Dating Apps Don't Optimize For Love
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Your nightly dose of unfiltered opinions and unexpected conversations. The Last Show with David Cooper. Dating apps. They claim to promise love at your fingertips. But what if they're actually optimizing for your loneliness? Let us swipe past the potential romance on these apps and dive into their business model, which shapes how and whether you end up connecting with someone. I'm here with Mathieu Legend, a marketing professor at Toronto Metropolitan University, who's recently researched and written on this. Mathieu, welcome to the show. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me today. You would think like Tinder and Hinge and all these apps are trying to get me to find the love of my life. You'd think they would be optimizing for that.
What do dating apps claim to offer versus what they actually optimize for?
But things aren't so simple with these apps, are they?
No, they're not that simple. You need to consider the app as a business first, you know. So love is not the end goal. It's more like a commodity, you know, like it's a mean to make profits. So on those apps, I would say you're not the user, you're the product.
You're producing value for the platforms. And why would I use my monthly subscription to a dating app if I'm no longer dating?
How do dating apps prioritize business models over user love?
So there's this perverse incentive for these apps to sort of get you to think you're going to find true love and de-platformed. But in reality, they may not want to do that.
Yeah, no, the goal is eventually for you to be like, I would say like a microtasker. Basically, you're doing a microtask on the platform, producing data, producing micro labor for the platform so you can generate revenue and profits. So you are looking for love, obviously, but eventually the work that you're producing on the platform is generating a lot of value and profit for the platform. So the more you get hooked to the platform, the more you produce and the more you're profitable.
Now, if you're a theoretical CEO for a theoretical dating app and you're trying to come up with a business model, would the goal be that users never actually delete it while tricking them to think that they will?
Well, OK, that's the thing. That's the tricky part of it. Like, obviously, you need to somehow provide the value to the users as well. Otherwise, it's like no one is going to buy it and then no one's going to stick to the platform. It's more like consider it like a slot machine, you know? You had a chance to win the big jackpot, but you need to play and you need to play for a long time. So you have like a bucket of coins and then you put one coin and another one and another one and you get something, but you can get even better if you continue to play. So that's the thing. I have played on this slot machine for an hour. I already spent $500. Why would I stop now if I can just put one more coin to get the jackpot?
You know what I mean? So eventually you need to get something, but it's never, never...
What is the true nature of users in the dating app ecosystem?
good enough for you. You just continue to sweep and then to continue to play.
There's even, and I'm not accusing any particular dating app of doing it, but there's this perverse incentive for them to keep my ideal mate away from me, right? Like they could use AI and stuff to figure out who my ideal partner was and not give them to me because they would rather me get mediocre partners, go on a date, have a pretty good time, but then go back on the app. This is the kind of, if we look at this from a purely business standpoint, this could be incentives for apps like this.
Yeah, that's right. You know, there's something that everyone should consider here. There's a difference between a market and a platform. On a market, you pay for a commodity, you pay for it, you pay the value, and you get the value. That's that easy. If you're not satisfied, you go to another business, to another company, you pay the money, and then you get the value. But the platform doesn't work like this. You don't pay to get the value. You work through the platform and the platform will organize the matching. So you have, you, David, you have your own preference. I don't know if you prefer the blonde, if you prefer the brunettes or whatever you prefer.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–0:49
2
What do dating apps claim to offer versus what they actually optimize for?
0:49–1:15
3
How do dating apps prioritize business models over user love?
1:15–2:50
4
What is the true nature of users in the dating app ecosystem?
2:50–4:32
5
How do dating apps create a cycle of dependency for users?
4:32–7:29
6
What incentives do dating apps have to keep users engaged?
7:29–10:10
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from The Last Show with David Cooper
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