Isn't their reason for existence now just to harvest your data?
this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2026
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Many of the sites charge subscriptions. They exist to make money no matter how they do it.
Could we have a fediverse dating app? What would it look like? How would we go about it?
Alovoa.com need improvment
There have been some solutions but they usually face two problems:
- Small userbase due to lack of commercials and aggressive attempts to make users stay there as long as possible
- No advanced matching algorithms due to high costs of their maintenance. No ELO. Then we turn back to the userbase and marketing question: people with completely different interests or "look ranges" see each other all the time and their high expectations and standards make them bored on such apps. I'd be very happy to know any FOSS app that defeated these problems but such issues are pretty much universal.
Can you point me in the direction of these failed attempts? I'm tempted to try something similar and would rather learn from others' mistake first.
and reminder, these places make more money if you don't find a match. they are actively disincentivized from doing their stated job.
same is true for companies like incogni. if mass data harvesting is made illegal, they're out of a job. and many of them are owned by companies that also own data brokers. the removal process is often just sending your data to a data broker and asking if they have it, which obviously just hands that data right over in the process. they will make more money from data harvesting staying legal and they know it.
As a reminder, you can make your own dating site if you think you could do better. And there is huge financial incentive to do better. Say you make a dating site that actually effectively finds people good matches quickly and easily. Millions, if not billions of people would flock to your site, and you could name your price to use your service.
Since I've been online, I've seen a lot of different dating sites with different formats and gimmicks. Craigslist personals, OK Cupid (the old style), Grindr, Tinder, r4r, Bumble, Hinge, Fruitz, Badoo, Feeld, along with countless others that never took off. Match group doesn't have a stranglehold on the industry. Any of their competitors could become "the dating site that actually gets you good matches" if they wanted. And since dating apps are purely digital, it would cost zero money to make an open source version and collapse the whole industry. So why hasn't anyone done that? Why does it seem like online dating engages in a constant cycle of novelty, rather than ever getting better?
Well, probably because the fundamental problem is not solveable by software: people want to "date up", but don't want to improve themselves. It's like Ronnie Coleman said - "Everybody wanna be a bodybuilder, but don't nobody wanna lift no heavy-ass weights." If you made a dating app that told people what their problem was - "The person you just liked is an instagram model, but you are not instagram-model-hot, go hit the gym" - then no one would use it.
Pour one out for the greatest dating website of all time, Craigslist Personals. You just posted a picture, wrote literally whatever essay you wanted, and you could subscribe to custom search results as an RSS feed.
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Pour one out for Okcupid. In its heyday it was such a fun site.
I met my wife there 14 years ago. I feel bad for people who are dating now. Seems bad out there.
Changend ownership since. They got bought out.
Good on them. It really felt like a genuine attempt by a few math nerds back in the day, if you read the blog. Hope they made bank.
Though I never met The One^TM^ on there, I had a few hook-ups that I really needed at the time. If I hadn't already met The One^TM^ through other means at that time, I would've abandoned ship as soon as I heard that it got sold.
One giant corporation, profiting off of, and intentionally worsening the loneliness epidemic by buying up all the dating apps, pushing premium features, and matching you with bots... It's shit like this that gives me trust issues with government, big business, rich people, etc...
As someone who's never used these apps, matching you with bots?! what the fuck!
How does that even work and what do you do about it?
As others have noted, they benefit from you being a continued customer - not finding a forever match. What better way to achieve that then never letting you match a real human at all?
Plus, the dopamine hit of getting interested messages and matches from attractive strangers keeps you interested, and interacting with LLMs, spammers, and scammers. And as you alluded to, obviously none of them are going to lead to a relationship...
Most of these platforms operate by showing you profiles of others, and showing them profiles of others, and requiring some kind of mutual match to start a conversation. I very much doubt any of these services create bot accounts to do this, and to be fair, they don't need to. The bots are created by scammers hoping to run a scam on lonely people.
The better apps do things to remove bot accounts. Hinge, for example, doesnt have many bots atm ime. Tinder, meanwhile, has been losing marketshare for the past several years and is becoming more lax about policing bots (not that it was ever particularly stringent...) in order to inflate user numbers to show to their shareholders.
People tend to match with bots because the bots will try to match with basically anyone, and because the profiles are made with pics of hot people.
For anyone who has adopted an effective strategy in dating apps, bots are not a problem. You can identify bots quickly and easily because bots don't go on dates. So if you match with someone cool, ask them out not long after you match. Most people who are actually using a dating site to find a partner (long term or otherwise) want to go on dates, so this is normal and expected. Any effective strategy minimizes long, drawn out conversations with people (since these convos almost always go no where anyway, even with real people), which is the opposite of what scammers want (finding people desperate and lonely enough that they will make an emotional connection with someone they have never met in real life).
But the biggest problem people have with bots isnt actually getting scammed, but rather, the emotional turmoil of seeing the notification that you got a match, then realizing it was just a bot. This can be effectively delt with by getting more human matches by becoming more attractive and getting better pictures to show off this attractiveness, and having modes outside of OLD to get dates so your whole romantic life isnt caught up in the internet (which, btw, is also attractive)
Is that why they all feel the same and suck equally?
OKCupid used to be great. Felt different. Less corporate I guess. Easier to talk to people. Was shit the last time I checked a handful of years ago.
Fun Fact: OKCupid used to be SparkNotes, which used to be a CliffNotes type site. Then they started doing user generated quizes. Which X-Men would you be? Then it was randomly a dating site one day.
OKC changed its model because it was losing marketshare to Tinder. Now they are both owned by the same company - but I would guess the two sites operate largely independently and try to compete with each other, since from the parent company's perspective, two services trying to outcompete each other will drive eachother to also outcompete outside competition.
Oh god the quizzes, I almost forgot about those.
It's almost a shame they didn't use them for their matching algorithm. I could've found the Dr. Jean Grey for my Cyclops. 😏
Back in the day, TheSpark.com used to be unhinged and a lot of fun. The Stinky Meat Project was so stupid, but so dedicated, that I couldn't help following along. And the quizzes were a great way to abuse poorly supervised time with computers at school, too!
It sucks getting old, but I'm grateful for the time we got online before it became all this.
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the best way to avoid monopoly charges, is to create multiple companies that "compete" with eachother, that you own.
Luxotica learned this a long time ago, which is why they profit on almost any pair of glasses you buy, and why no one things its a monopoly
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Federated dating app when?
I think it can be replaced with the group chat in matrix.
There no point in making dating app for 5 users.
There is an open source one at least: https://alovoa.com/
From my tests, it is full of fake bot account, bugs (my account simply vanished, twice, without reason), and moderation is basically nonexistent.
None of my 30+ interactions was with a genuine human, all of them were crypto scams, or similar scams.
It comes from a good idea, but god it is badly done.
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Wait til you learn about local news.
Twenty years ago, dating apps would introduce you to people you wanted to be with. In fact, there were no apps. They were websites.
That I actually had success meeting someone that I love and care about shows a flaw in their business model rather than a successful match. They accidentally lost two customers after extrapolating a lot of money from me without being helpful for more than a decade.
Yep. it's essentially a ridiculous, yet somehow legal racket.
And they convinced several generations that using them is necessary for dating.
It somewhat is for some people. Like where are you going to meet people of the opposite gender? I don't think most women want to be hit on at work, gym, grocery stores, whatever. Men are starved enough for attention that many of us will appreciate any, anywhere, anytime, but I'm not into guys.
We need a real-life amulet of Mara tbh.
Except third spaces have been systematically dismantled by capitalist interests, and the dating app industry's astroturfing on social media has done a lot of damage to the perceived validity of meeting someone in person organically.
You can't just say dating apps are necessary because there's nowhere else to meet people and ignore the fact that that very problem is socially engineered. It's manufactured scarcity.
Like if nestle were to poison a town's water supply so that they could sell more water bottles. After buying out deer park, dasani, and aquafina. And patenting the idea of selling water in bottles. You wouldn't say "actually it's necessary to buy their water bottles," you would say "that's fucked up and should be illegal."
Agreed on third spaces, but it's mostly because of car-centric city design and everyone having to work 40h or more a week (leaves little time to even visit those spaces). The dating apps have capitalised on it, but the change has been happening since before them. And also drinking has fallen out of fashion with young people... Bars and clubs were a major place to meet new people in the past. If you look at the statistics now, Gen Z barely drinks at all. In my country, most clubs are shutting down because people under 50 barely go and people over 50 are starting to get too old to go. Bars are still fairly popular among younger people, but not as much as even a decade ago.
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Break them up. Fine them for anti competitive practices. Bar their leadership from working similar roles for life. The solutions are easy.
The solutions are easy.
The concept of the solution is easy. The act of carrying it out is difficult because humans like taking bribes from rich people. And corporations. Oops, I forgot corporations are people in America.
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Makes perfect sense! How many companies would you expect to own all the popular dating sites? 5? 10?
Of course not! There should only be one company controlling entire markets, it's the American way 🤡
It's one giant database with different filters for each website.
Other than privacy concerns, I dislike the consumption aspect. I see them swiping and it looks like they're shopping. I know some people have found meaningful relationships on Tinder, but I can't get over it.
I wonder if so many using it almost as the default way of dating makes it harder to find someone for those who want to avoid it.
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It's just a big game of Monopoly except they're allowed to trick us into thinking they haven't dominated the board yet. What a joke.
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