Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Your nightly dose of unfiltered opinions and unexpected conversations. Unexpected conversations. The Last Show with David Cooper. Were you hoping to meet your next true love out there in these streets? Maybe at a cafe simply by locking eyes? Well, probably not going to happen. You probably need an app. And that'll be $19.99 a month, please. Plus tax and algorithmic processing fees.
Chapter 2: What challenges do people face in finding true love today?
For most people, the way they date is online. And all these apps, while they've charged monthly for a long time... It's starting to be all but a requirement if you actually want to find someone. I'm here with someone who's written about this. She is a senior economics reporter at Business Insider, and her name is Juliana Kaplan. Juliana, welcome to the program. Hi, thanks so much for having me.
So I always thought like $20 a month on Tinder, $20 a month on Bumble, $20 a month on Hinge wasn't really something you needed to do.
Chapter 3: Why are dating apps becoming a necessity for modern dating?
It maybe lets you get a few more matches, maybe lets you message someone who wouldn't normally you could message or whatever, but it wasn't like a requirement. How bad are these apps right now for the average user who is unwilling to pay? I mean, I think anybody who has been on the apps could tell you it is kind of the trenches right now.
But I mean, a lot of the problem too is like the features that you might want to be using an app for, specifically like filtering out for maybe like religion or values or like, do you want kids, things like that, that like used to be a given with the apps are increasingly getting paywalled. So we're seeing a lot of like a la carte paywalls, a lot of things that like...
You know, you would go on an app for specifically to be like, I want this type of person who is maybe like this far from me. Like those things are increasingly becoming monetized and that's what's making it so rough. Obviously, all of them still do offer like free options, but like it is definitely getting like more and more like, oh, did you want to see that person?
Like you got to pay for this now. Now, you wrote and you quoted New York Magazine as calling some yesterday time, we'll get to when in a second, as the golden age of dating apps. I matched with my beloved, the woman who's infinitely patient enough to live with me, Miranda, in 2012 on Tinder? Okay. That's my last experience was swiping left and right. And back then it was exciting. It was new.
It was only for like really young people. I was living in the Bay area. It was like a hot new app. I was an app central, whatever. What was so much better about these dating apps back then that now they're just kind of, well, cruddy to use. Yeah, you were swiping actually during the golden age of dating apps.
And it's funny, too, because a lot of the editors here at BI when I was working on this story were talking about how they met their partners during that exact same period on apps. And I'm like, congrats to you. But... There is actually like a pretty solid economic reasoning behind it. I'm sure folks have heard a lot about the Fed, particularly in regards to inflation and interest rates.
But we've had periods throughout like basically the past two decades at this point that are called ZERP or zero interest rate phenomena. And that means that for like these big VC companies, like your things like Uber, people I'm sure have noticed Uber getting a lot more expensive, like your DoorDash, whatever.
for a while, was pretty much free for VC people to, like, borrow and pour money into these apps. And, like, the game plan for apps in general like this were, like, okay, we're going to build up a huge audience by offering something that is, like, genuinely too good to be true. And then, like, once we built that audience, like, somehow the money will come or we will monetize it.
And that was true of the apps as well. So, like, back then, like... We're building Tinder not to necessarily monetize it, but we're building it to get as many Davids swiping as possible. Like, that's kind of the difference. Invest a bunch of money, probably at a loss, VC money on a product that just delights customers at all costs. Yep.
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Chapter 4: How do dating apps monetize their features and impact users?
And it's something you just see like a lot less of nowadays in general. Like we saw a little bit of it like in kind of like the immediate wake of the pandemic. But yeah, I think as I get into the article, it is like a little more insidious when it's the difference between like...
oh, I can get a really cheap ride home from like the bar in Brooklyn versus like we have basically outsourced our whole dating lives to these apps and now we have to pay for them. And especially in like a post-pandemic world where there just is like so many more restaurants and bars closed, everything's so much more expensive. We've lost the third places and the third spaces.
And then also like the apps cost money. So it's kind of like, what if we just, you know, lose, lose in every way? What does that $20 a month should I decide to subscribe to Tinder or Hinge? What does it get me now? Does it just get me what it would have felt like in 2012? Or is it I'm paying and the experience is still somehow worse than it was during this golden age?
No, it probably would get you closer to 2012. I admittedly haven't actually tried the paid features, although maybe now I have an excuse to expense it. Is that why you wrote this article? No, no, no, no. But yeah, I think it would get you a little closer to that experience. And, you know, also like something you may have heard of is this idea of like, quote unquote, Rose jail, maybe.
No, I've never heard of that.
on hinge yeah so basically like the app they kind of figure out who you're looking for right or like the kinds of people you're looking for and on hinge in particular there's like a little section that's like your standouts and those are people that the app thinks you would really really like um and generally in my experience like it is pretty accurate it is pretty dead on but like those folks don't show up in your like normal feed you have to send them a rose
Uh-huh. And the rose costs $2.99 a rose or something? Exactly. You're figuring it out. And they like, again, to their credit, obviously you can use all of these apps for free to some degree. So like you do get a certain number of free roses, but like, you know, the app is good enough to figure out, okay, like this is who you might want. And now it's like, oh my God, my dream person.
And now I have to pay $2.99 for a rose kind of situation. You mentioned this erosion of third spaces. What exactly do you mean by that? Are spaces where people go to meet other just kind of disappearing because things are just getting so expensive? There's no more like cheap coffee shop where you can sit for a million hours? Yeah. I mean, it's kind of like twofold.
One in the sense that like a lot of the spaces that like in American history in general have been kind of gathering spaces have like just dissipated due to a lot of structural forces. So you think of things like the union hall, organized religion, like even like charitable organizations or like volunteering.
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Chapter 5: What was the golden age of dating apps and how has it changed?
And obviously I love to talk. So I was like, this is great. Like captive audience. And from that, you know, I've made like a few like connections from that as well. But also like, you're not always going to walk away with a match and like rewiring my brain to be like, no, maybe that's the way it is. Like, cause on an app you're like, okay, I'm always going to get a match.
And it was like, that's not really how real life works. Juliana Kaplan is a senior economics reporter at Business Insider. Read her piece on this topic. Would you pay $20 a month to find your true love? You might have to. Juliana, thanks for being here. Appreciate your time. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. This is the greatest job in the world. An all-new Fire Country.
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