The Dating App SCAM That Is Destroying The Dating Pool
Matt Walsh exposes how Match Group's acquisition of Tinder and Hinge removed vital questionnaires to prioritize addictive, gambling-like mechanics, driving a 24% drop in sexual activity among young men by 2023. He argues this corporate strategy creates an adverse selection "death spiral" where quality users flee, leaving only lemons while economic struggles and visual prioritization further isolate Gen Z males. Consequently, the host advocates abandoning digital platforms for real-world interactions, noting a counter-trend of young men seeking partners within Catholic parishes instead. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|
Time
Text
The Rise of Dating Apps00:14:41
Let's be honest, the cost of living isn't just high, it's exhausting.
If you've been leaning on credit cards lately just to cover the basics like groceries, gas, and utility bills, you're essentially paying a survival tax of 20% interest or more.
Why keep handing your hard earned paycheck to big banks when you could keep it for your own family?
My friends at American Financing have a better way.
They're helping homeowners tap into their equity to pay off high interest debt with mortgage rates currently in the fives.
On average, American Financing is saving their customers $800 a month.
That's nearly $10,000 a year back in your pocket.
It's not just a loan, it's a total financial reset.
It takes just 10 minutes to find out what you could save.
There are no upfront fees and no obligation to talk to a salary based mortgage consultant.
Here's the kicker start today and you could even delay two mortgage payments.
American Financing, America's home for home loans, 866 569 4711.
That's 866 569 4711.
Or visit AmericanFinancing.net slash Walsh.
I mentioned a few times in the past that I met my wife from online dating back in the early days of the online dating, the existence of online dating.
Specifically, at the time, it was eHarmony.
And that was well over a decade ago.
Actually, it was like 15 years ago when these platforms were surging in popularity.
They had just sort of come into existence recently.
And there were plenty of independent dating apps and websites, mostly websites, there weren't a lot of apps at the time, all competing with one another to attract as many users as possible.
And because an enormous amount of venture capital money was flowing into the industry, most of these dating services weren't worried about monetizing everything or nickel and diming their users.
They were trying to be the best platform in a very crowded market.
Now, the case of eHarmony specifically, they came up with a unique idea, a massive questionnaire consisting of more than 450 questions.
And that's how they matched people.
The whole point was to ensure that you had as much information as possible about the person that you were about to talk to.
And when you did choose to talk to someone, you could see their photo, you could send them messages.
None of this required paying a lot of extra money.
Fast forward just a few years, and eHarmony made the questionnaire optional.
They also reduced it by hundreds of questions, and they made that change for the same reason that every other dating service did.
The less customers know about a potential match, The more customers will be willing to pay to unlock additional information.
And maybe more importantly, if customers don't have much information about a potential match, it's more likely the date will go poorly, which is good for the dating app because that means the customer won't get married and delete the app.
What happened with dating apps is they developed somewhat of a perverse incentive where if they succeed in matching you with someone and that relationship works out well and you get married, well, then they've lost a customer by definition.
So it's actually better for them if it doesn't go well.
Keep coming back to them.
So, pretty much every dating app has settled on a similar strategy, and that's led to catastrophic results.
It's one of the reasons why the dating market now is a total disaster.
Take a look at the stock group, stock price of Match Group, which owns the vast majority of dating services, including Hinge, Match.com, OKCupid, Plenty of Fish, and so on.
They've consolidated the market to a large degree, which obviously eliminates competition and led to the same kinds of problems across many different apps.
So here's the stock price, which you can see they're down roughly 80%.
They've been steadily buying up all their competitors, but it hasn't worked out.
They even hired someone named Bernard Kim, who used to run Zynga, the mobile games developer.
Kim was an expert at getting people addicted to simplistic and rigged games, so Match Group brought him on board for that reason to get them addicted to their apps.
Now, if you've noticed that dating apps resemble online games or gambling, well, that's why.
There's a reason for that.
But the plan didn't work.
Match Group continued to hemorrhage users, so after a few years, they fired Kim and they brought in a real estate executive to lead the company.
Meanwhile, Match's chief competitor, Bumble, Isn't doing much better.
Here's their stock price over the last five years.
Again, pretty terrible.
It's something like a 90% drop.
There really isn't any dating service that's doing better.
These are the two top players.
Bumble's revenue last year fell by around 10%.
They lost nearly a billion dollars.
Tinder lost 8% of its subscribers.
Match lost 5% of its paying members.
Around 65% of Tinder users are men.
And the match rate for men is around 5%, compared to 44% for women overall, according to Pew.
Around half of women report receiving an unsolicited graphic sexual image online, something that predominantly happens, of course, on dating apps.
There's also plenty of data to suggest that despite the prevalence of dating apps and the way their marketing pushes hookup culture, young people simply aren't going for it.
According to one survey, more than half of single American men had zero dates in 2025.
And the New York Post reports that, Americans are losing interest in sex.
A government study has found a whopping 24% of males, 22 to 34, Had not had sex in 22, 23, up from 9% in 2013 to 15.
For females, that number was 13%, up from 8%.
And when asked if they'd had sex in the last three months, 35% of men said no, another big jump from 20%.
Women didn't fare much better, with 31% concurring this time around, up from 21%.
So it's a bit like the SSRI numbers.
SSRIs were introduced to make everybody happier and less depressed.
And now, decades later, Americans are more depressed than ever.
And dating apps have followed a similar trajectory.
They were supposed to lead to more dates and marriages, hopefully, rather than just hookups.
But the opposite is happening.
So, what exactly went wrong?
How have dating apps completely and utterly failed?
And many of the people watching this right now are well aware that they failed because you've tried them and they didn't work at all.
Now, one explanation involves an economic concept known as adverse selection.
Now, the idea is that whenever you go to buy a product that may have some hidden serious defect, like a used car, for example, you tend to demand a big discount.
That's why cars lose so much of their value when you leave the dealership.
Nothing wrong with your car, but other people don't know that.
They have no idea what you've done with it since you left the dealership.
And that uncertainty all by itself lowers the value of the car substantially.
And for that reason, people who own used cars in perfect condition, Are they hesitant to sell?
They hold on to their cars for a while longer since they know that they aren't holding a lemon.
And the result is that the market for used cars gets worse.
More and more lemons enter the market.
The way the car market has dealt with this problem is by providing more information to buyers.
Services like Carfax and CarMax tell you about the car's accident history, they pass inspections, and so on.
As reporter Greg Rosalski with NPR's Planet Money has pointed out, a similar problem exists in the online dating world, except it's not so easy to get a warranty.
Uh, or an inspection on a potential date, and therefore the information gap is enormous and remains high unless you commit to a date and do plenty of research on your own.
And again, the apps themselves have the incentive to hide this information, which is what they do, so that you pay for it, or even better for them, really, you go on bad dates, you're back on the dating app.
So, what happens as a result?
Well, high quality men and women tend to get dissatisfied with the dating apps, just like people who own used cars in perfect condition tend to get dissatisfied with the used car market, and uh.
When those high quality men and women abandon the apps, a death spiral results.
As Greg Roselsky puts it, quote, like lemons driving good cars out of the used car market, maybe sleazeballs push great catches out of dating apps and ultimately ruin the quality of the whole app experience.
So people go to a new app with the hopes of finding something better, and the cycle starts again.
Now it goes without saying how an app like Tinder involves a significant information gap.
You're told to swipe right or left based on someone's photo.
That's basically it.
But because of the consolidation in the industry, every single app works like this now.
Didn't used to, didn't back in my day, but now it does.
OKCupid used to have an in depth questionnaire like eHarmony, complete with free messaging and so on.
It was primarily built as a website you'd access on your computer, on your desktop, instead of a casual app on your phone.
But that was too effective, as it turns out.
So when OKCupid was purchased by Match Group, they got rid of all of those features.
Watch.
And this isn't just theoretical.
We can take the example of OKCupid, which has actually gone through a bit of a transformation from being a dating app that dealt with this problem of bad apples a lot better than the new school of dating apps, into gradually becoming another Tinder clone.
I found this comment of someone who described their experience, and I think it captures quite well what's going wrong with these apps.
OKCupid used to be really great before they were sold off to Match.
Match is the company that owns Tinder and Hinge and all of the other ones.
It was a pretty simple concept that worked really well.
Start people off by forcing them to answer at a minimum like 25 matching questions around things like politics, religion, handling money, hygiene, et cetera.
Core factors that people would consider when dating, essentially.
But the kicker was that you also got to specify how you would like your potential match to respond to the same question.
And you got to weight that response based on how much you cared about that particular question.
After about 25 questions, you could always get a large enough sample size to match people, but it worked best at matching people that had answered over 100 questions each.
It was like magic.
Anyone with over an 80% match on that site always ended up being a show fire, amazing conversation.
It worked a little too well, so they bought it and then they destroyed it.
They also nuked tons of other features that OKCupid used to have, including My Best Picture, which allowed random people to decide which of your pictures looked best.
As a way of sort of helping you out, there was also a feature that would let other people suggest edits to your entire profile and play wingman to a degree, sort of.
For obvious reasons, they got rid of that.
It helped too many people improve their matches.
And then again, they go on dates, it works out, they're no longer customers.
They also got rid of crazy blind date because it was too fun and spontaneous.
They eliminated events and public meetups, which were a way to meet people in a more natural setting and bond over a shared hobby.
The winks and awards and forums were deleted as well.
In the old days, OKCupid would also tell you how likely someone was to reply to a message.
And it would even let people leave a review at the bottom of your profile after you went on a date, which admittedly could have some unpredictable and undesirable results, but it would definitely provide more information and some opportunity for hilarity to ensue as well.
And therefore, it was also eliminated.
Your gutters are not a DIY experiment or a place to test drive bargain bin gutter solutions.
Claw gutters don't just look bad, they can lead to serious water damage.
To your roof, your walls, even your foundation.
If you're going to do something about it, you do it once, you do it right, and you go with a system that's actually engineered to work.
That's where our sponsor, Leaf Filter, comes in.
America's number one rated gutter protection system built with surgical grade stainless steel micro mesh that channels water in and keeps debris out.
Every installation comes with a lifetime clog free guarantee, and a Leaf Filter Trusted Pro will clean, realign, and seal your gutters before they install it.
It's no wonder Leaf Filter is already trusted by over a million homes.
Start protecting your home today with Leaf Filter, America's number one gutter protection system.
Schedule your free inspection at leaffilter.comslash Walsh.
That's up to 30% off at leaffilter.comslash Walsh.
And by the way, when Match Group bought OKCupid, something else was eliminated too.
A bunch of blog posts from the founders of OKCupid were immediately erased.
Those blog posts included this one Why you should never pay for online dating.
Sites like Match and eHarmony are in business to get you to buy a monthly subscription.
The result, the particular way these sites have chosen, To make money creates strange incentives for them.
The only way they don't make money is to show subscribers to other subscribers.
It's the worst thing they can do for their business because there's no potential for new profit growth there.
Remember, the average account length is just six months and people join for big blocks of time at once.
So getting a new customer on board is better for them than squeezing another month or two out of a current subscriber.
This is the flow chart that OKCupid included in their blog post just to drive the point home.
But you can see the incentives, as you can see there, are completely backwards.
Because something like 95% of accounts aren't paying the subscription fee, these websites want to avoid matching subscribers with other subscribers.
They want to grow the number of subscribers.
And the only way to do that is to match subscribers with non subscribers, who in general are going to be less serious about the whole process.
It's fairly straightforward and intuitive to understand, but at the same time, At the time, anyway, it was remarkable for OKCupid to post something like this.
And they posted blogs like this constantly.
OKCupid had one blog post which ran the numbers from Match.com's official disclosures and found that, it turns out you are 12.4 times more likely to get married this year if you don't subscribe to Match.com.
OKCupid was relentless in criticizing their competitors because, unlike their competitors, they were clearly invested in making money through advertising and they weren't interested in a business model that strung their customers along.
But all that changed when they were bought out.
So all of those blog posts were deleted.
And now OKCupid resembles yet another Tinder clone.
It became precisely the thing that it had been publicly criticizing for years.
For high quality, interesting, and mentally stable women who are interested in a Long term relationship.
All of this is a major problem.
They had less and less reason to use OKCupid.
So they abandoned the site.
And the guys were left with extremely annoying matches.
Pretty much every anecdotal video you'll find on any social media platform confirms that lemons, to continue the analogy, are indeed a major problem with these apps.
Watch.
If you're between the ages of 21 and 35 right now and you are online dating, I am here to tell you, you are wasting every single second.
That you are on those apps.
Okay, I have gone on numerous dates with women from those apps.
Young Men Dropping Out00:10:53
I have matched with God knows how many, and they always end the same.
It's always them talking all about themselves.
They talk down to you.
Some of these girls feel like because they found you on a dating app, they feel like they're above you.
They feel like they're not also on the same exact dating app.
They're like, oh, well, I'm just on here to see what my options are.
I'm just on here to, you know, do a little swiping.
So are you.
And they think they can talk down to you for that.
God forbid you actually say, get on a date and then say something that they don't.
Love every single aspect of and they're gonna be like.
They're gonna say something like, oh, that's giving.
Insert stupid ass, adjective theory or era that they found off of TikTok to describe you in some negative way when in reality you're just acting like a normal human.
Okay, I can't tell y'all how many doors I have opened for these women and I hear, as you should instead of thank you, and there was one in specific.
I even said like yo, you know, you can say thank you instead of as you should.
And she goes, ew, that's giving, demanding.
And I go, no, it's just like, you know, common human respect and manners to say thank you when somebody does something.
You can go on TikTok, search for videos about dating apps, and you'll find thousands of videos like this one.
Here's another.
The longer I've had dating apps, the more I realize how pointless they are.
I've had dating apps for a long time, right?
Like, I've been out of a relationship for a while, and you finally give in to that, like, okay, I'll download Hinge or I'll download Tinder.
And, you know, I have over 100 matches on both, whatever.
But it never leads to anything.
It's like, oh, I have this person's attention for 25 seconds or 20 minutes, and then they ghost you.
That's happened to me plenty of times, and I've probably been evicted.
I've probably done that myself, the little girl.
I just don't think there's a point in dating apps.
I feel like you scroll through a dating app and you're like, oh, that person's attractive.
But you're not going to get with someone that you think is attractive, but not 10 out of 10, but you'll probably swipe on them.
I just feel like dating apps are so pointless now.
Like, I used to get on dating apps and I used to be like, all right, I wanna find someone and I wanna go on a date and I wanna do something with them.
Now I don't even have the motivation to go on them anymore.
It's just, it's the same cycle match, gay ghosted, match, ghost, match, get their phone number, gay ghosted.
Now, seeing these videos, you might respond by saying, well, the people who had bad experiences will be the most vocal.
That's usually how it goes.
If somebody manages to find a great match on one of these services and then get married, They probably aren't going to spend a lot of time doing positive testimonials on TikTok or anything like that.
I know I really didn't.
TikTok didn't exist at the time, but still, on the other hand, if someone is lonely and constantly striking out and going on dates with horrible women, then there's a good chance he'll make a video about it.
And many other frustrated people will upvote those videos.
Therefore, you might conclude we can't draw any conclusions from these kinds of social media videos, you might conclude.
But if that's your response, you're ignoring the fact that there are many, many other signals all over social media.
That this problem is indeed real, and not just on social media.
Talk to anyone.
Talk to almost anyone who uses dating apps these days, especially young men.
You hear the same story from almost everyone, it's like unanimous.
And it's a bigger problem than just dating apps are bad or women are insufferable now.
The larger issue is that, as we've discussed many times on the show, it's become extremely difficult for young men to own a home or to earn a living through hard work alone.
The market is a lot more competitive thanks to the tens of millions of foreigners who now live in the United States.
Artificial intelligence is eliminating entire career paths from customer service jobs to computer programming and lots of things in between.
We printed so much money during COVID that inflation remains a drag on the economy.
So, financially speaking, a lot of young men are not doing well.
And then, to compound the problem, dating apps decide to raise their subscription fees to ridiculous amounts as a way of signaling to women that they're going to meet a provider if they interact with paying members instead of someone who's struggling financially.
They've completely erased the OK Cupid model where you didn't have to pay a fee.
And therefore, a lot of young men are simply giving up on dating and everything else.
And on top of that, also, we should note that one of the major problems with these dating apps, especially the way they are now, without the questionnaire, like the way they used to be, and it's all in an app and it's all visual.
And so you have women that are making determinations on who they're going to date, just looking at a picture very briefly for like a second and then scrolling past it.
And that is totally unnatural.
You know, the dating market has never worked that way in the history of humanity up until now.
Women are not primarily visual.
And so, usually, for thousands of years, if you were a man and you wanted to attract a woman, being physically attractive would help.
That was one thing that you could use to try to attract a woman.
But even if you weren't very physically attractive, well, you were meeting women in the real world.
And so, things like your personality could come into play very quickly.
If you meet someone and you're able to talk to them and be conversational and you're funny, All that you get a chance to sort of use those skills and use those facets of your personality to attract a mate, and now men aren't able to do that.
And so, women are making these determinations, and what's a really unnatural way for women, and that it's entirely visual.
And men just have to hope that you have a good profile picture, which is just never the way that it works.
So, the deck, the card, the deck's stacked against you.
This is one of the reasons that the streamer known as Asmund Gold is so popular, he's easily one of the most popular streamers on YouTube right now.
And I'll admit that I don't follow his content on a regular basis, which is a mixture of political commentary and gaming.
From what I've seen, he's good at what he does.
But I do know that by his own admission, one of the reasons for Asmund Gold's popularity is that he represents a tremendous number of young people in the country.
He talks about issues they care about, and he does it without being pretentious or fake or condescending.
Watch.
Yeah, seven years old, I was like, I'm just not gonna make it, guys.
Sorry.
Increasingly, more and more men are giving up.
Giving up on relationships, careers, and society as a whole.
Resentment is growing.
This is why my stream is getting popular, by the way.
Employment is becoming rampant.
Keeping your head above water seems almost impossible for many men today.
This is leading to more men than ever dropping out of society entirely.
And it's not just that.
Men are becoming infantilized, with terms like adulting now becoming normal.
Three stages of adulting for men.
I think it's that people have been divorced from being able to hope for anything better than what they already have.
That's the real reason.
Like, you see this all the time.
Like, because it's true that working hard will make you, like, working hard will increase the probability that you will be successful.
But I think that, like, the reason why video games are so popular and so many young guys like video games is because video games provide a guarantee that if you grind and you work hard at something, you'll see a result.
Whereas in real life, a lot of times that doesn't happen.
I think that it's actually like that's why young men are drawn to video games a lot.
It's because they're an equal playing field in a way that nothing else in the world really provides them.
I was obviously right about that, particularly for white people.
The deck is again stacked against you by DEI, affirmative action, equity, and so on.
The economy is doing well overall in terms of GDP in the markets, but for competent men who are entering the workforce for the first time, the economy has never been more brutal.
So now the dating apps, which now make all their money through subscriptions instead of advertisements, Are focusing on established, wealthier users.
They're leaving the young men behind, like every other institution in the country.
That doesn't mean that young men don't have places to find young women.
For one thing, a lot of people are meeting via Instagram or TikTok now, for better or worse.
They're seeing videos from people they like and sending them a message.
But there's another much better way to find a date, and it's becoming a lot more popular.
This is from a recent article in the Washington Post of all places Why Catholicism is drawing in young Gen Z men?
Young men in their 20s and 30s are increasingly drawn to the Catholic Church as they seek truth, beauty, and yes, girlfriends.
Parishes in Catholic strongholds like New York, Washington, and Chicago have all anecdotally reported renewed interest from young men, particularly young people.
The 6 p.m. Sunday Mass at St. Joseph's has become a hub for New York City's young Catholics.
Its pews full of young women wearing sweater sets and silver cross necklaces, and young men with biceps straining against sleeves of their polo shirts.
A huge selling point is finding a potential partner, said Anthony Gross, though he was.
Rolling solo.
The joke is that St. Joe's is the ultimate place to date Catholics in York because it's all the young, beautiful people that go there, said one parishioner.
Now, if this trend continues and young people start meeting in church again instead of dating apps that are designed to get them addicted and waste their money and make sure they don't have success, then without a doubt, it will be a massive net positive for civilization.
Even if the dating apps hadn't become complete garbage, this would still be the ideal outcome.
If you spend your time at church trying to find a girlfriend and you strike out, then, well, you're also at church.
There's a huge benefit, huge spiritual benefit to that.
And you're outside of your house.
As well.
At least you've been around other people listening to scripture instead of scrolling on your phone in a dark room and occasionally charging your credit card.
I know that may sound hypocritical coming from someone who met his wife on a dating site.
So to be clear, I'm not saying that no one should ever use a dating app, even the terrible ones that exist today.
But I am saying that the apps are not remotely similar to what existed even 10 or 15 years ago.
They are now targeting a very different audience.
And if you bulk At the fact that they're constantly raising their prices, then you're not part of that audience.
That doesn't mean you need to give up, but it does mean that you should take some notes from those Catholics at St. Joseph's and put the phone down.
That's what every young man and woman did throughout all of history when there were no phones to put down, but they met out in the real world until about 15 seconds ago.
And if the dating apps are telling us anything, it's that it's time for millions of young people to revisit that approach once again.
History Written by Victors00:01:59
I do believe that if people have committed treason against the United States of America, their statues should not be in the Capitol.
History is written by the victors.
And since the 1960s, we've been told, mostly by people whose ancestors didn't even live here during the war, the South committed treason.
But if the Confederates were traitors, then why was Jefferson Davis never put on trial for treason?
What were Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson afraid of?
Did they know something they're not allowed to say today?
It's time for the truth.
So here it is.
Robert E. Lee was a military genius and a man of immense honor.
He was beloved by Americans from the North and South for a century after the war.
This is the real history of the Civil War.
Shipping, billing, admin, payroll, marketing.
You're managing all the things, so why waste time sending important documents the old-fashioned way?
Mail and ship when you want, how you want, with Stamps.com.
Print postage on demand 24-7 and schedule pickups from your office or home.
Save up to 90% with automated rate shopping.
That's why over 1 million small businesses trust Stamps.com.
Go to Stamps.com and use code PODCAST to try Stamps.com risk-free for 60 days.
Shipping, billing, admin, payroll, marketing.
You're managing all the things, so why waste time sending important documents the old-fashioned way?
Mail and ship when you want, how you want, with Stamps.com.
Print postage on demand 24-7 and schedule pickups from your office or home.
Save up to 90% with automated rate shopping.
That's why over 1 million small businesses trust Stamps.com.
Go to Stamps.com and use code PODCAST to try Stamps.com risk-free for 60 days.