It's unfortunate, exactly what happened to OKCupid. It used to focus on profile text and descriptions. It's gradual, because they don't want to scare all their users, but with each update it's becoming just a swipe left/right Tinder clone with focus on profile picture only.

If I were to buy OKCupid, I'd do the following:

- Remove any features cloned from Tinder.

- Every major city would have a small office where singles can go to set up their profile and have a set of professional photos taken. Users can add other photos online, but their avatar has to be the one taken at the office. This would also help prevent fake profiles.

- Users will only visible or come up in search results if they are online, or by those they have replied to in PM.

- If a user doesn't go on any dates in 60 days, they are kicked off and have to go to their local office to get their account reinstated. (I'm most iffy on this one)

- Get rid of any existing compatibility profiling. No surveys. No "sex drive higher than average", or "less adventurous". All of that is horseshit.

Hmm, that photo office might itself become a singles hangout. It seems like a high-risk idea that could go surprisingly well or extremely badly depending on how it's done.

It's like the dating app equivalent to Network Decay [1]. The problem with dating apps is the same problem with Facebook (or even more accurately, LinkedIn): the business model does not align with the interests of users. For a dating app, users don't want to mess around in endless cycles of conversations that go nowhere. Users want to actually meet someone and have a meaningful relationship. Match Group do not want this. They want users to stay on the app long term and keep going on dates but never settling down.

[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NetworkDecay

It doesn't sound like your implication is that OKCupid doesn't know what the market wants. I think we can assume that OKCupid is following the market in doing what you describe. In other words, giving online daters what they want... or at least attracting the kinds of online daters that earn them money.

Perhaps the kinds of online daters that aren't superficial attention-seekers don't end up earning very much money for the companies.

I think this is exactly it: the big problem with dating apps is that every time the product succeeds, they lose two customers. The better the product, the lower your user retention rate.

Tinder-style hookup apps don't have this problem, at least to the same degree.

There’s always people falling in and out of love or new people waiting to find their match. I don’t think it’s a resource limit but rather a how do I get more people to use it to replenish the ones who left. Even couples have single friends that they try to set up, maybe a feature to aid in finding a 4th wheel

The difference between what dating sites want and what their users want occurred to me a few years ago. Users (well, people like me, I’m not necessarily representative) want a good long-term match. Sites want users to keep coming back, which means relationships that fail before the site deletes your data.

Perhaps, but if I wanted OKC to be like Tinder, I'd just use Tinder.

That's right. I ran into this article when Match.com bought Okcupid: [link] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/02/match-c...

Sadly, this may be true if the answer to "how are they going to make any money with this?" is anything but "make all the guys pay $5 or so a month".