The machine is taking over almost every aspect of our lives—including romance. But can technology save the dating app—or will the new always-online generation look for love off-screen?
Editor’s note: In part one of this series, we traced the history of dating apps—and all the ways that their algorithms are broken.
Researched by: Nirmal Bhansali
End of the golden era of apps
At the dawn of the 21st century, single people everywhere fell in love with dating apps—which promised us an abundance of possibilities—delivered one swipe at a time. Even after the excitement sparked by Tinder or Bumble died—but we still believed that love was only a new and improved app away. A better algorithm would save our aching hearts. But even that hope has died in recent years:
Dating apps promised a quick fix to the messiness of love. Their promotional narratives spoke about reducing love to a simple procedure. Dating apps promised a love that ‘works.’ But they do not ‘work’ as they are supposed to, yet they create the expectation of love as an efficient business. Users get frustrated with this.
That disillusionment is showing up in the revenue numbers of the industry.
A shrinking pie: Late last year, the superstar of dating apps—Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd—quit her job, signalling the end of an era. Her exit was precipitated by a nosediving stock price—down 40% since Bumble’s IPO in 2021. Morgan Stanley declared the industry "saturated, mature or over-monetized.” And Match.com—which owns everything from Tinder to Hinge and OKCupid—reported a steady decline in paid users, quarter on quarter.
As for India, the outlook isn’t much rosier:
Six out of eight dating apps in India have seen a drop in monthly active users (MAUs) on Android between October 2022 and September 2023, with five of them —Tinder, happn, Aisle, Truly Madly and OkCupid—seeing a significant fall of 20-55%.
Losing the adults: Dating apps are losing traction in almost every demographic. Millennials who have been on these apps for over a decade are tuning out due to swiping fatigue. They are tired of being served up the same dead-end choices by an algorithm that is geared toward taking your money—but with very little return.
For example, this how one user describes her Hinge experience today:
Most Compatible has become the feature on Hinge I fear the most, because it often makes me question if I am indeed destined to end up with a man whose profile exclusively includes photos of himself in front of sports cars, along with selfies of his ‘best Blue Steel’ facial expression that looks like he just ate a sour gummy bear. If this is who the Hinge gods have decided I'm best suited with, I'd rather be single forever.
The conversations about Bumble over at Reddit are no less gloomy:
In August, a swarm of hopeless and horny romantics on Reddit disputed the pros and cons of Bumble, the dating app that requires women to make the first move. “Besides barren wastelands like [Plenty of Fish] crawling with bots, scammers, hookers, and psychos, this app has to be the worst,” one user posted… [T]he consensus was unequivocally clear: Bumble, like the majority of dating apps currently on the market, is bad. “If Bumble is the worst dating app, then what’s the best alternative—Tinder, Hinge?” asked one user. “They all suck so which one sucks the least?”
People are still on dating apps mostly because our wired life offers few other options for meeting someone new. The hope of actually finding love, however, is fading: “If you met your partner on a dating app two years ago, you caught the last chopper out of ‘Nam.”
Losing the kids: The real dire news for the industry lies in Gen Z survey numbers:
A Harris poll, the Singles in America Survey, published in February found that 44% of Generation Z would rather clean a toilet than go on another online date, and 30% of Gen Zers agree with the statement “I would rather walk across hot coals than go on another online date.”
More than 90% feel generally frustrated with dating apps. But even worse—a full 40% say they are “happily single”—and therefore highly unlikely to spend hours swiping in search of love. The kids are instead using dating apps like LinkedIn—to network—or just for time pass. Others have entirely ditched the apps to look for connections IRL
Enter the machine: An AI to woo them all
As with all problems of humanity, both companies and their users are looking to tech for a solution for their woes. And the candidate most likely to be appointed saviour is —surprise, surprise–Artificial Intelligence.
Need a dating mentor? AI tools on the user side focus on reducing the drudgery of online dating—uploading, swiping, sifting, texting. If constant flirting has become such a chore, why not let the machine do the wooing for you? You could, for example, turn to Rizz—a “digital wingman” named after the slang word for ‘charisma’—which can help you come up with “killer opening lines.” As the founder so romantically puts it:
It's awkward in the very beginning, especially coming up with the right opener. It's time consuming, it's like a second job. And so they come to Rizz in order to help them relieve that barrier, that friction point.
Or you could opt for a ‘dating mentor’ like Meeno—a relationship coach designed for a post-pandemic generation—“lacking even basic social skills, because they spent two years at home staring at screens not being able to pick up basic body language.” If that’s not enough, you can practise your dating skills on a customizable AI girlfriend or boyfriend on Romance.AI.
Need a dating doppelganger? With Volar, you can create a virtual avatar after extensive convos with a chatbot that will do all the initial grunt work for you:
The app then spins up a chatbot that tries to mimic not only a person’s interests but also their conversational style. That personal chatbot then goes on quick virtual first dates with the bots of potential matches, opening with an icebreaker and chatting about interests and other topics picked up from the person it is representing.
Of course, your chatbot will be interacting with the other person’s chatbot—just to make it entirely surreal:
The chatbot asked a different potential match what type of kitchen utensil they would want to be and why. The potential date’s own bot didn’t seem fazed and responded that it would be a ladle because it enjoys “adding flavour to the mix.”
Sigh! Why do machines get to have all the fun?
The other option: An AI to match them all
The other AI-driven iteration is focused on improving your matches—using the oddest criteria. For example, SciMatch:
The dating app runs photos of users’ faces through its algorithm to determine their personality traits, such as outgoing, neurotic or conscientious. It then recommends potential mates who have compatible characteristics.
Be warned: its interpretations are, umm, a little creative:
The algorithm doesn’t focus on specific facial features but studies the face as a whole. For example, people with heart-shaped faces are considered by face-reading experts (yes, this is a thing) to be creative and have a fiery temperament.
Hot or not? Apps like Iris use equally creative—if less new-agey—methods of predicting mutual attraction:
Iris Dating predicts attraction by having users register their like or dislike of a large number of photos, starting with random stock images and then narrowing down to pictures of people the algorithm predicts the user will find attractive. At the end of this process, Iris claims it will have trained an AI that understands your type.
Meme me this! Or you can undertake the same exercise with memes over at Schmooze:
Instead of people’s profiles, you’re immediately greeted with a meme set against a colourful, cartoon-like backdrop, with the choice to swipe right for “like” and left for “don’t like.” After a certain amount of swiping, the app’s machine-learning model attempts to evaluate what kind of humour you like and your topics of interest, such as politics, pop culture or science. At that point, you’ll receive a “#MatchRec” with someone whose humour allegedly matches yours, leaving you with the choice to “Schmooze” or “Snooze.”
Of course, human attraction is as always fickle—liable to disappear at moment’s notice when you actually encounter a warm body.
The bottomline: We give the last word to Jason Parham in Wired who writes:
We are inching toward.. a period of post-romantic love in our digital society, where conveniences such as dating apps play a hand in rewriting “the ethical codes of love with the objective of building a notion of love deprived of pain, loss, and negative emotions.” In this new notion of love, if it should even be called that, the human experience that characterises dating, its highs and lows, is flattened through machined exchanges.
Reading list
TIME, CNN and LA Times an excellent roundup of the latest AI apps. Bustle explains why millennials are breaking up with dating apps—while the Washington Post explains why kids hate Tinder. Economic Times has more on the end of the Indian love affair. Wired via Vogue has a colourful take on the same. Fortune via Yahoo News has more on Gen Z folks networking on dating apps. ICYMI: The first part of this series looked at why dating apps are broken.
