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Comment by chongli | Hacker News Reader

The story is about how Tinder and Bumble are in decline. The superficial model isn’t working anymore.

I think the issues are much more fundamental than you suggest. They’re societal and they’re subcultural within the apps. For one, people are much pickier now than they’ve ever been. On the other hand, the dating apps have this filtration problem: those who successfully form a relationship quit the app, possibly for life.

Unfortunately, it’s not random when people form successful relationships. Some people are just much better at it than others. This is where the filtration problem arises: over time, the concentration of people who aren’t good at forming relationships increases, as these are the folks who stay in the apps the longest. This makes it harder and harder to find a relationship through the apps, and frustration ensues.

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The filtration problem isn't app specific, that's life. For example, looking for partners at 40 is very difficult, and the population of singles has been very filtered.

With respect to the apps, you have to realize the filtering problem comes to a steady state, where new "dateables" in equals "datables" out. This isn't necessarily a problem

The time constant can be quite long, some people are on these things for months or years. It takes time to equilibrate.

I think the time constant might be larger than the lifetime of any of the dating apps so far.

Unless the "undateable" person gives up and accepts staying single forever, they may stay on the platform for a decade or more. Maybe with decreasing activity/time investment, but still an active user eligible for matching. That's longer than I'd expect a dating platform (or any random software startup in general) to thrive.

A lot of these profiles stay on the site and appear active when the user has moved on. That’s good for the company but bad for actual people looking for matches

> A lot of these profiles stay on the site and appear active when the user has moved on. That’s good for the company but bad for actual people looking for matches

It would seem that the obviously good solution to this is to hide profiles if the user hasn't been active in a certain time period. Say, 30 days?

Of course, that's not good for the company metrics. They have to inflate their numbers somehow, and so including accounts that aren't being used anymore in their subscriber count makes them look good!

Yeah they have no incentive to do that and actually have incentive to fake activity

I imagine there’s a relationship between this accumulation of singles and population growth rates. It would be interesting to compare the demographic flows of online dating in countries with aging populations vs populations that are trending younger over time.

    The story is about how Tinder and Bumble are in decline.

Yes, and they are probably being replaced with DMs in Instagram. I like to call Instagram the world's largest dating app.

Totally agree. An idealized journal of one's life over time on Instagram is way more interesting and revealing than any dating app could ever be.

Maybe for some people. Personally I don’t find it very interesting. From the people I know on Instagram, the pictures they take and the stories they write are extremely curated and artificial.

It’s like deciding to date a famous actress based on a character she played in a movie. She may look like the character but personality and interest-wise she’s unlikely to be anything even remotely resembling the character!

This really takes the artificiality of the dating profile and explodes it to an incredible degree. I’d much rather meet someone through a common interest and start dating organically. That’s basically what the article is saying is coming back.

    Maybe for some people.

I would say 95% of people.

Rather I would say that Tinder is not hip any more, so the "normies" are out and the usual suspects of dating sites linger.

I've heard tinder users say they are picky because swiping yes on too many reduces your visibility (or something like that). That seems like a bad incentive to make people take chances on each other.

>Tinder and Bumble are in decline

do we actually have any evidence this is true? people have complained about dating since we were neanderthals; articles like this have written themselves for the past decade

Match Group embraced, enshittified, and extinguished the entire online dating industry.

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