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The great millennial garbage gyre
(slrpnk.net)
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this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2025
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A confounding issue is the apps themselves have gotten worse over time. Like, old okcupid you could search. You could type in like "final fantasy" or "the Mets" and find people who liked those things enough to put them on their profile.
Now you're limited to whatever the app decides to give you. Well, the app doesn't want you to leave so that incentive doesn't line up.
A lot of the more popular ones, okcupid included, all got bought up by Match Group and almost immediately started trending anti-consumer in their updates or removal of features. They want you paying, they don't give a shit about success.
100%. Match group should be broken up.
It's an especially insidious type of monopoly to me because it deals with relationships, they can manipulate millions of people, affecting the creation of their families and kids.
Surprised that the religious right haven't put them in their sites.
Close, they actively fight success. Legally obligated to, even. It’s their fiduciary responsibility to keep you using the app.
That's not really how that works.
I’d love for you to be right. Please elaborate.
“Rather than require specific outcomes–such as achieving maximum share price–fiduciary duties are largely about conduct, process, and motivation”
You don't have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize profit, or anything like that. You have a responsibility to act in accordance to company rules and guidelines, and to act in the company's interest, not your own.
There is no requirement to burn to company down to maximize short-term profits, like some people think. That's usually at the expense of long-term profits anyway, so it could be better for profits to do something better for the customer.
You're only required to act "ethically" and keep the company's interests above your own.
If the company has a goal to make more money every year, then you can justify a lot of actions in that pursuit. And once they have a monopoly you kinda don't have many options, so they can push more.
Saying they have a responsibility to keep you on the app may sound silly, but app user churn is most likely measured and has some goal around it. And if a goal is set around that churn then they very much have an obligation to keep you on there as long as possible.
There's the alternative of trying to obtain more users, or also to retain users by being a better service (although it has to appeal to a different demographic than those trying to leave for this though).
They have a pretty universally bad name now, so obtaining new users only gets harder, and a lot of people leave even without finding a long term match because the service is shit. They can optimize for these factors without burning the place down.
They have no requirement to grow year over year either. That has nothing to do with fiduciary responsibility. It just keeps stock value growing. Prioritizing long term health at the expense of short term gains is perfectly fine a legal.
So capitalism is incompatible with dating apps. Who woulda thunk?
You also had decent profiles where you could write more texts about you. That could give you an idea of who that person is. There is a difference between "Tea or Coffee? - Tea." and "Tea or Coffee? - I like green teas but also some black teas like assam. I sometimes bake scones to eat with the tea." A lit of modern apps don't even give you the option to show your personality more.
OkCupid used to actually work rather well at finding compatible people who were actually honest about what they were looking for.
Then it got bigger, got acquired, and the matching model of the whole industry was intentionally modified to be more monetizable, and to keep giving matches that are close, but not close enough to be truely long term compatible.
You aren't using the app/website anymore if it works and gets you a successful long term match.
You are using the app for a longer time if you keep getting close but just missing the mark.
...
Do people not think their dating app is tracking... how many matches and text exchanges they have?
How much time elapses between you matching, chatting, leaving... and then going back to swiping?
And then multidimensional matrix comparing that to every other definable variable about you?
Including whether or not you say you're looking for something long term, or serious... but you actually keep cycling through people?
These algos, these things... they know exactly to what extent you lie to yourself and others, and they weaponize that to keep people in a sort of optimal (for the app, not you), constant disappointment loop.
...
Everything digital is now way beyond 'if its free, you are the product'.
The model is now entirely attention, addiction based, and manipulating your emotions in as close to real time as possible is absolutely integral to all this.
People forget that over a decade ago, Zuckerberg said his dream was to be able to predict with high accuracy what any given Facebook user would post next.
Nearly a decade ago, Netflix CEO or some such stated 'our primary competitor is sleep'.
People largely do not realize the extent to which these corpo fucks have been running highly precise and targeted manipulation of every aspect of human behavior... all to drive goddamn ad revenue and market share, ie, entrench themselves as institutions the modern world is no longer imaginable without.
I'm just confused as to how there isn't a dating app that is better.
Fetlife is like that too. “Find people with the same interests as you!”… select an interest: 120K people! Okay, let me filter by location? No. Filter by age? No. Filter by sex? Guess what, also No. So instead you have to hand scroll through all the entries. I don’t want to spend a lot of time connecting with someone with a common interest if they’re on the other side of the world.
I just got so sick of using the apps and their crappy interface. I can never remember if left is good, or right is good. Who designed that was a good idea?
The interface literally tells you as you do it which is which...