> After a couple of days I concluded that most (all?) of these dating apps are pay-to-play.
It's definitely most and certainly feels like nearly all, especially once you start to notice just how many of these are all run by the same scummy corporation, Match Group [1]. Most of them are just thin skins over the same underlying terrible monetization platform.
Most of the dating apps that aren't from Match Group generally either have their best features stolen by Match Group and monetized and then out-competed to death or live long enough to see themselves become the villain and reaching for the same monetization dark patterns or even just exiting directly into Match Group.
(Among others, OKCupid was explicitly founded to be the hero against Match Group and eventually succumbed and was bought by Match Group. Tinder was built by whole cloth by Match Group to steal good ideas for features from smaller apps including but not limited to Bumble and was built to be an intentional slow boil-the-frog as it slowly added in other Match Group monetization features and then slowly started passing on its own features to the overall group "platform" as the features themselves stopped being the novelty. Now nearly all of Match Group's apps act like Tinder and swipe left/right.)
It's definitely most and certainly feels like nearly all, especially once you start to notice just how many of these are all run by the same scummy corporation, Match Group [1]. Most of them are just thin skins over the same underlying terrible monetization platform.
Most of the dating apps that aren't from Match Group generally either have their best features stolen by Match Group and monetized and then out-competed to death or live long enough to see themselves become the villain and reaching for the same monetization dark patterns or even just exiting directly into Match Group.
(Among others, OKCupid was explicitly founded to be the hero against Match Group and eventually succumbed and was bought by Match Group. Tinder was built by whole cloth by Match Group to steal good ideas for features from smaller apps including but not limited to Bumble and was built to be an intentional slow boil-the-frog as it slowly added in other Match Group monetization features and then slowly started passing on its own features to the overall group "platform" as the features themselves stopped being the novelty. Now nearly all of Match Group's apps act like Tinder and swipe left/right.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Match_Group#Dating_services_ow...