You sure are good at finding articles that make you think the sky is falling, aren't you?

So I've never used Tinder. Probably never will. I sunset on the dating scene back when Match.com on dialup was state-of-the-art. But I've spent a lot of time counseling people, hanging out with friends, and observing this brave new world of dating. I've said it before and I'll say it again: all these apps and trends and fads and what-have-yous are about meeting, not dating. The analogy is not apt; Tinder is hot-or-not.com is, as 'Ben summarizes, bone or don't. The oppression of choice is all about the ability to compare fifteen different models across 27 metrics on seven websites, four of which offer free shipping but three of which take Paypal when the fact of the matter is, if you schlepped your ass down to Best Buy and laid hands on it, you'd discover that the remote feels like it was assembled out of returned hair dryer parts by the mentally handicapped in Bangalore.

What's happening is we're surrounding ourselves by a million different mediated experiences instead of actually experiencing choice. Who the fuck says Tinder knows what you should look for in a girl? Tinder and only Tinder. Who the fuck says Amazon knows what you should look for in a toaster? Amazon and only Amazon. But since there's no way to appify the way a pair of headphones fits on your skull, you'll spend 45 minutes cross-referencing head-fi.org with Amazon with Crutchfield with Consumer Reports with Reddit in order to buy a brand you've never heard of before (and then another 30 researching whether burn-in is real) when prior to the Internet you would have gone to Fry's and paid for the ones from a brand you trust in a color you like.

Dating is no different. There is no secret sauce. No metrics to be found that will measure whether or not you'll click with someone. It's entirely about how you collaborate and to do that, you'd best start interacting in a non-mediated environment. What the Internet has brought to the table - when it comes to human experience, or things that face the human experience - is a dizzying array of mediated pseudoenvironments to postpone the interaction you actually want.

No wonder that the people trapped in those pseudoenvironments bemoan the lack of interaction... and hearken back to the glory days when they didn't "have" to use Tinder and the like. So much easier to blame the interface than recognize that it only ever gets you to the first date anyway, try not to take it so seriously.