Apps: Is there more to Tinder than lust?
It looks like it’s going to be an active summer for online dating apps, said Sophie Mellor in Fortune.com. Already, “swipes are surging,” and an explosion of new profiles after lockdown restrictions began to ease in the United States and Europe led to a record-breaking first quarter for the world’s largest dating company, Match Group, which owns Tinder, Hinge, OkCupid, and Match.com. Most dating apps fared well during the pandemic, mostly because users “didn’t have a choice: Stuck at home, it was often the only way to find a new connection.” But even with the end of lockdowns, almost “every app on the market has seen an uptick as singletons prepare for a sweltering, mask-free summer.” Many people, though, seem to be using dating apps differently now, said Aniruddha Ghosh in Reuters.com. Tinder and Bumble have started promoting themselves “as a way of finding friends” rather than just seeking out “amorous entanglements.” Match Group recently paid $1.7 billion for the South Korean social media firm Hyperconnect, to “let people chat from across the world using real-time translation,” another sign that the company is “pushing beyond love and lust.”
A new wave of dating apps is modeled after TikTok, said Arielle Pardes in Wired.com, featuring short-form video formats that feel familiar to Gen Z. Snack is a “video-first dating app” that has branded itself as “TikTok meets Tinder.” Another company, Feels, has attracted 150,000 users since April and features “a carousel of short-form videos on profiles, where people are supposed to express themselves in more dimensions.” It’s being marketed as the option for daters “who believe that swiping is boring.” But even Tinder is evolving, said Ashley Carman in TheVerge .com. The controversial app, which popularized the idea of “swiping” to match with another person based almost solely on appearance, recently launched a new feature called Hot Takes, “which occurs nightly from 6 p.m. to midnight local time and allows daters to answer questions” in a chat. The idea is to give potential matches “something to talk about and therefore assess the actual conversation chemistry.” It’s part of an effort to make Tinder “more than just an app to judge people off their photos.”
It’s all getting to be too much, said Katie Way in Vice.com. “The makers of dating apps are regularly dreaming up new features to keep hopeful users swiping.” But this misses the point. “The point of online dating is not to stay on the apps for an entertaining experience,” it’s to find and connect with someone in real life. “Dating apps work in large part because they’re so unpleasant to spend time on.” The point of the technology is to make real-life dating better, not to keep people glued to a screen.