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They were a silly concept to begin with. If they worked well, they’d kill their own business model. To stay economically viable they therefore have to use all kinds of tricks and produce mixed-at-best results, and cognitive manipulation to keep their user base entertained. Glad to see them finally collapse
Or arguably it’s the issue with running then as an unregulated business to begin with. It’d almost be better if it was just run as a public/non-profit database service: here’s an anonymised, clinical, filterable list of other people who are looking for a relationship, and a safe way to connect with them. Like all other online services it’d be killed off by bots, trolls, and creeps, but still… If it’s in the public’s general interest for people to be in relationships?
Let me filter the bots, trolls, and creeps myself. I don’t need a rent-seeking middleman for that.
(My wife’s pickup line was trolling the shower curtains in my photo)
I think, it’s a myth that matchmaking has to be bad to survive. We see that in gaming all the time. The problem is just that physical world matchmaking is optimized to get recurrent customers instead of finding good matches. And that inevitably tanks the reputation. The first dating platform with good matchmaking will be the last one standing because it will suck the competition dry.
There is a market for good matchmaking. It’s just not as big as the imagined market for bad matchmaking (which we see now isn’t actually that big once people realize that the service sucks).Also there are still “for real” matchmaking services — for marriage — in plenty of cultures. This is a pretty normal way for folks to get married in many countries. If these apps had gone for being “the digital version of that” instead of algorithmic enshittification, maybe it would be a different story
I never really believed that montra of if they were successful they lose a customer. I met my wife on a dating site over 13 years ago and told everyone I knew about it and how good it was. Many of the people that I told tried the site. It’s a great way to spread your business if anything then through natural word of.mouth you actually kinda weed out people who are looking for the wrong things. Unfortunately the one I used ok cupid was bought by the big conglomerate and they change it so it was just like all the others. The other place I see it working is if governments offered the service because they want people to be matched up. I get people might not trust the government to match them up but why would you trust a company to do it then.
That’s BS, the population is literally aging into a new market evey year, but they want to nickel and dime to the point of exploitation their existing base ruining the reputation of the entire industry in the process.
All of them being opened by a single money grubbing company, which has enshitified them to an accounting degree has not helped
That and who can afford the apps nowadays? Not me.
I’ve paid for a few to see if it helps - It does and I feel like it was worth it up until 2 years ago when they changed how matching works. But you know what doesn’t work, people telling the truth on their profile.
accounting
squints eyes not sure if typo or not
Also opened instead of operated, so likely autocorrect.
Opened is probably meant to be owned.
And accounting is probably supposed to be acute.
And “grubbing”, grabbing.
Moral of this message: proofread your stiff. Uh stuff.
Bro didn’t even proofread his own username and y’all expecting him to proofread his posts lmao
Money grubbing is the correct term.
Money grabbing is a slightly bone apple tea thing.
I used dating apps on and off for the best part of 10 years when I was single I never got a single meaningful match. They simply do not work.
You do have to use them correctly. I know a lot of people who use them irresponsibly, who don’t have the emotional intelligence to understand how the experience is going to be different(and therefore manage their emotional expectations*), and who match with way too many people for basically nothing while denying others over trivial things.
*You should be very into people and they should be into you, but how crushes develop from online dates is simply fundamentally different. You will likely not get the same “oh my god who is that?!” moment from someone you’ve already spoken to and who you know already wanted to go on a date with you.
The point of the app isn’t to get you dates, it’s to get you to use the app so they can sell your data.
If you get into a relationship and delete the app, they’ve lost a customer.
The system only works with competition, but as we stopped enforcing anti trust and anti competitive laws in any meaningful way, the same company owns most of the sites, and is in a shittrust with the rest to all maximize revenue instead of competing.
they’ve lost a
customerdata source
You have to follow rules 1 and 2.
Maybe if they weren’t all about making money off loneliness they might be doing a bit better.
The dating app kinda reminds me of gambling. Gambling is selling the hope of being rich. Dating apps are selling the hope of finding a partner.
Grindr is the ultimate gamble, hahah I was telling me wife my blocklist grows every day. I had a guy solicit me for dirty socks, didn’t even want to buy them just wanted to trade one dirty sock for three clean ones… I had another guy call me an asshole for not responding to them. Not to mention the people who don’t read profiles.
They just throw quarters into the machine and hope one of their bets pays off.
Dating apps never really served their purpose. They killed themselves.
Disagreed. OkCupid worked until Match Group destroyed it.
“Destruction of OkCupid as an attack against its liberal-skewed user base”
https://lemmy.world/post/24108120
Yesterday, I matched with 12 men. Only two messaged me.
Lmao she should have tried running an account for an average looking man
“Yesterday, I swiped on 1000 women. I got one match. She removed me. An above average day”
- why I’m not on tinder anymore.
Pretty sure swiping yes on everyone just tells the algorithm that you’re low value. I’ve been having much better luck since I started swiping no on most profiles.
Point A) I’ve tried less frequent “yes” swipes and overall match rate was about the same.
Point B) calling people “low value” sounds like disgusting incel-speech and I think we should all avoid it and embrace the different qualities and virtues we all have.
Have you tried being 6’7"
Dying. They been dead. Tinder is nothing but catfish, Asian dudes pretending to be females, instagram wanna be models and actual sex workers.
Thank God
I met my wife on a dating app, but it was over 20 years ago now. I suspect that like everything they all have evolved to capture your eyeballs as much as possible. Back when I used them, they were about meeting people, they hadn’t yet gamified them with the swipes and so forth.
So, not surprised, a little sad to hear it even, since I can’t imagine being a young person and trying to meet new people these days. Then again, as an aspiring Luddite these days, I hope people find a way to connect in real life.
Back when I used them, they were about meeting people,
back then they didn’t suck (as much) because they were still in the ‘acquire users at any cost’ phase.
I met my spouse over 10 years ago on a dating site, but now I believe they’ve all been bought up by one or two companies and have become completely enshittified. Dating sites would work if there were a Craigslist of dating sites.
Agreed, this is pretty much what they were back when I used them. This was well before tinder or whatever the big one that disrupted the industry is/was.
Funny enough, despite me being extremely happily married for over 18 years now, I still cannot get my damned email off their spam lists. I’ve abandoned that address so I don’t much care, but they really don’t seem confident in their matches apparently :)
People who find people don’t pay. It’s that simple. They are more about sustainable profit than actual match making.
Some used to be fun. I had the best success with Plenty of Failure and OkStupid before they became complete trash.
Hard to argue this isn’t a good thing, given how they’ve driven young people apart on purpose for profit.
Of course they are, people are now dating fucking chatbots.
I am currently developing one and what I can see is the following:
- people get treated like cash cows. It is almost not possible to successfully date without spending money
- people are burned out. The low quality swiping, matching, just to get ghosted, is hurting the motivation.
- people have other problems nowadays. COVID reshaped us completely. We don’t want to spend 2h a day on a dating app. 2h a week max and then they want to continue in real life.
Those are pain points introduced by big corpos (e.g. Match.com) and the fact, that they have launched their apps before COVID.
I have addressed those pain points.
I recommend you take a look at Breeze. It is a dating app in the Netherlands (and expanding).
When you match, you get a date planner (after paying for the date). No chatting allowed. A real date or nothing. That is the premise. You pay per date, and you get your money back if the date is cancelled or they don’t show up. So the app earns money from sending people on real dates. People that don’t show up or cancel dates are penalized by the algorithn and they loose badges on their profile. This is good for Breeze, who wants people to go on dates, and good for the users, who want to go on dates.
Chatting is allowed a couple of hours before the date, but this is not intended for conversations, only for practical purposes.
As a result, profiles also matter much more. For both sides. You litterally need to sell yourself, because if someone swippes on you, they may need to pay 10 euro for the date if you also swipe on them.
You also get only a handful of profiles each day. Which makes sense, because you can limit the number of concurrent matches/dates, hence the app is better off distributing the matches, rather than piling them onto the 10% hotest accounts.
This also means you can’t spend more than 15 to 30 minutes a day going over 5 tot 10 profiles.
Meanwhile, the app can provide free accounts, where people only need to pay for actual dates, hence the entry barier is lower than Tinder, where men won’t get seen without paying. Meaning it is easy to get a userbase going.
I suspect the hard part is the logistics of setting up the dates. A spot in a bar or coffee place needs to be organized for each date. If that is no option, the users are asked to choose a meeting spot (talking to eachother via an intermediate person.
I worked customer service for match for almost a decade, so I can give you a few pointers.
People leave when they’re the only ones in an area. So giving them something to do is important to retain people. The best idea I’ve ever saw was having a forum where people can discuss any topic. I think Match also tested public chatrooms and streams, but i didn’t really dealt with those. You’ll have to deal with forum drama and moderation, but some people will be very engaged.
Speaking of, moderation will take lots of time and effort. People sick. Make sure that moderation tools are as robust as the matching ones.
I think those are the general ones. Best of luck!
Thanks a lot for sharing. I have a Community Manager background and also was a moderator at Jaumo. Having a place to engage can be fun, but I am not fully sure yet if people really want to do that, when they just want to date. I have to think about it and maybe I will add something as an optional feature.
One of the things I am doing is launching with a wait list, so that an area can populate first, before opening the gates. This avoids the problem of feeling alone.
You’ve missed the big one. Those aren’t people.
They are AI fronts for orgs of various size that will scam you for whatever opportunity they may discover.
You can’t fix that. Try developing something that helps people instead of another platform to use them.
You want to help people meet? Open a bar.US bars suck too as a way of meeting people. Too ritualized, too fake, often too noisy to have a conversation or the whole thing is set up to be a meat market.
Pubs in the UK are better, but it’s a slower game.
I’ll accept that. People suck in general, but its the only game in town.
I’m perfectly happy to see the entire dating app thing die under a flood of slop and abuse.
Dating apps are scams. Either a scammer in Hyderabad is conning you or a scammer in a boardroom is selling your data and forcing invasive ads on you. Did you discover some other way of funding your project aside from the ads or making people pay for sex but pretending it’s classier when an app does it?
Do they have to be scams though? Why or why not?
What is the potential of a dating app that isn’t a scam?
Good point. Men usually get contacted by a lot of “gold diggers” and content creators. Women often are targets from scammers or crypto bros.
Scammers can be avoided by using a mandated verification process. But here I don’t rely on a third party service, as privacy is a really important topic for me. I wouldn’t want users to be forced to upload sensitive data to Persona for example. This is why I have developed a small verification service, that applies some algorithms that have been working quite well according to the research papers. It will not be impossible to catch all scammers, but if 95% are cought, that’s already a big win. As for the other problem with people just trying to sell content, a working reporting system should help. The reporting systems of the current apps are majorly flawed, punishing legit people while protecting scammers. The reason is also gender based. The more women a dating app has, the more men are attracted, so women tend to get extra protection. That hurts the whole community.
As for the funding, this is such a difficult topic. The system costs money, so I need to get a bit of money back. I didn’t want any of the “pay to win” features. I also don’t want ads, not even sponsored content. As a video gamer, I tried then to figure out why free games such as Warframe or Path of Exile were earning so much money. It comes down to two things people are willing to pay for: Cosmetics and time-savers. So that’s what I now implemented. Decorate your profile with paid cosmetics. I don’t know how to implement the time-savers yet, so for now it is just cosmetics and an optional “buy me a beer” donation I offer.
It’s not just women being targeted. My roommate got conned for dick pics. He’s not very intelligent so he believed the scammer was going to send his nudes to friends and family. I had to explain to him it’s a scam and if he wants the guy to go away, take the power away. Let him send whatever he wants.
This situation isn’t uncommon. There are plenty of other people being conned on these things. It’s such a problem that most people who contact you on these apps are scammers so you are just wasting time feeding them. It’s more depressing than just staying single.
As long as the data is centralized it will be abusable too, especially in 2026. You could go decentralized to reduce costs and lighten the load, but that has its own risks for abuse and criminal activity.
The web is retracting.
Oh that scam happened to me personally, too. It is not just annoying, it is damaging people.
There is no option to go decentralized, as I have no incentive for others to spend computing power. Decentralized services are ideal for communication and I have also developed a fully peer-to-peer, end to end encrypted Discord alternative. I just didn’t want to release it yet, until someone verified the security layer. Other than that, I kinda need to have everything centralized to foster the community and to set the rules for that community.
As I am not investor backed and also don’t want to be, I focus on releasing in very specific locations at first to create revenue with small investments. It takes a bit longer, but the growth is more stable and more organic.
But decentralized is kinda perfect for this. Webtorrent is a standard now so you might not even need an app. Just have users seed the service. More users, better service, though webtorrenting the entire site would likely eat data so splitting the different where accounts sort of mesh messages within their area would make more sense than just tossing sniffies in webtorrent.
Hi, I’m from the EU, I have the right to get all of my data removed from a centralized service using GDPR. How do I do it on a decentralized one?
Leaving aside the whole issue of those companies not being trustworthy about the data deletion, at least my profile won’t be public when its’ been deleted and I’ve got someone to make a complaint about if I have reason to think they’ve lied about it. The fines can be pretty high. With federation, actually getting all copies of your profile deleted is nearly impossible. With torrent style decentralization, it seems completely impossible. Everyone will have access to everyone else’s data and it’ll be trivial to make backups.
Presumably most people would be using this on their phones with mostly their mobile data. An issue with the bittorrent protocol is that to open a connection, one peer has to have a port forwarded. Is this different with webtorrent?
Federation is simpler than true P2P here, but you then still need to trust the instance admins. It’s fine for Lemmy/piefed style media for me because I don’t put my real name, face and other details here.
My personal opinion is that a centralized alternative owned by a foundation rather than a for-profit company would be best of both worlds: No profit motive, just like decentralized. A centralized entity that holds liability in case there’s a data leak or someone starts spreading CSAM. And ability for said centralized entity to moderate said CSAM, scams and other reports.
Not sure if you’re open to collaboration on the app: I was thinking of making one with a few novel takes.
Fun fact: I worked with a guy at IBM who wrote some of the original algorithms for Match.com back in the day.
I was thinking about how I’d like to work on projects like these. Collaboration can be very fun and engaging. For this app, I am basically done already, so the next step is to verify if the features work with real people. If it turns out to be a success, I will come back to you and will open the doors happily, as two brains are always better than one.
Wicked. If you need a tester let me know. I’m familiar with TestFlight, too.
I’ve started planning a mobile OS and a handful of other apps, FOSS primarily. Worked in the industry for about 12 years doing devops/sys eng/ and some software dev. Collaboration can be the secret sauce sometimes.
GL regardless. I love seeing fresh takes on an otherwise saturated and greedy industry.
I’m blessed to have experienced pre-algorithm tinder back in the day.
How it different from what is now currently?
You would literally be able to match with the entire pool of women in your selected ranges. Now if you’re not within their elo range they won’t even see you.
Even the gay ones?!
Especially the gay ones. Can’t even hold the RNC without them crashing.
can we stop sharing this same demonstrably false shite 🤦♀️ it’s been thoroughly debunked at this point
lol stay mad
Ain’t just a river in Egypt, honey.
And yet people are in denial about it being a hoax.
It’s always “oh Grindr went down in the city where the RNC held an event”. Why do people think Grindr has servers for each city and not a proper load balancing setup agnostic of the users locations?
Much more likely that cell towers get overwhelmed in that area. Or that they pull Grindr down in general. But the claim that always gets made is that they bring it down in the exact city where the convention happens lol
Grindr is exclusively ads and bots in most places and has been for a long time. Sniffies is okay but the ads are getting overwhelming so I don’t even bother anymore.
