"Dating apps do not optimize for you to find the love of your life, they optimize for you coming back to the app" - Connor Leahy
this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2026
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Who's shocked.
My Male coworkers scroll hrs a daily for a match and get terrible options.
Meanwhile Female coworkers get overwhelmed with 100s and cannot possibly get the best fit for them. Horrible for both sides.
Swiping yes on a hundred dudes and being overwhelmed sounds like a self inflicted problem
They dont do that. Dudes do 100s of swipes and messages and the apps are dying for any women to respond so the men will pay.
When i was on them not a single man would read that i said i was a lesbian and got tons of messages even saying i wanted no contact from men on said apps.
this is by design. NO COMPANY in the entire world is going to provide a product in hopes that one day you won't need to use it anymore. So dating apps, by design, provide you with horrible matches so that you keep using said app. They don't want you finding the "love of your life", it's bad business if they did.
"Dating App is great! It helped me find my soulmate 15 times!"
Well it would help if it was a one time payment without any other form of monetization
i read that its most geared towards benefitting woman more than men, by forcing them to scroll through more.
Most of them were full of bots and scammers even before the AI craze. I can only imagine how bad they are now.
I'll say that I had a good experience with Coffee Meets Bagel but that was years ago. Their gimmick at the time was that they only showed you up to 10 profiles per day so it didn't incentivize doomscrolling like Tinder.
Not surprising at all, one conglomerate owns pretty much every single one of them, and it they're successful you don't need them anymore.
good riddance!
Nothing of value was lost.
After Grindr started using PairIP and made this mod unusable: https://github.com/R0rt1z2/GrindrPlus, Grindr has become shit if you don't pay for it.
They are all now shit if you don't pay for it. Pof, okcupid, they are garbage. They used to work while silicon valley was still in it's growth phase, hen enshitified when they entered the maximizing revenue phase, which started perhaps a bit earlier with dating sites than other sectors like search engines.
gets up from rocking chair I never really got the purpose of dating apps, as I was still married when they came out, and when the ex and I separated, I had a Plan B inadvertently lined up via work. The latter and I did use apps on her phone, but it was just for the purposes of making fun of the banality of cookie-cutter pictures and bios while drinking on the porch.
The irony is I met both my ex-wives on OKCupid, but back in 2004.
I'll say that (pre-)2016 OkCupid still was able to work like a charm without paying for anything. The idealized purpose of dating apps is, or was, to have you find the right partner that you might not otherwise would have found and you might have settled for a partner that you're ultimately only okay with, because they're the least-bad option in your area. These apps and websites provide a place where everyone has the expectation that they want to get romantic with each other (opposed to randomly messaging people on their website / social media profile) and also the wide range of the internet, connecting people that would have never met otherwise.
My story of 2016 OkCupid: I had freshly signed up for a week or two and my now-wife just returned from a long hiatus for only a day or so before we found each other with a 99% (at one, short, point even 100%) match But I recognise that even back then it was almost "are you sure you're not being paid to advertise OkCupid?"-levels of coincidence