The tragedy of modern dating apps
Update 01.24.24
author: cmdr_nova
This is going to make me sound old, and maybe rightfully so. There are good things about the new age, the new landscape in which the way the world works, but there are also a lot of bad things. Bad things, like mass-disinformation in the form of short video content, sludge-video content (multiple videos side-by-side in the same post i.e., Tik Tok), splintered social media that is almost entirely just people lying, or saying fake things they don't actually believe in order to do the numbers (most of the time for no reason other than to feel like a celebrity)...
And then you have post-2020 dating apps. In a world where most everything you see online feels fake and contrived, and every corporation wants your attention in order to get you to buy, buy, buy, while prices rise, rise, rise, you have split-second, window-shopping dating.
Back in 2010, or, at this point, "back in the old days," you would log onto a website named OKCupid, and you weren't asked to spend fifty six dollars a month to see and/or message people. You simply just made your profile, and then searched for people with similar interests and backgrounds, and then you messaged them and setup dates. That's it. Back in the age of Mafia Wars, The Sims Social, and a baby version of Twitter where engagement farming was nothing more than a twinkle in the eye of an idea of what a hustle bro might be. Back in those days you had honest-to-god normal dating online.
And then that was destroyed. Utterly decimated. An orbital nuke was dropped on that whole-ass thing.
If you're someone with social anxiety, and reservations about meeting strangers too quickly (hello, true crime podcasts), you're pretty much dead-in-the-water in the way of dating. Because, let's face it, dating doesn't happen offline anymore. Not intentionally. Meeting people at bars is a great way to meet a drunk, and do things you regret. Meeting people in public places isn't advised, because most of the time, people aren't bumbling around public looking to meet strangers. They're trying to get their shit down, and get home.
To be fair, some people meet their significant others in online games, and sometimes even that mass of fakeness that corpo social media seems to be nowadays (Mastodon excluded, I can't get enough of Mastodon). But stories like that are one in a million.
So you log onto Tinder, or one of the forty other apps that are pretending to be Tinder. You upload a few photos, write some sort of profile, and start matching. That's the easy part. The next part, is to navigate your social anxiety enough that you can forego the fear of rejection and message someone. But your message better be interesting, and it better be eye-catching, and it better be something original, and it better be funny, and it better be--You see what I'm getting at. It's garbage. And on quiet nights, it all has me wondering, "Who the fuck asked for this? For real?"
Was it silicon valley nerds? Were they upset in 2005 when Facebook started to not be the hot-girl-rating app it was designed to be from the start? Is it corporations trying to turn a profit on your loneliness like some kind of money-sucking, heartless machine? Is it both? I don't know, maybe?
You're probably wondering by now, if you've made it this far, if I have an answer to challenge all of this. I don't. I just have an ever-growing singularity in my soul that never stops as technology gets worse, and worse. As "AI" threatens to kill jobs, as the climate threatens to melt all of us into puddles, and as Tinder and it's ninety seven wannabes dangle bot-people with blurred photos in front of your face, begging you for eight hundred thousand dollars a month in order to unlock them.
Welcome to hell.
