The enshittification of dating apps

The problem today’s daters face is that the mass adoption of online dating apps has not only eroded incentives to switch from explore to exploit mode, it has made exploration itself boring and dysfunctional.

When it comes to the business of dating apps, the most relevant principle isn’t necessarily patriarchal, but inherently capitalist: celibate, app-less women are not lucrative, an issue that the entire industry is grappling with.

The incentives of dating apps actively discourage building algorithms that show compatible matches, since finding a compatible match means you no longer need their product. You really are put in a room with total strangers, most likely the wrong kind, instead of those with similar interests and values. If you met the right stranger, you’d hit it of... See more

Increasingly, consumers (Gen Z’s especially) are seemingly ditching Bumble, Hinge, and Tinder in favor of apps that better cater to their preferences and behaviors. In the last 18 months or so, a new paradigm of dating apps has emerged, many of which draw upon growing behaviors around gaming, live and short-form video (Curtn, Lolly, Snack, Filter O... See more

Technology babies us all the time. Putting aside the marginal good these apps do for people who rely on them, their ads are clearly focused on a capable, upper-middle class that’s learned to take its neuroticism a little too seriously. They exploit what probably started as compassion-driven conversation about burnout into a recursive push for comfo... See more

To exist on a dating app is to be constantly inundated by the pressure to meet up, regardless of your readiness. And for women, that pressure is reinforced by existing in a world that hates them for being single.

If you match and then change your mind, you can just un match without explanation.

But that’s not how healthy human relationships work, and so it’s not surprising that going back to app-less dating isn’t as easy a switch as it sounds. We’re now more scared of rejection, more avoidant of the uncomfortable conversations that are all but inevitable, a... See more

The App economy is also just a massive waste of human capital—just think about all the wasted time we have collectively spent engineering the same feature again and again for every new App, when we could have been crafting unique commands that users can choose to obtain a la carte.