Breaking up with dating apps

We're just getting started on Lately and we'd love to get your opinion. There's a brief survey at the end of the episode and as a thank you for taking it, we'll give you a chance to win some prizes. More details at the end of the show. I'm going to get you to tell a little love story. Oh my gosh. Because I really like the story of how you met your partner because it involves such vassie things. Technology, data, intelligence. Sleuthing online. And a big heart. I feel like I started taking a bit more of a data-driven approach. This is like 2014. Early days-ish. The early days. I was on OkCupid before you had name verification and one of the co-founders of OkCupid wrote a book called Dataclism and it was all about behaviors that people exhibit online and how more polarizing pictures are actually more attractive or the differences between what we purport to want, like who we say we're looking for and then whose profiles we actually spend time kind of gazing at. So very much this moment. Remember like big data was hot and I had a high percentage match with someone who I thought was quite cute who ended up living 800 meters away from me. You know I'd recently worked in a political war room so I was really ready to take information that I found on OkCupid and prepare myself a bit of a dossier. Oh I love this. Of course before my first date with my husband I knew where he worked, where he had lived previously and now I sound creepy. Anyway he messaged me back in a timely fashion and honestly I was like this guy's great. That's enough for me. Not taking two days. He's messaging me, he seems charming, let's go have a beer. And you know the legend continues but it was a very efficient way for me to match with someone that turns out I really like. I feel like we don't hear that many of those happy ending stories around dating apps anymore. Not enough. What we're hearing is people being exhausted, frustrated, angry and just depleted. If anything beyond this kind of overly trite gamification of online dating it's become parody right. You're with friends, you're appraising people, you're letting people swipe for you. For one of my girlfriends I have the privilege of I can swipe for her on her behalf. I love to look for matches for her or send messages to people. Wait why do you do it? I don't know just to help out. She doesn't want to because she's so burnt out. She's tired of it and she's seeing the same people across different apps. Definitely. I mean there is a reaction. There's been a lot of reporting about how the dating app industry is floundering. Last fall the Bumble CEO founder that one-time billionaire Whitney Heard stepped down from her position at Bumble but there's still going to be a celebrity biopic about her and I am definitely going to watch that. Me too. And we're also seeing stock sliding significantly from Match Group which is the behemoth that owns many apps like Tinder, OkCupid, Hinge, etc. Together Match Group and Bumble which make up nearly the entire industry by market share have lost more than 40 billion dollars in market value U.S. since 2021. And the value drop is cultural too. It does seem like we're in a bad moment for dating apps where people maybe they've been long disillusioned but again way more transparent about it way more willing to articulate it and just sort of fed up with how these apps work or frankly don't work right. Are they offering something that people still believe they're capable of delivering on? Are we even messaging someone who's real, right? Generative AI, fake profiles, scams, not to mention harassment, unwanted interactions, photos that may be sent, ways you may be discriminated against. Yeah and we were looking on Reddit where people air their grievances and under one thread someone wrote are dating apps ruining online dating and someone wrote in response yes. All right put that in the notes. And the person wrote because it makes people feel like something better is just a swipe away. Yeah we're looking, we're chasing. Paradox of choice. Paradox of choice, chasing that dopamine hit and feeling like you have to just keep searching or sifting through. Right or pay more to get better matches. Yeah which is something these companies are going to ask of their users in order to survive and pay their shareholders. Since many of the apps have moved from a kind of freemium model to those tiered systems that can cost you know hundreds or even thousands for the more elite apps of dollars a month. You can see the company's scrambling a little bit just by the way that they're trying to evolve their businesses. So Bumble has Bumble Biz, that's B-I-Z-Z. Of course. Yes it's a new mode on its app for professional networking, definitely a place I'd go. And Grindr just announced that it's expanding into, wait for it, travel and health. Helping people find doctors when they take a pause from swiping for a hookup. Well it's one way to optimize your time. Absolutely. I'm Vass Bettnar, the host of Lately. And I'm Katrina Onstead, the producer of Lately. And this week we are going to be talking about breaking up with dating apps. Yeah or just you know taking a break, maybe not being exclusive. I'm being so silly. Stuck in a toxic relationship with them. Yeah. We could keep going. And yet apps are still a really significant part of how we love and how we connect with one another, a big part of our social fabric. According to Pew, one in 10 partnered adults met their current significant other through a dating site or app. Yeah that's a lot. So who are we going to talk about this with today? I've swiped right on a really cool economist who looks at how the market affects our love lives. Dr. Marina Adshade describes herself as a techno-optimist, which I love. I need to be around people like that. We need more of those. We need more. She's the author of The Love Market and Dollars and Sex, How Economics Influences Sex and Love. She teaches at the University of British Columbia's Vancouver School of Economics. And I'm not going to lie, I'd love to take one of her classes. They seem really fun. Yeah I really liked how she talked about dating apps not just as a social phenomenon but as a real economic problem that needs to be taken seriously and that there might be solutions for the dating app problem. Yeah I really appreciated her reframing and how these companies may overstate what that market actually looks like to us. And I also like that she told us about an app we did not know existed. Our new favorite app, Farmers Only. Farmers Only. We gotta get in there. Let's dive in. This is Lately. To kick off, I wanted to ask you a little bit about how people are experiencing dating apps today or at least the activity of dating as mediated through our phones. Yeah so over time I think as we all know now that dating has been treated more and more as a market which of course this is why it's of interest to me as an economist. But I think that it is seen more like shopping than it was in the past. This isn't particularly new because we've had online dating for a long time. You know we've had it since the mid-1990s. We had the original websites that all of your parents grew up with I guess. But now online dating of course moved into the apps with Grindr. And so when it became more app-based you really ramped up the kind of shopping element of it where you're just literally going through profiles and swiping and swiping and swiping. There's actually a maximum number of profiles you can swipe on any day and it's a large number. It's like 120. And some of my students report to me that they will max out on their daily swipes. And so it's kind of been a real shift with the movement to apps and the evolution of the technology. And the volume of people that you can be exposed to through that mediation. You mentioned Grindr. I think Grindr just had its 15-year anniversary. So that is a bit of a milestone and an app that for all its downsize has been remarkably sticky in terms of a dominant vehicle for particular daters. One of the things that made Grindr special, you know when it was originally devised, it had this locational element so that you actually didn't just see somebody's profile but you knew where they were relative to you. So if you were in a bar at night, you could go on your Grindr app and see who else was in the bar with you. And that was a real game changer. Grindr was really the first one that took, I'm out in a bar and I'm meeting people, I have technology and brought them together in one place. I think that's a really good element to highlight because that's an example of mediating those worlds. Whereas when online dating was first introduced, it really seemed like it was something you did complimentary. It was in kind of the suite of tactics you had for meeting people, whereas now it does seem like that dominant almost gatekeeping to setting up a date. You mentioned markets out the gate and of course you're an economist, but what is a dating market? How is it different from the marketplaces that we're used to experiencing? Yeah, so any other market you have, you have money to smooth the way, right? I have something to sell, somebody gives me money, then I take that money and I buy something that I want. Whereas dating is a different type of market. It's more like a barter economy because you don't have money to smooth the transaction. I have to both find somebody who has the qualities that I want and who is looking for the qualities that I have to offer. In economics, we call this the double coincidence of wants. Barter economies are very difficult to resolve because it's hard to find somebody who both has what you want and wants what you have to offer. It becomes even more complicated with dating because nobody's just looking for one thing. Traditionally, dating markets were very different when we lived in smaller communities where people married at younger age to go back to the 1960s where half of all women were married by their 20th birthday. Those markets were different because people didn't search as intensely as they did today because the markets were so small, people kind of settled. I know people don't want you to hear that, but they did. They just made it work over time. People moved into the cities. We get technology. We get women moving into the workforce. We get women going to university. All of a sudden, the markets become much, much bigger. Then they become much harder to solve in part just because there's so many choices. Then along comes online dating. You would think in some ways online dating resolves this issue of this double coincidence of wants, but at the same time, there's so many options that people start getting very overwhelmed. Then limit what they're looking for. I'm only going to date somebody who's over six feet tall. I'm only going to date somebody who has a certain income. Then you start narrowing your field down, which then makes it more complicated. I read an interview where you said that online dating apps can solve what you refer to as a thin market problem. Can you just pick up on what a thin market is for me? A thin market problem exists when there's just not very many buyers and sellers. With dating markets is that when markets are really thin, people actually really lower what they're looking for. He seems like a good man. He will be a good father. These are the decisions that were made in the past, but there's an opposite of thin markets, and that is thick markets. Thick markets are good in the sense that they resolve the thin market problem, but you can also get congestion where the market is just so thick. There's just so many buyers and sellers. Everybody has raised their value so high that it becomes more difficult to clear the market. Fascinating. Maybe some of that happens with people's elasticity around the ages that they'll date and how they self-declare the markets that they're looking in. I want to put this moment in a historical context. What was the early days promise of dating apps? They were novel out the gate, and sometimes people were even a little bit shy about using them in the first place. That seems to have changed. Back when dating apps started, nobody wanted to admit that they were using it. Couples would make up stories about how they met because they didn't want to admit that they had met online. The original dating websites were for people who had very specific needs. Their markets were even thinner than everybody else. There were dating sites for people who were disabled. There were dating apps for people who had sexually transmitted diseases. There were dating apps for people who had a certain religious. The one that has really persisted, which is one of my favorite dating websites, is Farmers Only. What? Okay. Why is it one of your faves? My students always laugh because I like to sing the jingle for Farmers Only in my class. I'm not going to sing it for you, but it's, you don't have to be lonely when there's Farmers Only. It's a dating site for men who are living in rural areas. The thing about the modern economy is that because so many women are educated and because educated people are paid so much more in cities, you just get a lot more single women in cities. You get a lot more single men in rural areas. There's this market problem where these people are just not meeting each other. Farmers Only was intended to resolve that issue. Somebody told me once that they asked farmers, what was the most important technological advance in farming in the last 10 years? They said, Farmers Only. Wow. Because it made it possible for them to keep people in rural areas. Anyway, so the point is that originally these dating sites were very specific. They were focused on very specific markets, trying to solve very specific problems. But over time, that kind of opened up and then just started to envelop everyone. There's also this gamification element to the apps, right? Where it's almost addictive behavior, where you're just kind of hooked into playing this game that is online dating. I think some people do get a little bit addicted. There's been research on the design. You know, Tinder, letting the second card underneath kind of peek out, prompts your brain to swipe faster and more often so you can see something. So you've touched on the impact that a dating app like Farmers Only has had for the economy, helping match people. You've also touched on, as people became more educated over time, people tend to match with or seek people that have a similar or higher education level. That has implications for matching. Are there any other impacts you want to shout out that apps have had on dating and matchmaking overall? Actually, the last point you make is really important. So there's this concept in economics that we call marital sorting, and it just basically means that people have a tendency to match with people who are very similar to themselves. In the past, actually, there was to some degree less marital sorting than there is today. Today, I think the apps have really kind of ramped up the idea that you're going to, I have a certain amount of income. I need to find somebody with the same income. Well, that didn't happen before, right? I have this education. I need to have someone, this education. Gone are the days where like a lawyer would marry a high school graduate, right? And then over other things like height and weight and physical fitness, and then we get into other categories like your political beliefs, your religion, culture, family background. Vaccination status. Previous number of sexual partners. I mean, it becomes really, really fine-tuned. eHarmony was the first website that did this. So back in the day, you did a 300-question survey, and they basically plunked you in a box, and then they only introduced you to people who were sitting in the same box as you. I remember this distinctly because the first time I did the survey, eHarmony came back and said I was unmatchable. What? Yeah, they said I was unmatchable. Get your money back. But we don't need eHarmony to do that. We do that anyway. We put people into boxes just to make the search simple for ourselves. And then this just leads to way more marital sorting, way more people finding people who are very similar to themselves and contributes to some polarization to some degree. I want to touch on a lawsuit against Match Group, which is the parent company of most dating apps. It's been referred to as the Valentine's Day lawsuit. It's in California. What's going on there is that six dating app users have claimed that Match Group uses a predatory business model that deliberately employs psychologically manipulative features to ensure that people actually remain on the app perpetually as paying subscribers. So they're saying that actually it's not in dating company's interest to have us match up whether we're unmatchable or not. Does this suit have merit? I can't really speak to the suit as having merit, but the one thing that I know that the apps do, and I can say this pretty definitively, is they tend to overstate how big the market is. And so when they overstate how big the market is, people tend to stay or maybe people leave their relationships. You know, every once in a while you'll read this. Oh, I was having this tough time with my boyfriend and I fired up Tinder. And then I saw that like 5,000 people had swiped right on me in the time that I was gone. Look, I have all these other options. I don't have to put up with this guy. But I think that it does do that. And that keeps people looking because they think, OK, this person's fine, but there's literally hundreds of other people who would suit me, whereas those numbers are just randomly generated. I want to pick up on gamification. Gamification is part of how these apps get us addicted, take something that's very valuable from us, our attention and our time. Specifically, I want to touch on the roses on a hinge. So a rose is kind of an enhanced form of a like button, and it indicates that you are especially interested in a person, just like if you were to give them just casually a physical rose in an analog world. And if you send a rose, it elevates you in that person's feed. But you only get one free rose each week. It's precious to share with other users, but you can buy more starting at the low price of $3.99 each. What's gamification doing here? Yeah, so that's interesting because you talk about the idea that the market is so large that people get overwhelmed. And so what they're trying to do is they're trying to essentially segregate the market, right? Oh, there's all this noise in the market, but there's this quiet space where you could exist. And you'll be with people who are just like you. Maybe it's like the VIP room in the strip club. And then you go into that space and then you can interact with people who are more along your lines. And I think that that's not that surprising that it's a moneymaker. And this is a huge industry, right? And it's a huge industry that is dominated by a very, very small number of players. You know, economists like me, match.com and these companies, they'll hire people who are just like me. They hire people who are experts in this area, experts in analyzing data to come up with these algorithms in order to find ways to maximize their profits. And that's not necessarily going to be done in a way that makes you closer to your happy ever after. I also want to touch on the dilution of what used to be or seem to be more distinct identities of each and every app. It strikes me that Tinder used to be known primarily for hookups, Hinge or Bumble for romance. And you mentioned eHarmony earlier to my mind, like eHarmony, that's where it was like, you're serious, like you're looking for a serious capital S relationship and you have pretty good photos. So that's the platform that you're on. But now it kind of seems like one big murky pool where people are just on every app and you see them again. You may have matched on one app, but you didn't on a different platform. So what happened? Actually, I thought of a great business idea is that somebody should come up with an app that actually puts you on all of the apps and you monitor it all from one app. That would be actually the dream, right? Control room. But you're right that it used to be really segregated. Actually, eHarmony in its onset was very much intended for people who are religious. I'm a spiritual person. I need to find a spiritual person. And it really branched out. And then people have, you know, they'll be running Bumble and Hinge and Tinder. And then also the Facebook dating app, which is a little bit of a different creature. And then on top of that, it's become so much easier to find people in their other spaces. For example, maybe I find a picture of somebody on Tinder. I can take that picture. And maybe this is just me who knows to do this. It takes the picture and do a reverse image search and find that person on Instagram, right? Oh, yeah. We all have the super sleuth in our friend group who can quickly come back to you with like a dossier on somebody based on their photo. But often these apps are also inviting you to link to your other forms of social media, which allows people to maybe overshare or frame their online life as one big advertisement. Yeah, I think the word is curate. You're curating your existence. And then on top of that, there's professional photographers here. My guess is in every city across the country who all they do is take photographs for dating apps. You talk about the money being spent on the apps, but there's these additional branch out industries where you can hire somebody to write your profile now. Although I guess you could just use AI and that would be easier. AI is not going to catch that fish for my profile picture. It's not going to show you the Stanley Cup? No. Actually, AI can maybe show me with the Stanley Cup. I want to ask about choice and this is very much asking for a friend, but to what extent are users to blame here for a failure to match? Because we're all conditioned to kind of keep swiping, does too much choice mean that we're never actually choosing at all? I'm kind of an optimist, just to be perfectly honest with you. People are actually ready to go back to real life meeting. We're seeing more branching out. When people complain on Reddit that they're single, I actually literally never see anybody say, hey, you should get on a dating app. Everyone's like, why don't you go join a club? Why don't you talk to the people in your classes? And I think that actually, I really do think this next generation that's coming up, the Gen Zs, and I guess they're being quickly followed by the Gen Alphas coming up behind us. They're actually pretty connected. They're like the large friend group generation, right? I'm so jealous when I see how they interact with each other. And I'm not sure that they're gonna have a lot of time for these apps. We might be in a moment here where there's potential for a shift. It has reportedly been difficult for these apps to capture the Gen Z demographic. What do you think their aversion could be? Is this younger generation kind of reevaluating the whole notion of coupling? And this ideal is losing appeal in an individualistic age? Or are people just more adept and comfortable at using other mechanisms, both online and off, for instance, sliding it to someone's DMs and disposing with the dating app screen? I actually wouldn't call the next generation individualistic. I actually think they're way more collective. I think that the millennials were pretty individualistic, but the next generation is pretty collective, which I love about them. They're just more social. They're more likely to touch grass. They're more likely to go out and do things with their friends. But I also think that you're absolutely right in terms of meeting on other platforms. And I don't think that's anything that's new. People are meeting on Reddit. People are meeting on TikTok, right? People are meeting on gaming sites and stuff like that. You want to see the way people interact with each other, and you don't get that on a dating site. I don't get to watch how one person talks to another person on a dating site, but I get to see it on all sorts of other platforms. And that is actually way more informative than an 80-word blurb on how much you like going to the gym, right? Or do you like your friends and listening to music? Of course you like your friends. That's why they're your friends. That's the definition of a friend, somebody that you like. Anyway, that used to drive me particularly nuts. I was not swiping on that. So it sounds like some of your thinking is that this next generation, they might be the ones who can actually deliver on the dating app's promise that they're meant to be deleted because they might forego them altogether. And maybe that's how we're going to get around some of this bad design. I think that people like to look down on the dating apps. And there's good reasons for being judgmental about just how superficial the dating apps and how manipulative they can be. But at the same time, our divorce rates in this country and across the developed world are lower levels now than they have been since the late 1970s. And they really started to decline when you get into the late 90s, you start getting the access to online dating. Larger markets, I genuinely believe, create better quality relationships. So maybe people search longer. Maybe it's super frustrating. But I actually think that when people do find people, I like to think that they find people who make them happier. And that is something to be celebrated. The fact that you don't have to just give up and say, you know, I want to have children if I don't marry this guy who's not everything I want. I'll never have a family. I don't think people need to do that anymore. And I think that that's actually something that is important and that we should treasure to some degree about the larger market. I appreciate your optimism there. You're sort of framing the work of online dating and it is increasingly now a form of labor, again, taking our time, taking our energy as something that can be ultimately truly productive and rewarding. But the flip side is people cyber-stalking or finding out where you work and being really upset that you didn't write back to their message. Maybe that's what people are also finding frustrating about online dating, the kind of depletion of boundaries and your full self being online. In my ideal dating app world, people would have to verify their identity. We have very good tools for people verifying their identity. And I think that that would be really good because there's enormous amount of fraud that goes on in these dating apps. There's legitimate reason why people should be concerned about this. Okay. As a final question, as an economist, how would you design a dating app? Oh, this is such a hard question. And I wish somebody had asked me this 20 years ago and I'd gone into the dating app business instead of becoming an academia because there's obviously a lot of money to be made in this industry. I think that I would design a dating app where you actually get to witness people interacting with each other. I just think that's so telling. It's not just how somebody talks to me, it's how somebody talks to the person who is standing next to me, right? So if you go on a date, how the person treats the server actually really matters. How is he talking to this person who's bringing us food, right? I think that that's how I would design a dating app where it's more of a group environment where you actually don't just see how they interact with you, you see how they interact with everybody. And I think that I would enjoy that. I'm totally with you. Thank you so much. It was great to talk to you. Thank you. You've been listening to Lately, a Globe and Mail podcast. Our executive producer is Katrina Onstad. The show is produced by Andrea Varsany and our sound designer is Cameron McIver. I'm your host, Bess Bettner. 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