‘It’s not you, it’s me’ is the gist of college student qualms with dating apps. Hook-up culture declines while young people search for genuine connection.

8 points

This is the best summary I could come up with:


A decline in interest from dating apps’ core demographic is wreaking havoc across the industry, as Bumble’s CEO and founder Whitney Wolfe Herd steps down a day before the company reports earnings, says the Wall Street Journal Monday.

Tinder’s stock plummeted 15% last week after reporting a decline in paying users.

Wolfe Herd, who also cofounded Tinder, started Bumble to create an app where women could have more control by initiating conversations with men to reduce the unwanted and creepy messages that plague dating apps.

She’s succeeded by Lidiane Jones, a former CEO of Slack, who’s looking for opportunities to use artificial intelligence in dating app algorithms.

The resurgence of organic relationships deals a major blow to Bumble, Tinder, Hinge, and other dating apps that have profited off the boom of hook-up culture.

Though the company says this is not the case, frustrations with dating apps have percolated through user bases and many are opting for meeting partners the old-fashioned way.


The original article contains 382 words, the summary contains 161 words. Saved 58%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

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95 points
*

Probably never should have tried to make money off hook up apps in the first place. When you have a rotten business idea, eventually the house of cards come tumbling down. I’m surprised it took this long.

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66 points

Investors made bank either way. Same shit with Airbnb. It doesn’t have to be a sustainable business if you can make a shit ton of money in a short amount of time.

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18 points

So pump n dump has more than one meaning here.

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2 points

Welcome to capitalism. It may not be the best system…but the oligarchs say it’s the only one we can have (until NeoFeudalism).

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22 points

Grindr was fine from what I hear. But it had a unique way to succeed. Horny men want horny men right now. It was an evolution of cruising not of dating.

The rest? Yeah I meet people in person for a reason.

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12 points

Grindr went through a period where it was really shit, but in the last two years or so it has gotten a lot better.

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19 points
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2 points

Yeah and honestly ironically I think such an app could also have success with lesbians if it wasn’t for the fact that it would include a lot of “surprise my boyfriend wants to join/watch”. I know plenty of women who want casual sex with men but decide that the risks aren’t worth rushing in.

And yeah not all or even most gay men are the grindr audience, but their casual sex scene is an enduring part of their culture. And it’s because horny dumbass 21 year old men who are attracted to men can just fuck other horny dumbass 21 year old men.

Though I do think there’s been interesting cultural shifts they’ve developed due to grindr. Namely many have begun employing safety techniques traditionally used by women on dates.

And I’ve noticed that part of the queer backlash against grindr and the like is that it doesn’t build culture or community like the things it replaced. You go to a gay bar, get irresponsibly drunk looking for a casual lay, maybe you find it, maybe you find someone who isn’t your type that you chat with all night, maybe you find friends old or new. I hate that our and their in particular main cultural hub is bars, but that’s something really important for community building that living on the apps will cost you.

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43 points

The dating apps are just a symptom of the disease, to be completely honest. The hook-up culture isn’t going anywhere, because despite what people say, that’s what continues to happen. Anyone longing for a genuine connection are wasting their time on these apps, especially if you’re guy. People need to work on the impossible standards, on the constant approval-seeking/instant gratification, and set their priorities straight

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32 points

I’ve found several long term relationships off tinder as a WLW. It seems to work pretty well for me. The system doesn’t seem to be working for guys, and that’s unfortunate. But a lot of the pressure on women to settle for any man has gone away as women have become more self reliant. The whole thing has become far more consensual and less mandatory for survival. That’s going to influence men’s dating success no matter what medium people use to find matches.

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13 points

My personal experience with these has been even worse than the average, because my demi ass just doesn’t find most of the people on those apps interesting.

After half a year of some activity, I got maybe 2 likes, and 0 matches. Obviously I don’t even know who those people are, because the app doesn’t show me until I pay. Issue is, if I didn’t already swipe on those people, I don’t care who they are anymore.

Ironically, when I checked out the BFF section, I got several pings within a few days

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24 points

This is ultimately a big part of it, and it’s universal, not just in dating. Most friendships are “friendships of convenience” and the other types of relationships typically progress from there. But in western culture, we don’t have any third places, and so we just plain don’t make friendships of convenience anymore.

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2 points

If you’re demi how are you judging people based on images?

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6 points

What does WLW mean?

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6 points

probably Woman Looking for Woman

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-8 points

I married a smoke show I met on Bumble.

I gotta be real: you’re all doing it wrong.

It’s a sea of people’s assumed personas. Being genuine actually makes you stand out.

Feel like you’re pressured to be or act a certain way in order to get matches? And then you’re sad that they’re of low quality? While you are actively misrepresenting yourselves? Wtf did you think was going to happen?

If you’re approaching it like you’re trying to get a high score, you aren’t going to be yourself, and you and the people you match with are going to be disappointed. Faithfully represent yourself and what you want. Accept you’ll get even less attention than you already are. Get much fewer but higher quality connections.

Every online dating forum’s advice is incredibly terrible, and people failing to realize that they don’t HAVE to treat the platforms as a Skinner Box are what I think the root causes of the decline of online dating.

Which, isn’t to say the industry doesn’t bear most of the responsibility. If people treating your platform as a Skinner box decimates the value of your platform, maybe you shouldn’t go to such great lengths to make your platform such a box.

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10 points

I married a smoke show I met on Bumble.

I gotta be real: you’re all doing it wrong.

My ex was on bumble and she had over 4000+ likes. She was too anxious to even open the app by the time we had met. I deleted it for her.

You can have the greatest profile in the world as a dude, it just dosent matter statistically speaking if you’re not perceived as attractive/ have shitty photos.

If you married a smokeshow you met off of bumble, you could have probably had the same or better luck in real life. I’m not saying boo hoo poor boys but at the same time most of the guys desperately hoping for a connection on these apps won’t be able to get a date. Guys outnumber women on these apps something like 4 - 1.

The monetization of the apps are no good. I’m not agaisnt online dating but at the same time the status quo is pretty shitty, espcially if you fall into categories of people who are viewed as less desirable on these apps; ie Asian men and Black women.

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1 point

I can’t stress enough that I understand the mechanics at play. I am a software engineer. It’s literally my job to step back and understand how systems work.

I’m saying my initial failure, and the failure of most users, is choosing to compromise their authenticity for short term gains, if long term connections are your objective.

Look at any dating app forum. They’re all obsessed about min-maxing your profiles. They’ve got repositories of pickup lines. They’re all running under the faulty premise that you want to maximize the number of matches.

That is a great strategy if you are looking for a hookup. That is a great strategy if you’re looking to maximize dopamine hits.

It is an intrinsically self-defeating approach if you’re looking for a steady long term relationship.

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1 point
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181 points

Match Group deserves to collapse. Online dating has never been fun, but since Match Group bought up nearly every dating app, they’ve all become very homogeneous and outrageously more expensive.

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41 points

Seriously it’s all just carbon copies of each other.

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17 points

There’s a lot to be said about it but anyone with a brain will agree to this, and simply this;

Good.

Don’t qualify it. Don’t turn it into yet another stale argument that will invariably link some grifter’s asinine manifesto. Everyone from every side can agree that this is a good thing. Let it be enough.

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