Boo! Revisiting Horrifying Dating Apps

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Earlier in the year I wrote about the terrible situation that is dating in the post-2020 world. Everything’s a swiper, everyone’s making decisions based on appearances, and nothing else. Most of the accounts on these apps are like, 2% real people, and 98% bots, Instagram account spammers, scammers waiting for you in a motel with a baseball bat and some dude, and couples looking for a unicorn. It’s dire out there, brosefinas.

But there’s this one dating app that kind of emerged way back, and now they’re spending money for ad revenue, billing themselves as the app that’s not like the other apps, with ads that feature cartoon dudes talking about how all the other apps (Tinder, Bumble) are all about beauty pageants. How they’re not fun anymore, they’re all scams. How they keep swiping daily, more as a last-ditch hope that someday, they get lucky.

It’s aiming itself directly at lonely guys, and, okay, sure. There are a lot of lonely guys. And, I mean, some of them are lonely for good reason.

I decided to give a shot, though. Because, hey, they’re not like the other apps, right?

Wrong.

It’s true: Most dating apps in 2024 are a scam. They don’t exist to match you with anyone. They don’t exist to be deleted. They exist to extract as much money as possible out of you, in the exploitation of your loneliness, and hopes of ever finding love. And with the way offline life has gone since the pandemic, meeting online is also becoming one of the only ways to … genuinely connect with someone.

According to this National Academy of Sciences study.

In a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Rosenfeld found that heterosexual couples are more likely to meet a romantic partner online than through personal contacts and connections. Since 1940, traditional ways of meeting partners – through family, in church and in the neighborhood – have all been in decline, Rosenfeld said.

Rosenfeld, a lead author on the research and a professor of sociology in the School of Humanities and Sciences, drew on a nationally representative 2017 survey of American adults and found that about 39 percent of heterosexual couples reported meeting their partner online, compared to 22 percent in 2009. Sonia Hausen, a graduate student in sociology, was a co-author of the paper and contributed to the research.

It goes on to talk about how, with online dating, people have a much larger pool of potential partners to choose from, and this is basically why online dating has become the full and total norm (at least, if you’re fully straight, which I am not).

So … then why is there a loneliness epidemic? Why is this app titled “Boo” advertising itself by calling other apps scams.

It’s because, like I said, they are.

But Boo’s not much any better.

Sure, you can actually match with people, and potentially start conversations. You can select from a large amount of profile information to make matching easier. You can make posts as if you’re on some kind of social media website, and swipe left and right, just like on all the other apps.

Until they hit you with the, “36 dollars a month, please” ask.

Come to think of it … you can talk to people on Tinder. You can talk to people on Bumble.

It’s that, usually, when the time comes to talk, most people don’t. But that’s besides the point of the issue here.

The issue, is that these apps think they’re worth as much as Apple Premium, for almost no features.

I’m sorry, but being able to continuously match with potential partners, and message to my heart’s content is not worth nearly the cost of two Doordash orders per month. It’s not worth the cost of a Crumbl cookie. It’s not worth the cost of running a 500 user Mastodon instance.

People must actually be paying these fees for things you used to be able to do for free in 2012 on dating websites, and that’s just sad, dude. Stop paying these companies nearly 40 to 50 dollars a month, and go sign up for like, I don’t know, an anime box? A handful of streaming services? A monthly motel room to sit alone by yourself and watch TV on a foreign bed?

Do anything, besides rewarding these soul-sucking companies for being machines of exploitation. And I’m talking about you, too, Boo.

“We’re not like the other apps.”

Yeah, you’re not.

Most of the other apps aren’t trying to convince people they totally aren’t run by scum of the Earth, grifters.