What travel mode does to dating apps
The last couple of days I was having a look on a dating app that offers the "travel mode" feature. This is where you pay some money to the dating app platform to allow your profile to poop up in a different location to where you really are. This then wastes an enormous amount of other people's time because it effectively makes the location filter ineffective. If only a few people do this it might not be noticeable to the average user, but eventually it's impossible to not notice. These screenshots are a small insight into what you'll see on an app these days:
The annoying thing about this is that a lot of these profiles looked great, except that they were thousands of kilometers away. With the exception of the one saying "I am the girl who open the fridge door, knowing there's nothing inside but still hoping to find something. Bumble feels the same to me" because she's part of the problem and knows it but yet continues to selfishly indulge in the very behavior that is destroying the dating landscape anyway. But even if you do find the perfect profile from overseas it is not possible to form healthy relationships with this sort of distance. We as healthy humans need direct contact with those closest to us, there's too many things that only are possible in proximity and long distance arrangements cannot provide these.
When you see a profile or two that aren't in your area you don't think much about this "feature" but if you live in a desirable location for immigration the overseas profiles you will be shown are just an onslaught. Did you feel fatigued seeing this long list of profiles? I took some stats on this from what I saw in Melbourne and Sydney, places that are highly desirable for immigration and I might reveal them in a future post, the number of overseas profiles shown is very high. In any case fake or fraudulent accounts are something that you are exposed to on dating apps in large numbers now. I do think the travel mode thing is deception with the explicit intent to benefit from that deception, which is close to the very definition of fraud. How could anyone start a healthy relationship if this is the starting point?
The other really annoying thing is when you see a profile and you think "oh this could be great" and you match up to just find out later that the person isn't even on the same side of the world as you. I think this sort of thing is a big part of why I mostly avoid these apps, perhaps people who want hookups or casual sex like these platforms but for seeking relationships I'm not seeing much of a positive experience on these in 2024.