Many of us have had bad experiences of being swiped left, ghosted, breadcrumbed and benched on internet dating apps – though few people have ever thought to take their heartbreak to court.

On Valentine’s Day, six dating app users filed a proposed class-action lawsuit accusing Tinder, Hinge and other Match dating apps of using addictive, game-like features to encourage compulsive use.

Match’s apps, according to the lawsuit filed in federal court in the Northern District of California, “employ recognised dopamine-manipulating product features” to turn users into “gamblers locked in a search for psychological rewards”, generating “market success by fomenting dating app addiction that drives expensive subscriptions and perpetual use”.

Match said the lawsuit was “ridiculous”, but online dating experts said it reflected a broader backlash to the way apps were gamifying human experience for profit and leaving people feeling manipulated.

“I’m not at all surprised that this has come to litigation. I think big tech is the new big tobacco, as smartphones are just as addictive as cigarettes,” said Mia Levitin, author of The Future of Seduction.

Addiction may have been built into dating apps from the beginning, she observed, since Jonathan Badeen, the co-founder of Tinder who invented the swiping mechanism, admitted it was inspired by BF Skinner’s classic experiments with pigeons, which conditioned hungry pigeons to believe that food delivered randomly into a tray was prompted by their pecking.

“By hijacking the brain’s reward system, which privileges the short-term hit of dopamine over more long-term rewards, the design of dating apps encourages us to keep playing. It’s like the quick fix of junk food rather than enjoying a real meal,” Levitin said.

The game-like element is further exemplified in the deck-of-cards-style interface first used by Tinder. Natasha Dow Schüll, a cultural anthropologist and the author of Addiction by Design, has likened dating apps to slot machines.

Whether dating apps discourage longer-term romantic connection is harder to pin down. One study suggested that couples who meet online are slightly more likely to have less satisfying and less stable marriages than couples who meet offline, though it is hard to prove causation.

Natasha McKeever, a lecturer at Leeds University specialising in love and sex, said dating apps appear to “encourage bad behaviours – ghosting, breadcrumbing, backburner relationships”. This could be because having a dating app in your pocket can make you feel that “a better partner for you could always just be one swipe away”.

The problem is that dating apps nudge and change how people act by using behavioural science techniques, said Lee MacKinnon, a lecturer at the London College of Communication who is completing a PhD on the gamification of dating apps.

“People feel very cheated when they’re led to believe that these sites are working in their interest, but actually they’re really acting in the interests of the digital corporations. We have become the product and our personal life, our love lives, our most intimate details are capitalised upon, are commodities,” she said.

Although dating apps in theory open up a wider pool of prospective partners, in practice they “reproduce privilege”, MacKinnon added, by entrenching idealised preferences for certain ethnicities, age groups and body types. This is exemplified by Match.com’s uses of the Elo algorithm, which was originally developed to rank players in competitive games, she said.

But she pointed out that romantic love in the west has always been gamified. This can be seen in the use of competitive metaphors: the chase and competing for attentions among other suitors to win someone over, with – traditionally – the woman as the prize.

What is definitely new is the way dating apps make romantic prospects available around the clock. A recent survey suggested that millennials spend 10 hours a week on dating apps. Luke Brunning, a philosophy lecturer at the University of Leeds who has researched the ethics of online dating, said infinite profiles resembled the compulsive infinite scroll on social media – with a similarly negative impact on mental health.

Brunning said platforms could introduce improvements, including greater transparency around matching algorithms. They could also educate users on the pitfalls of online dating, punish ghosting and serial swiping by pausing users’ ability to use the app, and show users how they have been behaving to expose unconscious bias.

He said that while plaintiffs in the lawsuit may be right that dating apps are monetising its users’ attention and romantic investment, that is not unique to dating apps.

“I suspect the arguments of this lawsuit may fail to find a sympathetic ear in court. In a way, the plaintiffs have pointed to a systemic problem with the dating app ecosystem.”

A Match Group spokesperson said: “This lawsuit is ridiculous and has zero merit. Our business model is not based on advertising or engagement metrics. We actively strive to get people on dates every day and off our apps. Anyone who states anything else doesn’t understand the purpose and mission of our entire industry.”

• This article was amended on 18 February 2024. An earlier version said that Lee MacKinnon had a PhD on the gamification of dating apps. In fact she is currently completing this.