First, this is all US-based. Granted, Tinder is a thing here in Europe but as far as I know the overwhelming majority of sexual encounters here still occurs in meatspace. I do believe online dating only caters to a certain demographic with a certain personality type and the market will be eventually saturated.

Likewise, 'dating' as most people know it is primarily an American concept. Due to the cultural influence the US has over the world, this concept has been imported/distorted here (to my dismay, but that's more of a personal view), but the concept of repeatedly taking someone else out until things evolve or devolve (first base, second base, whatever) is just not the norm everywhere in the world. In many places people just hit it off first, then 'date' later. There are also things like arranged marriages, 'debutante balls', and so on.

Also, it bears repeating that online dating, in its current implementation, is a privacy nightmare rife with plenty of repulsive and shady practices [1]. There's plenty of research done about this, but what I find worrying is that researchers may request access to the entirety of everyone's conversations with everyone else, complete with username and location database, as well as the history of matches, dismissals, and so on. Likewise, Tinder execs harvest all this precious and intimate data for advertisers with little concern for security or privacy.

It also reveals worrying trends about society. Research has shown that "the average woman’s desirability drops from the time she is 18 until she is 60. For men, desirability peaks around 50 and then declines." Likewise with education, "desirability is associated with education most strongly for men, for whom more education is always more desirable. For women, an undergraduate degree is most desirable; postgraduate education is associated with decreased desirability among women." [2] As for ethnicity: "there is also a clear and consistent dependence on ethnicity, with Asian women and white men being the most desirable potential mates by our measures". Black women and Asian men would be the least desirable. (For information, desirability is usually computed by giving everyone a score, usually derived from a PageRank-like method or something like an Elo rating.)

I get that people working behind the scenes are not trendsetters and only follow what is currently the norm to maximize user engagement, but in this age of reckoning about big tech and privacy, perhaps now is the time to imagine a product that actually caters to people into dating instead of selling their information, doing creepy data mining and compelling them to stay on the apps?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18713837

[2] Aspirational pursuit of mates in online dating markets (http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/8/eaap9815)