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.
Yeah, this whole thing is gross but this post summarizes it best.
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.
Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things
This was a nice read, thanks.
Thank you for sharing this link. It was quite the read.
Thanks for linking this.
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.