What Has Happened to Online Dating Apps? Our Dating Expert Explores
I was wondering the other day whether or not there are still millions of subscribers using dating apps and online sites to meet others and decided to do some research. I found my answer on Reddit under the headline ‘What has happened to dating apps?’ with 126 replies that largely answered my question, with postings from both men and women that the heady days of successful dating through the internet have now long since passed.
Also from the Guardian article ‘Bumble Fumble’:online dating apps struggle as people swear off swiping’, we get our answer as shares in Bumble crashed 30% this month after a bad stock market earnings report and the Dallas based ‘Daddy of them all’ Match Group, the owners of match.com, Tinder, Plenty of Fish and Hinge, reported a decline in numbers for 7 consecutive quarters, with nearly half of all daters and more than half of female daters reporting negative experiences. In terms of safety the feedback worsened further with 52% of men and a whopping 57% of women stating that they felt using dating apps wasn’t safe.
The Reddit thread was powerful as it was feedback from real consumers. One of the leading postings was a man with the username GWPtheTrilogy, who said that out of every 10 matches, 5 don’t ever respond, 3 fall out of bed at an early stage in the conversation, leaving 2 and 1 then ghosts him prior to the meeting or fails to turn up.
Many tried to persuade him that 1 out of 10 in a month isn’t bad - a 10% hit rate, with one person stating he only averages one date per year: “Women don’t owe men a response” was one view from a female perspective. Another concluded that her ‘heyday’ on the apps was between 2013 and 2015; and another view was that dating apps were killed by Covid and that the scenario we are experiencing now in 2024, is vastly inferior to how things were before the advent of the pandemic, when the popularity of apps was at its height.
Another view from Reddit was that apps and meeting online have collapsed because only a tiny percentage were enjoying success anyway and that particularity applied to men, with only around a quarter of them (actually 27%) were able to get regular dates, with 100% of the women targeting those 27% of men, but were then quickly becoming despondent by over ‘inflated egos’ and men who ‘just didn’t care.’ Use of bad language and highly explicit sexual content in messages was also one of the reasons for the decline in numbers and levels of success/meetings.
Some contributors wondered if it was an age thing, pointing out that we are all getting older and were being discarded because we have become age inappropriate, but a 35 year old user E-money420, who claimed to look much younger, falsified his age to 25, but there was no real change in his levels of success.
Other accusations from females were that ‘men only want to hook up and then never see you again, and as a consequence, women are now doing the same’, which is an interesting scenario. Another went on to say that she’d had some “really creepy” and generally scary experiences online and through apps, and that it didn’t feel as safe or productive as it once did.
User BDB8566 had a view that it is the dating apps that are the scammers and that they don’t actually want their app or site to work, as they want to keep customers. His view being that the dating apps give each member a score out of 10, but then block communication between people with a similar score, as they don’t actually want people to enjoy success. It’s a tremendously interesting theory and is very well put together, but remains to be proven.
Others feel that it is the high and growing crime rate that is to blame for the decline in numbers, with record numbers of fraudulent or fictitious profiles and identities. This is said to be more than 3 million in the UK alone and the misappropriation of cash is at a peak of more than £100 million per annum. That’s a frightening number of scammers and a frightening level of fraud too.
User Elegant-Spinach believes that we will “turn back to real life eventually.” Well, at Elect Club, many thousands already have. Our wonderfully friendly membership adviser team and brilliantly skilled matchmakers are ready to help you on your journey to find love. We’re a dating agency that puts you first, and we genuinely care about your success. If you’d like to find out how we can help you, then get in touch. Our professional matchmakers would love to hear from you!