No matter what you use, it seems they always fail and no one is interested.
Even a free app like duolicious has this problem.
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Sorta related, if you’re really interested in using them and are a straight cis person I highly recommend trying them out from the other side. Create a more or less generic account of the opposite gender and see what kinds of messages, likes, or whatever you end up with. It will be mind boggling how different it is from what you are used to and give you an idea of what you will need to do to actually make a match.
My partner and I found each other on OkC over 4 years ago. I had been on dating apps for maybe 5-6 years prior, whereas I was basically her first match
I mean I don’t date, but I’ve never once heard of a person who met on a dating app and actually got together with them, I have heard of instant message platforms working though.
I met my last long term partner on a dating app, but these days it’s not a route I’d want to take. I met someone on discord more recently in a really wonderful community that allowed me to get to know him and make other friends with none of the same pressure
Well, think about it.
They profit off their users by either charging them for a service, selling user data, and/or advertisement. If their dating app was very successful and quickly matched users together, they wouldn’t be using the app very long and the company would lose potential profit.
This probably wasn’t the case in the earlier days of the internet but it certainly is now. They want you hooked and coming back every day so they can get maximum profit off you.
I’ve actually wondered if it’s possible to make a decent living taking a larger upfront cost to personally meet with people locally then match them accordingly. I just worry that it would be a lot of explaining to men that they don’t shower enough and to women that they’re either going to have to stay single, date other women, only have casual sex, or just accept that the bar is on the damn floor and I’m just trying to find them a man that showers and vaguely shares their cultural family values.
Matchmaker is an ancient profession.
TRADITION! TRADITION!
And honestly to me a pretty necessary one. I see the utility of a service like okc used to be where you take all those quizzes then get a match percentage based on that because that would get a lot of the more boring work out of the way, but imo you would also need someone to personally evaluate how the people interact with a person they’re not intending to have sex with, because that’s going to be the biggest indicator of their true character and what factors are actually going to make people compatible beyond those first few interactions. You’d be able to match people who might not consider each other otherwise, and help people skip people who might look nice but don’t actually have anything in common. You could also give people some more honest feedback on what they’re doing that’s not matching up with the result they’re trying to achieve.
Duolicious only asks for donations and it’s algorithm was interesting, too bad the anti-AFK ideology was never enforced
Can you be a bit more clear on what you mean by failing?
I’ve met my girlfriend on Tinder and had some nice dates / hookups because of it. Are 98% of the women not intetested because of my average looks and being overweight? Sure, but it’s the 2% that made wit worthwhile. Tinder was getting more expensive depending on your age back then but I think I would use an app again if I needed to.
I’ve met some people that I would otherwise never have met, made some rich corporation even richer in the process… 🤷
Wait…you paid for tinder?
Yep, wasn’t as overpriced back then though.
The first dating apps designed for straight people always had an unbalanced ration of men and women, which appears to have gotten worse over time. Early on a few people I know did find people, dated, and married. They were mostly people who had niche interests for our area and were successfully connecting with people at least a couple hours away who they never would have met in person.
But that was well over a decade ago and I don’t know of anyone having success since those early years.
They work. I don’t know why people like to perpetuate that dating apps make suboptimal matches. Dating apps match people up on some basic metrics. It’s up to the people to form connections. They dont have a magic ability to keep people from long term relationships.
If anything people might be more picky or idealistic because dating apps exist, so they’ll likely not commit because of their high standards or FOMO. But that’s more of a society issue not the dating apps themselves.
No, they used to be more or less good - they all had slightly different vibes instead of being the exact same thing with different fonts. Okcupid used to publish a lot of fun data and was kind of a middle ground, Match was known for being for more “serious” daters, and plenty of fish tended to be a little trashier - not that there wasn’t plenty of overlap, that was just kind of the reputations they had. You could pay for things but you could also do just fine with free accounts, and the ads focused on how many people had had success with them.
Now they’re all owned by the same company and it shows, and they’ve decided dumbing the experience down to the most superficial stuff and letting bots and people advertising OF or their MLMs take over is fine. I don’t think any of them are worth the time they take to download at this point.
I remember 10+ years ago using okcupid. It was alright.
Best dating site ever? Myspace.
See the thing about dating sites is the women are guarded, and protective of what they say and do because they’re afraid of any little thing they say being judged as then being slutty.
But on myspace, I would introduce myself by sending a new message, to someone I never talked to before and the message would say “Hi, I’m Rob. Can I put it in your butt?”
And then they’d see my pics, and realize my entire existance is a joke. And they’d reply “Well obviously! When are we getting drinks?”. Her joking obviously, because who would agree to something like that so fast?
And then we WOULD get drinks. And I WOULD put it in her butt…eventually.
But on Tinder, it requires the women to swipe right to create a match. And in their mind, it means they’re actively agreeing to sex in that moment. And that little butterfly effect moment breaks the chain.
They never have that joking intro. They never meet for drinks. They never start dating. They never get vunerable about their biggest fears. They never come home to their house full of bees as clowns wrap their arms around them and drag them into the bees nests. They never get stripped down and have honey lathered all over their naked body. They never have you come in with a chainsaw, decapitate a few dozen clowns, and run with her out of a bee filled house just moments before it explodes, and ride away on a motorcycle as you flee the chasing yakuza, despite being in Ohio. She never feels the adrenaline rush of speeding up a ramp on the motorcycle, and hopping over the tracks of a speeding train, thus stopping the yakuza. Then later at your place, you’re like “oh, sorry, the water is broken. Some house exploded and the whole citys water is shut off now. Which means I can’t serve you a cold glass of water. Just some wine. Like…a LOT of wine. You wanna drink 46 bottles of wine? Also, you can’t take a shower to wash off that honey. I’ll have to lick it off. But you better hurry. There’s fire ants outside, and they sting.”
And after 2 hours of drinking, and licking, she’s now in the mood, and now you’re putting it in her butt, and she’s loving it. Her reservations she previously had about anal were totally false.
And thats what she’s worried about happening if she swipes right. So she swipes left instead. So now YOU are spending Saturday night masturbating with a bottle of honey…
Wtf did I just read? You are a funny person!
Welcome to the internet, hold on to your socks
'Cause a random guy just kindly sent you photos of his cock
They are grainy and off-putting, he just sent you more
Don’t act surprised, you know you like it, you whore
Could I interest you in everything all of the time?
A bit of everything, all of the time
Apathy’s a tragedy and boredom is a crime
Anything and everything, all of the time
If you are male, then this video could clarify a bit: https://youtu.be/x3lypVnJ0HM Main point is that twice as many guys want a relationship comparing to gals, so you should really stand out in a quirky way to get noticed
Well, sorta. As someone else pointed out the economic incentives for most dating app owners are diametrically opposed to the needs of the users. There is also a huge consolation in the market with the majority of the apps by user count being owned by a single company which leads to enshittification.
There are a few exceptions but they very much aren’t for everyone.
OKCupid from 20 years ago was great before it sold out. But it’s only accessible to time travelers.
Next are the more event based or hookup apps which tend to cater to kinksters, swingers, poly, and queer folk. I’m thinking of things like FetLife, Grinder and Plura. They work well for their audience since those communities tend to have events that people will keep coming back for even if they have successfully found someone on the app. In fact success finding someone might make them more likely to keep on the app and bring in their friends.
But for monogamous straight people? Dating apps are a hellscape.
Yes they’re a scam
I’m a man and I sought out relationships exclusively through online dating*. It was extremely discouraging, but it did eventually work three or four times (depending on how you define a long term relationship) over the course of years of trying. Each success was a big deal.
I used the free version of the old OkCupid - the one where you wrote a long profile and answered a bunch of multiple-choice questions. I only sent messages to women who seemed highly compatible with me, and I put some thought into every message. My rough estimate is that one in twenty messages received a reply. One in five replies lead to a date. One in five dates was the start of a long-term relationship. So that’s “only” about 500 messages per relationship, and that took several years. (There weren’t 500 women on the site who lived nearby and seemed compatible with me at any one time.)
I have no idea how well the modern “swipe” apps work. Frankly they seem gross and I never seriously tried using them.
*I have been introduced to women by a friend or relative a few times, but that friend/relative was the one who took the initiative.
With that kind of hit rate and timescale did you ever think the apps were unnecessary vs just meeting people? Or were you not really in a position to meet people by other means anyway?
No, there were always lots of people relatively near me. Even when I lived in New Hampshire, I was only an hour away from Boston. Now I live in Manhattan. My issue is the standard one that nerds have: intense social anxiety, and all the solitary habits formed by decades of social anxiety.
The funny thing is that when my dog was alive, I made sure that he had an active social life. I would even ask strangers with dogs if their dogs would like to meet mine.
Damn, I can’t even do this: my dog has worse social skills than I do (we tried but she is a rescue with a hard previous life)
Mine was weird because he had very intense separation anxiety but as long as I was with him, he loved everyone and wasn’t afraid of anything. He could even watch fireworks with me - when the noise started, he gave me a look and when he saw that I was calm, he didn’t worry either.
grindr
faceless profile, blank, no information: “no pic no chat”
it’s all stupid hypocrites looking for low-effort validation fix.
Idk what to tell you. Are you following rules 1 and 2 of online dating cause while I haven’t settled down with a woman yet, I’ve met multiple gfs through tinder and bumble. Some lasted years
No, they worked for me between 15-10 years ago, but I get it - by all accounts now they’re so enshittified that it’s just Match parasitically turning loneliness into profit at ever greater efficiency. They would have failed immediately if they didn’t work long enough to capture enough market and attention.
As others mentioned OK Cupid, and it’s a great example. It was originally very good at matching people, and they took pride in it. I remember when Match bought it, as I had recently (just in time) found my person. I was able to see it go from “No, we’re leaving it alone, just tweaking a few things” to ending the interesting data-exploration articles, dumbing down the experience, adding micro-pay-gating, and fully gutting the experience and staff. Nobody should have trusted Match to not destroy what it was, and if they hadn’t sold and remained a useable app, maybe the market would have abandoned Match. Instead, here we are.
I don’t envy those people still looking, I assume best case is still using apps but you just have to waste a lot more time.
