Fixing Digital Matching: A New Model and Technology
The Historical Rise and Unraveling of Dating Apps
Digital history traces the roots of online mediated romance to a cold Cambridge night in 1965. when two Harvard students, Jeff Tarr and Vaughn Morrill, returned from an evening out carrying an idea that would quietly alter human courtship: Could a machine choose one’s perfect match?
Armed with an IBM computer and a 75-item questionnaire, the two students invited classmates to imagine a scientific path to love. Participants filled out the form twice—once for themselves, and once for their imagined partner, and for the price of three dollars, they received a list of five names and phone numbers. Operation Match was humble, mechanical, and utterly groundbreaking.
Three decades later, as personal computers filled American homes, that early experiment inspired an ambitious entrepreneur named Gary Kremen. In 1995, he launched Match.com, a website where men could pay for access to photographs and email exchanges with women, a digital continuation of age-old courtship economics. The site’s algorithmic matching was rudimentary, and revolutionary for its time. Within a few years, Match.com would change hands twice, eventually landing at Ticketmaster, which was quietly controlled by a sprawling media empire: Interactivity Corp, or IAC.
That acquisition marked the beginning of an era in which a single corporate force would gradually absorb nearly every major dating platform on earth. While young internet users believed they were hopping from site to site in search of a fresh experience, they were—unbeknownst to them, circling the same corporate drain.
By the late 2000s, IAC had perfected its strategy. Beginning in 2009, it acquired People Media, then OkCupid in 2011, Plenty of Fish in 2015, and through a massive 2017 merger, Tinder itself. Hinge followed soon after. In less than 25 years, more than forty-five dating brands would operate under IAC’s umbrella. The company had constructed a near-complete monopoly over modern romance.
But the technology, and the business model, had changed. When Match.com launched in the nineties, customers paid a simple monthly fee. Smartphones changed the incentives. Instead of charging admission, apps allowed free entry, then erected paywalls inside the experience: pay for more swipes, pay to be seen, pay for priority status, pay to message without matching.
As one Silicon Valley observer would later remark, “If love was once the goal, now engagement is the currency.”
The incentives quietly reversed. A dating service no longer prospered when its users coupled off; it prospered when they stayed single. The perfect match became bad for business. Algorithms shifted to optimize return visits rather than human connection. A match delivered at the moment a user was ready to give up. A dopamine spike calibrated to pull them back in. A maze with no exit.
By the early 2020s, this ecosystem had become a defining feature of young adulthood. Some compared Tinder to Zillow, a marketplace for human profiles curated for consumption. Others noted that premium tiers had climbed into the hundreds of dollars per month, with select memberships costing $500, fees determined, in some cases, by a user’s age or location. In California, such practices were ended by a multimillion-dollar settlement related to age discrimination.
And all the while, the platforms’ financial ambitions grew. Match Group went public in 2020, its valuation soaring into the tens of billions. Yet success proved fragile. Users grew weary of ghosting, failed dates, and the emotional drag of endless swiping. By the mid-2020s, Tinder’s monthly users began to decline, while Bumble struggled to turn a profit. The more dating apps leaned on monetization, the more users questioned the promise of digital love.
In response, companies offered new innovations, an AI flirting coach here, a virtual girlfriend there, technology meant to soothe the isolation the apps themselves helped create. Critics saw a troubling arc: tools once built to connect human beings were now drifting toward replacing them.
Thus, many young people found themselves asking an old question in a new era: If the apps aren’t designed to help me find love, then where will love be found?
For many, the answer led back to the physical world, book clubs, running groups, cooking classes, and accidental encounters. After years spent behind paywalls and algorithms, people rediscovered that the most meaningful connections usually come from eye contact, not interface design.
Historians may look back on this strange chapter of digital romance, a period in which the pursuit of love became entangled with the economics of attention, and study ways future generations will judge the early twenty-first century’s experiment with algorithmic courtship.
Will it be remembered as a necessary transition… or a detour away from the human heart?
A New Model For Digital Matching
This article examines Bend Dating (www.BendDating.com), a new generation, clinician-supervised non-profit dating application, developed in Bend, Oregon. Drawing on research conducted by the Mentor Research Institute (MRI), it presents Bend Dating as an ethical experiment intended to reverse the cultural and psychological harm produced by 1st and 2nd generation dating apps. Earlier generations, driven by profit and gamification, disrupted traditional courtship rituals and fostered behavioral addiction, loneliness, and declining trust. Bend Dating is designed with ethical oversight, local community limits, behavioral and psychological screening, background checks, and transparent governance.
This paper argues that Dating and Courtship technology can be re-engineered to serve relational health rather than corporate profit, and that Bend Dating provides an empirical test of whether ethical digital connections can support healthy, safe relationships.
Introduction: When Technology Broke Courtship
Over the past three decades, online dating has evolved from cautious curiosity to cultural dependency. The first generation of dating platforms (e.g., Match.com, eHarmony) presented the optimistic promise of scientific matchmaking. The second generation (Tinder, Hinge, Bumble) transformed that promise into gamified entertainment, replacing compatibility with consumption.
According to Mentor Research Institute (2024), these systems “monetized the illusion of intimacy,” prioritizing engagement metrics over emotional health. The result was an ecosystem where users were no longer searching for love but trapped in a loop of dopamine, data, and disappointment. In this sense, corporations broke the culture of dating with technology that became a scam, a behavioral marketplace optimized for addiction.
The Ethical Question Behind Bend Dating
Bend Dating was founded on a simple but radical question:
Can ethical technology help us prevent and heal the damage that has been done, and continues to happen?
Developed by a multidisciplinary team of psychologists, counselors, software engineers, and marriage/divorce attorneys under MRI’s oversight, Bend Dating seeks to restore authenticity to digital relationships. Its guiding hope is to support genuine relationships, while its deepest fear is that the dating public has grown addicted to gamified validation that they can no longer tolerate authenticity.
From Algorithmic Seduction to Algorithmic Repair
Generation II: Addictive Design
Mentor Research Institute’s (2023) paper The Dating App Mirage identified a neurobehavioral pattern nearly identical to gambling addiction. Apps like Tinder and Hinge exploit intermittent reinforcement through “matches” and paid visibility boosts. Visibility fades over time, creating artificial scarcity; users are then prompted to pay for “roses,” “super likes,” or “boosts.” Each micro-transaction offers a temporary reward and reinforces dependency.
This system, MRI concluded, has turned courtship into a stimulus and response game, where affection is replaced by algorithmic manipulation. In social-psychology terms, users of generation 2 apps are not forming relationships, they are participating in variable-reward conditioning.
Generation III: Corrective Design
Bend Dating, by contrast, was engineered to neutralize the addictive design elements.
Key features include:
Local limitation (Bend, Redmond & Sisters, Oregon) to foster real-world accountability.
Identity verification and background checks at no cost to users.
Clinical oversight by licensed mental-health professionals.
Evidence-based personality screening and compatibility metrics.
No swiping, no AI filters, no “friend zones.”
Secure mental-health screening tools and referrals.
Third-party oversight by Mentor Research Institute, ensuring ethical transparency.
With roughly 500 members and an estimated operating cost of US $5.25 per user, Bend Dating can operate as a non-profit-aligned social laboratory, an antithesis to billion-dollar engagement engines.
Addiction, Anxiety, and the Illusion of Choice
Second-generation apps created a paradox of abundance: more profiles, less satisfaction. MRI (2024) reported that users experience higher anxiety, reduced self-esteem, and “choice paralysis.” Gen Z and Millennials, in particular, report dating burnout before age 30.
The apps’ algorithmic scarcity loop, which offers visibility that fades unless one pays for boosts, has turned digital dating into an economy of manufactured desperation. Mentor Research calls this the commodification of hope. The behavior parallels gambling pathology, where intermittent reinforcement sustains user engagement despite repeated disappointment.
The Enshittification of Digital Dating and Bend Dating’s Response
Technology critic Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification to describe the predictable life cycle by which online platforms decay as they chase profit. As Doctorow (2023) explains, a digital service typically begins by maximizing value for users, then gradually shifts to extracting value for business customers, and finally degrades both experiences in order to maximize shareholder returns. Dictionary.com (2024) defines the process as “the gradual degradation of an online platform or service’s quality and user experience as it becomes more focused on profit at the expense of users.”
In the realm of online dating, this cycle is unmistakable.
Generation I platforms (eHarmony, Match.com) prioritized helping users form relationships; their revenues depended mainly on subscription access.
Generation II apps (Tinder, Hinge, Bumble) shifted to attention extraction—designing interfaces that reward endless swiping and selling temporary boosts for visibility. As users became habituated and locked-in through social norms and network effects, the platforms began optimizing not for successful matches but for maximum time-on-app.
The result is a textbook case of enshittification: products that once connected people now monetize loneliness through engineered scarcity, gamified “boosts,” and algorithmic throttling of organic reach. In this mature stage, platforms profit precisely when users fail to find lasting connection.
Bend Dating was conceived to break this pattern. Its design inverts every stage of enshittification:
It is non-extractive—operating at a fixed, transparent low cost per member.
It eliminates manipulative engagement loops—there are no boosts, filters, or algorithmic visibility games.
It replaces opaque data-driven monetization with clinician oversight, ethical governance, and evidence-based compatibility tools.
By placing relational outcomes, privacy, and user trust ahead of scale or shareholder gain, Bend Dating represents an anti-enshittified model of digital intimacy, one built to heal rather than exploit.
Bend Dating as a Research and Cultural Intervention
Because Bend Dating operates under MRI’s non-profit oversight, it functions as both product and study. Its research objectives include:
Evaluating whether ethical design reduces compulsive usage.
Measuring relationship readiness and satisfaction outcomes.
Examining whether community-limited platforms can rebuild social trust.
This approach reframes dating technology as therapeutic infrastructure rather than a marketplace. Ethical algorithms, under clinical supervision, can potentially serve as tools for social healing.
Generational Impact and Cultural Repair
MRI’s longitudinal reviews outline the generational consequences of early app design:
The Bend Dating model aims to counteract these harms through local connection, verified identity, ensuring psychological and physical safety, and clinician-guided awareness and readiness. It asks whether users across generations can relearn courtship once the “game” is removed.
Hope and Fear: A Cultural Crossroads
Our greatest hope is that Bend Dating will support relationships. Our greatest fear is that the dating community is too addicted to their dark personalities and the thrill of the game.
This tension defines the research question: Will people choose genuine intimacy when freed from addictive design?
If they do, it will suggest that digital environments can nurture virtue. If not, it will confirm that the pathology runs deeper, that culture itself has adapted to exploitation.
Conclusion: From Algorithmic Addiction to Algorithmic Empathy
Bend Dating stands as both critique and experiment. It exposes ways corporate platforms converted the search for affection into enormous profit, and tests whether ethical design can reverse that conversion.
Where first-generation apps promised compatibility and second-generation apps monetized loneliness, third-generation models aim to cultivate empathy and accountability.
If corporations broke courtship with technology that became a scam, Bend Dating represents the counter-narrative: technology designed to promote emotional well being..
Whether humans still prefer love over dopamine is the question Bend Dating dares to ask.
Its motto is both a moral declaration and a research hypothesis:
No Games. No Bullshit. No Joke!
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