If you get a message from someone you never matched with on Tinder, it’s not a glitch — it’s part of the app’s expensive new subscription plan that it teased earlier this year, which allows “power users” to send unsolicited messages to non-matches for the small fee of $499 per month.
That landscape, in fact, is largely populated by apps owned by Tinder’s parent company: as Bloomberg notes, Match Group Inc. not only owns the popular swiping app, but also Match.com, OKCupid, Hinge, and The League.
Match Group CEO Bernard Kim referred to Tinder’s subscriptions as “low-hanging fruit” meant to compete with other, pricier services, though that was before this $6,000-per-year tier dropped.
Why are you assuming that men who can’t get matched are automatically creeps? That’s not at all a good assumption, and is a BIG part of the problem with tinder.
Back before I met my now fiancee, I never got tinder matches. I only got matches on OKCupid, back when you were allowed to message people before matching with them. That’s how I met my now fiancee, too.
Tinder is incredibly toxic by design and is designed to damage people’s mental health. They’ve taken dating, something that requires a lot of human interaction, and reduced it to a literal slot machine which tinder can rig however they want. They’ve reduced finding a partner to “does this person look attractive to you?” which is NOT how dating works IRL. I know a lot of people who met their partners IRL and were not attracted to them until they started getting to know each other as friends, then fell for each other.
Tinder not only exploits the problematic beauty standards in our society, but actively makes them worse. If you’re not getting matches you feel unattractive, because every piece of feedback the app gives you says you are. It doesn’t matter how charismatic or interesting you are, it doesn’t matter how much you and a potential match may have in common, all that matters is the pictures you put up, and maybe the first sentence or two of your bio.
The whole system is designed to make people using it feel desperate, men and women both, and this $500 to message first thing is incredibly scummy. They suck you in, kill your self confidence, depress you, then offer you what seems like a lifeline.
This is like a casino offering you a slot machine with a 50% higher win rate for a monthly subscription.
I never said men who can’t get matched are creeps, I said this is aimed at creeps who can’t get matched but would be willing to pay $500 a month to force themsleves on to others. That’s who you’re jumping to the defence of here.
And I laid out how I clearly disagree with the idea that this is “aimed at creeps,” because it’s aimed at people who have been made desperate by the predatory nature of Tinder’s algorithm. Desperation doesn’t necessarily make someone creepy, but it does make Tinder a lot of money.
Why are you making it seem like someone sending a message to someone else on a dating app is somehow a kind of, like, assault? You’re using very aggressive language to describe normal behavior by people trying to date, AKA talking to other people who they may be interested in
It’s not your decision alone to decide if you are a good fit for someone, though.
If someone, for example, doesn’t want to date people who are older than them, there shouldn’t be an option for people to just write to these people anyway. Because they think: “but I am so nice and we have so much in common”.
How would they even know that anyway? As you said so yourself, Tinder is basically a collection of photos and a few very shallow stats. It will be used by people to write to others they assume wouldn’t match with them in the first place!