Users kinda suck and hate to pull out their wallets if they don't have to.

Dating apps also suck at giving compelling reasons to pay them unless the app is purposefully made worse so they can sell the functionality back.

How much of that is because they have been conditioned that things should be free though?

We have 10+ years of Google, Facebook, and others handing out major tools and functionality for free because of the privacy invasion.

I have to wonder how things would have looked had that not become the norm.

As far as being purposefully made worse, yeah both apps do that. Grindr charges $100, Scruff charges $120 a year. Considering how popular both apps are I have to assume they are pulling in quite a bit of money.

> have a fairly devoted base that doesn't end just because they get into a relationship.

At least in the US, one might imagine this is more important to users than hiding their sexual preference.

That's quite a claim when, until Grindr's practice of selling PII was disclosed, no one had any reason to imagine that by using the app they would be disclosing their sexual orientation and behavior. In light of that I have no idea what preference you imagine to have been meaningfully revealed here.

My claim is that for a large number of Americans, it's probably worse to be outed for seeking extra-relationship (I'm not sure of the proper term) casual sex than for being gay/bi/queer. Of course, both of those could be revealed at the same time which would be quite the double-whammy to an unsuspecting partner.

Oh, I see what you mean.

I'm not sure I agree, though. In an open relationship it'd be no surprise to my partner if I were using Grindr (he probably would be too, in that case!) and I think therefore that'd be more or less orthogonal to the concern around the risk of forcible outing posed by Grindr's misuse of data. Both are certainly of concern, but I think independently so.