Tinder Cuddles Up to Instagram in Latest Update | Hacker News Reader

Tinder Cuddles Up to Instagram in Latest Update

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47 pointssimas42 comments

As somebody who flirted around with Tinder for a little while (ha ha), I think this is a pretty good idea. But at the same time, I think I'd prefer to be able to select which Instagram photos I would like to remain hidden, in case they're of a more personal nature. But beyond this, I can't help but feel the entire Tinder experience is slowly deteriorating. The beautiful simplicity of what it used to be is slowly starting to be replaced, which I suppose is to be expected, but disappointing nonetheless. I can't help but feel they'll quickly monetize the amount of swipes you get, so they can quickly squeeze users down to a couple a day.

As sort of a mini experiment, I downloaded some of the other apps out there that are in the same sphere and I've found Hinge to be particularly interesting (assuming you're in a large city). I'm kind of fascinated by all of these relationship apps and I'd love to see data on which are most effective (not for personal gain, mind you).

They're already monetizing the amount of swipes you get:

http://uk.businessinsider.com/tinder-plus-being-tested-in-eu...

Dropped dead instantly among everyone I know.

I actually think limiting swipes is a good thing. It means people can't just like everyone and then choose the matches that come in later.

Very true. If people I know are any indication, when we'd get to a new city (for a wedding, for example), they'd furiously swipe every person that showed up. All that does it water down the entire app and defeat the purpose of the whole thing. Last thing anyone wants to hear is "Oh, I didn't mean to swipe right..".

It's a question I've been interested in about how you can improve response rates and whether you should give people more swipes based on the amount of actual interaction they have with other people, which may indicate they're using it properly.

Are there any proximity-based apps that don't require Facebook? I'm interested in trying something like this out, but I don't use Facebook for various reasons.

I think Grindr and Hornet let you make accounts without Facebook.

Want to replace Tinder? I'm not a mobile app guy, but I do big infrastructure and know enough Python to be dangerous.

I'm not saying "How hard can it be?" I know that road to hell. But seriously, storing a couple million photos? Storing profile data? There is literally zero barrier to entry. S3, Elastic Search, EC2, and a bit of ELBs or Haproxy for that HA magic.

Let's call it "Blaze". (Seriously, check my profile for contact info)

Yup, I worked at a dating company for a while, the scale is trivial, couple huge DB servers and half a dozen webservers.

I had read a devops job posting for fetlife.com (think kink okcupid/match.com site) a few weeks ago, and you're right! The resources are incredibly minimal to run sites like this, even at scale.

It's not the tech part that's the barrier to entry, it's the social aspect. Figuring out a new way to represent social relationships that attracts users.

The tech portion of a dating app is trivial. The marketing and business side? Less so. Even UI - Tinder wouldn't be Tinder without swiping.

You can't patent swiping, and now that Tinder is charging there exists a vacuum in the market for someone who doesn't charge (or monetizes differently).

But literally all you are doing is copying an existing concept. That never works. You need to have something that makes you unique. Slightly more granular privacy controls or faster response times will not do it.

I got a good chuckle. But seriously, copying concepts works as long as you can execute better in some way. Stripe wasn't the first payment processor. Google wasn't the first search provider. Okcupid wasn't the first matchmaking site.

http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html

"Actually, startup ideas are not million dollar ideas, and here's an experiment you can try to prove it: just try to sell one. Nothing evolves faster than markets. The fact that there's no market for startup ideas suggests there's no demand. Which means, in the narrow sense of the word, that startup ideas are worthless."

You're talking about business concepts (a dating site) I'm talking about more fine-grained concepts (swiping between potential dates).

If you cloned Tinder, pixel for pixel, and added a couple of extra controls, your app would fail. Tinder already has a huge userbase and you have a userbase of zero, and the minute benefit provided by your app would be outweighed by having no users on it.

> Tinder already has a huge userbase and you have a userbase of zero, and the minute benefit provided by your app would be outweighed by having no users on it.

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/tinder-may-have-...

Heh, you're free to your opinion though.

You're countering that with the fact that Tinder has enough users that it can afford to introduce pricing to some of them without losing its place in the market?

Look, by all means, clone Tinder and see how it goes. I'll be interested to watch, while also not investing a second of time or effort on such a concept.

> You're countering that with the fact that Tinder has enough users that it can afford to introduce pricing to some of them without losing its place in the market?

I'm countering with the assertion that no one knows if they have enough users that they can afford to introduce pricing.

Suddenly charging for something does not mean its sustainable, no more than users would pay for Twitter or Facebook.

> I know enough Python to be dangerous.

Off topic: I'm stealing that phrase for my résumé.

I think this is bad. Tinder was built on anonymity, but many people have identifying information (knowingly or unknowingly) in their Instagram profiles. The two services were built for entirely different purposes. By allowing people access to the Instagram profile of a Tinder user, there could be some bad consequences.

I have personally written an app that can take an Instagram feed and group pics by the physical address from which they were taken, if they have GPS enabled for Instagram [1] (I purposely limited it to the first 20 pics in this instance, but that limit is arbitrary). So Tinder users can now unwittingly go from basically anonymous to giving out their home address to people looking to sleep with them. Not awesome.

[1] http://guiyui.com/username_geo.php

Linking Instagram is not required, and most people I've seen while using Tinder have their Instagram handle in their profile text.

This is just Tinder enabling their users to share what they're already sharing in a more convenient way.

The awesome thing about Tinder is: a ton of hot girls use it; not just girls: hot girls. This sounds shallow, but it's not. They somehow managed to make them believe there is nothing wrong with looking for a hook up online (and that's true) but only if you look for it through the right channel.

So at the end of the day no hot girls care about anonymity, they care about not being judged for their choices, and for the better or wrong we still need a hip app to make it happen.

Which in turn is quite ironic: the philosophy was around since the 60s, but the implementation is unmistakably a product of contemporary capitalism.

I'm not sure Tinder got the nth-degree thing quite right - first degree is someone I know, not someone who I have a mutual connection with.

Goddamn engineers, always counting from 0...

I would love to hear this end up being a feature not a bug, where the programmer, in fact, began his counting from 0.

I would've thought a 0th degree connection is myself.

I think they did. The users of Tinder don't need Tinder to tell them the friend they already have, they need it to tell them where potential matches are. So lowering the standard of degree that Linkedin uses would (I assume Tinder would argue) lower the barrier to foster communication between potential matches.

You're not going to use Tinder to date your friend. But you would use it to date your friend's friend. Smart move by them.

Saying someone is a first-degree connection implies to me that I already know them. Changing what a first degree connection is doesn't lower the barrier - it's just confusing. Trying to redefine something I already understand doesn't make much sense to me at all.

Tinder has been showing users people who they are already friends with for as long as I've had the Tinder app. Tinder isn't as useful if you already know the person, but it's still got use.

This is sort of interesting, and I think that this is a good time to comment on a problem I've been having with apps, tinder included.

Updates break perfectly good apps. Due to permissions changes, I haven't updated to Tinder's older update which introduced swipe-undoing and travel. Why? Because besides the fact that I use a version of the app which doesn't seem to adhere to swipe limits, I have no interest in granting tinder more permissions. Also, the plus-feature of visiting different locales can be achieved by using a GPS mock (which I suspect you can't do in the newer versions).

I've seen it too often that apps on phones get worse with each update due to trying to bandage up haemorrhaging losses. While this is a good addition to tinder I think, it's not compelling enough to get me to update.

Maybe they should include LinkedIn integration to avoid awkward encounters.

And this is where Facebook buys Tinder.

Possibly, but it's also an opportunity to flex their social graph and entice other services to use it.

I think that's more in their interest than buying Tinder outright.

They can't. Tinder is already owned by IAC (Match.com, College Humor, etc.)

The app doesn't work on android.. SGSIII, 4.2.1 I believe. Looks to be a problem with Facebook permissions AND image cropping, both on Tinder's side..

I think this update actually makes sense. A great deal of Tinder users list their Instagram username in their Tinder profiles (Usually as "IG: <username>"... it took me forever to realize what IG stood for).

I think this is a case of Tinder observing how their users behave, and giving them functionality that they'll actually want.

I agree, it's a feature which their core demo will take to like a duck to water, while those who don't "get it" will fail to figure out.

Tinder Plus, on the other hand, doesn't help anyone.

This is way better than Facebook integration, cause let's be real, who really uploads pics there regularly anymore? Ha.

The entire world.

* Over the age of 30.

Well, there goes Glimpse: http://mashable.com/2014/02/11/glimpse-app-instagram/

As long as the relationship doesn't go the other way, this doesn't upset me as an instagrammer.

This is a really interesting integration.

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