Are Dating Apps Over?

0:28Hey, this is Adriana, one of the show's producers.

0:35This is Wired's Uncanny Valley, a show about the people, power, and influence of Silicon Valley. I'm Michael Kalori, Director of Consumer Tech and Culture here at Wired. And I'm Lauren Good. I'm a senior writer at Wired. I'm Zoe Schiffer, Wired's Director of Business and Industry. Today, we are talking about the current state of dating apps. The apps have evolved a lot over the years. There are now apps where you can meet dog lovers, astrology heads, fans of live music. Whatever your thing is, there's an app for that now. But zoom out from those swipe right moments and you're looking in an ecosystem of niche platforms and algorithms that are just as delicate and turbulent as love itself.

1:18As the industry seems to be at its all time worst, we're wondering, could this be a corrective moment for dating apps?

1:33So what's going on with online dating right now? Like, what's the current state out there of the apps and the scene? What are people doing? I was really worried going into this episode that you guys were just going to be like, so Lauren, tell us you attached people. As a correspondent in the field. Yes. We did jump on that first question, I must say. Well, yeah. So something like 30 % of adults in the United States have used dating apps. That's according to a recent survey by Pew Research Center. The biggest ones you've probably heard of, Bumble, Hinge, and Tinder. For a while, in the early aughts, we heard about companies like Match, eHarmony, OkCupid.

2:18Match is still in the game. In fact, Match is now Match Group, which owns a whole bunch of these name brand dating apps that you've heard of. Tinder is 36 % of the total monthly active users in the United States. And Tinder, I think we're going to be talking about a lot in this first part of this podcast because of the way that Tinder kind of revolutionized mobile dating apps. Most of these apps start out free, but it's kind of like a mobile game in that they're becoming increasingly gamified. Like you're encouraged to make in-app purchases. But in this case, you're buying access to virtual likes from other human beings.

2:50So that's the dystopian state of dating right now. So in the free experience, you're swiping and you're seeing people. And at some point you stop seeing people who are like good matches for you. And it just becomes sort of a sea of faces, right? Yeah. So for example, within the free version of Hinge, if you get a bunch of likes, you can only see one at a time. And you have to decide in that moment if you're going to reject someone or accept them as someone you want to chat with. And so that kind of limits you in terms of the context you can put that person into. So you don't have the ability to say, well, my other matches actually look better, you know, because you just can't see them until you pay for the premium version.

3:29Some of these apps also use some form of dynamic pricing, too. So they're able to sort of bucket you and identify whether you'd pay a little bit more, what market you live in, what age group you're in. The whole experience has become, I think, increasingly inauthentic and kind of spammy. So it's not all Bumble and Hinge and Tinder. There are now a whole host of dating apps that are just for people who are into a very specific thing or people who want to meet somebody like minded in a community that they're a part of. Like there are apps like for people who like jam bands and there are apps for people who like to go to hip hop concerts.

4:07And there are even apps where men with beards can connect with men and women who like men with beards. No. It's called Bristler. No. Oh, this can't be real life. No, it is real life. Yeah. You know, specifically, you must have facial hair. And then there's Vegely, which is for vegans to get together because nothing's more awkward than going on on a date and person takes you to a restaurant where the only thing you can eat is like the beet salad. Yeah, that's a bummer. Yeah. Well, it seems like what you're describing, though, are these very, very niche apps. And I think there's also this space that's in between the big ones, Tinder, Hinge, Bumble, and those hyper-specific ones because they're apps that everyone's heard of before even though they have a specific purpose like Raya, which is for like influencers who love other influencers and Field, which is for monogamous or non-traditional relationships or ones that are specific to religious values like a J-date or Christian dating or there's Salams.

5:10Those are specific, but they're not like, I like beards. I feel like that's a different category. I like beards feels universal. I was going to make a joke that like, that's the universal dating app. I'm like, who doesn't have a beard? Come on. It's not a niche. I interviewed these Stanford students a few years back who'd created an app based on the matching algorithm for medical schools. Their whole thesis was like, dating apps are not good at predicting chemistry, which I think anyone who's been on a dating app would attest to. And so they wanted to create a questionnaire that all Stanford students could participate in.

5:46And then you'd have match day at Stanford, which became like a legit campus-wide event where you'd get your one single match. And people would be like running across campus screaming. They would like meet up, go on dates. Couples would form. Friendships would form. It was like a pretty cool kind of IRL hybrid dating app experience that these students kicked off that went on for years. That sounds absolutely delightful and also absolutely Stanford. And I love it. They're like, let's take the med school algo and apply it to our love lives. We also haven't mentioned Grindr, which, of course, is the massively popular LGBTQ app.

6:22And we mentioned it on an earlier episode of Uncanny Valley because it set a precedent for Supreme Court ruling. It was the original dating app, right? This was like the first one. Before Tinder or after Tinder? No, it was definitely before. It was before? Okay. Yeah. Really just a pioneer. There are literally hundreds of apps for whatever you're looking for. But let's put all of them on a timeline, because I feel like if you look at the last 15 years or so of online dating, you can see two pretty fundamental shifts in the way that these apps work. One's clearly about technology, right? The rise of smartphones and the fact that you can download these mobile apps onto your phone, carry them around in your pocket and spend five minutes on the bus or two minutes standing in line at the grocery store swiping through potential mates.

7:04And the swipe right, swipe left dynamic really comes to the foreground in this era and becomes sort of the standard across all the dating apps. Then you have the pandemic in 2020 and shelter in place when meeting people in real life became much harder and literally everything about dating moved online. So let's first start by talking about the dating app scene pre-pandemic. Like what did the app industry look like before 2020? I mean, my understanding of this era of dating was that it was very like the dominant players were eHarmony, OkCupid, these desktop experiences that ask for a lot more information up front.

7:45Like you get pretty robust profiles of people. Yeah, I think that's the first time they were kind of branded because since the beginning of chat rooms, people have been all ASL, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I feel like the friends that I have that still prefer the like eHarmony experience do so because they feel like they get a much better sense of people where the newer apps kind of have these prompts. You get very short snippets and it's more photo dominant. So it's like people put less time into the profiles and you have to swipe a lot more to like understand what the field is like, what the individual is like.

8:19There were other big platforms, too. Like there was Yahoo Personals, Nerve.com Personals, Craigslist. Let's give a shout out to all the Craigslist couples out there. All the misconnections and everything else going on on there. Oh, misconnections. Oh, my God. They were the original meet cute on the Internet. Yeah, they were. When I was in college, my senior year in college, this is the early 2000s, one of my housemates decided that she was tired of the dating pool on our pretty small campus. So she got on Yahoo. I don't remember if it was called Yahoo dating or Yahoo personals, but it was the first time that I had ever laid eyes on an online dating profile.

8:59It was my friends. And we, you know, we, we thought she was going to get murdered, actually, because that was the perception of dating apps. They weren't completely normalized. It was embarrassing to say you were looking online a little bit. There was this stigma attached. Also, she was fine, folks, for what it's worth. But yeah, I think to your point, Mike, the mobile revolution really changed all of that. It changed the mechanics, the dynamics, and it changed the stigma. Yeah. And here's where we have to talk about Tinder, because in the smartphone era with the touchscreen, swipe right, swipe left really became the dominant way to search for that needle in the haystack, so to speak.

9:35Right. Yeah. Yeah, and then it became much more of a numbers game, it feels like. You could just continue swiping seemingly forever in order to try and find your match. But the downside of that is the pool feeling endless makes it harder to know when to stop. Yeah. And one thing that often gets overlooked is the importance of geolocation in these apps because you can filter for distance. You can say, I'm only interested in seeing people who are 10 miles away from me. I'm only interested in seeing people who are 50 miles away from me. So if you live in a city and you don't have a car, or if you live in the boonies and there's not a big pool, you can adjust the location settings to find out how many people are actually out there.

10:14That was really the thing that Grindr pioneered, I think, which was not just telling you who was interested, but who is interested in your immediate proximity and making it easier to find and hook up with people, which every app since seems to have copied. So around this time that we're talking about, a lot of these apps are free. And then there was a shift when they all started charging for premium subscription features. We have to like pause here because these companies are largely venture backed and their investors want them obviously to earn money or continue earning money. And the way to do that once you've saturated like the immediate obvious dating pool is just upcharging your existing user base.

10:56And so we see the apps start to change in kind of significant ways that have important implications for like the goals of the company and then the goals of their users and how those goals might actually conflict. Right. I think what you're saying is that the incentives totally change. Yeah. I mean, it's hard to say if they ever really wanted you to find true love to begin with, whether you're an ad based free website or whether you're charging a subscription fee. the goal is really like, let's keep you swiping. Let's keep you tapping because we want to make money. Yeah. When I was reporting on dating apps, one of the questions that I would always ask employees who worked at these companies was, do you have a metric that you track in terms of how many couples are actually getting and staying together from these apps?

11:38And it's different app by app. Like I think Tinder and Grindr, the perception was they were more to find people to hook up with, not like necessarily lasting love. But for the other ones, it was like, is a KPI that your company is tracking that you have up on the wall that you're measured against whether people find lasting love or is it minutes spent on the app? Because I think that that's like critically important for understanding whether your goal is aligned with the user's goal. Yeah. So how safe did the apps feel in this era? I mean, it's not often that we get to look back and sort of chart how safe we were feeling at certain times, but I feel like dating apps offer an opportunity to do that because we all kind of remember the scandals and we remember the experiences that we and our friends had during this era.

12:21I do still think that even after mobile dating apps became incredibly popular, there was still a stigma around them. And part of that was vulnerable populations feeling especially vulnerable out there. There's this meme that floats around the internet where there's a woman saying to her friend, like, hey, just in case I end up murdered, like his name was Alex. He lives in this part of town. Here's a photo, like sending all the data from the app. And the friend goes, great, have fun. You know, so now I think that's just kind of a more accepted part of dating apps. We have names and sort of ideas around what those experiences are, you know, whether it's like catfishing, for example, or now there's a new type of scam called pig butchering.

13:06And I think by the time you you're giving a name to something, it is normalized, like it's codified at that point. Right. It's not sort of this nebulous idea of, oh, dating app is danger. Right. Still very real concerns, but it was different about a decade ago. It was different. And I think now there's more literacy on like what the dangers are, how to protect yourself, what you're getting into when you use the apps. Like this was a more innocent era of the internet. Generally, we were like couch surfing, taking rides from random people. Like there was a way to connect with strangers and engage with them in all sorts of ways that I think now we're a little more suspect of, but at the time was like, wow, the internet's amazing.

13:44You can find anyone. Smartphones are amazing. You were fist bumping your Lyft driver with the pink mustache on its car. That is not a euphemism. I never did that, by the way. I always offered my elbow. Mike knew right away that that was lame. I would just offer my elbow. I'd say, how about we elbow bump? OK, so now we're at the pandemic, right? 2020 rolls around. All of a sudden, everybody's stuck at home. People start getting a little lonely and they're swiping like crazy. Yeah. So during the pandemic, dating apps expanded. Their businesses grew similar to the other online services that we were completely tethered to, like Netflix and Zoom.

14:22Match Group in particular, which I mentioned earlier, owns a bunch of apps, include Tinder, Hinge, Match.com, OKCupid, BLK. they had 17 % higher revenue in the first year of the pandemic. They use it as an opportunity to push out new features and different subscription levels. It was also when they were introducing new safety guides. And then they leaned on video calls because we were all on video chats anyway. So it was also a moment where culturally video chatting first became kind of normal. And then I don't know the exact data on this, but I think even now it's a little bit more common for some going to say, well, why don't we video chat first before we kind of take the time to meet up in person and potentially experience disappointment in person?

15:06Yeah. And once again, like this wasn't at the time seen as a momentary bump because of the pandemic. Like a lot of tech companies and dating apps were part of this kind of assumed like maybe this is the new normal. Our user bases have ballooned. We're raking in money like this is the golden era and it's going to continue. And so then And when it did not continue and there was kind of a pullback in the dating app industry, people didn't want to be online all the time or on their phones all the time. The kind of companies themselves had to recalibrate and start finding new ways to squeeze money out of people.

15:42And can I just give credit to our producer here for a moment? She sent along a data point that said on March 29th, there was a one-day record for the app. Tinder users swiped through more than 3 billion potential matches in one day. But this was, this makes me laugh because it's March 29th, 2021. So it's like, I just want to go back and be like, kids, the vaccines are coming. They're coming. You're almost out of this. You don't have to do this. Well, you know, I think the best thing to happen around dating apps because of this pandemic bump was that the stigma pretty much went away. Like all of a sudden it was just okay because everybody was on dating apps and it was okay to talk about it.

16:20And it was OK to meet people there who maybe you weren't interested in dating, but you just wanted to chat with them because you feel like you could get along. And to the point we were talking about earlier with Field, there were a lot of people who were sort of open to a new experience, right? Like they're trapped with their partners in their houses and they're dealing with all of their relationship issues. and maybe now it's time for them to branch out. And the safe way to do that feels like signing onto a new kind of app that's going to fulfill a new need that they now understand that they have.

16:50Yeah, it's like, it's vulnerable to put yourself out there and say that you're looking for something that you might not get. And so when everyone else is admitting that they're also looking for that thing, which is like basically the human experience, I feel like we're all looking desperately for love. Yeah, it's like there's a huge normalizing factor that comes into play. Okay, let's take a break and come right back.

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18:00Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. So dating apps were on the rise during the pandemic and are still booming afterwards. words. So what are some of the features that we saw introduced during this app boom? Well, we can't have this conversation without talking about AI. And I think it's important to make the distinction between the different flavors of AI that we've seen in dating apps. Like I think ever since we've had access to advanced Photoshop or the app Facetune, people have technically been using forms of AI to, you know, put themselves out there or outright catfish people. We've also seen the emergence of bots, which is you're chatting with a person in the app and you have a sense that they're not actually a person or they're a person who's been using some kind of tool to chat with you.

18:47Now, in a lot of instances, the companies themselves are using AI as well. And they're either using it because they're doing things like identity verification, or they're using it to spot harmful communication, spam, abusive language, that sort of thing. And now some of the apps themselves have actually just sort of co-opted the idea of chatbots and said, well, we're just going to introduce our own version of an AI chatbot that you can use to do the conversations for you. I think that's the weirdest thing, just personally, like that it's gotten to that point within dating apps. You know, I know Snapchat has a version of this too, my AI, and some of the teens are into it and all that stuff.

19:27So like, I just think like that's the, like one of the most desperate things you can do as a company, which is we're going to take this fundamentally human experience. We know our incentives have been kind of misaligned with what you want for a while, but we've danced around it. And now we're just explicitly saying, look, we're going to do anything we can do to keep you chatting, chatting, chatting, chatting, and just to keep you in the app. Yeah, I feel like when we talk about AI and dating apps, the assumption is that it would be used explicitly to like improve the algorithm to find you better matches.

19:54So the idea that no, in fact, like Grindr is really not the AI wingman. So you can kind of have a dating coach to chat with or the Bumble founder who said that like in a future state, maybe just AI avatars will like date each other is surprising, which, you know, there are people who chat with chatbots all day for therapy purposes or in relationships with them. So it's not to say there's not like a use case for this, but I don't think like to me, it wasn't the expected application of AI. And it does seem like the goal is can we upsell our existing user base right I also just wanted to have a little um caveat around catfishing because the line between catfishing and then whatever else we all do all the time feels like surprisingly thin to me I feel like there have been so many times where I put up a photo and I was like this is not difficult this is me absolutely yes hoodwinking whoever yes like we see a lot of high and we do a lot of like high gloss images on LinkedIn now for example, and it's like a good angle.

20:57That can be a, anyway, I don't want to get us off topic. Well, Zoe, I mean, you hit on a good point, which is the fact that, you know, the upsell is getting really, really outrageous now. You know, the fact that you have to pay sometimes like$30 a month just to unlock the ability to see who's looking at your profile or to chat with more than one person at a time. It's really contributing to this sort of distaste for dating apps now. Like, I feel like a lot of people are feeling fatigued, they're feeling overwhelmed, and they're feeling like they're just not getting as much out of the apps as they used to because of all this stuff that's being added.

21:33Yeah, it feels like we were kind of, I mean, what we were talking about before, like the pandemic felt like peak dating app era. And now it seems like there's been a bit of a backlash where the companies are trying to upsell users more and more and users are getting, you know, a little upset and fatigued with the business model. I also think in general, the bar for what's considered successful on these apps is pretty low and maybe has gotten lower. There's this great book called Dataclysm, and it's written by the co-founder of OkCupid. I must admit, I haven't read all of it. I skimmed it, but it's fascinating and it's really well written too.

22:10And because he has access to all of this data, he gives this really incredible sociological snapshot of dating apps. And one of the things that it points out is that men are less discerning than women. they'll do like, they'll like, like, like a whole bunch of profiles. So their rejection rates tend to be higher. Women will often vocalize how, you know, quote unquote, bad dating apps are. And it's true. And we also worry about safety, but I think men overall have a worse experience just in terms of rejection. This book also points out that men think women are sort of generally more attractive.

22:41There are societal stereotypes around women. Like if women have a lot of tattoos, it says this about them. If women are over 40, it says this about them, right? But despite that, like on the scale of attractiveness, men tend to rate women a lot higher and women find these very specific subsets on dating apps attractive. And then it just sort of falls off a cliff. Like the line he uses in this book is basically at that point, after that women think 58 % of men are brain damaged. Yeah. So there's a lot of discrimination against certain groups of people, black women, Asian men tend to have the worst experiences on dating apps.

23:18So what's happening here is that like the apps or the companies that make the apps don't actually care if you find a quote unquote partner, they're aware of these discriminations that exist amongst the groups. And what they're trying to do is just have you have enough matches that it keeps you on the apps. So they algorithmically create these clusters for you based on all of that. And just hope you get a few dates here and there, because that's the thing that will make you think, well, I might as well just keep the app on my phone. To get back to the original point, they don't really care if you find a long-term partnership from the app.

23:50Wasn't there also reporting a while back that apps like Tinder, at least at one point, gave you a score that was like where you ranked overall in the app? It was called like the LO score or something that was related to chess. Like an Uber rating? That's brutal. It was like, yeah, it was like everyone was kind of curious about like, what does Tinder set, like think on the back end about my overall attractiveness. And it was based on kind of, you know, perhaps the company's own assessment of you, but also how people interacted with your profile, which was just kind of fascinating. Wow. Woof. Yeah.

24:24How have the scams gotten worse? Lauren, I know you have done a lot of reporting about this, so I want to put you on the spot. Yeah, I did some reporting for Wired in 2022 about this category of scams that is known as pig butchering scams. The idea is that these bad actors on the apps are taking a long time to chat with you and sort of fatten you up, you know, and convince you that they're really interested in you personally and romantically. And ultimately what they're interested in is money. And so they'll often say things like, well, I run a trading platform on the side, or I'm really big into crypto and I can make you money from crypto.

25:03And vulnerable people end up giving away their personal information. And in some instances, legitimately getting scammed. It's something that the FTC has been looking into. And we've written a lot about this at Wired. Lily Hay Newman, our colleague has too. So I recommend that people go and check out those stories. I had this one experience where I was starting to notice this. People were popping up in Hinge that appeared to just be very fake. And by fake, I mean, they kind of had that face-tuned look and some of the answers that they gave in their dating app profiles to like these prompts that exist, the answers were nonsensical.