Carouselling: The Design Flaw Dating Apps Can't Ignore

The dating app industry has spent years optimising for engagement, ignoring what happens when users actually engage. A new term has emerged to describe the consequence: 'carouselling', the phenomenon of matches trapped in weeks-long pre-meeting message exchanges that increase anxiety and kill off potential relationships before they begin. According to research cited by matchmaker Tina Wilson of Finding The One, 77% of singles report heightened nervousness the longer online conversations continue without transitioning to an in-person date.

The numbers expose a structural problem. The same research suggests 83% of users want to meet someone within a week of initial contact. Most don't. What's blocking them isn't incompatibility or lack of interest—it's a collective action problem built into the product itself.

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Platforms have optimised for a proxy metric (messages sent, time in app) that directly undermines their stated purpose (facilitating real-world connections). The incentive structure is backwards.

The irony is that dating apps have always faced accusations of being designed to keep users single. This critique typically focuses on the gamification elements or the paradox of choice. What the carouselling phenomenon reveals is more subtle and more damaging: platforms have optimised for a proxy metric that directly undermines their stated purpose.

Match Group (MTCH) has never published data on match-to-date conversion rates across its portfolio. Neither has Bumble (BMBL). Grindr (GRND) disclosed in its S-1 filing that the median user spends 56 minutes per day in the app, positioning this as a strength. But if a significant portion of that time is spent in anxiety-inducing message spirals that go nowhere, it's a retention strategy with a shelf life.

What design changes actually address this

Some platforms have already moved to compress the timeline. Thursday, the UK-based dating app that only operates on Thursdays, forces urgency by design—matches expire within 24 hours, and the entire premise is meeting that week. Bumble introduced its video call feature in 2020 and has since made it increasingly prominent in the user journey, ostensibly as a trust and safety tool but functionally as a forcing mechanism for progression beyond text.

Hinge, owned by Match Group, has leaned into the 'designed to be deleted' positioning and added prompts that explicitly encourage meeting sooner. The company told investors during its Q2 2024 earnings call that it was testing features to 'help users move conversations forward more quickly', though it declined to specify what those features were or share performance data.

The most aggressive intervention comes from apps that impose hard limits on messaging before requiring a decision point. Some smaller platforms, particularly those targeting older demographics or serious daters, cap pre-meeting messages at 10 or require users to either schedule a date or unmatch. These design choices haven't been widely adopted by the majors, likely because they risk reducing daily active usage in the short term—a metric that investor relations teams and product managers are measured against.

Dating apps are stuck between what works for their business model (longer sessions, more messages, higher DAU/MAU ratios) and what works for their users (quick progression to in-person meetings, which removes people from the platform).

That's the underlying tension. Dating apps are stuck between what works for their business model and what works for their users. The carouselling problem crystallises this conflict. Users are doing exactly what the product quietly encourages them to do, and it's making them miserable.

The trust and safety angle complicates matters

Platforms will argue, with some justification, that extended messaging serves a protective function. It gives users time to assess whether someone is genuine, to spot red flags, to build enough comfort to meet safely. Bumble has been particularly vocal about this, positioning its messaging features as part of its women-first safety model. The longer conversation window, the argument goes, empowers users to vet matches on their own timeline.

But the research on carouselling suggests that extended messaging doesn't actually improve safety outcomes—it just delays decisions and increases dropout. If 77% of users are experiencing heightened anxiety as conversations drag on, and 83% would prefer to meet within a week, the current design isn't protecting anyone. It's paralysing them.

There's a balance to strike, and it's probably platform-specific. Grindr, where the median time to meetup is measured in hours rather than weeks, faces different design challenges than Hinge, where users skew older and more risk-averse. But across the board, the industry has defaulted to infinite scrolling and infinite messaging without interrogating whether that infinity serves anyone.

The competitive opportunity here is meaningful. Whichever platform successfully designs for velocity—without sacrificing safety or user control—gains an advantage not just in user satisfaction but in the metric that actually matters: relationships formed per active user. That's the number that drives organic growth, brand strength, and defensibility against the next wave of AI-powered or niche competitors.

The immediate challenge is measurement. How do you track whether users are carouselling without invasive message content analysis? Match length and message count are easy proxies, but they don't capture context—some users genuinely want slow builds, others are engaging with multiple matches at different speeds. Product teams will need to instrument their apps differently, potentially introducing post-match surveys or discrete decision points that generate data on user intent.

What's certain is that the current state is unsustainable. Users are verbalising their frustration, giving it a name, and discussing it publicly enough that it's entered the advice-column discourse. That's not a leading indicator—it's a lagging one. The dysfunction has been normalised.

The platforms that move first to de-normalise it, to build products that actively push users toward decisions rather than deferring them indefinitely, will own the next iteration of this market. With 78% of users reporting dating app burnout, the cost of inaction is increasingly clear. The broader research indicates that dating apps have potentially harmful effects on body image, mental health and wellbeing, suggesting the carouselling phenomenon may be just one symptom of a much deeper structural problem.

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