Two Cents

- [Julia] If you've never used a dating app before, lucky you.

Maybe you prefer finding dates the old fashioned way at ye old meat market.

Maybe like Philip and I, you found your partner before the boom in online dating.

Or maybe you're just single and not particularly down to mingle.

- Even if you think it doesn't apply to you, the rise of dating apps has had an enormous impact on our society and economy.

Almost a third of US adults have used a dating app, and today it's the most common way that Americans find romantic partners.

- [Julia] Recently, these platforms have started charging more money for various services.

And for the first time meeting new people has become a line item on many household budgets alongside groceries and gas.

- But can you really pay your way to a perfect match and how can you protect yourself from the upsellers and scammers who want to profit off your dreams of love?

- Over a third of people who use dating apps say they have spent money on them, either for subscriptions or in-app purchases.

The average amount that a paying customer spends is around $19 a month, but you can certainly pay more if you're desperate-- I mean, motivated enough.

Tinder has a $499 a month subscription while elite dating app, The League, has a VIP membership that costs almost a thousand dollars a week.

Hard to believe someone with that kind of cash needs help finding a date.

- Of course, most platforms still have a freemium tier, but there are a lot of limitations.

You might be restricted on how many profiles you can see or like per day.

Or you might not be able to filter results based on certain criteria like age or height, or hide your own characteristics from others.

Spenders also get to boost their own profiles so they're seen by more people or can give virtual gifts like roses to get the attention of someone who might otherwise not notice them.

- The platforms claim that paying customers will get more and better dates.

And Pew Research did find that people who found a partner on a dating app were more likely to have spent money on it.

But there are also many people out there who've been spending hundreds of dollars a month for years without anything to show for it.

So how can you know whether the cost would be worth it to you?

- To answer that question, we first need to understand how these platforms work.

In the ancient era of eHarmony, users were asked to fill out a lengthy questionnaire and the algorithm, to the extent that there was one, simply introduced people who had common interests and lived nearby.

- But the smartphone changed the rules of the game.

App developers became focused on minimizing friction.

Like a social media app, the value of a dating platform lies in how many people are on it, and if you want a lot of new signups, you don't wanna hit them with a ton of questions up front.

You want them on their service and swiping as soon as possible.

That means that modern dating algorithms are based less on your biographical information and more on how you use the app, who you're liking and messaging, and how other people are responding to you.

- The most popular dating app Tinder launched with an ELO rating system originally designed to rank chess players.

Basically, everyone is assigned a desirability score and it goes up when someone swipes right on you and down if someone swipes left, but the swiper score matters.

If you get liked by a more desirable person, your score will go up a lot.

But if you get rejected by an undesirable person, your rating will take a big hit.

As in chess, the point is to match players who are in the same league, so to speak.

- After some criticism that their system was just a fancy hot or not game, Tinder said in 2019 that it did not rely on the ELO system anymore, but didn't say explicitly that it had been retired or what new system may have replaced it.

- Hinge, another popular dating app, uses an algorithm originally developed by Nobel winning economists, Lloyd Shapley and Alvin E. Roth, which was designed to be a solution to the stable matching problem.

Given two groups of people with individual preferences, how do you pair them up so that no two people would prefer each other over their assigned partner?

- The solution is to allow one group, let's say in our very hetero example, the men, to make proposals to the women in order of preference.

If a woman receives a better offer than our current partner, she can accept it.

Once all the men have finished making their proposals, there will be no two people who would prefer each other over their current partner.

- While neither Tinder nor Hinge are specific about how these algorithms are put into real world practice, it does raise questions about some of their paid features.

Hiding information about yourself or being able to access profiles that are out of your league, doesn't that subvert the algorithm?

It's almost like you're paying for the rules to not apply to you.

- Well, maybe these platforms just really need the money.

After a burst in popularity in the mid 2010s, dating apps user base has been steadily shrinking.

Match Group and Bumble, which make up the majority of the industry's market share, have lost more than $40 billion in market value over the last few years as many of their customers have either settled down or given up.

- At the same time, rising interest rates have slowed the gush of cheap money that fueled much of the tech industry, and now investors are starting to demand profitability.

In response, dating apps are pushing their paid features hard, but some of the tactics are raising complaints from customers.

- For instance, some users claim that once you've run out of your allotted daily likes, the service will show you a very attractive person whom you now have to pay extra to like.

Or you'll be told that several people have liked your profile, but you'll need to pay to see who they are.

According to a lawsuit filed in early 2024, the platforms use addictive game-like design features, which lock users into a perpetual pay-to-play loop.

- Match Group, which owns Tinder and Hinge among others, called the lawsuit ridiculous and contends that they rely on satisfied customers to build their brand.

Indeed, hinge is advertised as the dating app designed to be deleted.

If true, that would make it an outlier in the tech world.

From Netflix to DraftKings to YouTube, the main goal of virtually every online platform is to keep users engaged for as long as possible.

Tinder even advises people to use the app regularly if they wanna find good matches.

- Until we can peek inside their algorithmic black boxes, it's probably safe to assume that dating apps work like most other freemium services.

Many will use it responsibly and temporarily, while a small number of highly addicted whales generate the bulk of the company's revenue.

To avoid becoming a whale yourself, here are a few simple guidelines.

- Quantity does not equal quality.

according to psychological studies, having too many options can create decision paralysis and actually decrease the satisfaction of your eventual choice.

If you've already swiped through a thousand profiles, another hundred is not likely to make a difference.

- Instead, many dating experts advise people to improve their own presentation.

Spend that money on a gym membership, or get professional help on your profile and photos.

Instead of searching for the perfect partner, work on becoming the perfect partner yourself.

- And as always, watch out for scams.

Romance scams stole over a billion dollars from Americans in 2023 alone, and that only counts the victims that weren't too embarrassed to report.

These scammers target people who are lonely and looking for love.

So dating apps are a natural hunting ground.

In fact, in 2019, the FTC estimated that as many as 25 to 30% of match.com members who registered each day were using match.com to perpetrate scams.

If anyone you meet on these platforms ever asks for money or gift cards or encourages you to invest in crypto, they're almost certainly after your pocketbook and not your heart.

- Do in part to these pitfalls and prices, gen Zers have been less likely than older generations to use dating apps.

Preferring to meet people on TikTok, Snapchat, or even IRL.

- Besides saving money, it is a way to reclaim a slice of the human experience from Silicon Valley.

After all, people used to be able to meet each other and fall in love without a profit hungry middleman setting the terms of the courtship.

- As long as people are looking for partners, there will probably be others looking to capitalize on it.

But it's nice to remember that no algorithm yet has been able to fully map the human heart.

And some things like love are impossible to commodify.

- For now.