The Unethical Nature Of Dating Apps

And how we might solve the problem once and for all…

Sean Rad, Whitney Wolfe, Christian Rudder, Arum Kang, Gary Kremen, Adam Berger, and I could go on and on. All these names have one thing in common — they’re either founders or CEOs of currently popular dating sites and apps. On the surface are often presented as visionaries, downright examples to follow in the business world, changing the world one swipe at a time. Whitney’s story for example, leaving Tinder to start her own thing, Bumble, has been shared on LinkedIn so many times, it makes me wonder whether the world forgot there’s plenty other female CEOs to celebrate, and frankly for better reasons than building yet another dating app where the only difference is the female initiating the conversation. If I am to be honest, Elizabeth Holmes at least tried something truly revolutionary. Too bad she failed and did so miserably. I really hoped she wouldn’t.

But of course Whitney is not the only one putting a different spin on dating. Adam Berger is all about getting the church folks into a café or bed if it ever goes that far. The unverifiable testimonials tend to claim it does, though if you ask me, it’s easier to verify the existence of little green men roaming around the Universe than some of the happily-ever-after claims.

But let me take a step back. Why am I here bitching in public about dating apps, their founders, and CEOs? After all, “live and let live”, right? Well, apparently that only goes one way — their way. As a young bachelor who has over a decade’s worth of successful and not so successful experience with dating apps, I have spent a lot of time analysing not just user profiles, but trends, business models and the ethical aspects of these sites and apps, and came to some interesting conclusions, which, I think, are worth sharing. I would also invite you to put your shyness aside and share your experience in the comments as well. While I may have started using dating apps back when it was the unconventional path to meeting people, in this day and age, it is the norm, nobody is going to judge, certainly not me! Your grandparents might, but hey, they’re old, and probably don’t read Medium anyway. 😁

A multitude of issues

None of which are perceived as issues by the app owners. From a user perspective, it’s baffling that virtually all dating apps have adopted the swiping mechanism, but from a business perspective, this is a feature, and frankly everything that most users will hate about dating apps, are things their founders and CEOs will love about them and call features.

I have seen OkCupid for instance go from a decent place to find love to just another Tinder over the last ten years. I have seen monthly memberships costs go up for no apparent reason. Matching has gone from pseudo-scientific to surface-level literal matching of interests, traits, and preferences. But let’s not gloss over them, and break some of them down a little.

• Swiping. While undeniably a genius UX design choice — though not accessible — it is objectively an action that keeps users on these apps. However, it also hides a massive flaw — it promotes superficiality. In fact, it goes beyond that, it creates a culture that’s unfair to both sides — the one who swipes and the one who is being swiped on. What happens, really, is a lot more than just deciding whether we’re interested in meeting someone or not. In fact, a wild guess would be that 90% of users swipe right on anyone whom they don’t find unattractive within 1 second. But that’s just the first filter. Everyone who got swiped right on get into a bucket of potential matches, and that’s a big bucket. That’s likely 50% of users or more, and can go as high as 80–90%! Essentially, a match means nothing, and getting excited about it is the worst thing one can do. That’s a problem because matching with someone should be exciting. It’s like going up to someone at a pub, and them not sending you to take a hike after five seconds.
• Profiles. To date, I think Hinge has the more clever profile, and funnily enough, Hinge is where I met my most amazing date in the last 10 years. But, it’s still nowhere near what a profile should be. In general, users are not required to fill out a solid set of info or verify themselves. Profiles are just as shallow as the swiping action they encourage. Some say a picture’s worth a 1000 words. Well, I’d argue that when it comes to dating, one needs a lot more than a photo. There are no layers. In fact, even the most creatives users struggle to put their personality into the very little space there is for it to shine. Interestingly, enough, when a friend of mine tried to set me up with someone, she gave me photos and information that I actually found relevant, which was great confirmation that throwing a standardised profile out there is a very hit-and-miss approach.
• The extras. The super-likes, the anything and everything that you can be fooled to pay for. I mean, it often feels like half the dating apps out there were designed by RyanAir’s O’Leary. I wonder what’s next. Want to write sentences longer than ten words? Pay up! Want to send emojis? Pay up! Want to keep the match alive for more than a day? Pay up! Oh! Wait. That’s already a feature, courtesy of Whitney Wolfe’s Bumble!

There are a multitude of other questionable features in dating apps everywhere, but I’ll stick to the above three because they illustrate the best my next point, and really the main point of this article.

Categorically unethical

If you spend just a few minutes to analyse what dating apps offer for their monthly memberships, you’ll quickly realise it’s practically nothing and that nothing comes at a pretty steep cost — a cost that is in no way justifiable. I actually sat down twice to build a dating apps in an attempt to start a more ethical alternative. From a business and technical perspective, these apps are at best medium-complexity developments. Heck, you can download entire white-labelled UIs for just a couple hundred bucks, all designed, coded and ready to connect to a back-end service. So, the technical effort is definitely not what you’re paying for.

When love is being sold, it’s called prostitution. When hope is being sold, it’s called… a dating app.

Running these apps at scale, will, of course, incur some costs. Given how popular they are, we’re looking at millions of users hitting their services on a daily basis. Given that most include direct in-app chatting and calling services as well, that also amounts to additional traffic and third-party service costs. Hosting all the images and other assets users upload, costs storage space as well, but all that added together is still somewhere below $1/user/month. Bumble, for instance, however, charges $29.99! And if you thought that was it, you’d be wrong. An additional monthly boost option comes at $18.99, and then if you want a month’s worth of spotlights, it’s another $49.99! That’s practically $100/month to take full advantage of the app’s capabilities. And because we all know how well these apps work, multiply that by 12, and you’re looking at a $1200 cost a year just for an app to give you access to meet people. People who were not selected by any science, by a capable matchmaker, your friends, or anyone with any credentials of knowing who might be good for you. Well, except yourself. And this is where the ethics comes in…

No dating app guarantees they’ll get you a match or a date. What they do guarantee is that you’ll have opportunities. They sell you hope.

They sell you hope that the next swipe will be the one. When it keeps not happening, they’ll sell you premium extras to improve your chances, none of which have anything to do with who you are as a person. In reality though, that’s less than what you’d get with just going to a pub, park, library, church, supermarket, anywhere and everywhere humans go and have the opportunity to strike up a conversation. If anything, the in-person initiation of a conversation will be tons more beneficial that swiping and paying for it. Saying hello in real life costs nothing, but it costs $20+ on a dating app. You also get to hear their voice, see their gestures and behaviour in a context, find out whether they smell bad or not, if they like alcohol just a tad too much, you even get to touch their hand as you introduce yourself! You get to match in 3D for free! Isn’t that crazy…

The fundamentally unethical aspect of dating apps is the sale of hope.

People who sign up, even the sleaziest of them, do so with one hope — some kind of connection. That connection, however, is not guaranteed, if anything it’s made just difficult enough that you’d feel you need the extras to improve your chances. Dating apps feed on desperation, and it got so bad that many users are now subscribed to not one, but a number of these services, and suddenly, you’re looking at higher bills for dating apps than what you’re paying for food on any given month. The fact that one of them allows the women to start the conversation? Well-marketed gimmick. That it’s targeting only Christians? Just a well-marketed gimmick. It’s just a different slice of the same pie of people who are either desperate, don’t have the skills to initiate live conversations, or are looking to fit dating into an extremely busy schedule — and frankly this is their best option. None of the above reasons, however, are good enough reasons for dating apps to exploit this very basic human need and desire of wanting companionship and/or romance.

Love must be democratised

So, what is the solution? To be perfectly honest, the true solution would be for people to find their way back to the “old ways” of socialising and meeting people in real life, without the need of any sort of digital tool. But I cannot be an idealist. That’s something that will neither happen, nor is it in many ways practical in the digital age. So, we must find a way to democratise dating in a different way.

Now, of course many dating app advocates, especially their owners and marketing teams will quickly point out that some of them offer a free tier, but I’ve seen and used the free tier and so many others, and it’s never great in fact. It’s not meant to be.

The free tier is there to draw you in and sell you the subscription.

That is not a free tier, that is not democratised dating, that’s simply an elaborate ad. Free tiers are definitely not the solution. The solution is a lot more radical.

Dating apps need not be owned by for-profit private entities. Yes, you heard that right. Democratising dating actually would mean reinventing how the apps are owned, governed and overseen. Dating apps need to become an open social experiment and owned by non-profit agencies. The second time I sat down to build a dating app, I actually built it with this model in mind. Let me explain briefly.

Imagine a dating app that’s 100% free, there are no paid tiers or features. None of its capabilities are driven by profit, but by scientific, sociological and psychological focus on its users and their well-being and success. Its funding would be part-funded by charities, non-profits, a chosen percentage of one’s taxes, and partly by anonymised data. The reason for the latter is that having a massive global database of anonymous data on how romantic connections form and evolve over time in the digital age would be invaluable information and would greatly help improve these applications over time, with the hope that it would also reflect positively in new human connections.

Love and companionship is incredibly important for the healthy development of a well-adjusted, well-rounded, and purposeful society.

If this sounds a bit like a social experiment, then that’s because it is. A very long-term one. But if you look at all the current dating apps and the companies that own them, they do the exact same thing, but they do so for massive profits, while skewing the user experience, creating social classes within the app based on simply how much you can afford to use it, all the while collecting gazillions of data and doing God know what with it. Zero transparency at a huge cost, with very questionable returns.

What my model proposes is the opposite. All the anonymised data collected could be queried and stats could be generated by anyone at any time. One could literally sit down in front of their computer and get an in-depth understanding of the dating pool and scene of their respective area.

Dating apps would become a public service for the first time ever, and I think the world would only benefit from it.

Attila Vago — Software Engineer improving the world one line of code at a time. Cool nerd since forever, writer of codes and blogs. Web accessibility advocate, Lego fan, vinyl record collector. Loves craft beer!