[csee]

The alternative is the way things were 15 years ago, where people found mates via their physical networks, work, family, hobbies, religion, and day to day life.

The criticism is similar in nature to the criticism of Twitter and Facebook. These apps play to and encourage the worst side of humans in the way that their social dynamics are designed, which distorts relations between people for the worse.

In the case of dating apps, it's because the "first meeting" is viewing someone's curated digital profile instead of getting to know their full self in the real world, they strongly encourage selection based on trivialities like height, hip to waist ratio, income and other signals. You also encourage the same narcissistic performance games that Instagram encourages. It's also the sheer deluge of profiles. Like, our dopamine system isn't designed for that, and nor is it a fully free choice when the app has exploited that evolved system to hook users. And what's going to be the impact of designing a system that makes it easy for people to self select into opposing political tribes?

Of course most of this stuff happened to an extent 15 years ago too. But as with Facebook and their tendency to stoke outrage and division, the problem is how the app has turbocharged our worse tendencies while also creating dilemma like incentives that make it tricky to opt out from.

My point about low status men is that they often aren't bad mates. They're low status through the prism of hyper gamified dating apps that magnify the importance of trivialities. There's no question that there's people who've had it worse in this regard in the pre-dating app era (various low-caste/untouchables types in different societies), my point isn't that we are at rock bottom, just that dating apps are a pretty large step in the wrong direction.

[eropple]

I think I notionally agree with a lot of what you're saying. Where I think we disagree--and this is me maybe not being the most optimistic person in the universe--is in the alternative. I think the fracturing we are seeing right now doesn't mean the alternative is "find mates at work and through other physical networks". I think it's "don't find anybody."

To that end, I think these are awful, but perhaps not the darkest timeline.