Women on dating apps get 100+ likes per day and cannot meaningfully evaluate any of them

A woman in her 20s-30s in a major city opens Hinge. She has 147 likes in her queue. She can see 8 of them for free (the rest require a $34.99/month subscription). She opens the first like: a guy who liked her photo with no comment. Second: 'hey.' Third: a thoughtful comment on her prompt. She now has 144 more to go through. Evaluating each profile takes 30-60 seconds. That is 2+ hours to review her current queue, which will refill tomorrow. She gives up after 10, matches with 2, and ignores the rest — including potentially great matches buried at position #87. So what? The gender imbalance on dating apps (roughly 2:1 to 3:1 male to female on most platforms) creates an asymmetric experience: men get too few matches and women get too many low-quality likes. Neither side is served well. Women experience decision fatigue and default to superficial filtering (height, first photo) because there is no time to evaluate 100+ profiles thoughtfully. Great matches are missed because they were like #87 in a queue sorted by recency, not compatibility. Why does this persist? This is the fundamental structural failure of swipe-based dating: the marginal cost of sending a like is zero, so men like broadly, which floods women with volume. Apps could rate-limit likes (Hinge does, at 8/day for free) but aggressive limits reduce engagement. The like economy is broken but fixing it would require making the experience worse for the majority gender, which would cause them to leave.