Tinder Now Letting Rizzless Sad Sacks Pay $500/Month to Message People Without Even Matching ( futurism.com )

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.

FFF982 ,

Imagine spending 500$/Month to harass people on a dating app. That’s creepy and sad.

nosurprises ,

Per month?? That’s crazy.

pkulak ,

Can you really put a price on harassment?

SouthEndSunset ,

Surely this is just validating SA and misogyny.

j4yt33 ,

If you want to rip off rich, desperate men, here’s how: just wait for a message from someone you haven’t matched with.

Catfishing just got so much easier

jarfil ,
@jarfil@beehaw.org avatar

Time to make a new profile with a few AI generated photos… 🤦

rgb3x3 ,

“Your hands look weird in all your photos, what’s up with that?”

“…I have a condition.”

jarfil ,
@jarfil@beehaw.org avatar

“…but there is a treatment! Unfortunately my family is too poor to afford the $2847 it takes…”

01011 ,

You have it wrong OP, Tinder has become official in its online pimp status. Those who have been using Tinder to sell sex are the ones most likely to be charged.

Kolanaki ,
@Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

If someone pays $500+ to talk to me, I’ll talk back.

Also: I feel like this is gonna lead to most women on Tinder leaving Tinder after they get flooded by creeps. Rich creeps, but still creeps.

echodot ,

I don’t know it might be a good opportunity to get with some politician and then have a scandalous relationship. And positive it’s going to happen.

trancertong ,

This is Tinder, not Grindr.

danfromwv ,

One of OKCupid’s founders - Christian Rudder was in a band called Bishop Allen (along with Justin Rice). Awesome band. That has nothing to do with this thread - just thought I’d recommend you check them out.

XTornado ,

Sir, This Is A Wendy’s

butsbutts ,

aww hell ya!!!

scott ,
@scott@lem.free.as avatar

Enshittification at its finest.

lightnsfw ,

That should make things easy for gold diggers

ParsnipWitch , (edited )
@ParsnipWitch@feddit.de avatar

Many years ago™ OkCupid actually had a good system, before it revamped itself and got bought by Match (Tinder).

In the old version of the website, you could answer any amount of questions from a huge catalogue of sometimes very obscure and specific questions and look for people who had very similar (or very different) answers overall. You could chat freely with everyone and had the option to look just for (platonic) friends.

I had incredibly interesting discussions with people who were at the opposite spectrum of my answers. And I made a few acquaintances and two amazing friends who still are my friends today, one is even my roommate for 8 years now! I also found a group of white hackers and Linux enthusiasts for real life meetings and we still hang out occasionally.

Two other friends of mine looked for and found romantic partners there and they are both happily married to the partners they found via OkCupid back then.

It went all down the gutter when people used the “platonic friends” option to get into your pants.

And when OkCupid tried to make more cash by pushing into the sex/romance market more and copying dating apps.

I don’t think something like this would work anymore. Dating apps and the weird culture and thinking about a “sexual market” seem to have broken humans or something. This asinine idea is just another symptom.

Crotaro ,

OkCupid really used to be awesome. I would not have met my spouse, had I not checked it out because of the amazingly interesting and varied questionnaires.

I’m so sad that it was made shitty.

renard_roux ,

My wife and I actually met on OkCupid, happily married for 8 years now, and dated a few years before that, so safe to say I haven’t been there in 10+ years.

Sad to hear it’s gone down the drain, it seemed the least vile of the available options 😓

BDC ,

My wife and I also met on ok Cupid. Just celebrated our 17th wedding anniversary.

fox ,

Absolutely LOVED the questionnaire aspect of okcupid. At one point I ran out of questions you could answer. Met some fantastic people using the app.

SeriousBug ,

Did they get rid of the questions? That was the most awesome part of OkCupid. Because you not only answered the questions but you could pick if you cared what your potential matches answers should be.

I met my wife on OkCupid, we were a high % match according to OkCupid and we did turn out to be a great match. That’s stupid if they got rid of that.

beto ,
@beto@lemmy.studio avatar

There’s a big conflict of interest in dating apps: if you’re successful you stop using the app, and of course the company doesn’t want that.

theUnlikely ,

But if everyone has a shitty experience with it, they won’t recommend it or even tell people to stay away from it. But if it works well, they’ll praise it, thus gaining more users.

interolivary ,
@interolivary@beehaw.org avatar

And enshittification and buying up competitors will lead to all sites being the same, which is exactly what has happened. Executives don’t care about providing a useful service, they just care about getting richer

shitwolves ,

Match Group has basically ruined all of online dating.

SnowdenHeroOfOurTime ,

Another version of “online dating is awful!”

Haven’t heard this one before. The world is better with online dating than it was without it

Axolotling ,

That’s not what the original comment said if you read it at all. The commenter was making the point that okcupid was pretty good before it was enshittified. There was no direct judgement about whether the world is better with or without OLD. And the subtextual judgment seems to be positive or at least neutral, so I’m not sure what you actually have a problem with.

SnowdenHeroOfOurTime ,

How I saw this as a different version of the same old stuff is that this comment said essentially “well it used to be good when I used it, but now it’s awful and destructive” which it might be in ways but it’s absolutely a net positive from what I have seen

As someone who online dated for years, up until 2021, I’m very aware of the down sides.

Axolotling ,

Okay that makes more sense. I do think that “online dating is awful” is a very different statement from “well it used to be good but now it sucks” and the two phrases come with very different qualifications and conclusions.

The former phrase is a pretty blanket judgement on this aspect of society in relation to the whole. But the latter statement has more to do with the enshittification of the internet and the capitalist systems woven inbetween. The latter statement is a historical comparison while the former is a value judgment of society.

As for your opinion itself, I don’t have any strong feelings one way or another. The nature of the internet has paradoxically connected more people than ever before while simultaneously isolating us more than ever before. I personally don’t think that online dating really differs from that mold. I think that this is one small part of a larger problem where capitalism has commodified almost every aspect of humanity, which is accelerated by the internet.

SnowdenHeroOfOurTime ,

Yeah, this is all fair. I’ve just heard that online dating is bad so many times and so often that it’s become expected. I feel like it typically comes from people who either have never used it, or have only dated that way. Both groups have a less informed opinion than someone who went on a few mortifying “traditional” dates, and then started dating online.

I’m not trying to say I’m an expert but I do think people my age are in a unique position. We saw the world before and after the Internet, and since this change occurred in our youth we had enough awareness to process both versions of the world. If we put some laws into place that protected consumers on a basic level, I sure would drastically prefer the post Internet world. As it stands, some days I don’t feel like the Internet is such a great thing, but most days I do think it’s a better world, on balance.

cicapocok ,

I also met my boyfriend back then like 7 years ago. It was the best “dating platform” that I ever used. Had a lot of great conversations with many people all over the world. Came back to it a few years ago but they already changed it to a more tinder type of way. It was very disappointing.

aaronbieber ,
@aaronbieber@beehaw.org avatar

More old trivia is that the original OK Cupid system was written in C, including the actual web server that served the pages. They wrote it in C so that the matching thing could run real-time, which is super impressive, even if writing your own web server is actually pretty dumb.

I loved the days when people just wanted to make fun, useful, quirky stuff on the internet and not just peddle thirst traps and Chinese merchandise.

timo21 ,
@timo21@mastodon.sdf.org avatar

@UrLogicFails Some of that money should go to the people being messaged without their consent. 😅 JK. That's the direction they seem to be going.

PotentiallyAnApricot ,

The incredible horror of tying self worth to romantic “success” and then charging people money for it, is awful on its face, but it leads to much worse things too. This is, in effect, charging money for people to have “access” to people who haven’t consented to being contacted, furthering the idea that money=access to people who can’t say no to you. Tinder is monetizing peoples’ emotional need for connection at best, which is horrible, but at worst it’s also propping up a whole complex of ideas that erode respect and consent toward potential romantic or sexual partners, and that the far end eventually leads to like, Andrew Tate shit. And why wouldn’t it work? People have had their self worth obliterated by the commodification of human beings that is mainstream heteronormative dating culture. Tech companies making themselves the mediator of human connection, romantic or platonic or in terms of activism, hobbies, groups, etc - and then charging money for us to know each other and meet each other - horrifies me daily.

HarkMahlberg ,
@HarkMahlberg@kbin.social avatar

Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things

PotentiallyAnApricot ,

Thanks for linking this.

keciga ,

Thank you for sharing this link. It was quite the read.

Sausa ,

This was a nice read, thanks.

TheSaneWriter ,
@TheSaneWriter@lemmy.thesanewriter.com avatar

It truly is disgusting that they’ve made this model. Tinder has always been severely flawed in my opinion, but this makes it several times worse.

Very_Bad_Janet ,

This is the sign you were looking for to get off of dating apps.

theUnlikely ,

I totally agree that it’s a ridiculous thing for them to implement, but saying that consent is required to say ‘hi’ is a bit over the top. I’m assuming the receiving party will still be able to block the sender of course since I’m pretty sure that’s required by Google and Apple.

PotentiallyAnApricot , (edited )

So there’s a big whole complex of online harassment, offline harassment, misogynistic attitudes, beliefs about dating, “strategies” for “getting” women to date or have sex with you, weird money related ideas about all of this, ideas about strategies to turn a no into a yes, etc etc, that is in the background whenever normal low stakes human interactions are happening. So it’s not the act of saying “hi, you seem cool, let’s get coffee” that is the problem. It’s the context. Tinder is making the context so, so much worse. It’s creating creating conditions that make an otherwise normal ‘hi’ seem more likely to be in bad faith, and sending a signal to malicious people that a new option for being malicious has opened up. So, even if the vast majority of people looking to meet humans this way are totally kind and earnest, it brings a certain vibe to the entire thing that will make many people, especially women who have had scary or unpleasant experiences in that vein, very uncomfortable, and cause them to think twice about that “hi”, because they know that access to their inbox has been sold, when that was never allowed before, to people who may be more likely to have bought into the aforementioned complex of bad ideas. It makes the “hi” not normal anymore.

TwilightVulpine ,

WTF??? Monetized sexual harassment?!?!

What is even parody anymore?

falsem ,

Wait until you hear how other dating services used to work

Nivekk ,
@Nivekk@kbin.social avatar

Next step: Charging you money if you DON'T want to hear from someone you haven't matched with.

PoisonedPrisonPanda ,

!remindme 1 year

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