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.
Had it happen to me too. They’ll refund you for this. Just be polite when asking for it.
My review on the Play Store: “Premium is a scam. Hides likes which come from all over the world (clickfarms?) even though I set my radius to 5 km. But of course they only show you the fake likes (all of them) after one pays for premium.”
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.
Maybe he was practicing on her
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.
Good, maybe politely* asking people out in public spaces other than “the fucking bar” will become acceptable again rather than creepy.
*To clarify, I mean stuff like “I think you look cool, wanna grab some coffee?” not like “Ay lemme taste the inside of your butthole gurl.”
Aww man, throwing shade on my best lines, bruh
Lmao it seems 5 people agree with you. Sorry butthole tasters, I didn’t mean to say I don’t count myself amongst your ranks, as I most assuredly do. I only mean to say that leading with it is probably not the least creepy move one could pull in a grocery store.
probably not the least creepy move one could pull in a grocery store
So you’re saying it’s definitely not the worst, right?
“Ay lemme taste the inside of your butthole gurl.”
🥵 I think I need a cold shower now
I agree, I’ll be honest that’s why I use these apps. Because when I’d try to just talk to a girl in person and be friendly I get the sense they think I’m either being creepy or want to get in their pants. When I’m just an introvert just trying to start up a conversation lol
I’m old enough to remember life before the apps. I could never figure out how to make that work. Approaching girls was stressful and hard and there was a lot of ambiguity because you’d need like some ulterior motive for talking to them and then would have to shift to dating which I never had the confidence to do. Like I’d offer to send her some class notes or something and I’d get her email. But then what?
Just walking up to a random girl and saying:
I think you look cool, wanna grab some coffee?
Would have an extremely low success rate I’m sure. Girls need to feel comfortable first, after all strangers who approach you in a public place tend to be people you’d rather not talk to. Now if you’re at a bar and a friend introduces you and you have a conversation first, well that could work and it’s kinda how my parents and older cousins met in the pre-app days. But if you’re me in college and you’re an engineering nerd and have only a handful of equally nerdy friends, those conversations are hard to come by. And that’s the role the apps filled for me - the introduction.
No, it won’t, because it has never not been creepy. People should be allowed to go into public without constantly being approached. The part you don’t get is that being asked out for coffee once is novel, twice is fun, but after that it gets old really fucking quick. I do not want to have to deal with that every time I just want to do some fucking laundry.
And 90% of the people who do/did this are legitimately creeps.
You can still do that, but as rsuri says, you cannot be so direct. It’s too confrontational and girls don’t really appreciate that. You have to invent some plausibly deniable reason to start a conversation. This also gives the girl an out if she is not really interested. Then you just allude to your interest in her, which don’t worry she will pick up on immediately. At some point you will either hear, “… and my bf and I” or you hear nothing of that genre. At the end you can ask for a number. That’s not exactly the end of the story. Most of the time, the conversation continues through text only for her to drop you before a date is planned. But it’s in any case a way better experience than Tinder, unless you’re some hunk who can write “6’4” on Tinder and get 100+ matches.
Another thing MBAs have destroyed as they try to slightly increase profits.
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
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.
His description of how his analysis of the OKCupid questions discovered that there were 7 discrete cluster of personality that it would put you in was awesome.
He then make three profiles. One for each of the clusters he felt he was most like, but the profiles targeted the groups very specifically and so his matches started climbing like crazy.
After going on many many dates, he dropped two of the profiles because he found that he didn’t click with the women that they matched with.
The description of going on two dates to the same location in the same day with different women because ran out of novel date locations was hilarious.
Data science nerd out played a data driven system.
But that takes the human out of it, and at that point it’s just depressing.
Does anyone have a link?
Does anyone have a link?
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.
An already shit thing that has been massively enshittified, “NOBODY WANTS TO DATE ANYMORE???”
Met my now wife on these when they first came out. It was challenging back then. Can’t imagine how much they’ve enshittified it by now.
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
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.
The solution is obviously more AI!
I mean… maybe in this case? I feel like profile/picture based matchmaking is something an ML model could be pretty good at in theory. Match people based on physical preferences and attractiveness (get head scans and frontal & profile full body shots), basic demographic/location/financial info, fill out a questionnaire with hobbies, political views, sexual preferences, etc.
Do that for groups of satisfied pre-existing couples first to train the model on, then continue training the model on the successful matches from the app. Have it spit out X number of matches that have the highest ratings for all users, limit it to X matches per time period to limit “swiping” behaviors, then let users talk/date and provide feedback to the app about what they did/didn’t like.
Obviously, it would need major privacy protections given how sensitive the info is, but that’d be a way better system than Tinder and the like. Like a super powered robo matchmaker serving up the highest probability matches.
we should make an entirely AI based dating platform, that does everything for the individual. Such that the only way you truly meet is in person. Surely there would be no problems with this.
Nah. Obviously, you’d talk beforehand, and no one would be forced to use it. It’s no different than arranged dates through a matchmaker. Now, there’d be valid privacy and ethics concerns - especially if your ML model is racist. But that’s a whole different thing. People are often quite bad at picking good matches for themselves, and computers are great at pattern ID and so potentially good at finding matches.
yeah, it’s definitely an interesting idea. But someone will inevitably satirize it to the fullest extent so.
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.
Met my now-wife on Bumble in 2019, but I have a feeling it peaked around that time based on all the stories I’ve heard.
Might have to do with commodifying relationships, but who am I to guess 🙃
