[throwaway77384]

You are right, my statement was too extreme, borne from frustrations over the degradation of many online services by profit-motives. I'm sure online dating platforms, so long as they get user profiles in front of user eyeballs, are inevitably going to lead to people getting into relationships. Much like with Facebook or, say, news media, the algorithm has a specific purpose and, as we see rather often, that purpose is not "make the user happy", it is "keep the user engaged by any means". So, for a news media website, the purpose is no longer "deliver the best news", but "deliver the most engagement". And that process can be automated by changing content subtly and measuring again, until the content pulls the most attention.

I guess with Tinder, that's not necessarily how it works? Do they have ads on there? No idea. But again, I wouldn't be surprised if there is some kind of data collection / trading going on. But who knows, I have no evidence of this and wouldn't want to badmouth Tinder just because it's trendy to bash big platforms. Please consider this an attempt at making a more balanced comment :)

[livinginfear]

I appreciate your response. I apologise if my initial response seemed too hostile. I've seen the claim made a handful of times on Hacker News that Tinder somehow games the results to maximise engagement. Admittedly I've been waiting since the last thread about Tinder to refute this point. I apologise for targeting you in doing so.