Dating apps are extremely broken, and yet they're almost all owned by a single company: Match Group. I have a suspicion that these apps are left intentionally broken to keep users fruitlessly searching and boost engagement metrics. I can't find a complete list of the companies they've acquired, but last time I checked, Match owns over 20 different apps and dating sites, including Tinder, OkCupid, and Hinge.
We really need some antitrust action in this space. Sorry, but they're not extremely broken. I worked at OkCupid 8 years ago, saw the issues they faced then and have seen the evolution of the apps since then, and right now they really are as good as anyone's been able to come up with that attracts enough active users to generate promising dates. If there were a drastically better solution, then it would take over the market. The last major innovation was when Tinder invented swiping and went mobile-first, a genius move which drastically cut down the spam women deal with and made it actually feel like a fun game instead of a chore.
The fact is, despite all the work of psychologists and technologists, nobody 's come up with a better, more efficient way of matching people. Personality profiles and questionnaires are a poor predictor of chemistry -- they can help with filtering compatibility in basic ways, but they're not going to find you your soul mate.
Photos reveal potential likely chemistry more than anything else. Swiping works. Messaging works. The apps can't perform magic, though. If you're looking to find more success on them than you would with the same group of people at a bar or meetup or wherever, that's not gonna happen. They're not changing whether people are attracted to each other or not.
What they do do is give you a pool of users far larger than you'd ever encounter in a single night out, and you know they're mostly all single, also different from when you go out. And they're honestly pretty good at that. SkyBelow on Nov 25, parent next [β]. At least for dating, there's an easy solution to the Paradox of Choice problem: 1. Be unattractive. Don't be attractive. Seriously, though, this probably was a factor for why I met my current wife on OKC.
