Here's what a lot of terrible dating, both on- and offline, has taught me:

The things that make a person "intoxicating" as a significant ingredient in LTR material, are completely irrational and not captured by any dating app: Things like how a person moves; their posture; how their voice sounds; their smells and, perhaps, tastes; their interaction manner; the fluency of their expressiveness; their emotional and physical openness; how their hands feel on your body; how much respect they garner or give (to themselves, to you and others), etc. etc.

The rational stuff? Sure, these sites will let you get a bead on those at least, such as general intelligence, values, general static attractiveness/smile/etc., politics, tastes etc. But I believe they overvalue these things, and while we are collectively some quite proud intellectual beings who wish to base all of our decisionmaking on things at intellectual and rational levels, evidence shows that the body wants to have its say as well, and a quite powerful one at that, due to things like MHC comparisons being very important for creating healthy offspring: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5006172/, https://www.splice-bio.com/can-you-smell-sexual-attraction/ etc. Basically, the keys to the vagaries of the process of reproduction have only barely been given to us; the whole thing is still largely biologically-driven, and biology requires physical presence to work!

The second problem with online dating is that it shifts the power dynamic too far away from men and too much into the hands of women. Whereas in a pre-online-dating context, a woman might have, say, 2 to 10 (or more) "suitors" or interested men, in an online dating context, the most desirable women now have 100 or 1000 or more to sift through (and even the middlingly-desirable ones likely have a hundred or more), and can select the best possible ones (at least on the basis of rational reasons, see above) and then let the MHC game play itself out among those. Meanwhile, a regular man on these sites who previous to online dating might have had a shot with the desirable women in his extended circle of acquaintances or coworkers etc. thanks to boons such as the "proximity leads to sexual attraction" effect https://www.neuroscience.org.uk/proximity-mere-exposure-effe..., have now been stripped of that edge, since those same women in their circles can now simply go online-date and benefit from a significantly larger pool of eligible men to choose from, and because those men themselves now have to send, say, 1000 sincere and time-consuming messages in order to perhaps get 2 or 3 responses. (And women complain that most of their messages from guys online are either too simple or too formulaic or "low-effort"... this is why!)

On the bright side, perhaps it's high time for men to sincerely step up their game!

I'm going to tell my (still a toddler) son to skip online dating because it's a losing game for him, to get himself out there physically in front of women by being present physically at things out in the world, to ask them to dance or otherwise physically interact playfully in order to let the MHC/scent thing do its thing, and to de-emphasize "rational" reasons to choose someone. I'm also going to tell him that that, plus enduring mutual respect (thanks to the work the Gottman Institute did on uncovering the importance of this), and basically little else, are the ingredients of a good LTR: https://firstthings.org/4-reasons-why-respect-matters-in-mar...

So, back to the article, I'm not terribly upset that some women on Hinge now have to do more work to weed out bots in addition to "terrible men", because they were already (HUGELY) benefiting from online dating to begin with.