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What is the general state of online dating?
Previously, I left that particular cesspit some 10--15 years ago. Back then, I used various text-based dating websites. The dynamics were what I would describe as toxic. The platforms I used had unlimited messaging for paying users. I think the dominant strategy for guys was to message all the women they considered attractive using canned messages optimized through careful A/B testing. This lead to the women's inboxes to be full of messages which resulted in a very low response rate -- which was frustrating because I would typically put my emotional energy reserves of a few days into writing an initial message. (Today, I would experiment with sending a short comment which requires less energy. "nice shoes/helmet/whatever" or something.)
I think that with the advent of LLMs, text-based dating has probably jumped the sharks completely. If a woman gets texted by a guy who refers to her profile text, quotes her favorite authors and is generally very engaging, then 99 out of 100 times it is just some dude using an LLM who has spent five seconds looking at her profile picture before forwarding her account to his chatbot.
(I still think there is a niche for LLM-based dating where users explicitly engage with the site's LLM instead of each other and clarify their preferences through text. "Yes, I told you that I am into guys who read a lot, but the person you suggested to me just is a big nerd, I am not into that." etc. Not sure if it would offer any advantage over the status quo for women, though. Also, there is probably a cousin to Arrow's theorem stating that there is no dating system where participants are incentivised to state their true preferences.)
So how are the swiping apps these days? (Personally I think it would be more sustainable for me emotionally because swiping right is a much smaller investment. Swiping right on 100 women and not getting any matches would not significantly update my world view, while composing longer texts to three women and not getting any replies would be painful.)
Or whatever is the next hot thing in dating?
Miserable.
Both from personal experience and the sheer stats.
Every forum about online dating you can find is dominated by three genres of posts:
Male who is struggling mightily to figure out why he can't get matches.
Male and Female who are struggling to understand why someone they connected with, maybe even went on dates with, ghosted them or otherwise rejected them without warning.
Male and Female who post aggressively toxic interactions they had with their matches, and often insinuating that this is a problem with the entirety of the opposite sex.
And some people in the comments pointing out how these issues interact. (To be explicit: Most men don't get matches, so women are choosing to match with a small subset of guys who turn out to be toxic (but they're hot), and they use this experience to justify being toxic to other guys, and it ends up mostly being toxic interactions that get posted and get attention, so it makes it look like everybody is toxic.)
Admittedly there's the occasional 'hey this app worked for me, I'm getting married!' post, but rare enough that they're not representative.
Nobody, I repeat NOBODY is having a good time on these apps, and yet they all feel stuck because that's where they perceive the equilibrium is. And they repeat the various 'copes' to each other like mantras. "Its a numbers game" "their behavior doesn't reflect on you" "you dodged a bullet, keep looking!" Actually, a handful of sociopathic dudes are probably having an alright time.
Its generally known that paying money for the apps is a waste and doesn't help, yet they don't take the next logical leap and see that being on the apps at all is probably a waste.
Yeah that's the thing.
Try swiping right on thousands of women, of varying degrees of attractiveness, and getting nothing. Quantity has a quality all its own, indeed.
The dating apps have managed to cheapen the value of any individual connection to almost zero. And most of what we're seeing now is downstream of that.
Swiping-style apps are just a plague. Its easier to see that if you remember long enough ago when there were apps that sort of worked. Now they literally gameify things and pretend they're doing you a favor... whilst also denying any responsibility if the quality of your matches is terrible (but they don't let you search for what you want!) and in fact implying its really your fault altogether.
I recommend avoiding.
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