The rules came from Megan, a friend of a friend who lives in Los Angeles and had recently done the impossible: She’d found a boyfriend on Hinge . “Finding a boyfriend” is the ostensible point of dating apps, but for single straight women in their 30s, it’s increasingly an anomaly. The rules were a six-bullet-pointed list of how Megan had hacked the service to make it actually work the way dating apps are supposed to. “I’m not exaggerating,” she says. “I got 300 likes in a week.”

Like most of the internet, Hinge has undergone a thorough enshittification over the course of the 2020s, abandoning the promise of its famous slogan — “the dating app designed to be deleted” — in service of becoming ever more like a casino. In the golden age of dating apps , which I’d argue spanned from th

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