Culture Gen Z is breaking up with dating apps, Ofcom says

Gen Z is breaking up with dating apps, Ofcom says​

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Watchdog says Tinder, Hinge, Bumble and Grindr have all seen dip in use since last year

The UK’s dating scene is swiping left on popular apps such as such as Tinder and Hinge as younger people turn to real-life ways of connecting with potential partners, according to the UK’s communications watchdog.

Ofcom said the UK’s top four dating apps had seen a dip in use since 2023, with Tinder losing 600,000 users, Hinge shedding 131,000, Bumble declining by 368,000 and Grindr falling by 11,000.

Ofcom said the overall number of adults visiting a dating service in May this year – nearly 5 million, or about one in 10 – was broadly in line with the same period in 2023, but the slight decline could be linked to the shifting dating habits of members of gen Z, the demographic cohort born between the mid-90s and 2010.

“Some analysts speculate that for younger people, particularly gen Z, the novelty of dating apps is wearing off,” Ofcom said in its annual Online Nation report.

Luke Brunning, who runs a research network at the University of Leeds exploring the ethics of online dating, said the Ofcom data chimed with his own research.

“There is a growing romanticisation of in-person meeting and interaction. The ‘meet cute’ is becoming a trope in how people on social media talk about romance,” he said.

Brunning added that dating apps were still being used by young relationship-seekers, even if the plethora of online services sometimes made the experience difficult to navigate, while safety issues such as unwanted attention for female users had also been flagged in his research.

“Very few of them are turning to the apps as an exclusive means of setting up an in-person meeting. It’s much more fluid now,” Brunning said.

Tinder’s owner, Match Group, has admitted issues with attracting a younger audience, saying in January that its leading app would be focusing on “shaping an in-app experience that resonates better with today’s younger users”. It said gen Z users were seeking “a lower-pressure, more authentic way to find connections”.

Ofcom also found that dating services still had the biggest reach in younger adult age groups, reaching 18% of 18- to 24-year-olds and a similar proportion of 25- to 34-year-olds. It said two gay dating apps, Sniffies and Scruff, had entered the top 10 most popular dating apps.
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I don't have much experience with the apps, but from what I remember the most "datable" women weren't on them. Maybe things have changed, but back when I was single none of the women you wanted to date were using the apps because they just didn't have to, and from the stories I've heard from friends things still seem the same. Also I'd imagine most of Gen Z are still in places where women don't need to go on to an app to search for a guy worth dating. Your average attractive likeable woman is being sought after by basically every available man in their general radius, so there's no real reason to go searching.
 
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Hey Johnny Bravo said:
A "romanticisation of in-person meeting and interaction"? These people seriously lack self-awareness. Meeting in-person is how it was done for literally all of human history until the past 10 years.

I remember when online dating was considered embarrassing and shameful in the 2000's.
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Sounds like something out of the 1993 movie Demolition Man:
 
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More AWS-8Q Than You said:
A good chunk of Gen Z and Alpha is them rediscovering traditional things, giving it their own retarded names, and acting like they're the first people to ever do these things. That's just how bad things have gotten, Silent Gen, Boomers, and Millennials have Year Zeroed things so hard the later generations don't even know they existed. Xers, of course, simply are out of fucks to give, if they had any in the first place.
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i graduated from high school in 2012 and that was admittedly before 'gen z' was even a concept people were discussing, but at the same time it was also very clear that the social structures and institutions that are omnipresent in 20th century media that the older millenials grew up with no longer existed. there weren't any after school programs that weren't babysitting poor people, there was no AV club, i was already on the journalism team and they hadn't done a newspaper or news show in years. college was the exact same thing except instead of blaming the lack of government funding they just blamed you for having expectations.

by that point everyone had spent the last 5 years moving everything onto the internet, and most of them had never used the internet before that, so literally, and i do mean literally, everything got moved onto the internet even if it didn't make sense. i'm not even joking when i say that it was passe to ask women on dates instead of using an app, i slept with two different women by posting on anonymous facebook secret admirer pages because they wouldn't pay me any attention just talking to them in person. there were flyers and posters put up for people's weird social media startup apps and websites. it was very much cool to be terminally online

anyone slightly younger than me won't have the advantage of remembering how things were before that, but it also means they probably think it's as fake as any of the other things they've been told about
 
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Zoomers only exist in digital form, they're just moving from dating apps to video games.
 
Don't be surprised when it turns out dating apps weren't the only problem.
 
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