General News

Hinge has teamed up with renowned psychotherapist and relationship expert Esther Perel to create new prompts for users to engage in conversation.

Perel was involved in creating new “Your World” prompts, including a collection of ten questions designed to help Hinge users share more about themselves in their profiles and hopefully attract better matches.

“[The prompts] are intended to help someone reading them have a bit more imagination about how your world and their world might connect,” Jackie Jantos, Hinge’s president and chief marketing officer, told Fast Company. “Esther contributed what she knows about getting into deeper, more intimate conversation.”

Tinder is testing a new height feature, which sparked controversy among daters after a screenshot from a Reddit forum disclosing the feature was leaked.

According to Tech Crunch, Tinder confirmed that it is testing the height feature, but only among its paying users. In other words, subscribers to Tinder Gold and Tinder Premium who are participating in the test group can now filter their matches according to height preferences. The testing is taking place globally.

According to Tech Crunch, the feature allows paying users to set preferences for height, but the app won’t block or exclude matches who don’t meet the requirements. Instead, the company says the feature will “inform recommendations.”

The U.S. Embassy in Mexico has issued a critical security alert for Americans using dating apps when traveling in Mexico due to several confirmed reports of kidnapping.

According to Newsweek, the Guadalajara Consulate confirmed reports of US citizens being kidnapped by people they met via dating apps, particularly in popular tourist destinations like the Puerto Vallarta and Nuevo Nayarit areas.

"Victims and their family members in the United States have at times been extorted for large sums of money to secure their release," the security notice said.

Tinder CEO Faye Iosotaluno announced in a post on LinkedIn that she will be leaving her role in July after two years as head of the app and eight years working for parent company Match Group.

This is the latest shakeup for Match Group, whose new CEO Spencer Rascoff recently announced that Tinder’s chief technology officer would also be leaving at the end of May, with no replacement named.

Match Group said it would be laying off 13 percent of its workforce in efforts to cut spending, the bulk of which would come from Tinder, according to The New York Post. Tinder has seen a decline in paying users over the last several quarters, and activist investors have been pushing for a turnaround. Hinge is the company’s bright spot, which is steadily growing despite the industry’s general decline.

SmashTogether, a new dating app that was to launch in beta version on May 15, received a cease-and-desist order before the platform went live.

The new dating app was meant to bring together fans of Super Smash Bros, a popular video game, with its name being a cheeky reference to hooking up. SmashTogether doesn’t say who ordered a cease-and-desist, but likely it’s from the Smash Bros. game’s company Nintendo.

The legal news was announced via a Twitter post from SmashTogether, alongside a picture of Yoshi from the video game perched on a wall and looking off into the sunset. 

A recent study by OkCupid has found that above all else, singles want to know where people stand politically, and more specifically, if their matches’ views align with their own.

According to OkCupid's blog post, 6 in 10 women around the world want their partners to share their political views. In the U.S. which has become more divided since Trump took office, that number climbs as high as 70 percent. More than half of Gen Z men and women want to share the same political views, as do 63 percent of Millennials and 64 percent of Gen X daters. Among LGBTQ daters, that number goes up to a whopping 80 percent.

According to OkCupid, today’s singles are more interested in where someone stands on issues like climate change or reproductive rights, rather than something benign like where they last went on vacation. And if their politics don’t match, it can be a dealbreaker.