Can you be a bit more clear on what you mean by failing?

I’ve met my girlfriend on Tinder and had some nice dates / hookups because of it. Are 98% of the women not intetested because of my average looks and being overweight? Sure, but it’s the 2% that made wit worthwhile. Tinder was getting more expensive depending on your age back then but I think I would use an app again if I needed to.

I’ve met some people that I would otherwise never have met, made some rich corporation even richer in the process… 🤷

I think they are worse now than they used to be, but they do work for some people. I was always suspicious of the PII gathered so I stayed away from them. Craigslist personals worked back when they existed, and Reddit can work. An important tip: copyedit your SPAG (spelling, punctuation, and grammar) to hell and back before sending a response, since the slightest error WILL hurt your chances.

Without wanting to sound patronising, dating apps absolutely do work, but it’s the users that make them work. If your profile photos are shit, or your chat is uninteresting or unfunny, you’re not going to succeed.

I’m a middle-aged male divorcee who’d been off and on Tinder for about 4 years, and I’d describe myself as average-looking, but I met a number of women on it. Without the dating apps, my in-person shyness would have prevented me from meeting anyone. They were an absolute godsend for me.

They were “decent” 14 ish years ago. And they worked a fair amount. I know married friends who met on them.

That said the Internet in general has fallen off a cliff with enshitification…

I know people today that still use them and do ok.

“Free” anything is going to be complete shit.

Like anything else in life it takes work, during 8 months I was doing it I spent 10-15 hours on it. And that wasn’t “scrolling” profiles. I was constantly tweaking my profile, looking for was to improve it. Also when I did “match” someone I worked on my greetings, interesting things to say, etc.

I would even keep snippets of texts. (The one I was on had a question/answer part.

Dating is a lot of work for many people.

deleted by creator

I met my partner through a dating site. In the two years prior to that, I had used the site to meet over two dozen other women, which led to no long-term relationships but did result in a few short flings.

I can say that what helped me was expectation management. This was actually my second time using a dating site, and the first time around I was super picky, looking for “green flags.” Correspondingly, I messaged very few women, and met even fewer (four in two years). The second time, I realized that someone having a sparse profile didn’t mean they were a boring or lazy person. Sometimes it does, but other times it just means they aren’t very good at writing about themselves.

I’ll also say there’s only so much the metrics of dating sites can tell you about someone and your compatibility with them. There’s a level of response bias to the questionnaires on these sites, i.e. people answer the questions based on what they think a potential partner might like, not their genuine beliefs and preferences. You’ll never discover your actual compatibility with someone unless you talk to them, so I took the approach of, “unless there are explicit deal breakers in your profile, I’ll ask you on a date and we’ll see how things go.”

There’s also the expectation management for the frequency of matches, responses to messages, dates, and beyond. Dating apps aren’t magic machines that will get you hooked up in hours. They take work, and you’ll see a lot of rejection (most of it just utter silence). There can be long dry spells. Sometimes you’ll need to take a break because you’ve literally messaged everyone on the site and you need to wait for more members. And sometimes, they just won’t work for some people. That sounds harsh, but it’s true. Success for many of these sites and apps is highly dependent on one’s physical attractiveness, and some people simply did not win the genetic lottery.

No, they work

They work sporadically, but you have to fit a few fairly specific archetypes to get a significant amount of matches. There’s more options that you can shoot for beyond hyper-attractive guy but not a lot more.

If you’re a generic man looking to find a generic woman to have a generic relationship with, then the odds are stacked against you for most of them.

Yes they’re a scam

I haven’t touched them in 5 years, but Hinge was the best of all of them. The thing is designed to make it as easy as possible to set up a profile packed to the brim with conversation-starting prompts, and then it’s stupid easy to start a conversation with someone else because you can respond to a specific prompt on someone else’s profile.

In my experience, it works really well if you set someone up to ask a question

I married someone I met on one of those sites. But that was years ago.

Now that one company owns most of them, they’re a lot less effective, as eHarmony basically gutted the interesting features of their competitors and let them/encouraged them to become bot infested OF pitch platforms.

My partner and I found each other on OkC over 4 years ago. I had been on dating apps for maybe 5-6 years prior, whereas I was basically her first match

I mean I don’t date, but I’ve never once heard of a person who met on a dating app and actually got together with them, I have heard of instant message platforms working though.

I remember being shocked in the early 90’s listening to plans for a dating site. The focus was on collecting and selling demographics. Even the private info being collected was driven by what sold to advertisers more than what helped people relate to each other

Yes, dating apps have always been a fraud because making a social connection was always secondary to selling you

I think there was a time fairly early on when at least one was built to do the job it was advertised to.

I think more than half of Lemmy’s members were born after that though.