I think you're right about dating apps not really favoring either gender. Hiring is the first thing I think of when reading about dating apps. There's just a very strong natural imbalance.
Dating apps are especially good at making people not have to face their shortcomings, i.e. I don't have to fix my shortcomings, because with a large enough pool there's going to be someone broken in the right way to accommodate me. Maybe that's rational, or maybe it's not, it really depends on expectations.
Counter intuitively, accepting that we're just stupid hairless apes makes me believe we're rational. We're not failing to find anything meaningful; we're not interested or looking.
We have our moments. But relying on rationality is an assumption that will bite you in the ass every time. Just look at markets, even when there's a clearly superior option, there's been plenty of times the inferior product wins.
Often because that inferior product manages to exploit our irrational selves either intentionally or unintentionally.
> Hiring is the first thing I think of when reading about dating apps
I agree for a different reason. The circus show about hiring is mostly bullshit. You could probably randomly select qualified candidates and turn out just fine.
Likewise with dating, ordering up another human like a sandwich creates a weird dynamic designed to keep you shopping — you stop paying when you meet someone.
If you paired 10 pairs of average people at random and had them doing some task that took them a couple of weeks, half would be “together” at some level by the end.
Doing things together in groups, which leads to almost by definition having to build relationships, including romantic, seems like the best way, and that's how things were before Internet. Some commenters above hit kind of the same notes, and I wonder, maybe an app that builds a mixed group of men and women to do some activity together offline, would result in better outcomes. Of course this will be gamed in no time by the bad intentioned. I think the truth is, that finding a mate has always been a crapshot, and largely random, through out history of life itself. Internet does not seem very successful as a mating platform, I have never been a user of dating apps so what would I know, but maybe on average it's just a little better than randomly stumbling on potential life partners. Still, going out and meeting people instead of staring in screens feels more natural to me.
Dating apps are especially good at making people not have to face their shortcomings, i.e. I don't have to fix my shortcomings, because with a large enough pool there's going to be someone broken in the right way to accommodate me. Maybe that's rational, or maybe it's not, it really depends on expectations.
Counter intuitively, accepting that we're just stupid hairless apes makes me believe we're rational. We're not failing to find anything meaningful; we're not interested or looking.