I strongly believe Match Group is single handedly deteriorating relations between genders in regions where they are popular.

The commercial incentive Match Group has to prevent churn means the optimal outcome for them is that you never find a partner. And so if you’re outside that top N percentile of popularity, they’ve optimized their apps to abuse you emotionally and financially. They’re engineering the perfect carrot on a stick.

One such behaviour, for example, is that when you buy Tinder Plus, they will feed you a couple matches, but withhold more than they give you. Once the subscription expires, they feed you rest of the “Likes You” people into the page where they’re obscured, forcing you to resubscribe if you want to see them. And of course you will never encounter those people just by swiping, they’re purposefully held from you.

I’ve recently switched to Facebook Dating because they don’t have any commercial incentives (and in fact probably negative incentives) to NOT match you. Thus they can also give you all of the “Premium” features for free.

What Match Group is doing probably isn’t illegal, but I think it probably should be. It’s the same kind of emotional manipulation that casinos are guilty of.

I've thought about this a lot, but I really don't think the profit incentive changes much. I don't think for example that a free and open-source community-supported dating app would result in a better experience, because a lot of the problems with dating apps are about human psychology and not with the business model.

A FOSS or nationalized dating app would still result in:

1. The feeling of FOMO (99% of swipers stop swiping before they find their REAL soulmate for real this time)

2. Impersonality. One cannot effectively communicate that they are generous, kind, and funny or any other set of attractive but abstract qualities in 4 photos and a short bio.

4. Similar to impersonality, is the loss of contextual bonding. Especially for women, being in proximity to a potential mate tends to work a lot better than seeing a few 2D photos. It's crazy to think about, but a huge percentage of happy long-lasting couples who met organically would have never swiped on each other, me being one example.

5. Asymmetrical supply and demand (women dying of thirst in the ocean while men die of thirst in the desert)

6. The 'stranger' dynamic makes everything low-stakes and therefore low effort. There is no social consequence for bad behaviour, whereas if you met someone at work, school, church, or were introduced by a mutual friend, there IS a social cost for ghosting, manipulation, superficiality, etc.

7. All of the above results in WAY too many interactions in a romantic or potentially romantic context, and I don't think people were meant to have dozens of situationships for a decade before finally getting success. The constant churn and burn cycle results in burnout. The burnout is exhausting and discouraging and worse, can lead to feelings of antipathy.

None of the above is actually solved by a different ownership or funding model. I'm sure that building an app in such a way that artificially gatekeeping a superior experience behind a subscription creates its own set of winners and losers, but I don't think that is actually in people's top complaints about the dating app experience!

My wife and I got married just before "app dating" got popular, and she says "we caught the last chopper out of 'nam."

Dating apps are a Skinner Box by nature. They give randomized reward in the form of likes and matches. If you're attractive, you're the product because you don't need premium service to get more dates.

Give me Yelp for date spots and take a cut of the ad revenue. That way, there's at least an incentive to get people to not ghost each other long enough to actually meet up for a date. Hopefully that will do some level of incentivizing human connection.

> I’ve recently switched to Facebook Dating because they don’t have any commercial incentives (and in fact probably negative incentives) to NOT match you. Thus they can also give you all of the “Premium” features for free.

Don't they still power this via ads? Every set of eyeballs looking for love is slowly trickling nickels into their bank accounts; it seems like they would have the exact same set of incentives as you describe Match Group having.

This sounds plausible

If there is a viable contender, match group will work hard to buy it to drag it down to its level, c.f. Tinder

OkCupid was different, before it got bought by match. The single best thing that could be done for the dating world and fertility rates would be to hire the MIT/Harvard math guys from the original OkC and restart it as a not-for-profit dating app.

Jesus Christ, I had thought Hinge was still independent from Match Group. Guess I'll uninstall and start talking to people in person...

What they do is literally like P&G in the laundry isle or Unilever in soap. Have the illusion of choice while it's really all the same thing with a UI change and maybe a unique feature or three.

The incentive dating apps has is built to be completely opposite of what (at least many of) their users are trying to use it for.

Chose your poison:

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45311274

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35726102

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44917922

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> What Match Group is doing probably isn’t illegal, but I think it probably should be.

What should be illegal? Withholding matches when you're paid to keep you single but showing you more attractive matches after you unsubscribe? Listen to yourself. Your idea of what they're doing is so highly engineered and specific.

It's so convoluted but it comes down to its a shitty product and people don't want to use shitty products. They may for some time but making a product purposely bad and hostile to your user base doesn't lead to long term growth and people will abandon the product for alternatives.

Not everything "bad" needs to be illegal.