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Why we’ve fallen out of love with dating apps
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this post was submitted on 15 May 2025
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Technology
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I met both my ex-wives on OkCupid ... in 2004. Of course, I had no idea I met my second wife before getting serious with the first.
I put scores of hours in answering match questions, and the whole experience was, dare I say, fun. Longform profiles with candid photos and the ability to see how answers differed so you could get the dealbreakers out of the way before wasting any time messaging.
Oh, and it was completely free.
I tried a few apps after getting separated in 2016, but the experience was truly a nightmare. I'm not a terrible-looking guy, but my looks are not what has ever drawn anyone to me, it's how I comport myself. This is completely useless on these apps. It felt like high school popularity contests, which I was happy enough to escape the first time, except that to participate in any meaningful way, you have to pay.
I did find one use for them, and that was getting drunk with my girlfriend (who I met at work) and mocking profiles.
Yet another example of a feature dumbed down for seemingly no reason... In another comment I mentioned removing features, and this one mentioned here used to have a section for you to elaborate on your response... They removed it just a few years ago for god knows what reason, making that questions section worse...
"Do pets have souls: yes/no"
...well normally I'd say "no" and then elaborate with "because I don't believe in souls, I don't think anyone has a soul. We have personalities and I believe animals have them too."
Now I just look like some heartless psycho "no, animals don't have souls."
They also took away the ability to specify your answer separately from the answer you were looking for from others, so now it's just "did you say the same thing." Which doesn't make any sense for some questions, like "do you prefer a partner that is a) taller than you, b) shorter than you, c) doesn't matter", if you both picked A or B, you aren't a match for this question!
The quality of questions fell off a cliff well before Match Group came in and really enshittified the whole affair. I soured on continuing to answer questions once the new ones were almost exclusively false dichotomies.