>If the platforms are deliberately fostering this dynamic or exploiting it for profit at the expense of their users' mental health, that's of course unethical.

>If the platforms are deliberately fostering this dynamic or exploiting it for profit at the expense of their users' mental health, that's of course unethical. They are. Some platforms do this, most notoriously Tinder. Did their engineers sit there and say "Aha, let's be evil!"? No, of course not. Things like this happen via a combination of apathy, and focusing primarily on business metrics. It's a black box with every aspect built for monetization. Whether its ill effects satisfy the definition of deliberate is semantics at that point. The tragic part, is these dating apps have become so widely popular that they've nearly monopolized the dating scene. Most non-technical users don't care about the nuance of this stuff, so that's how they get away with it. The crux is this: these systems have created conditions where desirable people fall into the cracks for reasons that are purely algorithmic, and there's nothing those people can do about it.