People say this, but I don't think it actually plays out like this.
People like and use the app if they get matches.
I'm not convinced there's an appreciably good way for the app to give you matches and keep you single.
People like and use the app if they get matches.
I'm not convinced there's an appreciably good way for the app to give you matches and keep you single.
Maybe I'm mis-attributing survivorship bias to malice. In other words, sure it's profitable for Tinder, but not inherently beneficial to society. Tinder might not actively trying to operate this way, but there is a large population of people that will gravitate towards the dating services that give them that high of variable rewards It's profitable for Tinder and all of it's look-alikes, so they continue to exist in the market.
The issue I take with all of it is the misalignment of incentives in the business model. Regardless of intention, there's an inherent disconnect. If Tinder has someone paying $500 a month, they're going to want to keep those payments coming. How would they do that?
What would it do?
Main thing would be changing the matching algo. Tinder seems to want to show "hot singles near you." I kinda reverse-engineered it (at least the 2018 version), and it seems to just score each user based on swipe:match ratio and total number of matches then show you the highest scoring users matching your gender/distance/age filters. It doesn't try to figure out who you'd be compatible with or anything like that. Exploiting a glitch, I managed to game this and get 500X the matches as normal (as M seeking F), which confirmed my suspicions about the algo.
How do you determine compatibility without onerous onboarding quizzes, not sure. Recommender algo ("people with similar liking patterns also liked this person") would be a starting point. But Tinder doesn't seem to have even tried this, while Hinge makes some attempt. There are also a few games they could take out, like telling you ~8 people liked you to bait you into swiping more to find them, but it's not a big deal.
To Tinder's credit, they made dating apps massively popular for the first time ever, and just getting a lot of people onto one app brought value even for serious dating. It was basically the only app in town from 2014-2018. Copycats were spawned, some of which were simply branded more for serious dating, and I met my now-wife on one of them.
I will say as someone who's extensively tested this though, Tinder doesn't seem to put effort into determining the compatibility between you and the recommendations. Their goal is something else, not sinister but not optimal either.