Grindr has faced a federal investigation, layoffs, mismanagement, and turmoil
buzzfeednews.com
buzzfeednews.com
Men wanting to fuck is not sustainable?? TBH, this whole article strikes me as after-the-fact hand-wringing and blame-gaming about how Grindr "never achieved its vision", a vision I guarantee 99% of its users couldn't care less about. Grindr was always about men finding other men to fuck (and sure, sometimes to go out on a date with or hang out and chat with), but the idea given in the article of it morphing into some sort of "queer Atlantic" has all the hallmarks of a completely out-of-touch and delirious exec.
At one point an app could arguably very popular and:
Users: This app is great!
Company: This app is yet to reach our goal X.
Parent Company: This app should do Y.
So then what is the next step? Is some sort of self destruction inevitable?
It's unlikely such a world will ever exist, but I'm a dreamer. Don't kill what has value if it can be self-sustaining somewhere.
Yeah I see a lot of purchases that make no sense, not going to get along with their parent company.... and they just trash something that might be worthwhile.
The stories about them sharing HIV data with the Chinese government is horrific. Pretty sure they could microtarget that into individuals.
The article goes on and on about creating a kind queer space and the new owners not understanding the community. Except, having actually used Grindr, this is a perfect summary of the experience.
“Scott openly mocked Kindr,” a former employee recalled. “He didn’t understand why we wanted to celebrate what he saw as ‘fat people.’”
That is, in fact, Grindr in a nutshell. It's for anonymous torsos looking for action while their boyfriend/wife/roommate is gone. There is no kind community on Grindr. Scruff, maybe. But Grindr is just lust and body negativity laid bare.
When I moved to a different country and knew literally no one there, I turned to the app exclusively to make friends. It worked, but my boyfriend at the time did not believe my story.
Back to my country, I used similar apps more than once to find people willing to play football with me and my friends. Unfortunately, this never worked and we had to play with uneven teams.
The world has been better for queer people living in many civilized & tolerant countries compared to 10 years ago when Grindr was first released. How much role Grindr had to play in this is extremely doubtful.
But it was first, and the network effects were obvious. You had other apps in use in large gay cities in the States, but while traveling, and you want that fun hotel action, you pretty much had to go with Grindr.
Yes, sure, Grindr started with being just about sex. But there's a huge interest amongst gay people for long term relationships and a dearth of apps that cater to them.
OKCupid was, for a time, a go-to app for gay men interested in LTRs. But OKC never capitalized on that opportunity -- never built features, or outreach, or anything to grow that niche. Plus, a couple years ago they dramatically changed the app (in ways to address issues for straight users) which negatively affected gay LTR-oriented men.
Tinder is now the primary app for LTR-oriented gay men, and it's terrible. Filtering options suck. The matching system is terrible.
Grindr could've been more than it is. It could've had a monopoly over the entire gay men dating app vertical -- for short term and long term relationships. But they squandered that opportunity. If the software had been better, and if the management and community side had been better, I think we'd be talking today about Grindr as a successful model for a startup. But nope, we're reading articles like this instead.
If such personnel willingly uploads compromising photos of themselves online, then it's their own fault, not the platform or the platform owner's.
"Mr. Smith that works for government/corporate office of company, we have chats of you trying to solicit other men, tut tut, what ever will your wife and daughter think, we don't have to tell them but you'll have to do something for us in return".
This is literally the kind of stuff that agencies like the Defense Security Service looks for when investigating people to issue security clearance, in the case of DSS for stuff under the Department of Defense umbrella. It's just one way you can be exploited.
Similarly, I have a bankruptcy, that makes it difficult for me to ever have a security clearance again, especially anything greater than Confidential. My poor credit choices make me a 'security risk' because I might amass debt again and be easily influenced eyeroll.
It needn't be someone cheating either, being gay is still not socially acceptable in MANY circles remove wife/daughter from the above and change it to pastor, co-worker, employer, mother, father.
It doesn't have to be just the fact that the individual is gay or bi either, a listed kink could be used to coerce someone into a mildly compromising situation to maintain their privacy, then once you get them to do something compromising with their employer you now have even more leverage "oh well we could tell them you did this for us, so you'd better keep co-operating".
This is also used in television, an example being I believe season 2 of Madam Secretary with the gay Russian student at the war college and the FBI secretary in The Americans is compromised through a vanilla heterosexual relationship.
It's also used in non-espionage/corporate sabotage stages, like sextortion with both adults and minors by ether coercing someone into doing sexual things on camera or hacking a webcam/hiding a camera and catching them doing something sexual (or just naked) and using it as leverage against them.
This is a fairly competent wiki article with the TL:DR being
>There have been various attempts to explain why people become spies. One common theory is summed up by the acronym MICE: Money, Ideology, Compromise or Extortion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motives_for_spying
Compromise or Extortion being the important parts as far as Grindr is concerned.
None of the security concerns you mentioned will be solved if Grindr is placed under "trusted" ownership. Having a Grindr profile is a choice, not an entitlement or obligation. This is being framed as a national security issue 3 years after Kunlun Tech acquires majority stake in Grindr and 18 months after it fully bought out Grindr, because hate-fearing all things (and people) Chinese is too in vogue in the U.S. right now to not join on the bandwagon.
The fact is this is an app owned by a Chinese company that is being used by a vulnerable, often still persecuted, community to hook up with anonymous individuals that may or may not be openly gay.
It is worth noting that homosexuality was illegal until 1997 in China, was classified a mentall inless until 2001, in a country that still regularly bans LGBTQ events, that does not allow homosexuality in television shows or movies as part of a list that also includes 'sexual perversion, sexual assault, sexual abuse, sexual violence, and so on', in a country where creating content on the internet that contains references to homosexuality and the scientifically accurate words for genitalia is strictly banned.
If that's not enough reasons for you to scratch your head at a Chinese company owning a gay hook up app... then I suppose we'll have to agree to disagree.
When Kunlun Tech's ownership of Grindr was labelled as a national security risk, the U.S. government certainly did not take China's LGBT rights record or the privacy of regular American civilians into consideration. It was strictly about government & military personnel. I applaud your vivid & divergent thinking skills buy I'm afraid you've gone too far from the actual issue.
Publishing an advocacy magazine, with a paid editorial staff, was strange for a for-profit company. The article's main criticism of the new management seems to be that they focused on the core business of the company.
Grindr is a truly terrible app. Not because it allows men to hookup with other men but because it is just a very badly designed app. It would go for YEARS with barely a change at all then they would add some stupid useless feature that was a direct copy from Scruff (and friends).
It was impossible to manage your conversations, there was a constant stream of new messages and if you deleted a message thread you lost ALL the history. This means you could either delete threads of people you weren't interested in so you could keep track of the ones you were but then if you got messaged again by someone you deleted it was impossible to know if you had talked to them before. It was extremely frustrating to use.
I didn't like to delete messages because often a profile picture would be blank or a (misleading) torso/other. Then in the thread the person would send me pictures and I would know that I had talked to them and wasn't interested. The number of people who signed on, created an account, "got off", deleted the app, then created a new account the next time they logged on was STAGGERING.
The problem was that if I wasn't interesting in them and deleted the message then the next time they messaged me I wouldn't have any of those pictures/chats to remember who they were. It was a catch-22, either clean up your message threads and risk have the SAME conversation over and over again OR keep all your message threads and make it impossible to find the threads of people you wanted to talk to.
Also IIRC, Grindr would SCROLL TO THE TOP of your messages when you backed out of a thread. This meant if you were searching for someone with a non-obvious/blank profile picture you would scroll down, click on one, see the chats and know it's the wrong person, then have to remember how far you had scrolled down so you could go that far then keep looking. It was infuriating to use the app.
Couple all of that with the spam, harassment, new account creation to evade blocks, pissed off people because you weren't interested in fucking them, confusing UI/UX, inconsistent push notifications for paid accounts, and more.... I fucking hate Grindr. At least Scruff had a nice UI and tools/features that I actually liked using but the user-base.... Grindr DWARFED Scruff's user-base, it's why on Scruff you would stay "on the grid" for like 24 hours after opening the app while on Grindr it would be like 1hr. They had to make it seem like there were more people than there were.
I sincerely hope that my days of gay hookup apps are 100% behind me. It's a a cesspool that I never want to set foot in again. That said... If I ever become single again I'll probably be back. For all it's failings it's where I met my BF.
And the spam and phishing accounts have become rampant.
Their APIs are still open for anyone to access and get location information of all the Grindr users and spam them. There is nothing stopping anyone. Which is the reason for rise in spam.
Given his actions on these issues that we know about, what about all the stuff we don't know about?
For all we know, they've had tons of data breaches and covered them up. I wouldn't put it past this guy.
Is it okay for a CTO to give HIV data, photos — probably explicit photos given the nature of the platform — to China’s government, without permission of the user? I don’t think so.
That crosses into personal attack. Please don't do that in arguments here, regardless of how wrong someone is or it feels they are.
And could you please not post in the flamewar style to HN generally? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20473318 is an example.
If Queer was a fully synonymous with gay, the acronym wouldn't be "LGBTQ+" but simply "LGBT+".
The term can also ambiguously imply a particular political stance with regard to the role of gender in society, or more strongly a particular leftist philosophy.
I am gay man, I do not identify as queer, I think that is pretty common. I'm fine mostly with the umbrella term, but also don't identify with enough parts of that politics that I wouldn't use the term myself ever.
The original commenter is right that the apps don't necessarily seem welcoming to the specifically queer identified.
That's practically implied on a tech industry forum! But I think I see your point.
That is, they were someone who uses or tries to use technical and/or electronic means to "hack" their brains, for stimulation, improvement (memory or other cognitive function), etc.
A mild version would be something like using a tDCS system (especially if home-brewed). A hardcore version (I do not know of any real-world examples) would be some kind of homebrew brain implant.
Note: Such individuals are not the same as those who implant things like magnets or id chips under their skin for various purposes - though there is overlap of the two communities.
I'm not sure what - if anything - "grinders" call themselves today, or if there isn't any issue at all (part of me suspects the latter).