We’ve got a bunch of new people now so let’s bring back a classic post. What low stakes conspiracy theory do you believe that you cannot prove but feels right to you?
I’ll start: I believe that dating apps have made a concerted effort to smear in person meeting people and tie it to being “creepy” through social media so you are forced to meet people online(which was the creepy option just 15 years ago)
Even if this isn’t true: fuck dating apps. I hope they are a fad that dies out.
I don’t like them, but really can’t put my dislike into words. Do you happen to be more eloquent on this?
The apps train us to choose relationships the same way we choose which YouTube video to watch next. I got married just before these apps got big, but I remember watching dudes spend all day swiping and showing off their matches like it was their Pokemon card collection. There has always been an element of consumption in dating under capitalism, but with the apps dating as consumption is taken to a whole different level. They encourage the toxic behavior of using relationships as status signifiers.
I put them in the same category as alcohol, gambling, prostitution, guns, etc. A guy who is super into any of these is super annoying. I don’t want to see you swiping or hear about your escapades anymore than I want to hear about tales from the strip in Las Vegas except as a morbid piece of intrigue. If the apps were in their proper place, they’d be called meat marketing and you’d be kinda shy about doing it.
Mostly they’re designed to get you to pay for a subscription and then not actually get many dates, rather than to help you meet people. If you actually meet someone you stop paying for the subscription and the company stops making money from you. But if they can string you along indefinitely on the idea that you might meet someone, you keep paying. It’s a perverse incentive, a private dating company only makes money if their product doesn’t work.
part of the problem is that a lot of the swiping apps were at least partly inspired by Grindr. Grindr had a different audience - Gay men who wanted a hookup - and a different goal - helping gay men find a quick hook-up. Guys using Grindr weren’t likely to stop using Grindr when they found someone to hook up with. Grindr was more appealing to it’s audience the better it got at helping them find hookups. Tinder et all had a different audience - heterosexual people - of whom some were looking for hookups, but many were looking for longer-term dating. Trying to apply the Grindr model to straight (and other) people seeking relationships didn’t work as well, so capitalist innovation kicked in and they started searching for ways to manipulate people in to spending money on a product which by necessity couldn’t do what it claimed to do and still make money.
They’re fine when they’re actually designed to help people meet people they’ll probably like and go on dates. In the good old bad old days when the science and practice of monetization was far less refined the then-existing dating websites worked okay. OkCupid had no swiping or anything. You just answered a few dozen questions about stuff you liked and didn’t like and believed in, and then the website would show you a weighted list of people with answers similar to yours. That was it. That was the whole thing. “Hey, this person also likes gophers, thinks golf is dumb, and prefers dancing to sports bars. You probably won’t hate each other, send a msg”. It wasn’t magic or anything, but it was fine and worked okay. The enshittification really started with Tinder. Gindr worked fine because there were enough gay men who wanted a hook-up app that it’d support itself, but that dynamic wasn’t nearly as sustainable with straight people so Tinder kind of did a death march towards monetization and dragged all the other online dating stuff with it.
Removed by mod