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Look at the incentives. Dating apps want you to keep paying. That means they don't want you to meet someone worth entering a long-term rrlationship with. They w

Look at the incentives. Dating apps want you to keep paying. That means they don't want you to meet someone worth entering a long-term rrlationship with. They want you to have just enough success to stay a customer. The occasional, not-awful date. Like playing the slots: you get occasional, small payouts, and you hear about other people winning jackpots (oops, they slipped up), so you keep putting money in. A believable service needs to align its interests with yours, in some believable way.

rqtwteye 3y ago
When I used Hinge, I never saw a reason to pay for it. Match is basically useless without paying and for Bumble it also helps to pay. Not so much with Hinge.
zdragnar 3y ago
This erroneously believes that the owners think the following: 1- it is possible to completely tap the dating market and long term customers are necessary 2- customers all have a similar threshold at which they are just-successful enough to stay engaged long term Neither of these things are true. The more people "win the jackpot", per your analogy, the more people will use the platform. The market is big enough they don't need to fool you into paying to be unsuccessful.
- yomlica8 3y ago
  > 2- customers all have a similar threshold at which they are just-successful enough to stay engaged long term Don't they just create fake bot accounts to draw you back in when they detect you've abandoned the app? I'd imagine the app is tuned to maximum scam based on the individual user not using a single set of values.
  - water9 3y ago
    Yes the less users on the app, the more bots they have to employe to make it not feel like dead Internet conspiracy
- spott 3y ago
  Not if they don’t believe that customers will be able to tell the difference between stringing along and honestly trying. The problem is hard. It can’t be deterministically solved. Any likely statistical improvement is unprovable in a marketing sense (a competitor that is as good as possible at finding matches cannot prove it to the market that they are actually better at finding matches than a method that strings people along). Your points are only true if there isn’t an information asymmetry, but there is. I don’t think they are necessarily stringing people along on purpose, but they don’t have incentives to tell people they can’t help them, and they don’t have incentives to improve the product for those who aren’t successful. Those who are successful are probably going to be successful regardless of the platform they are using, and those who are unsuccessful aren’t going to be successful anywhere. And fixing that (rather than just milking money from the unsuccessful) isn’t really worth anything to them.
freejazz 3y ago
This is a bit paranoid - if no one found good matches through these services, no one would ever use them. It definitely sucks if you are on the losing end of the dating spectrum, but some of those people seem to have some sort of belief that they are entitled to dates, when they aren't. If you weren't getting action in real life, I don't think it's likely that people are going to be more desirous of you online. I've used these services and have had plenty of matches and luck, without ever needing to pay for it, with some of the matches working out for years(I don't blame the dating apps that we didn't get married), so I can't really agree with your perspective at all.
tayo42 3y ago
that doesnt make sense, there would always be a new generation entering the dating age. Otherwise the marriage industry would be optimizing for divorces too.
- lelanthran 3y ago
  > that doesnt make sense, there would always be a new generation entering the dating age. Otherwise the marriage industry would be optimizing for divorces too. Don't they? I mean, maybe not intentionally, but it certainly evolved to be that way. The more they can get you to pay for a once-off party, the less money you have entering your marriage. The less money the man pays, the more encouragement is bride is given to be bitter. This results in entering a marriage with less financial stability than you'd otherwise have. They sell the message constantly that it's okay to forgo things like home ownership as long as you get the "perfect" (i.e. most expensive) marriage. There's ever more useless things added to the ritual, resulting in an ever more stressful time due to more friction and more bitterness afterwards. They have spoken rules about how much you should spend based on a multiple (not a fraction) of what your income is. They don't care, and often even encourage, allowing the future in-laws to make a loan so that the couple can get the best marriage. That certainly looks like optimising for divorce to me. They sell it as a once in a lifetime experience, but they already know from their own experience that it's 50/50, if that. To me it looks like they are optimising for revenue, which indirectly means optimising for divorces.

rqtwteye 3y ago

When I used Hinge, I never saw a reason to pay for it. Match is basically useless without paying and for Bumble it also helps to pay. Not so much with Hinge.

zdragnar 3y ago

This erroneously believes that the owners think the following: 1- it is possible to completely tap the dating market and long term customers are necessary 2- customers all have a similar threshold at which they are just-successful enough to stay engaged long term Neither of these things are true. The more people "win the jackpot", per your analogy, the more people will use the platform. The market is big enough they don't need to fool you into paying to be unsuccessful.

yomlica8 3y ago
> 2- customers all have a similar threshold at which they are just-successful enough to stay engaged long term Don't they just create fake bot accounts to draw you back in when they detect you've abandoned the app? I'd imagine the app is tuned to maximum scam based on the individual user not using a single set of values.
- water9 3y ago
  Yes the less users on the app, the more bots they have to employe to make it not feel like dead Internet conspiracy
spott 3y ago
Not if they don’t believe that customers will be able to tell the difference between stringing along and honestly trying. The problem is hard. It can’t be deterministically solved. Any likely statistical improvement is unprovable in a marketing sense (a competitor that is as good as possible at finding matches cannot prove it to the market that they are actually better at finding matches than a method that strings people along). Your points are only true if there isn’t an information asymmetry, but there is. I don’t think they are necessarily stringing people along on purpose, but they don’t have incentives to tell people they can’t help them, and they don’t have incentives to improve the product for those who aren’t successful. Those who are successful are probably going to be successful regardless of the platform they are using, and those who are unsuccessful aren’t going to be successful anywhere. And fixing that (rather than just milking money from the unsuccessful) isn’t really worth anything to them.

freejazz 3y ago

This is a bit paranoid - if no one found good matches through these services, no one would ever use them. It definitely sucks if you are on the losing end of the dating spectrum, but some of those people seem to have some sort of belief that they are entitled to dates, when they aren't. If you weren't getting action in real life, I don't think it's likely that people are going to be more desirous of you online. I've used these services and have had plenty of matches and luck, without ever needing to pay for it, with some of the matches working out for years(I don't blame the dating apps that we didn't get married), so I can't really agree with your perspective at all.

tayo42 3y ago

that doesnt make sense, there would always be a new generation entering the dating age. Otherwise the marriage industry would be optimizing for divorces too.

lelanthran 3y ago
> that doesnt make sense, there would always be a new generation entering the dating age. Otherwise the marriage industry would be optimizing for divorces too. Don't they? I mean, maybe not intentionally, but it certainly evolved to be that way. The more they can get you to pay for a once-off party, the less money you have entering your marriage. The less money the man pays, the more encouragement is bride is given to be bitter. This results in entering a marriage with less financial stability than you'd otherwise have. They sell the message constantly that it's okay to forgo things like home ownership as long as you get the "perfect" (i.e. most expensive) marriage. There's ever more useless things added to the ritual, resulting in an ever more stressful time due to more friction and more bitterness afterwards. They have spoken rules about how much you should spend based on a multiple (not a fraction) of what your income is. They don't care, and often even encourage, allowing the future in-laws to make a loan so that the couple can get the best marriage. That certainly looks like optimising for divorce to me. They sell it as a once in a lifetime experience, but they already know from their own experience that it's 50/50, if that. To me it looks like they are optimising for revenue, which indirectly means optimising for divorces.