DATING AFTER the APPS

Was there such a thing as LOVE before Bumble, Tinder, and Hinge? How a generation of RELATIONSHIP SEEKERS that came of age SWIPING is now looking to MEET PEOPLE in NEW (and some very old) ways.

- SARAH THANKAM MATHEWS

Earlier this year, Whitney Wolfe Herd, founder of app giant Bumble and a cofounder of Tinder, offered a solution for the future of dating: Al. Speaking onstage at the Bloomberg Technology Summit in San Francisco in May, Wolfe Herd envisioned a scenario where an app user's AI "dating concierge" would "date" other people's AI concierges, recommending the best matches among the lot.

People reacted with a mix of malaise, amusement, and horror, many pointing out that this was a plot point in the dystopian Netflix series Black Mirror.

How did we get here? Let's rewind. In the spring of 2020, as Covid-19 blanketed the U.S., dating-app usage surged. Bumble's video-call feature saw a 70 percent increase in activity. The number of OkCupid users going on virtual dates shot up by a factor of seven. Tinder users set a record for swipes in a single day: three billion worldwide, or nine times the population of the United States.

Four years later, we're reminded of one of the most enduring patterns of nature, culture, and markets alike: the S, or sigmoid, curve. For every boom, there is a corresponding bust; for every period of flourish, there is one of decay. In 2023, Tinder's base of 10 million subscription-paying users decreased by 8 percent following three consecutive quarters of declines. By the end of 2023, the stock price of Match Group, which operates the largest portfolio of online dating services, including Tinder, OkCupid, and Hinge, had tumbled to about a fifth of its peak in 2021. Bumble's stock, too, has fallen as much as 85 percent since its February 2021 IPO.