Move deliberately and fix things

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The inevitable dumpster fire of online dating

For those who are looking for love on the internet, rather than short-term flings, the online dating industry is a dumpster fire. This has always been inevitable, given the nature of the industry.

Incentives

Show me the incentive, and I'll show you the outcome. - Charlie Munger

Online dating companies, whether catering for hookups or long-term relationships, whether they have websites or apps, all share a single overriding incentive: profit.

Everything else, even their purported "missions" to bring people together, is subservient to their pursuit of profit. And every source of income that these companies can utilise undermines the very pursuit of long-term relationships for their users.

Making money

There are four main avenues of income for online dating services:

Advertising requires people to be using the site or app. The more someone uses an app, the more advertisements they see, and the more money the company makes from them. Thus ad-funded companies are clearly motivated to keep users in the app for as long as possible, looking around as much as possible.

Paying for features necessary for the user to actually succeed in finding a partner means that the company profits more the longer users stay on the app, are engaged with the app's features, but are ultimately unsuccessful in finding a partner. It should be no surprise then, that many services which put such basic functionality behind a paywall explicitly engange in catfishing of their own customers?

Similarly, paying for digital "gifts" to send to other users produces more profit when users who send these gifts are unsuccessful in attracting or sustaining the recipient's attention, so must continue using the app, and perhaps buying more such gifts.

Paying for premium features shares the same core flaw as the other revenue mechanisms, in that more money is made the longer a person is using the app and desires to use those "advanced" features. This has the further perverse incentive to make such for-pay features appear useful or desirable, but for them to be ultimately inadequate.

All of these sources of revenue incentivise the companies to try and keep people using the apps, rather than fulfil the desire of the user to stop needing to use the app.

Consequently, this drive to keep users around means that dating companies are incentivised to provide to users a large number of superficially desirable "matches", to keep them hopeful and interested, but who have poor long-term compatibility so users do not leave the app for long. This is fine and very profitable for serving and encouraging a "hookup culture" of short-term casual flings, but fundamentally incompatible with the search for a long-term relationship.

But... the testimonials!

One alternative incentive which could be argued is the network effect of endorsements from those who do have success finding a partner using a dating app. However, marketing and search engine optimisation scales far better than relying on word of mouth recommendations, and require far fewer actual successes. That last part is important:

It turns out you are 12.4 times more likely to get married this year if you don't subscribe to Match.com. - OKCupid, 2010

Over a decade ago, it was documented in a (since deleted) blog post from OKCupid that for-pay online dating sites are less successful at fomenting relationships than the population average. This was based on two of the biggest dating sites' own advertised numbers.

(OKCupid was later bought out by one of the big dating sites criticised in the blog post, and thus OKCupid eventually also faced the inevitability)

We can do better

We see then, that the sources of income available to a dating app are fundamentally incompatible with the objective of helping people form lasting romantic relationships. It is also clear that a profit motive will always push corporations toward more exploitative ways of extracting revenue.

The fix for the latter issue is clear and obvious; that for a dating app to ultimately be useful, it must be run by a non-profit entity which has the explicit purpose of helping find and foster long term relationships among people.

But even non-profits need funding to develop and support the services they offer. So how could such an endeavour be financed, in a manner where the incentives do not undermine their mission?

Investing in relationships

If the purpose of a service is to produce long-lasting relationships, then to incentivise that the most logical and direct system would be for the organisation to receive payment so long as the relationship persists. Thus, the longer a relationship lasts, the more the service benefits.

Unfortunately, I can't see any way such a scheme could be implemented. I don't think adding a subscription payment to marriage contracts would go down very well in any quarter!

Donations

The default go-to for non-profit corporations are voluntary donations. This is perhaps the source of revenue closest to the ideal as far as incentives are concerned, as funding becomes tied to the general public's experience of the usefulness and trust of the service.

That said, many, many, non-profit organisations struggle to maintain enough donors to keep their services running adequately. However, a service for finding relationships has understandable goals and a universal appear amongst the general population.

Grants

The "stable household" is frequently quoted as a hallmark of a strong and prosperous society by many nations and civil society groups. It may therefore be reasonable, for an organisation with the primary purpose to create long-lasting stable relationships between people, to find grants from public bodies.

In closing

The current online dating industry is fundamentally broken for the goals they claim to facilitate. Today's dating apps use deceptive, abusive, and self-serving practises, which perpetuate and aggravate human misery for the sake of profit.

Any upstart competitor which actually prioritises the promise of getting people into lasting relationships above all, will necessarily be getting people out of the dating pool, and therefore out of the dating industry's potential paying user base. Thus we should expect that the established industry powers will fight such a competitor tooth and nail, by fair means or foul, in the media, the courts, and the lobbies.

But I still hope that enough people with enough idealism, spite, grit, and determination come together to upend this corrupted industry.