Isn’t hinge addressing this
To a complete outsider it feels as if Hinge is just becoming the new Tinder. Anecdotal of course (mostly from women friends), but partly supported by the growth of Hinge lately.
People looking for relationships don't want to be matched with people only looking for hookups, and people looking for hookups don't want to part of a club that accepts them. Apps have the incentive to make money so they don't really do anything.
Hinge's free tier is absolutely excellent and I have gotten multiple dates, as well as a girlfriend, without paying a cent.
What's the catch, you may ask? As with most dating apps, let's just say that if you don't have a "highly competitive" profile, you will struggle if you don't pay for high-volume swiping.
If you have a higher than average Elo, it will seem like having a free lunch. But that's because it's fueled by someone else's desperation at being caught in low Elo feedback loop early.
You then have high Elos who cycle through the app quickly and don't pay, and the rest who cycle more slowly and are more likely to pay during their time there.
I don't plan on returning to any apps, because the whole experience feels dehumanizing, and I'm looking for something enduring now.
I found the people in the "rose list" to just look like Instagram profiles with fairly vanilla profiles and standard TV/socmed good looks, whereas I usually fit better with other nerdy weirdos of average/decent looks. It's oversimplification, but that's about as good as I can get as a generalization.
I still spent some weekends taking care of things at home and plenty of others with dates over the course of several months. I met a few lovely people who I'd totally say hi and chat with if I ran into them out and about today. I went out a few times with one or two that eventually fizzled. And I went out with one that I wouldn't have met otherwise (lives 45min away) and am still involved with a year later.
I never paid for it (Hinge) and just treated it as a way to "surface" potentially interesting people to say hi to, chat with, and potentially date. For all the flaws, it's a more effective way to do this than counting solely on meeting people in your physical sphere.
Since you have a limited number of "likes" per day, you have to actively "say no" to people that's attractive to you.
That said, this is not the only thing happening, and the platform apparently also does the opposite, or does batches (exclusively low-Elo followed by exclusively high-Elo for a while). At the end of the day, it's an ML blackbox.
I have seen this on NYC subway adverts, but is there anything substantially different about their app or business model that backs up their motto?
That sounds pretty counterproductive to me? I feel like many people on Tinder already volunteer way too little information about themselves in their bios. I guess maybe that's OK if you're just swiping based on the person's pics but that seems like a bad strat for finding a partner.