Who the hell uses Facebook dating?

Cyrus Youngpantom has Single mothers seem to love the areola.

Youngbantum, a 29-year-old teacher and musician from Richmond, Virginia, didn’t know much about Facebook dating before creating a profile in 2023. However, his matches… Kind of logical. “I think being on Facebook is just a mom thing,” he says of the perception of the social network. What Yongbanthom couldn’t figure out was why he kept getting along with people so far away. “There’s absolutely no one near me, which is interesting because there are so many users on Facebook Dating.”

In fact, there are twenty-one million users. In November, for the first time since its launch in 2019, Meta shared with WIRED user information about Facebook Dating, and the numbers reached a level of collective astonishment. Suddenly, the platform was an underground success, bigger than Heng, its closest competitor. Even more puzzling is how Facebook dating seems to be slowly catching on among younger people, with 1.77 million daily active users in the United States between the ages of 18 and 29, a statistic that challenges the idea that only boomers use Facebook. According to a Pew poll last year, 32% of teen respondents said they use Facebook compared to 71% in 2015, although Facebook Dating notes that daily conversations among 18- to 29-year-olds increased by 24% in 2024.

Facebook Dating is not like any other dating app on the market. It’s technically not even an app. Like Marketplace or Groups, it’s a service within the Facebook app. It also doesn’t rely on a subscription model like Bumble or Tinder, which is a big advantage when onboarding new users. That’s what Olivia Nwokuma, a 24-year-old hospitality worker in Maryland, likes most. “It doesn’t block the better features behind the paywall,” she says. Nwokoma, always looking for a good deal on Facebook Marketplace, prefers men taller than 6 feet, so when a dating app allows it — and Facebook Dating allows it — she often filters by height.

AI-based Vibe checks

What Facebook Dating lacks in cool, it makes up for in efficiency. Like every other dating app this year, Facebook has based everything on artificial intelligence. Unlike any other dating app, it has the most complete dating assistant I’ve seen. This means that it is very similar to ChatGPT in its speed, functionality, and logic.

The goal is to build functionality that helps you “skip the swiping,” says Facebook Dating product manager Neha Kumar. “You can say, ‘I want to find someone who loves going to music festivals and would be willing to explore the Brooklyn food scene with me,’ and he will find the right person for you.” It also has preset prompts – from “Find someone who loves baking” to “Show me the best match in my city.” “We are the first to market with an integrated assistant that you can chat with and give you advice and recommendations throughout your journey,” says Kumar. She adds that there will be no paywalls or tiered services, saying: “I think people are tired of their basic human desire to find connection and find love that is monetized.”

During Kumar’s Zoom demo, she asked the assistant to find someone her mother might like for her, and after a brief glitch, the assistant recommended Dayet, a 39-year-old New York City-based businessman who “values ​​loyalty and trust” and is a “big foodie.”

“This is the one the assistant thinks I should bring home to my mom,” Kumar says.