Why you shouldn't pay for premium extras on swipe based dating apps
In recent discussions about dating and people's attempts to find relationships in the modern world a few topics seem to come up a lot. One of these is "what's the best way to use online dating apps?". People should first ask if dating apps are even the right place to look. Depending on where you live, your age, your gender, etc, dating apps might be a complete waste of time if you are looking to find a relationship in 2024. Also if online dating does make sense in your circumstances you really need to be on the right platforms for what you are seeking.
If you do use one of these apps I think it's imperative that you understand the financial incentives of the businesses that run these apps. Many of the apps that employ a swipe based mechanism make their money from users who pay for premium features. Because these platforms want the positive network effects of having more users many of them have a freemium model where it is free to sign up and put a profile up. When you first create an account many of these platforms will "boost" up your account, you will be shown to more potential matches when your account is new. This is done to hook people into these apps and to set an expectation that they can get more attention and dates by being on the platform.
The downside is that after the initial boosting phase is over you start to get less results. This isn't a result of anything you've done or demographic changes but rather comes about because of the algorithm changing how many people get to see your profile when your account is a no longer new. Where you show up in the list of other people's screens is one of the most tightly guarded secrets of all these platforms. This is in part because many of the users would not like what they would see if they knew how it all worked.
Selling the idea that you can get more success on the platforms by spending money on premium features is the way these platforms are structuring their businesses to get revenue. This creates a perverse set of incentives, the app platforms will make more money by keeping the people who pay for premium services on the apps for longer rather than shorter. However many of the people who are paying for premium services are doing so because they want to meet someone and get off the app faster.
If I were an unethical person I'd make a swipe based app and then use a variety of psychologically manipulative tactics to try to get the desperate people on the apps to keep paying more and more money for "premium" features. I'd try to sell them the false hope that even though their profile isn't attractive if they just pay that little bit more money they might get some success. Unfortunately this wouldn't be beneficial for those users, they'd be paying money and not getting anything in return for it. But from the perspective of the unethical dating app provider the hope would be that they would remain lazy and just keep forking out the money without actually making the changes needed to self-maximize that would actually see positive change. This sort of deception could work for quite some time until the common knowledge formed that paying for these features didn't help anyone's chances and perhaps even harmed them.
To some degree this is the problem on most freemium dating sites based on the swipe mechanic. People who are very attractive don't have to pay and they start seeing matches. Whereas people who aren't attractive have an entirely different experience on these apps sometimes going months at a time with zero matches. The experience of someone attractive compared to someone unattractive is just so different that its hard for them to believe that they are even on the same app. I've seen this first hand via an experiment and comparing results with other people I know. Lately I've had a profile up on a site and I've been looking to gather some stats on red flags for an article and how often those come up in profiles. This has been going a month (so far) during which time I've had 3 matches total, one expired, two got into a chat and zero led to dates. There's multiple other people I know carrying on 5-10 conversations simultaneously, going on dates weekly with new people. Those people look significantly better than I do in their profile photos.
This brings me to the point of this article, if you aren't getting success on these apps you need to change your profile first before you do anything else. The lack of engagement on the platform is giving you feedback that your profile isn't attractive to the people on that platform. If you are having no success you really need to do some work on getting better photos and writing a better bio. Don't be tempted to pay money to avoid doing that work, paying more to the dating app platform won't help you, it will just cost you money (and might even harm your chances if the app does nasty things with the algorithm to turn you into an ever frustrated cash cow for their platform). Even if paying gets your profile put in front of more users if they don't match with you when they see your profile then you get no benefit. If you aren't willing to invest the time into making a good profile you really shouldn't be doing anything on online dating.
Further more if you do really improve your profile and continue to get no results you might be tempted to pay for premium features. Generally speaking I wouldn't recommend this. If you decide you want to keep trying on the apps this is a point where you need to seek external feedback from 3rd parties that won't bullshit you or have some other incentive to be dishonest with feedback about your profile. You need to get high quality feedback then take that feedback on and incorporate that into your profile. If you are not finding success on dating apps after you have gone to effort improving your profile then this is feedback that you should get off that dating platform entirely. Why pay money to a platform that is not giving you results? Maybe give a couple of premium features but only do this after you have made improvements and seen if those yielded better results. If after making these improvements you still aren't getting anything you have to get off the apps entirely and try something else. A personal anecdote is that I've never been on a date from an online app. I have been on a number of dates though and have been in a few long term relationships. I do far better in person compared to apps and I use the knowledge of my strengths and weaknesses to play to my strengths. Find out what works for you then go try that.