As other have said Tinder was the biggest shift and the prime reason as stated is there’s a lot of fear that gets removed when you know you’re both there to date and you both at least superficially like each other.

This was before it was enshittified. Superlikes weren’t a thing, you had unlimited swipes and the algorithm tried to get you a match. Post-enshittification the algorithm tries to keep you hooked and paying. So there’s been a slight shift back to in-person but life is busy and expensive.

Tinder was a paradigm shift. It’s success around 2015 started to flip public perception of online dating. Suddenly it was for all kinds of young people that were looking for the convenience of profile matching. A rising tide lifts all boats so legacy platforms shared in the popularity, also getting runoff from the non-target audience of the newer apps. The change in perception of online dating allowed people to appreciate its pragmatism. We’re in an age of busy people optimizing their lives. The structure and accessibility of online dating just fits with those kinds of people.

Slowly but surely grown over the years but Covid probably contributed a lot in a short time.

I met my wife in 2016 on OKCupid and have been online dating on and off since 2009, when I was 14. My cousin met her husband on Match.com around 2011 as well. Maybe your social circles just didn’t take it seriously since you were kids? You would’ve been 9 in 2010.

At the same time, flashy apps like Grindr and Tinder were starting to really impress people just as the concept of Instagram-style social media was really taking off. A massive amount of people were essentially captivated by the idea of “living on your phone,” which was really mainstream and supported by a ton of aesthetically pleasing lifestyle content that seemed to appear almost overnight.

You can imagine that a dating app that highlights your best qualities while minimizing your worst isn’t a far stretch from the curated profiles that are all over social media. But since it’s still a place for direct messaging, and you do still have the chance to express yourself and talk to like-minded people, some people find that that still allows for genuine connection in some respects.

Even after all these years, the best advice when using these apps is to make a connection and immediately get off of the app in order to move to texting or something instead. Long-term chats are where matches go to die.

I’ve never used those apps myself, but I think a factor is, how do you meet other people when you start working most of the day? Most of my friends who use dating apps, do so because meeting someone at the job is unrealistic, and in some fields, super dumb. So instead they’d have to hope to meet someone at an event or something, but after working a full week, they don’t want to go to events all over the city in the hope that they meet someone, especially not when datings apps are so readily available and easy to use.

I’m not sure when the shift happened, but I had many friends using dating apps mid 2010’s when they started working after highschool, for lack of a better option.

As someone who was dating (and found my wife!) online around that time, it was Tinder that marked a watershed moment.

Tinder gamified dating and made it accessible to everyone with a smartphone, which at the time was itself experiencing massive growth as a platform. The image of online dating changed almost overnight from awkward questionnaires and ‘lonely hearts looking for the one’ to swiping right and hookups.

People got convinced that it was normal to sell their souls and reproductive opportunities to the algorithm.

Probably Corona. Social avoidance in teens led to lack of social skills and lack of offline dating opportunities. Shift to online is a logical consequence.

It’s quite simple really, in my opinion:

There’s all kinds of bullshit involved in traditional dating. Asking someone out can be a definite social “faux pas”. I know this personally because I asked someone out and they were like “ew” and then told their friends “I can’t believe that guy would ask me out, do you believe that? Hahaha let’s all laugh at him”. Obviously they are shitty people, but it’s a definite issue. This was an extreme example, but there’s more like it (also personally experienced, but no need for more boring personal anecdotes), even just relatively simple ones like women being annoyed at being asked out so much.

Along come dating apps. This is an extremely convenient way to meet people, and mainly because of one thing: everyone there is fine with being asked out and being sexual. That’s literally the purpose why everyone is there. All the bullshit I talked about basically vanishes. They obviously come with their own problems, everyone knows about them, but it just can’t be denied that they’re extremely convenient, take a lot of pressure/fear out of the whole process.

Along with public spaces dying, everything becoming more impersonal, the gap of still the same desire of closeness needs to be filled by some other way of meeting people.

@supermoon

So I see a few takes… But I think it’s been a slow and mostly private change. My mom is a wedding planner and it’s been a bit more than 10 years since she went from saying ‘they met x at y’ yo ‘they met online’ for most of her weddings. Most folks that I can recall were on MatchDotCom. It was interesting seeing the progression form ‘oh that’s kinda weird’ to it being the norm from her perspective.

Edit - …I never answered why my mom thinks it’s happening. In short, the USA worklife mentality. People just aren’t going out to clubs and shit like that as much. So it’s easier for them to do a few clicks while working to meet some new people.

It was a gradual thing. I remember when my uncle got married in 2006 he told me that he had met his wife on Match.com, but it was a bit of a secret. My uncle didn’t mind if I and my siblings knew (I was 20 at the time), but didn’t want my dad or grandparents to learn because he felt there would be some stigma because they met online.

It was my generation (I was born in '86) that kicked off the apps/online dating thing. I started dating my (now) wife in 2010. We met at a party and neither of us ever did online dating or the dating apps. But so many of our friends did/do.

I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that we were the fist generation to socialize on the internet on a large scale. We grew up in high school on AOL Instant Messenger and Myspace. We got on Facebook back in 2004/2005 when it launched. We were just very primed to be open to online socializing, which is just a step away from dating.

As soon as we became old enough to be in charge of our own finances and be a demographic group businesses were willing to market to, the online dating world opened up in a BIG way.