No matter what you use, it seems they always fail and no one is interested.
Even a free app like duolicious has this problem.
You must log in or register to comment.
Well, sorta. As someone else pointed out the economic incentives for most dating app owners are diametrically opposed to the needs of the users. There is also a huge consolation in the market with the majority of the apps by user count being owned by a single company which leads to enshittification.
There are a few exceptions but they very much aren’t for everyone.
OKCupid from 20 years ago was great before it sold out. But it’s only accessible to time travelers.
Next are the more event based or hookup apps which tend to cater to kinksters, swingers, poly, and queer folk. I’m thinking of things like FetLife, Grinder and Plura. They work well for their audience since those communities tend to have events that people will keep coming back for even if they have successfully found someone on the app. In fact success finding someone might make them more likely to keep on the app and bring in their friends.
But for monogamous straight people? Dating apps are a hellscape.
No, they used to be more or less good - they all had slightly different vibes instead of being the exact same thing with different fonts. Okcupid used to publish a lot of fun data and was kind of a middle ground, Match was known for being for more “serious” daters, and plenty of fish tended to be a little trashier - not that there wasn’t plenty of overlap, that was just kind of the reputations they had. You could pay for things but you could also do just fine with free accounts, and the ads focused on how many people had had success with them.
Now they’re all owned by the same company and it shows, and they’ve decided dumbing the experience down to the most superficial stuff and letting bots and people advertising OF or their MLMs take over is fine. I don’t think any of them are worth the time they take to download at this point.
I remember 10+ years ago using okcupid. It was alright.
Best dating site ever? Myspace.
See the thing about dating sites is the women are guarded, and protective of what they say and do because they’re afraid of any little thing they say being judged as then being slutty.
But on myspace, I would introduce myself by sending a new message, to someone I never talked to before and the message would say “Hi, I’m Rob. Can I put it in your butt?”
And then they’d see my pics, and realize my entire existance is a joke. And they’d reply “Well obviously! When are we getting drinks?”. Her joking obviously, because who would agree to something like that so fast?
And then we WOULD get drinks. And I WOULD put it in her butt…eventually.
But on Tinder, it requires the women to swipe right to create a match. And in their mind, it means they’re actively agreeing to sex in that moment. And that little butterfly effect moment breaks the chain.
They never have that joking intro. They never meet for drinks. They never start dating. They never get vunerable about their biggest fears. They never come home to their house full of bees as clowns wrap their arms around them and drag them into the bees nests. They never get stripped down and have honey lathered all over their naked body. They never have you come in with a chainsaw, decapitate a few dozen clowns, and run with her out of a bee filled house just moments before it explodes, and ride away on a motorcycle as you flee the chasing yakuza, despite being in Ohio. She never feels the adrenaline rush of speeding up a ramp on the motorcycle, and hopping over the tracks of a speeding train, thus stopping the yakuza. Then later at your place, you’re like “oh, sorry, the water is broken. Some house exploded and the whole citys water is shut off now. Which means I can’t serve you a cold glass of water. Just some wine. Like…a LOT of wine. You wanna drink 46 bottles of wine? Also, you can’t take a shower to wash off that honey. I’ll have to lick it off. But you better hurry. There’s fire ants outside, and they sting.”
And after 2 hours of drinking, and licking, she’s now in the mood, and now you’re putting it in her butt, and she’s loving it. Her reservations she previously had about anal were totally false.
And thats what she’s worried about happening if she swipes right. So she swipes left instead. So now YOU are spending Saturday night masturbating with a bottle of honey…
Wtf did I just read? You are a funny person!
Welcome to the internet, hold on to your socks
'Cause a random guy just kindly sent you photos of his cock
They are grainy and off-putting, he just sent you more
Don’t act surprised, you know you like it, you whore
Could I interest you in everything all of the time?
A bit of everything, all of the time
Apathy’s a tragedy and boredom is a crime
Anything and everything, all of the time
deleted by creator
I think there was a time fairly early on when at least one was built to do the job it was advertised to.
I think more than half of Lemmy’s members were born after that though.
They were “decent” 14 ish years ago. And they worked a fair amount. I know married friends who met on them.
That said the Internet in general has fallen off a cliff with enshitification…
I know people today that still use them and do ok.
“Free” anything is going to be complete shit.
Like anything else in life it takes work, during 8 months I was doing it I spent 10-15 hours on it. And that wasn’t “scrolling” profiles. I was constantly tweaking my profile, looking for was to improve it. Also when I did “match” someone I worked on my greetings, interesting things to say, etc.
I would even keep snippets of texts. (The one I was on had a question/answer part.
Dating is a lot of work for many people.
I married someone I met on one of those sites. But that was years ago.
Now that one company owns most of them, they’re a lot less effective, as eHarmony basically gutted the interesting features of their competitors and let them/encouraged them to become bot infested OF pitch platforms.
They work. I don’t know why people like to perpetuate that dating apps make suboptimal matches. Dating apps match people up on some basic metrics. It’s up to the people to form connections. They dont have a magic ability to keep people from long term relationships.
If anything people might be more picky or idealistic because dating apps exist, so they’ll likely not commit because of their high standards or FOMO. But that’s more of a society issue not the dating apps themselves.
Idk what to tell you. Are you following rules 1 and 2 of online dating cause while I haven’t settled down with a woman yet, I’ve met multiple gfs through tinder and bumble. Some lasted years
I think they are worse now than they used to be, but they do work for some people. I was always suspicious of the PII gathered so I stayed away from them. Craigslist personals worked back when they existed, and Reddit can work. An important tip: copyedit your SPAG (spelling, punctuation, and grammar) to hell and back before sending a response, since the slightest error WILL hurt your chances.
I mean I don’t date, but I’ve never once heard of a person who met on a dating app and actually got together with them, I have heard of instant message platforms working though.
I met my last long term partner on a dating app, but these days it’s not a route I’d want to take. I met someone on discord more recently in a really wonderful community that allowed me to get to know him and make other friends with none of the same pressure
My current and most of my more recent relationships started from tinder, which has been more or less the “default” at least here in my age group (back then, some 20-30). A few were from Jodel or such in between, but I’ve had most luck with the swipey app. Both poly and mono, depending on the phase I was going through at the time.
I think at least most of my friends have met their partners (most being long term by now, with children and such, like mine too currently) that way. But I live in a relatively small country, so maybe that affects the spread in the apps. When you are just a few million people in total speaking the language, there’s not much sense I suppose to spread thin between several apps.
My partner and I found each other on OkC over 4 years ago. I had been on dating apps for maybe 5-6 years prior, whereas I was basically her first match
The first dating apps designed for straight people always had an unbalanced ration of men and women, which appears to have gotten worse over time. Early on a few people I know did find people, dated, and married. They were mostly people who had niche interests for our area and were successfully connecting with people at least a couple hours away who they never would have met in person.
But that was well over a decade ago and I don’t know of anyone having success since those early years.
I haven’t touched them in 5 years, but Hinge was the best of all of them. The thing is designed to make it as easy as possible to set up a profile packed to the brim with conversation-starting prompts, and then it’s stupid easy to start a conversation with someone else because you can respond to a specific prompt on someone else’s profile.
In my experience, it works really well if you set someone up to ask a question
In my experience, Hinge is still the best, but all of the apps have the same fundamental flaw. Imagine every person in your area who is single is in one big room and you line up to meet each other one at a time. That’s basically how they work. Want to skip meeting people with different political or religious beliefs? No problem! Just pay up (and by the way, it’s not cheap). Also, the filters are critically limited and largely superficial. It’s a slog no matter what.
From what I’ve heard, OkCupid used to work properly as a way to find people who were actually a good match for you, but Match group bought them and stripped all the tools that made it useful. I actually recently saw a great comment about exactly that.
Well, think about it.
They profit off their users by either charging them for a service, selling user data, and/or advertisement. If their dating app was very successful and quickly matched users together, they wouldn’t be using the app very long and the company would lose potential profit.
This probably wasn’t the case in the earlier days of the internet but it certainly is now. They want you hooked and coming back every day so they can get maximum profit off you.
deleted by creator
Matchmaker is an ancient profession.
TRADITION! TRADITION!
deleted by creator
Duolicious only asks for donations and it’s algorithm was interesting, too bad the anti-AFK ideology was never enforced
No, they worked for me between 15-10 years ago, but I get it - by all accounts now they’re so enshittified that it’s just Match parasitically turning loneliness into profit at ever greater efficiency. They would have failed immediately if they didn’t work long enough to capture enough market and attention.
As others mentioned OK Cupid, and it’s a great example. It was originally very good at matching people, and they took pride in it. I remember when Match bought it, as I had recently (just in time) found my person. I was able to see it go from “No, we’re leaving it alone, just tweaking a few things” to ending the interesting data-exploration articles, dumbing down the experience, adding micro-pay-gating, and fully gutting the experience and staff. Nobody should have trusted Match to not destroy what it was, and if they hadn’t sold and remained a useable app, maybe the market would have abandoned Match. Instead, here we are.
I don’t envy those people still looking, I assume best case is still using apps but you just have to waste a lot more time.
