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/dagbrown Sep 11 '26

OKCupid's enshittification took off like a rocket once they were acquired by Match Group.

Match Group's whole business model is failing to match anyone with anyone else, because if they make a successful match, they stop paying for their subscriptions. OKCupid was originally designed to match people as well as possible as quickly as possible, so of course Match Group put a stop to that as soon as possible.

Match Group also owns Tinder, Hinge, Plenty of Fish, The League, Meetic, Azar and assorted others. The ineffectiveness of dating sites is approximately 0% to do with online-dating fatigue and 100% to do with Match Group's greed.

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u/ShouldersofGiants100 Sep 11 '26

Nothing is quite as funny to me as companies that fail to realize their reputation is actually important to their prospects.

If people find partners and leave your app, that's still positive advertising and you'll always have new customers because new people enter the dating pool.

Instead, they went after the whales. But the problem is that by doing so, no one actually succeeds while using your app and worse, a lot of those whales are guys who can't get a date for good reason. This ends up driving more and more women off the site, as a disproportionate number of their matches are creepy weirdos who will never get banned for harassment because they're paying for the app.

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u/pittaxx Sep 12 '26

They don't fail to realise it, they just don't care. They cornered the market and know that when people get sick of one of their products, desperate people will just switch to another of their products.

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u/osiris0413 Sep 11 '26

I last used OkCupid in the pre-smartphone era but I feel like anyone who starts with Tinder wouldn't believe what it was like. Nobody paywalled, and the quizzes meaningfully improved your matches and you could check out someone's profile without having to immediately "yes/no" them. And the act of messaging itself meant you had to show meaningful interest to make a connection, I think that little hit of validation on a "match" vs the choice to message someone when it may not be returned changes the calculus of that action in a meaningful way for both parties. I like that the author called that out in the article.

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u/polakfury Sep 12 '26

how are they still in business if people cant get dates?