Dating Sites Are The New Parents

Despite the fact that you, your best friend, or your dad (or all three) are probably on some form of online dating site, Pew research released yesterday found that 21 percent of people still find online dating "desperate." This is even true for 13 percent of people who online date. This would seem like bad news (unless you're one of the many who use and hate Facebook), and Slate's Amanda Hess declared it the death of the traditional dating site. She cited the rise of Tinder, a location-based app that's simpler than OkCupid and requires daters to sign in through Facebook.

It's telling, though, that Hess believes dating sites will be supplanted not by a return to older models (running into people at parties and asking if they like hummus, say), but by "the full integration of the Internet into our romantic lives," a time when "we will feel less incentivized to segregate our online romantic dealings from our digital business connections and social spaces." Basically, no matter what it looks like, humans are going to continue doing a lot of their dating on the internet, and that gives whoever administers internet dating enormous power.

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