Musings on the swipey dating apps

Well, after a bit more than a year of blissful ignorance about what the dating apps were doing, I'm back at it, so I thought I'd write a little update to my previous post.

After my generally terrible experience with Tinder and its awful UI that caused me to bail after 3 weeks, I went to Bumble. Turns out I never really discussed it in comparison to Tinder when I used it for a couple of months in the fall of 2019, so briefly:  

Bumble is another swipey app, and as I understand it, was formed by a woman who had been in a leadership role at Tinder and parted ways with them due to sexual harassment and other issues, so the "like Tinder, but better" vibe definitely figured in. Bumble had been hands-down the better overall experience, because it addressed 95% of Tinder's counterintuitive UI, the silent failures (it throws up a flag "you're using Bumble offline"), and because it was a newer app and was trying to attract people, less upsell. It also was designed to address what I called brand confusion on Tinder, where it was trying to be both a dating app and a hookup app, because there were categories of things beyond the short bio that you could use as filters, but only if you had populated them, meaning there was incentive to complete that part of the profile. There were also prompts for additional info so that you have more to go on than the pictures and a couple hundred characters of bio. Additionally, there are rules about photos having to contain actual people, so you didn't end up with dating profiles with no actual pictures of the person they were representing. Between this, and the fact that when there's a match, women have to initiate the conversation, they were definitely pitching it as a place for a safer, more useful experience for those wanting to find something more than a hookup, but without the heavy time commitment of building a giant profile to sacrifice to the algorithm gods for the "matching you with science" dating sites. So Bumble had better quality profiles, and the feeling that you were actually getting somewhere faster for the time you invested. And measured by actual success, it worked for me - I matched with someone I was able to chat with long enough to decide we wanted to meet in person, and date for more than a year, during which my Bumble account was happily dormant.

But, after reactivating my account in late January and dusting off the place, I discovered that sometime last year, Bumble instituted a swipe limit, and it's really aggressive - something like 25 yes swipes every 24 hours if you're on their free tier. They still have generally better quality profiles, but you're seeing a lot less of them in a given session, meaning that everyone's match chances are way down, despite lots of new users due to "well, it's a pandemic, how the hell else am I going to meet people?" There are also a lot of efforts to upsell to get better access to various features. 

So, I groaned and signed back up for Tinder. Most of my previous complaints are still true, but 6 weeks in, I'm at least more used to the UI now. Tinder has a yes swipe limit too, but it's more like 50, and it resets every 12 hours, so it's a lot less intrusive. I suspect Tinder is still playing some games with what profiles they show you in order to get you to go paid, because I frequently am told that there are no more matches in my area, but there are several that are in their daily "top picks" that may or may not eventually show up in the regular feed, and closing the app and reopening frequently brings several additional profiles. But it seems like when the available profiles drop below a certain threshold, they'll arbitrarily ignore your age range and distance limits, so some subset of what you're getting isn't actually usable. Tinder has also started making it look like you have new messages so that they can show you more ads than the ones that show up in between profiles, and that seems kind of cruel.

But Tinder has a somewhat more fundamental problem that they don't seem interested in actually solving - fake and otherwise garbage profiles that ruin the signal to noise ratio. This is likely Tinder trying to strike a balance between keeping you on the platform longer swiping through garbage so they can show you more ads and keep trying to convince you to pay for the service, and having a reputation as a waste of time/ not worth the effort.

Anecdotally, I'd say that 25-40% of the profiles I'm getting shown are not useful because they're doing some or all of the below: 

• using generic photos (landscapes, memes, food, etc) instead of pictures of the person they're purportedly representing
• leaving the bio completely blank
• These first two are especially frustrating because it's a site where you're literally deciding based on a handful of pictures and a few words if you might want to meet someone. I suspect some of this is women who think "well, they're not going to read the profile anyway and they're swiping right on everyone in the hopes of getting a match, so why bother?" but for those of us that aren't, it's just wasting everyone's time and limiting the potential match pool.

• advertising their sensual/erotic massage services
• and they know they're likely doing something prohibited, because the people generating these accounts do things like post a picture full of text with details about their services and how to contact them with a code word on another platform (usually snap or instagram), or deliberately misspell certain keywords (add spaces, extra letters and numbers etc) to defeat pattern matching. 
• a catfish to try to get you to sign up for another paid-only dating site (Ashley Madison is still a thing, apparently), their Onlyfans, or some similar paid content site
• putting their location as a big US city so that they're shown to people as a local option but actually being based in any number of remote countries, ostensibly wanting to chat to improve their English, but I suspect also hoping for import dating, or another type of catfishing.

I'd been dutifully reporting the more obvious of these, but I suspect this is a fool's errand, and in the last couple of weeks it appears that Tinder either accidentally or intentionally made this harder. It used to be once you reported a profile, you could then swipe left so you wouldn't see it again. Reporting a profile now makes it disappear, but it'll show back up in your options later, so you have to interact with it twice. Similarly, if you match with someone and they play any of these games in private messages, you have to report them before they realize you aren't falling for it and unmatch you, because it's extremely difficult to report someone after they've unmatched. 

It is difficult to continue putting time and effort into either of these sites right now due to the lack of success, but it is harder to discern where the frustration about the crappiness of the platform ends, and my own limitations as attractive to the pool of people I'm interested in begins. Either way, I do appear to be getting exactly what I paid for this time around.