Trapped by the swipe? Dating apps are designed to keep singles ‘swiping and spending’ rather than finding ‘The One’, experts warn

If you spend too much time and money on dating apps, you could be ‘seduced’ and ‘trapped’ in an endless cycle of swiping, experts have warned.

A new BBC Three documentary explores how love lives have changed with the rise of app-based dating over the last decade.

In ‘Dating Apps: The Inside Story’, Tinder, Hinge and OKCupid users confess to their addictive behavior in a desperate search to find ‘the one’.

People interviewed by the BBC liken scrolling to a game that is addictive, like ‘bingo’ or ‘slot machine’, but without an end point, like a ‘hamster in a wheel’.

Other singles, meanwhile, reveal the ‘instant dopamine hit’ of receiving hundreds of matches that lifts their mood and keeps them coming back.

The documentary claims the firm behind the top platforms aims to get singles swiping and spending money on paid features for a steady income stream.

Lee Mackinnon, a media and technology researcher at the University of the Arts London, says dating apps put users in a “permanent state of starvation”.

‘[There’s] “It’s this kind of reward system where you get positive feedback through likes, hits, swipes, so you keep coming online,” he said.

People interviewed by the BBC liken scrolling to a game that is addictive, like ‘bingo’ or ‘slot machine’, but without an end point, like ‘hamsters in a wheel’

Tinder, Hinge, Plenty of Fish, OKCupid and more are owned by a single conglomerate called Match Group, which has annual revenue of approximately $3.5 billion.

Tinder first launched in September 2012 for several college campuses in the US and quickly expanded to launch in the UK in 2013.

It was the first to use the famous swipe right and left feature, but the first iteration had heart and X buttons for users to indicate whether they were interested in someone.

Co-founder Jonathan Badeen had an “epiphany” that allowed users to navigate the screen like a deck of cards, and the time users spent on the app began to skyrocket.

“We knew that for people to match, to meet the right person, they had to go through a lot of people,” Badeen said.

‘We were trying to make the deck of cards feel like random rewards so the cards would keep swiping until we hopefully got that match.’

Badeen admitted that he was inspired by BF Skinner’s classic psychological experiments with pigeons in the 1940s.

Skinner turned hungry pigeons into ‘gambling fanatics’ by convincing them that the food randomly distributed on a tray was the result of pecking.

Tinder, Hinge, Plenty of Fish, OKCupid and more are owned by a single conglomerate called Match Group. Bumble is owned by Bumble Inc., which also owns Badoo. It is operated by.

Tinder’s swiping mechanism was based on an experiment by American psychologist BF Skinner in the 1940s; In this experiment, he conditioned hungry pigeons to believe that food randomly delivered to a tray was triggered by pecking (pictured).

‘These variable rewards show how you can better motivate a person to do something,’ Badeen said. ‘We were aware of this idea at Tinder.’

Karim Valera, who was an Android manager at Tinder from 2013 to 2014, said engineers were “really trying to celebrate that moment” by getting a match, making it a form of positive reinforcement.

He said: ‘Everything is like a slot machine; ‘You are presented with one suggestion after another, you don’t quite know what to get, you may meet a hot person, you may meet an ugly person and if you like them you may be rewarded.’

One of the singletons interviewed said: ‘It feels like a bit of a game because when you get a match you feel like you’ve won and if they don’t match you you feel like you’ve lost.’

Another said: ‘For a lot of girls it’s especially like validation; so I feel like it’s a game of who will like me.’

In 2015, Tinder introduced the ‘Plus’ subscription tier, which includes various features such as undo swipes and unlimited likes for a monthly fee.

Meanwhile, those who didn’t pay the fee were only given a limited number of swipes per day to create a sense of scarcity and “keep people coming back.”

“Famine rewards create a kind of reward system that allows the person to go hungry so that they have more control over their behavior,” Mackinnon said.

Today, Tinder Plus starts from £8.33 per month for a 12-month subscription; The top tier, Tinder Platinum, starts from £16.67 per month for a 12-month subscription.

The documentary also shows how sexual predators and scammers use dating apps to target victims; but Match Group claims to be working against this.

In response to the documentary, the company said the idea that the company’s apps were designed to be addictive was ‘completely false’.

He stated that their algorithms are ‘designed to prioritize active users and mutual compatibility, not to force people into an endless loop’.

‘Dating Apps: The Inside Story’ airs tonight (Monday) at 9pm on BBC Three and is available on BBC iPlayer.