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The Wild World of the Van Gogh Truthers
In 1990, after years of practicing medicine and reviewing Van Gogh’s case history via his hundreds of letters, Arenberg published a paper in JAMA diagnosing Van Gogh as suffering not from epilepsy, as the artist’s physician claimed a century earlier, but from Ménière’s disease, an inner-ear affliction that can cause vertigo, of which Van Gogh complained, and tinnitus, a persistent ringing in the ears. Ménière’s, to Arenberg, could better explain Van Gogh’s decision to slice off his ear. After retiring, in 2017, Arenberg recommitted himself to studying Van Gogh and became convinced that art historians had made an even more alarming mistake: Van Gogh had not committed suicide. He’d been murdered.
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Every Friday, Kay Reports uncovers global dating scams, emotional red flags, and digital deception — so you can date smarter, not harder. This week: the business of modern dating is breaking — and the industry is panicking in public.
The swipe is dying. Here is what the $12.5 billion dating industry is doing about it.
Tinder lost 8% of its paying users. Bumble is scrapping the swipe. And your next date might be set up by a robot.
The dating app era that Tinder and Bumble built together lasted about a decade. It is now, visibly and measurably, falling apart.
Tinder — still the most-used dating app on earth with over 60 million monthly active users — had its first annual revenue decline in 2025, dropping 5.2% to $1.8 billion. Its paying user base fell 8% year-on-year in Q4 2025 to 9.1 million. Match Group, Tinder's parent company and owner of Hinge, OkCupid, and Plenty of Fish, saw its stock fall more than 80% from its 2021 peak. Bumble, which IPO'd at a $13 billion valuation, has since lost nearly 90% of that value. Its paying users dropped 16% in a single quarter.
The global dating app market is worth $12.5 billion in 2026. But growth has stalled, subscriber counts are falling, and the companies that built their business on the swipe are now spending hundreds of millions of dollars trying to convince you that the swipe was never really the point.
This week, a financial analysis of Match Group's position in the evolving online relationship market framed the company's future as dependent on subscription models and user engagement driving long-term revenue potential. That framing is accurate. It is also the most optimistic possible reading of what the data actually shows.
What the data shows is a reckoning.
What went wrong — and why it matters to you
The swipe mechanic was a brilliant piece of product design. Tinder launched in 2012 and within two years had fundamentally changed how a generation thought about meeting people. The variable reward loop — swipe, maybe match, maybe not — was borrowed directly from slot machine psychology. It was addictive by design.
The problem is that addictive and satisfying are not the same thing.
A 2025 Forbes Health survey found that more than 79% of dating app users reported swipe fatigue. A 2026 systematic review linked dating app use to loneliness, anxiety, body dissatisfaction, and lower psychological wellbeing. A Pew Research study found a majority of young single men report rarely or never going on dates — despite many of them using apps regularly.
The apps created the conditions for connection without delivering the thing itself. Users spent enormous amounts of time — and money — on subscriptions designed to improve their chances, in an environment specifically engineered to ensure those chances never felt quite good enough. You could always pay a little more. There was always another feature that would help.
A survey by Match Group and the Kinsey Institute found that 26% of US singles reported using AI to enhance their dating — up 333% from the year before. 6 in 10 people who use dating apps believe they have already encountered at least one conversation written by AI, according to Norton research.
By 2026, a significant share of the interactions happening on the apps that were built to facilitate human connection are not between humans at all. They are between algorithms, chatbots, and AI-assisted personas performing interest in each other.
The industry created this. And now it is betting that more AI will fix it.
What every major app is doing right now — and what to make of it
Tinder — the panic pivot
Match Group has allocated $60 million specifically to AI and product development at Tinder for 2026. The flagship new feature is called Chemistry — an AI matchmaker that scans your camera roll to learn your visual preferences and surface more compatible profiles. Tinder has also introduced FaceCheck, an identity verification tool, and partnered with Sam Altman's biometric company World to let users verify their humanity by staring into an orb.
It has also launched in-person singles events and virtual speed dating sessions — which is, when you think about it, the app admitting that the app does not work well enough on its own.
Bumble — the scorched earth rebuild
Bumble's response is the most dramatic. CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd — who returned to the company she had left — confirmed to Axios that Bumble is scrapping the swipe entirely, replacing it with something she describes as "revolutionary for the category" that rolls out in select markets from Q4 2026. The company is also dropping its women-go-first messaging rule.
Simultaneously, Bumble is building an entirely new platform from scratch — a cloud-native, AI-first system that will power everything from profile creation to match recommendations. The rebuild suggests that Bumble's leadership sees the current app architecture as a fundamental limitation, not a product problem that can be patched.
Hinge — the quiet winner
While Tinder and Bumble spiral, Hinge is the only major platform growing. Direct revenue grew 26% year-on-year to $186 million in Q4 2025, and Match Group is targeting $1 billion in annual Hinge revenue by 2027. Paying users grew 19% year-on-year. Hinge reports the highest match-to-date ratio of any major dating app.
The reason is not complicated. Hinge was built differently from the start — conversation-first, prompt-based, deliberately slower than Tinder. It launched with the tagline "designed to be deleted," which was either the most honest or most ironic mission statement in tech history. Its AI features — a Core Discovery Algorithm that boosted matches by 15%, and AI Convo Starters based on the finding that 72% of users are more likely to consider a match when it includes a message — are working because they are solving real friction, not just adding novelty.
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The new threat nobody in the industry wants to name
Here is what is sitting underneath all of this that the earnings calls do not address directly.
The apps' response to their crisis is more AI. But AI is also the thing most accelerating the trust collapse that caused the crisis in the first place.
By 2026, 80% of top dating apps are anticipated to offer agentic AI features — systems that handle match selection and scheduling on your behalf. Tinder's Chemistry scans your camera roll. Bumble's Bee AI assistant conducts an interview with you to learn your preferences. New standalone apps like Iris are literally building an attraction model from your behavioural data. One platform, Fate, has a full transcript of users explaining their attachment styles to a chatbot.
The intimate data being collected by these systems is categorically different from what existed five years ago. As one analyst put it with appropriate bluntness: a data breach at a regular dating app leaks your photos and messages. A data breach at an AI dating app leaks a psychological profile of your romantic desires.
And there is a deeper irony. The same AI tools the apps are deploying to fix authenticity and connection are the same tools being used by scammers to fake it. AI-powered chatbots can run hundreds of fake romantic relationships simultaneously. Deepfakes can pass a video call. Voice cloning can replicate a person's voice from seconds of audio.
The apps are trying to use AI to make connection feel more real. Scammers are using the same technology to make deception feel more real. The user in the middle cannot always tell the difference.
Bumble's AI fraud detection claims a 95% interception rate. Tinder introduced FaceCheck. These are genuine improvements. They are also the industry acknowledging that the environment it created has become dangerous enough to require safety infrastructure that did not previously exist.
The dating app industry spent a decade building an environment optimised for engagement. It is now spending hundreds of millions trying to make that environment safe enough to use. That sequence is worth remembering the next time a new feature launches.
What is actually working — and where people are going instead
The most significant data point in the entire industry right now is not in any earnings call. It is in the category growth numbers for activity-based dating platforms.
While Match Group and Bumble report slowing growth, activity-based platforms — apps and services that get people into shared physical experiences before or instead of a solo date — are growing significantly faster. The message is clear: people want to meet through shared experiences, not photo-based judgments.
Speed dating nights are selling out globally. Apps like Thursday (UK-based, single day per week of availability to force urgency and real-world meetups) have grown a following by positioning themselves explicitly as anti-swipe. Niche platforms with smaller, more curated communities are retaining users at rates the big platforms cannot match.
Gen Z is also simply going elsewhere. Third spaces — bars, clubs, hobby groups, community events — are recovering as social venues now that pandemic-era isolation has faded. The generation that grew up on dating apps is now, counterintuitively, more likely than millennials to say they prefer meeting people in real life. 33% of adults aged 18-34 say they are actively avoiding dating apps to protect their mental wellbeing.
The industry's billion-dollar AI pivot is a response to a user base that is, in meaningful numbers, choosing to leave.
What this means for you — the red flags in the new landscape
This is Kay Reports. So here is the practical version.
🚩 The AI that wrote their message may not reflect the person who will show up.
54% of daters are using AI tools on dating apps. AI-assisted bios, AI-edited photos, AI-suggested opening lines. The version of someone that presents themselves on a dating app in 2026 may be significantly more charming, more articulate, and more compatible-seeming than the actual human. This is not necessarily malicious — but it means the first date is doing more vetting work than it used to. Meet people sooner. The app is not the person.
🚩 Subscription pressure is a designed feature, not a reflection of your worth.
The business model of every major dating app depends on you not finding what you want quickly. Subscriptions, boosts, super likes, visibility upgrades — these features exist because the company needs recurring revenue. The feeling that you need to pay more to be seen is not evidence that you are not desirable. It is evidence that the incentive structure of the platform is not aligned with your interests. Know the difference.
🚩 The new AI safety features do not catch everything.
Bumble's 95% interception rate sounds reassuring. It means 5% of fraud attempts get through — on a platform with tens of millions of users. Tinder's FaceCheck and Match's identity verification are genuine improvements. They are also baseline minimums, not guarantees. The scammer operating in the 5% is using the same AI tools as the platform. Verification reduces risk. It does not eliminate it.
🚩 A platform that asks for your camera roll, your attachment style, and your attraction patterns is collecting something significant.
The new generation of AI dating tools requires data that did not previously exist in corporate hands: your facial attraction preferences, your relationship psychology, your behavioural patterns across hundreds of decisions. Read the privacy policy before you complete the AI profile setup. Understand what you are handing over and what happens to it if the company is acquired, breached, or changes its terms.
The Kay Reports rule
The dating app industry is not in crisis because people stopped wanting connection. It is in crisis because it built a product optimised for engagement instead of outcomes — and users noticed. The app that is designed to be deleted is the one growing. That is not a coincidence. Date toward the outcome you actually want, not the platform that keeps you scrolling.
Date smarter: how to navigate the new landscape
01 — Use the apps as a filter, not a destination.
The data is consistent: apps that move people offline faster produce better outcomes. Do not optimise for matches. Optimise for dates. Move conversations to a real-world meeting within a week or two. Everything that happens inside the app after that is procrastination dressed as caution.
02 — The subscription is not a signal of your quality. Treat it like software.
If a paid tier helps you reach more people and you want to use it, fine. But buy it the way you buy a software subscription — evaluate it, set a time limit, assess whether it produced results. Do not extend it out of hope or habit. The app's goal is renewal. Yours is a date.
03 — Be sceptical of unusual fluency.
A match who writes with unusual warmth, unusual coherence, and unusual responsiveness may be a genuinely great communicator. Or they may be using AI assistance — or running a scam. The signal to look for is not the quality of the writing but the pace of escalation. Real interest deepens gradually. Manufactured interest needs to create attachment quickly, before scrutiny arrives.
04 — Explore what is growing, not just what is famous.
Activity-based dating, niche apps, in-person events, speed dating — these formats are growing precisely because they solve the problem the swipe-based model created. If you are burned out on apps, the answer may not be a better app. It may be a different format entirely.
05 — Understand whose interests the product serves.
Every new feature a dating app launches is, first, a business decision. AI matching, AI conversation starters, AI companion features — evaluate each one by asking: does this help me find what I want, or does this keep me engaged with the platform longer? Those are not always the same thing. In fact, for a company with a subscription model, they are often in direct conflict.
Kay Reports goes out every Friday. We uncover global dating scams, emotional red flags, and digital deception — so you can date smarter, not harder.
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