Andrea Gil has passed Tinder. She says it like this, “I had a good time”, as if it were a particularly easy video game. Gil, a 36-year-old from Madrid, slides profiles on this dating application at a feverish and mechanical pace, her fingers moving with the agility of a pianist: left, right, left, right. Until they are finished. Then a message appears announcing that “there are no more singles in your area”. Is he game over of love, it means that you have passed Tinder. The expression is apt not only because of its ingenuity, but also because dating applications are becoming more and more like a video game.
A Stanford University study claimed that 39% of heterosexual couples and 60% of homosexuals meet through these applications. One in five couples who got married in Spain in 2019 had met on-line, according to the portal Weddings.net. This has an eminently positive effect: today it is easier to meet someone and you don’t need the intermediation of friends or going out to a nightclub to do so. It’s faster and it’s within everyone’s reach. But this change has collateral effects. One of them is the gamification of dating (from English gamegame), a way of wrapping search for a partner in playable mechanics to retain the user longer on the platform.
The problem is in the mechanics of the apps. To connect with a partner and be able to talk to her, Tinder asks the user to slide the profiles of the candidates to one side or the other of the screen, accepting or rejecting them, in an almost endless carousel of suitors. According to various studies, Tinder has 57 million users in 190 countries who slide 1,500 million profiles a day. The photos pass from one side to another as the stickers were passed at school. yes, no. For this reason, many users call “collecting cards” the constant search for matches, of possible hookups with whom, once the connection is achieved, not two words are exchanged. “I’m not disgusted with these either. apps”, says Gil, who in the last seven years has gone through almost all of them, “but I think there have been times when I have felt hooked. It makes you so addicted that you keep searching, instead of engaging people in conversation, you keep passing profiles. It’s already something I do mechanically, when I’m on the subway, when I’m watching TV or in downtime”.
Gil’s case is not special. One in six singles acknowledges feeling addicted to the dating process, according to a 2017 report from Match, parent company of dating apps Tinder, Match, OKCupid, Pairs, and Hinge. This problem does not affect everyone equally. Millennials are 125% more likely to engage in this behavior than previous generations, and men are 97% more vulnerable than women. The worst thing is that this effect is not accidental, it is intentional and has been carefully designed.
Is named swipe infinite and it is a mechanism similar to the one used by social networks like Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, (in this case it is the scroll infinite, because it slides down, not to the sides) to retain the user with an endless concatenation of publications. “It has been proven that this system activates the release of dopamine, creating a certain degree of addiction,” he says by email. Californian psychologist Alina Liu. “What happens in our brain in these apps it is quite similar to what happens with games of chance or slot machines”, he says.
It is a program of variable reinforcement, in which the reward appears from time to time, the specialist points out: “The hope of getting this reward, in this case a match, motivates us to keep sliding”. The problem is that with dating apps the reward isn’t seeing an interesting post, not even three red cherries and a bunch of chump change. It’s physical validation, a possible date and who knows if the love of your life. Hitting those emotional keys in users can bring in a lot of money. From Tinder they point out to EL PAÍS that free users can only accept 20 candidates a day, limiting the hypothetical hook that this mechanism could have, and that their business model is not based on user retention, but on the user opting for a payment account.
In any case, it is a model that works. In the first quarter of 2022, Match Group announced revenue of $3 billion. Tinder adds 163 million users premiumthus becoming the highest-grossing lifestyle app worldwide, according to company data.
“These apps have put dating through a capitalist filter and turned it into an addictive game,” says Liu. “The problem is in their business model: they generate revenue through subscriptions and ads, so their profits are tied to users spending their days swiping left and right on their platforms.” That is why new mini games and mechanisms are sought to retain the user in the application. In recent times, Tinder has added fun features. An example is swipenight, an interactive series that asks the user to make moral decisions (type save the girl and risk your life or run away from danger) that can affect who you connect with in the future. The gamification It is becoming more evident, in a movement that the company justifies as a way to get closer to the tastes of generation Z. “They are tempting you all the time,” explains Gil. “Telling you: ‘Get in, give him more.’
Applications can use mechanisms to try to retain the user, but this is, in any case, the one with the power. The problem is not only in the algorithm or the design of the application, it is in the personality or the environment of the user. “For me, the emotional discomfort that exists in the person who develops the addiction is clearly more relevant,” he says. the psychologist Paloma Salamanca Iniesta. “There are addictive substances or experiences constantly around us. Tobacco, coffee, gambling, betting… but normally we do not fall into any of them until we go through a moment of special psychological vulnerability”.
According to a report by dating app Badoo, based on data from its 370 million users, a millennial will spend, on average, 90 minutes a day on that apps. These metrics can be triggered if the person goes through a bad patch or develops a certain degree of dependency.
Applications do not always take advantage of this situation, there are some that are establishing digital well-being measures. Bumble periodically launches messages to its users to minimize the negative impact that the apps of dating can have on the self-esteem of its users. “Our apps has a number of features that put mental health and self-care at the forefront, such as the function snoozewhich gives you the opportunity to pause your activity and come back when you’re ready,” he explains. e-mail Naomi Walkland, Vice President of Bumble for Europe. Thursday goes one step further. Is apps It is only activated one day a week and is based on creating events in bars, promoting meetings outside the platform.
There are some examples, but the general trend is to maximize the user’s time in the application, to seek to subscribe to paid models, to increase profits. The search for love, in the digital world, is inseparable from the search for profitability. “Tinder is an emotional techno-merchandise, that is to say, a merchandise that provides emotions and uses technology”, explained the Franco-Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz in EL PAÍS a few months ago. “And it’s an emotional techno-commodity that profoundly disrupts current forms of socialization.”
The emergence of this application, and all those that have come after it, has changed the way of looking for a partner. “They are affecting the dating landscape and modern couples in many ways,” says Dr. Liu, who has long wondered what the consequences are. “Are couples becoming more homogenous as they meet through carefully selected filters, with matching educational, political, and financial backgrounds?” he muses, “Are dating apps making it harder to find love, given the abundance of options at our fingertips and the choice paralysis they cause?” We will probably need years to answer these unknowns, as they raise complex doubts in scenarios hitherto unexplored. What seems evident is that the way of meeting, of meeting people, has changed forever. The writer José Luis Alvite said that dating is the social envelope of what is nothing more than an instinct. In recent years, one more layer has been added, a technological, playful and capitalist one that turns the process of looking for a date into something exciting and addictive. Until it ceases to be.
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