| Commodification of dating prospects makes it harder to invest in one person when you know that a replacement who might be cuter or more fun to talk to just 5 minutes of swiping away. Dating markets are a two-sided market (but in reality, they are sets of multiple intersecting two-sided markets as there's a wide diversity of preferences and identities related to gender, sexuality, race, political tribe etc), two-sided markets are hard to make work because if you want to improve the UX of one side of the market, it's often at the cost of the UX of the other side of the market. It's really hard to build features or improvements that improve the experience for everyone. EG: make height filter a free feature and you've improved the straight woman's experience but hurt men's experience. Increase a man's access to inbox of a higher tier attractiveness woman and you've improved his experience but you've hurt hers. If you build a dating app that tries to enforce people making fewer matches but spending more time messaging or getting to know or going out on a date with them, even if your 'quality > quantity' model would lead to better social outcomes for society writ large, as long as there's an alternative dating app that lets someone sit there and swipe for 30 mins straight and chat with 5-10 new matches each time (or uses gamification and cheap tricks or re-enforces hookups/ghosting/etc), your artificial constraints or protections you put in place to try to de-commodify humans are just overwritten by your user opening up that competing dating app. Most dating app users use 2+ apps. It's not enough to build a good app, it has to fit into the broader context of the market of services. Photos and text are not a good way to become attracted to someone. Real life is a better form of "rich media" than online and we are often attracted to a wider range of people in person than we'd be if we just saw a few photos of them in a profile, but it doesn't facilitate the efficiency of online, its more socially risky and embarrassing or requires more courage. Leading to people making tons of matches in online dating, but most or all of the conversations becoming stale or fizzling out, or first dates leading one or both people to discover they lack physical or romantic chemistry. The future of dating likely involves combining the best aspects of real life dating and online dating. Monetization and engagement is often at odds with the success criteria of the user. It's incredibly hard to start a new service or app because its value is correlated to the size of the network, meaning its not very useful in the beginning. So the hardest part is the start. Interestingly, governments may eventually start to subsidize this industry as birth rates continue to plummit. Or to make their own nationalized attempts. It's a smart investment for them economically. Japan already is doing this. https://futurism.com/the-byte/japan-ai-singles-dates https://businessinsider.com/japanese-government-dating-servi... |
I find that most first dates end with mutual ghosting, I'm not even sure if it's appropriate to call it ghosting if it's mutual. In many of the cases there probably isn't long term relationship potential, but in some cases there could be if the effort was put in by both parties. But why put in the effort when you have someone who you've already fantasized to be better that you can go out with in a few days? If people had fewer choices they'd be more willing to put an effort into making a connection with those choices and see if a relationship can blossom.
I don't really know what's better. Few choices that you put a lot of effort into, or a multitude of choices that you wait until you have instant chemistry. For me personally I've done a lot of app dating and it's only ranged from hookups to short term dating. All of my long term relationships have been through people I've meet in real life.