Also, it bodes extremely poorly for the future of a dating website when you log on and it *immediately* serves you ads for other dating websites under the same corporate umbrella

The only reason match.com bought okc was because okc threatened the business model of all the other match products

I genuinely believe this

I thought the business logic of match is to lower the amount of dates people get to be able to raise the revenue per user by frustrating them until one has reached a maximum of total profit

Yeeeah. OKC used to be soooo good. But it's really a prime example of enshitification.

Kind of a perfect case study, honestly!

Dating non-monogamously can be tricky no matter what -- lots of people aren't into it, which is fine -- but I remember what the app experience used to be like even just pre-pandemic, and it's kind of astounding how much worse it is now. And I think a lot of that is down to the apps themselves!

Is Feeld still the only place for poly folks to date? (I don’t count the nightmare that is FetLife as a dating site.) I haven’t had a dating app on my phone since 2019 and cannot imagine how bad they are now.

Hinge, Bumble and Tinder have all — to varying degrees — made it possible to list/filter for it, but Feeld is the only one explicitly for it and also the only one that doesn’t rely on swiping to see a full potential range of matches

I would absolutely love to see an(anonymized, obviously) Ashley Madison-style leak of Match's servers, just to get a sense of what the actual engagement numbers and data looks like, because it feels like they're trying to cover for the fact that folks are abandoning their products in droves

Honestly do not know how people realistically date anymore

OKC was a totally useful app when I was using it 2018-2020, give or take. It was super easy to meet people there! Now on the rare occasions I even remember to look at it, it's like a ghost town with what are clearly a bunch of abandoned profiles.

Do any of us have entrepreneurial sense, because I feel like there's an opening for someone to make a very obvious website

It would be *so easy* to make a dating app that works, but (a) you have to have a critical mass of people using it, and (b) a truly useful app probably wouldn't make much money bc the fees the main ones charge for functionality are a big part of the problem

What if I told you that we could drive both usership and ad revenue by supplementing the app with notably quirky personality quizzes

honestly just re-creating 2018 OKC would be a public service

OK this thread made me curious so I just took a look at OKC and unbelievably they have made changes to the desktop interface design to make it EVEN LESS USABLE

My wife and I met on OKC back in 2011. Back then the service was good and the concept of the quizzes were a good way to find matches.

I met my husband on there back in 2012 and it was a really fun place to meet people. It sucks that it’s degraded into something unusable

I gave up on apps around 2013 because they were so bad THEN, I have no idea how they could get even worse!

They've gotten noticeably worse since 2019, and they weren't great then, either

I'm more than a little convinced that the fabled loneliness crisis in America is a result of the collapse of usable dating apps

One last thing: I was reminded of this funny interaction I had with OkCupid back in 2021

It's been like that for at least a decade. I can't imagine it's got any better since I got off the apps.

It's gotten worse than even that!

Even worse than straight people discovering Feeld?

Frankly, yes, because Feeld has not (yet!) actively destroyed the core engine that makes it work

Rolling back features and trying to be like tinder as much as possible, all while re-serving me profiles I’ve said no to and raising prices so high I’d never dream of giving them money

I noticed that now they no longer show any of the extra context you could add to your questions answers, or indeed the extra information about what was an important answer or not