More to the point I think the population of men on those services grossly outweighs the population of women. The women have to be selective because they don't have time to engage with each of the hundreds of responses they get.

It might be interesting to run a dating service that limited signups to an even gender ratio. Or at least didn't let the imbalance grow more than a modest amount. Of course then most men would complain that they can't even sign up. You'd have to be very aggressive about culling idle accounts.

Alternatively, the site could limit the number of introductions that users could send per month. For example, if there were 10 men for every 1 woman, but men could only contact one woman per month (but women could contact a new man every day), women might be willing to give those introductions more consideration.

In fact, rather than hard-coding those rate limits (or generating them algorithmically from the gender distribution of accounts) it might be viable to let each user decide on the limit themselves. It may not be a good idea to show users the specific rate limit that another user has chosen, though, as that number might give all sorts of weird signalling about how "desirable" they consider themselves to be.

Bumble's whole premise is that (for heterosexual matches at least) women must send the first message.

For the men who were using the apps (and talking about it) in my social circle it doesn't seem like it improved much from this side of the gender divide. YMMV of course.

Personally, I've been struck by the overwhelming majority of women who match and don't actually send that first message. Matches last at most 48 hours - message or lose them.

Maybe, but I think that would result in the supermodel looking ones still getting clobbered with requests while the majority of women get nothing.

If men had the choice of messaging one supermodel-looking woman per month (with no guarantee of a reply) or, say, four better-than-average-looking women, I think eventually they would learn to be more realistic in who they approach.

In any case, if the supermodels can set this spamminess/selectiveness parameter for themselves, they can tune it to a value where they don't get clobbered (unless they like the validation of being clobbered).

Right, but isn't that the current situation for men?