[roenxi]

> If you find good matches but not great matches, you stick around.

I dunno, I have difficulty seeing how the dating sites could singlehandedly pull that off in the average case without the site users really leaning in to help. It would seem to run into the basic reality that men and women historically pick the best match from a fairly small pool of people. A dating sites can't do worse than that even if they're trying. If people are willing to use the same standards as all their ancestors then they'd pair off quickly.

It seems more likely that there is just a natural dead-sea effect because of that where the people on the sites over the long term are not the sort of people you'd settle down with, and there is also this subtle idea that the dating site is there to find someone a perfect match (probably doesn't exist to start with). Those are design issues that go a lot deeper than any algorithm the sites might be using.

[chongli]

That's because "matches" are the wrong criterion to look at. In aggregate, matches don't matter. What matters is the population of marriageable (or otherwise amenable to long-term relationships) people. And that's what the dating app calculus works against. Every time 2 marriageable people get together, they remove themselves from the pool. If there is not a significant influx of new marriageable people then over time the marriageability of the pool will decline. As it drops, the concentration of "serial daters" goes up.

In a high concentration of serial daters, no one wants to pair off because there isn't anyone worth pairing off with around.

[Retric]

> If there is not a significant influx of new marriageable people then over time the marriageability of the pool will decline

That seems to be extremely unlikely, people have finite lifespans and are only in the marriage pool for a small fraction of that. More importantly your website could easily be targeted to an even smaller pool say 25-45 and ignoring deaths and divorce your already ~10% turnover per year if you own 100% of the market. Actual numbers depends on what percentage of the pool starts married, becomes a widow etc but their’s plenty of new people to make up for any couples. Further, happily married couples are great advertising.

[mahirsaid]

1 The number of people using these apps. 2. The age group using the apps 3. the type of people using the apps 4. the culture that it has replaced and infiltrated 5 It is the social norm by now to be asked if your on TiXXXr or some other app

The modern interaction have eroded, it is awkward or weird to be approached in public, every middle aged woman or elderly woman has her purse on while shopping at a grocery store, locking the car 6 times and looking back while doing it as if its a James Bond movie. I live in middle class neighborhood and this is the things i see on a daily bases. it is sad.

[crazygringo]

> Every time 2 marriageable people get together, they remove themselves from the pool. If there is not a significant influx of new marriageable people

But there is. It's all the people aging into the dating apps. That's how it works. The rate of people leaving is balanced by new people arriving.

[chongli]

No, they aren't. If you're in your 40s you aren't looking to date people in their 20s. Where's the influx of other people in their 40s to date?

[echelon]

> If you're in your 40s you aren't looking to date people in their 20s.

My building is full of divorced 40-somethings dating younger. You see it all over media too. Leonardo DiCaprio is famous for this, and he's hardly the only one.

Women date younger too. My wife's TikTok is full of women empowerment videos; the number of videos on her feed that talk about this is not inconsequential.

Plenty of people to date.

[crazygringo]

What do you mean? From recently divorced people, of course, if you want to look at that age bracket. But it's the same principle.

[wojciii]

Younger women wanting older mature partners is as old as time.

There is even a subgenre of romance writing with this as a theme .. age gap.

[kelipso]

But where’s the growth?

[imiric]

It's a truly sad state of affairs that human relationships are reduced to this clinical technobabble.

Technology was promised to solve our problems, yet it has created so many more.

[arjie]

It's just a reinforcement loop where the more of something you have the more it accelerates. It happens in many places: bank runs (as soon as people start taking money out, more start doing so), the dead sea effect (where the best people leave and people start leaving as the median quality of coworker drops), hiring (where the more capable you are the more likely you are to get hired, so it gets harder and harder to hire the later you are to the game - most obvious with when you're interviewing interns or whatever), and so on.