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.
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
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.
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.
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.