This is pretty disturbing considering how necessary dating apps are today.
Let's say you get banned from Tinder and consequently Bumble. What do you do now? You can create fake accounts, but they'll eventually find you. Coffee Meets Bagel? Plenty of Fish? Match.com? Don't make me laugh.
It's already bad enough that women find it strange that a guy doesn't have an Instagram account (this has been my experience 90% of the time), but at least as someone who is dating you can work your way around that. But if you get shut out of even 1 of the few main dating apps, you've lost a massive pool of dates and potential life partners. Unless something has changed since my foray into that scene, these days those apps are pretty much a requirement for getting any meaning amount of dates.
I can't help but feel bad for the younger generations of today. I was fortunate to come of age during the tail end of where it was still largely acceptable to meet and approach women IRL while online dating was kind of a sideshow. Today, what were once the best places to meet other young single people, are not only where it's become unacceptable to meet new people at bars and clubs or meetups but they also are the places with the most COVID-masking (yes, this DOES affect attraction and being able to read the other person). For most young guys and girls, you're probably stuck with Tinder and Bumble unless you are a 9 or above.
The other day I got permabanned from Nextdoor, not because I did anything wrong, but because I didn't use my real name. Of course the name that I used is the name that I use in real life and as a professional. I logged in one day to find that I had absolutely no access to my account. There was no read-only access to my messages, my activity, settings, or anything. Just a page that said I'd been banned for not using my real name but that I could contact their customer service or whatever. Imagine if that happens to you on Tinder right as you're about to ask someone on a date, or to your Wells Fargo account as you just got a paycheck and are ready to make that big purchase.
Dating apps are so, so bad now. Not that they were great before, but I think people actually took Tinder somewhat seriously as a place to get to know people for the first couple years. Now it's just become an ever-more expensive game that preys on how imbalanced dating is between men and women that I believe is due to these apps and the internet in general (I'm sure there's other issues for gay people but I'm talking about the use case I'm familiar with).
The gender ratio is like 1:10, so even non-conventionally attractive women can get on there and get a few dozen matches in a day (if not 99+ if you're even moderately attractive), and any guy who isn't in the top 1% of looks/money/clout/influence is lucky to get a few matches per day. So the men are making any desperate attempt to stand out from the crowd of other men they're competing with for women's attention, meanwhile every day I see viral tweets of women screenshotting and posting men's "cringe" Tinder openings, telling them to try harder. I don't think a lot of women even realize what dating apps are like from the other side, because I've heard plenty of instances where a girl helps her guy friend make a dating profile thinking she can help him get setup on a date, and are baffled when they can't get him matches or conversations with anyone.
And one thing that's not obvious unless you do your research, is if you're getting swiped right or matched with frequently enough, the Tinder algorithm will just stop showing you to people with no indication you're essentially shadowbanned. Supposedly you can reset the algorithm every few months by deleting your account and recreating it, but apparently if you do this too many times you'll get permanently shadowbanned and won't be able to use Tinder unless you get a new phone number. And considering Match.com owns Tinder and every other major dating website/app, I wouldn't be surprised if they'd use a shared list of the "unlovables."
It really feels like it's cranked to 11 a system where men have to desperately try and stand out amongst a ginormous crowd of other men, and women have to sort through this ginormous crowd of men who may or may not be genuine, not wanting to "settle" because there might be a better one in there somewhere. It's clearly not working anyone, and dating is just so exhausting because of it.
Unlike a lot of the other people on here, I like the Facebook integration, provided of course nobody else on my Facebook can see that I've added this app. It saves the hassle of having to upload pictures and lowers the proportion of fake accounts.
As a male (23 years old), I've completely written off online dating. Sites like OkCupid make total sense if you're a female because you don't actually have to do any work, but they absolutely suck for men. Women are inundated with messages and rarely respond, and thus as a male you have to spend hours and hours sifting through profiles and sending tons of messages. On top of that, very few of the women on dating sites are even attractive.
That's why I prefer Tinder, although it'd be nice to have a middle ground between the shallowness of Tinder and a dating site.
It's great that this site saves time on the user's part (mainly the male). The problem is that it doesn't seem like I can see what my potential match looks like. Being a male, looks are pretty important. That's why I stopped going on Groupers - my last one hooked us up with 3 unattractive women. It sounds shallow and fucked up, but that's just the reality of it.
Until a service comes along that hooks me up with women that I know will be physically attractive enough from the get-go, I'm not going to pay money for it. And since most hot women are already inundated with guys trying to ask them out in real life, I'm not sure if a site like that could ever exist.
It is very informative to make a an online dating profile of the opposite gender. I'm a man, but when I made an account on tinder with a female friend's pictures I was blown away by just how radically different the experience was.
Almost every person would match with me. Everyone would message me straight away. If I didn't reply most would message again in a few hours. A few would get very angry/upset that I didn't reply.
I think Tinder is a real stroke of genius. All users, men and women, get given the same interface and the same choices. But of course things are not really equal. Men shotgun and women pick and choose. Tinder has essentially made Bumble, but they have plausible deniability. No need to enforce any rules about women messaging first when that emerges naturally.
I’ll provide a perspective not usually found on programming forums - over 6 months of usage, I had ~250 matches on Tinder when I was 23. I’m not unusually attractive by any stretch, but before I started I treated getting matches as a technical problem and A/B tested pictures as well as seriously studied what types of pictures tend to do well, and deliberately shot each type.
Of those 250 matches, I didn’t message half. These were people with almost nothing in their profile who I also didn’t find particularly attractive. Half the people I did message didn’t respond back or ghosted after a few messages
So about 60 short to medium conversations. In the majority of those, it was clear that they weren’t particularly interested in dating or were on the app for an ego boost(or perhaps I wasn’t attractive enough for them)
I was able to get about a dozen numbers, out of which a third ghosted me and a third got ghosted by me. I dated 2 people casually and met 1 woman that caused me to delete the app, and I have been with her for 1.5 years.
If I had to start over again, I reckon the odds of me finding a relationship is very very low. The LTR started after the girl messaged me first( which happened like 1% of the time) but it was obvious she was attracted and interested in meeting. But I count myself very lucky that happened. I would likely be single if I didn’t match with her.
TL;DR: Tinder is a huge crapshoot even if you’re getting matches
Out of all the dating apps Tinder has done the absolute bare minimum to ensure the safety of its members.
The number of active fake profiles on there in large metropolitan areas is mind boggling. They've known this for years and done absolutely nothing to address it. I imagine it would affect the numbers significantly. I have completely given up on the app given the % of fake users who are there to take advantage of someone's loneliness.
And like most large faceless companies, if you're somehow banned, you have no recourse. I have no idea what I did, when I did it, or who I supposedly did something to, but I can't use Hinge anymore on my phone number. Also banned from Match but not Bumble or Tinder. The apps are indeed a shit-show and I no longer use them. Facebook singles groups and going out in real life are how I'm meeting people now. Much more satisfying and engaging than endless swiping and rejection. FWIW, I'm a genx male, divorced with kids 50/50, and a stable job. A little dad-bod, but not grossly overweight. I'm not a 10 but I'd rate myself a probably a 6-7.
Tinder is very cut throat. The whole social network values people based on their appearances. When I was single I had written a bot on their v1 API when Tinder was first on app store. I was curious of their security and social dynamics. No intent to release anything in public.
I had then created 5 different profiles of same picture, with different shades of skin color. Interesting results. I came to the conclusion that tinder wasn't for me. I had to try good ol' face to face interactions.
I'm sure Tinder and snapchat are a trove of data to help study the science of human mating. Releasing a dataset online is crazy although I wonder what would happen if tinder got hacked and their data published on bittorrent like the fapgate with celebrities that happened a while ago.
A security disaster like that is just waiting to happen.
Tinder and Bumble are the same form of awful and from the same founder. These apps are designed to exploit men. There are a fewer number of women on them and plenty of men, as a result they design features like boost, super likes, and premium subscriptions that you must pay for every month. There are studies and data that show that even normally attractive men with good profiles will go unswiped while women will get hundreds[1][2]. You then have to deal with a dating scene where you are knowingly competing with other men for a woman's attention while having very little in the form of options. The irony behind a TOS like this is it's designed to prevent bad behavior, but the entire underlying system generates more bad behavior. This is not to even mention the number of OnlyFans, prostitution, and people lying about their sexual orientation that users will need to sift through.
Unfortunately dating apps are an area where popularity does matter. Few are going to stick around on a largely empty app.
I was banned from Tinder about a year into the pandemic. I would sometimes idly swipe over that year to pass time but wasn't having conversations. I can only conclude that something in my profile was misunderstood.
They will not explain why, but I am now banned from all Match owned properties. That more or less leaves Bumble. At least until Match owns them.
I got permabanned when I tried logging in from my phone with oss android installed. In Tinder's defense I imagine my phones system might have looked similar to that of spammers leading to a false-positive, so I don't mind the ban itself.
What I do mind was that their official stance is that they don't reverse bans for any reason. Creating a new account is against their terms of service, so
in theory I am locked out of one of the primary ways my generation finds partners.
In the country I live, the competitors don't have user bases nearly large enough to compete so Tinder is effectively a monopoly. With Tinder's enormous market-power comes great responsibility, and they have in my eyes failed to live up to it.
- make non vulnerable people behave like if they were on a social network
Having different price, per geography, gender and age is just a consequence of the first.
It is not surprising that you can't see anymore the instagram handles of people on tinder. Instagram is a direct competitor to tinder for most of their users ( the non vulnerable ones).
Actually that's very smart, Tinder is probably the only big social network (tinder is not a dating app) which didn't require ads or a lot of funding to get big, only because one small portion of their user are willing to pay to be part of their community
Tried Tinder as an experiment. Hated it. I would prefer to base my approach to online dating on personality rather than a single profile picture. The entire Tinder experience is incredibly superficial and facilitates hookups rather than actually meeting interesting people.
I see web-based dating platforms as something that will always have a userbase.
Is Bumble big tech ? No, still they have the same tactics than Tinder.
I'm not saying there is no problem (I have wrote several article criticizing Match group and the app dating market), I'm just saying this has nothing to do with big Tech. Any dating app (and some do) can do the same as Tinder
The past 3 times I have tried to use tinder, I was left thinking it's just a front for onlyfans, sex workers and scammers. Profiles would either have 'onlyfans $name' or 'of $name' or 'I don't use this app much here's my Instagram'. But when you opened up their insta profile first line in their about me section was a onlyfans link. Sprinkle in some gift card scammers, sex workers, not being good looking and huge anxiety problems and I was left disappointed and frustrated every time. If I reported profiles it would just show them later on and not block them. So I would always report them again and again.
I would always play along with the scammers. Mostly out of curiosity and bordem. I would practice my osint skills. And try to report domains for abuse.
Okay we're going to sit down and talk about the interface for this.
Tinder is a dating app, we judge quickly based on pictures and meet people solo. It's awkward but physical attraction is largely the criteria we judge love interests by. Currently it's effectively a dating app but we aren't encouraged to go outside of our comfort zones (new is interesting when it comes to dating). It's competing with tinder directly even if that's unintentional. Plus you are forced to meet people immediately one-on-one; some people never meet anyone they meet on tinder and are perfectly happy with that. Why bother with this when everyone else already uses Tinder? It just doesn't fill a niche.
But it feels like this app wants to solve a completely different problem: meeting people as friends in a casual manner. I think it would be much more successful as a sort of pick-up group deal (for a buffer against all that uncomfortable). Don't even bother showing people's faces until after they've joined the group, shopping for friends isn't as much about looks. Keep related interests, food they like and such. Maybe build in an icebreaker kind of question that displays below them. If you want to stick with the food thing, getting people little group deals at restaurants would be epic. Hell, it might be handy to have a friends only feature so I can plan food dates with my existing buds.
Edit: To differentiate from say meetups, limit group sizes and make it really easy to just have it be a thing you can say, I'm gonna do Chinese today here (or in some general area); come join me.
Let's say you get banned from Tinder and consequently Bumble. What do you do now? You can create fake accounts, but they'll eventually find you. Coffee Meets Bagel? Plenty of Fish? Match.com? Don't make me laugh.
It's already bad enough that women find it strange that a guy doesn't have an Instagram account (this has been my experience 90% of the time), but at least as someone who is dating you can work your way around that. But if you get shut out of even 1 of the few main dating apps, you've lost a massive pool of dates and potential life partners. Unless something has changed since my foray into that scene, these days those apps are pretty much a requirement for getting any meaning amount of dates.
I can't help but feel bad for the younger generations of today. I was fortunate to come of age during the tail end of where it was still largely acceptable to meet and approach women IRL while online dating was kind of a sideshow. Today, what were once the best places to meet other young single people, are not only where it's become unacceptable to meet new people at bars and clubs or meetups but they also are the places with the most COVID-masking (yes, this DOES affect attraction and being able to read the other person). For most young guys and girls, you're probably stuck with Tinder and Bumble unless you are a 9 or above.
The other day I got permabanned from Nextdoor, not because I did anything wrong, but because I didn't use my real name. Of course the name that I used is the name that I use in real life and as a professional. I logged in one day to find that I had absolutely no access to my account. There was no read-only access to my messages, my activity, settings, or anything. Just a page that said I'd been banned for not using my real name but that I could contact their customer service or whatever. Imagine if that happens to you on Tinder right as you're about to ask someone on a date, or to your Wells Fargo account as you just got a paycheck and are ready to make that big purchase.
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