New App ‘Hater’ Matches You Based On The Stuff You Can’t Stand

A new dating app is inviting singles to take a great big sip of Haterade.

Online daters are usually encouraged to put their best foot forward, bond over shared interests, and keep conversations positive. That is, unless they’re on Hater, a new app that matches users based on mutual dislikes.

Founded in 2016, Hater promises to make serious online dating more approachable by replacing cumbersome surveys and bios with a fun, alternative way to express your personality (and let out your frustrations over slow walkers and paying for extra guacamole).

The app presents users with thousands of subjects to register their opinions on, ranging from the serious (Vladimir Putin, WikiLeaks) to the frivolous (butt selfies, Brangelina). To make your hatred known, swipe on each subject in one of four directions to indicate whether you love, hate, like, or dislike it. Hater plans to add more topics over time, including user-submitted ones.

“Online dating has become so monotonous,” CEO Brendan Alper told the Huffington Post. “Everyone just goes through the motions. Swipe. Swipe. Swipe. Match. Canned line. Bad date. Repeat. We want online dating to be fun again. Just like in real life.”

When not curating your profile with your personal loves and hates (which, you’ll hate to admit, is actually pretty entertaining), you can swipe through profiles like you would on Bumble or Tinder. Unlike those apps, however, you won’t know much about your potential matches. Hater’s profiles are minimal - photos, age, and the hate/love/like/dislike lists, but no standard dating app info like job or education level.

But Hater does offer something other apps don’t. Hater attempts to alleviate the stress of sending initial messages by providing creative conversation icebreakers. Users can fill in the blanks in sentences with a series of responses - think Mad Libs, but specifically for getting to know potential dates. It’s more interesting than a “hey” or the eggplant emoji, and definitely funnier.

The humorous aspect of the app was baked into the idea from the beginning. Alper is a former banker who tired of finance and turned to comedy. He originally conceived of Hater as a sketch idea, but after doing some research, decided it stood a chance of succeeding as a real app.

So far, Alper says the response to Hater has been positive. “We’ve heard tons of stories of friends sitting around at parties, swiping through topics together, matching with other people, playing our icebreakers,” he told HuffPo.

The beta version of Hater is available for iOS downloads now. An Android version is set to debut in Spring 2017.