Dating

Young jobseekers in China are increasingly turning to Tinder to network and look for a job, rather than to find a date.

According to Sixth Tone, young Chinese college graduates are gravitating to the platform in the midst of a record-setting 20 percent unemployment rate across the country. Tinder is not one of the more popular dating apps in China, but it is known, mostly for the type of people who are on it. Namely, employees of large companies that hold some of the most coveted jobs in the country.

Tinder is also not officially accessible in China, though residents have found a way to join. In fact, the difficulty associated with accessing the platform is one of the reasons people are turning to it – because they have access to people they wouldn’t normally encounter in everyday life. In this region, Tinder skews toward people who have studied overseas and now work for international companies.

Men using filters to enhance their dating app photos tend to attract more matches, but they also come across as less trustworthy to women.

According to a new study published in Computers in Human Behavior, women were shown 10 profile photos of single men, both filtered and unfiltered versions. Most women preferred the more attractive, filtered versions of the men, but these same women also said they didn’t seem as trustworthy as the men in the untouched ones.

Researchers also found that ultimately while the women found altered profiles less trustworthy, they were in fact more interested in dating the men behind them. According to PsyPost.org, this conclusion “ultimately suggests that the allure of heightened physical attractiveness outweighs the reservations arising from diminished trustworthiness.”

Image: Hinge

Dating app Hinge wants people to connect with their dates instead of scrolling their phones, and so it has launched a new guide to help curb dating distraction.

According to Mashable, a whopping 78 percent of Hinge users say that they believe their date isn’t interested in them if they look at their phones during the date (even though a lot of dating app users admit to doing this themselves). Seventy-five percent say they are more hesitant to open up to a date when they are on their phone.

Hinge’s new Distraction Free Dating Guide was created by Logan Ury, Hinge’s director of relationship science, and Moe Ari Brown, the company’s love and connection expert, in collaboration with the Foundation for Social Connection.

Millennials and Gen Z singles are spending more money on dating, with some going into “dating debt,” where they are spending money on grooming, dinners out, gifts, and other related romantic expenses.

According to a new study by Lending Tree, 22 percent of millennials and 19 percent of Gen Z singles have begun to incur “dating debt.”

And another study by Credit Karma found that among daters aged 18-34, 29 percent said they’ve gone into debt for dating, including 21 percent who’ve said that debt exceeded $500 in one year. Twenty-nine percent admitted they had overspent in an attempt to impress their dates, while 19 percent said they did it to “seek intimacy.”

Muzz dating app, formerly MuzzMatch, has had a hard time growing an active userbase in India, despite the country having the third largest Muslim population in the world. Also, nearly 50% of India’s population is under 25 years, making the country the second-largest market for dating apps (after the United States).

Muzz is marketed as a matchmaking app rather than a dating app for Muslim singles, because as founder Shahzad Younas told Rest of World: ““We don’t date. We get people married.” The app however, is encountering safety problems concerning fake accounts and bots, a problem for all dating apps. But there are more issues to consider for a marriage-minded app in India, because dating app users have had their photos taken and used for other purposes.

One such high-profile incident happened in 2022, where a group worked to scrape photos of prominent Indian Muslim women and uploaded them to a dating app “listing them at ‘auction’ with an attempt to humiliate them,” according to Rest of World. This kind of behavior could become more common without specific protocols and safety measures in place.

Dating app Bumble has updated its community guidelines to crack down on bad behaviors like ghosting and doxing, as well as to cut down on bots.

Bumble is coming down hard on the issue of bots by banning actions like “artificially influencing connections, matching, conversations, or engagement through the use of automation or scripting,” according to Tech Crunch. The app has blocked more than 8.2 million fake and spam accounts this year using AI. The problem of bots is an ongoing one for all dating apps, and using AI as a tool to identify and block these accounts benefits users in the long run.

In its guidelines, Bumble added clauses prohibiting adult content on its apps, including language in profiles and attempts to “buy, sell, or promote sexual content” according to Tech Crunch.