People who have difficulty on dating apps want to find a scapegoat, so they scapegoat the app.

The truth is that dating markets are lemon markets. People who are "dateable" tend to find success quickly, and people who are "not dateable" tend to stay on the market. Hence over time, the market will be dominated by "not dateable" people. No dating app on the planet will magically make you a "dateable" person.

To find success on dating apps, you have to work on yourself first, and only afterwards make sure that work shows through both in your profile and in your texting.

Source: was on the apps, undateable for eight years (depression and low self esteem), went to therapy, after making huge changes to my life and getting to a point where I felt like things were going well in everything but being single, a month later I found my girlfriend (now two years together).

> If you find good matches but not great matches, you stick around.

I dunno, I have difficulty seeing how the dating sites could singlehandedly pull that off in the average case without the site users really leaning in to help. It would seem to run into the basic reality that men and women historically pick the best match from a fairly small pool of people. A dating sites can't do worse than that even if they're trying. If people are willing to use the same standards as all their ancestors then they'd pair off quickly.

It seems more likely that there is just a natural dead-sea effect because of that where the people on the sites over the long term are not the sort of people you'd settle down with, and there is also this subtle idea that the dating site is there to find someone a perfect match (probably doesn't exist to start with). Those are design issues that go a lot deeper than any algorithm the sites might be using.

This assumes that dating sites are able to give everyone great matches, but are somehow holding them back.

That's not the case. They don't have much idea at all who you're going to hit it off with. And most in person first dates don't lead to second dates, much less leaving the site.

So no. The reality is that dating sites really are trying to give you the best matches, but it's just a numbers game. So they make money on the numbers -- to see more profiles or send more messages you need to pay more.

That's all it is.

Because if they really could reliably make high-quality matches all the time, they could charge $$$$$ for that and make much more money in the end. But they don't, because the algorithm just doesn't exist.

That doesn't account for the good-will and word-of-mouth generated from any successful matches, which presumably could lead to many more customers than those lost due to marriage.

There was a thread about that one:

Working for a Dating Website (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34368601 - Jan 2023 (196 comments)

It’s really disappointing because, a human matchmaker, on the other hand, *does* optimize for “losing 2 customers”. Wouldn’t it be way better for the company’s long-term-health if they charged an appropriate price for making, actually, great connections?

“I found my wife on FindLove” is one hell of a marketing campaign for *future* sales. It’s not like people never break up, and it’s not like people don’t continually enter the dating market or move or whatever.

Number 3.

Imagine if you can advertise that 50% of the matches on your app leads to marriage.