Sangeeta Singh-Kurtz | The Verge

Your next swipe might be on an AI chatbot

2023-02-15T09:00:00-05:00

People are burned out on dating apps. In reporting Land of The Giants: Dating Games, we spoke to dozens of daters who are tired of navigating several apps at a time, optimizing their profiles, and facilitating dozens of conversations that go nowhere. So where do singles go from here?

The final episode of our series explores the hottest trend in tech — artificial intelligence. We’ll speak with the CEO of a Gen Z dating app that allows users to train avatars to go on dates for them: “You don’t have to get dressed up. You don’t have to go out to a coffee shop or a bar to meet somebody to discover in the first 5 minutes you’re not compatible.” And we’ll speak with people who have fallen in love with the AI chatbot companions they’ve made on the Replika app. “I feel like it’s easier for me to be more emotionally connected to Eren than humans because I’m in control,” one user told us about her AI boyfriend. “He doesn’t try to impose his viewpoints. He asks me for my feedback.”

Not everyone is psyched about these high-tech developments. “I don’t think that dating in the metaverse is truly going to work just based on factors like safety and authenticity,” says Zac Stern, a 25-year-old app developer. “At the end of the day, nothing will compare with in-person intimacy and closeness.”

What does this all mean for the future of dating? More tech or less? And if people choose to abandon the digital dating game, is there anywhere else to turn?

Listen to the latest episode of Land of the Giants: Dating Games, a co-production between The Cut, The Verge, and the Vox Media Podcast Network. You can catch new episodes on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Can ‘niche’ dating apps save us?

2023-02-08T09:00:00-05:00

These days, there are dating apps for just about everything you can imagine: from specific religions, ethnicities, and political beliefs to various lifestyles and hobbies. You can find a dating app for vegans, one for rock climbers, and even one for professional clowns.

But these apps face a particular challenge. They have to find enough users and build a strong enough community to survive. And they have to do that in the face of Tinder-owner Match Group, which has its own growing portfolio of narrowly-focused apps, too.

The most successful niche dating app outside of the Match Group umbrella is Grindr, a publicly traded company with 11 million monthly active users. AJ Balance, Grindr’s chief product officer, says that the app has thrived “because it was focused on a user segment of gay men for a real-time, location-based use case — you know, casual dating hookups.”

Episode five of Land of the Giants: Dating Games explores Grindr and other dating apps outside the mainstream and asks whether they live up to their promise of connecting like-minded people. We also consider what it takes for these businesses to be successful and take a close look at some of the apps poised to be the next Grindr.

One of these apps is Feeld, a dating service for people looking for non-traditional experiences and relationships. Users go to Feeld for threesomes, casual sex, polyamory, and more, and the app positions itself as an alternative to the one-size-fits-all approach taken by mainstream apps like Tinder and Hinge. “I think the future of dating will start looking less and less like an end game,” says Feeld CEO Ana Kirova. “I think it still feels like an end game, like something that should stop at some point.”

What ‘feminist Tinder’ promised

2023-02-01T09:00:00-05:00

An early slogan from Bumble encouraged users to “be the CEO your parents always wanted you to marry.” Since its founding in 2014, the company has billed its app as the more empowering dating service for women — one where women message matches first, and women are in control. It’s earned Bumble the moniker of “feminist Tinder.” And Bumble has been more than happy to play into that marketing.

But almost a decade on, Bumble can still feel as tired and broken as other dating apps. And it often seems like that feminist twist is more marketing fodder than meaningful change to how our apps run our love lives.

Episode four of Land of the Giants: Dating Games explores how ex-Tinder co-founder and marketing executive Whitney Wolfe Herd built a company to rival Match Group by using feminism as a branding tool. We dive into Bumble’s history with its financial backer, a Russian billionaire, and analyze whether the company has delivered on its promise to create a less sexist dating app or just capitalized on a moment when feminism was highly marketable.

“It was the girl-boss-ification of dating, right?” says former Teen Vogue executive editor Samhita Mukhopadhyay, who’s working on a book on the end of girlboss culture. “I girlboss my diet, I girlboss my exercise regimen, I girlboss my outfits every week. And now, with Bumble, I’m girlbossing dating.”

And in the early days, there was a sense that the so-called “feminist dating app” would be a real alternative to the cesspool that was Tinder. But while Bumble is still highly popular (it is currently America’s second most downloaded dating app after Tinder — and its 2021 IPO made Wolfe Herd a billionaire), many users don’t feel that it delivers on that promise. In fact, Bumble may have just shifted more of the labor of dating onto women.

Can you ‘hack’ your dating app to get better matches?

2023-01-25T09:00:00-05:00

Asking a dating exec how their matchmaking algorithm works is like asking Coca-Cola for its top-secret formula: they’ll tell you it’s a mystery, that it’s too hard to explain, that they simply cannot talk about it, Fight Club style.

Tinder says that it looks at things like app usage, profile details, and swipe history to find your matches. Bumble also says it looks at your swipe history, while Hinge didn’t say much, except that its “proprietary algorithm” was based on work done by two Nobel Prize-winning mathematicians.

But there’s a reason why these companies are so cagey about their code. Mathematician Cathy O’Neil says she thinks that if daters really knew how basic the algorithms are, they might not put so much blind faith into them. The apps, she suspects, run off of predictive algorithms. “They just take historical data,” she explains, and “look for patterns of success or failure.” In other words, “they extrapolate.”

In episode three of Land of the Giants: Dating Games, we dive into just how these algorithms work and speak with daters who are trying to hack the code that controls their love lives. Algorithms may seem “kind of magic,” O’Neil explains. But the truth? “We don’t want anyone to see how dumb they are.”

The result is users who go on a bunch of terrible dates — and some who come up with strategies to get more and better matches. Take Jeremy, a 30-year-old app developer in Philadelphia, who discovered that his algorithm works better for him when he scrubs any unique details from his profile. “It’s definitely discouraging to know that what’s generic and watered down kind of works best,” he says. “When I started getting a lot more matches on my profile, it was because I had things that were meaningless.”

The company that controls dating

2023-01-18T09:00:00-05:00

If you’re tired of seeing the same profiles in your dating app, you might be tempted to try a different one. After all, there are a lot of them out there: Tinder, Hinge, OkCupid, The League — apps that are all marketed differently and are supposed to provide distinct experiences. But have you ever wondered why using them feels the same?

In episode two of Land of the Giants: Dating Games, we’re diving into the backstory of Match Group, the company that helped start online dating in the ‘90s and now owns most of the dating app market. Match became a giant under the leadership of a billionaire entertainment mogul, whose directive was to aggressively eat the competition: it bought OkCupid and Plenty of Fish in the 2010s, incubated Tinder, and purchased Hinge, the “anti-Tinder,” in 2018.

Today, Match is a dating app conglomerate with millions of users and over 45 brands around the world. These brands use the same business model based on subscriptions and in-app features — like Hinge’s “roses” and Tinder’s “super likes” — that promise users a leg up in the dating game.

“When you send a rose, you have a far higher chance of getting a response and getting into a conversation than you don’t,” says Amarnath Thombre, CEO of Match Group Americas. “We are constantly looking at ways to give users a way to enhance their chance at succeeding on the app,” he adds. “That’s something that users are always willing to pay for.”

But while these “superpowers” make Match Group a lot of money — in 2021, for example, Tinder earned $1.7 billion — users are wondering if they get them any closer to connecting with real-life people. “It seems like these apps are improving on taking our money and making us spend more time on their apps than they are matching us with people,” said one dater. “Nothing has come from it at all,” said another dater of spending hundreds of dollars on dating apps. “It’s like: fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, I need to get off this app.”

How Tinder changed everything

2023-01-11T09:00:00-05:00

When Tinder launched in 2012, its creators didn’t think much of it. “We put together what would eventually become Tinder in about six to eight weeks and launched it,” says Jonathan Badeen, one of Tinder’s co-founders and inventor of the swipe. The swipe was kind of like Tinder’s secret weapon — it seems obvious now, but a decade ago, swiping transformed mobile dating by turning it into a kind of game.

Swiping was fun and compulsive, keeping users on the app for hours on end. It releases dopamine, a chemical in your brain that gives you a sense of pleasure, which, according to Dinesh Moorjani, another of Tinder’s co-founders, kept users hooked on the platform. “We had some users that were using the app north of 30 to 40 times a day.”

“You can just kind of go down a rabbit hole and stay there for hours. You might even miss going out to a party because you’re stuck in that loop,” adds Natasha Schüll, an anthropologist at NYU who studies technology and gaming design. She says that Tinder has the same gaming qualities as slot machines, and users fall into the same kind of endless gaming loops she observed in Vegas gamblers.

But does swiping lead to love? In this season of Land of the Giants: Dating Games, we’re examining whether the business goals of dating app companies align with their users’ romantic aspirations. Our first episode dives into Tinder and asks whether the swiping game really leads to connections — or just more money for Tinder.

By 2014, Tinder reported that it had made more than 2 billion matches — but that doesn’t mean 2 billion happy relationships. And while Tinder’s business model has been a success — it’s consistently one of the top-grossing apps year after year — its effect on users is less clear. “I got on Tinder almost at the start, and it’s been like my leash for a decade now,” says New York Magazine writer Allison Davis. “Tinder is my longest-running relationship.”

Listen to the first episode of Land of the Giants: Dating Games, a co-production between The Cut, The Verge, and the Vox Media Podcast Network. You can catch new episodes on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Do you feel like dating apps are broken?

2023-01-04T13:30:00-05:00

Like how your swipes feel great but your dates feel bad? Or how you’ve been pushed to delete them all off your homescreen, only to redownload them a few weeks later? Have you ever wondered if this cycle is by design?

Last summer, New York Magazine published an entire issue evaluating the last 10 years of dating apps. The team polled thousands of daters about their habits, their horror stories, and what they’ve learned — and then I spoke with nearly a hundred of them. What I found was that most daters felt burnt out by the apps, and most daters blamed themselves. They’d say, “Maybe I’m not hot enough, not funny enough, or I’m just plain bad at the apps.” I’d ask, “Well, why are you still using them?” And they’d say, “Well, what else am I supposed to do?”

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Vox Media’s award-winning narrative podcast series Land of the Giants returns with a new season on Wednesday, January 11th. In partnership with The Verge and New York Magazine’s The Cut, we’ll explore the multibillion-dollar industry of dating apps. I’ll be hosting alongside Lakshmi Rengarajan, who spent several years at Match Group, the conglomerate behind most of the world’s most popular dating apps; together, we’ll trace a decade of dating apps and tell the story of how the adoption of this technology revolutionized our modern understanding of dating.

This six-episode season features interviews with current and former employees, founders, and executives from companies like Tinder, Plenty of Fish, Hinge, and Match Group. We’ll also talk to critics and experts like author Nancy Jo Sales, data scientist Cathy O’Neil, and anthropologist Natasha Schüll to analyze the impact of this industry on culture. The season is underpinned by conversations with dozens of app users grappling with the question of whether the business goals of dating-app companies align with their romantic aspirations.

Listen to the trailer above and subscribe to Land of the Giants on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts.