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Tinder Now Letting Rizzless Sad Sacks Pay $500/Month to Message People Without Even Matching (futurism.com)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by to c/technology@beehaw.org
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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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[–] [S] 57 points 2 years ago (4 children)

This move seems absolutely wild, and I think Match knows it; which is why it's only available to such a small segment of users.

If too many users have this feature (and who knows how many that would be?) it''s going to scare away all the regular users. What's the point in swiping no if that user can just veto your decision anyways?

This move reminds me a lot of what I've heard about mobile gaming. The 500USD/month users are whales, but the whales need regular people to play with or they'll get bored and leave.

Right now, keeping the number of whales to a minimum is important to keep the regular users happy, but I wouldn't be surprised if in the future some cost/benefit analysis shows that they can take the hit on regular users to squeeze out a few more whales.

It also seems like a bonkers move to pay 500 dollars to talk to someone who doesn't want to talk to you, too. (But that's a different issue.)

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  • [–] 21 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    They'll milk it when upper management is ready to cash out to massively grow short term profits so they can all take huge bonuses. Then they'll replace upper management with scapegoats who can be there to absorb shareholder blowback and try to rebuild something of value from whatever's left.

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  • [–] 20 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Except what they're all "playing" for are people (and lets be honest, this is aimed at creepy men who can't get matched otherwise, so more specifically they're "playing" for women), with their own wants and needs and often safety concerns, all of which this serves to circumvent, which is definitely not how you "win" at tinder (finding an abuse victim? Sure, but not an actual viable relationship. Which again, tells you who this was designed for and why).

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  • [–] 18 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Why are you assuming that men who can't get matched are automatically creeps? That's not at all a good assumption, and is a BIG part of the problem with tinder.

    Back before I met my now fiancee, I never got tinder matches. I only got matches on OKCupid, back when you were allowed to message people before matching with them. That's how I met my now fiancee, too.

    Tinder is incredibly toxic by design and is designed to damage people's mental health. They've taken dating, something that requires a lot of human interaction, and reduced it to a literal slot machine which tinder can rig however they want. They've reduced finding a partner to "does this person look attractive to you?" which is NOT how dating works IRL. I know a lot of people who met their partners IRL and were not attracted to them until they started getting to know each other as friends, then fell for each other.

    Tinder not only exploits the problematic beauty standards in our society, but actively makes them worse. If you're not getting matches you feel unattractive, because every piece of feedback the app gives you says you are. It doesn't matter how charismatic or interesting you are, it doesn't matter how much you and a potential match may have in common, all that matters is the pictures you put up, and maybe the first sentence or two of your bio.

    The whole system is designed to make people using it feel desperate, men and women both, and this $500 to message first thing is incredibly scummy. They suck you in, kill your self confidence, depress you, then offer you what seems like a lifeline.

    This is like a casino offering you a slot machine with a 50% higher win rate for a monthly subscription.

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  • [–] 19 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    I never said men who can't get matched are creeps, I said this is aimed at creeps who can't get matched but would be willing to pay $500 a month to force themsleves on to others. That's who you're jumping to the defence of here.

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  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    No, you just heavily implied it. If you didn't mean to then you need to edit you comment. And I laid out how I clearly disagree with the idea that this is "aimed at creeps," because it's aimed at people who have been made desperate by the predatory nature of Tinder's algorithm. Desperation doesn't necessarily make someone creepy, but it does make Tinder a lot of money.

    Also, why are you making it seem like someone sending a message to someone else on a dating app is somehow a kind of, like, assault? You're using very aggressive language to describe normal behavior by people trying to date, AKA talking to other people who they may be interested in

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago*

    It's not your decision alone to decide if you are a good fit for someone, though.

    If someone, for example, doesn't want to date people who are older than them, there shouldn't be an option for people to just write to these people anyway. Because they think: "but I am so nice and we have so much in common".

    How would they even know that anyway? As you said so yourself, Tinder is basically a collection of photos and a few very shallow stats. It will be used by people to write to others they assume wouldn't match with them in the first place!

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    It's only £20 per month

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  • [–] 14 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    No that's Platinum and also new but the $500 USD per month one is called VIP and also you need to be invited/selected to even be able to get it, which of course is just a ploy to get the selected to feel special and buy it to flaunt that they got invited.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    As someone who never did online dating, what exactly are you paying for with these subscriptions..?

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago

    As a guy, you're essentially paying for the ability to see who liked you. Dating is a seller's market and the sellers of dreams in the market are women due to numbers. With a subscription, rather than aim for the stars, you're able to pick the best of the women that are attracted to you?

    I have no idea. In any other industry the Match Group wouldn't be allowed to exist.

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