Dating Apps are Company Towns

For the longest time I have been trying to make sense of my disdain for dating apps. I've come to the conclusion that the whole conceit is inorganic and manipulative. The whole set up feels contrived and that's because it is.

Think of an industrial town centred around a specific firm or a student town centred around a huge university. The population of such a town is not, by any means, under the impression that the town is home. They live in the town for commercial purposes only. If it were not for the commerce or education, they wouldn't be there. It follows that all the people you meet there aren't really people you'd typically meet if it were up to you. Once such an arrangement reaches its conclusion, either through graduating, getting fired, the company closing up or just moving away, there's no real reason to stay.

Dating apps are engineered, much like social media platforms, for one primary purpose, which is to maximise the time you spend on them. They want to extract as much engagement and revenue as possible from your presence. Don't be fooled by clever taglines like Hinge's "designed to be deleted." If you find love and leave, you cease to be a customer. Their business model depends on you staying single. They want to keep you in the company town.

After half a decade away from dating apps, I decided to download Bumble. In the time I have been away I did many things, one of them being that I got deep into the tech world and saw how things work. This time around I refined my approach to swiping, I told myself I wouldn't just swipe right on every second profile and that I would take the time to read every profile before doing any swiping. The results were quite interesting. I found myself doing accidental swipes, left or right. No matter the amount of intention I put, I still couldn't be in control a 100% because swiping is too accessible, easy and addicting. In away, it has gamified the experience into a cat and mouse. On the free version of Bumble there way to see the amount of people who swiped right on you but you have to pay for their profiles to be revealed to you. However, Bumble tells you if you swipe left on someone who swiped right on you, which is fine but it stings your swipe is accidental and completely subconscious.

They achieve this infinite loop of a cat and mouse game by exploiting a fundamental human cognitive process called automaticity. Automaticity is our ability to perform tasks without conscious thought. Think about how you speak. You don't laboriously construct each sentence, the words flow naturally from years of practice. It's an efficient way to handle routine tasks. Dating apps reward automaticity. They train you to swipe without thinking, creating a rhythm where you miss the subtle details that could signal a real connection. They bombard you with a concerning amount of context switching. Profile after profile, you have to refocus and absorb new discrete information constantly. I found that this design made me prone to accident. The kind of accidents that could only be remedied if I paid Bumble. The accidents may very well push one into rage swiping or just mindless engagement. The lapse in judgement of swiping could very well lead to bad matches which would keep you on the platform for longer and would make you a prime candidate for their monetisation strategies.

To illustrate the extent of this design, let me offer an analogy from my own work as a software developer. I was once looking for a tool to help choose a colour palette and stumbled upon a site called Coolors. Its concept seems brilliant, you just hit the spacebar, and it generates a new palette for you. You can continue pressing the space bar until you find a palette you want. But the joke is, you probably never will. The moment you begin pressing the space bar continuously, automaticity takes over. You're no longer thinking critically about what colour you need, you're just along for the ride, mesmerised by the constant variety that just happens to not be quite what you're looking for. Generating a palette per second stops being a means to an end and becomes the centrepiece. You're caught in a loop, constantly feeling like the next palette will be the one, but it never arrives. While Coolors has tried to mitigate this with features to lock colours or go back, they don't fix the core lull of automaticity induced by the simple act of pressing the spacebar.

The dating apps are far more sinister. They aren't trying to mitigate their manipulative design at all. They want you to engage in quick, aimless swiping, it's their raison d'etre. They create a slot machine effect, where it constantly feels like the next profile could be the one. They want to keep you in the company town but unlike real company towns, you live in this town to pay the company. Inevitably you will hit your daily limit and you will be met with a prompt to upgrade to a premium subscription. Even worse, you can't undo your accidental swipes because that's also a paid feature. There is no winning on these apps. They are a system designed to profit from your being single.

I find that the only right thing to do is to leave the company town and make real connections in the real world. Connections that are unsullied by dirty tricks and are devoid of a middle man trying to profit off your relationship status.