Tinder

Yeah it does sort of look like it. Immediately going to an email address is fishy. I got into a really nonsense interaction with a scammer and the penny only dropped when they wanted to funnel me to some kind of fake-ass verification site that required credit card details. I didn’t get fully scammed but still felt v naive for having gone that far.

Decided to experiment joining up with Tinder, and after a couple of weeks stumbling around with it have come to the sad realisation that it's just the same "pay to win" mechanics that plague modern gaming, but applied to online dating instead. It's now not so much an easier way of allowing people to hook up as "how much are you willing to pay in order to get noticed"?

I really do feel like I missed the boat with the whole thing, i.e. not getting in on it before it turned into an over-monetised nightmare.

I mean ffs, paying for a full account and then being expected to pay more just to message people is such a piss-take.

What’s this pay more to message people thing? Messaging someone who hasn’t swiped on you or something?

Yeah basically if someone hasn't already matched with you can't message them without paying extra on top of your existing sub. It feels like they try to squeeze you for every penny, every useful feature costs just that much extra.

I also noticed prior to going "Gold" I was getting a steady-ish number of likes, which pretty much dried up the instant I activated my sub. I can't help thinking this is a deliberate part of the process, because once they've got you on the hook you'll then be expected to fork out more for Boosters which fulfil the function of allowing people to actually see your profile. It certainly doesn't help make it feel not like a scam.

xp that seems like a feature that breaks the premise of the app so I see why they’d make that a cash grab?

You can mostly tell who has swiped right on you without paying for gold. I find that when I open the app the first person presented to me is usually some conventionally attractive normie. When I swipe left, the next person is almost always someone who has liked me, as evidenced by the "you missed a match" message I get if I swipe left (or more obviously the match I get if swiping right).

You don't need to pay a penny for Tinder. It's fairly easy to see who's liked you (as they're not pixelated out very much) and once someone likes you they'll almost always come up in your feed at some point.

Decided to experiment joining up with Tinder, and after a couple of weeks stumbling around with it have come to the sad realisation that it's just the same "pay to win" mechanics that plague modern gaming, but applied to online dating instead. It's now not so much an easier way of allowing people to hook up as "how much are you willing to pay in order to get noticed"?

I really do feel like I missed the boat with the whole thing, i.e. not getting in on it before it turned into an over-monetised nightmare.

I mean ffs, paying for a full account and then being expected to pay more just to message people is such a piss-take.

― "Spaghetti" Thompson (Pheeel)

my feeling is that it's less "pay to win" and more "pay to _feel_ like you're winning". i couldn't get a date for ages and it wasn't because i wasn't paying for the dating sites, it was because i was a fucked up person with no idea how to have a healthy relationship with other people. i tried doing some of the queer dating sites but i don't know how to take pics of myself that make me look hot (advice to cis men: for the love of god do not post a pic of you holding a fish, it's not so much that you're doing it that bugs me as that _you genuinely don't even know what you're doing is A Thing_) and I mean fuck it if I ever get to a point where I feel like I'm competent to date I'm on Discord.