DRAFT

I’ve been thinking a lot about the perverse incentives at play when it comes to the services that a lot of use to connect with others. In particular, I’ve been thinking about social media and dating apps and how their stated aims (“to connect people” or “to help you find a partner/lover/hookup/friend”) are fundamentally at odds with the business models of the companies that provide the service. Let’s take an app like Hinge, or Tinder as an example. In principle, these apps help connect you with people you might find compelling in some way. These sort of apps are pretty interesting from a data science perspective – they have tons of relevant data at their disposal to help design an algorithm (or train a model) to link you up with people who you’re interested in. This problem isn’t quite as clear cut as say, image classification, but it is reasonably well scoped. Given that you give these apps all sorts of information about yourself and about your preferences, why don’t they work better?

Why do people struggle so hard to connect with others with these apps? My hypothesis is that the companies that build these apps have no reason to do a good job of connecting you with people. The primary goal of these companies is to make money for their shareholders. Any other objective is secondary and subsidiary to this. The way these companies have figured out how to make money with these apps is by selling ads and subscriptions. Both of these approaches benefit from the user spending more time using the app, which I believe is largely antithetical to the “public-facing” goal of the company (Hinge in particular bills itself as the app designed to be deleted!), which is to help you connect with others. The more you connect with others, the less you’re inclined to use a dating app – who needs Hinge or Tinder if you’re going on fun dates with someone (or multiple people)? In short, the capitalist incentive structure in which dating app companies are situated doesn’t allow for building a dating app that benefits the user.

Note that I’m not saying definitively that capitalism is to blame for why dating apps suck. I think a bunch of other reasons contribute to this, including but not limited to gender-based socialization (eg, toxic masculinity), racism, unhealthy beauty standards, mistaking sex for intimacy, mistaking lust for love, the superficialization of desire, and the fact that we live in a world where women actively fear for their lives when interacting with men. That said, I think it might be possible to test out my hypothesis that capitalism at least contributes to the shittiness of dating apps: What if we were to build a dating app that didn’t have to make money? How could we design algorithms for matching and connecting people if we didn’t have to worry about selling more ads or selling subscriptions? Moreover, what if we thought about dating apps as a public service, like the U-Bahn, or public toilets?