People don't even use these apps to actually meet people. There are much better ways to actually meet people and we all know it. They all involve getting out and interacting with human beings in meatspace. We use these apps for parasocial stimulation. We look at the faces scroll by, gaze into their eyes, and it tricks our stupid brains into thinking we are having social interactions. That's the actual product they are selling.

Yeah, all of the Match.com owned services have done that for ages. Okcupid used to be truly a unique service, but it got transformed into another match.com zombie. Yay for late capitalism consolidation efficiency, or something...

Had it happen to me too. They'll refund you for this. Just be polite when asking for it.

My review on the Play Store: “Premium is a scam. Hides likes which come from all over the world (clickfarms?) even though I set my radius to 5 km. But of course they only show you the fake likes (all of them) after one pays for premium.”

Similar situation here. Lots of ghosting, or unmatching the day of a scheduled date. Had two dates in the last few months of using the apps. First woman was about 15 years older than her pics. Not unattractive by any means, but felt lied to from the get go. The other, let’s just say she had some work done after most recent pics, and the surgeon shouldn’t be practicing.

Are you sure about being ghosted? Or is the app just cutting your connection?
Same thing you described happened to me so many times I've lost count. Furthermore, I've compared profiles with some women I did met IRL and wouldn't you know, what you see in your "profile preview" or whatever is not necessarily how anybody else gets to see you. We've seen profile pictures being removed or entire profile texts being wiped out, sometimes just before the first date.
Some people became aware of the enshittifaction/ gamification many years ago and resorted to putting their IG handles or phone numbers into their profiles "in case we get interrupted." When some dating sites starting cracking down on that, too, they started putting this info into their pictures instead.
And that's not even mentioning the bots and "controllers," as they used to be called, whose only purpose is to extract private information from you. At least in the EU, dating apps have had to disclose their existence in the TOS for some years. They all do.
TLDR; The game is rigged beyond belief.

That’s really key. They might have 10 times the subscribers if they charged a quarter as much.

His description of how his analysis of the OKCupid questions discovered that there were 7 discrete cluster of personality that it would put you in was awesome.

He then make three profiles. One for each of the clusters he felt he was most like, but the profiles targeted the groups very specifically and so his matches started climbing like crazy.

After going on many many dates, he dropped two of the profiles because he found that he didn't click with the women that they matched with.

The description of going on two dates to the same location in the same day with different women because ran out of novel date locations was hilarious.

Data science nerd out played a data driven system.

EaaS. Emotions as a service.

It's all people outside of your search parameters that's why they never show up. So basically it's people you're not interested in anyways and it's not worth paying them money to find that out.

There is one it sucks

Now Craigslist, I have met friends for life.

Or at least the rest of it.

I met my husband of 8.5 years on Craigslist Casual Encounters. Those were the times.

I can't imagine how unpleasant I would feel if I was defrauded or harmed because of using a dating website. I'm going to call that 'appalling', although that's too weak a word.

I'm so happy that I met my wife through circumstance and chance and we just love each other and that's it.

Well Match saw the success of Tinder so they switched a lot of their apps to do the same. Then they bought Tinder and filled it with ads and enshittified it. Then people flocked to other apps because the old ones were shit. Then Match bought those too and made them shitty too worth swiping and ads. There have been no stellar new apps so people are avoiding them. Eventually there will be a cool new dating app that people will flock to that Match will buy and not learn anything from the catalogue of apps their strategy has killed and they will make that one shitty too.

Right? Even OKCupid ditched their highly successful model in favor of swiping.