I’m an old so I remember dating apps before smartphones. People with physical keyboards wrote long messages, like emails and letters. You could really get to know someone’s personality. This worked well for me because my sense of humor is absurdist and you need to know my values to know that I’m joking when I say something off-beat.
That just doesn’t work over short text message-style comms. So I can’t be funny. I can’t make a joke about voting for a terrible policy if I have to explain that it’s a joke because that’s not funny. But if I’ve revealed to you a bunch of things that matter to me and then claim to want the opposite, you know I’m being sarcastic and it’s fine. Oh well. I’m lucky enough to be in a great relationship despite the dating apps sucking much worse now.
Then there are the articles about how dating apps have deliberately made themselves worse to keep people paying for subscriptions… I’ve seen at least one and I’ve heard people talk about this on a podcast, I think. I may be misremembering. I consume a lot of media about how much capitalism and humanity create worse and worse systems.
Good luck to anyone who’s searching. I got your back.