Land of The Giants Podcast Will Focus on Dating Apps for Season 2

Image: Vox Media

Vox Media’s award-winning podcast series Land of the Giants, which is about the biggest tech companies and their impact on our culture, will focus on dating apps for its second season.

Hosted by Lakshmi Rengarajan, who spent several years at Match Group, and The Cut’s Sangeeta Singh-Kurtz, the two explore the industry as a whole and the experience of dating app users. The series delves into how dating apps have changed how we approach dating, and how the dating app industry designs apps to keep people coming back.

The series was inspired by New York Magazine’s special issue evaluating the last ten years of dating apps, according to The Cut. After surveying thousands of daters about their experiences with popular dating apps like Tinder, Hinge and Bumble, New York Magazine found that people felt caught in a cycle where they enjoyed the swiping experience for a few weeks, but then when nothing much changed, they deleted their dating apps - only to return to them again.

The two hosts of the podcast interviewed almost a hundred of these survey respondents and found that most daters blamed themselves for bad experiences, not dating apps. According to The Cut, they felt that they “weren’t hot enough” or that they were “bad at the apps,” for example, but felt they had no other choice but to be on the apps because that’s what eligible singles use to meet each other.

According to the podcast’s trailer, the hosts also look at dating app companies to answer the question: “are their business goals aligned with your romantic ones?” They speak with developers, including the architect who created the signature “swipe” feature, as well as dating app executives from some of the biggest companies like Tinder, Plenty of Fish, Hinge and Match Group, and experts like author Nancy Jo Sales, data scientist Cathy O’Neil, and anthropologist Natasha Schull who study the impact of technology on relationships.

“The door is never shut,” says one expert in the trailer, referring to why people are drawn to dating apps. “If you go to the next person and the next person, there’s some seed of possibility.”

The new season comes at a time when dating apps have matured and become more mainstream, but also at a time of growing weariness towards their effectiveness. A quarter of married couples met online in 2021, according to website The Knot, which is a significant change from just ten years ago, so dating apps are here to stay, at least until the next technology comes along.

The six-episode series launches January 11th.