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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u/[deleted] Sep 11 '26

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53

u/bitflag Sep 11 '26

OKCupid was amazing and then Match bought them and proceeded to enshitify it and make it a pointless clone of Tinder.

19

u/DrQuestDFA Sep 11 '26

My wife and I met on OKCupid and at the times (early 2010’s) it had really neat data science stuff going for it. From what I gather now all that uniqueness has been sanded down to make the service indistinguishable from any other.

18

u/schorschico Sep 11 '26

I know it sounds like the "I buy Playboy for the articles" but OKC back then had truly interesting data analysis of dating dynamics. Their stuff on race was eye opening. And the site worked really well so even when the dates didn't go anywhere, it was an opportunity to meet awesome people.

1

u/SnipesCC Sep 12 '26

A couple of my close friends are people I met on OKC but didn't end up dating.

4

u/awezumsaws Sep 11 '26

I think the reason the word enshitify was created was to best describe what Match Group did to OKC

2

u/HotSauceRainfall Sep 11 '26

I don’t remember if it was before or after Match bought them, but OKC blew up their own brand with one very terrible horrible no good very bad business decision.

They sent out notification of a policy change saying, “no more anonymous user names, your handle will be your real name.” And women and queer people quit the service in droves, because it was then a physical safety risk and life risk to use it. 

I think that was in late 2016 or early 2017.

3

u/awezumsaws Sep 11 '26

That was Dec 2017, long after Match took over. You can't monetize anonymity. I was on OKC at that time, and I remember the users leaving in droves as well. Every social media platform was flooded for a few weeks about people announcing they were leaving, with good reason. From social awareness to social backwardness.

1

u/HotSauceRainfall Sep 11 '26

Thanks for the timeline.

That was such a catastrophically bad business decision that I expect it’s taught in B schools as an example of what NOT to do.

3

u/capnscratchmyass Sep 11 '26

OkCupid was surprisingly good back in the day. I went on some dates with some good people and also met some insane people on there lol, but it did lead me in a circuitous way to my wife; who I had known and been friends with for a decade.  So that was cool. 

3

u/SlapHappyDude Sep 11 '26

Match bought OKCupid to kill their competition