Bullmaestro

Online dating sucks

Online dating sucks. Never in my 12+ years of frequenting dating sites have things been this bad. I've now reached the point where I seldom have any genuine interactions with women on these platforms.

So why is that?

1. Every app is now functionally a Tinder clone

I think it's fair to say that Tinder's success and every competitor's attempts to copy their formula ruined online dating. I miss the old days when you could send a message out of the blue to a random lady and grab her attention that way, which is how sites like Match.com, eHarmony, Plentyoffish and Okcupid used to work.

Nowadays, the only way to communicate with a woman is for you both to mutually swipe right on each other's profiles. Almost every app now works like this because Tinder does this, and Tinder is king!

Tinder turned online dating into a vain looks contest. And women judge men a lot more harshly for their physical appearance, which means that unless you have Ryan Gosling or Josh Hartnett levels of physical attractiveness, you're not going to have much success.

It's all the more baffling how often I see phrases like "can't see likes, send me a message" in a lady's profile.

Online dating hasn't fucking worked like that for years!

Every app is now functionally an enshittified Tinder clone, each with their own unique branding and flavor that only changes up the experience a little bit.

Of course there's regular vanilla Tinder, which every friend have told me is the app you go on when you fancy a hookup. Except that's not really been my experience at all.

But also you have:

2. Online dating is an oligopoly

Much of the online dating market is owned by just two companies.

Match Group (owners of Match.com) alone own more than half of the online dating market, and they got there mostly by buying out other big players like POF, Hinge and Okcupid, along dozens of other smaller, niche, more localized platforms. I originally thought Tinder was among these but that actually came from a startup incubator owned by Match's parent company...

Bumble Inc control Badoo and Bumble. While they haven't been going on a buyout spree like their main competitor, they're still the other big player in the market that have a similarly massive chunk of the market share.

This oligopoly is the reason why each app is now shit and charges the equivalent of several WoW subscriptions for Premium.

Unfortunately there's no easy fix. Don't expect regulatory intervention to break up the monopoly, especially with Trump getting back into power...

3. The rare few sites where I do get lots of matches (i.e. Okcupid) are filled with fake profiles, spammers, scammers and prospective migrants.

Do you see a problem with this profile?

okcupid profile 1

Exhibit A is a profile of a woman located in my city, but the description is entirely in Korean. A simple reverse image search of her profile pic (to my surprise since Google Lens sucks) gave me an exact match with a South Korean influencer with a pretty sizeable following on Instagram, suggesting a fake profile with stolen pics. As if the incredibly pretty face you'd expect more from a professional model wasn't a dead giveaway.

In case you're wondering about the Korean text, according to a quick and rudimentary Google Translate search, it reads:

Peace is always beautiful”........ Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that

What about this one?

okcupid profile 2

Exhibit B is is a Filipina falsifying her geographic location (to South Glamorgan, Wales, specifically) to appear in searches with Western men. While her profile pic doesn't seem to be stolen this time around, this is still somebody openly breaking Okcupid's community guidelines by changing their location to falsely appear in UK specific searches. To quote OKC's terms:

Also, your profile details such as age, height, location, etc. must be accurate. We restrict searching and showing profiles based on mutual fit for details like age, location, gender, and orientation for a reason: so that you can find a person who is looking for someone just like you. Changing these details to appear in searches that you would not otherwise is not allowed and will result in your profile being banned.

And this one?

okcupid profile 3

Exhibit C is an Indonesian lady doing the exact same thing, changing her location to match with British guys. I live in Bristol, and I can tell you 100% that it's thousands of miles away from Indonesia.

I could go on and on and on about this, but I'll keep it brief.

Nearly all of my matches on Okcupid have fallen into at least one of the below categories:

I do not have a preference for ethnicity when it comes to dating. My problem is that I don't want a long distance relationship with a lady who lives thousands of miles away, nor to be used as the means to a spousal visa. The last time I tried a LDR was seven years ago with a Japanese fashion design student, and the collapse of that nearly broke me. I do not want to go through that again, especially with how hostile the Home Office are with welcoming foreign spouses.

4. Women suck ....or is it the apps?

Before you click away, no this isn't intended as some Nice Guy™ rant...

Yes, it sucks to:

But I refuse to believe the manosphere stereotypes thrown around. I genuinely think there's an easier explanation for why the experience sucks for guys...

5. Match Group and Bumble Inc don't want you to find love

The likely truth is, none of the big players in the dating industry want you to find love.

Think about it this way, success in theory loses them money, because a couple meeting via their app would mean two fewer users, two fewer potential viewers of any ads/sponsored content, and two fewer potential buyers of a premium subscription.

Online dating sites thrive the most from human misery. I'm not saying they maliciously intended to make the experience as soul-destroying, lonesome and insufferable as possible, but this state is why they're able to sucker people into paying £30+ a month for Premium, which offers basic features like being able to send unlimited likes, see who likes you, priority queue, Super Likes, etc.

The more likely explanation is that they don't care. It shows in how buggy some of these apps are. Going back to Okcupid as an example, I've seen plenty of glitches on that app alone. Profiles showing a heavily inflated several thousand percent match score, notifications lying that I have new messages. Push notifications not going through at all despite being enabled. Receiving "new" messages from matches that are just a carbon copy repeat of previous messages sent days prior. It's no surprise that reply rates are so abysmal with unaddressed bugs like these.

On top of this, online dating is inherently a sausage fest where men greatly outnumber women. While I cannot speak for the LGBTQ experience, what cis-het men and women go through is entirely different. Women are inundated with (often creepy and lecherous) messages and unsolicited dick pics, while men struggle to even get attention, which makes them far more susceptible to dating scams.

One thing cannot be denied based on the current state of Okcupid, Match Group have clearly failed to police the website. Maybe it's because moderation costs money, expenses eat into profits, fake accounts make the user count seem larger and ratio of women to men seem more balanced. Or maybe Hanlon's razor applies here and Match don't know what they're doing.

You may have also noticed that I linked an archived blog post from OkTrends, the blog that Okcupid used to run, which was one of the first things Match Group put on the chopping block.

Some of these posts, such as The 4 Big Myths Of Profile Pictures challenged the tips, advice and best practices you often seen posted online. Of the misconceptions:

These are the kinds of insights I miss about the Christian Rudder era of Okcupid, but of course Match had to purge the blog. You can't sell £30/month Premium subscriptions with practical advice!

In conclusion, dating sucks and needs regulatory intervention. But we aren't going to be seeing that anytime soon...