How naive :)
Dating apps are many billion dollars businesses - users striking up a real relationship are lost customers and profits to them and they optimize their algorithms against it.
- attract new users; there's new 20 year olds every day.
- move into related niches, like finding friends, where it actually is fine to keep using the app after you meet someone. (Or polycules.)
- move into cheating, mistresses etc, where people will secretly keep using it and not tell anyone.
I think IAC/Match does try the evil way, but that only works as long as you can keep buying out new dating apps. It's not like there's a moat.
Users can be informed about all kinds of user-hostile behavior by dating sites/apps and still use them. Turns out companies don't go out of business because of screwing over their customers. Companies have been caught knowingly poisoning their customers and still they've stayed in business and are profitable.
Companies often put on a good show in their twitter feed but they don't actually fear customer backlash. If doing something evil is going to make a company money they will do it. We'll bitch about it on social media until we get distracted by something else, but we'll continue to accept their abuses over and over again. We'll even keep paying the company that did it to us.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/08...
https://money.com/match-com-is-being-sued-for-using-fake-pro...
https://www.denverpost.com/2021/10/21/denver-dating-co-lawsu...
https://theblogofdimi.com/meet-guy-behind-dating-sites-fake-...
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/scammers-a...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/dating-apps-bots-and-fake-profi...
https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2013/11/10/ashley_madiso...
Worth noting too that Bumble offers a lifetime subscription rather than yearly. There doesn't seem to be a misalignment of incentives there.
I worked at an online dating company. Matching people is fucking hard. It's hard enough predicting who will message who, much less who will actually date who. There's far more money in matching them well than stringing them along; if you had even a 10% success rate, you could get away with charging a silly amount of money.
> Of course, yes, a dating app's ultimate goal is meeting in person and striking up a real relationship. But anyone crossing that boundary had better be very sure that they've gotten to know the person and they really can trust that an encounter won't turn into a craigslist murder.
Too much caution and delaying IRL encounters for too long can be dangerous, though.
Disclaimer: I'm married and it's been long since I last was in the dating market, so these are quite old recollections from when Tinder wasn't a thing and people hooked up in ICQ, IRC and the like. This is also purely subjective.
I remember many women were extremely cautious, to the point of not dating in person until they had talked to a guy online for literally months, in some extreme cases even years. But the problem is that they talked to these guys without meeting them IRL for so long, that often idealization kicked in very hard. Because they didn't see the guy, they built an extremely rosy mind model of him and then trusted him too much when they finally met, when they shouldn't have. Sometimes they would even fall in love online. Manipulative guys often took advantage of these things: it's easier to get away with all sorts of shady tactics if they can't see you and everything is asynchronous.
So my advice as an internet dinosaur would be: sure, don't meet IRL before having at least some nontrivial conversation, and sure, take basic precautions (meet in a busy place, don't go to a total stranger's house, etc.). But don't go overboard postponing meeting in person, thinking that this will let you know the other person better and reduce risk. That can easily backfire. Once you've talked for 3-5 days, I think the risk mostly goes up from there, not down.
Perhaps no one is so cautious anymore so this doesn't apply anyway.
Creeps and stalkers will often try to get a woman's contact info (email, phone, GPS) so that they can continue pursuit and evade scrutiny by the dating app's monitors, who are often very good at identifying and banning unscrupulous people who are not in it to win it, so to speak.
Of course, yes, a dating app's ultimate goal is meeting in person and striking up a real relationship. But anyone crossing that boundary had better be very sure that they've gotten to know the person and they really can trust that an encounter won't turn into a craigslist murder.
Interesting case in point. My erstwhile fiancee and I met on a MMORPG in 2008. She lived in Europe and I live in these United States. She inquired politely of our mutual friends and acquaintances and then promptly booked a flight to visit me. Then she applied firm feminine pressure and caused me to fly to Europe and visit her for a month. As it turns out, I was not ready for the kind of relationship she sought and we flamed out spectacularly. She could not have expected this after how it went on that MMORPG and based on the reputation I had there among the other gamers. But if she'd asked real-world friends... it might've been a different story.