[nasalgoat]

I was a founding member of a dating app startup and worked there for 10 years until it filed for bankruptcy. I have some insight.

The number one reason dating apps suck is money, or the ability to make money is antithetical to the purpose of getting people together. A dating app is successful when people don't use it anymore, so that user churn is a serious impediment to earning a profit. Thus, the apps are designed to keep you paying that monthly subscription.

In that same vein, apps have to work way harder than websites to turn a profit because of app store fees. Our app would have been profitable if we didn't have to give Apple 30% of our fees, so we had to do way sketchier shit to increase profits to compensate.

Second problem is the wildly unbalanced male/female ratios in users. We had one of the better ratios in the market but it was still 70/30 male to female. Straight men and women simply do not have the same motivations around dating and trying to balance those is a hard problem. There are many videos out there about this problem, no need for me to go into detail.

Third is reach. We spent a lot of time trying to find ways to advertise or optimize for store placement and the restrictions placed on us were almost puritanical. For instance, Facebook wouldn't let us advertise because our relationship settings had "married" in the list, so we were forced to remove that option in order to place ads on Facebook. There were other compromises we had to introduce in order to qualify for other stores or advertisers.

Lastly, the Match Group is the 800lb gorilla of the industry and they buy all the good ones (OKCupid, Plenty of Fish) and grind them into maximum profitability like a hedge fund, thus removing any distinctiveness they had in favour of the Match methods.

What it comes down to is the ecosystem is gamed to make good datings apps impossible.

[jfengel]

Thus, the apps are designed to keep you paying that monthly subscription.

I've heard this assertion before, but I don't understand it. Relationships are hard; most relationships fail. There's no need to do any special work to set people up for failure.

If dating app providers had some algorithm that could match people to make lifelong partners, surely somebody would have publicized it by now. Maybe it would be self-defeating as a commercial app, but somebody would do it anyway.

The apps do need ways to keep you coming back, but I don't think they can achieve that by locating and then hiding your perfect match. The best way to keep people coming back is to set them up with the best possible dates, and wait for those to fail entirely of their own accord.

Or at least, that's what I'd expect. If you have more insight as an insider I'd love to hear more.

[nasalgoat]

For our app we front-loaded the list of accounts with the most "popular" users (number of likes, messages) within their criteria when people signed up. So the sort order was always "hottest" first then everything else.

This was to get people to sign up so they could chat.

People would get the most "success" with those closest to their own level but that did not result in subscriptions at the same rate as putting the hottest up front.

Just one of the many ways the apps don't work the way you expect.