What a New Addiction Study Says About Your Dating App Streak

Photo: Mediha Ekici, via Unsplash

A new study went looking for what makes dating apps addictive. It found a checklist.

Most "dating apps are addictive" takes stop at vibes. A study published in December 2025 in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, a Springer Nature journal, tried to actually name the mechanism. Researchers Siqin Wang, Weijia Yang, Yanqing Xia, Wenjun Yan, and Zixuan Cai built a twelve-factor model of app user experience, ran it against a validated twenty-item Dating App Addiction scale, and checked which factors actually moved the needle.

For location-based apps, the kind where you swipe on people near you rather than browse a curated feed, five factors came out significant: self-optimality, usability, selectivity, casual sex, and self-fulfillment. The one that should make anyone building or using a metrics-driven dating tool sit up is self-optimality: the sense that you're actively optimizing something about yourself by using the app. Not just meeting people. Improving your odds.

That's a specific, testable claim, and it points somewhere uncomfortable for anyone tracking their own numbers.

Streaks measure presence, not progress

RizzStats' activity timeline shows how often you've logged usage and matches over time, and it flags streaks, consecutive stretches of activity. The feature exists because seeing your pattern over weeks is more honest than staring at one day's swipe count. That's still true. But the addiction study is a useful gut-check on what a streak is actually rewarding.

A streak, by definition, only counts that you showed up. It says nothing about whether showing up did anything. You can rack up a two-week streak of daily opens with a match rate that never moves and a reply rate that's flat, and the streak counter won't blink. If self-optimality, the belief that repeated use itself is self-improvement, is genuinely one of the strongest predictors of compulsive use, then a streak is exactly the kind of number that can quietly reinforce the belief while your actual outcomes sit still.

None of this means streaks are bad or that RizzStats should hide them. It means a streak is a presence metric, and presence isn't the same thing as progress. The two numbers worth pairing it against are match rate and reply rate, both of which RizzStats already computes from your export. If your streak is climbing and those are flat, that's not failure, it's information: you're spending time on the app that isn't converting to anything measurable, which is close to the exact pattern the study describes.

What to actually do with that

The fix isn't quitting the app or feeling bad about a streak. It's using the same data the study points at, just pointed at yourself instead of a research sample. Pull up your own activity timeline next to your match and reply rates. If the timeline shows sustained daily activity while the outcome numbers stay flat over the same stretch, that gap is worth noticing on its own terms, separate from whatever the streak counter says about your consistency.

If you haven't run your own export through RizzStats yet, the upload page builds that timeline directly from your Tinder or Hinge data, so the comparison isn't a guess. The study can't tell you whether your own use is compulsive. But it does tell you which number to stop trusting on its own, and streaks were never meant to be read alone.