Hinge Wants to Ban Ghosting with Its Newest Feature
Contributed by: kellyseal on Friday, May 31 2024 @ 07:12 pm
Last modified on Friday, May 31 2024 @ 07:19 pm
Dating app Hinge is doubling down on efforts to curb ghosting on its app with a new feature called Your Turn Limits.
According to the company’s press release[*1] , Your Turn Limits encourages a user with eight or more matches left waiting for a response to their messages to either reply or end the conversation before that user can match with someone new.
“With the launch of Your Turn Limits, we’re testing a new way to help our users focus on quality over quantity – keeping intentionality at the core of their dating experience,” said Justin McLeod, Founder and CEO of Hinge, in a statement. “We’ve heard from daters how they’re feeling overwhelmed, distracted, and, simply put, burnt out.”
Ghosting has long been a problem on dating apps, because it’s relatively easy to drop communication with someone you’ve only messaged on a dating platform. However, the term spilled over into IRL when more and more people started experiencing dating someone only to have them physically “disappear” and drop all contact.
In a recent study by Hinge among its users, 44 percent of respondents said that “lack of responsiveness” is a top dating challenge for them. The company also noted that with matches where the first message was responded to within 24 hours, they were 72 percent more likely to result in a date.
McLeod also noted that having fewer conversations going at a time helped lead to quicker responses. If too much time has gone by and other messages come in and “flood” the inbox, it’s less likely that user will go back through their history to respond to the older ones.
Hinge’s parent company Match Group is putting a lot of focus on the app and in developing new features like Your Turn Limits to encourage relationships. Tinder, another popular Match Group app, has seen a decline in paid users over the past few quarters, while Hinge remains on the rise. In fact, paid users on Hinge grew 33 percent in the first quarter of this year compared with the same time period last year.
Stéphane Taine, Chief Product Officer at Hinge said in the company’s statement: “In today’s dating world, it’s become far too normalized for people to send likes liberally and leave their conversations sitting, leading to feelings of dating burnout for people seeking relationships.”
She went on to say that making the decision to keep the momentum going or stop pursuing altogether is important to both parties in communication, stressing that the feature will help users to “properly close out a conversation to give the person on the other side the closure they need to continue their dating journey.”