The time constant can be quite long, some people are on these things for months or years. It takes time to equilibrate.

I think the time constant might be larger than the lifetime of any of the dating apps so far.

Unless the "undateable" person gives up and accepts staying single forever, they may stay on the platform for a decade or more. Maybe with decreasing activity/time investment, but still an active user eligible for matching. That's longer than I'd expect a dating platform (or any random software startup in general) to thrive.

A lot of these profiles stay on the site and appear active when the user has moved on. That’s good for the company but bad for actual people looking for matches

> A lot of these profiles stay on the site and appear active when the user has moved on. That’s good for the company but bad for actual people looking for matches

It would seem that the obviously good solution to this is to hide profiles if the user hasn't been active in a certain time period. Say, 30 days?

Of course, that's not good for the company metrics. They have to inflate their numbers somehow, and so including accounts that aren't being used anymore in their subscriber count makes them look good!

Yeah they have no incentive to do that and actually have incentive to fake activity

I imagine there’s a relationship between this accumulation of singles and population growth rates. It would be interesting to compare the demographic flows of online dating in countries with aging populations vs populations that are trending younger over time.