The commercial incentive Match Group has to prevent churn means the optimal outcome for them is that you never find a partner. And so if you’re outside that top N percentile of popularity, they’ve optimized their apps to abuse you emotionally and financially. They’re engineering the perfect carrot on a stick.
One such behaviour, for example, is that when you buy Tinder Plus, they will feed you a couple matches, but withhold more than they give you. Once the subscription expires, they feed you rest of the “Likes You” people into the page where they’re obscured, forcing you to resubscribe if you want to see them. And of course you will never encounter those people just by swiping, they’re purposefully held from you.
I’ve recently switched to Facebook Dating because they don’t have any commercial incentives (and in fact probably negative incentives) to NOT match you. Thus they can also give you all of the “Premium” features for free.
What Match Group is doing probably isn’t illegal, but I think it probably should be. It’s the same kind of emotional manipulation that casinos are guilty of.