Free users / Hot people
Today: Jennie Rose Halperin, digital strategist and librarian at NYU's Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy; and Rax King, author of the forthcoming Sloppy: Or: Doing It All Wrong, it'd be neat to pre-order now.
Issue No. 233
Dating the Machine
Jennie Rose Halperin
Big Mistakes
Rax King
Dating the Machine
by Jennie Rose Halperin
A single company owns nearly every major online dating platform, including Tinder, Hinge, Match.com, and OkCupid as well as niche dating sites like “Senior Black People Meet,” “Little People Meet,” “Petpeoplemeet,” “LDS Planet,” “Democratic People Meet,” and “Republican People Meet.” The publicly traded, Dallas-based Match group earned $3.36 billion in revenue in 2023, and at the end of Q3 2024 had 15.2 million paid subscribers.
Freemium information-based services breed consolidation and market monopolization for the sake of shared networks, data brokering, user experience, and convenience, and Match’s properties are some of the most successful. The Match apps are used by more than 80 percent of the app-using dating public and operated as separate properties in order to “appeal to different types of users” despite being functionally identical. Match describes Tinder, the most popular dating app, as “fast paced” and “photo centric,” for example, as opposed to Hinge, which encourages “deeper relationships through meaningful prompts” like “My cry-in-the-car song is” and “The dorkiest thing about me is.”
Soon after I moved to New York in 2023, I went on my first Hinge date with a tech journalist. He seemed promising; we had similar career interests, at least. Within two minutes of meeting him I knew there would be no second date, but we had a drink because he’d made the effort to come out to my neighborhood. After a glass of wine, he determined that I was “not like other girls he meets on Hinge,” so he could tell me something that he ”usually saves for the third or fourth date” because it was “so weird”: he had been to Burning Man multiple times.
Keep us breathing fire!
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