The Truth About Online Dating

Let’s get the main idea out of the way right away: online dating is socially engineered to make companies money, and it’s not in singles’ best interests. Online dating, like most social media websites that grew out of the 00s, started out making heavy losses. As the 2010s moved forward, online dating services figured out ways to make it profitable, and I have no doubt that these developments are at the forefront of what makes modern dating dysfunctional.

It’s Monopolized

You might think that you have choices for online dating services, but you really don’t because only one company owns the majority of online dating services in the United States: Match Group ($MTCH). Match Group owns Match (of course), Tinder, Hinge, OKCupid, PlentyOfFish, BLK, and a long list of other services more popular outside the United States. According to a Seeking Alpha article in 2022, Match Group has over 65% market share in North America, with runner-up Bumble at a mere 22% (sorry, eHarmony, I don’t know where you’re at).

Online dating market share is going to differ significantly in different geographic regions, where in metropolitan Arizona I wouldn’t be surprised if Match Group made up well over 80% of market share. Match Group is essentially a monopoly that controls the online dating landscape, which practically makes up the entire modern dating landscape. The lack of a competitive market gives Match Group the opportunity to abuse the market, and I think it has.

It’s Misleading

In most cases, a single person’s best interest is to find a life companion. Match Group knows this so it purposely advertises the illusion that that’s its goal for you. Hinge had even advertised that it’s “The dating app designed to be deleted.” But what’s Match Group’s economic incentive for that? Literally none. Their incentive is to keep people on their service as long as possible, hopefully persuading them to purchase (and repurchase) their premium features.

It’s easy to think, “Well, if it works, then new people will continuously roll through their revolving door to keep the income coming.” Unfortunately, that’s rarely reality in business and certainly not in the highly competitive social media space. Acquiring new customers is almost always more expensive than keeping existing customers. To continuously acquire new customers, companies have to invest in publishing advertisements, giving trials/discounts, and other expensive incentives. Match Group has figured out a way to get existing customers hooked so they can maximize their income at the lowest costs.

It’s Socially Engineered to Keep You Hooked

How does Match Group get people hooked? Let’s go back a few years. Online dating didn’t start with “swiping,” it started as services where you entered in personal information and preferences, and the services populated search results that you could browse at will. This old method was fairly effective at quickly matching up compatible people, which wasn’t economically viable for the companies as it had low engagement and frequent customer turnover. Women received an overwhelming number of messages a day and men played the numbers game, constantly writing icebreaker after icebreaker. Swiping in itself is more addictive than search results, and it gives services more power to control the user experience which allows it to socially engineer.

How do they socially engineer? This is speculation but I’m convinced this is true: online dating services know who the attractive people on their apps are. They know who regularly replies and who doesn’t. They can detect when you’re hitting it off with someone; and, they don’t like it when that happens. Online dating services lose if you either give up on them or if you get into a relationship and delete the app. The order of which people are presented for you to swipe (and to swipe you) is no doubt calculated by an algorithm designed to hook you in for the long term. When you’re showing behaviors that signal disengagement to the app, either from giving up or meeting that life companion, they will make sure that someone new who’s attractive and responsive magically appears in your matches to regain your engagement to the app. Or, alternatively, this might happen to the match who you’ve been going out with for a few weeks, and suddenly they “won’t feel it” anymore because they found someone else. New people are almost always going to be more exciting than the familiar person they’ve gotten to know, who will inevitably have features as well as flaws. Everything, and everyone, always looks better from farther away.

The Impacts

I’m sure I know what’s going through people’s minds: “Well, I know [so-and-so] and they found their partner through online dating.” Yes, there are exceptions. But, remember, dating services ultimately lose when that happens, so they’re incentivized to find a balance that prevents it from happening most of the time.

I would liken online dating to casinos. Casinos are the original masters at social engineering. They successfully entice people with the (small) possibility that they’ll walk out profitably, although the entire experience is engineered to ensure the house wins the majority of the time. How else do they afford the chandelier? Seeing the success a very small number of people achieve is enough to convince others to give it a shot, just like with online dating.

From my perspective, and the perspectives of many of my friends, online dating has caused modern dating to become dysfunctional. People are frequently turned off by small differences because they think there’s always someone else around the corner. And I suppose they’re technically not wrong, but if they’re always looking for someone new around the corner, then they’re going to make themselves miss the opportunity of ever finding their life companion.

People can’t help but treat people found through online dating services similarly to how they treat Amazon, where if they’re not unconditionally satisfied with a purchase, they can return it for free and try another product. But people are perfectly imperfect; we all have flaws. Relationships are like building a house brick-by-brick, and not every brick is going to fall in place perfectly; it’s up to the two people in the relationship to problem solve to create something bigger than themselves. It takes work and it won’t always be easy.

One thing is for sure that what we have today isn’t working. I regret that, at this time, I don’t have any particular solutions (besides encouraging people to ditch online dating, which many won’t want to do because they’re hooked), but my ultimate goal for this article is to spread awareness and start conversations.