Dating apps have evolved a lot over the years, with apps dedicated to any romantic niche–dog lovers, astrology heads, and big, bushy beards. Despite the seemingly endless options of dating platforms, the industry seems to be at a low. So this week, we talk about the current state of dating apps and what it means for those looking for love (or something like it).
You can follow Michael Calore on Bluesky at @snackfight, Lauren Goode on Bluesky at @laurengoode, and Zoë Schiffer on Threads @reporterzoe. Write to us at uncannyvalley@wired.com.
How to Listen
You can always listen to this week’s podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here’s how:
If you’re on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link. You can also download an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts and search for “uncanny valley.” We’re on Spotify too.
Transcript
Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.
Michael Calore: All right, so this is the season of romance. It’s February, Valentine’s Day is coming up. Zoe, how are you spending this weekend?
Zoë Schiffer: My husband and I aren’t great at either remembering or celebrating Valentine’s. The same goes for our anniversary, we’ve never once, not once remembered that it existed. This year, we’re going to a friend’s house and we’re going to have a kid-free dinner, which honestly, nothing is more romantic to me than an evening without my children, as much as I love them. What about you, Mike? What are you going to do?
Michael Calore: We sort of already celebrated. We went away a couple of weekends ago and that felt right, because we were able to sidestep all of the madness of reservations and making plans and things like that. So we’re doing the same thing actually, we’re going to a friend’s house and we’re having a meal in. Lauren, what are you up to?
Lauren Goode: I’m going to leave it a little open-ended. That way, my plans are either extremely exciting or they’re extremely boring. But I’m going to leave it in the murky middle so that our listeners can just guess. I saw a celebrity say that once in an interview, if you just don’t tell people what you’re up to, they think your life is incredibly boring, and actually it’s quite interesting.
Zoë Schiffer: Love that.
Michael Calore: That’s wonderful. Well, we are talking about romance this week, so I think this is a good place to dive into dating apps.
Lauren Goode: Let’s do it.
Zoë Schiffer: The most romantic thing of all, swiping.
Michael Calore: This is WIRED’s Uncanny Valley, a show about the people, power and influence of Silicon Valley. I’m Michael Calore, director of consumer tech and culture, here at WIRED.
Lauren Goode: And I’m Lauren Goode, I’m a senior writer at WIRED.
Zoë Schiffer: I’m Zoe Schiffer, WIRED’s director of business and industry.
Michael Calore: Today we are talking about the current state of dating apps. The apps have evolved a lot over the years. There are now apps where you can meet dog lovers, astrology heads, fans of live music. Whatever your thing is, there’s an app for that now. But zoom out from those swipe-right moments, and you’re looking in an ecosystem of niche platforms and algorithms that are just as delicate and turbulent as love itself. As the industry seems to be at its all-time worst, we’re wondering, could this be a corrective moment for dating apps? So what’s going on with online dating right now? What’s the current state out there, of the apps and the scene? What are people doing?
Lauren Goode: I was really worried going into this episode, that you guys were just going to be like, “So Lauren, tell us.” You attached people.
Zoë Schiffer: As a correspondent in the field.
Lauren Goode: Yes. Oh, good God.
Michael Calore: We did jump on that first question, I must say.
Lauren Goode: Well, yeah. So something like 30% of adults in the United States have used dating apps, that’s according to a recent survey by Pew Research Center. The biggest ones you’ve probably heard of Bumble, Hinge and Tinder. For a while, in the early aughts, we heard about companies like Match, eHarmony, OkCupid. Match is still in the game. In fact, Match is now Match Group, which owns a whole bunch of these name-brand dating apps that you’ve heard of. Tinder is 36% of the total monthly active users in the United States. And Tinder, I think, we’re going to be talking about a lot in this first part of this podcast, because of the way that Tinder kind of revolutionized mobile dating apps. Most of these apps start out free, but it’s kind of like a mobile game, in that they’re becoming increasingly gamified. You’re encouraged to make in-app purchases, but in this case, you’re buying access to virtual likes from other human beings. So that’s the dystopian state of dating right now.
Michael Calore: So in the free experience, you’re swiping and you’re seeing people, and at some point, you stop seeing people who are good matches for you and it just becomes sort of a sea of faces, right?
Lauren Goode: Yeah. So for example, within the free version of Hinge, if you get a bunch of likes, you can only see one at a time, and you have to decide in that moment if you’re going to reject someone or accept them as someone you want to chat with. And so that kind of limits you in terms of the context you can put that person into. You don’t have the ability to say, “Well, my other matches actually look better,” because you just can’t see them until you pay for the premium version.
Zoë Schiffer: Some of these apps also use some form of dynamic pricing too, so they’re able to sort of bucket you and identify whether you’d pay a little bit more, what market you live in, what age group you’re in. The whole experience has become, I think, increasingly inauthentic and kind of spammy.
Michael Calore: So it’s not all Bumble and Hinge and Tinder, there are now a whole host of dating apps that are just for people who are into a very specific thing, or people who want to meet somebody like-minded in a community that they’re a part of. There are apps for people who like jam bands and there are apps for people who like to go to hip-hop concerts. And there are even apps where men with beards can connect with men and women who like men with beards.
Lauren Goode: No.
Michael Calore: It’s called Bristlr.
Lauren Goode: No.
Zoë Schiffer: No.
Lauren Goode: This can’t be real life. Really?
Michael Calore: Oh, it is real life. Yeah.
Lauren Goode: Wow.
Michael Calore: Specifically, you must have facial hair. And then there’s Veggly, which is for vegans to get together because nothing’s more awkward than going out on a date and person takes you to a restaurant where the only thing you can eat is the beet salad.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, that’s a bummer.
Lauren Goode: Yeah. Well, it seems like what you’re describing though are these very, very niche apps, and I think there’s also this space that’s in between the big ones, Tinder, Hinge, Bumble, and those hyper-specific ones because there are apps that everyone’s heard of before, even though they have a specific purpose like Raya, which is for influencers who love other influencers and Feeld, which is for non-monogamous or non-traditional relationships, or ones that are specific to religious values like a Jdate or Christian Dating, or Salams. Those are specific, but they’re not like, “I like beards.” I feel like that’s a different category.
Zoë Schiffer: I like beards feels universal. I was going to make a joke that that’s the universal dating app. I’m like, “Who doesn’t love a beard? Come on.” That’s not niche. I interviewed these Stanford students a few years back, who’d created an app based on the matching algorithm for medical schools. Their whole thesis was, dating apps are not good at predicting chemistry, which I think anyone who’s been on a dating app would attest to. And so they wanted to create a questionnaire that all Stanford students could participate in, and then you’d have Match Day at Stanford, which became a legit campus-wide event where you’d get your one single match. And people would be running across campus screaming. They would meet up, go on dates, couples would form, friendships would form. It was a pretty cool kind of IRL hybrid dating app experience that these students kicked off, that went on for years.
Lauren Goode: That sounds absolutely delightful and also absolutely Stanford, and I love it. They’re like, “Let’s take the med school algo and apply it to our love lives.” We also haven’t mentioned Grindr, which of course, is the massively popular LGBTQ app. And we mentioned it on an earlier episode of Uncanny Valley-
Zoë Schiffer: Yes, we did.
Lauren Goode: … because it set a precedent for Supreme Court ruling.
Zoë Schiffer: It was the original dating app, right? This was the first one.
Lauren Goode: Before Tinder or after Tinder?
Zoë Schiffer: No, I think they were around before.
Lauren Goode: It was before? Okay. Yeah, really just a pioneer.
Michael Calore: There are literally hundreds of apps for whatever you’re looking for. But let’s put all of them on a timeline because I feel like if you look at the last 15 years or so of online dating, you can see two pretty fundamental shifts in the way that these apps work. One’s clearly about technology, right? The rise of smartphones, and the fact that you can download these mobile apps onto your phone, carry them around in your pocket and spend five minutes on the bus or two minutes standing in line at the grocery store, swiping through potential mates, and the swipe right swipe left dynamic really comes to the foreground in this era and becomes sort of the standard across all the dating apps. Then you have the pandemic in 2020 and shelter in place, when meeting people in real life became much harder and literally everything about dating moved online. So let’s first start by talking about the dating app scene pre-pandemic. What did the app industry look like before 2020?
Zoë Schiffer: I mean, my understanding of this era of dating was that it was very… The dominant players were eHarmony, OkCupid, these desktop experiences that ask for a lot more information upfront. You get pretty robust profiles of people.
Lauren Goode: Yeah. I think that’s the first time they were kind of branded because since the beginning of chat rooms, people have been all ASL, right?
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I feel like the friends that I have that still prefer the eHarmony experience, do so because they feel like they get a much better sense of people, where the newer apps have these prompts, you get very short snippets and it’s more photo dominant, so it’s like people put less time into the profiles and you have to swipe a lot more to understand what the field is like, what the individual is like.
Michael Calore: There were other big platforms too. There was Yahoo Personals, Nerve.com Personals, Craigslist, let’s give a shout-out to all the Craigslist couples out there in the world.
Lauren Goode: Missed Connections and everything else going on there.
Zoë Schiffer: Oh, Missed Connections. Oh my gosh.
Lauren Goode: They were the original meet cute on the internet.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, they were.
Lauren Goode: When I was in college, my senior year in college, this is the early 2000s, one of my housemates decided that she was tired of the dating pool on our pretty small campus, so she got on Yahoo… I don’t remember if it was called Yahoo Dating or Yahoo Personals, but it was the first time that I had ever laid eyes on an online dating profile, it was my friend’s. And we thought she was going to get murdered actually, because that was the perception of dating apps, they weren’t completely normalized. It was embarrassing to say you were looking online a little bit. There was this stigma attached. Also, she was fine, folks for what it’s worth. But yeah, I think to your point, Mike, the mobile revolution really changed all of that. It changed the mechanics, the dynamics, and it changed the stigma.
Michael Calore: Yeah. And here’s where we have to talk about Tinder because in the smartphone era with the touch screen, swipe right, swipe left really became the dominant way to search for that needle in the haystack, so to speak.
Zoë Schiffer: Right, yeah. And then it became much more of a numbers game, it feels like. You could just continue swiping seemingly forever in order to try and find your match. But the downside of that is the pool feeling endless, makes it harder to know when to stop.
Michael Calore: Yeah. And one thing that often gets overlooked is the importance of geolocation in these apps because you can filter for distance. You can say, I’m only interested in seeing people who are 10 miles away from me. I’m only interested in seeing people who are 50 miles away from me. So if you live in a city and you don’t have a car, or if you live out in the boonies and there’s not a big pool, you can adjust the location settings to find out how many people are actually out there.
Zoë Schiffer: That was really the thing that Grindr pioneered, I think, which was not just telling you who is interested, but who is interested in your immediate proximity and making it easier to find and hook up with people, which every app since, seems to have copied.
Michael Calore: So around this time that we’re talking about, a lot of these apps are free, and then there was a shift when they all started charging for premium subscription features.
Zoë Schiffer: We have to pause here because these companies are largely venture-backed and their investors want them obviously, to earn money or continue earning money. And the way to do that, once you’ve saturated the immediate obvious dating pool is just up charging your existing user base. And so we see the apps start to change in significant ways that have important implications for the goals of the company and then the goals of their users, and how those goals might actually conflict.
Lauren Goode: Right. I think what you’re saying is that the incentives totally change.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah.
Lauren Goode: I mean, it’s hard to say if they ever really wanted you to find true love to begin with. Whether you’re an ad-based free website or whether you’re charging a subscription fee, the goal is really, let’s keep you swiping, let’s keep you tapping because we want to make money.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, when I was reporting on dating apps, one of the questions that I would always ask employees who worked at these companies was, do you have a metric that you track in terms of how many couples are actually getting and staying together from these apps? And it’s different app by app. I think Tinder and Grindr, the perception was they were more to find people to hook up with not necessarily lasting love, but for the other ones it was, is there a KPI that your company is tracking that you have up on the wall that you’re measured against whether people find lasting love or is it minutes spent on the app? Because I think that that’s critically important for understanding whether your goal is aligned with the user’s goal.
Michael Calore: Yeah. So how safe did the apps feel in this era? I mean, it’s not often that we get to look back and sort of chart how safe we were feeling at certain times, but I feel like dating apps offer an opportunity to do that because we all kind of remember the scandals and we remember the experiences that we and our friends had during this era.
Lauren Goode: I do still think that even after mobile dating apps became incredibly popular, there was still a stigma around them, and part of that was vulnerable populations feeling especially vulnerable out there. There’s this meme that floats around the internet where there’s a woman saying to her friend, “Hey, just in case I end up murdered, his name was Alex. He lives in this part of town. Here’s a photo.” Sending all the data from the app. And the friend goes, “Great, have fun.” So now I think that’s just kind of a more accepted part of dating apps. We have names and ideas around what those experiences are, whether it’s catfishing for example, or now there’s a new type of scam called pig butchering. And I think by the time you are giving a name to something, it is normalized, it’s codified at that point. It’s not sort of this nebulous idea of, oh, dating app is danger.
Zoë Schiffer: Right.
Lauren Goode: Still very real concerns, but it was different about a decade ago.
Zoë Schiffer: It was different, and I think now there’s more literacy on what the dangers are, how to protect yourself, what you’re getting into when you use the apps. This was a more innocent era of the internet generally, we were couch-surfing, taking rides from random people. There was a way to connect with strangers and engage with them in all sorts of ways that I think now we’re a little more suspect of, but at the time was like, “Wow, the internet’s amazing. You can find anyone.”
Michael Calore: Smartphones are amazing.
Lauren Goode: You were fist bumping your Lyft driver with a pink mustache on its card. That is not a euphemism.
Michael Calore: I never did that by the way. I always offered my elbow.
Zoë Schiffer: Mike knew right away, that that was lame.
Michael Calore: I would just offer my elbow. I’d say, how about we elbow bump? Okay, so now we’re at the pandemic, right? 2020 rolls around. All of a sudden everybody’s stuck at home, people start getting a little lonely and they’re swiping like crazy.
Lauren Goode: Yeah, so during the pandemic, dating apps expanded, their businesses grew similar to the other online services that we were completely tethered to, like Netflix and Zoom. Match Group in particular, which I mentioned earlier, owns a bunch of apps, include Tinder, Hinge, Match.com, OkCupid, BLK, they had 17% higher revenue in the first year of the pandemic. They used it as an opportunity to push out new features and different subscription levels. That was also when they were introducing new safety guides. And then they leaned on video calls because we were all on video chats anyway. So it was also a moment where culturally, video chatting first became kind of normal and then, I don’t know the exact data on this, but I think even now it’s a little bit more common for someone to say, well, why don’t we video chat first before we kind of take the time to meet up in person and potentially experience disappointment in person?
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. And once again, this wasn’t at the time seen as a momentary bump because of the pandemic. A lot of tech companies and dating apps were part of this kind of assumed maybe this is the new normal. Our user bases have ballooned, we’re raking in money. This is the golden era and it’s going to continue. And so then when it did not continue, and there was a pullback in the dating app industry, people didn’t want to be online all the time or on their phones all the time, the kind of companies themselves had to recalibrate and start finding new ways to squeeze money out of people.
Lauren Goode: And can I just give credit to our producer here for a moment? She sent along a data point that said on March 29th, there was a one-day record for the app, Tinder users swiped through more than three billion potential matches in one day. But this makes me laugh because it’s March 29th, 2021. So I just want to go back and be like, “Kids, the vaccines are coming. They’re coming. You’re almost out of this.”
Zoë Schiffer: You don’t have to do this.
Michael Calore: Well, I think the best thing to happen around dating apps because of this pandemic bump was that the stigma pretty much went away. All of a sudden it was just okay because everybody was on dating apps. And it was okay to talk about it, and it was okay to meet people there who maybe you weren’t interested in dating, but you just wanted to chat with them because you feel like you could get along. And to the point we were talking about earlier with Feeld, there were a lot of people who were sort of open to a new experience. They’re trapped with their partners in their houses and they’re dealing with all of their relationship issues, and maybe now it’s time for them to branch out, and the safe way to do that feels like signing onto a new kind of app that’s going to fulfill a new need that they now understand that they have.
Lauren Goode: Right.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. It’s vulnerable to put yourself out there and say that you’re looking for something that you might not get. And so when everyone else is admitting that they’re also looking for that thing, which is basically the human experience, I feel like we’re all looking desperately for love. Yeah, there’s a huge normalizing factor that comes into play.
Michael Calore: Okay, let’s take a break and come right back. Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. So dating apps are on the rise during the pandemic and are still booming afterwards. So what are some of the features that we saw introduced during this app boom?
Lauren Goode: Well, we can’t have this conversation without talking about AI. And I think it’s important to make the distinction between the different flavors of AI that we’ve seen in dating apps. I think ever since we’ve had access to advanced Photoshop or the app Facetune, people have technically been using forms of AI to put themselves out there or outright catfish people. We’ve also seen the emergence of bots, which is you’re chatting with a person in the app and you have a sense that they’re not actually a person or they’re a person who’s been using some kind of tool to chat with you. Now in a lot of instances, the companies themselves are using AI as well, and they’re either using it because they’re doing things like identity verification or they’re using it to spot harmful communication, spam, abusive language, that sort of thing. And now some of the apps themselves have actually just sort of co-opted the idea of chatbots and said, well, we’re just going to introduce our own version of an AI chatbot that you can use to do the conversations for you. I think that’s the weirdest thing, just personally, that it’s gotten to that point within dating apps. I know Snapchat has a version of this too, My AI, and some of the teens are into it and all that stuff. So I just think that’s one of the most desperate things you can do as a company, which is, we’re going to take this fundamentally human experience, we know our incentives have been kind of misaligned with what you want for a while, but we’ve danced around it and now we’re just explicitly saying, look, we’re going to do anything we can do to keep you chatting, chatting, chatting, chatting and just to keep you in the app.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, I feel like when we talk about AI and dating apps, the assumption is that it would be used explicitly to improve the algorithm to find you better matches. So the idea that no in fact, Grindr is really not the AI wing man, so you can kind of have a dating coach to chat with, or the Bumble founder who said that in a future state, maybe just AI avatars will date each other is surprising, which there are people who chat with chatbots all day for therapy purposes or in relationships with them, so it’s not to say there’s not a use case for this, but to me, it wasn’t the expected application of AI, and it does seem like the goal is can we upsell our existing user base? I also just wanted to have a little caveat around catfishing because the line between catfishing and then whatever else we all do all the time feels surprisingly thin to me. I feel like there have been so many times where I put up a photo and I was like, “This is not typical. This is me absolutely head winking whoever sees this picture.”
Lauren Goode: Yes. We see a lot of high… And we do a lot of high gloss images on LinkedIn now, for example, and it’s like-
Zoë Schiffer: A good angle? That can be a… Anyway, I don’t want to get this off-topic.
Michael Calore: Well, Zoe, I mean you hit on a good point, which is the fact that the upsell is getting really, really outrageous now. The fact that you have to pay sometimes $30 a month just to unlock the ability to see who’s looking at your profile or to chat with more than one person at a time, it’s really contributing to this sort of distaste for dating apps now. I feel like a lot of people are feeling fatigued, they’re feeling overwhelmed, and they’re feeling like they’re just not getting as much out of the apps as they used to because of all this stuff that’s being added.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, it feels like we were kind of… I mean, what we were talking about before, the pandemic felt like peak dating app era, and now it seems like there’s been a bit of a backlash where the companies are trying to upsell users more and more, and users are getting a little upset and fatigued with the business model.
Lauren Goode: I also think in general, the bar for what’s considered successful on these apps is pretty low and maybe has gotten lower. There’s this great book called Dataclysm, and it’s written by the co-founder of OkCupid. I must admit, I haven’t read all of it, I skimmed it, but it’s fascinating and it’s really well-written too. And because he has access to all of this data, he gives this really incredible sociological snapshot of dating apps. And one of the things that it points out is that men are less discerning than women. They’ll like, like, like a whole bunch of profiles, so their rejection rates tend to be higher. Women will often vocalize how “bad” dating apps are. And it’s true, and we also worry about safety. But I think men overall have a worse experience just in terms of rejection. This book also points out that men think women are sort of generally more attractive. There are societal stereotypes around women. If women have a lot of tattoos, it says this about them. If women are over 40, it says this about them. But despite that, on the scale of attractiveness, men tend to rate women a lot higher and women find these very specific subsets on dating apps attractive, and then it just sort of falls off a cliff. The line he uses in this book is basically at that point after that, women think 58% of men are brain-damaged.
Zoë Schiffer: My gosh.
Lauren Goode: Yeah. So there’s a lot of discrimination against certain groups of people. Black women, Asian men, tend to have the worst experiences on dating apps. So what’s happening here is that the apps or the companies that make the apps don’t actually care if you find a “partner.” They’re aware of these discriminations that exist amongst the groups, and what they’re trying to do is just have you have enough matches that it keeps you on the apps. So they algorithmically create these clusters for you based on all of that, and just hope you get a few dates here and there because that’s a thing that will make you think, well, I might as well just keep the app on my phone. To get back to the original point, they don’t really care if you find a long-term partnership from the app.
Zoë Schiffer: Wasn’t there also reporting a while back that apps like Tinder, at least at one point, gave you a score that was where you ranked overall in the app? It felt like the LO score or something that was related to chess.
Lauren Goode: Like an Uber rating? That’s brutal.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, it was like everyone was kind of curious about what does Tinder think on the backend about my overall attractiveness? And it was based on perhaps the company’s own assessment of you, but also how people interacted with your profile, which is just kind of fascinating.
Lauren Goode: Wow.
Michael Calore: Woof.
Lauren Goode: Yeah.
Michael Calore: How have the scams gotten worse? Lauren, I know you have done a lot of reporting about this, so I want to put you on the spot.
Lauren Goode: Yeah, I did some reporting for WIRED in 2022 about this category of scams that is known as pig butchering scams. The idea is that these bad actors on the apps are taking a long time to chat with you and sort of fatten you up, and convince you that they’re really interested in you personally and romantically, and ultimately what they’re interested in is money. And so they’ll often say things like, “Well, I run a trading platform on the side,” or “I’m really big into crypto and I can make you money from crypto.” And vulnerable people end up giving away their personal information and in some instances legitimately getting scammed, it’s something that the FTC has been looking into. And we’ve written a lot about this at WIRED, Lily Hay Newman, our colleague has too, so I recommend that people go and check out those stories. I had this one experience where I was starting to notice this, people were popping up in Hinge, that appeared to just be very fake, and by fake, I mean they kind of had that face-tuned look and some of the answers that they gave in their dating app profiles to these prompts that exist, the answers were nonsensical. And I brought it to one of my editors, our Editor Tom, and I was like, “Tom, this weird thing is happening.” We were running a whole package of stories on AI chatbots. So I said, well, I’m going to try to chat up some of these people, knowing that they’re purporting to be someone they’re not and see what information I can get from them. And ended up chatting with one in particular whose name was Paul. Spoiler, folks, his name was not Paul. I don’t know what his name was, but he was not Paul.
Zoë Schiffer: Shocking.
Lauren Goode: He said he was German. I don’t think Paul was German. He sent me a couple of photos where he was like, “Look, it’s me in Germany.” And I just very quickly reverse Google image searched it and it was in Barcelona, and I was like, “Paul, you’re such a liar.” And then he was like, “Let’s take this to Telegram,” which folks-
Zoë Schiffer: Never go to the second location.
Lauren Goode: … not a good sign.
Zoë Schiffer: Never go to the second location.
Lauren Goode: I remember I signed up for Telegram and one of my legit friends on Telegram got the notification that I signed up and he just texted, “Welcome to the dark side.” So I ended up chatting with this Paul, who we then in the newsroom started calling Paul Bot, for a few days, and asked him if he wanted to meet for coffee, knowing that the chances of that happening were zero, and he was like, “I would like to get to know you first.” I was like, “He’s such a gentleman.” And then one night I just said, I don’t want to do this forever. So I finally just said, look, I mentioned I’m a writer, but I’m a journalist and I’m trying to better understand what’s going on with these operations on dating apps, and I have a sense that you’re not really who you say you are, but you might be working for someone and I want to understand what you’re doing. I didn’t hear back, but then it was Saturday night, I was coming home from a party. And as I was coming home, I got these requests for video calls on Telegram, and it was Paul Bot. And I was very afraid to answer the video call because I thought, well then my image and likeness might be recorded by whoever’s on the other end of this. So I kept rejecting and he tried several times or they tried several times, rejecting, rejecting. Finally, we did an audio call, and all he said was, “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you” over and over again. He was so mad at me and I was…
Zoë Schiffer: Oh, scary.
Lauren Goode: And I just hung up the phone and blocked him, and never got the story on Paul. But yeah. Oh, and I guess the key thing is that Paul at one point told me he ran a successful trading platform. My experience was mild compared to what some people have been through. People have legitimately been scammed out of money through dating apps, and there’s some part of you that says, well, you need to be a smarter consumer on these things certainly, but also there need to be guardrails in place. The companies have tried to sift through and figure out who might be as we call them, bad actors on the apps, but I think there’s only so much you can do on any online platform.
Zoë Schiffer: And that’s the thing about these types of scams that are different than other scams, pig butchery and the whole thing is that they put a ton of effort into it. It’s like why his reaction when you called them out was not entirely surprising, even though it’s awful? Because it’s like he’s invested real time and energy into trying to ensnare you, and so then when it doesn’t work, they’re pissed.
Lauren Goode: Yeah, you’re totally right. I think a lot of these people are also working for larger organizations. It’s not to say what they’re doing is okay, but a person like Paul Bot may have been reporting to someone and saying, yes, I think I’ve… They may have a quota essentially, and I think I’ve ensnared this person, and then I was trying to pig butcher the pig butcherer.
Michael Calore: Right. It’s a terrible scam, and I think people hear enough of those stories and they want to just quit, they want to get off the apps. And also, the world opened up again, right? So all of a sudden you’re hearing about these scams, you’re getting upcharged for every little thing on your favorite dating app. You’re on four or five dating apps and they’re all trying to get you to sign up for the next tier. And finally there comes a point where you’re like, “Okay, I’m done. I’m out.” And also, maybe people actually met somebody. We don’t really know exactly what happened, but we do know that since the pandemic restrictions have eased, the use of dating apps has dropped. I’m curious about why.
Lauren Goode: I think we should also just note that I know a lot of people who also did meet their partners on dating apps and are quite happy. Statistically your chances are still pretty low, one in 10 or something like that, but I feel like… I don’t know, I go to a lot of parties and people will be like, “Oh, we met on a dating app. We’re getting married, we’re having a kid.” I’m like, “Oh, that’s great.”
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. In terms of the decline too, it makes sense that at a certain point these apps penetrate the existing dating pool and they will maintain perhaps their user numbers if the product stays good, but they’re not going to continue growing exponentially. I think in the early days, of course this was a new product and so they were picking up users at a very rapid clip. It makes sense to me that that can’t continue forever and we’re going to see some sort of pullback. That’s not really how investment always seems to work in Silicon Valley, the expectation is that number go up forever.
Lauren Goode: Right. You only have a certain total addressable market with these apps.
Zoë Schiffer: Exactly.
Lauren Goode: So I do think it’s a combination of things. It’s the feeling that maybe in some instances they’re scammy or there are bots. There’s the upsell, some people don’t want to upgrade and pay more because they feel like it’s not worth it. There’s app fatigue in general, and a lot of us are back to in real life stuff now.
Michael Calore: Yeah. People are joining running clubs. People are going out to do anonymous tennis. People are joining polar bear swim clubs. There’s all kinds of things happening in the world now that people are like, “Oh yeah, I always heard about those things and then I really missed hanging out with people and I’m sick and tired of all of these digital relationships, so I’m going to actually going to go give those things a shot now.”
Zoë Schiffer: Well, yeah. And then the upside to those things is that even if you don’t meet someone, you went and did the thing. You went and did the thing, and I feel like the thing that… I mean, I think it’s a both situation. Dating apps seem like they can be really helpful and then also, they don’t give you the sense of what in-person chemistry is going to be like, and so meeting up with people in real life gives you that kind of instant feedback that a dating app just can never do.
Lauren Goode: Yeah, and I just think in general, we as humans tend to be pretty bad at saying, this is a thing that I think I want, and it’s actually misaligned with what we want.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, which means the algorithms are… To me, it reminds me of the Spotify thing, where the Spotify algorithm can feed you music based on your past listening experience, but it can’t surprise you in the way that randomly hearing a song that you didn’t know you’d like but really speaks to you in that moment can. I feel like, yes, dating apps can help predict who we might find attractive on the page, but we have all, I feel like, had the experience of meeting someone and being totally surprised by an in-person attraction that you might’ve completely glossed over on a screen.
Michael Calore: So folks are more interested in going out and meeting each other in real life, and they’re not hanging out online as much, and there are more apps, there more choices to go out and find your unique smaller community where you can find romance. And it’s not a direct correlation between those things happening and the rise of scams and the drop-off of usage in dating apps, but there are some pretty stark numbers that we can look at to show that, oh, people actually are not spending as much time on the apps and they’re not spending as much money on the apps.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. I mean, Match Group reported a 3% decline in paying users in the third quarter of 2024, and just to share one other stat, shares of Bumble plunged nearly 30% after the company dramatically lowered its annual revenue outlook. It’s not comprehensive, but I feel like those just give a sense of where the market is at right now.
Lauren Goode: And both Bumble and Match Group have gone through pretty significant executive changes in the past couple of years.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, founders stepping down.
Michael Calore: Maybe they will find true love in the marketplace place. All right, well that brings us up to the current moment. So let’s take another break and when we come back we’ll talk about where it’s all going. So for all of the folks out there who are still on the apps and meeting people, and interacting with all of these new AI features, what is the experience like? What is dating like now in 2025 on the apps?
Lauren Goode: It’s that sigh. If I were to give a broad picture of where I think the apps end up, I think it’s that people continue to lean in on trying to meet in person still, through friends, at events, through shared hobbies and that the apps are just basically lead generators. They’re like other apps we leave on our phones or maybe we don’t take super seriously, but we check from time to time. And in some instances they may lead to a date, but I think in general, expectations are kind of low. And that of course is my own perspective and it’s maybe personalizing it a little bit, but I think all of these ideas of we’re going to be dating in VR and it’s all going to happen through the apps, I don’t think that’s where it’s at.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, I feel like my friends and siblings that are using these successfully, say the move is start a conversation and as quickly as possible meet up. The goal is not to keep talking on the app. And if it takes more than a week, then that’s just… You’re going to drop it.
Michael Calore: I have weirdly high hopes for the AI features, because we talked a little bit about some of the apps experimenting with what Grindr is calling the AI wing man, but basically like a bot that helps you flirt or a chatbot that you can send to the other person’s chatbot to talk through some of the small talk stuff to see if you’re actually compatible. But then there are more sort of interesting uses for AI within the apps. There are basically profile concierges that will look at your profile and maybe suggest different types of photos, tell you to remove a certain photo because it’s too much like another kind of photo, remind you to include a full body pic or something with better lighting. And then there are also AI bots that will read your profile and give you suggestions about things you can do to improve it. For example, instead of putting out negative boundaries, you put out positive boundaries. So instead of saying, I don’t want to meet for coffee at your house, you can say something like, “Let’s meet up for a drink to see if we’re compatible.” Just changing the language in your profile. So those sort of helpful things just make people better on the apps and may lead to more connections for them. Of course, this is all being done in the face of the massive gamification and all of the upselling as well because the companies have not backed off on those yet.
Zoë Schiffer: But I think that that’s a really good point, Mike. That actually makes me think that I should recalibrate what I said about the Grindr AI wing man because when I’ve tried to help friends write their profiles, there’s no more difficult form of writing than trying to distill someone’s essence into a few lines on a dating app. So having an AI that kind of has a really good viewpoint from gobbling up tons and tons of data on what’s worked in other people’s profiles and what hasn’t, that could be super helpful for people.
Lauren Goode: I also think if there is a bright spot, it’s probably going to be some of the apps that are very specific for people that help people winnow down what they’re looking for and find someone who is aligned with what they want, whether that’s someone who shares super niche interests or cultural values or even disabilities, people who just are like, “I need to find someone who actually understands this.” I think that there are a lot of positives in dating apps for that.
Michael Calore: Yeah. Another place that AI is making some interesting enhancements to the app experience is through the matchmaking, basically giving you a smaller subset of people that it thinks you’ll be best matched for. Instead of just showing you the old algorithm, there’s this new algorithm that gives you a better selection, and that’s kind of interesting. So yeah, I don’t think these things are going to stop people from using the apps, and I don’t think they’re going to necessarily make any of the other problems of the apps go away, but they could lead to more meaningful connections happening more quickly for people.
Lauren Goode: We’re going to leave this on a positive note, right guys? We’re going to give all the people looking for love, something to hope for.
Michael Calore: Embrace.
Lauren Goode: We’re like, “Look, no one’s using the apps anymore. Revenues are down, executive shakeups, scams, spam, bots, but keep looking.”
Michael Calore: Buy the ticket, take the ride. Embrace the AI matchmaker and the AI chatbot. Let it do all of the work for you. All right, so to close us out, let’s pretend that we’re going back out into IRL dating and we’re going out to meet somebody. What is the ideal place to meet somebody?
Zoë Schiffer: I mean, I met my husband at a book club and I thought that was a pretty good place.
Lauren Goode: That’s pretty good. Gosh, I don’t know. I’d probably say a friend’s party or something like that. Or maybe something like a piano bar, and then you have to figure out if the person is there because they are being ironic or they’re really into piano.
Michael Calore: And probably both of those would be good, right?
Lauren Goode: Sure. Yeah.
Michael Calore: You kind of want the person who’s genuinely there earnestly, and you kind of want the person who’s there, ironically.
Lauren Goode: Yeah.
Michael Calore: I would say probably the best place to meet somebody is on a bike ride.
Lauren Goode: It’s hard to have the conversation.
Michael Calore: There are group rides though.
Zoë Schiffer: Oh, right. And there’s always coffee and pastry afterwards.
Michael Calore: There’s always coffee and pastry afterwards.
Zoë Schiffer: That’s a good one.
Lauren Goode: I like that.
Michael Calore: Nobody said Instagram.
Lauren Goode: No. No one did.
Michael Calore: Slide into those DMs folks, it’s Valentine’s Day.
Lauren Goode: Seems like a good place to end it.
Michael Calore: Thanks for listening to Uncanny Valley. If you liked what you heard today, make sure to follow our show and rate it on your podcast app of choice. If you’d like to get in touch with us with any questions, comments, or show suggestions, you can write to us at uncannyvalley@WIRED.com. Today’s show was produced by Kyana Mogadam. Matt Giles fact-checked this episode. Amar Lal at Macrosound, mixed this episode. Jordan Bell is our executive producer. Katie Drummond is the editor-in-Chief of WIRED, and Chris Bannon is the head of global audio.