How do you reconcile such diametrically opposing claims? You don't, probably. But lucky for us, there's a huge and growing body of research dedicated to online dating, social change, courtship and promiscuity - and among them, there's a conclusion for just about everybody.
Think online dating is amazing? The University of Chicago is with you.
Already convinced that we're living through some kind of apocalypse? Studies from the University of Michigan will gladly "prove" it.
The debate over the net social value (or harm) of online dating is over-complicated for just this reason - there are so many studies, using so many different methodologies (and getting funding from so many deeply invested companies), that it's only too easy to cherry-pick one finding or statistic and run really, really far with it.
So we decided to look at the research in all its messy, contradicting totality.
Here's every major study we could find about the wider social impact of online dating. You decide for yourself if Tinder is ruining relationships ... or the exact opposite.
2012: Searching for a Mate: The Rise of the Internet as a Social Intermediary (corresponding author: Michael J. Rosenfeld, Stanford University)
In an analysis of data from a nationally representative survey of more than 4000 American adults, Rosenfeld concludes that the internet is beginning to displace old-school meeting places, such as schools and churches, as a place for romantic introductions.
"If one believes that the health of society depends on the strength of the local traditional institutions of family, church, primary school, and neighbourhood," he writes, "then one might be reasonably concerned about the partial displacement of those traditional institutions by the internet."
But aside from that, the news is all good. Rosenfeld found no differences in relationship quality or strength between couples who met online and couples who met off.
He also found online dating had been a huge boon to people in "thin dating markets" - think LGBT daters or older women - and hypothesised that marriage and partnership rates of Americans would rise as more of these people got online.
2012: Online Dating: A Critical Analysis from the Perspective of Psychological Science (corresponding author: Eli J. Finkel, Northwestern University)
Finkel et al's (very lengthy) review of several top dating sites and the literature on them is basically a wash for all involved.
Most sites are bad, they conclude, because their matching algorithms don't work. Despite that, though, online dating doesn't hurt daters or their prospects - in fact, it helps them by opening up the dating pool.
"Online dating offers access to potential partners whom people would be unlikely to meet through other avenues," the paper concludes, "and this access yields new romantic possibilities."
2013: The Impact of Internet Diffusion on Marriage Rates: Evidence from the Broadband Market (Andriana Bellou, University of Montreal)
Bellou's research is far less conclusive than some of the other work on this list; in a discussion paper published by the Institute for the Study of Labour, she basically charts internet adoption rates over time against marriage rates to see if there are any patterns.
There are, it turns out.
Bellou concludes that "internet expansion is associated with increased marriage rates" among 20-somethings, and hypothesises that the relationship is causal - in other words, that greater access to online dating, online social networks and other means of communicating with strangers directly causes people to pair up.
As Brad Plumer observed at the time, this doesn't definitively prove a causal relationship; it's still very possible that the two things just tend to go hand-in-hand, and don't contribute to each other.
2013: Marital Satisfaction and Break-ups Differ Across Online and Offline Meeting Venues (corresponding author: John Cacioppo, University of Chicago)
In a widely quoted study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Cacioppo surveyed a nationally representative sample of more than 19,000 married people ... and concluded that online dating was unequivocally a really good thing.
According to his research, married couples who met online were happier than others (5.64 points on a satisfaction survey, versus 5.48) and less likely to get divorced (6 per cent, versus 7.6).
Notably, this study looked only at married couples, so it doesn't address the core anxiety that people are forsaking relationships to just hook up.
It was also sponsored by online dating behemoth eHarmony, for which Cacioppo is an adviser, though independent statisticians reviewed the work before it was published.
2013: A New Standard of Sexual Behavior? Are Claims Associated with the 'Hook-up Culture' Supported by Nationally Representative Data? (corresponding author: Martin Monto, University of Portland)
This is not, strictly speaking, a paper about online dating - Monto doesn't really discuss online dating at all.
But that omission is what makes his work on hook-up culture so relevant to our interests here.
In a nationally representative sample of more than 1800 18- to 25-year-olds, Monto found that in general, today's sex-crazed, Tinder-swiping youth aren't substantially more promiscuous than past generations were. In fact, today's undergraduates have slightly less sex, and slightly fewer partners, than students who were dating before the rise of online dating and the so-called "hook-up culture".
While that might seem counterintuitive, it echoes other research in this space.
Sociologist Kathleen Bogle has traced the "death" of traditional dating back to the 1970s, long before Tinder's founders were even born. When she surveyed college students in 2004, most said they had never gone on a date.
2014: Is Online Better Than Offline for Meeting Partners? Depends: Are You Looking to Marry or to Date? (Aditi Paul, Michigan State University)
Well, this is fun. In an analysis of the same national survey data that Rosenfeld used, Paul - a PhD candidate at Michigan State - comes to the opposite conclusion about online dating and relationship quality.
Her findings? People who meet online are more likely than others to date rather than to marry. And whether or not they made it to the altar, online daters usually break up more frequently and more quickly.
Over the course of the survey, Paul said, 32 per cent of the online-dating couples broke up, versus 23 per cent of the couples who met offline.
Paul does use data from a longer time period than Rosenfeld did, and from fewer people, which helps explain the discrepancies between their conclusions.
Still, it seems weird that two studies could come to such different conclusions.
Further proof that all statistics - particularly statistics on sex and dating - lie.
