

Probably not specifically to reduce the competition.
The sad fact is that insecure and desperate men are easy to manipulate into paying you money in the hopes that it’ll give them a better chance at finding dates. Online dating was unfortunately doomed to be like this from the start.












Does it matter? The US government recommends Signal for government and service members.
As long as a project is open source (i.e. publicly auditable) and the maintainers aren’t using the project as a platform for spreading things like fascism or white replacement theory it’s not a big problem