#incels being an obvious example but i've seen plenty of animosity from women towards men about this subject

[bill-gates-hate-blog]

It's actually fascinating to me that dating apps have essentially pulled the same bullshit that streaming services (and the video game industry, now that i think about it) have pulled.

Essentially: - the market is over-saturated - "content" is spread thin - constant downgrades and removal of free features to paid tiers

I can think of quite a few dating apps off the top of my head. Hinge, Tinder, Bumble, OkCupid. (Most of which have enjoyed a brief five minutes on my phone before I realized ahh scary, but hear me out.) Userbases are actually spread pretty thin. Tinder has the most people on it, being the only usable app in many small town and rural areas. It has very effectively marketed itself as a hookup app, not a relationship app*--hence, people stay on the app longer and are more likely to get frustrated and pay for the premium tiers (after all, those 86 likes are so tantalizing! I want to know who they are! Ah...now that I've paid, where did they all go?) Technically all of these platforms will advertise your profile globally, far outside your location to drum up likes and trick you into paying for premium, but Tinder is a pretty hefty offender because of its near-ubiquity and explicit de-emphasis on long term relationships.

Other apps lack the userbase that Tinder has. They might be okay in the city, but the effect is very similar to content being divided among the many streaming platforms that have sprung forth since the advent of Netflix. Sure, it's easy enough to download every dating app available on the app store, but you have to a) dedicate time to curating your preferences on each of these apps and b) the free versions suck ass. Depending on what subscription model you get, these things can run you up as much as 40 bucks a month per subscription. That racks up fast. And people are desperate for companionship.

Here's the other comparison. Remember the paid streaming tier of Netflix with ads, when in the past decade its explicit appeal was having all the content with no ads?

I did a little snooping on the OkCupid subreddit, because I was curious. Most of the most popular posts and success stories were from... 2014. Nearing a decade ago, at this point. Many, many of the features that made (free!) OkCupid not only usable, but a genuinely accessible and efficient online dating experience have been slowly chipped away. Looking at the google reviews, and the subreddit, you can see how disappointed people were to watch this app's downfall. Prior to my own forays into online dating, when I was first doing research about free dating apps (because I'm a dirty cheapskate) I noticed that naturally, the older the articles were, the more highly these apps were spoken of. Despite this being the supposed heyday of online dating, the apps are at the worst they've ever been.

The parallels to the downgrades of streaming services are fairly clear, but I think it's even more obvious and insidious when you compare it to the state of microtransactions in the gaming industry.

See, many of these apps have "boost" mechanics that advertises your profile to more people (because everything these days is so swipe-heavy) or they have "super likes" that are limited and can be bought and let your potential match know you're interested--god, even the all important, basic dating mechanic of "letting people know you're interested in them" is made into a paid feature! Admittedly, most of my examples here pertain to OkCupid (because it's the only app I can bring myself to spend more than 48 hours on), but that one makes you pay fucking $1.99 for read receipts**. This is very similar to the pay structure of the mobile games industry, as well as the free-to play model of many modern console and PC games.

The gaming industry, being something of a new medium of expression and working as its own "virtual reality" of sorts, is usually a harbinger of new "innovations" in the ways we are sold commodities--lootboxes, for example.

And here we are. The invasion of microtransactions, season passes, and paid DLC that gut the base game of the most personal aspect of our lives.

In the case of streaming services and certain games, the solution has been piracy, or not to play. But for many of us, romantic loneliness is a major barrier to happiness in our lives, and the results these subscription services net us are...minimal. For those of us who are less than conventionally attractive or socially awkward, I mean, there's a reason we're trying to utilize these apps in the first place.

The equivalent to piracy is risking rejection and asking people out face to face. Otherwise... you can't exactly download a relationship. Or not one with a real person, at least. Our loneliness is already being capitalized on via AI romantic companions, as we've seen with Replika.

I've seen a fair few people (in my circle of edgy lefty tumblr, anyways) express frustration over the odd little cognitive dissonance that it's no longer as comfortable or commonplace to express romantic interests in strangers, though it may be in a normal, respectful way. Can't help but feel like that's related.

*I want to clarify that people who do hookups are cool and can do whatever they want. It's just that the state of the dating app industry has left those of us more interested in long term relationships in the dust.

**These are generally bad in normal day to day life, but I would argue in the context of a dating app that these can be pretty crucial in determining another person's interest.