r/technology • u/thinkB4WeSpeak • Sep 11 '26

Society Dating Apps Are Dying

https://time.com/article/2026/09/09/dating-apps-are-dying/
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2.6k

u/External_Relative231 Sep 11 '26

Good. They've done it to themselves. 

422

u/StrangeWill Sep 11 '26

Yeah, but arguably it's a weird spot to be in.

If your dating app is great, you lose customers all the time! Which I mean if you want to build good solutions for people, awesome. But it still costs money, time, etc. to get your app in front of everybody. It's hard and constant work because if your dating app rules your churn rate is like 100%.

If your dating app isn't so great, people keep coming back in hopes for finding that somebody! It's why dating apps that turn dating into transactional tomfoolery are so big. Recurring customers = lots of money = more ads = the ones you see more of.

Then one of the companies from Business B ends up offering to buy your Business A which always feels like an uphill battle (even if you feel you're doing the right thing) for retirement levels of money.... So you sell it, and they enshittify it.

It's truly hard to get traction at scale without significant funding, and probably 100x worse now with AI just flooding everything with everybody's ideas. A truly good platform is even more likely to get buried.

IDK what the answer is other than "follow the people that are truly passionate about providing good solutions for people", but it's not like we have a list of them, and even if we did, how do we get millions of people to follow that list...

And that's before we even get into the fact that Business B will totally put predatory addictive patterns into their app, Business A doesn't because they know it doesn't lead to good matches.

Ughhh

675

u/DarkAlatreon Sep 11 '26

But on the other hand single people are literally born every day, and if your app is known to be effective then you'd have free marketing from all the people saying we met on <app_name>, no? Sure, it's more of a long-term play instead of maximizing immediate... oh actually never mind, I see it now.

38

u/ZenMasterOfDisguise Sep 11 '26

But on the other hand single people are literally born every day

but should newborn babies really be on dating apps? /s

7

u/DarkAlatreon Sep 11 '26

They can match with Epstein's friends /s

1

u/lolovoz Sep 12 '26

Well, that's why you can select the desired age.

96

u/himynameisjoy Sep 11 '26

Even then it doesn’t work so well. Undesirable people (emotional issues, to be kind) are less likely to match out so they’ll be available for longer. Desirable people are more likely to match out so they’ll be gone quick. Result will be similar to what exists now: most people on the apps suck at any single point in time, even if across a year or longer it’s more desirable people than not.

15

u/turn-based-games Sep 11 '26

Mostly undesirable people on your app is actually fine if the app is good at sorting and filtering them (like old OkCupid). The problem with modern apps is they're filled with undesirable matches and you have no good way to filter many of them out (by design)

66

u/reezyreddits Sep 11 '26

You're assuming desirable people will match and be gone off the platform forever. Wrong. Some will be using the platform for different things. Some will go on a few bad dates and be right back on the platform. Even the ones that date might break up and go right back to the platform. See what I mean? It's not like everyone that meets on the platform is destined for marriage.

3

u/fjaoaoaoao Sep 11 '26

No.

People with more long-term dating skills will find more relationship success, thus needing the platform less, and will also be more successful off the apps.

1

u/reezyreddits Sep 11 '26

But that's an assumption, right? I know so many attractive women that are career singles despite being highly desirable. Either their standards are too high, they have some unresolved issues or they choose the wrong guys who end up fucking around etc. Many such cases. All I'm saying is there's no confident way to assume that desirables are leaving the apps permanently. Some ARE, for sure. But I think there's a steady stream of new and return users when you think of it this way.

8

u/abcamurComposer Sep 11 '26

Not the greatest argument, I mean you just listed the exact reasons why an attractive, wealthy, and smart woman would be perpetually single.

But I get your point. Dating apps can easily be sustainable if they prioritize long term over immediate

16

u/Thanatos971 Sep 11 '26

You are literally describing women with poor long term relationship skills. If their standards are too high for who they are then that makes matching much harder and lead to poor dates and rejection. If they have unresolved issues then that leads to them being poor long term partners. If they choose the wrong guys then they are poor at determining good long term partners. That they are attractive and successful has nothing to do with dating skill. It makes the process smoother as they have more 'value' but all the issues you listed are turn offs and flags that label them as poor dates for others and leads to them degrading the overall quality of the app.

7

u/himynameisjoy Sep 11 '26

I think you’re overly focused on desirable as a term. I chose it because “low exit hazard users” is not intuitive. Whether the person remains on the app due to external circumstances (e.g. geographical constraints) or internal factors (both demand-side where the user isn’t desirable or supply-side where the user has high standards the app can’t fulfill) the reality is to the average user it’s the same: an incompatible match that takes up your valuable time.

People who leave the app are likely to disproportionately be in a relationship compared to being single, and they’re less likely to need the app. This biases any given snapshot towards users who are less likely to be compatible. Further pushed by the fact that people without options are less likely to leave the apps.

All this to say that even with an altruistic nonprofit app, dating apps tend to move towards being difficult to use.

4

u/ADHDebackle Sep 11 '26

If your dating app is great, people who are not a good fit won't end up matching. I think perspectives are skewed by the current landscape. Back in the old days with OKCupid you just got a big ass list of people you could look through, read their (extensive) profiles, and decide whether or not to send them a message. You didn't have to swipe one by one, you just looked through everyone at once. It was nice.

0

u/GraveRoller Sep 11 '26

Basically to make an app work you’d have to fundamentally overhaul the app. But a dating app doesn’t have the same goals for the public consumer and the public company 

2

u/drteq Sep 11 '26

An app that teaches people how to be better people

14

u/StrangeWill Sep 11 '26

you'd have free marketing

Word of mouth is massively hard to do at scale. Most of the time anything you think is grass-roots you'll find is part of some big, usually expensive, social media push, especially if you're introduced to it on any platform like say... Reddit.

It's definitely possible, but harder and more rare. We know it from performance: all of the better performing ones are always less popular. Word of mouth didn't win out. Ads and paid social media chatter did.

2

u/lumiosengineering Sep 11 '26

If the app is priced reasonably and not for max profit, all you need to cover is sever costs and salary for a 2-3 engineers. Success measured by folks finding relationship, which means turnover. Most companies simply predatory and just want your money.

1

u/MrTastix Sep 11 '26

The problem with this isn't just that it relies on constant marketing to push growth through an everchanging demographic, but that these companies aren't happy with the stable profits that might entail.

All these companies want an ever-increasing YOY gain, however unsustainable that is, which you aren't gonna get if you're just rotating old users with new ones but keeping the monthly active accounts the same.

It's the standard corporate greed infesting every company. They won't be happy with consistent gains, they need to make more and more and more.

86

u/HeKis4 Sep 11 '26

you lose customers all the time

Nope, you lose concurrent users, your customers are the ad companies. It doesn't work when your model is based on drip feeding ads to current users, but it'd work if you made a paid app, in fact in a paid app you'd want to be as good as possible so that your customers leave the platform as soon as possible to reduce costs.

12

u/StrangeWill Sep 11 '26

Assuming that app was a one time fee vs subscription.

Which a lot of dating apps have moved to various forms of exactly that, where an individual is more income the longer they stay around.

62

u/lightningbadger Sep 11 '26

Eh, there's always going to be people looking for someone, they were simply too short sighted to build up the reputation needed for the required trust the user base needs in such a topic

6

u/Miserygut Sep 11 '26

Number must go up each quarter forever. The system doesn't allow a long steady profit.

2

u/StrangeWill Sep 11 '26

Eh, there's always going to be people looking for someone,

Right, but it takes time, money, and effort to get your app in front of those someones, and those that are churning through customers have a harder time getting their app in front of those that are looking.

It's not that you're going to run out of customers, it's that you are fighting for ad space for the dickbag who is doing a bad job and he has more money to spend than you on ads because he's doing a bad job.

It's an annoying cobra effect to the whole system and because of the structure of that I'm not sure it's easy to fix.

1

u/Tomacxo Sep 11 '26

Yeah. It's like saying the dentist puts themself out of business. It's like "yeah sorta", but things happen. If you have a good reputation, a good experience, if you need their service again you know where to go.

1

u/lightningbadger Sep 11 '26

Pretty good analogy tbh

Would be insane for a dentist to keep leading people on with a promise of working teeth lol

9

u/whytheforest Sep 11 '26

This is only a problem due to the insane "endless growth" mindset - you can have a stable business and be profitable and gasp NOT need to constantly post profits. Fuck the stock market, keep it private, keep salaries reasonable, focus on a good experience. That's absolutely doable.

2

u/StrangeWill Sep 11 '26

I mean you can -- don't sell stock, don't get a board. Many companies do this, but those A types do like to eventually sell out.

I don't get it, I like what I build and do, stable and keeping my employees employed is good enough for me, but the big boys playing hard and fast with other people's capital can do more with that. We're slower and take time. 

So I get why it's hard

1

u/fjaoaoaoao Sep 11 '26

Harder when there is more and more competition.

1

u/Silient_Qiller Sep 11 '26

What more competition? They’re all being bought by one big company

3

u/a_shootin_star Sep 11 '26

Not everything should be a business, but everyone needs to make money. The paradigm is real.

2

u/shmere4 Sep 11 '26

“And love is, bein' the owner of a company that makes rape whistles and even though you started the company with good intentions trying to reduce the rate of rape, now you don't wanna reduce it at all cuz if the rape rate declines you'll see an equal decline in whistle sales.

Without rapists, who's gonna buy your whistles?”

Bo Burnham

1

u/Silient_Qiller Sep 11 '26

This just sounds like a cop out to be a terrible person. If your business was able to directly decline rape, that’s a business opportunity there. People would want to know the business model that had such a profound effect. Business would likely hire you (with a high salary) just to help out. Or better yet you could shift the business into having a profound effect on some other important issue.

2

u/clinteraction Sep 11 '26

What if an OKCupid-quality service (it seems most people claim OKC was genuinely effective) was heavily subsidized? Governments have an increasingly large interest in people making babies and raising families. I certainly wouldn’t mind some of my tax dollars going towards helping people make genuine connection; seems to have a lot of positive knock-on effects for a society.

1

u/GraveRoller Sep 11 '26

Frankly that’s the only way a dating app could work with minimal outside incentive to fuck around with it. 

2

u/MetaCognitio Sep 11 '26

If your dating app is great you both lose and gain customers all the time. People age in to dating and return to dating after a breakup. The word of mouth that “I met my gf/bf/husband/wife” would organically pull people to the apps.

Instead these companies got so greedy they broke the apps to try and extract as much money possible as they could. Now people don’t recommend the apps, they warn against them and have developed extreme cynicism about them.

2

u/ADHDebackle Sep 11 '26

If your dating app is great, you lose customers all the time!

Single people aren't a non-renewable resource. They're constantly popping up. People age into the dating pool, people break up, people date serially, etc. If your dating app is great, it will get recommended more and people will go back to it if they are ever looking to make connections again.

It's also possible to do things other than just matching people for dates. You can have a whole social media network with a great dating aspect. People come for the dating but stay for friends.

I think the main issue is just establishing a user base and keeping it without using all the addictive psychology stuff. I think, given enough time, users wise up to that stuff though.

3

u/mehow89 Sep 11 '26

It should be created by government. Somebody had this idea in Poland. Sound funny , but man it would be so good for happiness of society and birthrate etc. People are lazy shy, don’t go out but dating apps are trash

1

u/StrangeWill Sep 11 '26

I dream of the government's process for getting software built to be any sort of competent enough to be worth it.

I wouldn't hold my breath

1

u/Jinxzy Sep 11 '26

I've been echoing this for over a decade. State-funded dating app is literally the only way for a functional dating app.

And it should be in their interest anyway, every western country is crying about falling birthrates.

1

u/Abedeus Sep 11 '26

If your dating app is great, you lose customers all the time! Which I mean if you want to build good solutions for people, awesome. But it still costs money, time, etc. to get your app in front of everybody. It's hard and constant work because if your dating app rules your churn rate is like 100%.

On the other hand, losing customers means less load on the servers, fewer people logging in and so on.

2

u/OneLonelyBrainCell Sep 11 '26

Also less revenue and less growth, and your platform won't be as attractive because there are fewer people using it. This leads to less revenue and less growth...

1

u/ash_ninetyone Sep 11 '26

I'd argue if your dating app is great, you'd pull customers in from other dating apps, or find demand from other people who's struggled to find love and hasn't tried it yet

1

u/silverionmox Sep 11 '26

If your dating app is great, you lose customers all the time!

But you gain walking advertising too whenever they tell people where they met.

1

u/rusty-turbine Sep 11 '26

Love, sure. But… what about the shareholders?

1

u/chilluvatar Sep 11 '26

The solution, i think, should be a government funded dating app with privacy guarantees (the cynic in me can't believe this could possibly work but here's hoping) and without all this gamification/paywalling bullshit they have added. Just an apps that matches good candidates between them and reverses the decline in population natality rates that we are experiencing.

1

u/AgentOrange96 Sep 11 '26

Exactly this, at least for paying users. What I hypothesize is that free users, especially those using ad block, may actually do better on these platforms since they actually cost these companies money and they'd have a financial incentive to shed these users. IDK that this is the case, but I suspect it is just from this logic.

1

u/Largeitude Sep 11 '26

All they need to do is throw some advertisements on their apps and they’ll have a steady stream of revenue.

The apps were still profitable before they monetized everything. So it’s not about revenue. It’s about increasing revenue from the previous years. Which they don’t have to do.

If they just did something like, have you watch an add, and you can see 3 profiles that like you. Or watch an add and get more swipes. They’d get more revenue without having to lock people out.

1

u/VictorReal_Monster Sep 11 '26

Also if you create matches with your app, and those people have children, arent those parents going to recommend that?

1

u/seste Sep 11 '26

Has that ever been a problem for dating apps though? Have they ever been *so good that they kept losing customers?

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

1

u/SrPicadillo2 Sep 11 '26

What about a free open source p2p option? The only tricky thing would be moderation, but, maybe running a smallish ML or LLM locally, or giving the option to plug in a custom moderation module to filter out junk and bots?

1

u/nankerjphelge Sep 11 '26

Sounds like a great opportunity for someone to create an open source dating app that has no skin in the game in terms of needing to constantly manufacture revenues and profits.

1

u/midwestcsstudent Sep 11 '26

They make billions of dollars in revenue, I think they can strike a balance. Not that weird a spot to be in.

1

u/panic_ye_not Sep 11 '26

Hinge's slogan was (and still might be) "the dating app designed to be deleted." 

I think when it first came out, that might have been true. Now I'm not so sure. 

1

u/DethBatcountry Sep 11 '26

Perhaps this isn't something that's compatible with capitalism. Like education, public transit, public utilities, communication, military and government, conservation, infrastructure, etc...

More and more, it seems like any form of social media just gets more and more problematic, the more capital is involved.

1

u/AbeRego Sep 11 '26

They're tailor made for the swinger community, but that's a small sunset of the population.

1

u/mormagils Sep 11 '26

That's silly. Almost every industry involves selling products that immediately fulfill your needs. Appliance companies aren't in an awkward position because buying a stove means you don't need a stove any more.

Dating apps have just fundamentally misunderstood their market. If they were content to sell a genuine match then they could actually have given and been an useful long term resource for people. Relationships end. Non monogamy is gaining popularity. Cheating happens. The idea that "if it works, that customer is gone forever" is absolute bullshit.

There are people who have only ever met people online that are now looking for their second marriage. They aren't doing it online any more because now the apps don't actually work. They used to work. But now they don't.

1

u/TonyzTone Sep 11 '26

I disagree with that.

Dating is a constant thing. People are born and age into adulthood every single day. To say nothing of existing relationships that end for hundreds of reasons.

If anything, dating is something like food that has an indefinite demand. No restaurant says “let’s not make our food too good otherwise the customer won’t come back.”

Instead, most restaurants understand that a happy customer will likely bring other happy customers in and when the customer themselves get hungry again, will likely choose the restaurant as an option.

The problem is that the dating app industry grew up in Web 2.0 era where it was no longer about delivering an actual product and was just about harvesting data. So, they don’t want you to leave because the more time you spend on the app, the more valuable you become.

Unlike a restaurant that wants to deliver good food and service and quickly turn the table over, the apps want you on the app 24/7 for 30 years if possible.

1

u/Big_Dumb_Asshole Sep 11 '26

So its economics are like that of the healthcare market, an inelastic demand. And like healthcare, it should be run by communities or the government because its positive outcomes create a loss of revenue, not a profit.

1

u/Executioneer Sep 11 '26

And that is why it needs to go non-profit, preferably gov sponsored. ID req upon reg to filter out bots too.

1

u/grio Sep 11 '26

You also gain new customers all the time. Relationships in western society don't last very long on average, so there is a settling point where new customers replace lost customers at steady rate. Business wouldn't max out on profits, but would thrive for a long time

Current apps go for relationship sabotage and overmonetization to maximize short term profits at the cost of longterm survival. That has run its course and these apps will likely become more and more diminished over time. It's not a good business plan, but it's a good cashgrab trick.

1

u/Moftem Sep 11 '26

I think the answer is to get back to the basics : )

1

u/HandsomePaddyRedux Sep 11 '26

It’s a matter of thinking like a business that expects ongoing customers but provides a service that should cause customers to come and go if the service works. Most businesses are based on actually fulfilling a need, at least in the short term. If I buy a vacuum, the manufacturer and store doesn’t make it not work so I have to keep buying them because I obviously won’t do that once I realize they make shitty vacuums. I’m also probably not going to pay a monthly fee for a vacuum membership to replace my vacuum every time it breaks because I know I may not even need that membership every month, and if I do need it every month then obviously the vacuums still suck.

My point is using a subscription model for a service that ideally offers no longer needing the service isn’t a good business model and nets less customers than if they just sold the service one time as a product. Maintenance of the service isn’t an argument for needing to use a subscription model since video games and software also need ongoing maintenance but sell the product once. How does that work? Because if the game or software is good it becomes ubiquitous and your user base is continually fed by new users, which exist for dating apps just as much as they do for video games and software. Hell, Fortnite hasn’t charged users anything for the game itself for years and they’ve been getting continual user numbers up while needing constant maintenance.

Sure Fortnite doesn’t sell itself as a game you just need to play for a little while and then never need again, and you can’t exactly sell cosmetics for a dating app, but you can charge one time for access to the app (which would also eliminate bots) and still have ads and perks that are attractive to users without making the base service “pay to win” so to speak. Can you imagine how much money a dating app could make by having a “Casual Encounters” section that women have access to for free but men have to pay extra for?

1

u/LeonidasSpacemanMD Sep 12 '26

It also feels like this specific industry isn’t quite like social media where a platform gains a foothold and just becomes the default app for that niche

It feels like a dating app gets popular, then gets flooded with too many users and bots and scams etc, its reputation tanks, and people try a new one that gets traction and the same happens

1

u/blueche Sep 12 '26

Maybe dating apps should be run by non profits. I'm half serious

0

u/SillyAlternative420 Sep 11 '26

I think we should build an open source application.

The concept should not be owned a by a company and with AI, it's accessible for all.

Obviously data and security are a concern, not sure how that works in the equation

0

u/No-Problem-4228 Sep 11 '26

That's pretty reductive. You could use the same logic to say that doctors shouldn't want to treat you, because if they do, then they lose a patient.

0

u/Redtube_Guy Sep 11 '26

The dating pool is infinite. You are making it sound like the dating apps have a finite amount of people when that’s not the case. Sure people will find love and eventually stop using it. But you’ll also have people who can’t find permanent love or who just got broken up. Or young people growing old enough to use the app.

0

u/happytree23 Sep 11 '26

whooooooooooooooooooooooooooooosh

This person has consumed way too much adspeak.