I would not at all be surprised if some or even most dating apps had a team or org in charge of making the platform “good” for users (using some metrics that really do correlate to what we would think of as a desirable experience); and a somewhat disconnected group of people aiming to increase revenue. This is a pretty standard way of trying to align incentives.
It does not take a genius to figure out that to capture value in the long term requires producing some real value for users.
- If you find good matches but not great matches, you stick around.
- If you get frustrated and give up, they lose one customer.
- If you find love and get married, they lose two customers.
Which one will they optimize for?
My writeup: https://caseysoftware.com/blog/working-for-a-dating-website
“I found my wife on FindLove” is one hell of a marketing campaign for *future* sales. It’s not like people never break up, and it’s not like people don’t continually enter the dating market or move or whatever.
Edit: people ask me which app, not which spouse.
I dunno, I have difficulty seeing how the dating sites could singlehandedly pull that off in the average case without the site users really leaning in to help. It would seem to run into the basic reality that men and women historically pick the best match from a fairly small pool of people. A dating sites can't do worse than that even if they're trying. If people are willing to use the same standards as all their ancestors then they'd pair off quickly.
It seems more likely that there is just a natural dead-sea effect because of that where the people on the sites over the long term are not the sort of people you'd settle down with, and there is also this subtle idea that the dating site is there to find someone a perfect match (probably doesn't exist to start with). Those are design issues that go a lot deeper than any algorithm the sites might be using.
In a high concentration of serial daters, no one wants to pair off because there isn't anyone worth pairing off with around.
That seems to be extremely unlikely, people have finite lifespans and are only in the marriage pool for a small fraction of that. More importantly your website could easily be targeted to an even smaller pool say 25-45 and ignoring deaths and divorce your already ~10% turnover per year if you own 100% of the market. Actual numbers depends on what percentage of the pool starts married, becomes a widow etc but their’s plenty of new people to make up for any couples. Further, happily married couples are great advertising.
Imagine if you can advertise that 50% of the matches on your app leads to marriage.
We were interviewed as a success story and our faces are plastered on the Internet now. My friends didn't find the same success, I concluded that they didn't know how to date. (wear the right clothes, etiquettes, conversation, navigate ghosting, etc.)
"What if the app could teach you how to do just that?" That's what I asked in our interview. That part was never published.
To keep people hooked while making them feel that the app is working, even though they are not getting their end result.
It if course true that the incentives on the platform are to prevent permanent relationships. But can they really tell "these two would make a very good match so let's keep them apart, this match here is at best adequate, let's do this one instead"? My gut feeling would be that they cannot tell.
But then of course the whole design of the platform prevents deep connection. About 70-80% of the information is encoded in a photo that is not even guaranteed to be realistic. And the point of the platform is to be a rich marketplace where you keep trying. That's the USP before you get into any further design choices.
Platforms like Harmony Online existed for a long time and IIUC they were optimising for long term matches, and for whatever reason they were not as popular as eg Tinder.
diego_moita•1h ago
> Dating apps don't sell love. They sell the feeling that it is one premium upgrade away. The platforms aren't primarily designed for users to find love and promptly delete the apps from their phones. They're designed to keep users swiping.
So they're not very different from porn and Facebook, right? They sell an illusion of the real thing that isn't fullfilling but is addicting.
IncreasePosts•1h ago