At a typical party you have a finite number of people to interact with. So you might as well work with who's available.
Online, the number of people available to us is practically infinite so we can afford to discriminate.
It’s entirely possible to encourage positive social behavior with technology.
Users could just move to another platform without artificial scarcity and... stay there, because there is no scarcity.
I'm not sure that coercing people to settle is positive behavior, but regardless, enforcing artificial scarcity isn't a feasible strategy for a dating app.
You’re equating more choices with better outcomes. I argue that isn’t the case. Unless we’re going to feed every data point we can into a ML black box, and out will come your arranged ideal partnership (there’s even a black mirror episode about this).
Getting to know people sounds more fun, but I’m old shrug
To be fair though, if people could be convinced to buy into the platform with its restrictions, it could make for an interesting experience.
While Tinder profiles are built for speed, with only a few pictures and blurbs, profiles on your platform could have much more detailed biographies, videos, etc...
It would be a more immersive experience.
If done right I think your idea does have potential.
At the very least it discourages the strategy of blindly swiping right as fast as possible and then choosing a mate from the intersection of "those who also swiped right on you" and "people you'd ever consider dating".
The problem is that's not what causes the problem.
What happens is that different people are different levels of desirable and everyone messages the highly desirable ones first. Then those women ignore most of the flood of messages they got, even the ones from other highly desirable people, because they don't have time for so many messages.
So then all the senders, dejected, realize the majority of messages won't get a response and become less selective in who they send them to. So then the second most desirable set of partners get flooded with messages and it repeats on down the line.
Which creates the illusion of choice, because even if you're a "6" you'll get messages from many people, including an "8" or three, but you can't actually have them. They only messaged you because they messaged everybody. So then the 6 wastes their time responding to the 8 instead of the other 6s they actually had a chance with, who then get no responses from other 6s.
If you limited the number of messages then everyone would only message the most desirable partners. So the 10s would still be flooded and not respond and the 6s would go from having too many messages from unavailable senders to having zero messages from anyone.
Some sites do the "user's mailbox is full" thing to try to avoid this, but that doesn't really fix it either. It just accelerates the problem because then the most desirable partners all have full mailboxes, so the second most desirable partners get flooded with messages even sooner.
What you need is some way to match people with the people they actually have a chance with (and who actually have a chance with them). But that's easier said than done.
“At scale” is f*ucking with how humans operate, and not for the better.
It's not that they never do, it's that they on average don't, in either case. The average person will choose an 8 over a 6, and the average 8 will have that choice. And I mean it as an overall rating including things like intelligence and wealth, not just physical appearance. It's not that a 6 can get an 8 because she's interesting, it's that being interesting makes her an 8 too.
So interactions between 6s and 8s (or, especially, 3s and 8s) are much more likely to be a waste of everyone's time than interactions between 6s and 6s, but that's what dating websites cause to be common.