[atleta]

I don't think dating apps are designed to make women picky per se but they definitely end up distorting their perception and turn them into overly picky for sure.

This has always been the case with all dating apps from the start (except for maybe a few that tried to actively designed around it). This phenomenon emerges automatically from how dating platforms and people work: 1. men are expected to do the approach/first move (this is socially and evolutionary encoded in both sexes) 2. men initially put the bar somewhat lower and mostly care about looks at first (I'd say it makes a lot of sense, especially in online dating, but only if you disregard that the photos end up manipulated) 3. women (and also men) will start manipulating their photos. Even just selecting your best photos is manipulation. (I'm not saying it's wrong or unreasonable.) 4. men will do more approaches than IRL because it's cheap and safe and also can be done in parallel 5. women will receive a lot more approaches than IRL because men do more apporoaches

and this turns on the cycle: 6. women will feel that they have a lot higher desirability than what they were used to IRL/before starting to date online. They'll become picky, will feel higher status and start to be mean with some of the men who approach. Actually they don't have to be actively and explicitly mean, not being nice with the rejection is bad enough for men (see 7.). And being nice to all the unwanted approachers is hard. I mean it can be hard work so it's frustrating. 7. men will start to see that their efforts don't pay off. I mean it will pay off for the top say 5-20% but not for the others. So they get frustrated and try to further minimize the investment in each approach 8. this makes women feel even worse about all the unwanted approaches and they'll be even less considerate about those who they don't want (while porbably increasing the bar). They'll start complaining and putting stupid requirements (messages, really) on their profile, like the usual "those who do X and are Y need not bother to swipe right", etc. 9. this further frustrates men

etc. The cycle is on. Online dating, at least the naive approches, don't work because it makes the wrong thing easy and efficient. (And yes, due to the business models of these platforms they are not motivated to solve the issue. After all, the more users they have the better it is for them. They are getting paid for keeping people on the platform and not getting them off i.e. hook them up.)