Tinder is terrible, but not for the reason you think

I'm ~2 years post divorce. That's not for sympathy, in this context, that only serves to set up the fact that I recently decided that I should start taking some sort of action to get back into dating. Since it's been two decades since I last was in the dating pool, I'm basically starting over from scratch, and honestly, dating as an adult in a major city is almost completely different from the closely packed social scene that is college anyway. So, Tinder seemed like as good a place as any to start. Low commitment in terms of the effort to put together a profile and get to a point where you can potentially meet people (i.e. no huge questionnaire), and I figured it would be ok if I had some missteps where I am awkward, and "not looking for anything serious right now" would be ok, as would something more.

Turns out, the idea might still be right, but the platform is really, really not. I went from signing up to deleting my account in 3 weeks.

While there are other reasons related to the actual framework it provides for human interaction that make Tinder terrible for exactly the reasons you might think, the primary reason I left is that Tinder, the app itself, is awful, and it leads to a terrible user experience. And as the geek I am, I thought there might be some value in writing that up, even though it means having to admit to any readers (all...both of you?) that I was using Tinder in the first place.
I come away from this experience feeling like I've wasted a pretty phenomenal amount of time in the last 3 weeks or so, and wanting to bail on the app that quickly is probably the opposite of what Tinder is going for, since they make their money by showing you ads and getting you to pay for additional tiers of service. Here's a few brief points about why:

• Navigation and interaction: Pretty much everyone is familiar with Tinder's basic UI at this point as it's entered pop culture - swipe left for no, right for yes. You can also press a heart button or an X if you prefer. But there's a bunch of other stuff overloaded on that basic interaction that makes it counter-intuitive and frustrating. 
• On the main screen (the one that each new profile defaults to), which is just the picture, work/education, and distance, you can tap on the left or right side of the screen to go back and forth between the pictures, swiping left and right is no and yes for the profile itself, and swiping up is a super-like. Based on the number of people who make a point to note that super-likes are always an accident in their bio, that last bit is something that confuses nearly everyone, and seems to have no actual value for its intended purpose. Want to scroll down a bit to read the rest of the bio that happens to be truncated on this screen? Don't swipe up like you do everywhere else, oops congratulations you just super-liked that person, and there's no way to undo it unless you want to upgrade to a paid tier.
• In the detailed profile where you can actually see what they've written in their bio, swipe left and right scrolls between the pictures, and swipe up/down scrolls the screen just like every other app on the planet. But here, you cannot swipe right/left for yes/no on the profile, only use the buttons. So you have two completely different modes of interaction, that you are rapidly switching between and must keep that context handy as you switch. What could possibly go wrong?
• Upsells - Tinder really, really wants you to pay for service, and they are busily making the free tier less and less attractive. The problem is that in the process, they're making their platform less attractive and reducing the perceived value of upgrading. Tinder already feels a bit like a ghost town for a number of different reasons, and limiting access just makes that feel worse because it takes longer for matches to surface. Add in effectively accentuating the bad UI so that they can sell you features that compensate for it like undos, and it becomes pretty disillusioning.
• Silent failures. Ever get lost, and realize that you've gone in a circle because you start recognizing landmarks? No fewer than six times (aka, at least twice a week), I had the same thing happen on Tinder. "I recognize that girl - I already swiped {left/right} on her." Turns out for reasons that I can't be bothered to troubleshoot, Tinder doesn't always register your swipes, even though the app moves on to the next person as if it did, rather than throwing any sort of error. And it's fairly common, because there's an entry in the FAQ about it that suggests switching from WiFi to cellular data or vice versa, or logging out and logging back in to your account, which means they can't be bothered to troubleshoot it either, but clearly there's some serious fragility in the way that they deal with network connectivity issues. The latter fixed it for me, but since there's no way to know that it is broken, you don't know that you need to do something to fix it. You can swipe and swipe and swipe and swipe, and your only clue there might be an issue is that you start seeing repeats, or you realize that you haven't hit your yes quota (common belief is you get about 50 right swipes per day as a guy) in the typical amount of time.  How's it feel to literally waste an hour swiping when you're already wondering about the usefulness of the app and platform due to low numbers of matches for time spent?
• Brand confusion: Tinder has two different types of people on it - those still using it as a way to find no-strings hookups, and those using it as a more traditional dating app to meet people for something more serious. Those two types are at complete cross purposes as far as the interaction with the platform. 
• Tinder only lets you filter your candidates on age range and distance from you. But it does not indicate whether people matching your distance range are there temporarily. It also has a paid feature called "passport" that allows a user to change their location and get a head start on finding matches wherever they're going to be soon. But this means that people who have limited the location so that they only see local people get a bunch of profiles for people who don't live anywhere near them, and that fact may or may not be obvious from the profile, meaning you have to watch carefully for the "nn miles away" to be higher than expected, or to notice that the "lives in" location doesn't sound familiar, or or catch a keyword in the bio. Miss it, and you may "waste" one of your limited daily right swipes on someone who is nowhere near you.
• The inability to identify and filter which type of Tinder user you are means that everyone tries to filter by saying things in their bio, which still gets ignored, and leads to a situation where (as far as I can tell) women get inundated with messages from the wrong type of guy, and the resulting noise means they don't see messages from users that they might actually be interested in.
• Opaque algorithm - no one really has any idea how Tinder decides what profiles to show you in what order. One would hope that perhaps it would show you profiles that have already liked you, followed by profiles that have been active recently, so that you're not seeing a bunch of people who have mostly abandoned their profiles or only check them once every 2 weeks and increase the chances of both matches and the subsequent chat interaction between matches. But I think that's probably optimistic and not really backed up by my experiences on the platform and their efforts to sell you access to those that liked you. There also seems to be no weighting given to completeness of profile, so you constantly see profiles that have no bio, only one picture or images that even a very rudimentary image processor could tell is not a person, super low-quality images, or repeated images. An app that lives and dies by the visual doesn't seem to put much effort into that aspect of things. 

I'll readily admit that some of this might be that I was somehow fundamentally "doin' it wrong" on Tinder, and that was more to blame for the fact that after 3 weeks of being on the site daily, I had 3 matches to show for it, 1 of which unmatched me a day after I messaged, the other two never responded to my initial message. I get it; I'm a 41 year old divorcee with 2 kids on an app for twentysomethings, but I think I would have been more willing to tolerate the issues with the app if it led to some level of success. Because it didn't, it just added insult to injury.