What really makes the dating app monopoly dysfunctional

They help you neither successfully exploit not explore.

Welcome to Offline’s first newsletter. Since we launched this many months ago, you might not remember why or what you’re subscribed to. Well, you probably did because of this tweet.

I’m happy to say that we’re a team of 3 (sometimes 4 or 5, on a good day) and have been building slowly yet steadily in private. And we’re going to have a beta version soon for you to test!

In the meanwhile, we’ll explore, in public, the problems and perils with dating today. Which brings you to today’s post: an abbreviated, hyper-relevant cut from Shreeda’s Dangerous Dating project.

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Dating is an exploration vs. exploitation problem

You’re put in a room with five strangers with the sole goal of finding a way to have fun together—in the shortest time possible. How do you solve this? It’s likely that you and the other strangers participating in this experiment come from different religious, ideological, and cultural groups. What’s funny to you will almost certainly not land as a joke with all five strangers. After all, you have no shared context with one another.

The group chooses to play a game. A game has explicit rules. Once you have rules—and consensus around them—you can cooperate and compete with one another. Moments will occur when something is funny. Perhaps bad luck strikes you down despite all the care you’ve put into a strategy to win the game. Maybe someone accidentally fumbles a move—much like making a typo—yet has to pay the price because the game says their turn is over and the move sealed. The game, a protocol that quickly establishes a shared map and rules for navigating that map, rapidly creates a sufficiently shared context. As Venkatesh Rao says, a protocol creates new water in which we swim. Now fun can emerge where it otherwise couldn’t.

Dating is also a problem of human coordination that benefits from protocols. Where a protocol is widely adopted, masses of otherwise unrelated humans can safely and productively interact with each other.

When a protocol participant ultimately seeks a desired end state (like finding a relationship), they have to make a decision between the two strategies of exploration and exploitation.

Exploration involves trying out new options that may lead to better outcomes. Exploitation involves choosing the best-available option based on prior exploration. Finding the optimal balance between these two strategies is a crucial challenge in many decision-making situations, where the goal is to maximize long-term benefits.

Too much exploitation risks getting stuck in a local minima. It’s likely that there are better solutions out there than you thought. Too much exploration, however, and you keep trying random new ideas without ever committing to one enough to see it through to completion.

Since the ideal strategy for many singles is to date around enough to find someone worthy of marrying, the “game” is of a finite length. At some point, singles will necessarily have to double down on a date, i.e., switch to exploitation. If you don’t date around (explore) at all, you may very well get stuck dating (or even marrying or having children with) someone you are incompatible with.

The problem of dating thus lies in finding and settling on a protocol that enables an optimal balance between exploration and exploitation.

Unfortunately, humanity has not settled on a sustainable dating protocol that has established an ideal equilibrium between exploration and exploitation. Arranged marriages overindex on exploitation. And, as we’ll see imminently, the problem today’s daters face is that the mass adoption of online dating apps has not only eroded incentives to switch from explore to exploit mode, it has made exploration itself boring and dysfunctional.

This is a huge shame as the dating outcomes of billions of individuals hence determine the collective political and social commons that constitute our society. The consequences of the behaviors of each generation impacts future generations. Plus, stable partnership correlates with better health and economic outcomes across the sexes. This is why dating is an important social issue whose protocols should be examined—and the consequences of such protocols taken seriously.

Dysfunctional dating protocols have a profound ability to negatively impact the long-term progression of society. If you only care about interacting with others for short-term benefits you can extract from each other, you lose the potential for solving loneliness, building community, or accessing committed support systems. Society as a whole could become less resilient.

Swiping now occupies a dysfunctional “protocol monopoly”

Swiping worked since it addressed the labor costs of sifting through a large list of potential dates. Creating a sales-process-like funnel, a user has to consider only one person and one decision at a time (left or right?). It also gamified this decision making by rewarding users with matches. This basic app mechanic has proven to be sticky. Not only is Tinder the highest-grossing dating app, its basic swipe technology has been replicated by its top competitors (Hinge, Bumble).

Online dating quickly went from something only the nerdiest did to becoming the common, default mode of finding dates.

For much of history, the most common way for people to meet each other was through mutual friends and shared social groups. Now, dating has been transformed into something akin to a pipeline process. In the same way that a sales rep sources leads, qualifies them, and then closes deals, people use apps to source dates. These dates either progress to later stages in the pipeline (kissing/hooking up, formally seeing one another, becoming a couple, and eventually, perhaps, getting engaged, then married) or eventually fail to (rejection). It’s also not uncommon for someone to be seeing multiple people at the same time, in the earlier stages of the dating pipeline, until one or a few are moved further along the pipeline.

But, as previously mentioned, dating apps fail to even enable successful exploration, i.e., the building of an effective sales funnel. When sales and marketing reps build and track sales pipelines, they use tools that allow them to populate potential leads in bulk, working in lists and spreadsheets. When it comes to dating, however, the most popular apps limit the number of new users someone can explore to just one at a time.

This brings us to a critical difference between sales and dating pipelines: the desired number of closed “deals.” Most people are dating to meet the one person they get married to. Sales reps, however, are trying to close the greatest number of deals.

Sales reps thus have a recurring need for the tools that help them source customers for their pipelines. This aligns with the incentives of the tool makers—often venture-­backed software companies that need to demonstrate scale and recurring use.

Dating, on the other hand, is a flow market. Successfully navigating the market means exiting the market, i.e., successfully finding a relationship and no longer needing to look for one. It’s possible that the relationship fails and people re-enter and re-exit in the future. But the ideal, for many people, is to be able to find a thriving marriage and exit the market for good.

All of today’s popular dating apps were founded as venture-backed companies. It’s trivial to see how successfully matching people at the first attempt is not an ideal business outcome. Investors themselves openly reject the idea of funding dating apps that promise high chances of user success. By limiting the number of users you can see to one at a time, you can’t actually use dating apps to filter and search through large lists of people.

In other words, you can’t create a meaningful top-of-funnel for your dating pipeline. You’re seeing only what the algorithm recommends. The incentives of dating apps actively discourage building algorithms that show compatible matches, since finding a compatible match means you no longer need their product. You really are put in a room with total strangers, most likely the wrong kind, instead of those with similar interests and values. If you met the right stranger, you’d hit it off, get married, and exit the dating market altogether—making dating apps obsolete for you.

Seeing who also swipes right on you satisfies curiosity and a basic human need for sexual validation. The use of swipe-based dating apps has also proliferated in part because there is no competitor with a comparably large user base.

When dating apps do work, it’s usually for users seeking hookups or short-term, casual relationships. Since hookups are noncommittal, users come back to the app(s) again and again to find more hookups. The apps win because they’ve generated recurring use. It’s also easier to find prospective hookup partners since hookup criteria are usually more superficial and easier to fulfill. (Is this person minimally attractive? Could I have sex with them for just one night?) Seeking a successful long-term relationship is much harder—you’re looking to find the one person who helps support or complement your self-actualization and growth needs for the long haul.

Hence, dating apps actively discourage users from ever switching from pure exploration to exploitation.

Dating app algorithms furthermore show a preference for attractive users (those receiving lots of likes and messages). Attractive users get more matches than they can meaningfully engage with. These users therefore put minimal effort into writing engaging messages. This practice of engaging with minimal effort then propagates as a norm across the entire ecosystem of dating app users.

Even when an opening message or dating profile bio is successful at driving engagement yet nonspecific enough to attract a broad net of leads, it mimetically spreads across the ecosystem. Suddenly you have tons of men who’ve written the same “Looking for the Pam to my Jim,” profile title, further creating boredom.

Dating is about looking for a unique connection, but dating protocol participants are incentivized to protocolize their own identities to better participate in the protocol. This is a type of flattening—sacrificing your dynamic identity in order to fit with the “flat” nature of digital dating apps, as currently conceived.

OkCupid, prior to its own pivot towards a swipe-based mechanism, encouraged users to write customized, long-form biographies and answer survey questions about themselves. The survey answers were used to suggest compatible matches—not just the users who are the most attractive. The long-form biographies were searchable. You could signal interest in a niche sport, subculture, or band, and someone could search for those criteria and find users who fulfilled them, en masse. You could also message anyone on the service—without needing to be liked back first. There was also an ability to prioritize compatibility at the expense of distance. These features made dating websites effective tools in thoughtfully constructing a dating pipeline, even if the platform took more effort to use. There were more levers to push, and more ways to filter.

The last feature—mutual matching—is marketed as a safety feature, helping decrease the chance of unsolicited harassment. But, as a friend has said, “the problem is that the apps assume textual harassment is a worse problem for women than failure to actually meet anyone interesting.”

Dating apps thus transform users’ desires for enduring romantic relationships into desires that can instead be satisfied in alignment with the goals of data-driven capitalism: seeking sexual validation and collecting many speculative sexual futures—at the expense of actually finding a viable, committed relationship.

Current geosocial, app-based swiping dating protocols have thus captured the dating market yet fail to deliver on creating relationships at a meaningful rate. They form an entrenched protocol monopoly despite being entirely dysfunctional on both fronts of exploration and exploitation.

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Aiming to solve the dating exploration vs exploitation dilemma might be a lofty goal, but we believe it’s still a worthwhile one! Can tech still can be good? It’s worth finding out.

In future posts, we’ll explore questions like whether the prolific spread of online creator-audience relationship dynamics is antithetical to dating and seeking intimate connections—things that are primarily about forming 1:1 relationships, not about audience building. We’ll wonder if some of the older dynamics of online, website based dating can be resurfaced in today’s culture and seek to uncover the primary motivation behind date-me docs.

If you want to help us, just reach out. We particularly have a need for design. And we’d love any grants.