[jerf]

They don't want to chat with bots.

They're going to be unknowingly chatting with bots.

It's a logical extension of things that are well established are happening: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38447794

It's one of the purest examples of short term business thinking I can imagine. Will this goose this quarter's revenue? Heck yeah. But there may not be a dating app market at all in three years once the public realizes that "dating apps" are just fancy wrappers around ChatGPT built to "drive engagement" by making damned sure you don't actually ever enter into a long term relationship with an actual human.

It seems dating apps will be leading the way into fulfilling the Dead Internet Theory.

[cal85]

This seems unlikely. Even if this were their plan, they surely would do it quietly and not make a press release about it.

[jerf]

Can't get those sweet, sweet AI stock bumps without a press release.

Anyhow, I expect them to announce something a lot more innocuous but do something a lot less innocuous. It doesn't have to be exactly what I said, which would be pretty blatant, though personally I have absolutely no problem imagining it would happen, but it'll be something that if someone just directly described it to you without sugar coating it you'd find offensive, I guarantee it. The game theory all but guarantees it; if $YOU don't do it, someone else will, so it may as well be $YOU. Basically a tragedy of the commons.

[cal85]

Maybe Tinder and some of its competitors will all self-destruct in that way, or retreat into being a kind of lowbrow spamware network for loners. But if so, there will still be a market demand from people who want to meet other humans to reproduce with, and other companies (both existing and new ones) will create new offerings to serve those people. The idea that ‘game theory guarantees’ that everything just turns to shit (which seems to be your view) is evidently wrong. Parts of the economy sometimes self-destruct in that way, but when they do, they leave fertile ground for new things to emerge.

[jerf]

If 'the public realizes that "dating apps" are just fancy wrappers around ChatGPT built to "drive engagement"', they'll salt the earth for any future dating apps. Fertile ground is not guaranteed.

This distrust is already building around us right now, it's not a theory. I don't live in Silicon Valley and I think that can sometimes help serve as a counterpoint to an excessively SV-view of the world here on HN sometimes. The normies in my life are already talking about this sort of thing, unprompted by me. Dating apps may be the vanguard but there's plenty of things charging behind them.

Game theory does not guarantee that everything turns to shit; that sort of glib summary makes me think you don't know what the tragedy of the commons even is, or the obvious application to a race to the bottom in this particular segment. Again, it's not like it's some brand new hypothesis that dating apps do scummy things to drive engagement; I gave an example. I find people's touching child-like faith that a known-scummy portion of the market won't do some other scummy thing once the opportunity presents itself to be simply incomprehensible. Plenty of people aren't nice, especially people already doing scummy things. Psychopaths are real and do real things to real people in the real world, not some sort of hypothetical construction dreamed up by disconnect ivory tower psychologists as a theoretical test case.

[cal85]

> they'll salt the earth for any future dating apps

Baseless assertion. If people get sick of dating apps because they somehow all end up being full of bots, someone can make a new dating app where the primary selling point is that they prevent or minimise bots, maybe using some kind of human vetting process. Many people would then use that app.

> faith that a known-scummy portion of the market won't do some other scummy thing

I have no such faith. I did acknowledge that parts of the market can degrade, and that you might even be right that bots will ruin most existing dating apps. That could happen. But the idea that this would definitely spell the end of all dating apps is just an assertion you are making with no evidence.