Dating apps are often a miserable experience for the participants, however for some reason they are quite popular and at times can be quite addictive.
If dating apps did what they advertised, they would eliminate their customer base.
The objective of the application is to keep you engaged in what they are selling. They want you dating, but not in a long relationship.
They don’t have a lot of control on how it happens after you meet, so most of their influence will be in who they present to you and how they gamify interacting.
Solutions are going to come down to real world social skills and overcoming the boundaries of online connections.
Dating apps are very much like games. It’s a big social game, and the reward is engagement.
To have a viable dating app it has to continue to have active participants. People need to feel dopamine using the dating app.
That being said the biggest issue is most of the dating apps are closed source. But the issue of opening them, to federation, are abuses spam, seeing people you don’t want to see etc.
Is swiping on people, and sending messages the ultimate in dating? Of course not. But it’s the current meta that’s emerged.
The big problems in the current model, engagement with people who are not photogenic. Being able to present people is more than a photo, with more depth. If the app does a very good job, and somebody finds a partner, they stop using the app, causing the community and ecosystem to die. So apps are currently incentivized to keep people engaged, but not off the market.
Humans are social creatures, Everything is a dating app one huge advantage dating apps have, is that more or less everyone is open to dating. And making connections.
A couple others here have the problem figured out and are echoing what I’ve been saying for years. Swiping is the problem. The addictive gamification of it may be fine for hookups (or just people browsing) but not for finding a potential partner.
Displaying more people, keeping you on the app for longer, is how these apps sell advertising. It’s about money, not love (especially given that they’re almost all owned by the same company now).
The more details you can include about yourself, the more data the platform has to understand you, the more likely it should be able to set you up with a partner. This results in far fewer people to choose from (less ad space), but potentially a higher likelihood of making a match.
Now, this may suggest the solution is a subscription service with some exclusivity and actual effort put into solving a problem for single adults. However, it’s clear that when given the options of a high-quality subscription service or an ad-subsidized inferior option, most people choose the cheaper. And the video streaming services have pointed out that they make more money from ads than they do subscriptions.
I have other opinions about how so many people are choosing to not interact with people IRL and how this is impacting our self-confidence and ability to function as a giving and empathetic partner. But maybe that’s off topic.
