A 2019 Stanford paper showed that the way couples meet has come to be dominated by the internet over the last 25 years. The authors conclude that the internet has disintermediated the need for friends and family to involve themselves in the matchmaking process.
The percentage of respondents who “Met Online” rose to 40% in 2017, though this category overlaps with other online meeting places. A majority of them mentioned meeting through a dating app. Of those 40%, nearly 9 in 10 of them revealed that they had previously been a stranger to their partner, and required no input from their social circle to find them.
Suffice to say that dating apps have taken over our culture in short order. Just 10 years ago, it was more likely that you’d find your partner by other methods, mainly through friends. Technological change in the past hasn’t quite caused this kind of upheaval in dating markets though, so why the internet? Landlines, the postal service, the printing press—none of these bypassed one’s network participating in the matchmaking process.
This disintermediation quickly made meeting someone online by far the most favored method of meeting your partner. Not because your friend’s/family’s dating advice is bad per se, but because the scale of a single person’s network will always pale in comparison to the entirety of the social web. Not only is the number of options exponentially higher, the information about each option is complete and up-to-date. Every single face you see on dating apps is available (or so one would hope)—is your mother sure that the handsome doctor is even single?
This “Internet Removes Middleman” phenomenon isn’t unique to dating, but what is unique here is that this disintermediation diminished a centuries-old, trusted cultural norm. Problems that arose around the death of the travel agent or the yellow cab agency were economic in nature, and did not have a marked effect on interpersonal relationships. On the other hand, it is easy to imagine the cultural second order effects of this new matchmaking system; even further downstream—to what degree will Tinder’s matchmaking algorithm decide the demographics of Generation Alpha (a term I had to look up while writing this)?
Has the expediency of this new dating paradigm made a truly improved matchmaking product? Or was this exponential adoption curve just people heading down the path of least resistance? Is society better off in a situation where one’s partner is chosen for them algorithmically?
One significant benefit to this disintermediation has gone to those who would rather not share what gender they are interested in dating. Grindr and other apps were able to flourish due to bypassing this exact friends/family matching process. Thankfully, it would seem this use-case is (hopefully) on the wane as Americans slowly come to their senses about other people dating who they want.
The advantage Tinder has over the ‘old-fashioned’ way is an advantage in user experience and scale, not one, I would posit, in higher-quality matchmaking. Tinder is an entertainment app as much as it is a dating app; hundreds of people for you to swipe/judge is an exhilarating experience compared to your grandmother introducing you to the nice boy she met at church. Depending on the cuteness of the boy, I suppose.
Misaligned Incentives
Much hay has been made over the very true statement that dating apps are in the tough position of having incentives that are quite misaligned with those of their user-base. Every time Tinder adequately matches up two lovebirds, they are no longer Tinder users. But hark, that is only but one example of how Tinder’s goals are at odds with its users.
Tinder and similar dating apps facilitate less a space where singles can find love, and more a digital night club. I can’t be found in night clubs frequently, but I am fascinated by how similar their flywheel maps to a dating app’s.
Attracting a number of women to your establishment through free drinks and line-cutting privileges is the first step to getting this flywheel chugging along. Once there, they will attract men to the club; a far more monetizable set of customers. Tinder sells them tools to increase their chances of matching, and the club sells them drinks at exorbitant prices.
Inequality is part of the plan for the proprietors of these apps—it’s good for business. Unequal marketplaces are all around us, no one would scoff at the fact that there are 100x more Uber riders than drivers—around 135 million eBay buyers, but only 18 million sellers. Is this inequality quite so societally burdensome?
Tinder does not even operate with these extreme degrees of gendered inequality that would be present in a product like OnlyFans. It is still quite the high Gini coefficient economy though. Specific numbers vary, but it is safe to say an overwhelming majority of users are men, around 3/4 according to a few sources. This is to say nothing of the relative ‘like’ inequality that exists between genders in the app.
A 2017 interview with a Hinge engineer is particularly illuminating on this. He found: 1/2 of all likes sent to men go to 15% of men and 1/2 of all likes sent to women go to 25% of women. So, men are both competing against a higher number of users on an absolute basis and the attention they do get is spread very unevenly across the spectrum of attractiveness. Meaning, a man of average attractiveness will find it very hard to find multiple matches, whereas most women will see their match tray overflow with men who send them such poetry as: “hey”, “what’s up”, and *generic sexual harassment*.
Both sexes must be present on the app for a functioning heterosexual dating marketplace, but in terms of how the product is monetized, having more men is, again, good for business. A majority of women are already inundated with matches, so they have no need for premium upgrades. Men on the other hand will pay through the nose to get a leg up on the competition.
This leads me to believe that Tinder has moved past its initial utility function, and is now simply a form of atomized entertainment. In the same way that TikTok feeds you a endless personalized stream of videos to swipe through, Tinder gives you tailored endless (if you pay for it) stream of profiles to swipe through. Yet, TikTok makes no pretense about its stated goal: To entertain. While night clubs can be fun, they aren’t exactly optimized for generating good matches. But hey, it worked for Usher, so what do I know.
Solutions
In June of 1968, the Toledo Blade published a story on the front page—the headline read: “Computer Cupids Woo 13-Year-Olds; N.Y. Schools Balk; Jury Investigates”. The story, if you can believe it, is one of an enterprising young man who charged classmates $3 to $6 a head to have a computer match them up with a classmate. The computer was fed surveys filled out by students with prompts like:
“Petting is always wrong: O.K. for two people engaged to be married, O.K. for two people who have dated for several weeks or months, petting is O.K.
“I would like my date to be sexy: intellectual, way out, down to earth, romantic, sophisticated, funny“
“My moral values are compared to other teenagers are extremely liberal more liberal than most, slightly more liberal than average, slightly less liberal than average, more strict than most, extremely conservative)
If we were looking for a product with the goal of creating the best possible matches, could this one be a better solution than Tinder? Impossible to say, but interestingly this service avoided such disintermediation by confining users to a single school.
Tinder and other entrenched players have proven challenging to disrupt. The most significant innovation in the space might be Bumble’s ‘girl messages first’ feature, which if we are being honest is a means to market the platform to women, thereby attracting male users. The innovation here is one of customer acquisition instead of product/technical innovation, which is likely what is necessary to uproot swipe culture.
Most if not all successful dating apps not named Bumble, have exited through an acquisition to Match Group—proprietor of such apps as Tinder, Hinge, PlentyOfFish, Match.com, OkCupid, OurTime, and The League (this is not even close to an exhaustive list). So if somehow you do succeed, you will likely find yourself in a stable of 30 other apps that mostly conform to a tried-and-true, don’t-rock-the-boat feature set.
‘Dating Ring’ went through YCombinator in 2014 attempting to grow a platform for group dates in select cities. People would sign up to be added to a database of singles within a city—and after paying $20 would attend a match-made group date. They later pivoted to facilitating individual dates between their members using a combination of algorithms and real-life matchmakers. The company ended up shutting down a few years later, but this Times profile it sheds light on the what it might take to build a product that is earnestly trying to solve the problem of ‘match-making’.
More recent developments in the space have found exclusivity to be a worthwhile strategy. Apps like Raya and The League require users to submit applications to determine if they are worthy of being in an exclusive club—Raya for influencer/celebrity types and The League, which focuses on the urban professional class . And though these apps may imbue their users with a sense of dignity for being cool and sexy and rich enough to get in, I seriously doubt they are finding their soul mate quicker than any other digital night club on the app store.
I met my girlfriend through mutual friends. We both weren’t heavy dating app users—and I now find myself wondering whether our self-selecting out of them is somehow an indictment, positive or negative, of our relationship…
Trying to Understand 