> I keep hearing this objection but how is the app supposedly stopping you from forming a happy relationship?
Most of these apps use ab testing to determine what features are launched. The speculation is that they optimize for retention and conversion into paying users, not for forming long lasting relationships. Retaining users is good for a business but terrible for people trying to form long term relationships.
It's pure speculation that this is what they are optimizing for in their experiments but I wouldn't be surprised if it's the case.
I think it’s much simpler: must relationships don’t end in forever monogamy. There’s like a 90% chance someone who leaves the dating pool will re-enter it eventually.
They don’t really need any algorithmic matching magic.
Also, the pool of people online dating is going to be somewhat (perhaps heavily) sample biased. People who are likely to form long term relationships will, over time, leave the dating pool at a higher rate than those who aren’t. By the time you hit age 35, you find the dating pool to be mostly people who haven’t permanently paired off for very obvious reasons (myself included, btw).
So overall, I just don’t think they worry at all about people leaving the dating pool.
I do think their incentive structure is broken and that plus the fact that they are all owned by two companies (and even one of them, Bumble, doesn’t just buy up all the competition) does prevent them from making the metric about user satisfaction though. I just don’t think it’s broken for this reason.
Most of these apps use ab testing to determine what features are launched. The speculation is that they optimize for retention and conversion into paying users, not for forming long lasting relationships. Retaining users is good for a business but terrible for people trying to form long term relationships.
It's pure speculation that this is what they are optimizing for in their experiments but I wouldn't be surprised if it's the case.