>My best relationships are ones that have felt effortless from the start. The ones where I had to put in more effort to make the connection work ended up not being as good.

the sad part in adult life is that "effortless" =/= "no effort needed". Unless you have some sort of worth, people won't just drive up to your house to hang out. You need to make some effort to get out there and do some regular meetups until that "click" happens. As you allude to, sometimes that click never happens. Maybe it never existed, maybe the opportunity never arose.

it's way different from college or grade school where you are around people your age 8+ hours a day with plenty of events tailored towards more people your age, and you get more time to have that click align.

>Isn't the entire point of technological progress offloading the high effort of all the needs and wants of life from humans to machines?

yes, but it's not the goal of sites like Tinder. And I haven't seen a successful "just wanna hang out" site/app yet to begin with. they want continuous money and their product's success cases means the customer is finished.

I think an app can do a great job bringing people together, but Tinder has grown too large and as a result diverged from the customer's needs.