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Comment by exitb | Hacker News Reader

Do you have any sources for that? The biggest change that happened in online dating in recent years is that it's been normalized, no longer seen as weird. That surely has something to do with the success its users had and is obviously very profitable for the companies running these services.

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Think about it, what if Tinder’s algorithm somehow matched everyone directly with their soulmates. How many of those users would be on the app the next day? How many of those would continue paying for the app? Providing this sort of service for free is just bad business sense. A more profitable approach is to hold the best matches out on the user and to promise that if they pay, their odds of finding their soulmate increase. As long as Tinder is a for-profit company accountable to shareholders it will never be in its best interest to provide the best possible matchmaking

That's not a good strategy either if users notice you're doing it, because they just won't use the app. There's better ones:

- attract new users; there's new 20 year olds every day.

- move into related niches, like finding friends, where it actually is fine to keep using the app after you meet someone. (Or polycules.)

- move into cheating, mistresses etc, where people will secretly keep using it and not tell anyone.

I think IAC/Match does try the evil way, but that only works as long as you can keep buying out new dating apps. It's not like there's a moat.

> That's not a good strategy either if users notice you're doing it, because they just won't use the app.

Users can be informed about all kinds of user-hostile behavior by dating sites/apps and still use them. Turns out companies don't go out of business because of screwing over their customers. Companies have been caught knowingly poisoning their customers and still they've stayed in business and are profitable.

Companies often put on a good show in their twitter feed but they don't actually fear customer backlash. If doing something evil is going to make a company money they will do it. We'll bitch about it on social media until we get distracted by something else, but we'll continue to accept their abuses over and over again. We'll even keep paying the company that did it to us.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/08...

https://money.com/match-com-is-being-sued-for-using-fake-pro...

https://www.denverpost.com/2021/10/21/denver-dating-co-lawsu...

https://theblogofdimi.com/meet-guy-behind-dating-sites-fake-...

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/scammers-a...

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/dating-apps-bots-and-fake-profi...

https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2013/11/10/ashley_madiso...

You are assuming people use Tinder to find a life partner. A large proportion use it to find a short to medium term companion, and if they do that successfully will return.

Worth noting too that Bumble offers a lifetime subscription rather than yearly. There doesn't seem to be a misalignment of incentives there.

You could apply the same logic to any long term purchase. Dealerships only sell lemons because they want you to come back and buy more cars. Recruiters only match you with companies that you'll definitely want to leave because they want to match you again. Realtors only show you houses you'll hate because then you'll want to move again.

I worked at an online dating company. Matching people is fucking hard. It's hard enough predicting who will message who, much less who will actually date who. There's far more money in matching them well than stringing them along; if you had even a 10% success rate, you could get away with charging a silly amount of money.

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