On Nov. 4, Zohran Mamdani won the New York City mayoral election, with campaign promises like a rent freeze and fast and free buses. He gave hope to New Yorkers across the city — as well as inadvertently giving hope to daters.
Mamdani met his wife, animator and illustrator Rama Duwaji, on Hinge in 2021, and they married in February. (Hinge doesn’t typically comment on public figures’ personal relationships, the app told Mashable.) In the days since Mamdani’s win, some have taken to social media to share their hope to find their future partner in a similar fashion. Others, though, are lamenting that they haven’t found their own leftist, smiling mayoral winner, and likely won’t, because the app “isn’t the same” as it was four years ago.
“This can’t be the same Hinge Zohran met his wife on,” X user @dfarecs posted last week.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
The feeling is shared on TikTok, with videos and comments flooding the app proclaiming that there’s no way Mamdani and his wife “met on the same Hinge app I’m using,” and that “Hinge was peak 2021-2023 it fell off.”
But the shared feeling that the apps are decaying isn’t new. In response to @dfarecs’s post, a 2023 video from comedian Keara Sullivan about this began recirculating on X. “If you’re someone who met their partner off a dating app at any point in the last year-and-a-half, two years, just know that you caught the last chopper out of [Vietnam],” she said.
Sullivan wasn’t talking about Hinge specifically, but rather apps in general. But she insisted that singles were “in the trenches,” and that she didn’t know what changed in the last year, but friends of all genders weren’t having luck on these platforms.
That video, with 4.5 million views, is two years old, but the sentiment has only seemed to permeate popular opinion since then. Dating apps boomed in 2020 thanks to worldwide lockdowns, but in the five years since, the experience of using them — just like the experience of being online generally — has shifted, and many say for the worse.
Tinder and Hinge both launched in 2012 (and their parent company, Match Group, merged with Tinder in 2017 and acquired Hinge in 2018). Over a decade on, the apps have lost their novelty with daters. In a Mashable story earlier this year about whether AI features are good for dating apps, sexologist, sociologist, and relationship expert Dr. Jennifer Gunsaullus broke down several reasons for this:
-
Swipe fatigue: a buzzphrase, but daters do really feel this. “Dating” with your thumb, scrolling through profile after profile, can get exhausting — especially when you’re not seeing results.
-
The paradox of choice: With an abundance of potential matches, it becomes hard to pick just one.
-
Superficial snap judgments: Deciding whether to go on a date with someone based on a few photos and a bio, maybe some prompt responses.
-
Bad behavior like ghosting.
Trust in these apps has also declined. Daters who have been on apps for years have seen features they used to enjoy for free now paywalled, and other features that were once unique to one app are now globbed onto others.
This distrust has translated into lawsuits and government action. Last year, a class-action lawsuit against Match Group (that’s since gone to arbitration) claimed that the apps are “addictive” and “predatory,” prioritizing making money over matches. In September, two senators wrote a letter to Match’s CEO compelling the company to take action against romance scams.
Hinge itself recognizes the evolving needs of daters and the challenges they face, and gathers feedback from daters and community partners to better understand. Those insights inspire new features. This year, for example, Hinge launched AI-driven prompt feedback and new prompts created in collaboration with psychotherapist Esther Perel, driven by user frustration about profiles sounding the same and blending together. And in response to lack of responsiveness and conversations fizzling — another big dating app gripe — Hinge introduced a cap on unanswered messages.
Still, there are reasons beyond the platforms themselves that contribute to the malaise of dating. Young women are increasingly liberal, while young men are increasingly conservative, which could make finding someone who shares the same values difficult. The job market is poor, and the increasing cost of living has impacted how people date; they may not want to settle down in a state of financial insecurity.
Meanwhile, the rise of AI has led to people using chatbots to date for them — if not choosing to date a chatbot full-stop. And as some people fall for LLMs, others want to remove tech from dating entirely and meet someone in person.
Tinder has taken a financial hit as of late, perhaps due to these mounting issues. Its direct revenue is down 3 percent year-over-year, and its paying users are down 7 percent year-over-year, according to Match’s quarter three earnings report. Bumble shared a similar story in its third-quarter earnings: total revenue is down 10 percent year over year, and total paying users 16 percent in the same time frame.
Ironically, Hinge is soaring financially. Its direct revenue increased 27 percent, and paying users increased 17 percent, both year-over-year. So despite social media’s complaints, people are still looking for love on that app. Whether they’ll find a future mayor to marry, however, is uncertain.