck, nobody gets unbanned for any reason".
If such a shift did occur, it would be an interesting reversal from the early days of online dating (eharmony, match.com) where the perception was that it was a fallback for people who were unable to meet someone in person.
Most young men in the US are already alone[1]. And this will get only worse unless something radical happens. The dating apps strategies do not help. Reverting to offline dating will need to restore the environment that facilitates it.
[1] https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/3868557-most-yo...
>Anthony couldn’t think of anything that might have gotten his account flagged. Regardless, Hinge didn’t offer an explanation for his experience.
It's been a while since I've been on Hinge, but Hinge is not like Tinder in terms of edgy/risque conversation, and I played every conversation with a match safe. I woke up one morning and was banned. They say you can appeal, but this seems like mostly something to make you feel like there's a possible recourse.
What I gathered from Reddit is that it's actually rather easy to get banned by simply not talking to people. There were a few times where I wouldn't message someone right away from not having a good ice breaker, I was busy, or the conversation just went nowhere and people would unmatch. When you unmatch with someone it asks if you'd like to report them as well. Since Hinge is meant to be a more serious dating platform, not talking to people can be seen as not taking the platform seriously and trying to hook up or something and if this happens enough times it seems Hinge will flag your account.
That sounds pretty good to me, the most annoying part about these dating apps is that people match with dozens of other people and then don’t message or respond.
I paid for whatever the premium version that lifts such restrictions is called. I'm fairly confident that I messaged everyone that matched and if the conversation died I would unmatch to clean things up.
On Bumble if you get a bunch of matches and don’t reply within 24 hours it basically makes the girl feel like you ghosted them and the report and unmatch button are right next to each other. What do you think a woman scorned is gonna press?
I downloaded Tinder right after I got single, back in 2015? It was glorious. It really did feel fun and exciting - I'm by no means a model-looking dude, but I got hundreds of matches in a fairly small place (think city with population of 50k), and people just felt more genuine and interested on the various apps back then.
Next time around I tried Tinder et. al. was a couple of years later(2018/2019), and I immediately noticed less matches, less convos, and the app being more pushy.
I recently, as in this year, tried some of the apps again...it's a total shit show, to be honest.
I've never tried any apps that applied so many dark patterns. It all feels like one big funnel where the goal is to extract money off you through gold memberships, boosting, extra swipes, and what not. I noticed "fake" notices, spammy notices, just a constant barrage of notices and messages NOT from actual people.
After a couple of days I concluded that most (all?) of these dating apps are pay-to-play. You start off with some initial amount of matches, which drop off sharply - then nothing. I asked a friend in the same room if she could see me on Tinder, but no dice, I didn't even show up on her feed - though she came up on mine.
These apps used to be easy and fun - now they just feel like the most pushy and parasitic apps out there.
> Next time around I tried Tinder et. al. was a couple of years later(2018/2019), and I immediately noticed less matches, less convos, and the app being more pushy.
They also filter you based on age. When I turned 40+, everything changed in terms of presentation and matches literally the next day.
Often those settings are ignored or fuzzy. Tinder also doesn't show you what someone else's settings are, so you can't game that. When I'd set my age ranges to 30+, I'd still see people younger than that because the person on the other end would put older ranges in. It is kind of a two way fuzzy search engine.
I built a super popular dating app right before Tinder came onto the market... our search was intentionally pretty fuzzy in this regard.
My point is show me the proof. None of the details of how their app works are public and you're telling me what I've seen from personal experience, isn't true.
Unless I'm missing something, you haven't proved it's fuzzy either though. Many of these apps have a "make this setting strict" switch for age and distance, that makes both of you half right.
Maybe the part you're missing is that we are talking about Tinder from the response to the OP, downwards. We are not fuzzily talking about 'many of these apps'.
Maybe the part you're missing from my comment is that you have proven just as little yourself, and there is precedent for both.
Because you want to ignore that and nitpick that I mentioned other apps doing the same thing, as if that prevents Tinder from doing it, I went out of my way to get a screenshot of my own Tinder settings. What do you know? It's right here. "Only show people in this range" https://imgur.com/a/yt34L2b
Upon further reflection, I'm just going with "they were actually correct".
Play to win. You want to get in front of someone before a competing dating market participant does, and people are tolerant of “white lies” when necessary (“dating apps are the worst amirite?”). If you can’t excuse it away, work on your sales skills.
Hate the fact that third spaces have evaporated and you need a dating app to meaningfully participate in the dating marketplace, not that you have to take liberties with facts to increase your opportunities and potential to close into a relationship.
Tangentially, love is grown, not found. Find someone you can grow to love (ie trust and mutual respect, shared values and belief systems).
I met my ex-wife on Match. Things didn't work out in the long run (10 years) between us for reasons that had absolutely nothing to do with online dating.
But, I certainly know that if I had lied initially, it would have never worked from the start.
Your attitude on this matter ("play to win" and "work on your sales skills") is what makes the whole scene really horrible. I feel for your partner, I wonder if they realize that is your train of thought.
After saying what you did, I find your advice at the end contradicts what you said above. "play to win"... but grow love with trust after lying about my age? Weird.
Married 15 years, together 20. My partner is aware what she’s dealing with, she finds my approach attractive (fwiw) and will encourage me to flirt in front of her. I am kind but also confident and direct. Win friends and influence people sort of thing.
I agree the dating marketplace is terrible, but you can’t change it, you can only change how you operate within in to arrive at a desired outcome. Would you own a business but do no sales or marketing because you find it icky? That’s a quick way to bankruptcy.
40-50% of first marriages fail. 60%+ of second marriages fail. This doesn’t account for relationships that never get to marriage and still fail.
That is to say that most relationship success is timing, luck, and emotionally healthy enough people (have to love yourself first before you can love someone else in a healthy way). I wish I had more actionable advice, but I don’t. Be a decent person, sell yourself, and get in front of as many (emotionally healthy) potential partners as possible. That’s it. I agree I am in the minority. I recognize luck for what it is, but try to encourage everyone to get more dice rolls in (see: this sub thread). I wish you luck and happiness.
> After a couple of days I concluded that most (all?) of these dating apps are pay-to-play.
It's definitely most and certainly feels like nearly all, especially once you start to notice just how many of these are all run by the same scummy corporation, Match Group [1]. Most of them are just thin skins over the same underlying terrible monetization platform.
Most of the dating apps that aren't from Match Group generally either have their best features stolen by Match Group and monetized and then out-competed to death or live long enough to see themselves become the villain and reaching for the same monetization dark patterns or even just exiting directly into Match Group.
(Among others, OKCupid was explicitly founded to be the hero against Match Group and eventually succumbed and was bought by Match Group. Tinder was built by whole cloth by Match Group to steal good ideas for features from smaller apps including but not limited to Bumble and was built to be an intentional slow boil-the-frog as it slowly added in other Match Group monetization features and then slowly started passing on its own features to the overall group "platform" as the features themselves stopped being the novelty. Now nearly all of Match Group's apps act like Tinder and swipe left/right.)
There is a dating app in my country that doesn’t have the option to chat, if you match you can only choose to meet up or not. If you do, you get to choose from one of the participating bars/coffee shops and you pay a small fee. That fee includes your first drink at the chosen place.
Basically, they monetize by setting people up on dates at specific places they have a deal with, driving customers to these places.
On the other hand you'd think people would flock to an alternative that actually works, while they're searching.
And truly successful in the sense 'never ever need the service again' probably has enough obstacles after the initial matching and dating phase that there could be a fair number of returning customers nonetheless.
Having enough users that could justifiably be called "customer" at all may be a catch of a different kind though. Can't say I know for sure, but I strongly suspect the network effects make it very difficult to attract useful amounts of people to match with to a purely paid service initially, even if it would be readily worth the fees to everyone involved if the system was already established with a large enough network.
Maybe it would have been neat if Musk had bought, and tried to reform, that major online dating service instead of the little bird company...
Explain the game to the user and make a package where the company reserves a large-ish sum on the credit card and they get to cash only when the user stops dating after a successful match.
The dating app doesn't make any money until a successful long-term. The dating app could also require feedback after dates, to both improve matching and verify that one user is not cheating.
If a couple colludes after they get i long-term relationship, they could continue dating... but it increases risks of cheating.
This aligns the interest of the daters and the dating company (less infrastructure expenses and also less risks from reserved but unpaid transactions).
There are open relationships, the app can learn to screen for people with profiles that are prone to that and avoid making the escrow offer.
Interesting idea for sure, but how do you distinguish between users successfully starting a relationship and those just not using the service anymore? Can I say "I did not find a relationship with that person and I'm not interested in looking again for a while"? If so, what would stop people from saying that even if it's untrue?
Also, it means zero monetization for people looking for single encounters and/or flings, which I would bet is a meaningful portion of Tinder's income.
Monetization is pretty straightforward, annual subscriptions, with equal access. Plenty of people will always be looking for love.
I am shocked at some of the prices I saw people paying? $100+ dollars/month to get a reasonable match? How much more monetization do you need there? A $60/year Strava subscription has done more for my love life than this.
Having used these in the past to moderate at first and then later fairly poor effect, in retrospect this conclusion seems obvious. Huge profit making corporations don't care about your relationships, your self esteem, your sex life or whatever is important to you. They're not neutral actors. They will manipulate and distort whatever they feel is appropriate until it extracts the maximum amount of money from its platform.
If you think it's eroding your self image then you can be fairly sure they've tuned something to do that to you because they think it will encourage you to part money for the perception of romantic advantage, or because they think it'll get your eyeballs on some ads, or for some other reason that funnels it money. The best move both romantically and for mental health 90% of users can make is to go touch grass, stop pushing for a date so hard and wait for serendipity to do its thing.
During the first year of COVID in San Francisco I had a date with a girl who I found completely annoying, she was rude to the waiting staff and insisted on finding “sugar daddy.” I couldn’t believe I was listening to the delusional beliefs this woman had, especially regarding she lied to me about her career after I sat down with her.
I told her exactly how I felt about her and that she really needs to fix her attitude towards people and men, and that I’m done with the date. I left, and never contacted her again.
Coincidentally the next day my tinder account got flagged and banned. I knew it was something to do with her and she was spiteful (though I couldn’t prove it), but the timing was impeccable. Someone had filed a report against me and the automation system at Tinder wouldn’t allow me to speak to anyone.
I couldn’t find a partner and every bar / club / restaurant / location in the city was closed for MONTHS! Tinder was literally exiling me to my room and closing off dating matches (I realize there are other apps but the pool is huge on tinder and I always found the most matches there and best outcomes for my lifestyle).
I think this should be against some policy or something. If folks just understood the isolation I felt those months, going from meeting women every week to 0 was very bad on my mental state.
I definitely fell into this category. None of my messages ever seemed to go through. I tried everything to fix it. The only thing that worked was getting a new phone, new number, and never connecting to my wifi. I have no idea what I did to get my account into that state but it really sucks. It damages your self esteem, but this is modern dating I guess. Talking to people in real life is quite a bit better.
> There are plenty of alternatives, but it’s less of a choice than you might think. With the exception of Bumble and Grindr, almost every popular American dating app is owned by a single company called Match Group, including Hinge, Tinder, Match.com, OkCupid, Plenty of Fish, and many others.
I don't know how that situation is allowed to persist. There should be some serious antitrust action is this space. What Match Group is going is 100 times more blatant that anything Facebook's done. At a minimum they should be forbidden from acquiring any more competitors.
And like most large faceless companies, if you're somehow banned, you have no recourse. I have no idea what I did, when I did it, or who I supposedly did something to, but I can't use Hinge anymore on my phone number. Also banned from Match but not Bumble or Tinder. The apps are indeed a shit-show and I no longer use them. Facebook singles groups and going out in real life are how I'm meeting people now. Much more satisfying and engaging than endless swiping and rejection. FWIW, I'm a genx male, divorced with kids 50/50, and a stable job. A little dad-bod, but not grossly overweight. I'm not a 10 but I'd rate myself a probably a 6-7.
Companies should be required by law to publish a standard service agreement and to inform a user if any changes are made to their account that deviates from that agreement. It's a necessity for companies to be able to manage their user community, but who among us wants a company to secretly change or restrict an account we use regularly without our knowledge and no recourse?
And sure, restricted users will make new accounts, but that's a problem as old as the internet and something companies just have to fucking deal with.
Someone needs to recreate the original okcupid. Back when it was a quirky site made by a handful of Harvard and MIT math grad students. It was the best dating site ever.
The top profiles are not real people. Especially with AI now we could generate 50 ideal matches which only take paid-likes and has generic AI responses if any
If we could drop some of the more poisonous attitudes ("entitlement" is key) and rid ourselves of many of our ideological blinders (men and women are totes the same and have the same dating needs, unless this is a conversation where I can say the opposite to win the argument) we could have some real discussion about this. There's just some basic things at play that we should stop denying, and I think the most important of which might be formulated like "Men are more 'thirsty' than women are."
Of course, we would have to season every sentence with some statistical weasel words ("tends to," "more likely to," "on the average," and so on) and we would have to risk bumping up against someone's carefully crafted worldview in an injurious manner. So be it.
Recall the now-vanished (Thanks, Match.com!) OKCupid blog posts regarding the different statistical spreads between the sexes. The more we try to obscure these differences, the more warped the strategic arms race between The Algo and the Lonesome Losers* will become, as The Algo will try to hide any unfairness and keep you playing.
However, there are a lot of different parties who are quite invested in avoiding bald statements about the reality of the situation. I don't see this changing.
* Lonesome Losers, named after the Little River Band song, strike out but they still keep on trying. They will, however, try to adapt.
(As a side note, "shadowbanning" is just gaslighting by moderators and/or The Algorithm. It's gaslighting, pure and simple.)
Haven't been on 'the apps' in a good while, but it was my belief that they all work a bit like this, no? The algorithm sizes you up, you get put in a bucket, and you are matched with those who are in an equivalent bucket. Bucket hopping is then made available at a cost.
I’m pretty sure that’s just an old bug they don’t care to fix. I know too many friends including me that are shown ONLY morbidly obese girls on Hinge :) unless you limit search distance to like 5 miles.
People have been reporting it for many years by now.
In general people throw the term shadow banned around too much. Whenever someone's content does poorly on youtube or tiktok they start claiming they've been shadow banned instead of considering their new content isn't worth watching.
I agree this is an incorrect usage of the term. Had they simply been unable to match with anybody but still saw everything as the same, that would be a shadowban.
I'm not sure what the correct term is for gently nudging people to get off the platform by making their experience worse.
Yeah, and then there’s also Twitter which testified Congress that they don’t do it and as soon as Elon took over lo and behold, there’s a shadow ban option for your account.
If you are less choosey, and happy to choose 'ugly' people, can you still have a good time on these apps. I'm married and not interested in trying it. I'm just interested in how it works.
> To use an overly simplistic example, if a lot of 25-year-old women who like Star Wars keep tapping “like” on one man’s profile, the algorithm might show him to more sci-fi fans in that age range.
The example here shows the author fundamentally misunderstands how collaborative filtering works. I am not saying it couldn't technically happen, just as many things are technically possible in a variety of circumstances, but that this is indicative of a Dunning Kruger esque mistake and jeopardizes the rest of his analysis.
> Can you hack the dating app algorithm? These guys are trying.
The simplest and most validly performance-improving hack is to create a new account, which isn't discussed here. The recommendations otherwise gathered are incorrect. In the context of the author's poor understanding of the underlying facts, it makes sense why this was printed though.
> With the exception of Bumble and Grindr, almost every popular American dating app is owned by a single company called Match Group, including Hinge, Tinder, Match.com, OkCupid, Plenty of Fish, and many others.
This is truly a nightmare. How did we allow such a crucial human function, finding a mate, to become monopolized? Both Democrats and Republicans need to date (though maybe not each other), so the issue should be bipartisan.
I feel like ever since Microsoft got a slap on the wrist back in 2001 (a few days before 9/11), antitrust law has more or less ceased to exist.
I’ve always wondered if this is because of globalisation. If you want your country’s companies to dominate the world market, then a strong home base would help.
> This is truly a nightmare. How did we allow such a crucial human function, finding a mate, to become monopolized?
I totally agree with you, and I would go even further. I'm actually furious that an essential part of human social life has become commoditised by a for-profit industry led by publicly-traded corporations. It being almost a monopoly, hidden to "consumers" [0] under an illusion of choice, is only the poop cherry on top of the whole steaming pile of crap.
One of my fantasies to become a millionaire (from a starting point of billionaire) is to establish an open source, transparent, non-profit and community-based online platform and app whose only mission is to help people meet someone with whom they are happy to meet and viceversa. Imagine a dating app but:
- Nothing encouraging "power users", even discouraging match accumulation.
- No gamification, other than configurable by user choice.
- No secret algorithms for rating. Instead, a choice of open community-developed algorithms for the swipe queue (if swiping is your thing, you can also filter and sort by query).
- No falsifying the potential dating pool size to keep users hooked. Do not show the profile of user A to user B, even if A fits B's filters, if B does not fit A's filters such that A would not see them.
- User engagement KPI in the denominator, not the numerator—the numerator being user reported success and personal satisfaction. The less time spent for good results, the better.
- No "pay to win". Instead of that, please donate if you win.
My dream would be to create a dating(?) platform, nay, a human relationship platform, with no perverse economic incentives that conflict with users matching. I would hope it could be So Damn Good that anyone looking for a date, or a shag, or a FWB, or to meet people to see where it goes, or whatever would feel like a chump to fall for Tinder, Bumble, OkCupid, etc. Let swiping and notification addicts continue to use those for-profit games. Meanwhile, people wanting a human connection could stick to the platform that cares to make it as likely as possible.
Unfortunately, the only thing stopping me from doing this is that I have no plan in motion to become a billionaire such that I can finance this idea ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
.
.
[0] No, damnit, searching for a relationship, a fling, a connection, is not an act of consumption, it is an act of basic fucking humanity!
Why would you need to be a billionaire to build a platform like you described? If you think you can't acquire users without big spending, then this platform is not really much better than existing ones?
To be honest, I'm mostly joking about the billionaire thing. If I were emotionally invested enough in this idea above other parts of my life I would look for a way to get it moving. The problem is that, by its very nature, a non-profit open-source project like this could not attract venture capitalists or angel investors, lest it become the very thing it was created to challenge (*cough cough*, OpenAI, *cough cough*). A project like this would need venture altruists or angel donors instead to be feasible and sustainable — hence my fantasy of become stupidly rich to be able to get it moving, at the cost of downgrading to "normal rich".
You don't need investors, unless you think you can't get users without buying them. The platform you described don't need much resources and can be bootstrapped. You can still capture just 1% of the value that Match Group captures and live nicely.
I think the reason we don't see competitors like that is that dating without aggressive monetization won't be much better for the average user.
OTOH, like all relatively simple apps, this ought to be trivially easy to create a competitor for, so it must not be economically feasible to do so (just like Facebook, Twitter and Reddit never got any competition no matter how user hostile they became). Why isn't there a free, non-evil Hinge competitor? Because it costs too much to run, and they have to do this to stay in business.
The arc of it seems to be that apps either die quickly seeing their best ideas cannibalized by Match Group (and can't compete with its network effects, its dark patterns, its massive budgets) or live long enough to become themselves the villains and eventually copy Match Group's dark patterns or simply just exit into Match Group.
I agree that it’s terrible, but you can still meet people in real life. This isn’t really aimed as a refutation your comment, but as pushback to people who are frustrated by these apps. It’s good to get away from them whenever possible.
Society has changed, though. I've seen it during my lifetime. The pandemic certainly changed everything as far as in-person socialization is concerned. But even before the pandemic, people were becoming increasingly isolated and antisocial, and there are a lot of factors at play here. Technology has changed how we interact. Instead of looking around and striking up a conversation with a stranger, they have their heads down looking at their smartphones. And the increasing prevalence of remote work has left fewer opportunities to meet people at work. Sexual mores have also changed. There's a lot more awareness of sexual harassment nowadays, which is good, but it also makes people more reticent to flirt in many situations.
That's not a comprehensive list of relevant societal changes, just some factors off the top of my head.
The very existence of the dating apps makes them difficult to avoid, because if that's where a significant % of the population are already looking, then you're ruling yourself out from that population by avoiding them.
This is a great comment. The world (at least the US) has changed and IRL interactions are more fraught than when I was dating. So glad I'm married and don't have to go back to the scene. Especially your point about the danger of flirting. The difference between flirting (wanted attention) and creeping (unwanted attention) is entirely in the mind of the recipient, so you don't know which one you have done until they respond. I'm sure this causes people to play it cautiously.
I'm married too, with kids. I don't think we can just be okay with it for ourselves, we have to consider what awaits our children when they get to dating age. It's not enough for us to not destroy the world, we have to be custodians of it till we hand it over to the next generation.
I'm personally not hopeful. The world is going to shit, and the only option I have available to me to safeguard my kids future is to acquire as much wealth as possible for them.
If that doesn't work, that means a giant war or similar catastrophe has descended upon us and there is nothing I could have done anyways.
I think it's worth remembering that actually only a minority of people with a partner found that partner through an app/dating site, even among relatively young cohorts. The only thing there is a monopoly over is the digital part but that's strictly optional.
I'm not arguing that the dating apps are particular good or successful. I wouldn't be complaining about Match Group if they were. In fact, there's been a rising share of people who are unpartnered: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/10/05/rising-...
In another comment, I talked about societal changes that have resulted in more social isolation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37213625 I think it's a problem is that we've become increasingly dependent on dating apps. Nonetheless, I don't think "just don't use dating apps" is really a solution, as if they were "strictly optional", because we can't magically go back to the good old days where everyone met their partners in person. The world has changed, and the old world doesn't exist anymore. In many cases, the alternative to avoiding the apps is singleness and loneliness.
We might all be better off if we collectively decided to abandon the dating apps. Short of that, however, it's kind of like "unilateral disarmament".
There's a few things going on here: a lot of young and LGB single people are using the apps but despite that most of those people who do get a partner still aren't actually meeting that partner through an app - about 20% for the youngest age group listed did. This isn't insignificant but 80% of that group did not meet their partner through an app still.
While the amount of users of that group are high, most of them are still ultimately going to meet their future partner through other avenues. It's worth highlighting that by definition most of them are unsuccessful at that point. It might be that actually one of the apps' main functions for some people is simply to give people some common ground as they exchange grievances about the experience...
On the amount of people in relationships, the data only seems to account for cohabiting and married couples, everyone else seems to be grouped into 'unpartnered'. As such this could also be reflective of changes in living circumstances - more young people still living with parents for example which may reduce opportunities for cohabiting. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/09/04/a-majorit...
In any case I agree with you that something is going on there but I still don't think that apps represent a good solution for most people.
My personal experience was that online dating was a disaster that (temporarily, fortunately) ruined my self-esteem and my best luck always came when I wasn't 'trying' to date at all.
> There's a few things going on here: a lot of young and LGB single people are using the apps but despite that most of those people who do get a partner still aren't actually meeting that partner through an app - about 20% for the youngest age group listed did. This isn't insignificant but 80% of that group did not meet their partner through an app still.
The raw percentages are somewhat difficult to interpret for several reasons. 1) Many people on the apps are not looking for a partner, they're just looking for dates or hookups. In a sense, neither success nor failure of the apps are fully or accurately represented in the cited percentages. 2) The dating apps themselves are only a few decades old and have increased in usage over time, so anyone who has been partnered for a long time, before the existence and rise of the apps, needs to be ruled out beforehand from the data.
> I still don't think that apps represent a good solution for most people.
I didn't say they were. ;-)
> my best luck always came when I wasn't 'trying' to date at all.
Alas, luck is just that, something that can't be relied on, and only blesses the lucky.
One company who owes all of dating apps which decides almost a third of all relationships means they are responsible for almost every negative thing that happens. The job is also a bit too germanic for me, they are effective causing a holocaust.
Stop using apps, especially if you're worried about "shadowbanning".
The open secret is that people use then to meet sex workers, who in turn sometimes troll people who they perceive as "harassing" them by reporting unwanted spam.
Imagine being lonely, going into a space to find a date, and having someone make your mental health worse because you wouldn't pay them for sex, when the whole reason you joined such a site is because you want an emotional connection and everything else aside... just don't want that.
I haven't used hinge, but I ended up deleting Tinder and OkCupid -- having coauthored a whole ass paper on the latter.
People need to be better about not using a PhD as a way to lift yourself out of economic precarity if you are unlucky enough to have affluent and absusive parents.
I don't see how that's too mysterious, and, for the most part, I don't hold it against Hinge, which has to try to make money.
edit: also, the other thing I forgot to say, is that I have also just keep deleting and recreating my account for every dating app. I don't do that to "game the algorithms" for these apps, though that may be a secondary benefit. I do it because I get tired of them, find them toxic/unhealthy, etc. I kind of just assumed most people did that, and I bet if the author's friend just shrugged and did that in the first instance instead of alleging foul play and conspiracy, they would have had a better time.
IIRC, Hinge always starts off by showing a good number of very attractive people in the main feed regardless, which I always assumed was partly to impress a new user with how worthwhile the app is, as well as trying to figure out how attractive the user is by seeing if attractive people respond to them.