Dating Apps: Much More Than You Wanted To Know

Two years ago, I wrote a post here titled "Can a dating app that doesn't suck be built?"

Since then, I have spent an unreasonable amount of that time going down the rabbit hole.

This is what I’ve learned.

1. The Lemon Market: Modern Romance

To understand why our dating app experience is miserable, we have to go back to a paper published in 1970 by George Akerlof called "The Market for 'Lemons'".

Akerlof won a Nobel Prize for describing a phenomenon economists call Adverse Selection. While he was talking about used cars, he was inadvertently describing modern romance.

The theory goes like this. In a market where quality is hard to observe, the seller knows much more about the car than the buyer. The seller knows if the transmission is about to blow up. The buyer just sees a shiny paint job.

Because the buyer knows they might be buying a lemon, they are not willing to pay full price for a peach. They discount their offer to hedge their risk.

Since the sellers of high-quality cars (peaches) cannot get a fair price, they leave the market.

Meanwhile, the sellers of broken cars (lemons) are happy to take the average price, so they stay.

This is Adverse Selection in action: the structure of the market actively selects against quality.

This is exactly what has happened to dating apps.

2. The Tragedy of the Commons: Why Men Spam

There is a fundamental asymmetry of attention that breaks the market.

Women are generally flooded with low-effort messages that simply say "Hey" or send an emoji.

This is not necessarily because men are inherently lazy or inarticulate. It is because men are rational actors responding to a broken incentive structure.

Consider the male user's position. He knows that a significant portion of the profiles he sees are "ghosts": users who haven't logged in for weeks or are just browsing for an ego boost with no intention of meeting.

If you spend twenty minutes writing a thoughtful, witty, specific introductory message to a profile that might be inactive, you have wasted your time. You are effectively shouting into a void.

If you do that ten times and get zero responses, you stop doing it.

The rational strategy for a man seeking to maximize his Expected Value in this environment is to cast the widest possible net with the lowest possible effort.

He effectively becomes a spammer because the system punishes him for being anything else.

Now consider the female user's position. She opens her phone to find fifty new messages. Forty-five of them are low-effort spam.

She cannot possibly filter through them all to find the five guys who actually read her profile. The cognitive load is too high. She gets "notification blindness" and stops checking her inbox entirely.

Or, if she is a high-quality user who actually wants a relationship, she leaves the platform because the noise-to-signal ratio is unbearable.

When the high-quality users leave, the lemons remain. The "inventory" of the dating app degrades over time. This lowers response rates further. This encourages even more spam.

It is a race to the bottom, and we are currently scraping the floor.

3. The Job Market Hypothesis

So if the "Commodity Market" model, where we shop for humans like we shop for jams, is broken, what is the alternative? I have a strong prior that the correct model is the Job Market.

When you look closely at structural economics, Dating and Hiring are functionally identical twins. They are both what economists call Matching Markets, meaning you can’t just "buy" what you want. You can't just buy a job at Google, and you can't just buy a partner. You have to be chosen back.

Crucially, they share the exact same risk profile regarding failure. If you buy a toaster and it turns out to be a lemon, the cost is negligible; you just return it to Amazon. But if you hire the wrong employee, the cost is catastrophic. You face months of lost productivity, team stress, and legal fees t...