Big Dating App is Dying

Here’s How it Can Save Itself (and everyone else)

Last month, Match Group CEO Bernard Kim published a piece in Fortune titled “Dating apps are the best place to find love, no matter what you see on TikTok,” in which he delivers an impassioned-but-unsupported argument that all is well on the dating apps. As a university professor and researcher who studies dating app dynamics, I’m troubled by the obvious conflict of interest, but I’m more concerned about the argument itself.

Kim’s central claim is that dating apps—his company owns Tinder, Match, Hinge, OKCupid, Our Time, and others—are doing a good job for their clients, but that Gen Z is making them look bad by sharing bad date stories on TikTok.

This begs the question, "How well can an industry really be doing if a bunch of 19-year-olds on TikTok can put such a dent in it?" And anyway, the problem isn’t that they’re posting about their bad experiences; the problem is that they’re having such bad experiences.

In any case, dating app users disagree with Mr. Kim, and so do the researchers and journalists who study them. Headlines just from 2024 read “It’s Not You: Dating Apps are Getting Worse” (The New York Times); “America is Sick of Swiping: Dating Apps are Falling Back to Earth” (The Atlantic); “Why Gen Z is Ditching Dating Apps” (Time); and “Dating Apps are in their Flop Era” (Bustle).

I have both a worm’s eye and a bird’s eye view of why. As a single woman, I’ve done my time on the apps. As a professor and researcher who studies dating app dynamics and practices public scholarship, I have access to over 100K people on social media who are intensely engaged in conversations about dating apps. Many of them, though they very much want to date, are ready to give up on the apps forever.

There are new apps emerging all the time, many of them with new business models that sound promising—game-changing, even—but they’re entering a market that is both flooded and failing, so I don’t have a lot of optimism for them.

The already-established big-name apps, like the ones owned by Match Group (which in addition to Match includes Tinder, Hinge, OKCupid, Our Time, and others), actually could still save the industry. I don’t think they have much time, but they have the resources because they have the vast majority of daters, and that grants them both power and opportunity. If they listen to their users, and if they act quickly, they might be able to not only prevent daters from jumping ship, but save the ship itself.

It’s not the dating apps’ fault that things are so terrible. The dating apps are simply a microcosm of society at large, a reflection of the social, cultural, and political problems impacting every aspect of modern life. The fact that it’s not the apps’ fault, however, doesn’t absolve them of the responsibility of working to mitigate how these social problems manifest within the communities they truly do control. And even setting aside any kind of humanitarian angle completely, I also think it’s their industry’s only shot at remaining relevant and solvent.

If the dating app industry wants to radically improve things, here are five practical, realistic, and easy things they could do:  

• Abide by the preferences you ask people to dictate. If a woman says she wants to meet politically-liberal, non-smoking men within an hour of Chicago, stop sending her MAGA-hat-wearing dudes from Fargo with cigarettes hanging out of their mouths.

• Get stricter about kicking out the bad actors. The dating app users I interview in my research regale me with tales of encountering sexual aggression, racism, egregious dishonesty, and threats of physical violence, yet nothing ever happens when they report these people; the offenders usually remain on the apps.

• Reject blank profiles. People who cannot be bothered to provide very basic profile data are almost certainly not going to productively interact on the apps, let alone successfully date. Simply don’t publish profiles that are not adequately complete.

• Either re-engineer how your dating apps work, or at least be transparent about how commodified they are. Many of the major apps advertise as though their goal is to help people find their soulmates, but their real goal is to keep people on their apps. The apps are intentionally gamified, engineered to hook people using the same intermittent reward systems employed to keep people playing slot machines (technically, it’s called a “ludic loop”). It’s the reason Match Group itself was slapped with a class action lawsuit earlier this year for “turning users into ‘addicts’ who do not find true love and instead keep purchasing subscriptions and other paid perks to keep the publicly traded company's revenue flowing.”

• Admit the algorithms don’t work. People on the dating apps suspect this, probably know it on some level, but since the app companies are constantly reassuring them of algorithmic magic behind the scenes, there develops a kind of massive gaslighting effect in which, not only are people frustrated with the lack of good matches, but they begin to question their own judgement in assessing the matches: “If this person is my 99% match, why do I hate everything about them? Am I the problem here?” It would be kinder and create less frustration if the apps just admitted there’s a lot of randomness and luck.

These five changes won’t solve every problem, but if implemented, they could radically improve the dating app experience for users and begin the process of restoring people's faith in the promise of digital dating.