Are dating apps a fraud since the beginning?

No, they used to be more or less good - they all had slightly different vibes instead of being the exact same thing with different fonts. Okcupid used to publish a lot of fun data and was kind of a middle ground, Match was known for being for more "serious" daters, and plenty of fish tended to be a little trashier - not that there wasn't plenty of overlap, that was just kind of the reputations they had. You could pay for things but you could also do just fine with free accounts, and the ads focused on how many people had had success with them.
Now they're all owned by the same company and it shows, and they've decided dumbing the experience down to the most superficial stuff and letting bots and people advertising OF or their MLMs take over is fine. I don't think any of them are worth the time they take to download at this point.
- I remember 10+ years ago using okcupid. It was alright.
  Best dating site ever? Myspace.
  See the thing about dating sites is the women are guarded, and protective of what they say and do because they're afraid of any little thing they say being judged as then being slutty.
  But on myspace, I would introduce myself by sending a new message, to someone I never talked to before and the message would say "Hi, I'm Rob. Can I put it in your butt?"
  And then they'd see my pics, and realize my entire existance is a joke. And they'd reply "Well obviously! When are we getting drinks?". Her joking obviously, because who would agree to something like that so fast?
  And then we WOULD get drinks. And I WOULD put it in her butt.....eventually.
  But on Tinder, it requires the women to swipe right to create a match. And in their mind, it means they're actively agreeing to sex in that moment. And that little butterfly effect moment breaks the chain.
  They never have that joking intro. They never meet for drinks. They never start dating. They never get vunerable about their biggest fears. They never come home to their house full of bees as clowns wrap their arms around them and drag them into the bees nests. They never get stripped down and have honey lathered all over their naked body. They never have you come in with a chainsaw, decapitate a few dozen clowns, and run with her out of a bee filled house just moments before it explodes, and ride away on a motorcycle as you flee the chasing yakuza, despite being in Ohio. She never feels the adrenaline rush of speeding up a ramp on the motorcycle, and hopping over the tracks of a speeding train, thus stopping the yakuza. Then later at your place, you're like "oh, sorry, the water is broken. Some house exploded and the whole citys water is shut off now. Which means I can't serve you a cold glass of water. Just some wine. Like.....a LOT of wine. You wanna drink 46 bottles of wine? Also, you can't take a shower to wash off that honey. I'll have to lick it off. But you better hurry. There's fire ants outside, and they sting."
  And after 2 hours of drinking, and licking, she's now in the mood, and now you're putting it in her butt, and she's loving it. Her reservations she previously had about anal were totally false.
  And thats what she's worried about happening if she swipes right. So she swipes left instead. So now YOU are spending Saturday night masturbating with a bottle of honey....
  
  Wtf did I just read? You are a funny person!

Can you be a bit more clear on what you mean by failing?
I've met my girlfriend on Tinder and had some nice dates / hookups because of it. Are 98% of the women not intetested because of my average looks and being overweight? Sure, but it's the 2% that made wit worthwhile. Tinder was getting more expensive depending on your age back then but I think I would use an app again if I needed to.
I've met some people that I would otherwise never have met, made some rich corporation even richer in the process.. 🤷
- Wait.....you paid for tinder?
  
  Yep, wasn't as overpriced back then though.

Without wanting to sound patronising, dating apps absolutely do work, but it's the users that make them work. If your profile photos are shit, or your chat is uninteresting or unfunny, you're not going to succeed.
I'm a middle-aged male divorcee who'd been off and on Tinder for about 4 years, and I'd describe myself as average-looking, but I met a number of women on it. Without the dating apps, my in-person shyness would have prevented me from meeting anyone. They were an absolute godsend for me.

Idk what to tell you. Are you following rules 1 and 2 of online dating cause while I haven't settled down with a woman yet, I've met multiple gfs through tinder and bumble. Some lasted years

Well, think about it.
They profit off their users by either charging them for a service, selling user data, and/or advertisement. If their dating app was very successful and quickly matched users together, they wouldn't be using the app very long and the company would lose potential profit.
This probably wasn't the case in the earlier days of the internet but it certainly is now. They want you hooked and coming back every day so they can get maximum profit off you.
- Matchmaker is an ancient profession.
- Duolicious only asks for donations and it's algorithm was interesting, too bad the anti-AFK ideology was never enforced

They were "decent" 14 ish years ago. And they worked a fair amount. I know married friends who met on them.
That said the Internet in general has fallen off a cliff with enshitification...
I know people today that still use them and do ok.
"Free" anything is going to be complete shit.
Like anything else in life it takes work, during 8 months I was doing it I spent 10-15 hours on it. And that wasn't "scrolling" profiles. I was constantly tweaking my profile, looking for was to improve it. Also when I did "match" someone I worked on my greetings, interesting things to say, etc.
I would even keep snippets of texts. (The one I was on had a question/answer part.
Dating is a lot of work for many people.

I met my partner through a dating site. In the two years prior to that, I had used the site to meet over two dozen other women, which led to no long-term relationships but did result in a few short flings.
I can say that what helped me was expectation management. This was actually my second time using a dating site, and the first time around I was super picky, looking for "green flags." Correspondingly, I messaged very few women, and met even fewer (four in two years). The second time, I realized that someone having a sparse profile didn't mean they were a boring or lazy person. Sometimes it does, but other times it just means they aren't very good at writing about themselves.
I'll also say there's only so much the metrics of dating sites can tell you about someone and your compatibility with them. There's a level of response bias to the questionnaires on these sites, i.e. people answer the questions based on what they think a potential partner might like, not their genuine beliefs and preferences. You'll never discover your actual compatibility with someone unless you talk to them, so I took the approach of, "unless there are explicit deal breakers in your profile, I'll ask you on a date and we'll see how things go."
There's also the expectation management for the frequency of matches, responses to messages, dates, and beyond. Dating apps aren't magic machines that will get you hooked up in hours. They take work, and you'll see a lot of rejection (most of it just utter silence). There can be long dry spells. Sometimes you'll need to take a break because you've literally messaged everyone on the site and you need to wait for more members. And sometimes, they just won't work for some people. That sounds harsh, but it's true. Success for many of these sites and apps is highly dependent on one's physical attractiveness, and some people simply did not win the genetic lottery.

The first dating apps designed for straight people always had an unbalanced ration of men and women, which appears to have gotten worse over time. Early on a few people I know did find people, dated, and married. They were mostly people who had niche interests for our area and were successfully connecting with people at least a couple hours away who they never would have met in person.
But that was well over a decade ago and I don't know of anyone having success since those early years.

No, they worked for me between 15-10 years ago, but I get it - by all accounts now they're so enshittified that it's just Match parasitically turning loneliness into profit at ever greater efficiency. They would have failed immediately if they didn't work long enough to capture enough market and attention.
As others mentioned OK Cupid, and it's a great example. It was originally very good at matching people, and they took pride in it. I remember when Match bought it, as I had recently (just in time) found my person. I was able to see it go from "No, we're leaving it alone, just tweaking a few things" to ending the interesting data-exploration articles, dumbing down the experience, adding micro-pay-gating, and fully gutting the experience and staff. Nobody should have trusted Match to not destroy what it was, and if they hadn't sold and remained a useable app, maybe the market would have abandoned Match. Instead, here we are.
I don't envy those people still looking, I assume best case is still using apps but you just have to waste a lot more time.

Well, sorta. As someone else pointed out the economic incentives for most dating app owners are diametrically opposed to the needs of the users. There is also a huge consolation in the market with the majority of the apps by user count being owned by a single company which leads to enshittification.
There are a few exceptions but they very much aren’t for everyone.
OKCupid from 20 years ago was great before it sold out. But it’s only accessible to time travelers.
Next are the more event based or hookup apps which tend to cater to kinksters, swingers, poly, and queer folk. I’m thinking of things like FetLife, Grinder and Plura. They work well for their audience since those communities tend to have events that people will keep coming back for even if they have successfully found someone on the app. In fact success finding someone might make them more likely to keep on the app and bring in their friends.
But for monogamous straight people? Dating apps are a hellscape.

I'm a man and I sought out relationships exclusively through online dating*. It was extremely discouraging, but it did eventually work three or four times (depending on how you define a long term relationship) over the course of years of trying. Each success was a big deal.
I used the free version of the old OkCupid - the one where you wrote a long profile and answered a bunch of multiple-choice questions. I only sent messages to women who seemed highly compatible with me, and I put some thought into every message. My rough estimate is that one in twenty messages received a reply. One in five replies lead to a date. One in five dates was the start of a long-term relationship. So that's "only" about 500 messages per relationship, and that took several years. (There weren't 500 women on the site who lived nearby and seemed compatible with me at any one time.)
I have no idea how well the modern "swipe" apps work. Frankly they seem gross and I never seriously tried using them.
Edit: I should add that I looked a little worse than average, had weird hobbies, and possessed enough social skills to sit quietly and not embarrass myself or the people I was with. I wasn't exactly hot stuff.
*I have been introduced to women by a friend or relative a few times, but that friend/relative was the one who took the initiative.
- With that kind of hit rate and timescale did you ever think the apps were unnecessary vs just meeting people? Or were you not really in a position to meet people by other means anyway?
  
  No, there were always lots of people relatively near me. Even when I lived in New Hampshire, I was only an hour away from Boston. Now I live in Manhattan. My issue is the standard one that nerds have: intense social anxiety, and all the solitary habits formed by decades of social anxiety.
  The funny thing is that when my dog was alive, I made sure that he had an active social life. I would even ask strangers with dogs if their dogs would like to meet mine.

I married someone I met on one of those sites. But that was years ago.
Now that one company owns most of them, they're a lot less effective, as eHarmony basically gutted the interesting features of their competitors and let them/encouraged them to become bot infested OF pitch platforms.

Duolicious? That owl has been busy, I see.

No, they work
- I always wonder about people who claim they don't work. People say they're rigged, meh, maybe so, but how rigged can they be?! You get pictures and words, decide if you want to engage. That's the meat of it, and they're not fucking with that.
  Years ago I logged into Plenty of Fish with a fake woman's account, looked at the men's profiles. Jesus fucking Christ. What a bunch of pathetic sad sacks, boring as hell to boot. Don't start me on the pics.
  Went back and rewrote my profile to be funny and interesting, likes came pouring in. I've had many, many women over the years message me to say, "Hey! Not looking for a date, but wanted to say your profile is awesome!" Both a bummer and nice to hear. :)

I think they are worse now than they used to be, but they do work for some people. I was always suspicious of the PII gathered so I stayed away from them. Craigslist personals worked back when they existed, and Reddit can work. An important tip: copyedit your SPAG (spelling, punctuation, and grammar) to hell and back before sending a response, since the slightest error WILL hurt your chances.

Sorta related, if you’re really interested in using them and are a straight cis person I highly recommend trying them out from the other side. Create a more or less generic account of the opposite gender and see what kinds of messages, likes, or whatever you end up with. It will be mind boggling how different it is from what you are used to and give you an idea of what you will need to do to actually make a match.

grindr
faceless profile, blank, no information: "no pic no chat"
it's all stupid hypocrites looking for low-effort validation fix.

I think apps and websites where you can see everyone without limits or algorithms are fine. Apps like those still exist. They are just like social networks with no gamification.
So I don't think it's the apps, friends. If it hurts no matter where you touch, maybe it's your finger that's broken...
- I generally hate thinking like this, but ultimately, as with everything, there comes a point where it’s actually beneficial and probably the only healing move left, to admit that the problem might be in one’s self, not others (or the tools used, as in this case).
  But that does not mean that the metaphorical finger is inherently fragile or unavoidably always broken. Just realizing this, as much as our psyche fights against it both to avoid admitting fault or conceding that there’s a lot of work to do, can start the processes to get the finger working and healthy.
  I also don’t like how often this line of thought is turned around and used as a weapon, when it can actually be very hopeful and healing after the initial struggles trying to accept it (and failing to do so, defensively fighting against it with all your cells for a good while).
  
  Well put. And let's not forget that society is in many ways against us and expectations are high. Are you fit? Do you have good hair and teeth? Do you already have children? Are you in finance? Etc etc. And this is true in apps and irl. So the only thing you have control of, is accepting yourself, loving yourself, and growing for sake of yourself. With some luck, you grow into someone that someone else also loves.
  I almost rejected someone that was truly into who I was as a person. I almost shrugged it off as them just being horny all the time. It's almost scary to find someone that actually likes us and all our weird quirks.

I haven’t touched them in 5 years, but Hinge was the best of all of them. The thing is designed to make it as easy as possible to set up a profile packed to the brim with conversation-starting prompts, and then it’s stupid easy to start a conversation with someone else because you can respond to a specific prompt on someone else’s profile.
In my experience, it works really well if you set someone up to ask a question
- In my experience, Hinge is still the best, but all of the apps have the same fundamental flaw. Imagine every person in your area who is single is in one big room and you line up to meet each other one at a time. That's basically how they work. Want to skip meeting people with different political or religious beliefs? No problem! Just pay up (and by the way, it's not cheap). Also, the filters are critically limited and largely superficial. It's a slog no matter what.
  From what I've heard, OkCupid used to work properly as a way to find people who were actually a good match for you, but Match group bought them and stripped all the tools that made it useful. I actually recently saw a great comment about exactly that.

They work. I don't know why people like to perpetuate that dating apps make suboptimal matches. Dating apps match people up on some basic metrics. It's up to the people to form connections. They dont have a magic ability to keep people from long term relationships.
If anything people might be more picky or idealistic because dating apps exist, so they'll likely not commit because of their high standards or FOMO. But that's more of a society issue not the dating apps themselves.

I remember being shocked in the early 90’s listening to plans for a dating site. The focus was on collecting and selling demographics. Even the private info being collected was driven by what sold to advertisers more than what helped people relate to each other
Yes, dating apps have always been a fraud because making a social connection was always secondary to selling you

My partner and I found each other on OkC over 4 years ago. I had been on dating apps for maybe 5-6 years prior, whereas I was basically her first match

I think there was a time fairly early on when at least one was built to do the job it was advertised to.
I think more than half of Lemmy's members were born after that though.

I think apps and websites where you can see everyone without limits or algorithms are fine. Apps like those still exist. They are just like social networks with no gamification.
So I don't think it's the apps, friends. If it hurts no matter where you touch, maybe it's your finger that's broken...

Dating apps are SUPER saturated now. Didn't used to be like that way back in the beginning. OKCupid was cool because it was free and had no limitations. Bumble is one of the better ones these days, as far as I'm concerned.
- I met my wife on OKC like... 10 years ago. I'm glad I exited that hellscape before it imploded.

Profit is gained by engagement.
Engagement is the opposite of solving the problem.
So an intermediate platform is not a working solution for dating.
Best interests of people looking for other people and the intermediary are in direct contradiction.

I mean I don't date, but I've never once heard of a person who met on a dating app and actually got together with them, I have heard of instant message platforms working though.
- I met my last long term partner on a dating app, but these days it's not a route I'd want to take. I met someone on discord more recently in a really wonderful community that allowed me to get to know him and make other friends with none of the same pressure
- My current and most of my more recent relationships started from tinder, which has been more or less the “default” at least here in my age group (back then, some 20-30). A few were from Jodel or such in between, but I’ve had most luck with the swipey app. Both poly and mono, depending on the phase I was going through at the time.
  I think at least most of my friends have met their partners (most being long term by now, with children and such, like mine too currently) that way. But I live in a relatively small country, so maybe that affects the spread in the apps. When you are just a few million people in total speaking the language, there’s not much sense I suppose to spread thin between several apps.

They work sporadically, but you have to fit a few fairly specific archetypes to get a significant amount of matches. There's more options that you can shoot for beyond hyper-attractive guy but not a lot more.
If you're a generic man looking to find a generic woman to have a generic relationship with, then the odds are stacked against you for most of them.

Yes they’re a scam