Are dating apps a waste of time

Over the last couple of years, dating app companies like Match Group and Bumble have learned that, like love, their business is a battlefield. Their stock prices are on the rocks. Their investors are heartbroken. Theyre getting ghosted by users and failing to woo Generation Z. Its no wonder why the CEOs of both companies have recently resigned.

Lost love in the crowded dating app market is nothing new. One moment a dating app might be hot and heavy with consumers, but the next theyre getting dumped. Match Group has tried to overcome this problem by incubating new dating apps and, more aggressively, acquiring rival ones. Originally just associated with the dating site Match.com, Match Group now oversees a sprawling dating empire of at least 45 dating apps, including Tinder, OkCupid, Hinge and The League.

The share of couples meeting on apps has remained pretty consistent in the years since his 2017 study, Rosenfeld told me. But these days, the mood around dating apps has soured. As the apps seek to woo a new generation of daters, TikTok abounds with complaints about how hard it is to find a date on Tinder, Hinge, Bumble, Grindr, and all the rest. The novelty of swiping has worn off, and there hasnt been a major innovation beyond it. As they push more paid features, the platforms themselves are facing rocky finances and stalling growth. Dating apps once looked like the foundation of American romance. Now the cracks are starting to show.

Last month, TikTok user bianca (infinitebs), who calls herself an amateur sociologist silly goose on her profile, released a viral TikTok video in which she argues that, basically, Hinge is the latest dating app to inevitably fall victim to the core contradiction between its missions of matchmaking and moneymaking.

Of all the dating apps, Hinge a Match Group property that has grown increasingly popular in recent years is perhaps the most illustrative of the dating app paradox. Hinge markets itself as the dating app designed to be deleted. How many other companies market themselves this way? Hinge is literally touting success as constantly losing customers. Their social and business missions are in a messy relationship, to say the least.

Hinge, like many other dating apps, has a freemium business model, which means you can sign up and use the basic app for free, but extras like a higher-visibility profile or the ability to message people who have not shown interest in you cost money.

In part, what has changed is the world around the apps, Rosenfeld said. The massive disruptions of the pandemic meant that young people missed out on a key period to flirt and date, and theyre still suffering from that, he told me. Compared with previous generations, young people today also have a greater comfort with singleness, Kathryn Coduto, a professor of media science at Boston University, told me. But if the apps feel different lately, its because they are different. People got used to swiping their hearts out for free. Now the apps are further turning to subscriptions and other paid features.

Modern dating can be severed into two eras: before the swipe, and after. When Tinder and other dating apps took off in the early 2010s, they unleashed a way to more easily access potential love interests than ever before. By 2017, about five years after Tinder introduced the swipe, more than a quarter of different-sex couples were meeting on apps and dating websites, according to a study led by the Stanford sociologist Michael Rosenfeld. Suddenly, saying We met on Hinge was as normal as saying We met in college or We met through a friend.The share of couples meeting on apps has remained pretty consistent in the years since his 2017 study, Rosenfeld told me. But these days, the mood around dating apps has soured. As the apps seek to woo a new generation of daters, TikTok abounds with complaints about how hard it is to find a date on Tinder, Hinge, Bumble, Grindr, and all the rest. The novelty of swiping has worn off, and there hasnt been a major innovation beyond it. As they push more paid features, the platforms themselves are facing rocky finances and stalling growth. Dating apps once looked like the foundation of American romance. Now the cracks are starting to show.In 2022, a Pew Research Center survey found that about half of people have a positive experience with online dating, down from October 2019. With little success on the apps, a small but enthusiastic slice of singles are reaching for speed dating and matchmakers. Even the big dating apps seem aware that they are facing a crisis of public enthusiasm. A spokesperson for Hinge told me that Gen Z is its fastest-growing user segment, though the CEO of Match Group, the parent company of Tinder and Hinge, has gone on the defensive. Last week, he published an op-ed headlined Dating Apps Are the Best Place to Find Love, No Matter What You See on TikTok. A spokesperson for Bumble told me that the company is actively looking at how we can make dating fun again.In part, what has changed is the world around the apps, Rosenfeld said. The massive disruptions of the pandemic meant that young people missed out on a key period to flirt and date, and theyre still suffering from that, he told me. Compared with previous generations, young people today also have a greater comfort with singleness, Kathryn Coduto, a professor of media science at Boston University, told me. But if the apps feel different lately, its because they are different. People got used to swiping their hearts out for free. Now the apps are further turning to subscriptions and other paid features.Tinder, for example, launched a 499-a-month premium subscription in December. On Hinge, you can signal special interest in someones profile by sending them a rose, which then puts you at the top of their feed. Everyone gets one free rose a week, but you can pay for more. Hinge users have accused the app of gatekeeping attractive people in rose jail, but a spokesperson for the app defended the feature: Hinges top goal is to help people go on dates, she said, claiming that roses are twice as likely to lead to one.Its the same process that has afflicted Google, Amazon, Uber, and so many other platforms in recent years: First, an app achieves scale by providing a service lots of people want to use, and then it does whatever is needed to make money off you. This has worked for some companiesafter 15 years, Uber is finally profitablebut monetization is especially tricky for dating apps. No matter how much you fork over, apps cant guarantee that you will meet the love of your lifeor even have a great first date. With dating apps, youre basically paying for a chance, Coduto told me. Paying for a dating-app subscription can feel like entering a lottery: exciting but potentially a waste of money (with an added dose of worry that you look desperate). And there has always been a paradox at the core of the apps: They promise to help you meet people, but they make money if you keep swiping.Over the past few years, the big dating companies have faltered as businesses. Tinder saw its paid users fall by nearly 10 percent in 2023, and the big apps have been beset by layoffs and leadership changes. Bumble and Match Group have seen their stock prices plummet as investors grow frustrated. Perhaps the biggest problem that the apps might face is not that people are abandoning them en massethey arentbut that even a small dip could prove detrimental. The current big apps edge relies on lots of people using them. Apps such as Tinder and Grindr have an enormous network advantage over newcomers, Rosenfeld said, for the same reasons Facebook does: Its not that theyre amazing; its that theyre giant. If you want to meet other single people, the apps are where other single people are.So far, the big apps efforts to avoid this doom loop have involved the same basic feature that has been around since the beginning: swiping. Were essentially at a tipping point for at least this version of the technology, Coduto said. Like so many other industries, dating apps swear they have the answer: AI. George Arison, the CEO of Grindr, told me that the app plans to use AI (with users permission) to suggest chat topics and power an AI wingman feature, and to scan for spam and illegal activity. Hinges CEO has suggested that AI will help the app coach users and enable people to find matches, and a product leader at Tinder said last month that the app has used AI to power safety features, adding that the technology can help users select their profile photos.But AI also holds the potential to unleash chaos on the apps: Bot-written messages and bot-written profiles dont exactly sound like a recipe for finding love. For Gen Z, the future may hold a grab bag of sliding into DMs, reluctant swiping, and generally doing what humans have always doneseek companionship and love through any means they can muster. With all the time spent online now, people are finding love on Strava, Discord, and Snapchat, among many other sites. In a sense, any app can be a dating app.Traditional dating apps might be most useful not to young people but to those middle-aged and older, with money to spare. They are more likely to be part of thin dating markets, or segments of the population where the number of eligible partners is relatively small, Reuben Thomas, a professor at the University of New Mexico, told me. Online dating is really useful for people who dont have that rich dating environment in their offline lives, Thomas said.In this way, the future of dating apps may look more like their past: a place for older daters to go after exhausting other options. In the 2000s, the heyday of OkCupid, eHarmony, and desktop dating, middle-aged people were the power users, Thomas said. Millennials had their fun on Tinder in the 2010s; many found lasting relationships. But as a top choice for young people looking for love, dating apps may have been a blip.