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Dating apps are extremely broken, and yet they're almost all owned by a single company: Match Group. I have a suspicion that these apps are left intentionally

• xwdv 7y ago
  As an investor in Match Group, and a witness to some of the behind the scenes data on dating apps, I can confidently say most reports of “broken dating apps” can simply be attributed to user error.
  • gddvhy 7y ago
    This is what you should say as an investor.
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• jacquesc 7y ago
  I've noticed Hinge go way down in quality since Match bought them. Where on Tinder, 1/10 gals ever reply to a message. Hinge used to be 1 out of 2 (or higher). Now it's slowly creeping down to Tinder levels. Or maybe it's just me.
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  • toxik 7y ago
    It’s somehow in the nature of dating apps to wax and wane, much like social networks. There’s some sense of novelty and excitement that wears off eventually. I think Tinder will eventually die too, and by the sound of it, already is well on its way.
    • dash2 7y ago
      Can confirm that in the UK, Tinder is pretty terrible. Hinge and Bumble are OK. OKCupid is gently dying under Match.com's tender care, but it's still my favourite because people actually have to say something about themselves. Can also confirm that online dating is a horrible, confidence-destroying nightmare (presumably for both sexes).
      • JimboOmega 7y ago
        > Can also confirm that online dating is a horrible, confidence-destroying nightmare (presumably for both sexes). It is, though it's more the overall culture it has created than online dating itself. The culture where there's always more and better options so you shouldn't commit to anything, where cancelling plans is just a text away so nobody takes them seriously. It's infested even non-dating relationships and is quite confidence destroying to have people cancel on you constantly. Also, when I changed genders the dynamic did shift a lot, but it's still confidence destroying. As a male-identified person it was very hard to get matches and the whole process was a tremendous amount of work. As a female identified person (though still dating women) the number of matches I have is basically infinite. Most of the other steps are easier too, though it is still a fair amount of work to get someone to show up. But when they do, it's rare to find people looking for emotional intimacy. It's much easier to wind up feeling used (as an experiment or otherwise). Queer drama is crushing in its own unique way. Even if you are reasonably attractive and desirable, people still want to invest the minimum, play the numbers game, and not commit to anything. Even if you're 90th percentile, that still means 1 in 10 are more <insert trait here> than you, so you can keep re-rolling; why not? I'm absolutely not immune to doing this myself; my standard for "Someone for tonight" is worlds apart from "Someone to have a relationship with", but it's not exactly like I'd disclose that up front, even if I immediately know what category my date is in.
      • newnewpdro 7y ago
        > horrible, confidence-destroying nightmare (presumably for both sexes). After watching over my single-mother sister's shoulder while she used her okcupid account, I highly doubt it's anywhere near as confidence-destroying for women as it is men. For her, she could login to okcupid any time she wanted an ego boost. She was constantly barraged with messages and likes, it was a completely different experience for her to login vs. me. I didn't even know those notifications stacked up across the screen, for her it was a maelstrom of attention.
  • pc86 7y ago
    I just looked up the acquisition and it looks like it was around February of this year. I met my girlfriend on Hinge the previous October, and after a series of mostly fruitless and/or boring dates on both Tinder and Bumble she was my only in-person meeting from Hinge, but even in the few short weeks I used that app, the message rate seemed much higher as well as the quality of conversation. Sad to see that it's been degrading recently.
• babaeth 7y ago
  Do you have any suggestions to improve dating apps?
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  • throwaway_date1 7y ago
    I am wanting to be social again after a divorce, and am not willing to join any of the dating apps currently available. Here is what I'd like to see: First-name only user names, real names/account names should be hidden or opaque No association with or dependency on external social media accounts Reasonable monthly service fee (around $10/month) with the promise of no advertising, tracking, geotracking, or selling of user data Pull only notification Strict never-match criteria Hyper-local geographical matching, with ability to turn on (I'm heading out tonight and am available) and turn off (the rest of the time)
    • vermilingua 7y ago
      I mean... with the exception of advertising, you just described tinder.
    • vlasev 7y ago
      Tinder has points 1, 2 (if you use your phone number), the first part of 3 (but it's more like $20) and 6. Some apps have certain no-match criteria.
• SaturateDK 7y ago
  I think you would find these interesting. - https://web.archive.org/web/20190429100515/https://static.izs.me/why-you-should-never-pay-for-online-dating.html https://web.archive.org/web/20190429100515/https://static.iz... - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/25/us/match-com-lawsuit-ftc.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/25/us/match-com-lawsuit-ftc.... - https://caseysoftware.com/blog/working-for-a-dating-website https://caseysoftware.com/blog/working-for-a-dating-website
• randomsearch 7y ago
  See also: Facebook/Insta/Whatsapp. One of the (many) major flaws in capitalism is that it incentivises the elimination of competition.
  • jdironman 7y ago
    Ironically, that's the opposite effect that it is supposed to have.
    • mcv 7y ago
      There's sadly a big difference between capitalism in theory and in practice. Concentrating a lot of wealth and power in a single entity is going to skew the power balance. I think capitalism might be better off without corporations.
      • randomsearch 7y ago
        Most supporters of neoliberalism don't know Adam Smith himself anticipated your observation and argued for the solution - i.e. regulation.
        • mcv 7y ago
          Absolutely. He was strongly opposed to monopolies and cartels, and I believe he even argued for what basically amounts to labor unions. He was incredibly prescient.
          • randomsearch 7y ago
            Indeed. I got downvoted for the above, but Thatcher-Reaganomics involved crushing the unions - exactly the opposite of what Smith would have argued for.
            • mcv 7y ago
              Yeah, no idea where your downvotes come from; I upvoted you to compensate. Because you're right. Adam Smith was very aware that a free market requires protecting that freedom, which means regulation. A market dominated by only one or two big players is not free; it needs to be accessible to everybody.
• erikpukinskis 7y ago
  Can you say more about what’s not working? I’ve been with my girlfriend three years, just bought a car together. It’s going well! We met on OKcupid. I’m a happy customer, though I don’t think I’ve ever paid them anything.
  • rkachowski 7y ago
    OKCupid has really been pushed to adopt the tinder based swipe approach in the past 2 years or so. They've also had a few big PR screw ups with forcing users to present their real names and really shifting the feature set to be more like Tinder now. It's really not the same as okcupid from 4 years ago
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    • WorldMaker 7y ago
      Yes, that's the impact of Match Group buying OkCupid. They've just about entirely completed homogenization with their other dating apps.
    • jlokier 7y ago
      I agree. I used the old OkCupid for years and met a few new friends through it. It tended to match me up with people already in my "friends of friends" extended circles, with good quality common interests and attitudes, and was great for expanding those circles. I thought it was one of the best sites on the net for getting to know new people. (Way better than, say, Facebook, where you exchange comments but never really get to know new people one-on-one.) And with people I already knew, we would have fun checking out how well OkCupid thought we matched up. I want back a couple of years ago, after a few years break, and OkCupid had removed everything that made it useful before. I mean everything. It just wasn't any use. Sadness. Never been back since. It's a shame there's nothing else on the net like the old OkCupid. It was socially useful and unique. Hopefully someone will come along and replicate the good parts in a new site someday.
      • 7y ago
• umvi 7y ago
  Worked for me... met my wife on Tinder, been married 5 years. For me the hard part was just finding new girls outside of my immediate social circle. Tinder just helped me meet lots of new girls I would have normally never met.
  • asdfman123 7y ago
    I find it's best to take part in some local activity in your city. Just meet as many people as possible, and they might have a friend who fancies you. I was on online dating for years and it was a huge waste of time, but met my fiancée through the local improv community.
    • coldpie 7y ago
      I don't think this is the kind of thing you can generalize. I have a very small social life, and I like it that way. I met my wife online (OkCupid, 8 years ago) and I don't think I would ever have met anyone without it. In my opinion, do what works for you and stop doing what you aren't enjoying.
      • asdfman123 7y ago
        Sorry, I should have better qualified what I wrote. What I mean though is that if you're having trouble meeting people, try expanding your social circles through new activities. If something works for you by all means do it, but if nothing seems to be working it's definitely a worthwhile step.
        • hombre_fatal 7y ago
          Your advice is spot on: I think it's uncontroversial to say that it's ideal to arrange your life such that you're meeting dating candidates all the time. But you can also use Tinder alongside this. And if you can't meet anyone by nature of your job, then you're not left with many hours of daylight to meet people more organically. That's why dating apps are so helpful. Somehow in these conversations though, people seem to reveal that they were under the impression that a dating app like Tinder was a completely replacement for a social life instead of a useful supplement. I think your advice is in this category.
• akersten 7y ago
  Match is not responsible for your lack of success in online dating. Having a lot of brands is not a good reason to involve the government. Hilton hotels has over a dozen brands. There's nothing stopping you from creating a competing dating app. If you have some insight into what's "extremely broken" and a solution for it, you might even attract customers. Sorry for being brash, but I've been seeing a lot of unjustified "just bring in the anti-trust hammer, that will fix all the problems in tech" posts lately, and most of them are fairly baseless.
  • saagarjha 7y ago
    What major dating sites are not owned by Match?
    • akersten 7y ago
      Facebook dating was announced recently. It doesn't really change my argument even if there weren't any major competitors; it's a prime space for entrepreneurs if it is as broken as people claim - there is a pretty low barrier to entry.
      • bryanrasmussen 7y ago
        why investors don't fund dating https://andrewchen.co/why-investors-dont-fund-dating/ https://andrewchen.co/why-investors-dont-fund-dating/
        • dylan604 7y ago
          Maybe the "getting big enough to have Match buy us" could be the entire business plan for the next app to "compete" in this market? If you can bootstrap yourself along for getting Match's attention, you might not need the investors.
    • rahidz 7y ago
      Bumble, despite Match's best attempts to buy it out, and once that failed, to sue it into oblivion.
• deleted 7y ago
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• mewpmewp2 7y ago
  What could they do they make them not broken?
  • tachyonbeam 7y ago
    Sometimes I don't get notified when people message me on OkCupid and Tinder. That means conversations that may lead to me actually getting a date might end prematurely because of software failure. The question would be whether that's a bug or a feature.
  • AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
    Personal opinion? Nothing. Some problems cannot be fixed with a website.
• thorwasdfasdf 7y ago
  I agree that we definately need healthy competition in this space. But, there may be other reasons why it doesn't work for some people: supply and demand. Those demographics that are in high demand will find that they have a lot of dating choices, for instance (women in their 20s are in extremely high demand) whereas older women have a much harder time. You can see this reflected in the # of profiles per age group. In the 20-30 group there's almost 3 to 1 ratio of males to females, at least in SF, when I last did the count. On other hand male to female ratio is almost even in the 40-50. and for over 50 males will have a big advantage because there's more women than men.
  • wolco 7y ago
    It's interesting. With the laws of supply and demand it doesn't make sense. If equal numbers of men and women are looking shouldn't there be an equal number at least by age. There are the same number of 40/50 year olds but males will target younger females. Where women will stay in there age range so they have less choices and the 20 year old female has more. So the 40 male who sticks to his age group would have more choices. The 20s male will have more competition but should come out on top. The 40 male who sticks to 20 year olds must strike out a lot.
    • thorwasdfasdf 7y ago
      So, as you aluded to, it's a matter of math. if 20s,30s and 40s males are generally targetting women in 20s then men in general who are in their 20s will have a much worse time. Some regions like san antonio or san jose simply have more males than females ~ roughly 2-9% more. That doesn't sound like a lot, but run the numbers on this. If 80% of the population is already coupled up, that leaves 20% single. Now if you have 29% males and 20% female, it means single males outnumber single females almost 3 to 2, which is quite a large margin.
• crazygringo 7y ago
  Sorry, but they're not extremely broken. I worked at OkCupid 8 years ago, saw the issues they faced then and have seen the evolution of the apps since then, and right now they really are as good as anyone's been able to come up with that attracts enough active users to generate promising dates. If there were a drastically better solution, then it would take over the market. The last major innovation was when Tinder invented swiping and went mobile-first, a genius move which drastically cut down the spam women deal with and made it actually feel like a fun game instead of a chore. The fact is, despite all the work of psychologists and technologists, nobody's come up with a better, more efficient way of matching people. Personality profiles and questionnaires are a poor predictor of chemistry -- they can help with filtering compatibility in basic ways, but they're not going to find you your soul mate. Photos reveal potential likely chemistry more than anything else. Swiping works. Messaging works. The apps can't perform magic, though. If you're looking to find more success on them than you would with the same group of people at a bar or meetup or wherever, that's not gonna happen. They're not changing whether people are attracted to each other or not. What they do do is give you a pool of users far larger than you'd ever encounter in a single night out, and you know they're mostly all single, also different from when you go out. And they're honestly pretty good at that.
  • SkyBelow 7y ago
    >is give you a pool of users far larger than you'd ever encounter in a single night out If the paradox of choice is actually true (as with anything in psychology, it needs further research to be sure), then this could be a major negative instead of a major positive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice
    • quotemstr 7y ago
      It's one of those situations in which something that's a major positive at an individual level becomes a major negative at the group level. Any given individual would prefer to have more choice if you asked him or her, but the overall effect of all this choice is probably to distort and delay normal pair bonding. If I were God emperor of mankind, I'd just ban dating apps as a way to solve this classic collective action problem.
• hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
  TBH, I don't really think it has much to do with who owns them. The reason people are dissatisfied has to do with the fundamental experience of using an app to find love in the first place. Apologies for not having a link, but there has been a good amount of research that shows that the rise of apps and the internet has made it much less likely for people to date outside of their "attractiveness level". That is, previously, it was quite common for people to become friends as part of a mutual friend group, and after that happens your looks actually start to be less important. Someone who gets to know you may find you physically more attractive because they actually find your personality engaging. With apps, though, there is plenty of data (the OkCupid blog has tons of great posts about this) that attractiveness is what counts far and away the most. And that's not surprising given the modality of how apps work, and I don't really see that changing. I think people are generally unhappy with online data because it has a tendency to commoditize an interaction, and that's very unfortunate IMO.
  • thaumasiotes 7y ago
    In Self-Made Man: One Woman's Year Disguised as a Man ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/0143038702/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/0143038702/ ), one aspect of male life the author explores is wooing and dating. Her initial expectation is that, with her inside understanding of female thinking, she will have an easy time courting. But she finds that in person, many women perceive and are uncomfortable with her lack of masculinity. Relationships usually fail quickly once they reach the point of in-person contact. But there's a major exception to this rule: she also found that women usually required an extended period of online correspondence before agreeing to meet face-to-face. And during this period, her initial expectation was completely correct -- women appeared to judge the man according to how much they liked his writing, and what they were looking for was feminine, not masculine, writing. She experienced unusual success in getting to the first date in the first place. We can make a small interpretive leap to say that this suggests women are actually looking for the wrong things when they use online dating apps, proactively selecting men they are unlikely to be attracted to in person.
    • ShteiLoups 7y ago
• koonsolo 7y ago
  I'm not intentionally trying to be rude here, but if you are able to go on dates, Tinder is working just fine. It is a dating app after all. If you are unable to take it a step further than the dating, it's not Tinders fault. My wife is a dating coach, and it always amazes her (and me) how unwilling men are to learn and improve themselves. It is not working for them, yet they don't accept advice that could drastically improve their chances. Women are way different in this. And yes, my wife and I met on Tinder ;).
  • vlasev 7y ago
    The parent comment said nothing about being able to go on dates. I don't know where you read that. It could really be Tinder's fault. I've used it over the last few years and while my profile hasn't changed appreciably, I noticed way less success with the app over the past year alone. As for self-development, I agree with you that men tend to be unwilling to learn a lot of the time. But from what I've seen from women, they also don't really want to learn. It's how people are. Tinder is, for the most part, heavily reliant on first impressions with regard to looks. If you are a man and you are seeking women on Tinder, you better have your shit together when it comes to that, or you're not going to get anywhere. This means high-quality photos, clothes, haircut and so on. I'm not saying this is a lot, because dating can be expensive anyway. It's more so that men are not really encouraged to invest in their looks and wardrobe as much as women are. If you're getting matches and you're not converting them to dates, well, that's another thing entirely.