Hey, at least you can say you had a direct role in how couples meet and their resulting progeny.

Our personal misery and loneliness aside, the long-term societal effects as generations wear on will be fascinating.

I appreciate your candor. Though I am upset, I realize this is the kind of thing that would be hard to see coming.

huh?

the top point is that more users usually lead to a worse product, no?

Speaking specifically to the short-sighted nature of business objectives and the enshittification of good services via acquisition and repurposing.

The perfect matching service would lose 2 new users every login. No different to selling an everlasting lightbulb. The only salvation of such a perfect product would be a "de-networking effect" whereby newly-happy couples would auto-evangelize the site for bringing them together in the first place, but that wouldn't grow the site much.

The success of the "nightclub app" is that people feel they are a match only as long as they "drink", and by morning they are thirsty for more. Growth comes from the heartache of loneliness, failed relationships, and divorce. A worse product (poor matching, and stifled communication) is the actual goal of a more profitable dating app, not simply being a consequence of having more users.

If match didn't understand this already they were pretty stupid. I think the blame lies 100% on the people at OKC who sold out.

I wouldn't blame the people who sold out. That team created a strong and delightful product. To me, blame goes to the people who took over and started to make bad decisions.