OkZoomer Takes off Among College Students
Contributed by: kellyseal on Monday, April 27 2020 @ 09:00 am
Last modified on Monday, April 27 2020 @ 09:07 am
Dating app OkZoomer began as a joke, but has unexpectedly taken off among college students across the U.S.
The coronavirus has forced people to find creative ways to connect, and college students have risen to the challenge. Ileana Valdez and Patrycja Gorska, two Yale Juniors, noticed the Ivy League Meme Consortium was growing fast with almost 100,000 members who were posting memes about their new social lives over Zoom. They thought they could do something similar with virtual dating.
According to The Dallas Observer[*1] , they created a Google Form to match people going on blind Zoom dates as a joke, but then they began seeing hundreds, then thousands, sign up. In just two days, almost 2,400 students from 170 colleges across the country had signed up. Gorska and Valdez recruited more students to help, with a total of six people staffing their project, including Valdez’s brother who created an algorithm to help with matches. Now just weeks later, they have over 12,000 sign-ups.
“Since freshman year I’ve always wanted to do some sort of dating app thing,” Valdez said to Rolling Stone[*2] in an interview.
It differs from a traditional dating app in that location isn’t a factor, because it doesn’t need to be. Students who live in different states or hours away from each other can be matched to go on a virtual date, because right now they aren’t able to meet in person anyway.
In fact, matching with people completely outside your social circles seems to be a selling point according to Rolling Stone. They interviewed a junior at Yale from a small town in Wyoming, who noted that Tinder matches him with people he already knows. But with OkZoomer, he was matched with a freshman from Tulane – someone who would never otherwise cross his path, which makes the dating process more interesting for him, even if it’s only virtual.
Valdez and Gorska are refining their match system. The form was created with only a couple of simple questions such as what college you attend, your age and gender - but now includes questions like “what keeps you up at night?”
So far, the founders say users have not reported any harassment or inappropriate actions on their Zoom dates. Notably, users skew heavily female.
Right now, the app is still a Google-based form but Valdez and Gorska are looking into turning it into an app. Samuel Cooper, one of their team and an SMU student who is helping develop OkZoomer told the Dallas Observer: “We are all locked in our bedrooms, it has to be that way now. Even concerts are virtual in 2020,” Cooper says. “I think there’s a lot of room for this to be something really unique.”