Dating apps really are getting worse

It started with just a dollar. That’s how much Matthew Thomason paid the first time he spent money on a dating app. For that dollar, the app would “boost” his profile — showing it to more daters — for half an hour.

Then Thomason saw that it cost just a few more dollars to pay for a 24-hour boost, so he tried that. “I would get maybe one or two extra likes, and it would make me think, ‘See? It works!’” he says. Next, he spent more substantial money — $15 to $30 — to access features that were initially free on some apps, like unlimited opportunities to “like” profiles. But paying didn’t seem to result in more connections for Thomason; to him, the apps seem worse than ever.

Thomason, 27, has been using dating apps for more than five years, trying Tinder, Feeld, Bumble and Hinge. “It’s all just basically much less usable and much less accessible with every new ‘feature’ they introduce,” he says. “But of course I and everyone else just keep trying because, ‘Maybe this time it’ll work.’”

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Swiping is still a mainstay of modern dating. People continue using dating apps to find sex, fall in love and experience the strange thrill of texting seven strangers, “Hey! How was your Monday?”

Many daters, though, say they find the apps more frustrating and manipulative than they used to be. “Consistently people say, ‘I don’t feel like I’m having as good of an experience’ or, ‘I feel like I’m being really limited in what I’m able to do,’” says Kathryn Coduto, an assistant professor in Media Science at Boston University who researches dating app usage.

As Asha David, a Bumble user, put it when the app prompted her to pay $14 a week to find out who liked her profile, “Bumble will crumble.”

“In this economy?” she scoffed on TikTok.

A few changes have occurred since your friends who now have a toddler swiped right on each other: Apps created more-aggressive incentives to get users to spend money; daters’ expectations have changed; and, more recently, artificial intelligence has encroached. “There’s this lingering understanding or idea of what dating apps are, based on what they once were,” Coduto says. People who found their partners on the apps six years ago telling current users to get swiping may sound akin to a boomer telling a millennial, “In my day, we could buy a three-bedroom house on a single government salary.”

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Most swipe-based dating apps were once completely free. These days, Pew Research found, more than a third of all people who have used a dating app have spent money on one. Apps including Tinder, Hinge and Bumble still have free options, but they also push premium paid subscriptions, as well as one-off payments like sending “roses” and “super likes” to potential partners.

Increasingly, dating apps are succeeding in coaxing users to part with their credit card information. In May, the number of people paying for Hinge increased 31 percent year-over-year. Bumble’s paying usership grew by half a million in the past year. In five years, the number of people who pay for some kind of feature or subscription on Tinder has doubled. Compared with last year, though, that number dropped by 9 percent — suggesting that fewer people may be willing to pay for these perks.

App makers say these features are designed to ease the process of dating, not just extract money. Hinge is “intentionally designed to help all of our daters get off of the app onto great dates,” a spokesperson told The Washington Post. And Bumble’s paid features offer a more “efficient or tailored experience,” a representative said.

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Many daters don’t buy it. “It feels like dating apps learn my interests and then use that info to hide the people who are most compatible with me behind a paywall,” says Kevin Power, a 29-year-old who uses Hinge, Tinder and Bumble. In fact, Power learned from a friend that his own profile was appearing in the “Standout” section for some Hinge users. “At first I was flattered, but then I remembered that in order for someone to ‘like’ me from that section, they would need to pay for roses,” Power says. “Hinge is profiting off of me being single. That doesn’t make me feel like the company actually wants me to find love on their app.” Match Group is facing a class-action lawsuit from users who say the apps use “psychologically manipulative features to ensure they remain on the app perpetually as paying subscribers.”

Dating coach Erika Ettin, who has been working with daters since 2011, says the popularity of apps has made them, paradoxically, trickier to navigate. “It means that you have to use the apps more efficiently to filter through to find what you’re looking for because it becomes more diluted,” she says. Some apps make users pay to filter for basic values and identity traits like “Wants kids,” and “Libertarian.” Ettin encourages her clients to pay for those filters. “But you can get quite far with the free versions,” she says.

When users do pay for features, the algorithm may treat them differently, though not in the way they might want — only showing their profile to other paying users, for example, Coduto says. There’s also a psychological implication for users. “Once you start paying for something, you definitely want to make sure you’re getting your money’s worth and you’re using it enough,” she says.

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Pay structures aren’t the only major shift for dating apps. Users are increasingly suspicious that the shirtless man or dimpled dog-lover they’re messaging aren’t real. In a 2024 survey from Boston University and Ipsos, nearly 50 percent of people agreed with the statement “Dating apps are filled with too many machines posing as real people (known as chatbots) to be trusted.” There’s reason for concern — some people are Cyrano-ing their own app correspondence, using AI apps like RIZZ to automate their messages.

Delia Lazarescu, a tech influencer who goes by Tech Unicorn on social media, used ChatGPT to set up an automatic swipe and messaging system on her own Tinder account. Her first attempts resulted in unfortunate messages to other users like “The ripper stalks at night … innocent blood on his hands.” But eventually, she coaxed it into sending more reasonable messages. She shared her code and step-by-step instructions online, and says she has heard from some of her followers who were able to replicate it. “I think dating apps are becoming worse and worse,” she says, referencing the rise of chatbots. Lazarescu is “trying to build a matchmaking solution” for this — using, of course, AI.

Mostly, profiles on dating apps do represent real people, Coduto says. But users are sensitive. AI or otherwise, half of people who have dated online have said that they think they have interacted with a scammer.

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Dating apps have always been a Wild West for communication — neither user can be certain who is on the other end until both parties venture out to a wine bar. Ettin’s dating business, A Little Nudge, offers a premium service in which Ettin takes over a user’s dating apps and does all swiping and messaging. Ettin’s not too worried about AI messaging. “There will never be a substitute for the human touch and human interaction,” she says.

Your roommate, your mom, the secretary of the Transportation Department and Drew Barrymore have all used dating apps. Their pervasiveness as catalysts of love stories and dating nightmares alike can lead to the collective sense that dating apps are the only way people meet. But a Pew survey published last year found that only 1 in 10 people in long-term romantic relationships met their partner on an app. The ratio goes up to 1 in 5 for people younger than 30, which still means the other couples met “IRL.” Still, users expect more and more from apps, in a way that may keep them from benefiting from the efficiency that apps promise. There is a sense, Coduto says, that “maybe I need to keep swiping because what if the next best person is just one swipe away?”

It’s tough out there. Power, whose profile beckoned other users to the tantalizing “Standouts” section, has paid for dating app features himself. He spent money on Tinder, which felt embarrassing. He’s on Hinge, but thinks the app is limiting. And Bumble “feels like a desert.”

“At this point,” he says, “I’m looking forward to being single for the summer.”

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