[joe_mamba]

>Humanity managed dating fine before these things were created

Except back then we had stuff like religion, church, village, common communities etc to bind people.

>even managed it in cities where we live in isolating apartments and only know our neighbours by the music leaking through the walls.

Statistics show urbanites to be lonelier than ever, so that take disagrees with you.

>Pubs, clubs, general social events where you can find people whose actual interests you share, these all do fine.

Massively depends on what the social life is like in the city you live in and what age you age. Some cities are better than others and the older you get the worse it is. While dating apps are more of a sure thing because most people are there to date. Meanwhile you can waste time and money in pubs and clubs for years and never meet a partner.

It's similar to job searching, if you're unemployed and need a job, you go straight to linkedin and apply, you don't go to clubs and pubs hoping you meet a founder who has a job for you. The latter might work every now and then if you're sociable and lucky and live in the right place, but it's not a sure thing for everyone all the time. That's why dating apps will never go away just like linkedin will never go away.

[wbl]

Social media and dating apps together have created this isolation. People can demand a completely comfortable illusion of life and enforce this sterility.

[simianwords]

> Social media and dating apps together have created this isolation

This is not true, dating apps the result of our culture and not causing it.

[joe_mamba]

>Social media and dating apps together have created this isolation.

Work with me here. If you ban all social media and dating apps tomorrow, will you suddenly cured loneliness? I 100% doubt it. This reductionist logic is more like Stalin having all sparrows killed to save the crops.

[wbl]

The causes of problems are not necessarily their solutions

[joe_mamba]

Both the cause and especially the solutions are way too complex to be summarized on HN comment in a few sentences but need an entire essay. Social media and dating apps are 10% tops of the issue. The issue has multiple layers developed over the decades.

[ben_w]

> Except back then we had stuff like religion, church, village, common communities etc to bind people.

And in cities, more pubs, clubs, general social events where you can find people whose actual interests you share.

Most of us didn't go from Renaissance village churches to dating apps in one lifetime, let alone one day.

> Statistics show urbanites to be lonelier than ever, so that take disagrees with you.

Most surveys only started about 10 years ago, i.e. after social media and dating apps were already around, and the few longer surveys disagree with each other, but even they only go back to the 80s AFAICT; we've been living in big dense isolating cities for a lot longer than that.

> Massively depends on what the social life is like in the city you live in and what age you age.

So the focus should be on that, then. As in, not a dating app.

> While dating apps are more of a sure thing because most people are there to date.

Everyone I've heard talking about dating apps since Match Group cornered the market, says the only "sure thing" about them is how mediocre they are, at least for straight couples. Women get all the low-effort displays, men get no responses and spiral into low-effort displays.

[joe_mamba]

>And in cities, more pubs, clubs, general social events where you can find people whose actual interests you share.

In theory yes, in practice, not so much. Just because you're surrounded by people doesn't mean people don't stay atomized. It doesn't mean everyone is open to you or likes the same things. If your interests are rather niche and don't live in a large metro area with million of people then you might be shit out of luck if you hope to meet your partner via your niche interests, so dating apps it is. For me, none of my partners shared the same interests, so if I relied on my hobbies for dating I would have stayed single forever.

>So the focus should be on that, then. As in, not a dating app.

Unfortunately, datings apps are the only easy way to meet someone is some cities at certain age groups. There's people who just don't like, or don't have the money or the patients, to go out to events, hoping to meet someone, as that's a waste of time and money if your goal is just romantic dating and not speeding two hours to listen to a band you don't like and paying 7 Euros for a mediocre beer. They just want a sure date in the near future to settle down and have a family in the near future.

If you're single in your thirties, and you move to a new city for work, you don't have the time to first build a social network from scratch before you can meet a partner as that takes years or even decades. If you're optimizing for starting a family ASAP due to your biological clock, then you need to optimize for dating people in your age group who also want a family ASAP, not waste your time going to art galleries, pubs and clubs hoping that maybe you'll meet your future partner there. For this demographic dating apps are the only way to optimize for dates, especially if you're a man working in male dominated fields with male dominated hobbies. Which is why the majority of dating apps users are Millennials. Students and people in their early twenties have a lot more options for IRL dating than apps.

>Women get all the low-effort displays, men get no responses and spiral into low-effort displays.

And you think the results of romantic interactions between opposite sexes in bars and pubs is THAT much different? If you as a man approach all the women in the club you find attractive, how do you think it's gonna work out for both of you? Unless you're Henry Cavill, it's gonna be similar to dating apps: women getting too much unwanted attention and men getting only rejections.