A new lawsuit accuses Tinder and Hinge of using features which gamify dating and encourage compulsive use – so is there any hope left for them?
25-year-old Katie* is a self-professed dating addict. She began using Hinge in 2019 while living in Leeds, but has also started using Bumble, Tinder, and Feeld since moving to Berlin. “I genuinely think no matter where you go the dating scene is quite bleak, and yet I never stop using the apps,” she says, adding that she doesn’t feel as though there are many ways “to meet people organically” in real life.
She says that although she’s been “chronically single” for six years and had no luck on dating apps, she still feels compelled to use them. “It makes you feel as if you’re actually taking action to start dating, [but] it’s just another form of zoning out on your phone like TikTok and Instagram reels,” she says. “I always get bored or fed up and delete them for a while, but the longest I’ve lasted without them is maybe a month.”
‘Dating app addiction’ is a new, but apparently common, phenomenon. While, like social media addiction, dating app addiction is not a recognised medical condition, there’s mounting evidence that growing numbers of people feel as though their use of dating platforms like Hinge and Tinder is increasingly out of control. Research has found that 90 per cent of singles feel “addicted” to dating apps, with 70 per cent believing their app use harms their mental health. It’s estimated that the average dating app user spends 55 minutes a day swiping, which amounts to roughly two weeks out of the whole year.
Notably, on Valentine’s Day this year, six plaintiffs filed a lawsuit against Match Group, the parent company of Tinder and Hinge, claiming that their “predatory” apps encourage “compulsive” use. “Match intentionally designs the platforms with addictive, game-like design features, which lock users into a perpetual pay-to-play loop that prioritises corporate profits over its marketing promises and customers’ relationship goals,” the complaint reads. It’s an unusual case and unlikely to be successful, but the fact such a suit was filed at all lays bare the extent to which people feel increasingly uncomfortable about their relationship with dating apps.
27-year-old Joe tells Dazed that he also has felt “addicted” to these apps, explaining that after a previous partner cheated on him, he began using Tinder, Bumble, Hinge and Feeld in earnest in order to “rebound”. But even after he had his fill of casual encounters, Joe says he remained in the thrall of these platforms. “It became part of my doomscroll. I just loved swiping through everyone,” he says. He admits that he now finds his fruitless app addiction “depressing” as he wants to find “true connection, true love”.
@ameliasamson Dating apps are being sued and for good reason
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Dr Luke Brunning and Dr Natasha McKeever are both lecturers in applied ethics at the University of Leeds and co-creators of the Ethical Dating Online research network. Dr McKeever says that it’s important to acknowledge that dating apps have helped some people find love. “They have vastly increased the number of connections we can make with others, and made it easier for us to find people who have similar values and interests to us,” she says. But at the same time, the zeitgeist is increasingly turning against dating apps, and there’s no smoke without fire. “Many people feel dating apps no longer work for them; that they are being encouraged to behave in ways which they ultimately find alienating or hard to resist,” says Dr Brunning. “People find the process of using apps, or the interactions on apps, to fall short of the intimacy they desire.”
Dr McKeever explains that dating apps are addictive and frustrating to use by design. “They hook us in by giving us a dopamine hit and self-esteem boost every time we get a match or a message,” she says. “They also encourage us to think that if we just spend a bit longer on the app, do a few more swipes, send a few more messages, then we might find ‘the one’, or at least someone better than the person with whom we’re currently conversing.”
This chimes with the view of Natasha Dow Schüll, cultural anthropologist and author of Addiction by Design. In a 2016 interview, Schüll described using a dating app as akin to using a slot machine. “The parallels are in the way experience is formatted, delivering or not delivering rewards. If you don’t know what you’re going to get and when, then that brings about the most perseverating kinds of behaviour, which are really the most addictive,” she said. “You build up this anticipation. That anticipation grows and there is a kind of release of sorts when you get a reward: a jackpot, a ding-ding-ding, a match.”
“[Dating apps] encourage us to think that if we just spend a bit longer on the app, do a few more swipes, send a few more messages, then we might find ‘the one’” – Dr Natasha McKeever
This childlike desire to do just one more swipe can be traced back to the advent of the infinite scroll. The feature was initially created by technology engineer Aza Raskin in 2006 to allow internet users to seamlessly scroll through websites without pausing to load the next webpage. But as it’s human nature to think of our consumption habits in terms of quantifiable ‘units’, it’s nigh-on impossible to feel satisfied by scrolling or swiping when there’s no discernible endpoint. On dating apps, the infinite scroll becomes dehumanising. “People are presented as a deck of cards to be sorted through and the prospect of getting to the bottom of the pack is alluring,” McKeever says, even though we can never really reach the “bottom of the pack”.
Most social media platforms use infinite scroll precisely to keep people addicted, and it’s worked – while speaking to Panorama in 2018, Raskin expressed guilt and regret over creating the feature at all. “It’s as if they’re taking behavioural cocaine and just sprinkling it all over your interface and that’s the thing that keeps you coming back and back and back,” he said. This chimes with Katie’s experience. “When you re-download dating apps [after deleting them], it’s initially quite fun to scroll and then after a few weeks it just gets depressing again,” she says. “But it’s like any other form of social media – it’s really, really difficult to put down.”
You don’t need to be Karl Marx to understand that app designers adopted ‘infinite’ scrolling on their platforms because the feature is addictive and the more time people spend online, the more money can be made. But at least other social media platforms are more barefaced about what they’re doing (Elon Musk said openly in 2023 that Twitter makes people angry). The fact that dating apps use features like infinite scroll leaves a particularly sour taste in the mouth, given that they’re explicitly advertised as platforms designed to help facilitate finding love.
As Dr McKeever points out, most dating apps offer certain features for paid subscribers, which results in there being different tiers of user. “This means that the more money and time you spend on the app, the more likely you are to find good matches,” she says. Hinge’s tagline is “designed to be deleted”, but how can it be, when their business is propped up by single people paying for in-app perks?
It’s hard to see a way forward. Dr Brunning says “dating apps have the potential to be a radical form of transformative technology which improves our quest for intimacy”, but it’s difficult to imagine a future where tech companies choose to prioritise people over profit margins. Still, one thing is clear from speaking to Katie and Joe: paradoxically, all the disappointment we feel towards dating apps ultimately springs from hope. We’ve fallen out of love with dating apps, sure, but we’ve not yet fallen out of love with love. The reason we care so much about the state of dating apps is because we still desperately want to find happy, healthy relationships; with this in mind, frustration is surely better than apathy.