> but in order to avoid serving you the best matches for a long-term relationship, they'd have to know what those are
No? With modern dating apps they can just serve you people who have already swiped left on you. Even if they made it a random presentation of candidates, they will never be incentivized to matchmake for free. If you're not paying then you'll get shown people in the area and that's it. That's all they need for their ad-revenue.
I think we're talking about different populations. You are talking about someone who gets zero matches at all but we are talking about people that get matches, but those matches never turn into relationships. To be fair, both populations of people have the same complaint that "dating apps don't work", but for extremely different reasons.
I don't think that dating apps are showing users profiles that have already swiped left, and if they do, it's not an attempt to get users to convert to a paid subscription. Consumer psychology doesn't work that way. People are far more willing to pay to upgrade a good experience than they are to pay to try to improve a bad one. Further, an unappealing profile that gets zero likes will continue to get zero likes after they upgrade to a paid subscription. This means that user will churn almost immediately after 1-2 months of paying for something that doesn't work. They typically don't stick around paying for years while getting zero matches all the while.
Dating apps DO derank unappealing profiles, but rather than doing it to try to get them to convert, it's instead done to try to prevent high bounce rates. Imagine a user downloads a dating app and is shown profiles in completely randomized order. This user is far more likely to get frustrated and uninstall after a few minutes than if they were to download the app and be shown profiles that are appealing. This rigged ranking may sound like its reducing relationship formation, but they never would have swiped on the unappealing profiles anyway; the counterfactual is they simply uninstall the app in frustration.
> You are talking about someone who gets zero matches at all
No, I'm not.
> People are far more willing to pay to upgrade a good experience than they are to pay to try to improve a bad one
This is an assumption and one I believe is false. My belief is that people are more risk-averse rather than they are risk-taking [1]. People don't care to upgrade when they're winning.
> Further, an unappealing profile that gets zero likes will continue to get zero likes after they upgrade to a paid subscription.
Not matching with someone does not mean they have 0 likes. The platform just isn't incentivized to show you who likes you for free. Concretely we can take Tinder as an example. They will show you that someone likes you even when they won't show you who. Swiping enough to find the person who likes you usually takes countless hours.
> This user is far more likely to get frustrated and uninstall after a few minutes than if they were to download the app and be shown profiles that are appealing
If you're extending this to anything past the first profiles shown, this is simply untrue. You just need to dangle a carrot in the form of "someone likes you," even when the person liking you is a bot account.
I agree with this. In my latest stint on dating apps as a woman looking for a man, I matched with dozens of profiles from guys average in terms of height and salary (when disclosed), and also in a niche of "attractive to me personally but not in the top 10% of conventionally-attractive dudes". So I know dozens of guys got at least one match, and most of the time they liked me first, I hadn't swiped in either direction when they were shown my profile.
Upwards of 90% of matches did not convert to dates, because many did not respond to messages at all, did not or could not carry on a brief "normal human" conversation, or if they did the first two things, never proposed meeting irl. I think you are correct in your assessment that the median user on a dating app is very non-committal.
No? With modern dating apps they can just serve you people who have already swiped left on you. Even if they made it a random presentation of candidates, they will never be incentivized to matchmake for free. If you're not paying then you'll get shown people in the area and that's it. That's all they need for their ad-revenue.