I would frame selection a bit differently. I think dating apps both select for people who want to keep their options open or are always on the lookout for a better dating partner and also nudge our behavior in that direction. The swipe paradigm in particular encourages browsing and dopamine addiction, which is fine for book shopping but ends up feeling transactional and exhausting in the long run in dating. You can't really do that as much in any other venue, even speed dating. I know some dating apps have tried to mitigate this behavior, but it seems to go against the whole online marketplace dynamic and is thus usually unsuccessful.
To make dating apps feel less dystopian, we would need to limit your selection of potential dates in a way that more closely approximates real-world dating.
> I have friends with varying levels of extroversion and agreeableness, but all of my friends seem to have high openness to experience. When I meet someone new, I’m convinced I can guess their openness to ±10% by the time they’ve completed five sentences.
Ditto! I am thinking of friends and acquaintances I gel with really well, and they are all at least 68th percentile openness.
I asked chatgpt for a few statistics about how many dates people get:
> wide dispersion: most singles go on very few in-person dates in a year, while a small minority go on tons. a recent (oct 2025) survey write-up pegs u.s. singles at ~1.74 in-person dates in the last year on average. that’s all dates, not just “first” or “from apps,” but it sets the baseline that the median is near zero. (https://www.datingnews.com/daters-pulse/the-great-dating-deficit-survey/?utm_source=chatgpt.com)
I don't know how often you can go at a speed dating event, and get 15 5 minutes first dates, you land just above the average, and if you go to an event like that you're beating the power users, all while not spending hours and hours on apps trying to get dates.
So here goes my theory: speed dating allows you to skip a hard part (getting a date) and give you a massive volume of first date for less efforts than apps.
Thank you for mentioning non-hotness information in pictures! It bugs be how no one seems to think of it
An alternative is integrating this information into our idea of hotness, which would make hotness way less superficial
On the "behavior" section, are you comparing niceness only between dating apps dates and speed dating dates?
If so, doesn't it neglect the time that people spend exchanging messages on apps before dates?
The "meanness" of people seems very relevant here
And actually, maybe it's not about meanness so much as laziness
In my experience it's really hard to get people to meet in person for a date, but I assume that after meeting in person once people are more motivated
The better bandwidth is certainly helpful in assessing how attractive people are but I feel like it also makes your brain see them as actual people or something
I feel like the intersection between this question and the question "why is flirting hard?" is pretty large.
TL;DR: not only are dating apps an algorithm, they make us also into algorithms.
In other words, I don't think "high bandwidth" quite captures all of what's important about in-person. It's also "low latency". In other words, it's interactive in human time. Both "high bandwidth" and "low latency" are essential to natural human interactions.
To expand on that, lets say we're sitting across the table at a speed dating event.
- We do basic introductions
- I say something I think is a bit funny, wait nervously for a reaction
- You laugh a little bit, signaling it's not really that funny but you acknowledge the effort
- I appreciate your reaction and adjust accordingly
- You say "that reminds me of..." and tell a slightly personal story
- I respond emphatically
... and on we go.
Now let's try the same thing on a dating app.
- We do basic introductions
- I say something I think is a bit funny, wait nervously for a reaction
- 24 hours go by while I get even more nervous that I blew it with this person with a hot picture
- After waiting the internet-approved period of time designed to most heighten anticipation, the other person responds with mild encouragement
- I spend eight hours carefully considering what next step will maximize my chances of staying in the game
- ...on we go.
In brief: There are no authentic interactions online. Maybe that's what "high bandwidth" is meant to capture, but swapping videos could also be "high bandwidth"*. So I think that "low latency" should be called out explicitly.
By the way, people who work in systems design will tell you that "high bandwidth" and "low latency" are often in tension with one another. I think that the technical term you want here is really "wide spectrum". In person we are signaling with not only our words but our tone of voice, timing, body posture, facial expression, nodding, little flirtations like playing with our hair, maybe even little touches if it's going well. We are using lots of "channels", my network engineer friends would say.
----
*Business idea: Dating app x TikTok. All contact on the app is in the form of back-and-forth short-form videos. You're welcome.
1. Many, perhaps most, people are happy with dating apps but don’t publicly voice positive sentiment. I had a pleasant time on them and found someone, but I don’t go around saying how great the apps are. We mostly see grievances in the same way that we mostly see negative reviews of insurance providers (failed claimants post more often).
2. Back in the 2010s it was fashionable for dating sites to have data blogs. Hinge once revealed that the top 10% of men and women received 58% and 46% of all likes, respectively. The bottom 50% received 4% and 8% (no typos). Basically we collectively (1) roughly agree on who’s attractive and (2) disproportionately pursue these people rather than our ‘proper’ match. The result is disappointment for these optimistic overshooters. Maybe in real life people are more pragmatic, either by choice or constraint.
3. Desirable/functional people are only on there a short time because they find someone and drop off. Uggos and weirdos stay on there a longer time, and so you’re more likely to see them than in some hypothetical random encounter model. This leads to sour experiences because no one likes them, not even other uggos and weirdos.
4. Higher sociosexuality in men leads to lots of lying about dating intentions, i.e. they claim to be looking for a relationship but in fact just pursue casual sex (intention is an actual field you fill out in most apps). If 30% of men are there for casual sex but only 10% of women are, then the excess men have an incentive to lie. This leads to bad experiences for women seeking relationships and engenders general cynicism (‘where have all the good men gone’). In a similar dynamic to #3, these deceivers are on the apps for longer than the ones with a genuine intention to partner up, so you run into them more than you seemingly should.
The missing variable in this conversation is an individual's level of "commitment to relationship seeking" (CRS)
Dating apps generally have very low barriers to joining, especially if free, and have many users with low CRS. Users with high CRS have bad experiences with flaky low CRS users on apps
By contrast the barriers to join speed dating are higher, so it's a higher CRS pool and therefore a more effective use of time and a better experience
Testable hypothesis: dating apps with higher barriers to entry (eg paid) will have higher user satisfaction because users have higher CRS
A major factor not mentioned: Adverse business incentives.
On a dating app: every time a user seeking a long-term match succeeds, the app gets deleted. If the user fails, the app stays
Tinder has an Elo score on each user. Cynically, it's in Tinder's best business interest to *never show you* perfect Elo matches... it should first show you profiles that are way out of your league so you start swiping, then show you matches that are a little below your league so you go on unsatisfying dates.
Speed dating events have the same adverse incentive — they'd rather you come back for more events than lose you as a customer — but they're not sophisticated enough to act on it the same way. Best they can do is just put people in a room.
Well, this is kind of the idea behind all the oligopoly stuff. I'm sure the dating apps would love to intentionally keep all their users around and paying forever. For the same reason, I'm sure restaurants would love to use the cheapest possible ingredients and zero-effort recipes. But in a competitive marketplace, they wouldn't be able to get away with any of that, because they have to compete!
Tinder WOULD love to keep users around, but there's no reason for users to stay once they've found a match.
it doesn't seem like an oligopoly problem... as you point out, there's lots of niche copycats that keep cropping up. None will succeed and supplant the market leader because a) they're niches, b) they have the same adverse business model, c) there's extremely low switching costs — it's trivial for someone active in the dating market to surf many apps at once
Feasibly there's an opportunity to build a dating company with better alignment. For example: Suppose the app is free, but charges $200 once you've found a partner. Then, everyone's core incentive is aligned: Users want amazing matches; the quicker the app matches people the faster it makes money. And yet, tricky: once you find your match on tinder you have a strong incentive to lie to them about how you met.
Maybe there's a way to vertically integrate? Like I dunno, a dating app that provides exclusive event and restaurant reservations might have the right incentives to match cool people and continually give them a reason to stick around, pay fees, produce ad impressions.
People do not have perfect information about the apps though - if the apps are just good enough that users don't give up and look elsewhere, they don't get out competed even though they suck as long as they do better at eg marketing
There was a paper.. I want to say 15 years ago... where the author posited the best compatibility indicator is having a live shared experience (it was in the 3D will solve everything era). "Add 3D to dating apps, talk while you tour a virtual art gallery together".
Disclaimer: I have no personal experience with any form of dating other than dating friends I met in school, and eventually marrying one of them. Personally, dating apps kind of horrify me and I'm very very grateful I never had to use one. Still, I have to ask, could it be that part of the explanation for "2. Lots of people hate dating apps" is that people like to complain? Like, despite my personal distaste for the concept, empirically, the apps have actually done a really good job of producing marriages and other long-term partnerships for people in my social circle. Of course they don't work for everyone, but the unsuccessful cases are the exceptions. On the other hand I don't, in fact, know anyone who's met anyone through a speed dating event.
Well I certainly like to complain. (You know what I hate? Having to sleep and get haircuts!) But it sure seems like people complain about dating apps a lot, no? That does seem a bit paradoxical given their popularity, but I think that's because people feel they're *unnecessarily* unpleasant.
But I don't trust people's judgment on what should or shouldn't be "necessary". I think people often say things like "obviously Product X could be 10 times more effective for 10% the price and 0% of the negative secondary social consequences if only Company X weren't conspiring with capitalism to suck" when they clearly have no idea how to solve the problem that Product X addresses nor have they ever tried.
Speed dating has a chance of success because it is a fun common activity. Dating apps always fail because they are soul crushing searches. That's all there is to it.
Soulmates aren't found; they're made. You aren't running an optimized search algorithm for a soulmate, and if you approach dating that way you'll never find one. The funnel diagram gets it all wrong. You're supposed to be having positive and meaningful life experiences with reasonably nice people, and in the process creating your soulmate and being created as one. This doesn't benefit from scale past a very low point. It's better to put more time into a smaller number of decent prospects.
Again, you're trying to make the one, not find the one. Speed dating does this; apps don't.
> If it’s true, then why aren’t dating apps trying harder to provide that same information that in-person interactions do?
One possibility is that the smartphone medium is just not suited to convey the relevant information. Maybe attraction is driven to a significant part by things that can easily be picked up in person but not over a screen - e.g. pheromones, smell, posture, gait, manner of speech, lack of nervousness, etc.
I'm not a dating app user, but it seems to me that in "real world" you already have a pretty good idea if you like someone (based partly on the things listed above) before you go on a date, whereas it's the reverse on apps.
Okcupids “love is blind” story seems relevant. Basically people select on attractiveness immensely in online profiles but in real life will let people compensate poor looks with other traits more (and find matches they would never consider online). So, according to them, people don’t know their preference function well. So they also didn’t want to use okcupids blind dating platform, even though pairs of inequivalent hotness enjoyed each other’s company sometimes. I don’t know how much I buy the story but it fits your conundrum.
Thanks, this gives me an excuse to post a paragraph that I couldn't figure out how to fit into the post:
> If you talk to couples who met organically, you'll often find that at least one of them wasn't romantically interested in the other. But when people interact for a while non-romantically, they tend to *become* attracted. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propinquity] As far as I can tell, these couples are as happy as anyone else. One of the sad things about dating apps is that there seems to be no chance for this to happen.
It also fits the (slightly surprising fact) that people report slightly differing partner preferences for a lot of physical and psychological traits but don’t actually act on the preferences (prefs don’t predict liking/matches/satisfaction, a model where everyone prefers the same stuff works just as well). I think this isn’t true for age, race and religion, not sure about education/class, which is an assortativity variable that has recently gone up a lot.
Network effects are one thing. Business model is another. A subscription dating app only makes money so long as you are dating. Why should it help you find your ideal marriage partner? That would end your subscription.
What do you all think about the speed dating meetups haha
I would frame selection a bit differently. I think dating apps both select for people who want to keep their options open or are always on the lookout for a better dating partner and also nudge our behavior in that direction. The swipe paradigm in particular encourages browsing and dopamine addiction, which is fine for book shopping but ends up feeling transactional and exhausting in the long run in dating. You can't really do that as much in any other venue, even speed dating. I know some dating apps have tried to mitigate this behavior, but it seems to go against the whole online marketplace dynamic and is thus usually unsuccessful.
To make dating apps feel less dystopian, we would need to limit your selection of potential dates in a way that more closely approximates real-world dating.
> I have friends with varying levels of extroversion and agreeableness, but all of my friends seem to have high openness to experience. When I meet someone new, I’m convinced I can guess their openness to ±10% by the time they’ve completed five sentences.
Ditto! I am thinking of friends and acquaintances I gel with really well, and they are all at least 68th percentile openness.
I asked chatgpt for a few statistics about how many dates people get:
> wide dispersion: most singles go on very few in-person dates in a year, while a small minority go on tons. a recent (oct 2025) survey write-up pegs u.s. singles at ~1.74 in-person dates in the last year on average. that’s all dates, not just “first” or “from apps,” but it sets the baseline that the median is near zero. (https://www.datingnews.com/daters-pulse/the-great-dating-deficit-survey/?utm_source=chatgpt.com)
> spend data ⇒ frequency proxy: match’s annual “singles in america” reports show average monthly dating spend ~$213, $310 for “active daters.” if you pair that with typical first-date spend estimates ($100–$190), you’re looking at something like ~1–3 dates/month for active daters, again not app-only, but it constrains the plausible upper bound for the average user. (https://www.globaldatinginsights.com/featured/matchs-singles-in-america-study-reveals-modern-dating-culture-shifts/?utm_source=chatgpt.com)
> demographic wrinkle: some polls say gen z averages ~14 dates/year, again all dates, not just first/app. helps sanity-check the “few per month” ballpark. (https://nypost.com/2025/05/21/lifestyle/where-americans-spend-the-most-and-least-on-first-dates/?utm_source=chatgpt.com)
> anecdotal ceiling: media profiles of “power users” report ~3 dates/week across apps—think 10–12/month—but that’s far from typical. (https://www.wired.com/story/confessions-of-a-hinge-power-user/?utm_source=chatgpt.com)
I don't know how often you can go at a speed dating event, and get 15 5 minutes first dates, you land just above the average, and if you go to an event like that you're beating the power users, all while not spending hours and hours on apps trying to get dates.
So here goes my theory: speed dating allows you to skip a hard part (getting a date) and give you a massive volume of first date for less efforts than apps.
Thank you for mentioning non-hotness information in pictures! It bugs be how no one seems to think of it
An alternative is integrating this information into our idea of hotness, which would make hotness way less superficial
On the "behavior" section, are you comparing niceness only between dating apps dates and speed dating dates?
If so, doesn't it neglect the time that people spend exchanging messages on apps before dates?
The "meanness" of people seems very relevant here
And actually, maybe it's not about meanness so much as laziness
In my experience it's really hard to get people to meet in person for a date, but I assume that after meeting in person once people are more motivated
The better bandwidth is certainly helpful in assessing how attractive people are but I feel like it also makes your brain see them as actual people or something
I feel like the intersection between this question and the question "why is flirting hard?" is pretty large.
TL;DR: not only are dating apps an algorithm, they make us also into algorithms.
In other words, I don't think "high bandwidth" quite captures all of what's important about in-person. It's also "low latency". In other words, it's interactive in human time. Both "high bandwidth" and "low latency" are essential to natural human interactions.
To expand on that, lets say we're sitting across the table at a speed dating event.
- We do basic introductions
- I say something I think is a bit funny, wait nervously for a reaction
- You laugh a little bit, signaling it's not really that funny but you acknowledge the effort
- I appreciate your reaction and adjust accordingly
- You say "that reminds me of..." and tell a slightly personal story
- I respond emphatically
... and on we go.
Now let's try the same thing on a dating app.
- We do basic introductions
- I say something I think is a bit funny, wait nervously for a reaction
- 24 hours go by while I get even more nervous that I blew it with this person with a hot picture
- After waiting the internet-approved period of time designed to most heighten anticipation, the other person responds with mild encouragement
- I spend eight hours carefully considering what next step will maximize my chances of staying in the game
- ...on we go.
In brief: There are no authentic interactions online. Maybe that's what "high bandwidth" is meant to capture, but swapping videos could also be "high bandwidth"*. So I think that "low latency" should be called out explicitly.
By the way, people who work in systems design will tell you that "high bandwidth" and "low latency" are often in tension with one another. I think that the technical term you want here is really "wide spectrum". In person we are signaling with not only our words but our tone of voice, timing, body posture, facial expression, nodding, little flirtations like playing with our hair, maybe even little touches if it's going well. We are using lots of "channels", my network engineer friends would say.
----
*Business idea: Dating app x TikTok. All contact on the app is in the form of back-and-forth short-form videos. You're welcome.
Alternative theories:
1. Many, perhaps most, people are happy with dating apps but don’t publicly voice positive sentiment. I had a pleasant time on them and found someone, but I don’t go around saying how great the apps are. We mostly see grievances in the same way that we mostly see negative reviews of insurance providers (failed claimants post more often).
2. Back in the 2010s it was fashionable for dating sites to have data blogs. Hinge once revealed that the top 10% of men and women received 58% and 46% of all likes, respectively. The bottom 50% received 4% and 8% (no typos). Basically we collectively (1) roughly agree on who’s attractive and (2) disproportionately pursue these people rather than our ‘proper’ match. The result is disappointment for these optimistic overshooters. Maybe in real life people are more pragmatic, either by choice or constraint.
3. Desirable/functional people are only on there a short time because they find someone and drop off. Uggos and weirdos stay on there a longer time, and so you’re more likely to see them than in some hypothetical random encounter model. This leads to sour experiences because no one likes them, not even other uggos and weirdos.
4. Higher sociosexuality in men leads to lots of lying about dating intentions, i.e. they claim to be looking for a relationship but in fact just pursue casual sex (intention is an actual field you fill out in most apps). If 30% of men are there for casual sex but only 10% of women are, then the excess men have an incentive to lie. This leads to bad experiences for women seeking relationships and engenders general cynicism (‘where have all the good men gone’). In a similar dynamic to #3, these deceivers are on the apps for longer than the ones with a genuine intention to partner up, so you run into them more than you seemingly should.
The missing variable in this conversation is an individual's level of "commitment to relationship seeking" (CRS)
Dating apps generally have very low barriers to joining, especially if free, and have many users with low CRS. Users with high CRS have bad experiences with flaky low CRS users on apps
By contrast the barriers to join speed dating are higher, so it's a higher CRS pool and therefore a more effective use of time and a better experience
Testable hypothesis: dating apps with higher barriers to entry (eg paid) will have higher user satisfaction because users have higher CRS
A major factor not mentioned: Adverse business incentives.
On a dating app: every time a user seeking a long-term match succeeds, the app gets deleted. If the user fails, the app stays
Tinder has an Elo score on each user. Cynically, it's in Tinder's best business interest to *never show you* perfect Elo matches... it should first show you profiles that are way out of your league so you start swiping, then show you matches that are a little below your league so you go on unsatisfying dates.
Speed dating events have the same adverse incentive — they'd rather you come back for more events than lose you as a customer — but they're not sophisticated enough to act on it the same way. Best they can do is just put people in a room.
Well, this is kind of the idea behind all the oligopoly stuff. I'm sure the dating apps would love to intentionally keep all their users around and paying forever. For the same reason, I'm sure restaurants would love to use the cheapest possible ingredients and zero-effort recipes. But in a competitive marketplace, they wouldn't be able to get away with any of that, because they have to compete!
Tinder WOULD love to keep users around, but there's no reason for users to stay once they've found a match.
it doesn't seem like an oligopoly problem... as you point out, there's lots of niche copycats that keep cropping up. None will succeed and supplant the market leader because a) they're niches, b) they have the same adverse business model, c) there's extremely low switching costs — it's trivial for someone active in the dating market to surf many apps at once
Feasibly there's an opportunity to build a dating company with better alignment. For example: Suppose the app is free, but charges $200 once you've found a partner. Then, everyone's core incentive is aligned: Users want amazing matches; the quicker the app matches people the faster it makes money. And yet, tricky: once you find your match on tinder you have a strong incentive to lie to them about how you met.
Maybe there's a way to vertically integrate? Like I dunno, a dating app that provides exclusive event and restaurant reservations might have the right incentives to match cool people and continually give them a reason to stick around, pay fees, produce ad impressions.
I can imagine a government sponsored dating app meant to encourage citizens to procreate. That's a problem creeping up on lots of developed countries.
People do not have perfect information about the apps though - if the apps are just good enough that users don't give up and look elsewhere, they don't get out competed even though they suck as long as they do better at eg marketing
There was a paper.. I want to say 15 years ago... where the author posited the best compatibility indicator is having a live shared experience (it was in the 3D will solve everything era). "Add 3D to dating apps, talk while you tour a virtual art gallery together".
Disclaimer: I have no personal experience with any form of dating other than dating friends I met in school, and eventually marrying one of them. Personally, dating apps kind of horrify me and I'm very very grateful I never had to use one. Still, I have to ask, could it be that part of the explanation for "2. Lots of people hate dating apps" is that people like to complain? Like, despite my personal distaste for the concept, empirically, the apps have actually done a really good job of producing marriages and other long-term partnerships for people in my social circle. Of course they don't work for everyone, but the unsuccessful cases are the exceptions. On the other hand I don't, in fact, know anyone who's met anyone through a speed dating event.
Well I certainly like to complain. (You know what I hate? Having to sleep and get haircuts!) But it sure seems like people complain about dating apps a lot, no? That does seem a bit paradoxical given their popularity, but I think that's because people feel they're *unnecessarily* unpleasant.
But I don't trust people's judgment on what should or shouldn't be "necessary". I think people often say things like "obviously Product X could be 10 times more effective for 10% the price and 0% of the negative secondary social consequences if only Company X weren't conspiring with capitalism to suck" when they clearly have no idea how to solve the problem that Product X addresses nor have they ever tried.
Speed dating has a chance of success because it is a fun common activity. Dating apps always fail because they are soul crushing searches. That's all there is to it.
Soulmates aren't found; they're made. You aren't running an optimized search algorithm for a soulmate, and if you approach dating that way you'll never find one. The funnel diagram gets it all wrong. You're supposed to be having positive and meaningful life experiences with reasonably nice people, and in the process creating your soulmate and being created as one. This doesn't benefit from scale past a very low point. It's better to put more time into a smaller number of decent prospects.
Again, you're trying to make the one, not find the one. Speed dating does this; apps don't.
Who is "you" here? Me?
Not you specifically, unless you're actively trying to find someone to settle down with. I was using the "generic you"
> If it’s true, then why aren’t dating apps trying harder to provide that same information that in-person interactions do?
One possibility is that the smartphone medium is just not suited to convey the relevant information. Maybe attraction is driven to a significant part by things that can easily be picked up in person but not over a screen - e.g. pheromones, smell, posture, gait, manner of speech, lack of nervousness, etc.
I'm not a dating app user, but it seems to me that in "real world" you already have a pretty good idea if you like someone (based partly on the things listed above) before you go on a date, whereas it's the reverse on apps.
When I saw this in my feed, I didn't notice the colon in the title and I was *very* intrigued.
Okcupids “love is blind” story seems relevant. Basically people select on attractiveness immensely in online profiles but in real life will let people compensate poor looks with other traits more (and find matches they would never consider online). So, according to them, people don’t know their preference function well. So they also didn’t want to use okcupids blind dating platform, even though pairs of inequivalent hotness enjoyed each other’s company sometimes. I don’t know how much I buy the story but it fits your conundrum.
https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/okcupid/weexperimentonhumanbeings.html
Thanks, this gives me an excuse to post a paragraph that I couldn't figure out how to fit into the post:
> If you talk to couples who met organically, you'll often find that at least one of them wasn't romantically interested in the other. But when people interact for a while non-romantically, they tend to *become* attracted. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propinquity] As far as I can tell, these couples are as happy as anyone else. One of the sad things about dating apps is that there seems to be no chance for this to happen.
It also fits the (slightly surprising fact) that people report slightly differing partner preferences for a lot of physical and psychological traits but don’t actually act on the preferences (prefs don’t predict liking/matches/satisfaction, a model where everyone prefers the same stuff works just as well). I think this isn’t true for age, race and religion, not sure about education/class, which is an assortativity variable that has recently gone up a lot.
Network effects are one thing. Business model is another. A subscription dating app only makes money so long as you are dating. Why should it help you find your ideal marriage partner? That would end your subscription.