They stated " If you want to meet people don't use Tinder, that used to work well in the past, it very rarely works now.", which if I understand them correctly means that it's hard to meet people without it. Perhaps you don't need to meet anyone, but for someone who does I don't think it's that absurd.
When people use Tinder, they behave in the way that the user interface encourages them to. Because Tinder was built with assumptions about dating that are socially conservative, the behavior that the app encourages is behavior which conforms to socially conservative ideas about dating. Because the people who promote these socially conservative ideas like to wrap them in a veneer of pseudoscience, they claim that Tinder reinforces “ancient” behavior.
(Great source on the pseudoscience part: “Delusions of Gender” by Dr. Cordelia Fine. Plenty of others exist. And while I know the pseudoscience part might be controversial to some on here, I hope at least the idea that user interfaces guide user behavior is not.)
Just a comment - love the idea, going to use this, I think it’s a good idea not to lead with “Tinder for X”. At this point Tinder occupies a pretty bad lexical territory of being one of the classic examples of anti-user practices and enshittification.
Dating requires physical attraction, and a way to meet people you're attracted to. Tinder satisfies that, just as going to a bar does.
>To do more than hook up, one must determine compatibility, and Tinder provides nothing but the most shallow and difficult tools to accomplish this.
Tinder provides better tools for this than walking up to a stranger in a bar. A person in a bar doesn't carry a sign around saying a few things about them, such as that they like dogs or cats, follow a particular religion, aren't interested in casual sex, or whatever they choose to advertise about themselves. You can only find that out by starting a conversation with them and asking them these things. On Tinder, there's at least an opportunity to put these things out there, and then someone looking at your profile is able to screen you out.
>You'd have better luck walking around with a list of your favorite interests and biggest deal-breakers taped to your back.
No, you wouldn't, unless you happen to know a place that's packed full of hundreds and hundreds of singles of the sex and age range that you're looking for, and isn't limited to a self-selected group of people that may not be the group you're interested in (for instance, people who drink a lot).
>I can only think of two better ways to meet people online: a referral-approval system for friends-of-friends
That's pretty lousy because it limits you to people within your social circle. If you don't have a lot of friends, or you've moved, that isn't going to help you. A lot of people simply do not make a significant number of new friends after they're 30+ years old.
What would be better is something more like OKCupid, where you're basically forced to create a pretty extensive bio for yourself, which people can use better to look for a good match. The problem with this is that people have been abandoning OKC and other traditional sites for Tinder (IME), and for good reason: the traditional sites let anyone message anyone, and as a result, women get bombarded with message from men they're not interested in, and men waste all their time writing thoughtful messages to women who never respond. Tinder fixes that by only allowing people to message each other if they both "like" each other. Men still waste time writing messages that never get responses, but now it's more like a response rate of 25-50% rather than a response rate of 0.5%. And women seem to like it a lot more too, because they don't get overwhelmed with messages (this happened to my ex-wife after we split: she had to disable her OKC profile because she was just getting too many responses).
If you're able to meet eligible people through your social circle, great. But that doesn't work for a large and growing segment of the population.
Honestly, you sound like a college student to me. We older people don't have time for the stuff you talk about.
Why do you take it to mean that people who use a dating app are somewhat dumb? I can’t understand how you’d think that from Tinder misclassifying a photo
I'm not sure by what stretch of the imagination Tinder isn't useful, maybe not to you personally but to its intended audience.
By that standard, I could say hammers aren't useful because I personally don't have a use for them, or payday loans aren't useful because I'm personally opposed to them.
> For people who've never used Tinder, it's basically nothing like this, and it's not just my own experience or the way I use it - I've never seen any of my friends use it like the people in this article describe.
Same. Most of the people I've talked to that use it experience a typical "funnel": a bunch of available people, a smaller pool that you're interested in, a smaller pool that's also interested in you, and finally a few dates that go from there. Not an orgyastic meat-market where all your wildest sex dreams come true.
I wouldn't be surprised if this is a piece crafted by a PR team hired by Tinder.
Tinder [1] is a mobile dating application where users can swipe left or right to indicate if they are interested with another 'tinder-er'.
If it's a mutual Yes (when you swipe Yes on someone, they will see you mixed amongst random Tinder-ers on their swipe pages), then you both find out and can start talking.
"If you >don't< want to meet people don't use Tinder"
the way it's phrased means (unambiguously) that Tinder sucks, and Tinder doesn't work
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