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

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by UrLogicFails@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

110 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

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[–] ParsnipWitch@feddit.de 82 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (16 children)

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.

[–] aaronbieber@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago

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.

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