Types (Niche)

Tired of Tinder and endless swiping that leads nowhere? While the dating app is popular, it’s leaving most online daters a little cold. Many come across fake profiles, or they match with someone only to have them disappear before actually meeting in person. And then there is the whole hook-up reputation.

So what is an online dater to do? New dating apps like The Grade and Bumble are setting out to alleviate online dating fatigue by putting their resources into creating more quality matches, so users can have a better overall experience. Specifically, these apps analyze and the behavior of their own members, so other users can see how they rate.

Bumble, founded by former Tinder co-founder Whitney Wolfe, aims to give power back to female daters. Bumble only allows the woman to reach out and make the first move – not the guy. So she is in control of the dating experience. A recent article in International Business Times revealed that a new feature Bumble will be rolling out is a verification program called “VIBee” -- a system that rewards users with a badge if they have good behavior on the app. The feature will aim to discourage users from nonstop swiping (left or right), and from spam messaging. If a match sees you have the badge, you’re more likely to be contacted – or so the thinking goes.

The Grade operates in a similar fashion, and as the name suggests – grades people on their behavior while using the app. The grading system is three-fold: you are "graded" based on how complete your profile is, how long it takes you to respond to messages, and the quality of the messages you send. In other words, the app will analyze message quality, including length, spelling mistakes, slang and hostile words and then assign you a letter grade, like in school. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really check context, so while some words might be “red flags” in certain contexts but not others, you could be penalized for using them at all.

Founders of The Grade pride themselves on the fact that they are weeding daters out based on how they behave. With about 100,000 downloads of The Grade so far, approximately 1,000 have been expelled and 2,000 are in danger of “failing.”

Cliff Lerner, founder of The Grade, told International Business Times: “We’re not saying we’re going to take on Tinder. We don’t want every user. All of our users are going to be high quality and accountable for their behavior. A lot of people will be kicked off.”

Lerner’s app focused on the complaints he kept hearing from female online daters, who were asking for an app that allowed them to handle offensive or hostile messages from men. Most women who have online dated have encountered such messages from time to time, which has created a huge trust problem with online dating apps and services.

Behavioral monitoring might be the next Tinder after all, at least for female daters.

The hack isn't the only bad press plaguing the Ashley Madison camp. Following the security breach, the leak of sensitive customer info, and a class action lawsuit, a former employee is now back in the news for claiming she was told to create hundreds of fake profiles for non-existent female “members.”

Doriana Silva, who worked at the company’s headquarters in Toronto, Canada, tried to sue the firm after claiming she suffered a repetitive strain injury after being told to input 1,000 counterfeit memberships in a short period of time.

According to court documents, Silva alleges that her job “entailed concocting phony profiles of alluring females and inputting these profiles into the appellants' online dating service in order to attract male subscribers.” She claims she was given only three weeks to create 1,000 fake profiles on Ashley Madison.

Her claim states that the purpose of the profiles is to “entice paying heterosexual male members to join and spend money on the website. They do not belong to any genuine members of Ashley Madison — or any real human beings at all." She also claims she was led to believe that the creation of fake profiles was considered a normal business practice in the industry.

Silva claimed £10 million in damages when she launched her case in 2012. Avid Life Media, Ashley Madison's parent company, counter-sued. The two sides agreed to drop their cases earlier this year, but the suit is back in the news following the big hack.

Online security experts have suggested Ashley Madison is perhaps guilty of further fraud. Some believe the company may have purchased bulk email addresses from marketing companies in order to create the impression that their user base is significantly larger than it really is.

A source involved in the FBI's investigation into the leak told The Daily Telegraph that inspections of the database suggest that a large number of the female profiles on Ashley Madison were in fact created by a relatively small number of individuals.

Ashley Madison says on its website that it cannot “guarantee the authenticity of any profile,” but it's hardly an uncommon phenomenon for an online dating site to artificially inflate its number of profiles to appear more attractive to new users. Ashley Madison may have taken publically available information from other databases to use on its site.

Alternatively, actual users may have stolen other people's email addresses to avoid giving their real name and contact info.

Either way, the news is ensuring Ashley Madison is hit even harder. Avid Life Media has scrapped plans to float on the London Stock Exchange and now faces serious legal action from those affected by the hack.

August 2015 hasn't been kind to Tinder.

Vanity Fair journalist Nancy Jo Sales wrote a feature called “Tinder and the Dawn of the ‘Dating Apocalypse”, in which she blames the app (and online dating in general) for swiping romance off the screen and disrupting the dating lives of modern twentysomethings.

Rather than quietly moving on, Tinder took a stand. Or, to put it more accurately, Tinder decided to go on an epic Twitter rant against Nancy Jo Sales. The Twitter tear ended up in everybody's headlines, putting the app under even greater scrutiny than the original article.

In the wake of the messy meltdown, many seem to be rethinking their approach to online dating. And interestingly, a Tinder co-founder may be behind one of the best alternatives.

Last year, Tinder co-founder Whitney Wolfe sued the company for sexual harassment and was pushed out of the business. Following the kerfuffle, Wolfe founded Bumble – a free, feminist dating app where women call the shots.

The familiar swipe feature is still in play, and both users receive a notification if a match is made, but only women are allowed to make the first move. So far, the app has been successful. The male-female ratio is about 50-50 and more than 500,000 users have joined. The average user spends more than an hour on Bumble per day.

This month, Bumble plans to launch a new feature to help users separate the frogs from the princes. Changes to the algorithm will measure how users behave on the app. Those with “good” behavior will be rewarded with a verified status dubbed “VIBee.” The hope is that VIBee status will act as a filter, much the way age might, helping users to weed out flakes, trolls, and anyone else with generally jerky tendencies.

Unlike some apps that screen for external markers of social status, like graduating from an Ivy League university, VIBee status is about how users conduct themselves. “Our pre-vetting is about how you behave in the app,” Wolfe told TIME. “If you didn’t graduate from Harvard you can still earn your way in.”

“We want to reward those users who have been good members of the community,” she continued. “It’s about rewarding, not excluding.”

Users who respond to messages and swipe judiciously are eligible to earn VIBee status. Those who always swipe right or never swipe right at all will be screened out, as well as anyone who has been reported for harassment. Users with VIBee status will be able to search only for other VIBee-status users.

Tinder is unlikely to disappear from the scene any time soon, but for those who are questioning the world it creates, Bumble could offer a brighter future. For more on the Tinder dating app, please read our review.

The bad news just keeps coming for Ashley Madison.

The adultery dating site was hacked last month by a group calling itself The Impact Team. At the time of the security breach, The Impact Team threatened to release customer records online if Ashley Madison was not shut down.

Avid Life Media (ALM), which runs Ashley Madison and other dating sites, did not back down and the hackers made good on their threat. More than 30 million email addresses and credit card numbers have been exposed, including those of notable figures in entertainment and politics.

In the wake of the leak, things have only gotten worse for Ashley Madison. There are reports of suicides that may be tied to the hacking scandal. Avid Life Media is offering a $500,000 reward to anyone with info that leads to the arrest of the hackers. The company is also facing a $760 million class action lawsuit over the data hack.

Eliot Shore, a widower from Ottawa, is the plaintiff in the suit filed this week in Ontario against Avid Life Media and Avid Life Dating, a subsidiary that runs Ashley Madison. The legal action alleges that the privacy of thousands of Canadians was breached when the hackers infiltrated Ashley Madison.

"Numerous former users of AshleyMadison.com have approached the law firms to inquire about their privacy rights under Canadian law," the law firms Charney Lawyers and Sutts, Strosberg LLP said in a statement. "They are outraged that AshleyMadison.com failed to protect its users' information. In many cases, the users paid an additional fee for the website to remove all of their user data, only to discover that the information was left intact and exposed."

Lawyer Ted Charney told VICE News that around 100 people have expressed interest in joining the class action so far, noting that anyone who registers will remain anonymous.

It will be up to a court to decide whether Ashley Madison did enough to protect its customers. David Fraser, a Halifax-based internet, technology, and privacy lawyer, thinks the class action faces “a bit of a challenge.” He says the Ashley Madison terms of service are "decidedly consumer unfriendly" and "completely covered their butt."

There may even be a question over whether this can be a class action at all. Ashley Madison's terms preclude customers from filing such suits, but consumer protection legislation in Ontario protects the right to do so.

Either way, it won't be the end of the issue for Ashley Madison. The Associated Press reported that another lawsuit seeking class action status was filed in the US days after the hack became public.

A recent article in Vanity Fair made the argument that apps like Tinder have ruined dating. Reporter Nancy Jo Sales interviewed single twenty-somethings to get their impressions of online dating, and it wasn’t pretty. They admit that “Tinder sucks” and yet they still keep swiping for lack of a better way to date.

Part of the problem, she argues, is that people have a hook-up mentality with dating apps, and men especially. They meet girls to have sex under the guise of pretending to date them, and women have been burned more than once – making them skeptical that any guy wants a relationship.

This argument isn’t a new one. But the reporter feels that dating apps are the real problem – the technology, not the people using them. Let me be more precise: dating apps make it easier than ever to meet new people, providing a way for those who are averse to commitment to do a date-and-dump.

The problem I see with this argument is that it assumes technology is the problem. If we ditched dating apps and online dating in general and went back to an “easier time” – say 1995 – when dating was supposedly alive and well, and all single people were looking for long-term romance. But this just wasn’t the case. In fact, people would hook up and avoid commitment with relative ease – they just did it in person at bars and clubs, rather than through a dating app. Maybe their choices were limited, but the behavior wasn’t much better.

Remember The Rules – dating advice lexicon of that decade? It centered around dealing with men who had commitment issues, basically teaching women how to use their sexuality and femininity to get what they wanted – a relationship.

We’ve come a lot further in our relationship progress in my opinion, partly in thanks to online dating. Dating apps have helped make online dating mainstream. They have allowed shy types to interact more easily with new people. And yes – while some people do use them for hooking up, many others are looking for real love.

Dating takes time. It takes meeting a lot of people before a connection happens. That is the nature of dating – and with a dating app, the haystack is considerably bigger when you are just trying to find that one needle. So it will take you that much longer.

Instead of getting discouraged and giving up dating apps and online dating altogether, it’s time for a different approach. Let’s embrace online dating. Be truthful about what you want so you don’t waste someone else’s time. And most importantly, be respectful to your dates and you’ll find yourself meeting people who will respect you in return.

Cheaters are having a bad week.

In case you're not up to speed on the latest scandal to rock the online dating world, here's the gist: a group of hackers calling themselves The Impact Team attacked Ashley Madison and gained access to the site's database of 37 million members. The hackers got hold of financial records, addresses, and other highly sensitive personal information, and have threated to publish it online unless Ashley Madison shuts down.

Avid Life Media, Ashley Madison's parent company, says it has secured its sites and is working with law enforcement agencies to find the parties responsible. Despite their efforts, files containing emails and passwords for some Ashley Madison users have started to spread online.

Some have called this the beginning of the end for Ashley Madison. It's devastating for any website to be hacked, but infinitely more so when it's designed for a philandering clientele whose top priority is privacy. Ashley Madison has failed to uphold one of its most important – perhaps the most important – promises.

And it gets worse. Avid Life Media announced earlier this year that it hopes to raise $200 million in an initial public offering in London in 2015. The brand's value is based almost completely on the service's ability to protect its members' privacy. Without that, is the Ashley Madison worth anything in the first place?

“If a password manager such as LastPass was hacked,” writes Christina Warren for Mashable, “the service would be dead in the water. After all, the whole point of a password management service is to secure and protect your passwords.”

The same principle applies here. Ashley Madison's adulterous target audience is likely to be wary of a site with a history of being hacked. New customers will think twice before joining. Current customers will jump ship. And the IPO? If the hack doesn't squash it completely, it will at least significantly reduce the value of the company.

A renaissance isn't impossible. Other companies have endured disasters, rebranded, and risen from the ashes. It's possible that Ashley Madison could update its security practices, change its name, and come back to reclaim its place in the online dating market.

But should it? Will anyone buy into the narrative that Ashley Madison has seen the error of its ways and reformed? Will cheaters, who require privacy more than anything else, take a chance on a service with such a shoddy track record? The damage may already be irreversible.