People are burning out on dating apps for two reasons, Hinge CEO says

• A growing number of online daters are struggling with burnout from dating apps.
• Some are reeling from too many options; others have too few, Hinge CEO Justin McLeod says

Dating app fatigue is real — and it boils down to two reasons, the CEO of dating app Hinge says.

"One is that you are overwhelmed: there's so much activity, and so many people and everyone starts to look the same, and conversations are dying," Hinge CEO Justin McLeod said in a recent interview with the Financial Times.

The other, he said, is that many people don't get enough activity — they send out likes and notes and don't get responses, for instance.

His thoughts jibe with a recent Business Insider survey that looked to take the pulse of Gen Z. For younger generations, especially, online dating can be too transactional — and the myriad options can result in decision fatigue, respondents said in the BI survey taken earlier this year.

Data has shown in the past that a small fraction of users get the bulk of attention on dating apps.

For example, the top 1% of men on Hinge got 16% of all likes in the app, and the top 1% of women got a little over 11% of all likes, according to Hinge data previously cited by Quartz.

Meanwhile, the bottom 50% of men only received 4.3% of all likes on the app, and the bottom 50% of women received a little under 8% of likes on the app.

Hinge is betting AI could help the playing field by facilitating more matches.

"The opportunity of AI is that it allows us to function more and more like a matchmaker that's making really, really targeted introductions, and helping people put their best foot forward," McLeod told the FT.

That way, those users who get too many likes won't need to spend as much time weighing their options. Meanwhile, those not getting enough traction might have a better shot of landing a date.

Hinge will draw on users' profile information, their behavior on the app, and the feedback they provide after they've gone on date through the app to develop its matching algorithms, McLeod said.

"We ask people if it was a good date, so we actually have the information that we need to figure out: What are the components that lead to a good date? And how do we look for those, when we're trying to match people up?" McLeod told the FT.

Hinge's parent company, Match Group — which owns apps like Tinder and OkCupid — is also working on integrating new AI-driven features to solve "user pain points" and attract new users across all its products, according to its third-quarter earnings report.

In the coming years, McLeod said AI will bring about a revolution in online dating that will be as big as the onset of dating apps.