Facebook Inc, nowcalled Meta,announcedits dating app, Facebook Dating, in May 2018.
There was real excitement, with people expecting a revolutionary dating app thatwould soon beat Tinder.
But four years later, it hasnt taken over the market most people have simply forgotten about it.
Numerous reports claim the dating apppractically doesnt function.
As anonline dating technology researcher, I had an eye on Facebook Dating since its announcement.
Now, I think I have a good idea of why the app failed.
I started pressing like, soon receiving match notifications, meaning people had also liked me.
It’s free, every week, in your inbox.
Nevertheless, my phone didnt stop buzzing for hours.
To see what was going on, I started chatting.
My past work has shown thisusually happens after at least 20 messagesand within three to four days.
This was light-speed-dating according to science.
They all wanted to chat about interesting things on WhatsApp.
Things got even weirder quickly.
Tomasz, aka Diana, said its her ex-boyfriends name and Moises didnt reply.
A rather unconventional naming convention.
Why then didnt Facebook bother to remove all these fake profiles?
Maybe an invasive use of personal data for matching purposes would have raised more angry voices.
Your experience would be similar to your experience on Tinder ten years ago.
It seems most likely intentional that Meta allows fake accounts to lurk around Facebook Dating.
There are simply arent many real users.
So what can we learn from all this?
For the first time since its launch in 2004, the number of Facebook users stopped growingthis past quarter.
So perhaps the failure of Facebook Dating was an early sign that Facebooks problems ran deep.
The Conversation approached Meta for a comment but didnt get a reply.
