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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Because it's almost impossible to optimize for love. like how?

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.

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.

https://github.com/Alovoa/alovoa

We should go back to arranged marriages.

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.