01
PART ONE — THE PORTFOLIO
Revenue per user rises while the number of users falls.
Fewer paying users. More revenue extracted from each one.
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Theses
31 entries
02
PART ONE — THE PORTFOLIO
The revenue model is indifferent to whether a user succeeds, and is mildly penalised when one does.
A successful relationship removes two potential subscribers.
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PART ONE — THE PORTFOLIO
The scarcity is manufactured, and the removal of the scarcity is the product.
The platform introduces the restriction. Then it sells its removal.
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PART ONE — THE PORTFOLIO
Over twenty brands, one owner.
Changing apps may only move you to another line in the same earnings report.
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PART ONE — THE PORTFOLIO
Users were ranked, were not shown the ranking, and the gesture itself is patented.
Desirability became an internal score. The swipe became intellectual property.
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PART ONE — THE PORTFOLIO
Volume produces refusal, and the refusal outlasts the session.
The more profiles people see, the less likely they become to accept one.
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PART ONE — THE PORTFOLIO
The application is the destination rather than the route.
Matches accumulate. Meetings remain optional.
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PART ONE — THE PORTFOLIO
Price is set by demography.
The same country. The same subscription. A different price.
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PART ONE — THE PORTFOLIO
A measurable share of the interest shown to users was fabricated.
The notification looked romantic. The account was already suspected of being fake.
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PART ONE — THE PORTFOLIO
Safety was withheld from the free tier and later sold as an upgrade.
One group of users received screening. Another received exposure.
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PART ONE — THE PORTFOLIO
Intentionality is a growth segment.
The promise of leaving the app has become one of its fastest-growing businesses.
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PART ONE — THE PORTFOLIO
The consolidation has reached the communities the industry once ignored.
An independent queer platform became part of the largest dating portfolio.
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PART ONE — THE PORTFOLIO
The sector is contracting while the extraction intensifies.
The audience shrinks. The company cuts costs. The business searches for higher yield.
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PART TWO — THE GRID
The paying minority is small, and the free majority is the inventory.
Fewer than nine in every hundred active users pay. Everyone still produces value.
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PART TWO — THE GRID
The risk is distributed globally and the revenue is not.
Exposure travels everywhere. Monetisation remains concentrated where visibility is safer.
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PART TWO — THE GRID
Health status was handled as telemetry.
HIV status travelled with location, device and identity data.
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PART TWO — THE GRID
The user base has been treated as a national security asset.
The data was considered too sensitive to remain under foreign ownership.
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PART TWO — THE GRID
Membership is itself the sensitive datum.
The disclosure is not only what you said. It is that you were there.
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PART TWO — THE GRID
A man was identified using data that nobody had to steal.
No breach was required. The signals were commercially available.
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PART TWO — THE GRID
Profiles circulate as commodities on a resale market.
One million people. One hundred and thirty-six euros.
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PART TWO — THE GRID
The record kept on a user exceeds the record the user keeps.
A personal history returned as 800 pages of platform memory.
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PART TWO — THE GRID
The company that sells community suppressed its own.
A return-to-office mandate followed a union campaign. Half the workforce left.
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PART THREE — REFUSALS
The extractive configuration is optional, and some firms have declined it.
Another company faced the same risks and made a different decision.
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PART THREE — REFUSALS
Refusal is not innocence.
Doing better on one mechanism does not make a platform clean.
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PART THREE — REFUSALS
The interface is optional, and some products refuse the grid entirely.
No swipe. No ranked grid. Text before photographs.
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PART THREE — REFUSALS
Removing a filter is not the same as removing the sorting.
The menu disappeared. The distribution remained.
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PART FOUR — THE OTHER LEDGER
The applications work, and the argument survives it.
Real relationships emerge from systems that still reward continued use.
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PART FOUR — THE OTHER LEDGER
The same infrastructure is the lifeline and the trap.
The same app can enable connection, entrapment and emergency warning.
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PART FOUR — THE OTHER LEDGER
The population being metered is measurably dying.
Loneliness is not caused by dating apps. It is the condition against which they are priced.
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PART FOUR — THE OTHER LEDGER
The successor product removes the other person.
Companionship remains. Reciprocity disappears.
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PART FOUR — THE OTHER LEDGER
Regulators have named the mechanism without halting it.
The dark pattern is prohibited. The like limit remains.
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