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.
People don’t even use these apps to actually meet people. There are much better ways to actually meet people and we all know it. They all involve getting out and interacting with human beings in meatspace. We use these apps for parasocial stimulation. We look at the faces scroll by, gaze into their eyes, and it tricks our stupid brains into thinking we are having social interactions. That’s the actual product they are selling.
You’re getting downvoted, but you’re right. They sell hope.
Some people do use apps successfully, but from the Sankey charts I saw on reddit, the vast majority of interactions go nowhere. On the other hand, most interactions I’ve had IRL usually lead to at least a few dates.
I don’t think these are for parasocial interaction at all. Maybe for social media as a whole yes. But dating apps are pretty much intentionally trying to meet people. Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok sure, those are just interaction simulators. But those aren’t what we are talking about here.
I know anecdote doesn’t mean data, but I met my wife on OKCupid. We’re both asexual trans women, and the notion of finding someone so compatible like that would have been terrible had we done it in real life, locally only. She was in Boston, I was in Portland. And asexual trans women are a minority of a minority, so it would have taken forever in real life.
Then again, OK Cupid has since enshittified.
you could still find each other online and get to know each other there, and then IRL. It just wouldnt be over a dating app.
The internet is basically free, so i don’t see why we’re skipping over that one here.
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.
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.
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.
You have to build in a nearly 10:1 cost. For every ten tentative contacts, only one is going to pan out. That’s just the cost of playing. If you don’t like it, there are better ways to meet people.
Put “NO FAT CHICKS” in your profile, I’m sure she was more disappointed to get you and would have appreciated the heads up. In fact, wear a shirt that says that and save everyone from wasting their time.
Another thing MBAs have destroyed as they try to slightly increase profits.
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.”
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?
Maybe women like not having men randomly coming up to them trying to express interest and pursue a date, and not having to deal with the fear of what they may do if rejected?
IDK I’m not a woman.
Women like not being approached by men they don’t find attractive, but women also like being appreciated and approached by men they find attractive. And you can never know in which group you fall. And if you just always do what other people desire, you will never get anywhere in life.
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.
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
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.
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.
