Mocking “this person paid $8 for Twitter” is already a meme, this is 1. $499 and 2. a dating app where you’re trying to look attractive. Does having a badge that someone is burning $499 a month on this increase attractiveness?
It seems less appealing than buying all of the other features but keeping the fact you paid for this completely hidden.
You could spend $499 out at bars trying to meet people, and at least you’d get 50 beers in return!
The platform is at this point majority scam accounts, I'd probably put the number at 80% (speaking as a man looking at women at least) as fake.
They'll send you a like, and they'll quickly talk about "making their fortune" or buying multiple properties. Once you're suckered in thinking that's fortunate they'll ask if you're interested in making such profits, because they can show you "crypto investments". Of course you'll be trained on just sending money to some account on a fake website you can never withdraw from.
If you haven't used to platform in the last six months it's really hard to believe how bad things have gotten. "Verified" accounts that are AI generated and have no hands or no face, and profiles like this actually common:
I know we joke about places like Reddit and Twitter being full of bots but I don't think anyone has any sense of the scale of the bots on Tinder. Paying $500 for priority matching with that sounds funny.
People put silly pics in their profiles and memes sometimes. If someone has this as their only profile pic, they're not taking it seriously. If someone has it after real pictures, they're trying to see if you have the same sense of humor.
But yeah, AI generated profiles are becoming an issue. Especially because you can't reverse image search them like you could with old scammers.
> Does having a badge that someone is burning $499 a month on this increase attractiveness?
The badge signals two things:
1. This person is likely serious about finding a long-term partner.
2. This person likely has considerable disposable income be able to pay $499/month.
> You could spend $499 out at bars trying to meet people, and at least you’d get 50 beers in return!
If you're looking for a long-term partner, I think a bar is basically the worst place. Or maybe it's just a terrible place for me personally, since I go to bars, so a person at a bar is probably not a good match for me.
Not, necessarily, a negative dating signal for some people.
(Less cynically - it might signal "this person is comfortably-off and is willing to devote significant energy to dating" - which could be positive or negative depending on whether you think their dating intentions align with yours or not)
Perhaps the dating scene has changed since I was last exposed to Tinder but “serious” is not the term I would use to describe an app primarily used for hookups.
It was partially used for serious dating (myself included) back when there were no other popular dating apps, meaning all kinds of people were on there. Since then, users have split out to other ones. Maybe Tinder wants them back.
Luckily I'm not going back cause I met my now-wife somewhere else.
Yeah, your car says something about you. Teslas are a goal for a techie, Mercedes/BMW are the goal for old money, big trucks are the goal for more working class guys etc
yeah pretty much everyone I've seen in a 3 series is basically trying to hard; the painfully middle class Persian guy with overpriced sunglasses. Meanwhile the actually rich folks I know are driving F150 Raptors or Teslas.
I've always said (with tongue planted firmly in cheek) that BMWs are for people that just want to look like they have money. People who actually want a nice car will buy a Lexus.
At least Lexus considers long-term reliability to be a luxury feature, whereas BMW just makes sure the car will last for the 3 years the original owner will lease it.
okay so then go to church. or a book club. or a softball team. or a linux user group. or D&D/tabletop group.
plus bars skew by demographic and event. used to work at bars and restaraunts near hospitals -- 9am shift changes means people want beer at 10am -- and dated a couple of nurses because of it. find the punk rock bar, or nerd event at the bar, etc.
if you're only willing to do low effort interactions through an app then you're only going to get low effort partners, who will dismiss you based on one bad photo.
> or a linux user group. or D&D/tabletop group [...] or nerd event at the bar
All of which will be like 98% men.
> if you're only willing to do low effort interactions through an app then you're only going to get low effort partners, who will dismiss you based on one bad photo.
I found my wife on OKCupid back in 2010, before online dating became an utter cesspool of dick pics and matches based purely on attractiveness with no consideration for actual matching by personality.
Really, if I were to ever be back in the dating pool, Tinder in general would be my last choice.
No paid feature can make people on Tinder like you. But a paid feature can show you to more people on Tinder, which makes a big difference as I've detailed elsewhere.
but what's the point if those people aren't interested un you? those who don't need the feature, have no reason to buy it, and those who "have a reason" for it will not benefit from it.
The point is that some of them are interested, even if they're few. Say it's only 1%. If 100 see you, you get 1 like. If you pay for 10K to see you, you get 100 likes.
One thing that doesn't sit well with me about most dating apps is that they operate under the paradigm where "If you're attractive, you're the product, not the customer" If you're getting likes, or swipes, or matches, or whatever the app wants to call it, why pay extra?
This can lead to a really perverse set of incentives like trying to keep your user base single. They have essentially turned dating into a Skinner box and used the inherent variable rewards to keep users addicted. Once users are addicted, you can play with their emotions by messing with the volatility and frequency of their rewards. This allows you to dangle a carrot in front of them and tell them that they can simply pay extra to bring the carrot closer.
Why can't apps monetize dates by suggesting cool date spots and activities? Maybe try to keep people engaged after the first 2 or 3 dates by gamifying cool activities and deep questions? At least this way it incentivizes human connection and experience, while making ad revenue.
Yeah, I guess older ones have tried. They used to let you match but require you to pay to send messages. Didn't work.
I will say as someone who's extensively tested this though, Tinder doesn't seem to put effort into determining the compatibility between you and the recommendations. Their goal is something else, not sinister but not optimal either.
The pattern I have observed in my friends and myself (when I was on dating apps) goes something like this:
We get matches, some of those matches flake, don't respond, or don't pan out into anything. So we mitigate that emotional risk by talking to multiple people at once. As a result we're pulling the lever (swiping) and eventually getting the emotional payout of a match with someone cute. Then we see something we don't like in the person we matched with, so we're faced with the choice accepting someone for their flaws, or pulling the Skinner box lever (swiping.) I know it sounds reductive, but it preys on our addictive nature in a way that gets in the way of human connection. Eventually we snap out of it, but by that time, we have been on the app for several months or even years for some people. While it doesn't keep people single per se, it is not the most conducive means of cultivating genuine relationships. As a result people stay on the app for longer, and keeps the user base high.
Maybe I'm mis-attributing survivorship bias to malice. In other words, sure it's profitable for Tinder, but not inherently beneficial to society. Tinder might not actively trying to operate this way, but there is a large population of people that will gravitate towards the dating services that give them that high of variable rewards It's profitable for Tinder and all of it's look-alikes, so they continue to exist in the market.
The issue I take with all of it is the misalignment of incentives in the business model. Regardless of intention, there's an inherent disconnect. If Tinder has someone paying $500 a month, they're going to want to keep those payments coming. How would they do that?
Basically it'd look like Hinge. Would still be pretty flawed.
Main thing would be changing the matching algo. Tinder seems to want to show "hot singles near you." I kinda reverse-engineered it (at least the 2018 version), and it seems to just score each user based on swipe:match ratio and total number of matches then show you the highest scoring users matching your gender/distance/age filters. It doesn't try to figure out who you'd be compatible with or anything like that. Exploiting a glitch, I managed to game this and get 500X the matches as normal (as M seeking F), which confirmed my suspicions about the algo.
How do you determine compatibility without onerous onboarding quizzes, not sure. Recommender algo ("people with similar liking patterns also liked this person") would be a starting point. But Tinder doesn't seem to have even tried this, while Hinge makes some attempt. There are also a few games they could take out, like telling you ~8 people liked you to bait you into swiping more to find them, but it's not a big deal.
To Tinder's credit, they made dating apps massively popular for the first time ever, and just getting a lot of people onto one app brought value even for serious dating. It was basically the only app in town from 2014-2018. Copycats were spawned, some of which were simply branded more for serious dating, and I met my now-wife on one of them.
Especially for $500. If I pay $500 maybe that’s a good deal if it saves me time and money on bad dates. But Tinder is incentivized to give me the best date that isn’t quite good enough.
My phishing pals tell me that this is a great bait for the elusive catfish!
I'm guessing the intersection between the amount of people who are able to pay for this (1% according to Tinder) and the number of people who are willing to pay for this/haven't thought the consequences through is extremely small.
Tinder Select might simply show you to more people, which despite not being an advertised feature, would actually matter the most.
Here's a little "revenge of the nerds" story about how I got the best Tinder boost for free back in college by exploiting a glitch that they patched later on. Was set to hetero male mode. Realized that decreasing the radius from >1mi to 1mi in Tinder, killing the app, then reopening it would show me only the women who swiped right on me. I'd match them all, change my radius back to ~5mi, then come back later. I'd never swipe on anyone else.
The second piece here is that Tinder had (and still has?) an internal "hotness" score determined by some combo of swipe:match ratio and your absolute number of matches, as first observed by one of my friends. The higher your score, the more likely Tinder will show your bio to others. New accounts also get a temp hotness boost to give them a fair shot. Wasn't obvious to me at first, but the biggest reason women weren't liking my old bio was only that they hadn't even seen it at all, since there are way more active men than women on there. While an average guy would see 1-3 matches his first month, a girl could easily get 100-200. In Berkeley, CA at least.
After ~a week of maintaining a 1:1 ratio, every similar-age woman in that city downloading Tinder saw me first or second, as confirmed by a female friend. I was honestly average, and my bio was geared towards serious dating. As you can imagine, the bios after me were gigachad 6'4" athletes. And it worked: I got 1000 matches the first month, another 1000 the second. Probably thousands more passed it.
I don’t understand. By 1:1 ratio you mean every single swipe is a match? How do you accomplish that in the first place? You would either need to have a ton of likes or know beforehand if you’ve been liked by that person, no?
That's right. I found a glitch allowing me to know beforehand who'd liked me without any special tooling, as mentioned near "killing the app". Something about their internal API was not so RESTful I guess.
> Inspiration for this members-only club within Tinder comes from Match’s July 2022 acquisition of another high-end dating app, The League, which could cost users up to $1,000 per week. During its Q2 2023 earnings, Tinder CPO Mark Van Ryswyk said The League indicated there was a market for daters who were willing to pay for quality matches and experiences. But Tinder Select doesn’t rely on human matchmakers, nor does it offer anything that’s really worth the cost of the $500 per month membership.
Ahh capitalism. They saw a premium service at a premium price, decided people will pay the price even without the service and shut down the original. Match.coms monopoly power over our love lives is very very bad for everyone. At this point I feel like arranged marriage is better because at least it's arranged by people who care about you and have aligned incentives. But my main point is this is terrible news.
> Match.coms monopoly power over our love lives is very very bad for everyone.
When enshittifier-Capitalists disintermediate and tax basic human connection --
When they have, by public relations fiat, claimed control of sex itself --
(Like a mining company showing up on tribal lands with bulldozers to claim it. Like a hedge built through the middle of India to divide it and tax the trade of salt.)
-- then to communicate directly becomes a revolutionary act.
We know DeBeers manufactured the diamond tradition. Surely these new companies are likewise influencing the ideas that are conditioned into peoples' heads.
Whatever ideas cause people not to communicate directly here -- to turn towards disintermediation -- are necessarily in the service of these empires. Astroturf taboos may have to be flouted to make human progress here.
56 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 357 ms ] threadIt seems less appealing than buying all of the other features but keeping the fact you paid for this completely hidden.
You could spend $499 out at bars trying to meet people, and at least you’d get 50 beers in return!
Unfortunately, in some demographic it does. Unfortunately there's also a demographic willing to pay $499 a month for premium tinder.
The platform is at this point majority scam accounts, I'd probably put the number at 80% (speaking as a man looking at women at least) as fake.
They'll send you a like, and they'll quickly talk about "making their fortune" or buying multiple properties. Once you're suckered in thinking that's fortunate they'll ask if you're interested in making such profits, because they can show you "crypto investments". Of course you'll be trained on just sending money to some account on a fake website you can never withdraw from.
If you haven't used to platform in the last six months it's really hard to believe how bad things have gotten. "Verified" accounts that are AI generated and have no hands or no face, and profiles like this actually common:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Tinder/comments/160lrof/bro_what/
I know we joke about places like Reddit and Twitter being full of bots but I don't think anyone has any sense of the scale of the bots on Tinder. Paying $500 for priority matching with that sounds funny.
And thanks for the link to the laugh/nightmare fuel.
People put silly pics in their profiles and memes sometimes. If someone has this as their only profile pic, they're not taking it seriously. If someone has it after real pictures, they're trying to see if you have the same sense of humor.
But yeah, AI generated profiles are becoming an issue. Especially because you can't reverse image search them like you could with old scammers.
The badge signals two things:
1. This person is likely serious about finding a long-term partner.
2. This person likely has considerable disposable income be able to pay $499/month.
> You could spend $499 out at bars trying to meet people, and at least you’d get 50 beers in return!
If you're looking for a long-term partner, I think a bar is basically the worst place. Or maybe it's just a terrible place for me personally, since I go to bars, so a person at a bar is probably not a good match for me.
Not, necessarily, a negative dating signal for some people.
(Less cynically - it might signal "this person is comfortably-off and is willing to devote significant energy to dating" - which could be positive or negative depending on whether you think their dating intentions align with yours or not)
Luckily I'm not going back cause I met my now-wife somewhere else.
But from what I've heard, I get the feeling that the majority of men think it's a hook-up app, whereas the majority of women think it's a dating app.
Men, both gay and straight, are far more willing, generally speaking, to be willing to have anonymous sex than heterosexual women.
This is deeeeep into try-hard territory.
Fancy cars work because fancy cars are cool regardless of dating status.
But what kind of "loser" is so desperate as to pay $500 a month to meet people?
The badge is not a plus. The other stuff is.
At least Lexus considers long-term reliability to be a luxury feature, whereas BMW just makes sure the car will last for the 3 years the original owner will lease it.
If I'd gone with the twin-turbo, I'd probably have thrown it away twice by now.
Bars/Pubs are a place people have been meeting each other for 100s of years.
plus bars skew by demographic and event. used to work at bars and restaraunts near hospitals -- 9am shift changes means people want beer at 10am -- and dated a couple of nurses because of it. find the punk rock bar, or nerd event at the bar, etc.
if you're only willing to do low effort interactions through an app then you're only going to get low effort partners, who will dismiss you based on one bad photo.
All of which will be like 98% men.
> if you're only willing to do low effort interactions through an app then you're only going to get low effort partners, who will dismiss you based on one bad photo.
I found my wife on OKCupid back in 2010, before online dating became an utter cesspool of dick pics and matches based purely on attractiveness with no consideration for actual matching by personality.
Really, if I were to ever be back in the dating pool, Tinder in general would be my last choice.
This can lead to a really perverse set of incentives like trying to keep your user base single. They have essentially turned dating into a Skinner box and used the inherent variable rewards to keep users addicted. Once users are addicted, you can play with their emotions by messing with the volatility and frequency of their rewards. This allows you to dangle a carrot in front of them and tell them that they can simply pay extra to bring the carrot closer.
Why can't apps monetize dates by suggesting cool date spots and activities? Maybe try to keep people engaged after the first 2 or 3 dates by gamifying cool activities and deep questions? At least this way it incentivizes human connection and experience, while making ad revenue.
Yes, a good person would want that.
People like and use the app if they get matches.
I'm not convinced there's an appreciably good way for the app to give you matches and keep you single.
I will say as someone who's extensively tested this though, Tinder doesn't seem to put effort into determining the compatibility between you and the recommendations. Their goal is something else, not sinister but not optimal either.
Maybe I'm mis-attributing survivorship bias to malice. In other words, sure it's profitable for Tinder, but not inherently beneficial to society. Tinder might not actively trying to operate this way, but there is a large population of people that will gravitate towards the dating services that give them that high of variable rewards It's profitable for Tinder and all of it's look-alikes, so they continue to exist in the market.
The issue I take with all of it is the misalignment of incentives in the business model. Regardless of intention, there's an inherent disconnect. If Tinder has someone paying $500 a month, they're going to want to keep those payments coming. How would they do that?
What would it do?
Main thing would be changing the matching algo. Tinder seems to want to show "hot singles near you." I kinda reverse-engineered it (at least the 2018 version), and it seems to just score each user based on swipe:match ratio and total number of matches then show you the highest scoring users matching your gender/distance/age filters. It doesn't try to figure out who you'd be compatible with or anything like that. Exploiting a glitch, I managed to game this and get 500X the matches as normal (as M seeking F), which confirmed my suspicions about the algo.
How do you determine compatibility without onerous onboarding quizzes, not sure. Recommender algo ("people with similar liking patterns also liked this person") would be a starting point. But Tinder doesn't seem to have even tried this, while Hinge makes some attempt. There are also a few games they could take out, like telling you ~8 people liked you to bait you into swiping more to find them, but it's not a big deal.
To Tinder's credit, they made dating apps massively popular for the first time ever, and just getting a lot of people onto one app brought value even for serious dating. It was basically the only app in town from 2014-2018. Copycats were spawned, some of which were simply branded more for serious dating, and I met my now-wife on one of them.
Suppose 0.2 percent of tinderers will pay for the select membership. This group of people is the result of a filter.
Those people will feel special and they will get in contact with like-minded people.
Also chances are greater that these people really want to find a partner soon as opposed to just hang around on tinder.
Also the premise of visual attractiveness will tune down for some amount, because very attractive people will not 'need' that membership.
I'm guessing the intersection between the amount of people who are able to pay for this (1% according to Tinder) and the number of people who are willing to pay for this/haven't thought the consequences through is extremely small.
Here's a little "revenge of the nerds" story about how I got the best Tinder boost for free back in college by exploiting a glitch that they patched later on. Was set to hetero male mode. Realized that decreasing the radius from >1mi to 1mi in Tinder, killing the app, then reopening it would show me only the women who swiped right on me. I'd match them all, change my radius back to ~5mi, then come back later. I'd never swipe on anyone else.
The second piece here is that Tinder had (and still has?) an internal "hotness" score determined by some combo of swipe:match ratio and your absolute number of matches, as first observed by one of my friends. The higher your score, the more likely Tinder will show your bio to others. New accounts also get a temp hotness boost to give them a fair shot. Wasn't obvious to me at first, but the biggest reason women weren't liking my old bio was only that they hadn't even seen it at all, since there are way more active men than women on there. While an average guy would see 1-3 matches his first month, a girl could easily get 100-200. In Berkeley, CA at least.
After ~a week of maintaining a 1:1 ratio, every similar-age woman in that city downloading Tinder saw me first or second, as confirmed by a female friend. I was honestly average, and my bio was geared towards serious dating. As you can imagine, the bios after me were gigachad 6'4" athletes. And it worked: I got 1000 matches the first month, another 1000 the second. Probably thousands more passed it.
Ahh capitalism. They saw a premium service at a premium price, decided people will pay the price even without the service and shut down the original. Match.coms monopoly power over our love lives is very very bad for everyone. At this point I feel like arranged marriage is better because at least it's arranged by people who care about you and have aligned incentives. But my main point is this is terrible news.
When enshittifier-Capitalists disintermediate and tax basic human connection --
When they have, by public relations fiat, claimed control of sex itself --
(Like a mining company showing up on tribal lands with bulldozers to claim it. Like a hedge built through the middle of India to divide it and tax the trade of salt.)
-- then to communicate directly becomes a revolutionary act.
We know DeBeers manufactured the diamond tradition. Surely these new companies are likewise influencing the ideas that are conditioned into peoples' heads.
Whatever ideas cause people not to communicate directly here -- to turn towards disintermediation -- are necessarily in the service of these empires. Astroturf taboos may have to be flouted to make human progress here.