the reality is that those stats were flawed in numerous ways. this is expected, they were never subject to peer review.

for example: ok cupid and tinder, during the times that christian rudder was blogging about them, never reported on the actual ratio of active male to active female users. this made it impossible to do any comparisons over time, it's like reporting only numerators in the absence of denominators.

a second example: when tinder's 2018 interracial dating stats were compared to okcupid's 2011 stats, there was no change, despite real preferences having shown that something like 40 percentage points more people were comfortable with non-same-race dating over that decade. rudder kind of failed the obvious interpretation, that the apps and/or data collection were broken, and instead talked about some conspiracy of the surveys being wrong.

i think there was a lot of other stuff broken with it.

As a young adult that data analysis blog post seemed like cool shit, and today I'm horrified because it seemed like cool shit. They make for "cute" PR soundbites, and back then the data analysts likely didn't know better, but they are terribly biased and reductive by virtue of the structure of the platform, and can't be used to support anything essential or fundamental about human romance.