Online dating industry in crisis as shares fall and nearly half of all users report negative experiences on the apps
As a guy, these apps suck. I’ve met a few people on them, but it’s very obvious that they are deliberately hiding matches and people that are your type behind a paywall. It’s not in their best interest to show you people that have the same interests as you, it’s better if they bundle them all up and slap a big fat price tag on the front.
People are starting to realize these apps aren’t about hooking up or making connections, they’re about squeezing desperate people looking for love into giving money for the promise of finding it.
Get hardly anyone to notice me on okcupid, so I cancel my subscription, and within a day or two after it lapsed, I get 25 people interested in me, but I can’t see their profile unless I pay, so I resubscribe only to see they’re all in the Philippines and Africa. Then it’s back to getting nothing. It seems to me that okcupid baited me into buying a subscription and I fell for it. The whole service is a scam.
I always have great conversations with girls on apps. Then when we set up a date I get ghosted the day of. The one time the date actually would have happened the girl was a LOT larger than her pics. And I have no problem with dating a bigger girl but I do have a problem with liars. Never again.
Similar situation here. Lots of ghosting, or unmatching the day of a scheduled date. Had two dates in the last few months of using the apps. First woman was about 15 years older than her pics. Not unattractive by any means, but felt lied to from the get go. The other, let’s just say she had some work done after most recent pics, and the surgeon shouldn’t be practicing.
My wife and I met through eHarmony about 15 years ago now, and have been happily married over 10 now. Prior to meeting her I’d tried a handful of other dating apps but never had any luck. I had very similar stories about ghosting, unmatching, etc.
I have no idea if eHarmony still works the way it used to, but back when I met my wife it was fairly different from the likes of Match.com, Tinder, etc. When setting up your profile you had to answer a bunch of fairly specific questions that covered everything from if you were looking for casual dates, long term, marriage, if you have/want kid, etc. to things like activities you enjoy to how important things like family, religion, career, etc. are to you.
When they show you a potential match you get to see how they answered those questions along with a more open profile. If both of you indicate interest in communicating with each other then you’re first led through some rounds of guided communication to begin with. As I recall you would both pick 3 or 4 multiple choice questions from a list of 30 or so to ask the other person, and they would do the same. After you both answered those questions then you would do the same with more open-ended questions and so on. Only after a few rounds of that would you be able to chat/email with the other person.
What I realized while using eHarmony is that it kind of forced you to invest time & some conscious effort to communicate with potential matches. That resulted in more of them being open to proceed further. I went on dates with a few women I met on eHarmony before I met my wife.
As I said before I have no idea if eHarmony still operates this way or not. That’s how they did things 15 years ago and it could have changed a lot since then.
From what I hear 15 years ago online dating is wildly different than today.
Can confirm.
Are you sure about being ghosted? Or is the app just cutting your connection?
Same thing you described happened to me so many times I’ve lost count. Furthermore, I’ve compared profiles with some women I did met IRL and wouldn’t you know, what you see in your “profile preview” or whatever is not necessarily how anybody else gets to see you. We’ve seen profile pictures being removed or entire profile texts being wiped out, sometimes just before the first date.
Some people became aware of the enshittifaction/ gamification many years ago and resorted to putting their IG handles or phone numbers into their profiles “in case we get interrupted.” When some dating sites starting cracking down on that, too, they started putting this info into their pictures instead.
And that’s not even mentioning the bots and “controllers,” as they used to be called, whose only purpose is to extract private information from you. At least in the EU, dating apps have had to disclose their existence in the TOS for some years. They all do.
TLDR; The game is rigged beyond belief.I’ve never seen any app mess with my matches. I’ve been unmatched plenty of times, but for every one I can think of, it was for a reason. One was clearly just using it for attention, one clearly had no interest during the date, one apparently took personal offense to my opinion that I didn’t like boba tea (and this after she asked what I thought was overrated!)
I currently have one match just sitting there weeks after going on two dates, and I guess neither of us felt strongly enough about it either to talk about a third date, or to confirm the end of it. So it doesn’t seem to cut anything off for me.
I don’t mind the concept of dating apps, but nearly all of the useful features are paywalled. I also wouldn’t mind paying a few bucks for a service I find useful, but the prices are outrageous.
I would like to make my own dating app cause i apparently dont know how to date, but these apps are obviously incentivised to keep you on the app, constantly spending money to have the hope someone you like actually messages you back.
But the amount of apps that spam you going, "this person just signed up, message them right away!”
Tells you all you need to know about how they companies work.
But all that being said, i would rather buy the match group, and just fix all the existing apps they have
Another thing MBAs have destroyed as they try to slightly increase profits.
I remember that one dude they interviewed like 10 year ago who basically made his own algorithm to find the perfect match on I think several dating apps including Tinder.
It would also tell him a ton of information about each person from web scraping other profiles and stuff.
He said he got about 200 dates that all went really well because he knew everything about the person, and the algorithm would sift through thousands at a time to match someone he wanted.
After all that, he still never committed to anyone, eventually stopped his scripted thing, deleted all his dating app profiles, and met his future wife months later IRL by complete chance lol.
An already shit thing that has been massively enshittified, “NOBODY WANTS TO DATE ANYMORE???”
These apps are a service, and as such - in theory - it’s not out of the question to ask for some sort of payment.
HOWEVER, the price they ask is so damned high it’s not worth it.
I think Tinder wants $35/m to let you “see your likes” (the people who have swiped right on you), and as far as I know that’s basically the only way to ever see them because just using the app regularly they never seem to show up. I think I’ve had 40 Likes in a queue for about a year because they just never show up in day to day usage. I assume it’s all bot profiles from other countries at this point.
It’s all people outside of your search parameters that’s why they never show up. So basically it’s people you’re not interested in anyways and it’s not worth paying them money to find that out.
Never met anyone good off those apps. Now Craigslist, I have met friends for life.
I met my husband of 8.5 years on Craigslist Casual Encounters. Those were the times.
There are ways to fix the issue, but it wouldn’t be ‘profitable’. It probably could not be run as a for-profit company. It would also necessarily be deeply intrusive; there’s no way to beat some of the problems that make dating apps such a pain in the ass without also giving up a lot of privacy to the company running the app.
You’ve got a couple of issues going on. First, women–and some men–end up getting harassed on these platforms. Related to that, you have people using them that simply aren’t safe, such as people convicted of violent crimes and sexual assaults. Second, you have a number of people using them to cheat on existing partners. Third, catfishing and scams. Fourth, the profit motive of the company means that they aren’t really interested in seeing you finding a partner at all.
For starters, you’d need to have a system that required your real name, and would require verification on the order of opening a bank account built into it. (Yes, that means that you’d need really strong security.) They would need to run background checks, and look for things like criminal history, and searching tax records to make sure that you weren’t filing taxes jointly. It would also forcibly populate fields about e.g. how many children you have. You’d likely need to set it up with geolocation (both GPS and WiFi); trying to use a VPN or any other privacy-centric processes running would prevent the app from functioning.
Rather than subscriptions, you pay a single fee up-front, and activate/de-activate your account as desired.
For harassment/catfishing/scams/paid sex work, etc., you could create a reporting system that would result in permanent bans for anyone found to be engaging in those behaviors. You’d likely need to also have systems in place and warnings against moving conversations to other platforms (e-mail, texting, etc.), so that harassing and scammy messages could get reported easily. Catfishing would be much more difficult if accounts were linked to your real identity.
This is just kind of brainstorming. As I said, there are ways around all of the issues that people have with apps, if they’re serious about meeting people. You can’t fix hook-up culture per se; someone can lie to you just as easily IRL as they can on an app. But you can at least remove the worst trash from apps.
Historically I’ve had a lot of success and met some really great women, even had awesome relationships with a few, but things changed at some point after Covid. I barely see anyone that isn’t almost the exact opposite of what I look for and thats alongside the litany of notifications to buy something
Why did they all go for the swipe model? That vastly reduced the size of their customer market while splitting that reduced market across several apps.
Well Match saw the success of Tinder so they switched a lot of their apps to do the same. Then they bought Tinder and filled it with ads and enshittified it. Then people flocked to other apps because the old ones were shit. Then Match bought those too and made them shitty too worth swiping and ads. There have been no stellar new apps so people are avoiding them. Eventually there will be a cool new dating app that people will flock to that Match will buy and not learn anything from the catalogue of apps their strategy has killed and they will make that one shitty too.
The solution is obviously more AI!
I’ve never used one of those apps, but the risk of being defrauded or, worse, assaulted, would be way too high for me to take that sort of chance.
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