[Dr_Birdbrain]

I don’t work at a dating company, but I do work in machine learning applications.

My best guess is this: they are not optimizing for good vs great matches, and they are probably not even building a model of what that would even mean, not even trying to represent the concept in their algorithms.

Most likely they are optimizing for one or more metrics that are easy to measure and hence optimize, and these metrics have the side effect of producing an excitement for the user without actually pairing them up.

Example metrics: - time spent on the site

- times they “swipe right” or whatever

- messages sent

- money spent

[Onavo]

But the end result is effectively the same. If you throw in the constraints of what GP mentioned about customer retention, at the Pareto frontier it boils down to the same optimization, just that instead of manually optimizing the specific variables they become latent variables. There is no difference in the resultant enshittification.

[crazygringo]

No, it's precisely the opposite.

If they're optimizing for engagement (the same as Netflix and everyone else), that comes from the the number of active conversations you wind up having. If you're swiping a ton but matches never message you, you'll give up and try another app -- that's not engagement. The more engagement you have from real back-and-forth messages (not spam), the more real-life dates you go on (if you're doing it right). And the more people you meet, the more likely you are to leave.

It's not "enshittified", dating is just hard. People are picky and it's difficult to get a good read on people from just their online profiles. The dating apps just want to keep you engaged and spending money. They don't need to make finding matches harder because they're worried you'll leave -- finding matches is hard enough to begin with. Trying to make it harder is the least of their concerns. They're trying to give you as good of a service as possible, while getting you to pay. So they limit numbers of matches to get you to pay. They're not limiting quality of matches.