Every dating app in the history of dating apps claims to be designed for your benefit—to help you find love (or a hookup, whatever you’re into). But unsurprisingly, these apps are extremely exploitative.
Now, anyone who’s spent more than five minutes swiping on a dating app knows just how discouraging it can be. But there’s something that keeps many of us returning for more, right?
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Yeah, it’s called addiction.
Match Group, the owner of Tinder and Hinge, has even been scrutinized for this specific reason.
“Harnessing powerful technologies and hidden algorithms, Match intentionally designs the platforms with addictive, game-like design features, which lock users into a perpetual pay-to-play loop that prioritizes corporate profits over its marketing promises and customers’ relationship goals,” a lawsuit claimed earlier this year, per the Guardian.
A former employee even alleged: “All they care about is revenue, finding as many ways as possible to lure people to a paid feature.”
Also, remember when dating apps were free? Now, to boost your profile or earn yourself additional features, you need to pay a hefty fee. Not to mention, we don’t really even know if our money is actually getting us anywhere.
“You’re basically saying, ‘Look, I’m going to pay money for this profile boost. I’ve got literally no idea how this works. I have no access to data. All I’m doing is paying money to a company in the hope that my profile will be pushed up, and I’ll somehow get an advantage,’” said Luke Brunning, who runs a love, sex, and relationships research group at the University of Leeds. “So people worry that could be addictive.”
Jonathan Badeen, Tinder’s co-founder, has even admitted to gamifying the dating app to retain users.
“We have some of these almost game-like elements where you almost feel like you’re being rewarded. It kind of works like a slot machine,” he HBO’s Swiped documentary. “Having unpredictable yet frequent rewards is the best way to motivate somebody to keep moving forward.”
Carolina Bandinelli, an associate professor at the University of Warwick, also spoke about the hoax that is a “premium subscription.”
“Those premium subscriptions are the business exploitation, the financial exploitation of this frustration—the promise that if you do something different, if you do something more, then the algorithm will reward you,” she said. “There is a certain extortion. Dating apps are businesses. If they worked, they would be financially unsustainable.”
