Selling visibility-boosts on dating apps: a problematic practice?

Abstract

Love, sex, and physical intimacy are some of the most desired goods in life and they are increasingly being sought on dating apps such as Tinder, Bumble, and Badoo. For those who want a leg up in the chase for other people’s attention, almost all of these apps now offer the option of paying a fee to boost one’s visibility for a certain amount of time, which may range from 30 min to a few hours. In this article, I argue that there are strong moral grounds and, in countries with laws against unconscionable contracts, legal ones for thinking that the sale of such visibility boosts should be regulated, if not banned altogether. To do so, I raise two objections against their unfettered sale, namely that it exploits the impaired autonomy of certain users and that it creates socio-economic injustices.

State-Run Dating Apps: Are They Morally Desirable?

“…For example, both Tinder and Badoo report that, on average, their users spend circa 90 minutes a day on their apps divided over 10/11 log-ins (Badoo, 2016 ; Thomas et al, 2023 ), with some surveys suggesting that dating-app addiction is a widespread phenomenon (Eharmony, 2023 ). What is apposite for us is that rather than being an inevitable side-effect of dating apps, commercial dating apps actively promote such excessive use by gamifying their apps and incorporating non-conventional forms of gambling into their design such as the aforementioned use of visibility boosts (Abolfathi & Santamaria, 2020 ; de Vries, 2023 ; Klincewicz et al, 2022 , pp. 556–559).…”

“…Insofar as it is mostly individuals looking for hook-ups and short-term relationships who are purchasing these boosts, it would seem that, although any given user looking for lasting love might stand a better chance of finding a suitable partner by boosting than by refraining from this (I say ‘might stand a better chance’, as it is conceivable that their willingness to pay for such boosts will cause dating-app providers to try to keep them on their platforms longer in the hope that they will purchase more boosts, for example by showing their profiles to less suitable users; cf. de Vries, 2023 ), they would be better off still were such boosts completely unavailable as this would raise their per capita visibility. Likewise, if (almost) all users on a given dating app are looking for long-term relationships, using visibility boosts may not lead to an increase in the number of such relationships as they would simply be competing against each other.…”