c/technology@lemmy.world · Mustachius_Grumpius@thelemmy.club · 12 Sep 2026 11:47

Dating Apps Are Dying

TIME Dating Apps Are Dying Abundance in online dating makes it harder to become curious about a person, tolerate uncertainty, or feel satisfied with our choice, writes Meehika Barua.

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‹ show full thread · in reply to @schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works

@sentient_loom@sh.itjust.works · 12 Sep 2026 · edited

quickly finding a new partner you are ideally matched with is the very last thing these companies want you to do.

Exactly. That’s the gamification. They want to keep you grinding against bots and employees, otherwise they won’t make money.

EDIT:

I’ll add that men are probably the customer here, and that might make women seem like the product, the company can actually swap out real women for bots and employees, making real women obsolete to the business model of dating apps.

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- @schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works · 12 Sep 2026 · edited
  
  Oh, men are definitely the customers. There was a website with a pornstar backer… Madison something or other. It was billed as a place to meet horny married women looking to have an affair–just sex, no attachment. It got hacked and, surprise surprise, it was entirely men talking to bots.
  
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  Annalee Newitz, editor-in-chief of Gizmodo, analyzed the leaked data.[46] They initially found that only roughly 12,000 (0.22%) of the 5.5 million registered female accounts were used regularly.[47][48] The vast majority of accounts had been used only once — the day they were registered. Newitz also found that many women’s accounts were created from the same IP address, suggesting there were many fake accounts. They found that women checked email messages very infrequently: every one time a woman checked her email, 13,585 men checked theirs. Only 9,700 of the 5.5 million female accounts had ever replied to a message, compared to the 5.9 million men who would do the same. They concluded, “The women’s accounts show so little activity that they might as well not be there.”[47] In a subsequent article the following week Newitz acknowledged that they had “misunderstood the evidence” in their previous article and that their conclusion that there were few females active on the site had been based on data recording “bot” activities in contacting members. Newitz confirmed that Ashley Madison had created more than 70,000 female bots to send millions of fake messages to male users. Still, they note that “we have absolutely no data recording human activity at all in the Ashley Madison database dump from Impact Team. All we can see is when fake humans contacted real ones.” They noted that the site seemed to keep track of human-to-human contact but that the Impact Team had not released this data.[49]
  
  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashley_Madison_data_breach
  
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  - @Tollana1234567@lemmy.today · 13 Sep 2026
    
    almost everything i heard about ashely, is about someone is a serial cheater.
    
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    - @schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works · 13 Sep 2026
      
      I can imagine. The difference between accidentally falling for someone at work, and sitting in front of a computer, credit card hand, is quite a difference in intentionality.
      
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