The long term monogamous dating market requires two people to accept that they likely won’t find someone better than the person they have found, so putting all of the options at one’s fingertips increases the risk of feeling like you could have done better.

Part of me wonders whether this isn't exclusive to dating, but a lot of fields and things come the internet, globalisation and social media.

Perhaps that's why getting a job seems to be much harder now for a decent percentage of people too, since now the competition is worldwide and mostly sky high. Employers can keep looking for the 'perfect' employee (and skip over people they would have hired with fewer options) and employees can keep looking for the 'perfect' company or organisation (and skip ones which may have been 'good enough' before).

The market's been widened significantly, so those who aren't at the top of their field are against much tougher competition.

Yes, although there is no “monogamous” assumption with employment, so just as you would switch to a different vendor offering the same product for cheaper, so would employers. It doesn’t seem employers have been hurt much at all by the new dynamic, especially as more and more work becomes automated or broken into simpler routine tasks.

But why did they spring up in the first place? Trends such as increased youth labor mobility expectations, more frequent job changes, and the decline of social interaction opprtunities (not at the bar) have really unmoored a lot of people socially.

As best I can tell:

1. Money. There’s a lot to be earned here, and the advertising spend to entice users is equally high.

2. We already live our lives on social media anyways. What’s one more app?

3. A very good value proposition: access more singles than a random bar, and avoid the painful uncertainty of whether or not they’re interested. (Whether or not it delivers on this is another matter).

4. MeToo. There’s basically no chance for miscommunication if both parties swiped right.

Tinder was originally Grindr, and it was meant to solve the double problem gay people had when finding a match, which is both the smaller dating pool and the risk of stigmatization. In this respect it was a huge boon to the gay community. One can imagine plenty of other such communities where such an app could be beneficial.

Grindr obviously influenced Tinder, but they were produced by different companies.

I would add OKCupid (though, it started changing in the direction of Tinder, sadly). For small populations it is easy to filter people based on their preferences. On Tinder it you interact with "mainstream" and it feels like searching for a needle in the haystack... just to get to one's target group.

On a lighter tone, http://www.collegehumor.com/post/6948732/what-youre-really-s....

I had no idea most of these existed. I thought badoo was a search engine?

You probably confused that with Baidu.