This assumes that dating sites are able to give everyone great matches, but are somehow holding them back.
That's not the case. They don't have much idea at all who you're going to hit it off with. And most in person first dates don't lead to second dates, much less leaving the site.
So no. The reality is that dating sites really are trying to give you the best matches, but it's just a numbers game. So they make money on the numbers -- to see more profiles or send more messages you need to pay more.
That's all it is.
Because if they really could reliably make high-quality matches all the time, they could charge $$$$$ for that and make much more money in the end. But they don't, because the algorithm just doesn't exist.
I don’t work at a dating company, but I do work in machine learning applications.
My best guess is this: they are not optimizing for good vs great matches, and they are probably not even building a model of what that would even mean, not even trying to represent the concept in their algorithms.
Most likely they are optimizing for one or more metrics that are easy to measure and hence optimize, and these metrics have the side effect of producing an excitement for the user without actually pairing them up.
But the end result is effectively the same. If you throw in the constraints of what GP mentioned about customer retention, at the Pareto frontier it boils down to the same optimization, just that instead of manually optimizing the specific variables they become latent variables. There is no difference in the resultant enshittification.
If they're optimizing for engagement (the same as Netflix and everyone else), that comes from the the number of active conversations you wind up having. If you're swiping a ton but matches never message you, you'll give up and try another app -- that's not engagement. The more engagement you have from real back-and-forth messages (not spam), the more real-life dates you go on (if you're doing it right). And the more people you meet, the more likely you are to leave.
It's not "enshittified", dating is just hard. People are picky and it's difficult to get a good read on people from just their online profiles. The dating apps just want to keep you engaged and spending money. They don't need to make finding matches harder because they're worried you'll leave -- finding matches is hard enough to begin with. Trying to make it harder is the least of their concerns. They're trying to give you as good of a service as possible, while getting you to pay. So they limit numbers of matches to get you to pay. They're not limiting quality of matches.
I’ve wondered about this. Presumably they have some idea of who you will initially match with?
Maybe they have enough data to say things like “when someone like user x matches someone like user y, they are relatively likely to both stop using the app within a month?” But that has to be so noisy.
It's not true. OkC gave the appearance of being really good at finding compatible people, because people would fill out lengthy text profiles, and answer hundreds of survey questions, and you'd get a match score like 85% or 97%.
But if you actually used it, the reality was that a match on paper says next to nothing about chemistry. And overlapping interests or survey questions don't say anything about personality. Except for a few dealbreakers like gender, age range, religion, etc., they didn't actually tell you much.
So OkC switched to prioritizing swiping on photos shortly after Tinder exploded, simply because they're the most effective thing there is for gauging chemistry. At the end of the day, it's way better than the supposed "match score" based on survey questions, or reading lengthy profiles. Not because they were bought by Match, but because it worked better at finding matches.
I thought getting bought by the Tinder people is when OkC became more like Tinder.
And OkC was the best at finding people I'd at the very least be friends with - which is foundational to me anyway. And Hinge loves hiding those profiles behind roses.
Its switch to a swiping interface didn't happen until a couple years after Match bought it. And everything became like Tinder, not just Match apps. Because it genuinely worked better.
And yeah I can totally see how the long profiles could be useful for finding friends. But that's not what the site was ever primarily meant for.
The reality is that OkC basically started out for grad students in Brooklyn to be able to find each other, the kind of person who loves writing and reading profiles. But that's not most people, and so as they expanded across the country they shifted to the format that worked better for most people.
That's not the case. They don't have much idea at all who you're going to hit it off with. And most in person first dates don't lead to second dates, much less leaving the site.
So no. The reality is that dating sites really are trying to give you the best matches, but it's just a numbers game. So they make money on the numbers -- to see more profiles or send more messages you need to pay more.
That's all it is.
Because if they really could reliably make high-quality matches all the time, they could charge $$$$$ for that and make much more money in the end. But they don't, because the algorithm just doesn't exist.