Degamification: Why We Need to Kill the Game in Dating Apps

I realized something unsettling the other day: Tinder’s defining gesture sums up everything broken about online dating. Your finger isn’t touching a real person—it’s stroking a variable-ratio reward system. Tinder co-founder Jonathan Badeen once admitted the swipe mechanic was inspired by B. F. Skinner’s starved gambler pigeons. The app gives you “match” rewards at unpredictable intervals, triggering dopamine spikes like a slot machine (LSE Blogs).

A 2024 study from the LSE Psychology Blog showed that this swiping motion activates the nucleus accumbens—the same brain region stimulated by cocaine (New York Post). That same year, a joint study by eHarmony and Imperial College found these reward cycles even impacted libido. The “ding” sound that comes with a match increases testosterone, while rejection crashes cortisol and estrogen. In short: the app isn’t selling relationships—it’s selling neurochemical turbulence.

Layer two of the system is a more insidious one: the Elo rating, borrowed directly from chess. As Ramin Shokrizade has explained, each swipe contributes to an invisible leaderboard. Rejecting someone earns points, accepting someone costs you (Harvard Gazette). This is easy to exploit: male users who swipe right indiscriminately plummet in score, while selective users climb to “grandmaster” status. The app becomes a competitive arena by design (Glamour).

And speaking of competition—Harvard sociologist Apryl Williams has shown how dating algorithms reproduce racial and sexual biases, systematically downranking certain demographics (The Guardian). So not everyone enters this “game” with equal chips. The deck is stacked.

There are also side effects. Infinite profile feeds trigger what psychology calls choice overload. A Sage-published article found that long swiping sessions delay decisions and crush optimism (Mozilla Foundation). A 2025 Glamour report documented that Black women were experiencing disproportionate dating burnout due to lower match and message rates. The structural bias demands high effort, but offers rare rewards.

Then there’s monetization: Guardian’s “Addicted to Love” exposé compared dating app boost packages to gambling. The more money you spend, the more visible you become—thus increasing your chances of spending even more. Mozilla’s report added that this casino-like economy also hoards your data.

My Proposal: Degamification

We need a new word—so I made one up: degamification. If gamification is about making tasks more engaging by turning them into games, dating apps have done the reverse: they’ve turned attraction into a game. So we must dismantle the mechanics, not reinforce them.

This begins with three bolts:

Bolt 1: Swipe Quota

Limit users to five profiles per day. That’s it. No endless swiping. This restores the weight of choice and kills “the grass is greener” intoxication. In ed-tech, quota-based systems reduce burnout and increase participation. Same principle applies here.

Bolt 2: End Pay-to-Win

No Boost. No SuperBoost. No Elo. The metric shifts from competition to mutual interest. If you can’t buy love, you can’t boost it either. The casino analogy collapses.

Bolt 3: Elo → Communication Score

Replace Elo with a Communication Score, calculated as:

At least 20 lines of real dialogue in the first 48 hours after a match. Emojis don’t count.
Score weight: 60% reply ratio + 40% average message length.
Below 0? Your profile visibility drops by 90%. Fall to −500? You're shadowbanned for 30 days.

The goal is to reward depth, not volume. In 2017, Tinder reported that 70% of matches never resulted in a conversation. This system flips that. By replacing Elo with cooperative metrics, Shokrizade’s claim that “Elo turns relationships into warfare” becomes irrelevant.

What happens when we degamify?

The dopamine curve flattens. Instead of variable-ratio chaos, we get stable, high-quality interaction. A review by Birches Health suggests predictable social reinforcement breaks addictive loops.
Decision fatigue drops. Five profiles a day = five possible stories. McLuhan’s “The medium is the message” becomes “less medium, more message.”
Algorithmic bias loses power. Visibility isn’t based on beauty metrics, but on conversational value.

Yes, there are technical challenges: requiring profile verification to deter bots (Elo fails in anonymity), storing communication scores on-chain to reduce tampering, encrypting metrics—not messages—for privacy. But those are engineering tasks.

The philosophy is what matters: shift dating from a zero-sum game to a positive-sum dialogue.

In the end, current platforms say: “play to connect.” But the real winner is always the platform. If I had to summarize everything in one line, using my B2-level, occasionally clunky Turkish-English hybrid blog voice, I’d say:

“Stop swiping. Start speaking.”

At the end of a game, the chips go back to the house. But relationships aren’t chips—they require time. Degamification means dimming the casino lights so two people can hear each other in the dark. If we’re talking about communication instead of competition—maybe, for once, we don’t win the game.
Maybe we win real life.