No, they used to be more or less good - they all had slightly different vibes instead of being the exact same thing with different fonts. Okcupid used to publish a lot of fun data and was kind of a middle ground, Match was known for being for more “serious” daters, and plenty of fish tended to be a little trashier - not that there wasn’t plenty of overlap, that was just kind of the reputations they had. You could pay for things but you could also do just fine with free accounts, and the ads focused on how many people had had success with them.

Now they’re all owned by the same company and it shows, and they’ve decided dumbing the experience down to the most superficial stuff and letting bots and people advertising OF or their MLMs take over is fine. I don’t think any of them are worth the time they take to download at this point.

Can you be a bit more clear on what you mean by failing?

I’ve met my girlfriend on Tinder and had some nice dates / hookups because of it. Are 98% of the women not intetested because of my average looks and being overweight? Sure, but it’s the 2% that made wit worthwhile. Tinder was getting more expensive depending on your age back then but I think I would use an app again if I needed to.

I’ve met some people that I would otherwise never have met, made some rich corporation even richer in the process… 🤷

Idk what to tell you. Are you following rules 1 and 2 of online dating cause while I haven’t settled down with a woman yet, I’ve met multiple gfs through tinder and bumble. Some lasted years

I met my partner through a dating site. In the two years prior to that, I had used the site to meet over two dozen other women, which led to no long-term relationships but did result in a few short flings.

I can say that what helped me was expectation management. This was actually my second time using a dating site, and the first time around I was super picky, looking for “green flags.” Correspondingly, I messaged very few women, and met even fewer (four in two years). The second time, I realized that someone having a sparse profile didn’t mean they were a boring or lazy person. Sometimes it does, but other times it just means they aren’t very good at writing about themselves.

I’ll also say there’s only so much the metrics of dating sites can tell you about someone and your compatibility with them. There’s a level of response bias to the questionnaires on these sites, i.e. people answer the questions based on what they think a potential partner might like, not their genuine beliefs and preferences. You’ll never discover your actual compatibility with someone unless you talk to them, so I took the approach of, “unless there are explicit deal breakers in your profile, I’ll ask you on a date and we’ll see how things go.”

There’s also the expectation management for the frequency of matches, responses to messages, dates, and beyond. Dating apps aren’t magic machines that will get you hooked up in hours. They take work, and you’ll see a lot of rejection (most of it just utter silence). There can be long dry spells. Sometimes you’ll need to take a break because you’ve literally messaged everyone on the site and you need to wait for more members. And sometimes, they just won’t work for some people. That sounds harsh, but it’s true. Success for many of these sites and apps is highly dependent on one’s physical attractiveness, and some people simply did not win the genetic lottery.

The first dating apps designed for straight people always had an unbalanced ration of men and women, which appears to have gotten worse over time. Early on a few people I know did find people, dated, and married. They were mostly people who had niche interests for our area and were successfully connecting with people at least a couple hours away who they never would have met in person.

But that was well over a decade ago and I don’t know of anyone having success since those early years.

I’m a man and I sought out relationships exclusively through online dating*. It was extremely discouraging, but it did eventually work three or four times (depending on how you define a long term relationship) over the course of years of trying. Each success was a big deal.

I used the free version of the old OkCupid - the one where you wrote a long profile and answered a bunch of multiple-choice questions. I only sent messages to women who seemed highly compatible with me, and I put some thought into every message. My rough estimate is that one in twenty messages received a reply. One in five replies lead to a date. One in five dates was the start of a long-term relationship. So that’s “only” about 500 messages per relationship, and that took several years. (There weren’t 500 women on the site who lived nearby and seemed compatible with me at any one time.)

I have no idea how well the modern “swipe” apps work. Frankly they seem gross and I never seriously tried using them.

Edit: I should add that I looked a little worse than average, had weird hobbies, and possessed enough social skills to sit quietly and not embarrass myself or the people I was with. I wasn’t exactly hot stuff.

*I have been introduced to women by a friend or relative a few times, but that friend/relative was the one who took the initiative.

Well, sorta. As someone else pointed out the economic incentives for most dating app owners are diametrically opposed to the needs of the users. There is also a huge consolation in the market with the majority of the apps by user count being owned by a single company which leads to enshittification.

There are a few exceptions but they very much aren’t for everyone.

OKCupid from 20 years ago was great before it sold out. But it’s only accessible to time travelers.

Next are the more event based or hookup apps which tend to cater to kinksters, swingers, poly, and queer folk. I’m thinking of things like FetLife, Grinder and Plura. They work well for their audience since those communities tend to have events that people will keep coming back for even if they have successfully found someone on the app. In fact success finding someone might make them more likely to keep on the app and bring in their friends.

But for monogamous straight people? Dating apps are a hellscape.

No, they worked for me between 15-10 years ago, but I get it - by all accounts now they’re so enshittified that it’s just Match parasitically turning loneliness into profit at ever greater efficiency. They would have failed immediately if they didn’t work long enough to capture enough market and attention.

As others mentioned OK Cupid, and it’s a great example. It was originally very good at matching people, and they took pride in it. I remember when Match bought it, as I had recently (just in time) found my person. I was able to see it go from “No, we’re leaving it alone, just tweaking a few things” to ending the interesting data-exploration articles, dumbing down the experience, adding micro-pay-gating, and fully gutting the experience and staff. Nobody should have trusted Match to not destroy what it was, and if they hadn’t sold and remained a useable app, maybe the market would have abandoned Match. Instead, here we are.

I don’t envy those people still looking, I assume best case is still using apps but you just have to waste a lot more time.

Duolicious? That owl has been busy, I see.

Sorta related, if you’re really interested in using them and are a straight cis person I highly recommend trying them out from the other side. Create a more or less generic account of the opposite gender and see what kinds of messages, likes, or whatever you end up with. It will be mind boggling how different it is from what you are used to and give you an idea of what you will need to do to actually make a match.

I remember being shocked in the early 90’s listening to plans for a dating site. The focus was on collecting and selling demographics. Even the private info being collected was driven by what sold to advertisers more than what helped people relate to each other

Yes, dating apps have always been a fraud because making a social connection was always secondary to selling you

grindr

faceless profile, blank, no information: “no pic no chat”

it’s all stupid hypocrites looking for low-effort validation fix.

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I think there was a time fairly early on when at least one was built to do the job it was advertised to.

I think more than half of Lemmy’s members were born after that though.

I think apps and websites where you can see everyone without limits or algorithms are fine. Apps like those still exist. They are just like social networks with no gamification.

So I don’t think it’s the apps, friends. If it hurts no matter where you touch, maybe it’s your finger that’s broken…