You would think. Those of us who have been wasting time on the internet for long enough remember the Secret Crush Meme from LiveJournal [1], which worked just like this. It was great up until someone realised they could just say they had a crush on everyone they knew to get a list of who had crushes on them, without any genuine reciprocity of the crush.

If you could figure out a way to make it somehow costly to falsely say you have a crush on someone, this might work, but until then, this is game-theoretically wince-inducing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_matching

Generally speaking for 99%+ of people, You shouldn’t have more than a few crushes at once. And they shouldn’t change that often. That would’ve curbed that a lot without restricting many people

Maybe just limit the number of people you can have a crush on at once.