- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
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“Monopoly fucks up the entire market, news at 11.”
“Capitalism is what ensures that monopolies have existed before and will continue to exist. And nobody wants to do a damned thing about it! News from 200 years ago.”
it’s not because there isn’t a desperate need. it’s that they are predatory and make a hard thing fucking impossible, and have a vested interest in making it impossible and charging for the solution, but not a good enough solution to invalidate needing to keep using it.
I of of the opinion that these sites commoditize women. They take in profiles, they curate and hoard them. They know that men will pay to get access to them, so they put the best “opportunities” behind their paywall. If you don’t pay, you can see them, but have low chances of getting their attention. I presume the same happens to both sides, but regardless of how they operate, they don’t want you to find someone. They don’t make money if you find someone and quit using the app.
They manipulate a population that is hooked on convenience and pretend to offer the same thing. Be a lazy turd and find a hot woman from your sofa. That isn’t realistic, but that’s the pitch. Nobody starts dating thinking “hmm, I want the chunky person who has no other hobbies than swiping on their phone while Netflix plays in the background”. If these apps were at all helpful, they’d tell you to put on some pants, get off the sofa and develop some appealing interests (no, “hiking” isn’t one of them because you don’t actually do it).
Good fucking riddance if this is at all true.
There’s also all the investment in making using the app addictive with all the little dopamine hits of finding something that might be good every so often at random. So when you do meet someone and you’re bored during the commercials in the from you’re watching, what app would give you a little dopamine hit, yes it’s your favourite dating app, run by the same one company as all the other dating apps.
Yesterday, I matched with 12 men. Only two messaged me.
Lmao she should have tried running an account for an average looking man
Maybe if they weren’t all about making money off loneliness they might be doing a bit better.
The dating app kinda reminds me of gambling. Gambling is selling the hope of being rich. Dating apps are selling the hope of finding a partner.
Grindr is the ultimate gamble, hahah I was telling me wife my blocklist grows every day. I had a guy solicit me for dirty socks, didn’t even want to buy them just wanted to trade one dirty sock for three clean ones… I had another guy call me an asshole for not responding to them. Not to mention the people who don’t read profiles.
They just throw quarters into the machine and hope one of their bets pays off.
It’s fascinating how different women’s experiences with these stupid things are than men’s…
How so?
I’m a man who originally met women on these apps, but after a certain point everybody seemed to be a bot and the app seemed to be completely gamified, even when I used paid apps. Other people might have different experiences.
From what I understand, women are deluged with mobs of low-effort fuck boys and men are mostly ignored, which creates a feedback loop where men swipe on anything just for the hope of a match, which only makes things worse.
It’s really fascinating from a systems perspective. But it used to be better before enshittification, in my limited experience. The reality is that quickly finding a new partner you are ideally matched with is the very last thing these companies want you to do.
One of my friends, who is a woman, once showed me her dating app to show me why she found it so exhausting. I tell you, I’m ashamed of my fellow males. She got so many cheap messages from horny guys, to the point where she found the app useless.
For me, last time I used a dating app, I found it very hard to strike up a meaningful conversation with my matches. It was like I had to carry the whole conversation and they took forever to respond. So in that retrospect, it might be why some guys don’t put in much effort when contacting women. But most of the massages my friend showed me, where absolutely just mouth breathing horny guys.
My last runthrough with the apps, I’d carefully read everyone’s profile and craft an interesting introductory message. It took quite a bit of time and was rarely rewarded with a reply, much less a conversation, much less a first date. My messages got shorter and shorter until eventually I was just mass swiping. And, just as far as a use of time goes, if all that matters is a woman likes your profile, it’s more efficient to roboswipe and filter the women who match back.
Also, the emotional toll of serially declaring “I like you” and asking “do you like me?” only to be greeted by rejection after rejection is pretty devastating.
Anyway, very happy with my current girlfriend whom I randomly ran into at a store while looking for an accordion.
it could be worse. she could have gone on a date with one and they say something really sad like “all the women on there just want sex. I want something meaningful”
oh honey…you have been hitting up all the bots.
there is a point where most people go “this might be a scam” but there is a special few that go so far to give it a whole backstory.
Gay dating apps are bad too. It’s no better with only men involved. On sniffies, for example, you get on and start texting with a cock pic. Want to have a conversation, get to know them, figure out if they are worth your time, hell, even if they are safe to be around and it’s treated as heretical. It’s just perverted goons.
Guys on these apps lobotomize themselves. They shouldn’t be breeding.
quickly finding a new partner you are ideally matched with is the very last thing these companies want you to do.
Exactly. That’s the gamification. They want to keep you grinding against bots and employees, otherwise they won’t make money.
EDIT:
I’ll add that men are probably the customer here, and that might make women seem like the product, the company can actually swap out real women for bots and employees, making real women obsolete to the business model of dating apps.
Oh, men are definitely the customers. There was a website with a pornstar backer… Madison something or other. It was billed as a place to meet horny married women looking to have an affair–just sex, no attachment. It got hacked and, surprise surprise, it was entirely men talking to bots.
Edit:
Annalee Newitz, editor-in-chief of Gizmodo, analyzed the leaked data.[46] They initially found that only roughly 12,000 (0.22%) of the 5.5 million registered female accounts were used regularly.[47][48] The vast majority of accounts had been used only once — the day they were registered. Newitz also found that many women’s accounts were created from the same IP address, suggesting there were many fake accounts. They found that women checked email messages very infrequently: every one time a woman checked her email, 13,585 men checked theirs. Only 9,700 of the 5.5 million female accounts had ever replied to a message, compared to the 5.9 million men who would do the same. They concluded, “The women’s accounts show so little activity that they might as well not be there.”[47] In a subsequent article the following week Newitz acknowledged that they had “misunderstood the evidence” in their previous article and that their conclusion that there were few females active on the site had been based on data recording “bot” activities in contacting members. Newitz confirmed that Ashley Madison had created more than 70,000 female bots to send millions of fake messages to male users. Still, they note that “we have absolutely no data recording human activity at all in the Ashley Madison database dump from Impact Team. All we can see is when fake humans contacted real ones.” They noted that the site seemed to keep track of human-to-human contact but that the Impact Team had not released this data.[49]
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User name checks out.
Constantly. Show me the lie.
I’m not saying you’ re wrong that women don’t like to approach men online. Bumble says 2/3s of women they surveyed said they don’t want to do it (which does leave 1/3, so you can update your extreme statement)…
But to calm your aggravation, maybe you could do a little thought experiment and see if you can’t find some reason other than women suck.
So, for instance, let’s presume the #1 problem women have with online dating is that men are mostly interested in sex. It seems to be a very common complaint, so this is plausible.
SO what happens when a woman makes the first move, is that she is giving some horny guy hope. A guy might say, " well, i don’t think she’s attractive or interesting, but maybe there’s a chance she’ll fuck me on our first date." And that’s not a great position to be in for a woman who is interested in a relationship.
Maybe the reason women don’t make the first move is to lower the odds that they’ll go on a date with a guy who has absolutely ZERO interest in her at all other than as a hole.
And this is not a conversation we’re allowed to have so much any more, because it implies that men are more interested in sex and women are more interested in relationships, and, despite this being the pretty obvious statistical truth driving why online dating is so shitty, this view is considered gender-essentialist.
So make men make the first move, and put him in the position of “Is this chick interested in me at all for anything or does she just want a free dinner?”
Look, the only solution to this is to make dating illegal and prostitution mandatory. Men want sex, women want money. So let’s kick this bullshit power play nonsense in the head, stop pretending love exists, and put the fucking price tag back on.
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I mean, they suck for everyone - don’t get me wrong.
But being able to see them as an ego boost, or having the frustration be that you get low quality matches, as opposed to the punishing experience of “80% of the matches you get at all are catfishing bots” is very different.
I really never found bots to be a problem. Maybe 1 of 20 matches and one gal I actually met started the chat with me saying she knows her profile looks like a bot but she is real and then asks me to meet her later this week for coffee. 😂 im not hot by any means, but she was… sadly it didn’t work out but damn good 45 days.
Mine has always been truth of person. No one seems to be who they really are on their profile.
Yeah it’s wild.
All of my female partners have at about 20 likes for every 1 that I, a male get from females.
I think I prefer to be on this side of the fence to be honest. Having more than a handful of people to chat with at once would be overwhelming.
HOW is this Possible? All dating Apps do is make it IMPOSSIBLE to Find a Real Person! How is that NOT a Winning Strategy in the “Find a Real Person” Industry?
I’ve paid for a few to see if it helps - It does and I feel like it was worth it up until 2 years ago when they changed how matching works. But you know what doesn’t work, people telling the truth on their profile. So great, I had better matches or in my case on bumble, better choice for matches based on who liked me. But damn if Jeni from the town next door loved “hiking” when really she just loved watching tv and one day wanted to “be more active”. She also told me she wanted to move to Spain one day… guess who also wanted to move to Europe ( Spain, wherever) - me! But I got the job and she’s pulling the “well not yet!!!” and in the end just wanted to visit and knew I have money to do this. P.s. I live in Spain now.
Each profile is a crafted (and truth bending) aspect of your life for others to review and I hate how it doesn’t capture the truth of who you really are in person. I went in being honest and found women who liked the same, but yet they were never really who they were on the app. I found my best matches when I wasn’t truthful or bent the truth a tad but yet I never stayed together long.
Best girlfriend so far, met her organically on the beach because my dog went over to say hi by licking her face. She’s a bit over the top, has tattoos everywhere including a funny phrase on her ass, but she’s the most compatible woman I’ve met so far.
Is the phrase
Live, Laugh, Love
Written in comic sans
Nah… Papyrus
Good
why? didnt find anyone? Ive had great success tbh - married, 2 kids not sure if its just luck or incidental or what
They’ve gotten worse by the year. If you’re married and have 2 kids, you probably were on them long enough ago that it was quite different. You might also be conventionally attractive.
I’ve been single a couple of times in my life and some of those times I created a Tinder (and/or Bumble, OKCupid) account.
First time must’ve been about 8-9 years ago now after I got broken up with. Got an okay amount of matches, tons of interesting conversations. Met a few people IRL. Found a girlfriend after about half a year, ended up not being very compatible, broke up, made another Tinder account. 3-4 years on Tinder, getting fewer matches by the year. Increasingly few interesting conversations, met maybe 4-5 people IRL over that time (some of whom I’m still friends with). Ended up meeting the person who would become my baby mama and ex-wife. After I divorced her, created a new Tinder account and… near-zero matches. I saw TONS of bots. Like super obvious bots, all the same-ish profile archetypes (my favourite one being random letters for name with a weird blurry photo of a red building, saw hundreds of those). Half a year and two dates with one woman later, I just… deleted it and embraced being single. An average looking woman makes an account and in a few hours they have 99+ likes (where it stops showing the exact amount). Not quite happening for me or any men I know.
I’m not super attractive, kinda average looking face and a bit overweight, but I’m quite strongly built and masculine which some women seem to find, I dare say, irresistible, but many do not. But I’ve never (in my adult life - middle school was different) had problems holding a conversation with a woman, I’ve always had creative bios and decent photos compared to many I’ve been shown from other guys’ profiles. My ability to get matches on Tinder, Bumble, whatever, has gone down over the years, whereas I feel off those apps I’m better than ever? I’ve joked that I have the exact same thing with jobs and women: Once I get to the interview, I’m in, but getting there rarely happens.
And like… it’s not just the quantity of matches that went down. Quality too. By match quality I don’t mean “I matched shit people”, that would be quite arrogant of me to say. I mean I used to match more people with whom I felt I had things in general. People with whom a conversation would just flow until 5 AM. That just stopped happening over time.
Oh and you get fewer swipes than ever, no longer get any free superlikes on a free plan (you get 5 a week on gold I think, used to get few on free…), etc. The gold plan is like 20€ a month which I got as a bonus through my Revolut plan and… they still keep upselling you on both a more expensive sub, and consumable boosts.
Most other apps belong to the same company and seem to have degraded similarly - but none of them are used much here anyway, there’s 100x fewer people on Bumble and OKCupid would just show me people from other countries only.
TL;DR: Used to get more matches. Used to match people who I’d actually enjoy talking to (and vice versa). App itself is trying to upsell you more and more while you get about as much on paid plans now as you did on free plans back in the day.
Good riddance
I am currently developing one and what I can see is the following:
- people get treated like cash cows. It is almost not possible to successfully date without spending money
- people are burned out. The low quality swiping, matching, just to get ghosted, is hurting the motivation.
- people have other problems nowadays. COVID reshaped us completely. We don’t want to spend 2h a day on a dating app. 2h a week max and then they want to continue in real life.
Those are pain points introduced by big corpos (e.g. Match.com) and the fact, that they have launched their apps before COVID.
I have addressed those pain points.
Dating apps are scams. Either a scammer in Hyderabad is conning you or a scammer in a boardroom is selling your data and forcing invasive ads on you. Did you discover some other way of funding your project aside from the ads or making people pay for sex but pretending it’s classier when an app does it?
Good point. Men usually get contacted by a lot of “gold diggers” and content creators. Women often are targets from scammers or crypto bros.
Scammers can be avoided by using a mandated verification process. But here I don’t rely on a third party service, as privacy is a really important topic for me. I wouldn’t want users to be forced to upload sensitive data to Persona for example. This is why I have developed a small verification service, that applies some algorithms that have been working quite well according to the research papers. It will not be impossible to catch all scammers, but if 95% are cought, that’s already a big win. As for the other problem with people just trying to sell content, a working reporting system should help. The reporting systems of the current apps are majorly flawed, punishing legit people while protecting scammers. The reason is also gender based. The more women a dating app has, the more men are attracted, so women tend to get extra protection. That hurts the whole community.
As for the funding, this is such a difficult topic. The system costs money, so I need to get a bit of money back. I didn’t want any of the “pay to win” features. I also don’t want ads, not even sponsored content. As a video gamer, I tried then to figure out why free games such as Warframe or Path of Exile were earning so much money. It comes down to two things people are willing to pay for: Cosmetics and time-savers. So that’s what I now implemented. Decorate your profile with paid cosmetics. I don’t know how to implement the time-savers yet, so for now it is just cosmetics and an optional “buy me a beer” donation I offer.
It’s not just women being targeted. My roommate got conned for dick pics. He’s not very intelligent so he believed the scammer was going to send his nudes to friends and family. I had to explain to him it’s a scam and if he wants the guy to go away, take the power away. Let him send whatever he wants.
This situation isn’t uncommon. There are plenty of other people being conned on these things. It’s such a problem that most people who contact you on these apps are scammers so you are just wasting time feeding them. It’s more depressing than just staying single.
As long as the data is centralized it will be abusable too, especially in 2026. You could go decentralized to reduce costs and lighten the load, but that has its own risks for abuse and criminal activity.
The web is retracting.
Oh that scam happened to me personally, too. It is not just annoying, it is damaging people.
There is no option to go decentralized, as I have no incentive for others to spend computing power. Decentralized services are ideal for communication and I have also developed a fully peer-to-peer, end to end encrypted Discord alternative. I just didn’t want to release it yet, until someone verified the security layer. Other than that, I kinda need to have everything centralized to foster the community and to set the rules for that community.
As I am not investor backed and also don’t want to be, I focus on releasing in very specific locations at first to create revenue with small investments. It takes a bit longer, but the growth is more stable and more organic.
But decentralized is kinda perfect for this. Webtorrent is a standard now so you might not even need an app. Just have users seed the service. More users, better service, though webtorrenting the entire site would likely eat data so splitting the different where accounts sort of mesh messages within their area would make more sense than just tossing sniffies in webtorrent.
Hi, I’m from the EU, I have the right to get all of my data removed from a centralized service using GDPR. How do I do it on a decentralized one?
Leaving aside the whole issue of those companies not being trustworthy about the data deletion, at least my profile won’t be public when its’ been deleted and I’ve got someone to make a complaint about if I have reason to think they’ve lied about it. The fines can be pretty high. With federation, actually getting all copies of your profile deleted is nearly impossible. With torrent style decentralization, it seems completely impossible. Everyone will have access to everyone else’s data and it’ll be trivial to make backups.
Presumably most people would be using this on their phones with mostly their mobile data. An issue with the bittorrent protocol is that to open a connection, one peer has to have a port forwarded. Is this different with webtorrent?
Federation is simpler than true P2P here, but you then still need to trust the instance admins. It’s fine for Lemmy/piefed style media for me because I don’t put my real name, face and other details here.
My personal opinion is that a centralized alternative owned by a foundation rather than a for-profit company would be best of both worlds: No profit motive, just like decentralized. A centralized entity that holds liability in case there’s a data leak or someone starts spreading CSAM. And ability for said centralized entity to moderate said CSAM, scams and other reports.
Well it depends how it’s built. It’s possible to make a decentralized instance where an account exists and there’s a ledger of accounts but what in that account isn’t there at all, it’s just an ID an authenticated user logs in and grabs on to. Then, messages and photos travel between nodes on the network rather than being stored on a server and pulled off it. Your pics and messages come from your device. I2P and reticulum already do stuff like this, webtorrent could provide a ledger of accounts without having to rely on darknet tech, the developer could roll his own, there’s plenty of options.
If it’s regional, I see no reason to have centralized abusable storage involved at all.
Do they have to be scams though? Why or why not?
What is the potential of a dating app that isn’t a scam?
I worked customer service for match for almost a decade, so I can give you a few pointers.
People leave when they’re the only ones in an area. So giving them something to do is important to retain people. The best idea I’ve ever saw was having a forum where people can discuss any topic. I think Match also tested public chatrooms and streams, but i didn’t really dealt with those. You’ll have to deal with forum drama and moderation, but some people will be very engaged.
Speaking of, moderation will take lots of time and effort. People sick. Make sure that moderation tools are as robust as the matching ones.
I think those are the general ones. Best of luck!
Thanks a lot for sharing. I have a Community Manager background and also was a moderator at Jaumo. Having a place to engage can be fun, but I am not fully sure yet if people really want to do that, when they just want to date. I have to think about it and maybe I will add something as an optional feature.
One of the things I am doing is launching with a wait list, so that an area can populate first, before opening the gates. This avoids the problem of feeling alone.
I recommend you take a look at Breeze. It is a dating app in the Netherlands (and expanding).
When you match, you get a date planner (after paying for the date). No chatting allowed. A real date or nothing. That is the premise. You pay per date, and you get your money back if the date is cancelled or they don’t show up. So the app earns money from sending people on real dates. People that don’t show up or cancel dates are penalized by the algorithn and they loose badges on their profile. This is good for Breeze, who wants people to go on dates, and good for the users, who want to go on dates.
Chatting is allowed a couple of hours before the date, but this is not intended for conversations, only for practical purposes.
As a result, profiles also matter much more. For both sides. You litterally need to sell yourself, because if someone swippes on you, they may need to pay 10 euro for the date if you also swipe on them.
You also get only a handful of profiles each day. Which makes sense, because you can limit the number of concurrent matches/dates, hence the app is better off distributing the matches, rather than piling them onto the 10% hotest accounts.
This also means you can’t spend more than 15 to 30 minutes a day going over 5 tot 10 profiles.
Meanwhile, the app can provide free accounts, where people only need to pay for actual dates, hence the entry barier is lower than Tinder, where men won’t get seen without paying. Meaning it is easy to get a userbase going.
I suspect the hard part is the logistics of setting up the dates. A spot in a bar or coffee place needs to be organized for each date. If that is no option, the users are asked to choose a meeting spot (talking to eachother via an intermediate person.
I suspect you’ll have one big pain point to address that most apps other than the few big ones struggle with: The network effect. How do you get enough people on your app that it’s worth it for people to get on your app?
Suspect you need either a really visible feature you can advertise (“we’re not enshittified” alone isn’t necessarily enough to sway people), or a ton of advertising budget.
I toyed with the idea of building an app myself, wanted to build something similar to what OKCupid used to be, where you could optionally answer questions about yourself and calculate compatibility based on those. Building an actually good algorithm to find you people you’d most likely truly like seemed interesting. Then I realized I don’t have the time to see it through as a project to the point I’d get a truly active userbase and I’d have to run it at a loss for at least a few years so I can’t quit my other work. Hope you do better, match.com truly needs some competition.
You’ve missed the big one. Those aren’t people.
They are AI fronts for orgs of various size that will scam you for whatever opportunity they may discover.
You can’t fix that. Try developing something that helps people instead of another platform to use them.
You want to help people meet? Open a bar.
If they are dying, I’d say nothing of value is lost.
They were a silly concept to begin with. If they worked well, they’d kill their own business model. To stay economically viable they therefore have to use all kinds of tricks and produce mixed-at-best results, and cognitive manipulation to keep their user base entertained. Glad to see them finally collapse
I never really believed that montra of if they were successful they lose a customer. I met my wife on a dating site over 13 years ago and told everyone I knew about it and how good it was. Many of the people that I told tried the site. It’s a great way to spread your business if anything then through natural word of.mouth you actually kinda weed out people who are looking for the wrong things. Unfortunately the one I used ok cupid was bought by the big conglomerate and they change it so it was just like all the others. The other place I see it working is if governments offered the service because they want people to be matched up. I get people might not trust the government to match them up but why would you trust a company to do it then.
I think, it’s a myth that matchmaking has to be bad to survive. We see that in gaming all the time. The problem is just that physical world matchmaking is optimized to get recurrent customers instead of finding good matches. And that inevitably tanks the reputation. The first dating platform with good matchmaking will be the last one standing because it will suck the competition dry.
There is a market for good matchmaking. It’s just not as big as the imagined market for bad matchmaking (which we see now isn’t actually that big once people realize that the service sucks).Also there are still “for real” matchmaking services — for marriage — in plenty of cultures. This is a pretty normal way for folks to get married in many countries. If these apps had gone for being “the digital version of that” instead of algorithmic enshittification, maybe it would be a different story
Hard to argue this isn’t a good thing, given how they’ve driven young people apart on purpose for profit.
Thank God
I’m blessed to have experienced pre-algorithm tinder back in the day.
