Behind the scenes of my Washington Post AmA on Reddit about Online Dating
my head is still ringing with dating facts, untold stories, and unanswered questions.
Backstory
In January 2024 the Washington Post reached out to me about doing a special comic series featuring people with unusual or nontraditional jobs. We scheduled a 1-hour interview, then exchanged several fact checking emails and confirmed a release date in September.
After the comic went live, I received a followup from WaPo asking me if I wanted to participate in an AmA (Ask-Me-Anything) on Reddit in a few weeks.
They asked me to come up with short introduction for myself, and provided three examples of their previous guests’ introductions.
I opted for:
We went live on Reddit on October 3rd. WaPo said their AmA’s usually go for an hour, but I’d be welcome to go longer if I wanted to keep answering the questions.
I answered questions for seven hours.
What WaPo didn’t know was that Reddit would automatically cut us off at the five hour mark. Thus, two hours’ worth of my answers never got published! I may share them here over the coming months!
The morning of the AMA, I woke up at 10am, mentally and emotionally prepared, but physically contorted with a stomachache and headache. I had some toast and coffee with my housemates and received hugs and reassurance. At 1pm, I began typing up some answers to the initial round of questions so that we could publish an opening salvo at 3pm sharp.
Before we dig into the questions, here’s the bio that I prepared for the Reddit community:
I'm Steve Dean, a dating industry consultant/researcher, dating & relationship coach, and social experience designer based in Philadelphia. I've used over 300 dating apps across 100+ cities and interviewed thousands of people about their experiences. WaPo recently interviewed me for their series, Shifts: An illustrated history of the future of work, and invited me to share more of my dating and relationship insights with the reddit community! I'm really excited to answer your questions.
Here's a little bit about me to seed some questions...
During my last 13 years working in the dating industry, I've:
appeared in an ABC News Australia documentary exposing Tinder’s problematic sexual assault reporting features and led to an overhaul of how Tinder handles abuse reporting, along with the creation of a comprehensive safety center within the app, and a portal through which local police precincts can view reports of sexual assault
keynoted dating industry conferences in which I've been propositioned by escorts, shady CEOs, and offshore tax haven sales reps
written white papers about topics like AI, content moderation, and communication tools
interviewed OkCupid's former CTO about their matching algorithm on my podcast (fun fact: he's presently CTO at Grindr!)
designed intimate, meaningful dates that helped people develop deeper relationships, and hosted hundreds of events tied to friendship, intimacy, and lifelong learning, my favorite of which was a 12-hour love language themed choose-your-own-adventure gathering in Manhattan
advised dating sites, including OkCupid, Coffee Meets Bagel, and Farmers Only
coached individuals of all ages, orientations, and relationship preferences through navigating online and offline dating, and matched several people to their future lovers, spouses, friends, cofounders, employees, and roommates
Currently, I'm building up a dating library on Substack and hosting monthly 12+ hour friendship-making walking tours through NYC and Philly.
Proof photo: https://imgur.com/a/xbaCs7k
MY ANSWERS FROM THE REDDIT AMA
QUESTION 1:
Are dating apps as inundated with bot accounts as Instagram and X? It seems like every day I get a new "like" from some fake profile touting an OnlyFans link. How do people navigate online love with so many spammers?
✅ Steve Dean:
Yes, they’re as bad, if not worse. Apps with faster/easier registrations get hit the hardest, because of how easy it has become to build bots that can endlessly generate new profiles. There are even robots now that can mimic human touch across hundreds of devices simultaneously in order to maximally impersonate real human behavior. Look up https://www.mobot.io. They’re intended for customer service and QA work, but scammers always find a way to access the latest tools and trends. In the US alone, online scams result in the loss of $4.5 billion annually, and in 2022, romance scams alone robbed Americans of $740 million!
I recently wrote a post exploring the ecosystem of bots and scammers across dating platforms: https://stevedean.substack.com/p/fakes-fakes-fakes. Honestly, it’s a total minefield across most social platforms. You’re pressured by your investors and your bottom line to grow your user base and subsequently retain those users. In dating, this is particularly hard because as your users succeed in finding romance and pairing off, they leave the platform, so you’re stuck having to go find new users all over again.
This is one of the reasons dating apps seemingly remove the features that feel most critical to users finding lasting partnerships — being “too successful” can be an existential threat for them. Dating apps like Bumble have even listed such telling “risk factors” in their investor reports as, “there is a decrease in user retention as a result of users finding meaningful relationships on our platforms and no longer needing to engage with our products.” 🙃
It makes me sad, because sometimes these platforms are trying their best to follow their actual user behavioral patterns. Imagine trying to follow the 80/20 rule as a dating executive, and you see that a specific matching feature is now only used by 20% of your users, while 80% ignore it. How many of those sub-20% usage features should you continue to allocate development resources to maintain? How much additional new user dropoff will you face by retaining features that most users do not use? After all, users will also leave if they’re required to spend too much time doing literally anything. Apps can face 85%+ user dropoff by doing something as inane as making something that previously took 1 click now take 3 clicks. Look up “click fatigue.”
Tinder made such a ridiculous splash when it hit the scene in 2013 because it enabled users to begin swiping after only 3 total taps! At the time, they were competing with the likes of eHarmony which had a 45+ minute questionnaire. Even OkCupid asked users to answer upwards of 50 questions after they’d already done the work of completing all the standard registration questions like age/sex/location and basic dating preferences. Imagine going from something like 100-500 clicks/keystrokes down to 3-4! It was such a transformative shift in how users engage with their dating platforms.
Here’s a screenshot from a presentation I gave at the iDate Los Angeles conference in 2017:
OK, one last thing — some dating apps have begun taking a page out of Meta’s playbook and incorporating advertising and profile boosting to their revenue models, which means they can make extra money from simply driving arbitrary traffic to their users. If you’re a user in the US, sometimes you’ll notice that after you pay to boost your profile to be seen by more people, you get inundated with a flood of random profile visitors from southeast Asia, most of whom appear to be bots. Not all traffic is good traffic.
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QUESTION 2:
Whats your opinion on online dating, selection bias towards women since way more men than women and difficulty for average looking men to generate matches?
I have completely abstained from alls due to this issue.
✅ Steve Dean:
This video touches on selection bias in dating in a very straightforward way:
I don’t like how intensely gendered it is, and it was hard to stomach the concept of “purity” as defined there, but the explanation itself did a great job of teasing out the selection bias concept. I’d also pair that video with one about the underlying algorithms of the dating apps:
As for my personal opinion, I think selection bias is a highly influential factor that is worth guarding against regardless of whether we’re online or offline. In my early 20s, it only took going to three night clubs for me to become convinced that selection bias was real, and devastating. I once walked onto a dance floor at a club in Philadelphia with over 100 people crowded together, and within just a few minutes of a song starting, the largest dude in the room found himself surrounded by 2-3 women taking turns trying to grind on him, while a circle began forming around him of over a dozen men looking hungry, jealous, and eager — awaiting their shot at some of the attractive women the center dude was pulling in with whatever strange preternatural gravity was emanating from his courtship display. I felt mesmerized and sick at the same time.
I think it makes the most sense for us to seek out environments that nurture our best qualities and don’t leave us competing so desperately for attention from people who are likely incompatible with us anyway. For some of us, this means cultivating delightful spaces online that let us shine: fun blogs, community boards, and dating profiles, fully customized to our unique vibes and preferences, on apps that attract people we’re more likely to mesh well with in the first place.
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QUESTION 3:
How do dating apps differ from city to city, country to country, region to region? Does any particular place tend to have the best dating apps, and why?
✅ Steve Dean:
Most of the super popular dating apps operate globally, and their localization features don’t typically alter the user experience very much. You can expect Tindering to mostly look and feel the same in whichever country you find yourself in, although the specific tranches of users that get displayed to you may vary significantly based on the cultural norms of that specific geo. For instance, always expect user profile photos in any city to gravitate toward some of the more iconic landmarks or stereotypical hobbies of that city. Reddit has already documented this quite extensively:
Tinder in Peru:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Tinder/comments/8qjjxj/tinder_in_peru/Tinder in Colorado:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Tinder/comments/8qnpwk/tinder_in_colorado_does_everyone_here_hike/Tinder in Hawaii:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Tinder/comments/8qopao/tinder_in_hawaii/
Very few dating apps focus exclusively on a single city or country. They’re typically too pressured by the demands of growth to stay confined to a single market. However, most dating apps do start with a single geo around launch, because both advertising and marketing can be extremely costly, and early users typically want to see other people they can realistically meet up with, ideally in their area. But it’s so hard to get the right people’s attention onto your platform at the right time, and to sustain that attention long enough for them to have a good experience.
A typical dating app starting out might have a marketing budget of $5,000 for their first year, or maybe $100,000 if they’ve received some seed funding. Average funding rounds for early stage dating apps are $500k-$2 million. Meanwhile, Bumble alone will spend over $22 million on marketing in a single month. Bumble spent over $270 million on marketing in 2023. See their 2023 annual report here.
Having tested over 300 dating apps across 100+ cities and countries, I’ve not found any particular country to have the best app, or feature set, or user base. There are, however, some noteworthy differences in trends across large regions. For instance, east Asia has a higher prominence of livestreaming dating apps, in part due to extremely skewed gender ratios (sometimes 90%+ men) that render it more financially and attentionally meaningful for apps to let a single female user go live in front of thousands of male users at once and collect their tips/digital gifts, which get split with the dating app 50/50, or 30/70. South Asia, on the other hand, has a higher concentration of matrimony-oriented dating apps, and services that facilitate in-person introductions and family involvement on the matching/vetting frontier, due to stronger cultural norms around a collectivist approach to dating, as opposed to the hyper individualist approach we see more of in the US.
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QUESTION 4:
Thoughts on the "swipe system" made almost standard by Tinder?
I get that dating sites lack the organic environment to be around a person and get to know them, but I feel the swipe system makes it too shallow and quick.
Also, why can't someone make a dating app that isn't: full of ads, locks a bunch of features behind a subscription and limits how many likes etc you can use in 24h?
If someone made an app with just enough ads to turn a revenue, but didn't have any BS subscriptions etc, it could outcompete the rest.
✅ Steve Dean:
Tl;dr — swiping helps more dating apps survive the brutal attention economy by lowering the barriers to entry, but every new and useful feature requires more time investment from users and could thus jeopardize users’ propensity to actually spend that attention on the app long enough to achieve success.
Most of the problem here comes down to: the demands of capitalism, the attention economy, and an under-educated user population.
Demands of Capitalism —
Dating apps need revenue to keep their servers running, their employees paid, and their marketing/advertising budgets flowing. Most of the top dating apps are doing relentless a/b testing to find out which specific screen-by-screen flows and line-by-line sales copy are driving maximal revenues. It’s almost comical to me that Match.com, despite having a thoroughly modern dating app that actually does a pretty great job of letting users share a lot about themselves, nonetheless had a membership upgrade window that looked like something out of the late 1990s until just this past year, when they finally modernized it. When your investors are clamoring to see next quarter’s revenues top this quarter’s, and the fate of your job hangs in the balance, most CEOs will tend to optimize for whatever is statistically driving more revenues, rather than what is statistically driving more quality matches or user experiences.
What this has meant for the average user is that we’re now being inundated with requests to pay to “boost our profiles” or “unlock” our matches or “send a superlike” in order for dating apps to accumulate more revenues and perhaps marginally increase our chances of getting/maintaining someone’s digital attention in the process. But as a former top-5 dating app CEO recently shared at a conference I attended,
"The predictors for long-term success are virtually nonexistent. The goal for these apps is to get people to long-term subscribe, and potentially meet."
The Attention Economy —
The average dating app user may use 2-5 dating apps and typically spends less than an hour total per day across all of them. The average female user may also receive such an extraordinary volume of matches and messages that they feel overwhelmed straightaway. Dating app algorithms and user demographics further exacerbate this struggle, as some apps have as much as a 20-1 male-to-female ratio, and those users may log in at completely different times of day.
Engagement curves on dating apps are wildly lopsided. A friend shared this telling anecdote with me earlier this year: "I redownloaded tinder in SF, partly to see if going back on tinder would increase my self-esteem, and it kind of did, because I got 7,500 likes in the first day. I didn't even know 7,500 people were on the app there. I paid for the week of it and swiped through 3,500 people. I liked 50 of them. I met none of them."
Under-educated User Population —
One of the most painful transitions I’ve borne witness to countless times as an online dating coach is that of people over 40, typically after leaving a marriage, attempting to re-enter the dating scene and finding it to be a dystopian hellscape of memes, subtexts, microcultures, and unseen risks they’d literally never conceived of during their decades away from internet dating. All of their priors are wrong, and catastrophically so. Men were socialized for decades with “advice” like, “If you see someone you think is hot, tell her! Shoot your shot!” which invariably translates to them sending a first message of “Hey beautiful! You’re so good looking!”, which invariably translates into their message getting bulk ignored, or deleted. Here’s a sample female user’s inbox from OkCupid:
To make matters more challenging, messaging is only a tiny fraction of the overall dating equation. Most users are abysmal at translating their 3-dimensional selves, along with all their accumulated preferences and desires, into the measly character counts afforded by most apps. This process frequently takes hours of handholding and teeth-pulling because we need to decipher what is true about us, safe to share, and attractive to the people we theoretically want to attract.
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QUESTION 5:
Is it as bad for average looking guys in major cities as it seems?
My experience with dating apps has always been terrible - not even that I get low quality matches but I just barely get any matches. I’m talking like 0-2 a month no matter the app. I’m 5’8”, have a good job as a lawyer, and took time to take good quality photos and prompts that exhibit my personality and hobbies - my friends say my profiles are great.
Then in real life I have absolutely no issue at all building a connection with people at the same or higher attractiveness that I go for on the apps.
✅ Steve Dean:
The odds for dating are generally bad in most places, and they’re acutely terrible for the average user who has bad photos, a milquetoast profile, and mediocre messages. There are critical failure points at every step of this process, and most of the work of dating involves solving for these failure points before you burn out or accumulate too much trauma.
Here are some of my personal recommendations for optimizing your online dating process:
In my opinion, a truly effective profile will capture 5 critical things:
Prove you’re alive, legit, accountable, and approachable
Whether online or offline, social proof/trust is an essential element of dating. It’s how people assess whether we’re a safe, reliable bet for dating, for friendship, or for introducing to other communities and confidantes.
Signs of life can include:
Lists of things unique to you — the more things you add to your list, the less likely someone else has exactly the same.
Videos/gifs — you, emoting, blinking, being real, maybe even laughing, smiling. All the good things!
Voice snippets — your actual voice! Super real!!
Screenshots — you in the wild, doing things with/for others! Now they don’t even need to google you 😜
IG photos — your actual life as you’ve shared it! Super real!! Be sure to do some mild curation of your IG so it’s not just selfies or self-promotion, which can be a red flag for many people.
Why you?
What do your past, present, and future look like?
What are the core pillars of your life, and what phase are you in right now?
What are the anchoring relationships in your life?
Where does your attention live, online and offline?
Where can you be found in the wild?
What things are channeling energy into right now that might overlap with someone else?
Why them?
Who are you drawn to? What energies, vibes, scenes, and communities might they hail from?
What’s their disposition toward the world? What do they aspire to do or become?
When in doubt, ask yourself: could someone send your profile to their friend and have their friend immediately understand why they thought you’d be compatible?
What can you do or build together?
What kind of encounter, or relationship, are you actively seeking?
Romantic date? Chill, no-strings-attached night of sexy exploration? Seek out concerts to attend together?
What’s your endgame?
Are you hoping for marriage? For kids? Moving in together? Moving to a new country together?
How might you actually meet?
What are some physical spaces and activities you deeply enjoy that you’d want to incorporate in a potential date?
Are there any life bucket list items you’re hoping to accomplish this year?
Are there event series, theater productions, dance gatherings, talks, or intramural sports you’re eager to explore?
What’s the general cadence of your life? Are there particular times of day/week when you’re most free?
Good dating messages as well as photo lineups follow a similar format. They need to be substantive enough to capture someone’s interest and give them a compelling reason to respond yet not so out of touch or tone deaf that they cause someone to immediately reject you.
Ultimately, it’s mission critical to reduce the likely decision fatigue on the part of your recipients by providing thoughtful and meaningful attentional bids that can merit an equally thoughtful response.
Consider the difference between these messages:
“I love your eyes. You must get so much attention on here!”
“Hey, what’s up”
“How was your weekend?”
versus
“You seem charming in your photos, and I’m curious to learn more. What’s an average week look like for you? On my end, I’m building an online course this summer, and sustaining myself with partner dance and obligatory treks to the Birria Landia taco cart on Metropolitan Ave.”
Here are some other first message examples that try to make use of the limited character counts available for introductory messages on most dating apps:
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QUESTION 6:
In a nutshell, if you were asked to make a modern day rom-com, what would it be about?
✅ Steve Dean:
Personally, I’d make a romcom about a polyamorous woman at the start of the pandemic trying to decide which of her various lovers to go into lockdown with, and the drama that ensues. Does she pick the one with the biggest apartment? With the best sex? With the best long-term prospects, but who happens to currently live with his elderly parents? I’d also factor in at least one scene where she spends 3 weeks trying to obtain sufficient PPE and logistical coordination for a successful threesome.
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QUESTION 7:
Has match group's dominance in the field been harmful to the industry, to the health of their consumer base? What do you think is the "healthiest" dating app, if there is such a thing?
✅ Steve Dean:
Match group helped prove that dating apps could make money, and justify investor attention. To this end, Match Group has been in part responsible for the significant growth in the dating industry over the last 15 years — from under $2 billion to over 10 billion!. However, Match group is now awkwardly one of the dominant investors in the dating landscape, thanks to its acquisition spree over the last decade as it built out a portfolio of dozens of dating platforms.
Fun fact(s): Match Group owns dozens of dating brands, including Tinder, Hinge, Match, Meetic, OkCupid, Pairs, PlentyOfFish, Azar, and Hakuna. In 2009, Match Group acquired PeopleMedia which owned OurTime, the dating site for people ages 50+. What this meant in 2013 when Match Group incubated and launched Tinder, which itself had a special zone for 13-17 year old users, was that the Match Group conglomerate could theoretically monopolize your dating attention from age 13 until the day you die.
I don’t specifically fault Match Group for the frustrating conditions of modern internet dating. I’ve already railed against dating apps writ large for their most salient failures.
I think the healthiest thing dating apps can do is maximize our capacity for compatibility indexing while minimizing attentional spend. Apps shouldn’t trigger such burnout and frustration. They should avoid gimmicky revenue tricks, optimize for the highest possible ROI on attentional spend, and encourage their users to freely share their successes, and what led to them — when your happy users do the word-of-mouth marketing for you, you can devote less of your budget to costly and low-ROI advertising.
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QUESTION 8:
I want friends to set me up, but people seem reluctant. One person replied that the concept of “leagues” exists, and it’s socially risky to say “You and Dave might be a match” bc Dave might be insulted if he thinks I’m below his league.
Another risk is that there could be drama in the social circles if things go south. I personally think that the highest probability of finding someone l like, though, would be a man who already associates with people I like.
How can we get our friends to set us up? Financial incentives (ex. bounties) don’t seem to be working, and folks don’t seem to want to hustle for us just on the basis of goodwill. It’s disappointing and frustrating, bc I’d happily introduce people if the tables were turned bc the potential upside is so much greater than the potential downsides.
✅ Steve Dean:
Our friends may have goodwill, but they may lack the time/bandwidth, tact/skill, and relevant knowledge it takes to make a meaningful introduction. The cost of their inaction is quite low (you could always ask another friend) whereas the cost of action can be high:
setting you up with the wrong person
setting you up with the right person but in a way that makes things super awkward or impossible, e.g. an unceremonious Facebook intro that neither of you asked for
setting you up with someone based on insufficient criteria, thereby making you question their judgment, or worse, question your entire friendship
generating information asymmetries that threaten the balance of power between you and your match (e.g. your friend shows you your prospective match’s OnlyFans before your match even mentioned having one)
My friend who used to work as an engineer at OkCupid gave a lecture some years back about how she found progressively better dating odds at every stage of her journey into adulthood, thanks to our increasing ability to exercise choice and personal agency in who we meet / have access to. We don’t typically have much choice over our middle and high schools. We have more choice over our college, so we can better sort into groups of people who we naturally align with. We have even more choice over the companies we apply to work for, and where we physically move and put down roots. As we gain access to more agency/choice, we can better tailor our choices to meet our evolving needs, desires, and newfound self-understandings.
Dating apps are particularly great at expanding the realm of choice for us. In the time it takes us to put on socks, a dating app can sift through 50 million people, identify who’s nearby, available now, compatible with us across dozens of dimensions, and alert those people to our existence.
But if we don’t want to confine our attention to digital fora, we can still try to imbue some UX design principles into our offline lives. Given that the cost of making a personal dating referral can be quite high, the the accuracy of those referrals can be quite low, here are ways of making it better:
Don’t expect your friends to make personal intros; instead, put yourself into more environments where your friends can invite people to show up and meet you where the stakes are vastly lower. There’s a world of difference between someone saying, “You should date my friend Dani! I think you’ll get along great! Let me connect you via text” versus saying, “Hey, I saw you’re hosting a BYO-music park hangout next week; can I send the invite link to my friend Dani?”
Make a datemedoc, or invest heavily into a single dating profile whose link you can share with friends, so they aren’t relying upon their memory alone to help you source compatible people. Most people default to shoddy heuristics for their matchmaking, e.g. “you both mentioned liking Art Nouveau so I figured I’d introduce you ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ !” We can dramatically increase the odds of an effective connection if we zero in on the specific variables that matter and place them front and center. This applies equally to other realms, like finding apartments/roommates!
Cultivate your week over week activities so that your whereabouts become more predictable. No one wants to make an intro when they can’t even tell where you’re going to be. It’s way easier to meet someone when your friend simply brings them along to something you’re already doing. If you’re not doing anything that your friends can attend / bring their friends, then you’re dramatically shrinking the possibility space where others can be invited in.
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QUESTION 9:
Do people who pay for app features find love faster than those who remain on the free versions?
✅ Steve Dean:
I’ve personally almost never paid for dating apps, but that’s in part because I’ve primarily favored free apps, and my compatibility-oriented filtering strategy makes it so I don’t need to spend as much effort utilizing features that put me in front of more (likely incompatible) people. I’ve had clients swear by paying specifically for features that “signal enhanced interest” (aka a SuperLike), so that their messages find a way of standing out and not just getting stuck in the flood of other competing messages.
Last year I spent a week analyzing 15* leading dating apps’ pricing and features. Here’s what I found:
Of apps surveyed, 13 of 15 offered purchasable a la carte features
Of apps surveyed, 15 of 15 offered a 1-month paid membership
Membership type frequencies and price** averages broke down to:
1-week membership: offered by 7/15 apps; average price $15.09
1-month membership: offered by 15/15 apps; average price $31.27
3-month membership: offered by 13/15 apps; average price $71.73
6-month membership: offered by 10/15 apps; average price $88.11
1-year membership: offered by 3/15 apps; average price $79.99
Lifetime membership: offered by 2/15 apps; average price $194.99
Credits/in-app currencies are occasionally offered (6/15 apps), most predictably by apps that feature livestream content, as credits can be used to purchase gifts for streamers and to achieve leaderboard rankings for top tippers
The most common features are Boosts (13/15 apps) and Super Likes (12/15 apps)
Average cost for a 1-time Boost is $6.68
*Apps surveyed: Badoo, Bumble, Chispa, CMB, Feel'd, Hily, Hinge, Inner Circle, The League, Lovoo, Match, OkCupid, POF, Pure, Tinder
**excluding The League, an extreme outlier with memberships as high as $2,499.99/mo.
Based on my experience from a dating coaching perspective, it makes sense that the most common a la carte features are Boosts and Super Likes because the most common user struggles I’ve encountered revolve around 1) not getting enough matches, and 2) not knowing how to indicate advanced interest in order to stand out from the crowd. Both of these situations are particularly salient for male users over 30 and those who don’t rank in the top ~25% of attractiveness, as they tend to match with very few users. Per data from Peach-app.io, a 32-year-old male Tinder user can expect a match rate of only 0.3%. This equates to about 3 matches per 1000 swipes.
In terms of feature popularity, I was surprised that message before matching was only a free feature in 5 of 15 apps surveyed, and entirely unavailable in another 5 of the 15 apps. Messaging is critical to user success on dating apps, so I expected it to be much more strongly represented throughout popular apps. My suspicion is that a plurality or even majority of users don’t send very thoughtful messages in the first place, so this feature may be most advantageous for more serious / proficient users. I’ve noticed an uptick in 2023 of apps offering AI assistance with messaging, including both affirmative suggestions of what to say, as well as warnings that what one is about to send is “too boring” or ‘is very commonly sent by other users and thus won’t likely receive a response.’
The most commonly-offered features overall were: remove ads, see who likes you, see all your (received) messages, super likes / skip the line, unlimited likes, rewind/undo swipe, travel mode, advanced filters, boosts, and curated/top picks.
Features with less representation included message before matching, read receipts, see who viewed you, and unlock extended profiles. Asynchronous communication continues to be a challenge in dating platforms (as well as communities outside the dating realm). It’s difficult to coordinate user attention at a large scale.
Some apps attempt to mitigate this by picking a specific time of day to encourage users to log in (for Coffee Meets Bagel, it’s always noon). The League attempts to mitigate this by encouraging users to log in at 7pm on Sundays for The League Live, a speed dating offering featuring audio/videos calls. Dating app Thursday only allows users to log in and explore during one 24-hour span, at which point it encourages all users in a given city to pay for a “ticket” to one of several preordained locations so they can more easily meet other users. It may be advantageous for community/affinity groups to specify a time each week when then greatest numbers of users are typically logging in, and set that as the “happy hour” window for that particular community (or for all communities, collectively). This would ensure fewer instances of individuals entering a chat only to find themselves alone, or awkwardly stuck with just a few other people they’re not interested in.
Strictly anecdotally, a friend of mine shared with me his feedback from paying for various dating apps, so I’ll reshare it here:
Steve’s friend:
Some feedback based on the greater southeast PA region (PA-NJ-DE-MD):
Tinder. On the free version, matches as slow as a trickle. Maybe 1 a week. With Platinum it’s usually a match a day always resulting get a quality person who meets within a week. I can see how this would be considering there are four tiers. Compares poorly to back in early 2015 when my tinder was on fire, and continued to be when I tried the first paid version of tinder plus.
Hinge. My hinge is on fire, on the free version, moreso when I had the paying version.
Bumble. Bumble for many years (2019-2022) kind of sucked compared to Hinge. Got the lifetime bumble premium in Apr and it was kind of slow been really picked up this Fall 2023, I wonder if it’s a trend. It’s on fire for me now. I can’t keep up with all the contacts.
Facebook dating. Been great as well, not on fire but very effective. Only draw back is tends to be much wider geographically.
So I tried tinder platinum again. I got to say, the technical aspects really work. It’s like they charge the platinum subscription fee for the kind of results I was getting on the free version in late 2014/early 2015. With boosts the results enhance to the kind I was seeing when I tried the first release of tinder plus in 2015. [...] Immediately once my subscription ended, the rate of matches slowed back to a trickle to the point where I concluded, it’s not even worth having a profile up on tinder unless i have the platinum subscription.
Steve:
How much did the quality of your matches change after upgrading? or more specifically, how did it change?
Steve’s friend:
It was mainly a change in quantity. On the free version, typically would get 0 to 1 match per day using the maximum number of free likes per day in Southeastern Pennsylvania. On the platinum, I got as many matches as I could handle, including probably 40 to 50 in the first day, not counting any of the 100+ who had already liked my profile, and I switched to incognito mode, and it continued at a more manageable pace. I don’t usually swipe on anyone I perceived to be low quality and a difference in quality was not conclusive. Many were conventionally “10” But anyway, the money spent was well worth it, because it proved it to me that not getting any matches most days on free had little to nothing to do with my own profile quality.
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QUESTION 10:
How can you square having an apparently earnest desire to help people "develop deeper relationships" with the fact that all these apps are stuffed to the gills with pay-to-play features and in fact actively impede people meeting if they're a good match by paywalling certain interactions (something which has only got worse in recent years and was not always the case)?
✅ Steve Dean:
I always give my clients the option of ignoring the online dating route entirely. Dating apps are routing mechanisms for human attention, but so are analog social networks. Ultimately, I want my clients to play to their strengths and avoid burnout. But if I sincerely think they’ll do well online, I’ll make a case for at least incorporating dating apps into a smaller subset of their overall dating strategy. I’m a strong believer in the power of a thoughtfully crafted profile, fully buttered to the edges with unique content, further bolstered by a coherent messaging strategy. I steer my clients clear of over 95% of the dating apps I’ve had the misfortune of wasting my time testing out, and I focus on the few apps that hit the sweet spot of having:
sufficient profile affordances (photo counts, text limits, etc.) that you can meaningfully convey (and discern) key dimensions of compatibility
sufficient user base in your city to be worth the time investment of even making a profile
sufficient desire-routing to avoid false starts (e.g., don’t show up on a hookup app expecting a marriage)
Critically, every relevant compatibility metric that we fail to include upfront means that either a) someone won’t feel confident enough that we’re a good fit, and will skip right over us, or b) we’ll be stuck trying to exasperatedly suss out compatibility downstream — in our messages and on our dates — precisely when it’s the most tedious, frustrating, and costly.
Some apps make it easy to address these compatibility variables upfront. I find myself most frequently recommending OkCupid and Hinge to my clients, but it really depends on their desires. Here’s my rough breakdown:
For getting a rough snapshot of who’s in your area and what kinds of people/vibes you might be attracted to: Tinder
For meaningful compatibility assessment: OkCupid
For reliably setting up a date this week: Hinge
For finding thoughtful events and gatherings: Plura
For expedient hookups: Pure
For explorations of non-monogamy and kink: Feeld
Here’s a more extensive breakdown of the dating apps I most frequently recommend:
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Special thanks to:
Beatrix Lockwood for coordinating the original Washington Post interview and comic series
Maya Scarpa for illustrating the comics
Amy Nakamura for coordinating the Reddit AMA
