If you can wear a tiger tracksuit, why aren't you wearing a tiger tracksuit?
Okay, so I spent a few more days poking around on dating apps. I did not get a date, thought I did have a very nice chat with a cool lady who called me "Amazing" and "Hot", so I'm going to take that glow with me for a while.
Browsing at first, I was incredibly intimidated. Tinder seems populated entirely by Instagram models. Hinge has lawyers who do an hour of yoga each day and spend half the years in glamorous overseas destinations. I changed my looking for to "everybody" to get a sense of the competition, and folks, Straight Men are not okay. I'm not going to say that I'm perfect, but I have stable employment, hobbies, reasonable personal grooming, can carry a conversation, and know how to take a selfie. Which puts me in the top 20% of straight dudes easy, maybe top 10%.
But then I started thinking. The big difference between this version of online dating and OkCupid a decade ago is the incredibly aggressive monetization. You want basic features like being able to see who liked you or narrow your searches down, expect to cough up $30 a month. You want to tell someone you really like them, and it's another few dollars each time, just like a slot machine.
Match Group is a master of Dark Patterns, and they own all the platforms. They control the vertical, they control the horizontal, they control who you see and who sees you. I'm not outright accusing them of lying to their users, but if I were a data scientist with questionable ethics (oh shit, I am), I could do some outright evil stuff to get users to fork over their money.
Fore example, I would definitely show new users incredibly attractive matches at first to get them hooked. If they did what I did and checked people like themselves to scope out the competition, I'd show some duds. "Abusive" users, guys who swipe right on everyone because they're horny and scammers who also swipe right on everyone because they're looking for guys who are horny and dumb help drive up the 'someone likes you' count to get people to subscribe to premium tiers. Inactive profiles can be sprinkled in to get users to spend consumable super-likes to no effect, and everything should be carefully tracked to maximize captivation metrics.
I do believe there real people out there who I'd love to meet, and who'd love to meet me as well. But hacking the platform and not letting it hack me is going to be a challenge. The only reasonable attitude when dealing with one of these platforms is to assume that it is an algorithmic demon feeding me lies.