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.
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.
This is the sign you were looking for to get off of dating apps.
Yeah, this whole thing is gross but this post summarizes it best.
Thanks for linking this.
Thank you for sharing this link. It was quite the read.
This was a nice read, thanks.
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.
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.
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.
That’s half my rent
Enshittification at its finest.
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“We know that there is a subset of highly engaged and active users who prioritize more effective and efficient ways to find connections,” Tinder’s chief product officer, Mark Van Ryswyk, told Bloomberg.
Regardless of how Tinder tries to spin the new feature — which, it should be noted, only allows the rich and rizzless to send non-match messages twice a week — it’s a very sad set of circumstances, even in the bleak landscape of dating apps.
The new “Tinder Select” subscription, which will offer three tiers starting at $24.99 per month, was purportedly created in part to help the app compete with other expensive services.
Indeed, Bloomberg notes that earlier this year, 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.
While this “new offering” may seem like a blatant cash grab to the average person, JP Morgan Chase & Co seemed pretty impressed, as the report notes, naming Match Group’s stock one of its top picks and upping its target price to boot.
“We expect Tinder payer trends to improve as focus shifts from price optimizations to product & engagement,” a JPMorgan analysis viewed by Bloomberg read.
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Whoever thought about this idea is a freaking GENIUS.
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.
Surely this is just validating SA and misogyny.
Tinder power users sound like extremely poor dates.
They sound like the type of people who would refer to themselves as “High Value Men”.
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.
Sir, This Is A Wendy’s
That should make things easy for gold diggers
Per month?? That’s crazy.
Can you really put a price on harassment?
aww hell ya!!!
This move seems absolutely wild, and I think Match knows it; which is why it’s only available to such a small segment of users.
If too many users have this feature (and who knows how many that would be?) it’'s going to scare away all the regular users. What’s the point in swiping no if that user can just veto your decision anyways?
This move reminds me a lot of what I’ve heard about mobile gaming. The 500USD/month users are whales, but the whales need regular people to play with or they’ll get bored and leave.
Right now, keeping the number of whales to a minimum is important to keep the regular users happy, but I wouldn’t be surprised if in the future some cost/benefit analysis shows that they can take the hit on regular users to squeeze out a few more whales.
It also seems like a bonkers move to pay 500 dollars to talk to someone who doesn’t want to talk to you, too. (But that’s a different issue.)
Except what they’re all “playing” for are people (and lets be honest, this is aimed at creepy men who can’t get matched otherwise, so more specifically they’re “playing” for women), with their own wants and needs and often safety concerns, all of which this serves to circumvent, which is definitely not how you “win” at tinder (finding an abuse victim? Sure, but not an actual viable relationship. Which again, tells you who this was designed for and why).
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.
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!
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.
No, you just heavily implied it. If you didn’t mean to then you need to edit you comment. 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.
Also, 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
Men who would do this are definitely creepy.
Yup, definitely feels like a p2w game pricing model
They’ll milk it when upper management is ready to cash out to massively grow short term profits so they can all take huge bonuses. Then they’ll replace upper management with scapegoats who can be there to absorb shareholder blowback and try to rebuild something of value from whatever’s left.
Rebuild? Checks notes not seeing that step, it just says “cash out”, “promise you’ve changed”, “wait to fall out of the news cycle”, and “repeat”
It’s only £20 per month
No that’s Platinum and also new but the $500 USD per month one is called VIP and also you need to be invited/selected to even be able to get it, which of course is just a ploy to get the selected to feel special and buy it to flaunt that they got invited.
You say no like it doesn’t say it in the screenshot that you can send messages to people you’re not matched with.
It has a subtitle though that it lets you attach a note to super likes. I don’t think it’s blanket, “Message anyone freely” like the VIP tier implies.
It’s also age dependent at the lower levels. Over 35 or 40 and you’ll pay more than someone young. Or at least that’s how it used to be.
As someone who never did online dating, what exactly are you paying for with these subscriptions…?
As a guy, you’re essentially paying for the ability to see who liked you. Dating is a seller’s market and the sellers of dreams in the market are women due to numbers. With a subscription, rather than aim for the stars, you’re able to pick the best of the women that are attracted to you?
I have no idea. In any other industry the Match Group wouldn’t be allowed to exist.
Why pay $500 a month to get blocked? You can get ghosted for free already
That’s why I pay for the $1000 a month “ultra supreme user” tier which doesn’t allow me to get blocked!
If I can just tell her how awesome my penis is she’ll fall madly in love! Right now she has no idea!
Only for the dick pic to contain a sad lifeless husk of a genital, complete with a strange bend to it.
This thread is full of people laughing at people who would pay for this, but I actually kinda empathize.
I got REALLY lucky and met my now fiancee on a dating app. It took about 2 years of trying to meet her, and in that time ithink I had maybe 5-7 dates. ALL of those were on OKCupid, back when it let you message people without matching. I am not the most good looking person, but I could get a good first impression through a message.
Tinder though? It killed my self confidence when I used it. I never got a single date from tinder. It is designed tonot get you dates, unless you’re SUPER attractive, especially if you’re a man. A lot of it is that there are so many more men on dating apps than women, I know that objectively. But it SUCKS when you’re actively looking for a partner and swiping every single day to either never get matches or get matches who are bots.
For a lot of guys like me being able to get a good first message in feels like the only chance, and if you’re seriously looking and starting to feel desperate (and these apps are designed to make you feel desperate) then dropping $500 for a month of being able to get a shot may not actually seem crazy.
These apps have designed a “dating economy” around themselves that tells people that they are not attractive or a desirable partner if they aren’t getting matches, then deliberately tailored their algorithms to manipulate people into coming back every day for a chance to meet someone. It’s slot machines, but with romantic relationships, and it convinces people that dating is like gambling. And these apps want you to feel like they are the only way to date, and if you’re not “winning” and getting dates they make it clear that it’s YOUR fault, and if you drop a little money you’ll get some matches.
Yes, some creeps will pay for this to send dick pics, but I think most people who will pay forthis are actually desperate and convinced that it’s their only chance at getting a date. It’s disgusting these apps are allowed to do what they have done. And I say all of that as someone who won the damn slot machine jackpot and came out with a long term partner.
I personally think these apps are doing some serious harm to our society and need to be regulated but that’s a different discussion
I had a similar thought. While I agree with the chorus that this is creepy AF and I in no way condone it, as a man who had to wade through these garbage dating apps to, fortunately, meet a long term partner I can attest to the profound sense of loneliness they cause. When I think back on it I can honestly see why some might consider this.
These apps suck, but in today’s world they aren’t always optional. My specific situation was living somewhere new at the beginning of the pandemic. It wasn’t really possible to meet people organically.
Edit: spelling
I never used dating apps in my life, so just a short question: Is Tinder only about looks? Or could you also be successful if you have a good job or house or something like that? Do people look at the profiles or do they select only from pictures?
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In my experience (I’m a few years out of date with how the app works now, keep that in mind) it’s like 90% looks. You CAN build up a profile, but IIRC only the first sentence of it shows up on your picture. A person has to see your picture and that tagline, be curious enough to actually go to your profile before swiping, then read your profile if they’re going to use it to judge you on.
Most of the people I know who used tinder, myself included, didn’t really do that much. We just swiped based on looks, and if someone was borderline then we looked at the profile to make a decision. But that was pretty rare, most people it was a pretty clear yes/no based on looks.
The apps is designed to encourage that behavior. When I used it profiles were REALLY not being encouraged, IDK if that has changed (I would guess it hasn’t).
A person has to see your picture and that tagline, be curious enough to actually go to your profile […] most people it was a pretty clear yes/no based on looks.
Is that wrong, though? Would you go on a date with someone you can’t stand looking in the face? There is no amount of profile that could make me swipe “yes” on a duckface, someone who clearly spends half their day at the gym, an over the top sport team’s fan, a photo of a cloud, or a close-up of some ass/tits.
Looks and context of a self-selected picture tell a lot about a person, and how they want to be seen.
On Tinder it would not be in the same context that what you experienced. In OKCupid it’s part of the rules that you can send messages without a match. So people are OK (I guess) with it. On Tinder it’s going to come as unexpected and unwelcome. You will start with a disadvantage. Unless the woman is only interested in money (if you can spend $500/month on an app then you are probably among the wealthier half of the population).
I agree, but that just makes this even scummier on Tinder’s part. The people who own and make the app know that, they’re doing this anyway. So they’re targeting people who are already desperate and lonely, and giving them what they will inevitably see as a “lifeline” which actually may make their chances worse.
Oh, it most definitely is scummy. It’s no news that Tinder does not care about people well-beings. Actually, they want you to get stuck to the platform as long as you can; if everyone was finding their partner after a week their platform would not be profitable anymore.
I used to use OKCupid, and it was so much better than Tinder. Unfortunately, Tinder’s success changed the game and it seems like all the dating sites follow its general form now. On old OKC people would write freaking novels in their bios, in addition to answering hundreds of questions. On Tinder, if you have even two complete sentences in your profile, you’re an outlier. It’s an explicitly, aggressively shallow platform.
I don’t think the old message-anyone method scales well, though. Dating sites are far more popular today than they were back when I used OKC. And even back then, every woman I knew who used it turned off notifications because it was overwhelming.
They all follow that general form because the same company (Match Group) bought all of the different dating sites and changed them to the form that makes them the most money.
I totally forgot about spark.com, or was it thespark.com?
Back in the early 2000 area if I recall correctly. I spent way too much time answering questions on there in my college computer lab, then suddenly they added dating.
I’m finding out from this that it’s owned by the same company but Hinge has a better formula for that kind of thing. You comment on an aspect of their profile (a picture, their response to a prompt, etc) and that gets sent to them. Then they can reply (which triggers a “match”) or not. You can also send likes without a comment but obviously that won’t be as effective.
In my experience, it’s both. I’m watching a friend of mine go on the apps and she got over 2000 likes (I’m not even exaggerating) in a week. When she sorts through those she first reacts to the main photo, and then looks at their job, and the rest of the profile.
So in order to get matches as a guy, you need to have your life together with a stable job, an interesting personality you can somehow convey in a profile, and good enough looks for that to matter.
Want to be a creepy dating stalker?
$500* please
*unlimited creepiness included!Actual creepiness is limited to two messages per week.
That said, I’m sure that (now the door is cracked slightly) there’ll be another tier with ten messages, twenty, a hundred …
This doesn’t make it better. That’s $125 per message then.
$500/month = ~$125/week, but if you get two messages per week that’s $62.50/message. Still a lot of money though.
Ah whoops.
