Yes, absolutely. But its even worse, its a crowdsourced eugenics program that the crowd doesn't know they are contributing to and I believe they would not consent to if they knew or had the choice (aside from not using the app at all).
Basically your selection (match, don't match) isn't just a personal choice. It alters the other person's desirability based on your current desirability. Its a weighted choice that affects how they are bracketed to everyone else, people in the same brackets match each other.
Now of course, this is similar to the outcome in real life. But there is a level of consent to these personal choices, and there are way more inputs before this outcome occurs.
Knowing that some derivative of this is employed allows you to game it, which makes it much less objectionable to me, but I greatly disagree with the idea that other people aren't aware. At this point my biggest issue with dating apps is that nobody moderately attractive has their notifications on, so it's easy to forget to check the app for a conversation (after you matched) but at the same time its still uncouth to ask for a phone number or other way of messaging right away, so a simple conversation could take weeks or months or more likely never occur. (Many people have their instagrams or snapchats written on their profile, but its an additional greater gamble to get a response through those as they are inferior forms of inboxes too).
I know its common for married people to think "omg dating is so nightmarish now, this justifies staying with my spouse through anything because I wouldn't know what to do", its not really that different, think of a dating app like a fisherman at the pier with 5 fishing rods out in the water. 2 of them are dating apps, 3 of them are other things. Its just an additional option to meet people outside of your network.
I've never done online dating, met my wife the old-fashioned way, but, it sounds like you're saying the network is making the choice of who should be matched/together, before they get the chance to decide for themselves?
If that's true, how anyone thinks that isn't totally fucked is beyond me. I mean, I'm seriously, deeply concerned by this notion more than the usual privacy, data etc that big tech concerns me with, they're literally shaping future generations according to their "algorithm", by deciding that one person shouldn't even be allowed to know another even exists, let alone have an opportunity to interact with them.
Yes, I'm also convinced that dating apps aren't a good way to match-make. I've had some experience of them, and there are clear problems for both men and women on it. Men struggle to get matches, women struggle to get good quality matches. The environment is artificial. A few words on your profile, a few photos that probably don't represent you in real-life, and then an artificial 'date' where it's hard for people to be natural. I met my wife in person at work. Not saying that is great either, but I find my attraction to someone is based far more on who they are in real-life than the 2D representation that a photo or some text messages can represent.
No offense, but bullshit. I've personally never once in my life used a single dating app and have met plenty of dates and love interests the old fashioned way, by interacting with them in the real world after random encounters (bars, events etc) or through circles of friends. Most of the people I know met their own love interests in the same way. I don't live in some backward country with little app use either. What a sad existence it would be to have something as fundamental as one's romantic life depend on a shitty, arbitrary and parasitic data collecting app that feels it has the right to treat its users like cash cattle with no recourse for any unfair ToS decision it makes. Grotesque.
Yeah, there's rightly a lot of concern over the power of the big social media monopolies and dating apps don't seem to get the same level of scrutiny.
Ultimately you decide who you want to date, but in scenarios where most people meet through apps, those apps have a lot of influence over who meets who. Nobody knows how the matching algorithms work, all we see is the effects and a mountain of anecdotal evidence that some men are having a difficult time finding partners.
there are some really out of touch takes here. dating apps haven't been about necessity for 10 years, that's exactly why the stigma of using an online matchmaker disintegrated.
people are moving away from them because they don't work well enough to justify the time and cost, and the negative effects on confidence are now known enough that thinly veiled digs at the user complaining about them don't work either. so because bad experiences aren't invalidated anymore, and the bad experience can be quantified, people are opting out entirely.
From female profiles, and speaking with my friends, it seems that no one is happy with online dating apps.
> dating apps have created an environment where women are hyper-selective and where men are hyper-indiscriminate.
I believe this is the key point, and ironic because it's viscous cycle.
This behavior encourages worse behavior that is counter intuitive to the goal of it's users.
The entire premise is flawed from the start, as a dating profile starts with a snap judgement based on pictures, a biography, and key details--such as height, job, education.
At this point, the competition for dates using an app is so high, and the experience is so mediocre, that I am better off spending my effort meeting women in real life.
I wonder if dating is one of the few arenas of human life in which tools and services to make it easier create invariably bad ethics. When you boil it all down, mating is an adversarial process dressed up as a cooperative one, making deception the order of the day. Tools and services, even with the best of intentions, wind up only serving those deceptive purposes.
In my own life, despite being an uber-introverted nerd, I've gravitated towards just the normal way of finding people I'm interested in in person and just asking them out. The advantage of this is feedback is much easier to intuit when the person you're asking out is right there in front of you.
I don't really see the point anymore in spending large amounts of time and effort to optimize a algorithmic online search pattern when daily life in a city gives one all the bandwidth one could ever need to find someone.
I really like this take, and I think it becomes extremely self-evident once you think about it for a bit, and talk with people who use dating apps IRL.
"Dating apps are incentivized to keep people going on mediocre first dates" is such a tired take that would require such incredible sophistication and secrecy to pull off, "we can't make the matches too shitty, but we also can't make them too good, damn it Jim that match was too high quality! now they'll stop paying!" its comic book villain stuff that cannot possibly explain why all of these apps suck.
"For which there are many highly personalized reasons" -> Look, yes people are responsible for their own mindsets. But in the words of a recent tweet (I wish I could cite but I can't find it) concerning learning comprehension tanking in K-12 students: Its Phones! Its just phones. Its obviously phones! You hear this crap like "well, its a highly complicated situation with many variables and possible explanations" Nope! Its literally just phones!
Dating is hard, weird, and scary. Its one of the most vulnerable things humans do. We're putting kids on a dopamine treadmill from childhood, and we're surprised that, at best, we've got cohorts of individuals growing up who love the matching but stop when it gets any more difficult than a swipe?
Yeah sure, if you see dating as an end it makes sense to use these apps.
For me it's most about meeting people, talking, learning etc ... it's part of the thrill. "But you can do that on tinder too", nah, being face to face explicitly for a date changes everything, people are not themselves in these conditions.
I don't want to meet people I "matched" because we watch the same shows, listen to the same music, have the same hobbies. That's not bad per say but I'd much rather learn that organically, even if it ends up being a "waste of time". I feel like reading a tinder profile + the first convo is removing most of the fun of meeting someone.
> Ever go out to try and meet women?
I don't go out with the intent of finding a date but if something happens I'll go with the flow. I met my last 2 ltr like that and learned a lot from it / them.
Sure if you compare that to having 3 dates a week on tinder my numbers look low, but I also avoid all the shit I don't want to put up with.
> You just have to remember easy come, easy go.
Yes, that's exactly what I don't like about these apps, you'll always have the occasional "I met my wife/husband on tinder" but it's mostly short term things. My personal theory is that the more people you date / the easier it is to find a mate, the less you'll engage and the faster you'll get disappointed / bored and go look somewhere else. It's always more exciting to start a new relationship than to face and overcome hardships in a newish one.
> My suspicion is that dating apps are so easy to hate because they bring to the surface what dating really is.
You could be right, I haven't dated many people so I'm probably extremely biased. All I can tell is that it saddens me to listen to the tinder stories of my friends and see them glued to their tinder app when I meet them in real life, it brings them way more issues than happiness.
The problem is not dating, the problem is visibility. If you have tons of dates with tons of people you'll end up with someone who aligns with you (also will help you to learn what you really like) but these apps, as funny as it sounds, make you invisible by oversaturation. The amount of people is so huge that you spend less than a few seconds to decide if you want to match or not with someone and you never know about this person ever again.
The alternative is the way things were 15 years ago, where people found mates via their physical networks, work, family, hobbies, religion, and day to day life.
The criticism is similar in nature to the criticism of Twitter and Facebook. These apps play to and encourage the worst side of humans in the way that their social dynamics are designed, which distorts relations between people for the worse.
In the case of dating apps, it's because the "first meeting" is viewing someone's curated digital profile instead of getting to know their full self in the real world, they strongly encourage selection based on trivialities like height, hip to waist ratio, income and other signals. You also encourage the same narcissistic performance games that Instagram encourages. It's also the sheer deluge of profiles. Like, our dopamine system isn't designed for that, and nor is it a fully free choice when the app has exploited that evolved system to hook users. And what's going to be the impact of designing a system that makes it easy for people to self select into opposing political tribes?
Of course most of this stuff happened to an extent 15 years ago too. But as with Facebook and their tendency to stoke outrage and division, the problem is how the app has turbocharged our worse tendencies while also creating dilemma like incentives that make it tricky to opt out from.
My point about low status men is that they often aren't bad mates. They're low status through the prism of hyper gamified dating apps that magnify the importance of trivialities. There's no question that there's people who've had it worse in this regard in the pre-dating app era (various low-caste/untouchables types in different societies), my point isn't that we are at rock bottom, just that dating apps are a pretty large step in the wrong direction.
I can't share personal experiences since I've always hated the idea of dating apps/sites with a passion. Social media in general but that's a different story. But a lot of people around me have and I have discussed it with many of them. There are a few not-so-obvious shortcomings in dating apps:
From a business perspective, they make a ton of sense. And I'm sure the people behind them have made thousands of experiments while developing them but I feel like(just like anyone I've spoken to), they never managed to simulate what would happen at scale and most importantly they can't fully simulate human behavior.
At large, us men are very used to hearing "no" from a very early age. Which has one of two effects: those that excel in some areas are more likely to keep trying even when they fail. Those who seem to be on the back foot in most areas become the outcasts but strangely it looks as if that yields some results for them in the dating apps. But there is a group in the middle that are the real losers in this(and likely the vast majority).
For women it's kind of different: they are the more likely ones to say "no" to a man, even if they feel some attraction - "there's always another one". Which is not to say that I don't know instances where this philosophy has massively backfired but what can you do.
The truth is, dating apps are very appealing to those with low self-esteem and bad social skills: at a glance they provide some form of protection, which is unfortunately not true. Dating apps, just like real dating is a numbers game and all they do is digitalize social anxiety and insecurities. If anything, they probably make it worse: people can hide to a degree things that they are insecure about: height, high pitched voice or whatever. But sooner or later that has to materialize and the blow often is much bigger than having to go through it out of the gate.
Here's a real life example with a former colleague of mine: finding a partner was his sole purpose in life. Really nice guy, very educated, great sense of humor but, as I said in the previous paragraph, kinda short and a really squeaky voice. The good news is that he made it and is now married and has a son. Great. But he spent ungodly amount of time on dating apps and spent thousands of bucks on them-like literally in the 5-digit realm. Kudos for being this persistent - I honestly don't think I know anyone that has gone through as much effort as he has - the process spanned over a period of 5 years. The truth is he was actively being exploited by dating apps and while he was aware of it, he saw it as his only chance. Personally I did not understand his urge and not because I had a partner or a family - I still don't in my dead-center mid 30's: my philosophy on that topic is literally "meh, whatever". But seeing this guy struggle so much, it honestly was heart breaking.
On the other end of the scale, I know women that scroll through tinder endlessly, nope-ing out of everyone they see and the second they tap yes on someone they are are even vaguely interested in, it's an instant match. It kind of looks like playing age of empires with the ac cobra cheat always on: it is fun the first three or four times but it gets boring fast. But remember when I said that women are not used to hearing "no"? Well I was having a coffee with her a while back and she said that at some point she really wanted to ask me out. I laughed and asked her why she didn't: "You are a very strange breed: most men will say yes instantly because it's an easy shortcut. You are not most and you wouldn't even bat an eyelash while telling me to take a hike in my face. That thought was absolutely terrifying". Those wouldn't have been my words of choice but she definitely had the right idea. But the fact that a woman that has a magnitude of good qualities and is way more attractive than I am is terrified of getting rejected speaks volumes.
In reality men have to go through a lot of effort to get any results at all with dating apps. Women... Well they simply need to be on them.
I completely agree. I'm always amused by the idea that dating apps have this secret, sophisticated algorithm that gives you dates that are nice but leave you wanting more. Human relationships are hard and I doubt that the best experts in the field could come up with something like that, and it's certainly impossible for an algorithm without any information about the person. I always feel that these complaints come from the frustration of not being able to find the perfect partner, from people who don't even come close to the standard they want in a partner.
In my experience, online dating is a pretty well functioning marketplace. People have a limited amount of time to date, so they'll take the best one they can get. Of course, online dating narrows down the ranking process to superficial information, but I don't think there's a technical solution to that. As a man I've seen both sides of the coin. When I started out with online dating I didn't have good pictures, no good bio, no good writing skills and didn't pay. I went months without a good match and even longer without a date. Then I decided to clean up my profile, highlight my strengths as a potential partner, learned to carry a fun conversation and started paying for the product and suddenly had to reject women, simply because I had too many options for any given night.
Dating apps are just a more extreme form of real dating. Dating always has been a competition, people will choose the best partner they can get. The advantage of the real world is that people often don't have many choices, but the disadvantage of the real world is also that people don't have many choices. Apps get rid of that disadvantage, but also of that advantage.
Basically your selection (match, don't match) isn't just a personal choice. It alters the other person's desirability based on your current desirability. Its a weighted choice that affects how they are bracketed to everyone else, people in the same brackets match each other.
Now of course, this is similar to the outcome in real life. But there is a level of consent to these personal choices, and there are way more inputs before this outcome occurs.
Knowing that some derivative of this is employed allows you to game it, which makes it much less objectionable to me, but I greatly disagree with the idea that other people aren't aware. At this point my biggest issue with dating apps is that nobody moderately attractive has their notifications on, so it's easy to forget to check the app for a conversation (after you matched) but at the same time its still uncouth to ask for a phone number or other way of messaging right away, so a simple conversation could take weeks or months or more likely never occur. (Many people have their instagrams or snapchats written on their profile, but its an additional greater gamble to get a response through those as they are inferior forms of inboxes too).
I know its common for married people to think "omg dating is so nightmarish now, this justifies staying with my spouse through anything because I wouldn't know what to do", its not really that different, think of a dating app like a fisherman at the pier with 5 fishing rods out in the water. 2 of them are dating apps, 3 of them are other things. Its just an additional option to meet people outside of your network.
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