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I strongly believe Match Group is single handedly deteriorating relations between genders in regions where they are popular. The commercial incentive Match Gro

I strongly believe Match Group is single handedly deteriorating relations between genders in regions where they are popular. The commercial incentive Match Group has to prevent churn means the optimal outcome for them is that you never find a partner. And so if you’re outside that top N percentile of popularity, they’ve optimized their apps to abuse you emotionally and financially. They’re engineering the perfect carrot on a stick. One such behaviour, for example, is that when you buy Tinder Plus, they will feed you a couple matches, but withhold more than they give you. Once the subscription expires, they feed you rest of the “Likes You” people into the page where they’re obscured, forcing you to resubscribe if you want to see them. And of course you will never encounter those people just by swiping, they’re purposefully held from you. I’ve recently switched to Facebook Dating because they don’t have any commercial incentives (and in fact probably negative incentives) to NOT match you. Thus they can also give you all of the “Premium” features for free. What Match Group is doing probably isn’t illegal, but I think it probably should be. It’s the same kind of emotional manipulation that casinos are guilty of.

pavel_lishin 1y ago
> I’ve recently switched to Facebook Dating because they don’t have any commercial incentives (and in fact probably negative incentives) to NOT match you. Thus they can also give you all of the “Premium” features for free. Don't they still power this via ads? Every set of eyeballs looking for love is slowly trickling nickels into their bank accounts; it seems like they would have the exact same set of incentives as you describe Match Group having.
- inerte 1y ago
  There will still be advertisers if you move to a more serious relationship stage, just different products.
- paxys 1y ago
  Facebook Dating isn't a standalone product, so people are likely going remain on the app even after they get into a relationship. The service only exists to funnel young people into the Facebook ecosystem. The dynamic is very different from a regular dating app where once you get somewhat serious with someone even having the app still on your phone will be seen as a massive red flag. And Facebook itself has been used as a dating/matchmaking service since well before Facebook Dating or Hinge/Bumble etc. were a thing.
  - SoftTalker 1y ago
    It's basically the original purpose of Facebook (some might use the term "stalking" over "dating" however).
- lwansbrough 1y ago
  The main product is Facebook. It’s like suggesting Google Analytics has the same revenue problem as Mixpanel. And no, I haven’t seen any ads in it.
s5300 1y ago
[dead]
carabiner 1y ago
OkCupid was different, before it got bought by match. The single best thing that could be done for the dating world and fertility rates would be to hire the MIT/Harvard math guys from the original OkC and restart it as a not-for-profit dating app.
- magicalist 1y ago
  Didn't all those guys go to Match and make it the company it is today in the mid 2010s?
  - carabiner 1y ago
    No, Chris Coyne, Max Krohn, Christian Rudder never joined Match. I don't know where you're getting that from. Match was already a behemoth before buying OkCupid. You can check their linkedin's. Wide range of ventures like Keybase.
- MostlyStable 1y ago
  People have tried making original OKCupid style apps, and they fail. Tinder et al are almost definitely worse, but they are also easier. It is always going to be hard for the better-but-harder option to win against the worse-but-easier option. This is exacerbated by the fact that dating apps are perhaps the service that is more reliant on network effects than any other thing. Even if one individual decides that they are willing to do the work for the better-but-harder thing, if not enough other people make the same decision, it will fail.
  - carabiner 1y ago
    > People have tried making original OKCupid style apps, and they fail That's why you need the original founders to make it again. OkCupid was a site made by 140 IQ dudes in Boston for 100+ IQ types. It was not an easy problem. It succeeded because the match % was uncannily accurate. Loss of the site (acquisition and tinderification by Match) was like the sack of Rome.
    - 1y ago
jjice 1y ago
Jesus Christ, I had thought Hinge was still independent from Match Group. Guess I'll uninstall and start talking to people in person... What they do is literally like P&G in the laundry isle or Unilever in soap. Have the illusion of choice while it's really all the same thing with a UI change and maybe a unique feature or three. The incentive dating apps has is built to be completely opposite of what (at least many of) their users are trying to use it for.
- carabiner 1y ago
  Hinge IMO is the best of the bunch because it's the only app still run by its original founder, even though it's owned by Match.
  - lwansbrough 1y ago
    They changed the algorithm a few months back to be much more like Tinder. Pushing people out of your league physically to the top of the stack, making it less likely that you'll find a match, and they're moving and increasing number of features behind Hinge+.
bko 1y ago
> What Match Group is doing probably isn’t illegal, but I think it probably should be. What should be illegal? Withholding matches when you're paid to keep you single but showing you more attractive matches after you unsubscribe? Listen to yourself. Your idea of what they're doing is so highly engineered and specific. It's so convoluted but it comes down to its a shitty product and people don't want to use shitty products. They may for some time but making a product purposely bad and hostile to your user base doesn't lead to long term growth and people will abandon the product for alternatives. Not everything "bad" needs to be illegal.
- biophysboy 1y ago
  It doesn't matter if its a shitty product if it has the largest network of users. The alternatives will be ghost towns.
- bogwog 1y ago
  I think the correct term for this type of thing is a "dark pattern", and they should definitely be illegal. In a sane market, those dark patterns would be defeated by competition, but there is a distressing lack of sane markets today. Everything is consolidating, and there seems to be zero momentum in the opposite direction. So in the face of these market failures, legislation to combat the low hanging fruit like this is probably the only way to make life for consumers bearable without actually fixing the underlying issues.
  - BrenBarn 1y ago
    > So in the face of these market failures, legislation to combat the low hanging fruit like this is probably the only way to make life for consumers bearable without actually fixing the underlying issues. I tend to think that makes things less bearable in the long term, though, precisely because it doesn't fix the underlying issues. It's like just taking a bunch of ibuprofen and walking on a badly injured leg. It may make it hurt less but it can also make the problem worse. We may need to let the pain get intense enough that people feel no alternative but to overhaul the whole system.
  - bko 1y ago
rayiner 1y ago
My wife and I got married just before "app dating" got popular, and she says "we caught the last chopper out of 'nam."
- danielbln 1y ago
  I met my wife via OKCupid juuuust before enshittification hit back in 2018 or so. i can't even imagine what it's like now to using these tools. Glad I'm out of the warzone, for sure.
- raxxorraxor 1y ago
  I don't know a single lasting relationship that came out of online dating or people that regularly go dating in the first place. Some peeps met online in games or hobby specific platforms, that works, but never on dating platforms. I think the barrier for entry to dating apps is having a special relationship to intimacy in the first place.
  - yareally 1y ago
    My wife and I met on one of those dating apps a few years before the pandemic. We've been married over 6 years now. I consider us more of the exception than the norm. I also went on at least 100 dates over 18 months mostly to realize what I wanted and didn't want in a relationship. It did work out for us, but I don't recommend that approach to everyone.
    - rayiner 1y ago
      Congratulations.
  - foldr 1y ago
    Hmm, this seems like an odd take to me as a gay man. We've been dating online since the late 90s. My marriage and the LTRs of the other gay guys I know all started from online dating. Fundamentally it's just a way for people to meet. Whether or not the relationship lasts depends on other factors.
missedthecue 1y ago
I've thought about this a lot, but I really don't think the profit incentive changes much. I don't think for example that a free and open-source community-supported dating app would result in a better experience, because a lot of the problems with dating apps are about human psychology and not with the business model. A FOSS or nationalized dating app would still result in: 1. The feeling of FOMO (99% of swipers stop swiping before they find their REAL soulmate for real this time) 2. Impersonality. One cannot effectively communicate that they are generous, kind, and funny or any other set of attractive but abstract qualities in 4 photos and a short bio. 4. Similar to impersonality, is the loss of contextual bonding. Especially for women, being in proximity to a potential mate tends to work a lot better than seeing a few 2D photos. It's crazy to think about, but a huge percentage of happy long-lasting couples who met organically would have never swiped on each other, me being one example. 5. Asymmetrical supply and demand (women dying of thirst in the ocean while men die of thirst in the desert) 6. The 'stranger' dynamic makes everything low-stakes and therefore low effort. There is no social consequence for bad behaviour, whereas if you met someone at work, school, church, or were introduced by a mutual friend, there IS a social cost for ghosting, manipulation, superficiality, etc. 7. All of the above results in WAY too many interactions in a romantic or potentially romantic context, and I don't think people were meant to have dozens of situationships for a decade before finally getting success. The constant churn and burn cycle results in burnout. The burnout is exhausting and discouraging and worse, can lead to feelings of antipathy. None of the above is actually solved by a different ownership or funding model. I'm sure that building an app in such a way that artificially gatekeeping a superior experience behind a subscription creates its own set of winners and losers, but I don't think that is actually in people's top complaints about the dating app experience!
- t-writescode 1y ago
  We had an open dating app in Plenty of Fish. How did that go before the swipe-system took over?
- jameslk 1y ago
  Many of the things you mention seem like they're symptoms of one specific problem with online dating: it's more like a sales numbers game than an intentional focus on one individual. This dynamic is present for both genders. Due to the "sales numbers game" of online dating, there's an incentive to keep your pipeline full, lest one of your deals falls through and you have to start all over. This seems to create many of the negative phenomena that people complain about. * Overwhelmed by too many matches or not enough matches? It's due to the numbers game * Shallowness and hyper pickiness? Numbers game * Getting ghosted? Numbers game * That "stranger" dynamic- i.e. not enough time to really get to know someone beforehand? Numbers game * Burn out? Numbers game * Situationships? Numbers game * Dopamine "likes" rollercoaster? Numbers game Before online dating, everything was slower. You were introduced through a friend or family member. You met someone at work, third place, community, or at a bar. It was one person at a time. Not a pipeline of matches.
procaryote 1y ago
This sounds plausible If there is a viable contender, match group will work hard to buy it to drag it down to its level, c.f. Tinder
mgh2 1y ago
Chose your poison: [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45311274 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45311274 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35726102 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35726102 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44917922 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44917922
Lramseyer 1y ago
Dating apps are a Skinner Box by nature. They give randomized reward in the form of likes and matches. If you're attractive, you're the product because you don't need premium service to get more dates. Give me Yelp for date spots and take a cut of the ad revenue. That way, there's at least an incentive to get people to not ghost each other long enough to actually meet up for a date. Hopefully that will do some level of incentivizing human connection.
- mothballed 1y ago
  You don't even have to be attractive. There is some dude in a slum in Manilla right now smoking a hand rolled cigarette between his unkept bearded lips, using his wrinkled face and cataract ridden eyes to squint at a screen to scam the next guy with his keyboard propped up on his oversized tummy. Meanwhile he has an image of a beautiful 20 year old Texas country girl on his profile and maybe even a Russian hooker on call for when he needs to make bait videos. And he probably gets 100x the interest of your 'legitimate' average male user.
  - HankStallone 1y ago
    If that's the case, then he is attractive to women. He's just not what we're told is attractive to women.
ajdude 1y ago
[dead]

pavel_lishin 1y ago

> I’ve recently switched to Facebook Dating because they don’t have any commercial incentives (and in fact probably negative incentives) to NOT match you. Thus they can also give you all of the “Premium” features for free. Don't they still power this via ads? Every set of eyeballs looking for love is slowly trickling nickels into their bank accounts; it seems like they would have the exact same set of incentives as you describe Match Group having.

inerte 1y ago
There will still be advertisers if you move to a more serious relationship stage, just different products.
paxys 1y ago
Facebook Dating isn't a standalone product, so people are likely going remain on the app even after they get into a relationship. The service only exists to funnel young people into the Facebook ecosystem. The dynamic is very different from a regular dating app where once you get somewhat serious with someone even having the app still on your phone will be seen as a massive red flag. And Facebook itself has been used as a dating/matchmaking service since well before Facebook Dating or Hinge/Bumble etc. were a thing.
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  It's basically the original purpose of Facebook (some might use the term "stalking" over "dating" however).
lwansbrough 1y ago
The main product is Facebook. It’s like suggesting Google Analytics has the same revenue problem as Mixpanel. And no, I haven’t seen any ads in it.

s5300 1y ago

[dead]

carabiner 1y ago

OkCupid was different, before it got bought by match. The single best thing that could be done for the dating world and fertility rates would be to hire the MIT/Harvard math guys from the original OkC and restart it as a not-for-profit dating app.

magicalist 1y ago
Didn't all those guys go to Match and make it the company it is today in the mid 2010s?
- carabiner 1y ago
  No, Chris Coyne, Max Krohn, Christian Rudder never joined Match. I don't know where you're getting that from. Match was already a behemoth before buying OkCupid. You can check their linkedin's. Wide range of ventures like Keybase.
MostlyStable 1y ago
People have tried making original OKCupid style apps, and they fail. Tinder et al are almost definitely worse, but they are also easier. It is always going to be hard for the better-but-harder option to win against the worse-but-easier option. This is exacerbated by the fact that dating apps are perhaps the service that is more reliant on network effects than any other thing. Even if one individual decides that they are willing to do the work for the better-but-harder thing, if not enough other people make the same decision, it will fail.
- carabiner 1y ago
  > People have tried making original OKCupid style apps, and they fail That's why you need the original founders to make it again. OkCupid was a site made by 140 IQ dudes in Boston for 100+ IQ types. It was not an easy problem. It succeeded because the match % was uncannily accurate. Loss of the site (acquisition and tinderification by Match) was like the sack of Rome.
  - 1y ago

jjice 1y ago

Jesus Christ, I had thought Hinge was still independent from Match Group. Guess I'll uninstall and start talking to people in person... What they do is literally like P&G in the laundry isle or Unilever in soap. Have the illusion of choice while it's really all the same thing with a UI change and maybe a unique feature or three. The incentive dating apps has is built to be completely opposite of what (at least many of) their users are trying to use it for.

carabiner 1y ago
Hinge IMO is the best of the bunch because it's the only app still run by its original founder, even though it's owned by Match.
- lwansbrough 1y ago
  They changed the algorithm a few months back to be much more like Tinder. Pushing people out of your league physically to the top of the stack, making it less likely that you'll find a match, and they're moving and increasing number of features behind Hinge+.

bko 1y ago

> What Match Group is doing probably isn’t illegal, but I think it probably should be. What should be illegal? Withholding matches when you're paid to keep you single but showing you more attractive matches after you unsubscribe? Listen to yourself. Your idea of what they're doing is so highly engineered and specific. It's so convoluted but it comes down to its a shitty product and people don't want to use shitty products. They may for some time but making a product purposely bad and hostile to your user base doesn't lead to long term growth and people will abandon the product for alternatives. Not everything "bad" needs to be illegal.

biophysboy 1y ago
It doesn't matter if its a shitty product if it has the largest network of users. The alternatives will be ghost towns.
bogwog 1y ago
I think the correct term for this type of thing is a "dark pattern", and they should definitely be illegal. In a sane market, those dark patterns would be defeated by competition, but there is a distressing lack of sane markets today. Everything is consolidating, and there seems to be zero momentum in the opposite direction. So in the face of these market failures, legislation to combat the low hanging fruit like this is probably the only way to make life for consumers bearable without actually fixing the underlying issues.
- BrenBarn 1y ago
  > So in the face of these market failures, legislation to combat the low hanging fruit like this is probably the only way to make life for consumers bearable without actually fixing the underlying issues. I tend to think that makes things less bearable in the long term, though, precisely because it doesn't fix the underlying issues. It's like just taking a bunch of ibuprofen and walking on a badly injured leg. It may make it hurt less but it can also make the problem worse. We may need to let the pain get intense enough that people feel no alternative but to overhaul the whole system.
- bko 1y ago

rayiner 1y ago

My wife and I got married just before "app dating" got popular, and she says "we caught the last chopper out of 'nam."

danielbln 1y ago
I met my wife via OKCupid juuuust before enshittification hit back in 2018 or so. i can't even imagine what it's like now to using these tools. Glad I'm out of the warzone, for sure.
raxxorraxor 1y ago
I don't know a single lasting relationship that came out of online dating or people that regularly go dating in the first place. Some peeps met online in games or hobby specific platforms, that works, but never on dating platforms. I think the barrier for entry to dating apps is having a special relationship to intimacy in the first place.
- yareally 1y ago
  My wife and I met on one of those dating apps a few years before the pandemic. We've been married over 6 years now. I consider us more of the exception than the norm. I also went on at least 100 dates over 18 months mostly to realize what I wanted and didn't want in a relationship. It did work out for us, but I don't recommend that approach to everyone.
  - rayiner 1y ago
    Congratulations.
- foldr 1y ago
  Hmm, this seems like an odd take to me as a gay man. We've been dating online since the late 90s. My marriage and the LTRs of the other gay guys I know all started from online dating. Fundamentally it's just a way for people to meet. Whether or not the relationship lasts depends on other factors.

missedthecue 1y ago

I've thought about this a lot, but I really don't think the profit incentive changes much. I don't think for example that a free and open-source community-supported dating app would result in a better experience, because a lot of the problems with dating apps are about human psychology and not with the business model. A FOSS or nationalized dating app would still result in: 1. The feeling of FOMO (99% of swipers stop swiping before they find their REAL soulmate for real this time) 2. Impersonality. One cannot effectively communicate that they are generous, kind, and funny or any other set of attractive but abstract qualities in 4 photos and a short bio. 4. Similar to impersonality, is the loss of contextual bonding. Especially for women, being in proximity to a potential mate tends to work a lot better than seeing a few 2D photos. It's crazy to think about, but a huge percentage of happy long-lasting couples who met organically would have never swiped on each other, me being one example. 5. Asymmetrical supply and demand (women dying of thirst in the ocean while men die of thirst in the desert) 6. The 'stranger' dynamic makes everything low-stakes and therefore low effort. There is no social consequence for bad behaviour, whereas if you met someone at work, school, church, or were introduced by a mutual friend, there IS a social cost for ghosting, manipulation, superficiality, etc. 7. All of the above results in WAY too many interactions in a romantic or potentially romantic context, and I don't think people were meant to have dozens of situationships for a decade before finally getting success. The constant churn and burn cycle results in burnout. The burnout is exhausting and discouraging and worse, can lead to feelings of antipathy. None of the above is actually solved by a different ownership or funding model. I'm sure that building an app in such a way that artificially gatekeeping a superior experience behind a subscription creates its own set of winners and losers, but I don't think that is actually in people's top complaints about the dating app experience!

t-writescode 1y ago
We had an open dating app in Plenty of Fish. How did that go before the swipe-system took over?
jameslk 1y ago
Many of the things you mention seem like they're symptoms of one specific problem with online dating: it's more like a sales numbers game than an intentional focus on one individual. This dynamic is present for both genders. Due to the "sales numbers game" of online dating, there's an incentive to keep your pipeline full, lest one of your deals falls through and you have to start all over. This seems to create many of the negative phenomena that people complain about. * Overwhelmed by too many matches or not enough matches? It's due to the numbers game * Shallowness and hyper pickiness? Numbers game * Getting ghosted? Numbers game * That "stranger" dynamic- i.e. not enough time to really get to know someone beforehand? Numbers game * Burn out? Numbers game * Situationships? Numbers game * Dopamine "likes" rollercoaster? Numbers game Before online dating, everything was slower. You were introduced through a friend or family member. You met someone at work, third place, community, or at a bar. It was one person at a time. Not a pipeline of matches.

procaryote 1y ago

This sounds plausible If there is a viable contender, match group will work hard to buy it to drag it down to its level, c.f. Tinder

mgh2 1y ago

Chose your poison: [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45311274 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45311274 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35726102 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35726102 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44917922 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44917922

Lramseyer 1y ago

Dating apps are a Skinner Box by nature. They give randomized reward in the form of likes and matches. If you're attractive, you're the product because you don't need premium service to get more dates. Give me Yelp for date spots and take a cut of the ad revenue. That way, there's at least an incentive to get people to not ghost each other long enough to actually meet up for a date. Hopefully that will do some level of incentivizing human connection.

mothballed 1y ago
You don't even have to be attractive. There is some dude in a slum in Manilla right now smoking a hand rolled cigarette between his unkept bearded lips, using his wrinkled face and cataract ridden eyes to squint at a screen to scam the next guy with his keyboard propped up on his oversized tummy. Meanwhile he has an image of a beautiful 20 year old Texas country girl on his profile and maybe even a Russian hooker on call for when he needs to make bait videos. And he probably gets 100x the interest of your 'legitimate' average male user.
- HankStallone 1y ago
  If that's the case, then he is attractive to women. He's just not what we're told is attractive to women.

ajdude 1y ago

[dead]