TikTok, Instagram, dating apps, Twitter/X, Bluesky, Twitch, YouTube, and countless others are all the same now. They all might have unique looks and personalized quirks, but they are functionally so similar. And so overlapping in true intent.
All of them, even work software, have a maddeningly addictive set of engagement tricks that all feel like they were stolen from the skeeviest casinos on the outskirts of Vegas. I’ve noticed this for a while, but it didn’t really hit me until this past New Year’s Eve, when I was talking to some friends who are entrenched in the harrowing app dating scene, a scene I’ve thankfully never been a part of since I met my wife just before dating apps got big. I met her the old-fashioned way: playing Dungeons & Dragons.
I’d heard the names of these apps before, and had a baseline cultural familiarity with them, but I’d never seen them in action. Not until I saw a friend using a dating app like it was a mobile game built by a shady company that used to specialize in heroin sales before pivoting to apps. He gave me a tour of how the various dating apps work since married life has left me completely out of the loop.
Everything Is the Same Now, and It F—king Sucks
No matter the app, my eyes kept seeing slot machines filled with therapy and relationship buzzwords. An inherently social act reduced to an infinite doom scroll of cheap but effective engagement tactics that, like every other app, feels explicitly designed to simulate social interaction while never actually being social, even if sociability is the app’s stated intent.
There is an easy accusation to make about all this: “Silicon Valley ran out of ideas!” That was my first instinct. It’s not true, though. They didn’t run out of ideas; there are plenty more out there to explore. They just stopped thinking about other ones because they found the idea, the all-encompassing final dream of capitalism that allows them to generate endless money through near-infinite, unrelenting engagement.
All apps have a stated purpose. They do a thing, for the lack of a better term. But that “thing” is a whisper-thin veneer masking its true intent to simply keep you on it for as long as algorithmically possible.
I watched my friend swipe at dozens of faces across several dating apps as we all sat around talking instead of partying the way boring adults do on New Year’s Eve. That is the dating app’s version of an infinite scroll, which has become the primary goal of every app, because the most profitable behavior online isn’t buying something once, it’s either getting you to buy it every month or giving it to you for free but making sure you pay in taps, scrolls, reacts, and most of all your precious time.
It’s pretty disheartening to know, almost but not quite definitively, that if there is an app that you like that doesn’t do any of that stuff, it’s probably only a matter of time before it does. Because it works, as long as you define “works” as “infinite moneymaking machine filled with little addictive game loops that never stop.” Works, sure, but inhumane.
TikTok, an app filled with shamelessly aggressive and addictive loops, perfected the model by removing almost all user intent. There is a search bar you can use to type in words to find something specific, but it serves as a perfunctory tool, like the font size settings. There is no choosing what you want to see, at least not after the algorithm “learns” what you’re into. You open the app, and it starts mainlining what it thinks you want.
Every app is like that now, with the only difference being the microscopically unique ways they hook you. Reels just straight hijacked TikTok’s addictive loops. And as I recently learned, dating apps stopped pretending that they were about love and meaningful relationships, a relic of those old Match.com commercials, and fully embraced the deeply cynical maxim I had gleamed about dating app culture through pop cultural osmosis: dating apps are a numbers game, with “game” being the operative term.
Every app slowly sheds its original purpose to become a feed, a dopamine loop, a “creator economy,” maybe one of the most eye-roll-inducing terms devised in an era that feels explicitly engineered to spit out an endless succession of eye-roll-inducing terms and people.
You keep feeding into it on the vague promise that if we engage with the madness of it all, we might hit the jackpot. Maybe if I scroll long enough and contribute to the Torrent of Stuff, I’ll find fame and fortune on TikTok while someone else finds love on Hinge, while someone else finds the perfect person to scream at on Twitter. Why wouldn’t we? The apps know us so well, right?
They don’t. Not really. They’re just pulling random odds and ends out of their giant sack of content based on a pool of keywords you’ve unconsciously associated with your account, and presenting it all like the interminably long credits of the Marvel movie as you sit there waiting for a godd—n 15-second post-credit scene that never actually arrives.
That’s all apps are now. You’re waiting for Thanos to arrive, but you just keep getting the names of key grips and ILM CGI artists.
The post Swipe, Tap, Repeat. Every App Is the Same Now, and That Sucks. appeared first on VICE.
