Tinder

Last month, Tinder rolled out its new and highly anticipated premium service Tinder Plus, which had been teased in the press with few details for months. But rather than praising its new features, Tinder has been criticized for discrimination. The company charges $9.99 per month for users in their twenties, but once you hit the magical age of 30, the price jumps to $19.99.

Compare this to the price daters pay for a service like eHarmony ($18.95 per month with a 12-month commitment as of this posting), which touts its match-making capabilities, and Tinder seems like a rip-off. After all, the monthly fee for eHarmony includes a lot of filters to help find a more "quality" match - an extensive questionnaire, a detailed profile, and a “communications process” - all aimed at helping you find a lasting relationship. While people do find good matches on Tinder, it's a lot more hit-or-miss.

Still, people seem to prefer the game-like swiping of Tinder. And according to experts, they will probably pay for it – even if they are 30 or older.

A recent article in The Washington Post claimed that there is a war among dating services like Tinder and eHarmony, who are categorizing daters and their behaviors according to their ages. Tinder assumes that younger daters are their target market (after all, the service began with heavy promoton on college campuses before it was unleashed on the greater population). eHarmony however, is going after the more “seasoned” dater, who has had enough with all the hook-ups and wants a real relationship.

The online dating industry is said to be worth about $2.2 billion, with one in ten adults averaging more than an hour a day on a dating site or app. This rise in popularity isn’t a coincidence – it’s gone hand-in-hand with the amount of time we spend on our phones – a near-constant accessory. Tinder appeared at the right time and made online dating seem like a game, and more importantly, removed its stigma.

The popularity of Tinder however has had a cost among daters. There is an assumption that the app is only for hooking up, and that people using dating apps aren’t serious daters. At least, this perception has been what traditional dating sites like eHarmony have been pushing. It founder Neil Clarke Warren told The Washington Post: “They put all their money on one variable: looks. That fills me with quite a few little chills… I have presided over the funerals of more marriages than any psychologist, and it is miserable.”

eHarmony isn't the only one speaking about Tinder's flaws. “There are limits to the percentage of single people who will become active Tinder users and repeating ‘casual daters,'” Morgan Stanley analysts told their clients in February. “And in our view, Tinder is reaching those limits.”

So what does this mean? Is Tinder trying to embrace their young daters as the future of dating, or does eHarmony recognize they will never have a service that’s so addictive and easy to use?

Both services offer very different ways of meeting people, and attract different types of users. But it will be interesting to see who will pay for them going forward.

Female Tinder users have dealt with a lot of inappropriate messages from men when dating through the app – it’s one of the issues challenging dating apps today. Men are particularly aggressive in their flirting, crossing boundaries with their sexual suggestions and then wondering why they don’t hear back.

A California-based computer engineer, who incidentally met his girlfriend on Tinder, had heard a lot of his female friends complaining about the guys messaging them over the dating app. In an interview with website The Verge, he disclosed that he had been able to hack Tinder, matching straight guys with other straight guys to see how their typically aggressive flirting progresses.

"The original idea was to throw that back into the face of the people doing it to see how they would react," the hacker said.

His program identifies two men who swipe right on one of his bait profiles (one using a prominent vlogger’s image, the second one of a friend who had let him use her photos). Then they are matched to each other (since they already have the woman they were originally attracted to in common). The suitors’ messages, according to The Verge, were all “unabashedly flirtatious” and relayed back and forth to each other through the dummy profile. Sometimes, it took several messages before the duped men started to figure out something was off.

The creator of the hack apparently stepped in before things got to heated and the matches decided to meet in person. Most of them seemed very confused after exchanging a few flirtatious emails, only to discover later that they weren’t flirting with women, but other men. The hacker witnessed about 40 conversations in the first twelve hours.

It has been reported that Tinder is vulnerable to hacks. There have been a few instances of people tweaking the app to “mass-like” several women at the same time, improving their odds of getting a match exponentially.

The Tinder hacker looked into Tinder’s API and discovered it had few safeguards. “Tinder makes it surprisingly easy to bot their system,” he said. “As long as you have a Facebook authentication token, you can behave as a robot as if you were a person.”  

When asked how he feels about hacking into Tinder’s system, he has mixed feelings. "They ignore all the signs, they ignore all the weird things," he says of the users. "When someone is so quick to meet up without any detail or know anything about the person at all — maybe it’s deserved."

Before flirting with someone you just met over Tinder, you might want to ask a few basic questions first.

Do you have Tinder overload? You’re not alone. Dating apps have made meeting people easier than ever, but dating behavior can be pretty brutal. Messages go unanswered, and connections are forgotten in favor of swiping left and right. With all of the distractions and annoyances that come with dating today, it’s difficult to get to know someone special.

Maybe it's time to disconnect.

When you’re experiencing frustration and overwhelm, it’s a good time to take a break so you can recharge. A fantastic benefit of being single is learning how to take care of yourself without relying on someone else to come along and do it for you. Instead of dating aimlessly and without much enjoyment, focus on yourself and what makes you happy.

Following are some tips to nurture your heart and soul and get you back and ready to date again:

Get away. There’s nothing that lifts the spirit like a new setting. It’s easy to plan a getaway when you’re single – there’s nobody else’s schedule preventing you from making plans, so take advantage! Plan a weekend getaway with friends or jump in your car for an impromptu road trip, even if it’s just for a day. It will give you a much-needed break from routine.

Set a goal and work towards it. Have you ever dreamed of running a half marathon, or finishing college, or getting that certification for a new career? Now is the time to establish your personal priorities outside of a relationship. When you find someone special, you will still want to challenge yourself – why not start now?

Learn a new hobby or sport. This is the perfect time to explore. You learn about yourself when you try new things – sometimes a new activity can become a stress relief and source of life-long happiness, whether you're in a relationship or not. You never know unless you try. So sign up for Zumba, join a volleyball meet-up, or try out that pottery making class – whatever sounds interesting to you, give it a try.

Relax. Sometimes the stress of dating takes a physical toll on our bodies as well as our psyches. For me, hiking and running were great ways to get out of my own head and truly relax. For others, it’s booking a massage or meeting friends for dinner. Fill your schedule with activities that replenish your spirit, and you will find you have more energy, too.

Meditate or practice yoga. This might sound New-Agey, but yoga and meditation are truly helpful ways to let go of anxiety, and there’s a lot of it in dating. Practice taking deep breaths, sitting still for a period of time, and stretching your body on a regular basis. These techniques help you feel more comfortable in your own skin, and less worried about where you “should” be in life. This is most important when it comes to finding a truly fulfilling relationship – you realize that you are enough, no matter what.

Have you ever swiped right on a Tinder match only to discover her profile isn’t real? Since the famous dating app partnered with mobile identity company TeleSign, it claims spam is down as much as 90%.

Spam has been a growing problem for Tinder– prostitutes masquerading as potential love matches eager to sell their services, hackers using the dating app to obtain valuable user information, and even companies like The Gap aiming to capitalize on the 18-25 market with clever marketing campaigns. (Last month they set up their campaign ads as Tinder user profiles without explicit permission from the company – and were asked to take them down.) Also, there was the incident of a hacker tinkering with their API to match straight men with other straight men, which ended up confusing and embarrassing a lot of users.

Even though Tinder verifies people through their Facebook accounts, many people have become adept at creating fake social media accounts, too. So Tinder’s new deal with Telesign seems to be alleviating the problem.

Telesign works by analyzing massive amounts of real-time and historical data on phone numbers, including associated contact information, phone types, geographies, and carriers. Their technology uses PhoneID verification to determine how potentially risky a phone number is, and whether the number really belongs to the person creating the account. If the score is high (meaning high risk), the user is blocked. Telesign also recommended that Tinder implement rate limits. This means that Tinder can set a limit for the number of accounts created using the same phone number. The companies did not say whether the analyzed information from Tinder users is kept private, or how it could be used by TeleSign or Tinder.

Ryan Ogle, Tinder’s CTO said in a statement: “Once we had TeleSign in place, we were able to block fraudulent accounts in a much more sophisticated way. It’s been 100 percent accurate and we’ve seen about a 90 percent reduction in spam traffic as a result, from day one.”

Tinder has taken other steps to cut back on spammers, including limiting the amount of swipes people can do in a 24-hour period with the free service. If they want to swipe indefinitely (as spam bots often do), they will have to pay for Tinder Plus.

This is another big step for the company, which seems to be making significant changes in recent months. IAC, the parent company of Tinder, has brought in a new CEO, and in March, Tinder rolled out its first paid service, Tinder Plus.

Check out our review of Tinder for more information on this popular dating app.

A recent article in The Daily Beast brought up a question that has floated around the online dating community for a while – that is, how do you handle seeing someone you know on an online dating site or app?

For example, have you ever been matched with a co-worker on OkCupid? Or with an ex boyfriend on Hinge? Or with your engaged friend on Grindr? Or even your sister on Tinder? (Yes, this has happened to a few daters.)

Many people have experienced this strange mingling of their real lives and their online dating personas, but have different emotional reactions. While some might be mortified to be matched with a client or co-worker, others take it in stride as part of the online dating experience. Chances are, you are eventually going to run into someone you know if you swipe long enough. So the question becomes: how do you handle it?

In the case of being matched in a potentially awkward situation (say, with your co-worker), would you swipe right out of acknowledgment that you know each other (and the other person has probably already seen your profile on the dating app)? Does this send a confusing signal since you aren't interested? Or would you swipe left and hope that neither one of you brings it up at the next staff meeting?

While online dating might seem like meeting endless random strangers, it really is a lot closer to your existing circles than you might suppose. In the case of co-workers, it might be a good idea to decide what makes you more comfortable – having a good laugh about matching with each other at the next staff meeting, or swiping left and pretending you never saw each other on Tinder in the first place.

Dating apps are making it easier to reject potential matches without the other person knowing if you’ve even seen their profile. If you swipe left, the other person isn’t alerted – they just won’t be able to view your profile. The potentially awkward situation results from that person swiping right before you have had a chance to swipe left.

Some dating apps are addressing this problem by allowing users to filter out people they know in advance of being matched. OkCupid is rolling out some new features by the summer, one of which allows users to hide their profile by default, only to be seen by someone they actively “like” or message. OkCupid users will also have the option of using a Facebook account to block any of their friends that are also on OkCupid.

But does the real problem lie in potentially being matched with a client or your ex, or is it that people you know can see that you are single and looking for someone online? As far as we’ve come with accepting online dating, people can’t seem to get past its stigma. Maybe it’s time we all agree that our world is getting smaller with technology, and now is the time to accept our connectedness. After all, maybe your co-worker is a good match.

Read our Tinder review for more information on this popular dating app.

Real talk about Tinder: it can be a frustrating, maybe even scary, place to be a woman sometimes.

In fact, any online dating site fits that description. The entire Internet fits that description. Give people an anonymous username to hind behind, and suddenly all their worst behavior is on full display. I'm not saying it's everyone, but it's enough people to make it a serious problem.

Normally serious problems require serious solutions, but a California-based programmer decided to take a more humorous approach.

According to The Verge, the unnamed programmer tweaked Tinder's API, turning it into “a catfish machine that fools men into thinking they’re talking to women – when in fact they’re talking with each other.” He began by creating bait profiles, one using the image of a popular vlogger and the other using the image of a friend who gave her consent.

He then developed a program to identify men who indicate interest in one of the bait profiles. Once it finds two, the program matches them to each other and lets them begin the awkward, hilarious process of striking up a conversation. Within minutes of activation, the program was hard at work.

The programmer – who The Verge calls “Patrick” – estimates he witnessed 40 conversations within the first 12 hours. He developed a code to scramble phone numbers and stepped in if a real world meeting was in the cards, but says he feels torn about the ethics of his prank.

"They ignore all the signs, they ignore all the weird things," he told The Verge. "When someone is so quick to meet up without any detail or know anything about the person at all — maybe it’s deserved."

Patrick's prank was inspired by his female friends who often complained about their interactions on Tinder. His first plan was to build a Twitter bot that tweeted every first message received by a female friend, but after looking into Tinder's API, he discovered it had few protections and his vision grew.

"Tinder makes it surprisingly easy to bot their system,” he says. “As long as you have a Facebook authentication token, you can behave as a robot as if you were a person."

Patrick is far from the first to reveal the weakness of Tinder's API, but he's certainly the funniest and most socially relevant. Other hacks can be and have been used for morally ambiguous, or even dangerous, purposes. This one is good for a few laughs and makes a valid, important point about the way we treat each other online.

To read some of the priceless exchanges, check out the original post on The Verge. Check out our review of Tinder for more about the dating app.