[Lramseyer]

The pattern I have observed in my friends and myself (when I was on dating apps) goes something like this: We get matches, some of those matches flake, don't respond, or don't pan out into anything. So we mitigate that emotional risk by talking to multiple people at once. As a result we're pulling the lever (swiping) and eventually getting the emotional payout of a match with someone cute. Then we see something we don't like in the person we matched with, so we're faced with the choice accepting someone for their flaws, or pulling the Skinner box lever (swiping.) I know it sounds reductive, but it preys on our addictive nature in a way that gets in the way of human connection. Eventually we snap out of it, but by that time, we have been on the app for several months or even years for some people. While it doesn't keep people single per se, it is not the most conducive means of cultivating genuine relationships. As a result people stay on the app for longer, and keeps the user base high.

Maybe I'm mis-attributing survivorship bias to malice. In other words, sure it's profitable for Tinder, but not inherently beneficial to society. Tinder might not actively trying to operate this way, but there is a large population of people that will gravitate towards the dating services that give them that high of variable rewards It's profitable for Tinder and all of it's look-alikes, so they continue to exist in the market.

The issue I take with all of it is the misalignment of incentives in the business model. Regardless of intention, there's an inherent disconnect. If Tinder has someone paying $500 a month, they're going to want to keep those payments coming. How would they do that?

[paulddraper]

Okay, so let's assume Tinder wanted to foster as great quality of long term relationships as possible.

What would it do?

[hot_gril]

Basically it'd look like Hinge. Would still be pretty flawed.

Main thing would be changing the matching algo. Tinder seems to want to show "hot singles near you." I kinda reverse-engineered it (at least the 2018 version), and it seems to just score each user based on swipe:match ratio and total number of matches then show you the highest scoring users matching your gender/distance/age filters. It doesn't try to figure out who you'd be compatible with or anything like that. Exploiting a glitch, I managed to game this and get 500X the matches as normal (as M seeking F), which confirmed my suspicions about the algo.

How do you determine compatibility without onerous onboarding quizzes, not sure. Recommender algo ("people with similar liking patterns also liked this person") would be a starting point. But Tinder doesn't seem to have even tried this, while Hinge makes some attempt. There are also a few games they could take out, like telling you ~8 people liked you to bait you into swiping more to find them, but it's not a big deal.

To Tinder's credit, they made dating apps massively popular for the first time ever, and just getting a lot of people onto one app brought value even for serious dating. It was basically the only app in town from 2014-2018. Copycats were spawned, some of which were simply branded more for serious dating, and I met my now-wife on one of them.