Dating: A mysterious constellation of facts
I think the author missed an important factor: misaligned incentives.
Dating apps make money when users spend time (and money) on the platform. Users who find a partner tend to leave the platform, so dating companies are incentivized to prevent that from happening. Those companies then have more opportunities to up-sell those users on premium features, which they're more likely to purchase due to repeated failure and/or feelings of inadequacy.
Controversial take, but have we considered that possibly dating apps dont suck, and that this perception is driven by a vocal minority of the people who have the worst experience on them? (A sad fact is that dating will just suck for some % of the population. Is it possible that if there were no apps the same % would be saying how IRL dating sucks?) I know many people in stable LTRs or married who met through dating apps. But I don’t think you typically find these people participating in discourse about dating apps. If anything they’ve probably moved on to complaining why wedding planners and baby books or whatever suck.
Everyone is playing the secretary problem. If you're popular, you have to turn down a lot of candidates before you try to find one that's in whatever you measure to be in your league (better than all the ones you saw previously, but I wonder how many people are really going with that). If you're on an app, that's a lot of people.
At the same time, there's a bunch of people who aren't so popular who are now done checking a short queue of candidates, and willing to go with whoever shows up next above their bar.
But those people are still busy rejecting everyone in a seemingly infinite line of suitors. So we have a problem getting people to match.
Add to this that the sexes are not distributed the same way. There's a few ultra hot guys who will never not have a date, and there's a more even number of hot women who the less hot guys are waiting on.
If you're speed dating or doing any other real-world dating, your queues are a lot shorter. You will feel like your idea of the market is set much sooner, and you can start picking out a candidate.
People come to dating apps for all sorts of reasons, and with different levels of investment. Pretty much every woman I know who has used a dating app has said she has gone on a dating app to alleviate boredom. That's probably not fun for the person on the other end if they are actually trying to find a partner.
If someone shows up to a speed dating event, that indicates minimum level of investment in the interaction.
The author didn't consider a more basic selection bias that the 3 contradictory facts are driven by different groups of people. That makes it rather easy to reconcile 3 apparently contradictory views. You can't jump-start a new market for a dating app with in-person speed daters because they are the people who refuse to use an app!
And it is worth being a little suspicious of the people who 'hate' dating apps. There are valid criticisms, but the people who are just bad partners are going to turn up somewhere and it might be that pool of people - they tend not to be big on reflecting on their own flaws with rigorous intellectual honesty and would blame the apps.
From the article:
> (…) pictures also give lots of information about important non-superficial things, like your personality, values, social class, and lifestyle.
This is the one thing that puzzles me most about dating apps: where do all these pictures come from? People seem to have pictures of them doing all kinds of activities. When I’m out with friends doing whatever, no one is taking pictures. Even if they did, it’s not like we exchange pictures afterwards.
I genuinely don’t have any pictures of myself.
Are me and my friends weird for not documenting every second of our lives?
As someone who is on the dating scene after my wife died of cancer some thoughts:
1) There are a lot more men on the dating apps than women.
2) Using just pictures to judge men doesn’t really work for women. See https://archive.ph/20251006053755/https://medium.com/the-kno... for discussion.
My personal experience, based on what I’m going through and what friends have to say:
3) 17 years ago, it was possible to meet and know really attractive women on the apps.
4) These days, the really attractive women no longer use apps.
5) The apps are optimized for engagement, not giving people successful romance.
Right now, the woman I’m currently dating is someone I met at church, not on the apps. The men I know who have success with women prefer the women they meet outside of the apps.
As a shy geek without too many social connections, the apps (websites, actually) were a very positive game changer 17 years ago. These days, they are more a liability than asset when it comes to dating.
I went to a speed dating thing once that tried to incorporate its own (clearly homemade) tech stack into the experience. Every few minutes you'd get a text telling you who to find next... to look for the person in the red scarf or cowboy boots or something. By the time you found them and found somewhere to sit, you had a few minutes to talk.
It felt a bit unnecessary. In any case, maybe it was just how totally random in age and interest the people there were, but the result wasn't like cramming 15 online dates into the span of a single one. It was more like 15 conversations with people I would never have had the slightest impulse to contact via an online dating app. Most of the conversations had what felt like a comfortable mutual vibe of "we both understand we could not plausibly be attracted to each other." Then again, in online dating, I've come to realize that most guys incessantly swipe right, while I almost always swipe left.
A major factor in my world: the coolest people don't use dating apps because they find the experience awful and they have no problem meeting people in real life
The spicier version: dating apps select for personality disorders, and as such, being on a dating app in the first place is a negative signal
For what it's worth, I think this has always been true of the web in general (forums, chat, social media, comments sections, etc.)
To the point about the incentives of for-profit companies: dating apps are more profitable if they take longer to match you with someone you like. If everyone finds their ideal match within a week, they cancel their subscription and the company makes no more money off them.
If the company puts some barriers in the app that slows down the process, you remain their customer for longer. Of course, there's a tension: they can't drag it out too much, or you'll get frustrated and leave.
OkCupid used to write about this effect, back when they were independent and free. But once they were acquired by Match Group they deleted their old blog and stopped talking about things like that.
People always "hated" dating apps, even when I used them back in the early 2010s.
However, like the iOS keyboard, people will put up with some annoyances if the overall product is valuable, and swiping for a mate (or, back in simpler times, answering heaps of questions on OkCupid and doing lots of clicking) is easier than doing so through church/school/work/bar/other opportunities through consistent exposure. (To wit: I met many incompatible people through the usual methods and met my wife through OkCupid, so the dating apps aren't useless!)
Also, as a former speed-dating host, speed-dating has always been something people mostly did for the entertainment value. I never did the math on it, but if I had to guess, it probably had about the same odds of finding someone than the apps back then.
I don’t think speed dating is as popular as submarine[1] articles suggest. But the constraint of being in-person and with a limited set of options may be helpful for some people. The paradox of choice is a significant issue on apps.
I do agree that bandwidth is significantly higher in person, we’ve evolved efficient pattern detection, and wish it were more acceptable to meet up for a quick coffee immediately after matching. But a few bad apples spoil the bunch.
There’s an alternate explanation - that the fittest companies prioritize engagement and revenue until reaching some threshold of user dissatisfaction. The healthiest businesses often have customers who wish they could leave, but can’t.
Concerning "dating apps suck": OkCupid was decent in its heyday. But even at that time, there were very few users of it near the city where I lived or even in the country where I lived. Thus, it simply was nevertheless not useful to me. But no other dating site uses a similar algorithm; perhaps most people care about other things in dating than what OkCupid is optimized to give them.
I don't think speed dating is going to replace apps. I did some dating pre-app, it wasn't big then. Its unnatural, and doesn't appeal to many personalities.
I'm one of the men apps don't work for, easy to see why we hate them. For women, I think they say they don't like apps, but they do like the fact they get an endless stream of potentially date-able men from them. So their revealed preference is they like the apps, and that is why the apps continue to be relevant.
Alain de Botton claims (probably with only anecdotal evidence) that we tend to find love in people who remind us of the template our parents gave us… so this is an explanation why certain individuals end up attracted to loving terrible people. How would you hope to possibly convey this?
Also social proof is such a big deal for women, I think being in public your date can pick up on all sorts of qualities like self worth and confidence that are extremely difficult to convey on dating apps…
I may be showing my age, but my wife and I both agree that we were very lucky to have met just before the dating apps became a thing.
OkCupid used to work on the basis of high bandwidth of information and excellent matches.
This wasn't profitable enough though so they changed to the Tinder-style swiping which doesn't work. More engagement interactions means more opportunity to show ads. If you find people good matches they will just leave the app.
Not related directly to the article, but I’m so glad there’s a “tell me mistakes I made to fix” box. I wish more sites, hell even news sites had that.
Dating apps feel bad not necessarily because they are less effective, but because they encourage a mindset that's draining: endless swiping, ghosting, the paradox of choice, etc.
So ... dating apps just need to remove text messages and replace them with voice messages. Problem solved. Thanks!
Are there any dating apps that try to bridge the two worlds? That is, put focus on having short video conversations with as many people as possible, rather than just selecting people based on their profile/pics and then texting.
Makes you wonder why innovation hasn’t bridged this gap yet, especially when user dissatisfaction is so obvious. Is the winner-take-all dynamic just too strong?
I'm just not sure there's a real phenomenon here. People's complaints about dating apps match up pretty precisely with common complaints about dating more generally. It's an inherently frustrating process!
I think it's pretty telling that the alternatives people talk about are always alternative strategies for how to meet lots of people. The most common pre-app experience, where you didn't meet lots of people and married a random person in your social circles rather than a best friend who gets you and shares your key interests, isn't something most people are interested in.
My guess is that most startup founders are in a relationship.
I've been in a monogamous relationship for nearly 16 years I would thus not be in a position to be a first customer.
The problems, in my view, are bandwidth and behavior, but not for the reasons noted. In a dating profile, you can carefully curate every part of your first impression. This means that 1) you need to have basically a perfect profile (doesn't mean you come off as the hottest, just that it's all green flags) because otherwise you are not putting your best foot forward, and 2) the dating profile is not reflective of the reality of the person.
This leads into behavior, as you can spend however much time you want vibing and talking through text, but meeting and spending time together in person will invariably be different. This results in two major high-pressure, high-filter events as opposed to the one from initially meeting in person.
I think the Job To Be Done of dating apps is "kill time on the couch". Dating apps aren't competing with speed dating; they're competing with Bejeweled. Basically dating apps are to love as Duolingo is to learning a language.
That filter graph: looks attractive and is not insane, i feel the last part could be its own category. I am prolly insane as well, but I would say 90% of my ‘dates’ through apps were, completely and utterly mental. The other 10% were amazing and friends for life!
Article leans heavily towards American social norms which are so far from global norms because it treats the U.S. model of dating (apps, atomized urban life, and market logic) as universal, ignoring that in much of the world relationships still form through family, community, or social context rather than algorithmic matchmaking. It’s a very “Silicon Valley is the world” kind of framing.
For example a lot of communities in Canada just don’t work like this. Highly incompatible with this kind of social network, mostly due to the pre existing real social fabric.
And: shout out to Max and Chris because they really got it with OKC in the beginning, which this article doesn’t seem to say anything about other than just to name drop.
I like these types of opinions that challenge entrenched beliefs, i.e. network effects etc. But in the end I don't think there's a contradiction -- if you have 30 people in the room speed dating, you have 30 people in the room. If you have 30 people on your app, you have 0 people on the app because most of them are there at different times and then they give up because nobody's there except them. People gravitate towards where everyone else is, in the case of a dating app it's where thousands of people in your area are, and for speed dating it's where 30 people per event are.
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Nerds will do everything to avoid practicing game, including writing blog posts
I think it's actually very simple... the paradox of choice.
You introduce somebody to your attractive single friend there's a real chance they hit it off and form a relationship. You introduce them to 100 attractive friends, one makes more money, one has a more stable job, one is flirtier, etc then it's both exhausting and none of them seem like a great opportunity.
I think there are certain basic psychological facts that are anti-standard-economics that nerds (and therefore tech companies) almost always tend to be completely blind to. This is one of them.