96E. Dating Apps

You might be surprised to learn that almost all dating apps in the West are controlled by one company. These Apps don't do what you think, and can inhibit fertility world-wide.

I need to start by warning that while there is no explicit content in this paper, adult themes are pervasive in every section. How Dating Apps affect or inhibit human reproduction (sometimes called sex) is detailed at a level you likely won’t find anywhere else.

Disclaimer: While I mention that tribal life is “biologically normal” for the species in the previous paper on Gender Wars, I’m not advocating for changes in ideology or even behavior. I’m educating. The further we get from our biology, the greater our rates of mental illness and associated crimes. But if I dropped 30 people in a remote place and said “make a tribe”, their various self interests would sabotage that situation pretty rapidly. I think there are even reality TV shows that attempt to simulate this. It won’t matter what their survival skills are if they don’t know how to live in a tribe. What I am going to do here is explain how dating app technology “works”, how it can be harmful and why, and perhaps get people to stop blaming each other for damage caused by the technology that is being used against them or the programming they have absorbed since birth.

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Why am I writing on this topic, and what makes me qualified to discuss it? It’s not something you would learn in economics school or expect to hear in a substack dedicated to advancing the scientific design of computer games. I have a belief that the enormous popularity of online computer games (at least before they were killed by microtransactions) is because people want to play with others. If they didn’t, they would have a consistently better experience playing single player games. The reason is intuitively obvious: people are lonely, and the statistics show that this is trending rapidly upward.

The idea that we could use games to increase social interaction also seems intuitive, even if the major companies that make games don’t give any indication of understanding this, or how to design products that would meet this consumer need. Thus after I completed my return to academia to complete my conventional economics training in 2009 I began studying how people attempt to socialize using dating apps. Most social media apps are also dating apps (Facebook was originally a dating app), though here I will be focusing on dating apps that use dedicated matchmaker algorithms for finding partners.

Due perhaps to childhood physical and sexual abuse, and also severe asthma that I got from smoking unfiltered camels at the age of 5, I had to become expert at dissociation in order to avoid dying from asphyxiation. As a result I am on the asexuality spectrum and never use dating apps to find sexual partners. I use them to survey people and learn about their behavior and why they date. From 2010 to 2020 I surveyed well over 150,000 people in multiple countries.

When Dr. Barry Carlin (Chiropractor of the year in California that year) trained me in soft tissue mobilization in 1987, it became obvious I had an instant talent for it. This is a medical massage technique that can be fairly invasive to be effective. It requires a lot of trust between the practitioner and patient. Of the 8 people he trained that year in the technique, only I was able to do it. For the others who were trained, it was too stressful for them. For me, I had no problem learning to adapt my dissociation to essentially meditate on the body I was working on and ignore everything else. I never had a breach of professionalism. I was like a master mechanic working on F1 racing cars, the occasional 90 year old antique, and a lot of Honda Civics. I even ended up training the PhD students in Loma Linda’s physical therapy doctorate program for their clinicals.

Thus when I was selected to be the trainer for the UCLA and USA Olympic Women’s track teams I had the technical skills to help produce two world record holders (Jackie Joyner-Kersee and Florence Griffith-Joyner “FloJo”). Thus I was well qualified to interview those 150k+ people on dating apps and not get involved in any spicy situations. I was laser focused on decoding how and why humans operate in dating environments.

In 2016 I was paid to fly out to Saint Petersburg Russia and give a presentation on the state of mobile game development (due to technical error, audio only for first 10 minutes). I gave a presentation on rapid human demographic changes that were going to affect game developers and then explained why Tinder was the best mobile computer game on the market. This confused my mostly Russian audience a bit because they thought Tinder was a dating app. I also predicted the success of PokemonGo (which released 3 months later) without even knowing it was in development. This lecture aged well, like pretty much all my content.

Here in this paper I will explain what Tinder really is, and all the other Western dating apps. Match.com has bought all of them and removed some of their most innovative features in order to make sure they all conform to the same business model and only give the perception of competition in this monopoly.

What is “Dating”?

Before we can get into what a Dating App is, what it does, and how it works, we need to understand what a “Date” is.

Common Definition of Dating: An attempt to find someone in my community that might be an acceptable partner for a relationship or casual sexual encounter. In some cases, just an attempt to get a free meal.

Real Definition of Dating: Dating is a 100% transactional interaction intended to authenticate a total stranger to make sure they are who they say they are, and then if they pass that check to engage in “Arbitrage” to see what’s the best deal you can get from this stranger. If the result of negotiation is satisfactory to both parties, a transaction takes place.

Note that in a natural environment with someone you’ve known for years, or even your whole life (in a tribal environment), there is no dating. You are in a relationship of some sort with that person for a significant part of your life before you even initiate any sort of romantic entanglement.

Authentication

Perhaps the most important stage of dating is in the very beginning. Does this person have the characteristics they say they have that you are looking for? People tend to have similar interest clusters within a gender, so it’s pretty easy to anticipate that and fake those characteristics. While women do this a lot with filters, makeup, clothes and favorable camera angles, men can do this also by faking wealth (what women are usually looking for). Height is particularly important to women, and that’s pretty hard for men to fake. If you can get the other person’s real name then you can usually do some internet research and figure out if they are legitimate. If they refuse to give their real name after the first date, it’s probably too suspicious to warrant a second date.

You can usually find out a lot about a person by checking their social media. People tend to be a bit sloppy there, and often are using it to advertise, which can make the person look a bit too “easy” and thus not suitable relationship material. Of course if they have children or a partner/spouse and are hiding that, that’s a serious red flag for most people. If they are “cheating” (because they are pretending to be monogamous), that might end up being a plus if you are also pretending to be monogamous.

Single parents with children are at a significant disadvantage in the dating pool for anything other than casual sex, which I will discuss more later in this paper.

What is Arbitrage?

In general it is trading one thing for another thing, kind of like bartering. In financial terminology, this usually means currencies or financial instruments. Here I want to introduce the concept of dating arbitrage, which is the stage that will commence after authentication is mostly completed (it’s never really complete until you trust the other person) assuming you think that some sort of deal can be made with this stranger you are dating.

Imagine one of those big old fashioned scales where there are two dishes hanging by a chain, one on each side of a lever. You put what you have to offer on one side, and your date puts what they have to offer on the other. If it balances out then dating proceeds, but this constitutes an informal contract. If one or both sides don’t deliver what they say they will, likely those people will “break up” (stop seeing each other).

There is an almost infinite number of things that can improve or hurt your ability to make a deal. Having children or ex spouses for instance can be very negative so you have to enrich your side with additional offerings to make up for that. Of course if one person has more money than the other and is willing to share that, then that can be a token used to balance the scale. Different people value different things so this process of arbitrage is a bit unpredictable with a new person until you go through the process.

This is probably the most complicated part of dating, though some of the later stages can be harder just because people who usually fail at this stage have no experience with later stages.

Age and Gender in Arbitrage

As I explained in my 2016 video from my lecture in Russia, men hit their peak value in the dating market at age 45. Women hit their peak value at age 26. Of course biologically we are reproductively “adult” by around age 13 (some drugs and high carb diets lower this even more), which was the age of Juliet in Shakespeare’s classic “Romeo and Juliet”. Generally the age of consent around the world is higher than that in the modern age. It was 13 in Japan until 2023 when it was raised to 16. As I explained to regulators in 2013, cognitively we are adult around the age of 25. Governments generally want you to be an adult as soon as possible so that they can exploit your labor and hold you legally/financially liable sooner rather than later.

The early peak in value is both a blessing and a curse for women. They start life on easy mode and can generate a lot of wealth by selling themselves, especially now that prohibitions against this are rapidly dissolving. But this creates a certain expectation or entitlement that can be hard to overcome later in life. As I discussed in my viral The Top F2P Monetisation Tricks (2013) paper, I introduced this concept of Reward Removal. Giving something to someone that they value, and then taking it away later, is especially painful. So this is a cruel trick nature plays on women by giving them so much value early in life and then taking it away later.

Men on the other hand start off with very low value in society and slowly develop it in life, assuming they live that long. So they never really develop this gender entitlement (at least not in the modern age) as they are mostly invisible in society. Nowhere is this more obvious than on dating apps where 70+% of men will get nearly zero matches in a typical month.

So your age and gender can be used to help you during the Arbitrage stage, especially if you are young and female, or middle aged and male. You can see the chart where I explain this in the 2016 video of the lecture I gave in Russia. Thus middle aged men and younger women tend to be very successful on dating apps and middle aged women and younger men really struggle.

Data from OKCupid indicates that 40 year old men tend to date 30 year old women. 45 year old men tend to date 25 year old women. This isn’t because of some creepy tendencies or a “DiCaprio Effect”, this is the expected result when relationships move to fully transactional systems and people try to match with people of equivalent “value” in the dating market. Thus a man can’t afford a 25 year old woman until they are 45, and a 25 year old woman can come to agreement with a 45 year old man very easily compared to a 45 year old woman.

If any of this data upsets you, I’m sorry. Don’t shoot the messenger. The result for young men and middle aged women is that they really have to go all out to find a partner, and even a casual hookup can be a bit challenging. For cis hetero men this likely is a huge contributor to their high suicide rates. For women, this can be especially frustrating, especially if they are just coming out of a long term relationship on the wrong side of age 26. They may find that arbitrage is much harder now than it was before, and now they have to offer up as much as young men had to in previous years to them.

This is probably the factor most complained about during dating by both genders (but at different ages) and often poorly understood.

What is a Dating App?

In most cases it is a product of Match Group which holds a near monopoly on dating apps world-wide. Bernard Kim, the former president of Zynga, became CEO effective from May 31, 2022, reinforcing my 2016 assertion that Tinder (and all dating apps) is at its core a gaming app. He was fired a few days ago because his talents at raising prices and reducing quality were just as effective for Match Group as they were for Zynga.

A dating app contains a number of steps/systems that create a complete gaming and monetisation loop:

1. You create a profile. This is where you will lie about yourself in order to get a first date, and in order to misrepresent yourself during arbitrage. Only 20% of people fail this stage and represent themselves truthfully. Perhaps less since many people leave the profile blank.

2. You often have the option of setting some parameters, so if you are racist or ageist you can exclude the people you would normally discriminate against at this stage so that they won’t be shown to you. Almost everyone is ageist, and people who are not ageist are typically shamed, so good luck if you are over the age of 50.

3. The matchmaker will then find some profiles to show you. I talked about the importance of matchmakers in games back in 2018 and again last year. Match Group will try to misrepresent themselves (why let you have all the fun?) at this stage in order to trick you into spending. More on this when I go into extreme detail on their matchmakers.

4. Monetisation. Match Group will attempt to get you to give them what they want, just like your date will during arbitrage. And they will misrepresent their value just like your date will. This is just part of the game, don’t take it personal.

5. Match Group has safety systems in place to eliminate known rapists from their apps. But they don’t work according to whistleblowers and court documents. Match also makes it harder to prosecute rapists that use their apps, and thus their apps are used disproportionately by rapists. Their own safety experts recommend you don’t use Match Group’s apps. As the Guardian article explains, at least in one case Match was promoting a person they knew was a rapist, and would say he was such a good match that they would charge an extra $3.99 USD to right swipe on them.

Dating App Matchmakers

OkCupid had a novel matchmaker that I was able to break/exploit. I’m not sure if they have changed it, but I don’t plan to explain how it works and can be gamed here (perhaps in a future paper). I will focus on the “Elo” matchmaker that’s in wide use in Dating Apps and also many competitive computer games.

It’s called “Elo” because Arpad Elo is credited with developing it and getting it put into use by the United States Chess Federation in 1960. Elo was a chess master and physics professor, so a pretty smart guy. As we become increasingly machine and AI dependent, these sorts of skills are becoming rarer in society.

Elo’s solution, while a bit complicated, was fairly intuitive and thus a pair of chess enthusiasts in Australia came up with a similar solution about the same time Elo did. Because it’s proven to work, it’s copied in a wide variety of ranked competitions (including dating apps and computer games) world-wide.

If you find it odd that Dating Apps are ranked competitions, well good on you. They certainly are, but creating a chess-like competition just aggravates the competition between strangers as they attempt to get something from each other. As I go over the details of how the matchmaker works, it should become more obvious why Elo might be good for ruthless casual dating transactions, but very bad for relationship formation.

In a dating app where you can right or left swipe, and your “opponent” can do the same, there are 4 possible outcomes:

1. You “right swipe” (you like what you see) and they do the same.

2. You right swipe and they left swipe (they were unimpressed by you).

3. They right swipe but you left swipe.

4. You both left swipe.

In Option 4, I’m pretty sure nothing happens.

In Option 1, there should be no effect on the higher ranked player/dater, but the lower ranked person should get a small improvement in rank.

For Options 2 and 3, whoever rejected the other person is the “winner”. They get an increase in rank. This could be a large increase if they were “liked” by a higher ranking person, but they rejected this person.

In any relationship, the person who can say “no” is in power. This is reflected by this Elo system. But men are rejected so often in “organic” situations (unless they are very attractive) that they have learned that dating is a bit of a numbers game. So they come on dating apps and often just right-swipe everyone. Many social media influencers actually tell men to do this. The result is that they lose a LOT of rank rapidly, and can dig a hole for themselves that has no positive outcomes.

The proper way to approach any Dating App using an Elo system is to carefully read the profiles of the people you are shown, and only right swipe on people who have characteristics that you think make you both compatible. And here “attractiveness” should not be one of those characteristics. Thirst trap profiles will destroy your ranking.

I “left swipe” on about 99% of profiles I see (but I carefully read all of them) and thus the Elo system puts me at the top of the male bodied ranking system when I use them. I get about a 50% match rate, which is normally only possible for male models, which I am not. I have clothes I’ve owned for 30 years that I still wear, like the Magic the Gathering shirt I posted here a few months ago. Pro tip: don’t put pictures of 30 year old MtG shirts on your dating profile. My match rate is so high because I carefully look for people who would likely get along great with me. There’s nothing wrong with being old fashioned in areas where that still works.

The point I’m making here is that the Elo matchmaker is easy to break if you know how it works. Likewise, it can screw you if you don’t know how it works.

What’s Wrong with the Elo Matchmaker

The most obvious problem with Elo is one you may have already figured out: That the ABSOLUTE MOST IMPORTANT THING you need to do on a dating app is to look like a 10/10 rated specimen of whatever your gender is. Even if the picture isn’t you!

As previously discussed, 80% of dating app users have figured this out and that’s why they lie on these apps. Since there is no authentication stage when you make your profile, and no way for someone to know you are faking it until they start to talk to or meet you, there is no downside here.

Even if 100% of people spit on you when they meet you, for wasting their time, you tricked them out of high ranking you. After you are done stepping over their pissed off bodies on the way to dating heaven you can swap in some more realistic photos. Your artificially elevated ranking will remain, though it might slowly decay if people see the real you.

Of course Elo was never made to be used in anonymous environments. You can’t be anonymous and compete in the US Chess Federation. Thus a rigorous authentication system should be used in Elo or ANY dating app. For those that are serious about dating (and maybe having children in the future) it is critical to have the app pre-authenticate for you. Those that have dishonorable intentions will avoid an app with authentication and this solves that problem right away for everyone else.

Built in authentication is discussed more in the next paper when we talk about Japan’s national Dating App.

The next problem with Dating Apps is they don’t record your history. Your history, and reputation, matters. A lot. When people say “body count” (how many partners you’ve had) doesn’t matter, they will change their story at light speed if that was printed on their foreheads. Or on their dating profiles. It only “doesn’t matter” as long as they can keep it secret.

But with modern technology, we can track that. This is especially true if one company (Match Group) owns all the dating apps and can track you across Apps. Just create a button that says “I’m dating this person”, and have Match recommend you hit that button before you agree to have sex with them. If they don’t also hit the button, the app warns you, and you know this is a casual situation and the other person likely won’t see you a second time. They also are probably hiding a lot of other stuff.

You don’t publish who a person is dating, but you DO publish how many people that person has “dated” in the last month or year, and since they signed up to that or other apps. Now you’ve changed the game rules entirely, and also changed the victory conditions. Now each person you sleep with suddenly matters, and you need to make them count.

Society literally changes globally over night. And, so do fertility rates.

The third big problem with Elo is that it is competitive. Transactional relationships are also competitive, and that’s what Elo generates. But relationships where you want to raise children are a different animal. Cooperation is pretty damn important in that situation, especially if you don’t want to end up a single parent.

So to make this work, you need a cooperative algorithm, not a competitive one. As far as I can tell, these don’t exist in gaming. Even the Olympics, which I aspire to and very much enjoyed being part of, are competitive. Raising children should not be competitive. So if you are going to make a game that promotes this, you need a different kind of matchmaker.

Of course this is not how we are wired to think in modern society, and a cooperative algorithm also does not exist in social media. Thus it took me several years to develop the first generations ones, with the first successes in 2016. I would say OkCupid was heading in this direction in 2010, but that mischief was terminated instantly once Match Group bought them.

Match does not want you to find a relationship, because then you become a non customer for their Apps. Thus they were going to do anything to acquire OkCupid.

Alas, I’m not going to explain how a social algorithm works, as I consider it proprietary. But if you saw the scene in A Beautiful Mind (2001), where Dr. John Nash explains how to be successful in dating, the movie nails it. I’m a fan of Nash, as he understood that you can’t apply game theory and economics to people unless you understand people.

His saying “Adam Smith needs revision” and “Adam Smith was wrong”, well… If you’ve read my papers you know this is pretty much the theme of my modern papers. But since I was rejected by academia for “non academic reasons”, I’m here in the trenches creating real world applications for advanced economic algorithms. The demographic extinction problem seems universal enough that maybe people can get behind it.

Wrapping Up

I understand all of this is not our problem. It’s our children’s children’s children’s problem. Or maybe not even that if we fail to have any children. We won’t have to live more than another 20 years to see this really start to bite us. But maybe, just maybe… If we lived in a better world, we’d want to have children.

It’s possible to make that world, but we have to rewrite the rules handed down to us by Adam Smith. The most important things, like fertility, need to be governed by people or governments, not private industry. Smith was a smart guy, but the world has changed a lot in 250 years.

In the next and final paper I tie the previous 5 papers (including this one) together and connect the dots. I also discuss the few examples where governments are taking effective steps to reverse fertility related extinction and describe the source of our sudden demographic collapse as a technology borne illness. Seeing it as a purely economic or biological problem is guaranteed to fail.