At least for dating, there's an easy solution to the Paradox of Choice problem:

    1.  Be unattractive.
    2.  Don't be attractive.

Seriously, though, this probably was a factor for why I met my current wife on OKC. There were only a few plausible (at best) matches, she was the only one who could converse coherently, and, well, one thing led to another...

The very name plenty of fish leads one to believe there is always someone better. As such daters do not invest the time it takes to develop intimacy by growing trust, resolving incompatibilities, solving issues together, etc.

It enables a habit of bailing at the first sign of trouble.

It's one of those situations in which something that's a major positive at an individual level becomes a major negative at the group level. Any given individual would prefer to have more choice if you asked him or her, but the overall effect of all this choice is probably to distort and delay normal pair bonding. If I were God emperor of mankind, I'd just ban dating apps as a way to solve this classic collective action problem.

>Any given individual would prefer to have more choice if you asked him or her

I think the issue here isn't one of what does a person wants, but what they benefit from. Sometimes people are harmed by what they want. In many cases this is obvious (think any addictions), but in others it belabors the mind as we struggle to see how something that looks harmless and helpful is actually harmful.

I don't think that applies here, although maybe I'm only right about users who understand what they are doing/have the right mindset.

I've lost the attribution, but someone said that "dating is a numbers game. The goal is to go on as many first dates as possible, to get in front of as many people as possible. At this, tinder (and associates) absolutely excel. There is no other way to reliably find a lot of single people to go on dates with."

That is not the mathematicians approach. https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/05/15/312537965/h...

Most people commit to one person eventually so you'll need to make a choice.

Agreed, the general goal of dating apps is to generate pairs. But in order to generate the desired pair, as many pairs must be "brute forced" as possible, as efficiently as possible, is my point.

I think it might apply in one sense. If you're in a room and the most attractive people is a 6 or a 7 and maybe a 9 or a 10. You're more likely to have a conversation with the 6-7 range given you can tell if the other person is even interested and you have a limitation of choice, there might even be other things about the 9-10's that put you off. They seem more appealing, etc.

Go online, suddenly the pool is so large that you see dozens of 9-10's and swipe right on them, suddenly the 6-7s seem less attractive so you start swiping left when in a social setting you'd probably at least talk to them, you become more picky, and you end up getting fewer matches because the wealth of choice leads to you being pickier about physical attractiveness than you'd otherwise be IRL.

The critical assumption here is that the first date is a useful metric for a long term relationship. And I don't think that holds, using hiring as an analog

FWIW, Coffee Meets Bagel had the limited pool of users as a key feature of their app, and they eventually killed that.