I've been thinking about dating apps lately, mostly because I've had some conversations about them. I've been trying to write a full essay about why I dislike them and everyone else should, but I'll only sound naive. Personally, there's just something unappealing about reducing yourself to a profile for others to judge and decide in microseconds. They're mostly advertised as a way to meet your life partner. However, from my observation, people who use dating apps always talk about them, which means they've not found a reason to delete them yet. Which in turn indicates that they have not found their "divine partner".

I think they're a virus that gives you a near-infinite pool of choices, yet I find that people can't find what they want from these apps. I don't believe in engineering friendships, affection, romance, or other things in that bracket. However, that's what people who use dating apps try to do: overengineer their profiles to solve an optimization problem. In this case, the problem is finding a partner they can be with. This reminds me of Goodhart's law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".

It could be the compression of complex human personalities into pictures and words that makes me hate them, or the fact that people turn themselves into filters because of the sheer magnitude of choices they've unlocked, but my contempt for dating apps extends beyond that.

In the future, I might write a longer and more complete perspective on dating apps. However, I wanted to share some of my incomplete thoughts.

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