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48 comments

  • Well, think about it.

    They profit off their users by either charging them for a service, selling user data, and/or advertisement. If their dating app was very successful and quickly matched users together, they wouldn't be using the app very long and the company would lose potential profit.

    This probably wasn't the case in the earlier days of the internet but it certainly is now. They want you hooked and coming back every day so they can get maximum profit off you.

    • Duolicious only asks for donations and it's algorithm was interesting, too bad the anti-AFK ideology was never enforced

  • I met my partner through a dating site. In the two years prior to that, I had used the site to meet over two dozen other women, which led to no long-term relationships but did result in a few short flings.

    I can say that what helped me was expectation management. This was actually my second time using a dating site, and the first time around I was super picky, looking for "green flags." Correspondingly, I messaged very few women, and met even fewer (four in two years). The second time, I realized that someone having a sparse profile didn't mean they were a boring or lazy person. Sometimes it does, but other times it just means they aren't very good at writing about themselves.

    I'll also say there's only so much the metrics of dating sites can tell you about someone and your compatibility with them. There's a level of response bias to the questionnaires on these sites, i.e. people answer the questions based on what they think a potential partner might like, not their genuine beliefs and preferences. You'll never discover your actual compatibility with someone unless you talk to them, so I took the approach of, "unless there are explicit deal breakers in your profile, I'll ask you on a date and we'll see how things go."

    There's also the expectation management for the frequency of matches, responses to messages, dates, and beyond. Dating apps aren't magic machines that will get you hooked up in hours. They take work, and you'll see a lot of rejection (most of it just utter silence). There can be long dry spells. Sometimes you'll need to take a break because you've literally messaged everyone on the site and you need to wait for more members. And sometimes, they just won't work for some people. That sounds harsh, but it's true. Success for many of these sites and apps is highly dependent on one's physical attractiveness, and some people simply did not win the genetic lottery.

  • The first dating apps designed for straight people always had an unbalanced ration of men and women, which appears to have gotten worse over time. Early on a few people I know did find people, dated, and married. They were mostly people who had niche interests for our area and were successfully connecting with people at least a couple hours away who they never would have met in person.

    But that was well over a decade ago and I don't know of anyone having success since those early years.

  • grindr

    faceless profile, blank, no information: "no pic no chat"

    it's all stupid hypocrites looking for low-effort validation fix.

  • I haven’t touched them in 5 years, but Hinge was the best of all of them. The thing is designed to make it as easy as possible to set up a profile packed to the brim with conversation-starting prompts, and then it’s stupid easy to start a conversation with someone else because you can respond to a specific prompt on someone else’s profile.

    In my experience, it works really well if you set someone up to ask a question

    • In my experience, Hinge is still the best, but all of the apps have the same fundamental flaw. Imagine every person in your area who is single is in one big room and you line up to meet each other one at a time. That's basically how they work. Want to skip meeting people with different political or religious beliefs? No problem! Just pay up (and by the way, it's not cheap). Also, the filters are critically limited and largely superficial. It's a slog no matter what.

      From what I've heard, OkCupid used to work properly as a way to find people who were actually a good match for you, but Match group bought them and stripped all the tools that made it useful. I actually recently saw a great comment about exactly that.

  • I think there was a time fairly early on when at least one was built to do the job it was advertised to.

    I think more than half of Lemmy's members were born after that though.

48 comments