Are Dating Apps Dying?

So I stumbled across a reddit link to an article that made the proclamation that dating apps are dying. The article referenced two additional sources (here and here) for this idea but the majority of the article read more like an anecdotal scenario rather than something with more empirical proof. Also, because the link originated from reddit, my suspicion for the author’s credibility, despite being from Time, made me call into question the article. But I did find another one with numbers and dollar values. That said, I think the question is an interesting one which is why I decided to write on it as a dedicated post.

The reddit post itself has a plethora of comments about OkCupid and various people’s experiences with the site. The main issue I’ve read is that Match.com’s acquiring of the site and roughly around 2016 are where things seemed to descend into muddiness. In my case, a coworker had mentioned sometime around 2017 – 2018 meeting her husband on the site and said I should give it a try. My experience at that point was that it was a soulless meat market and that there was less ways to match than eharmony (where I only had one date after paying). And I did try paying back for a period but never really got further than a few messages exchanged on OkCupid.

That said, I did try a few other online dating sites, even a so-called mail order brides site that I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit (but didn’t pay for after doing a whois lookup to find out it was located in a suspicious country). The bulk of these sites were almost the same except that they were flavored for a specific genre (e.g. older people, Christians, LGBQT+, etc.) I believe most were owned by a similar parent company that simply skinned these sites to provide the impression that they were different. But at the center of these sites were a similar pattern in trying to mine your data and get you to pay for exchanging simple messages or even doing anything transactional (e.g. look at images, comment, etc.)

Yet there were far more nefarious forces at work. Of course, some were Nigerian scammer type of scenarios. But I recall in one instance how after just signing up, without adding any preferences or personal information whatsoever, I immediately received a like/message from someone. When I inspected the profile, it turned out to be this white woman in her 50s…except the profile picture was of a black person in her 30s. WTF?????

So I pretty much stopped and signed out. Luckily, I used one of my expendable email addresses because most of these places make the bulk of their money selling off your information to their partners. And if you start receiving suspicious spam messages then this is how.

Some of these sites try to gamify their setup. I remember one with a sketchy voyeuristic camgirl type of setup. You’d get these tokens for spending money where you’d get private “sessions” with these people. Of course, none of this would lead anywhere but I’m sure a few suckers dumped their money into these things.

Lately, I’ve mostly avoided dating sites. The only one I occasionally check is OkCupid but I honestly find that site to be hopeless. Right now, OkCupid seems to be driven by bots and fake profiles (maybe worse than before). I’ve been getting these weird Chinese women trying to message me. For instance, I received an “intro” from a woman who claimed to be 55 but looked 35. I could not respond to this intro, despite how “she” had superliked my profile. I got the most minimalistic question which clearly demonstrated she did not read one word from my profile. And this message/like came out of the blue.

I think what happens on OkCupid is that if your profile becomes inactive for weeks/months, they send an automated message/like/intro to try to get you to log back in. Because you can’t really see anything beyond the most immediate and recent intro/superlike, their entire hope is that you’re stupid enough to fall prey for this scam. But the minute you re-log back in, you start getting pelted against by likes and an occasional intro. None of these people seem real though because they don’t really fill out their profile and only give 2-3 pictures at most to make it seem that a person really exist behind the image.

I’m not saying there aren’t real people but the “real” people are buried deep and the match criteria is horrible. You’ll see fake statistics like 85-95% matching based on some stupid, nonsensical questionnaire that honestly has little to nothing to do with your actual core values which are critical in a relationship. And even if you try liking someone, there’s no guarantees for the reverse to occur. Or you might write your soul into a message for it to be ignored, thus making you feel you’ve just wasted your time.

The problem about these dating apps is that they’re utter bullshit. I mean, you hear about success stories but I’m more curious about their failure rates. Even more importantly, I have to wonder how many of these profiles are auto generated from exposed photos on the internet that some unwitting person has provided via social media (i.e. the paid “partnership”). I figure at the least these companies have to be somewhat aware of the scumminess of their sites or at least realize that these profiles are fake.

In addition, at least for me, when I see one of these profiles, I just become really discouraged. It’s like reading a software requirements document for a highly classified missile system. You would think some of these people are just flat out deranged with their bullet points and specifications. Now, those are real profiles but who’d want to deal with that kind of person in the first place?

I just think that online dating sites are expensive for what you get. There’s no guarantees and many put you on some scammy subscription plan that’s very hard to cancel. Most just pray for desperate people to pay but once you get screwed over a few times, you’ll realize that these aren’t worth it.

Sadly, the only place that looked somewhat viable was the old Craigslist relationships section. But that’s long gone since some online law pretty much killed their dating classifieds. I almost would imagine that one of these power house companies might’ve tried bribing the government into pushing that into law so people would be forced to use these shitty dating apps (someone ought to research this to be honest).

But I have to say that the online dating thing never was a good thing for me. I’ve seen that crappy match.com ever since college and even back then it sucked and broke your heart. I don’t think anyone has really figured out how to crack the code for creating a really successful online dating site. Don’t tell me tinder nor eharmony because those either become gamified or require you to pay. I’m talking about just something decent where you can actually find someone you really want as you’re wading through the white noise of being online.

In addition, I think social media as it’s created worse behavior over time has killed off the desire for meeting people online. Add to this fact is how the internet got polluted by a lot of garbage people, really low class, poorly behaving nut cases. Then these days you have bots so it’s going to make determining whether anyone on the other side of the screen is real anymore.

But even before what you see now, I think just the lack of trust online has been a persistent issue. Not just the people behind these profiles but how companies try to treat simple (or complex) social interaction as being this opportunistic scenario for them to make a quick buck. Like for someone such as myself, I’m at the point where I have zero hope of meeting the woman of my dreams online or at the very minimal from an online dating site. There’s just too many expectations and forces working against someone like myself where it’s not worth the effort, the heartbreak and especially the money. So if the purpose for the online marketplace of dating was to pair up hopeless people like myself, then it’s a dead deal at this stage, especially with the economy in shambles in conjunction with some nutball in charge of the country.