A few quick thoughts on the article:

• ~50% having zero interest in ever dating someone from the app is such a huge number, what the hecc. I knew that people used these apps for a lot of reasons, most notably perhaps for validation, but I did not realize that it was half of the population of a dating app
• Using the app for social connections that are explicitly not dates has always felt weird for me, but also something that feels a lot more reasonable. Bumble even launched a "friends" version for this specific reason.
• I wonder how poly and lgbtq+ inclusive this survey actually was (currently waiting for it to be indexed on scihub or to get access via researchgate)
• I'm curious to read more into how they quantified "to cope with negative emotions". It's unsurprising to me that this is not a good way to cope, but I'm curious as to what exactly they're trying to cope with - is it validation or desire issues as stated above or something else? How was it measured?
• Tinder for entertainment???? this is wild, I want to speak with someone who does this and pick their brain
• Want to read more from the authors about the predictability of satisfaction as crossed with age, which probably requires me to understand what variables are involved with this regression.

The least surprising sentence here was:

The results suggest that online dating is an ineffective coping mechanism for those facing mental health challenges

I've personally had extremely mixed results with dating apps, but in my own personal experience nothing about them says to me, "This is good for your mental health." As always though, it's good to formally study these things.

The most interesting sentence, imo, was:

The variable that most strongly predicted higher satisfaction with Tinder-generated offline dates was age

I hated using a dating app back in the day. I can't imagine using it for fun or validation. At least okcupid had fun dumb quizzes.

Direct link to the paper

@realChem@beehaw.org