Seconded. Almost every profile I see on Tinder, if there is a profile, explicitly says "not looking for a hookup". (Which is ridiculous to me - how do people expect meaningful connection from just looking at pictures?)
There's nothing ridiculous about it; it's no different than any other dating site, except it doesn't have as much room for your bio. People naturally develop romantic interest in each other based on looks first. Tinder, like any other dating site, is just giving you a venue to meet people who available for dating.
What better method for meeting people do you propose? Go look at the article: online dating is now the #3 (IIRC) most popular method, just behind bars and through friends. Meeting through friends is falling fast, and all the other methods have gone down the tubes: church, school, through family, etc. In a society where people are more mobile (i.e. they move around the country with job changes, they don't live in the same place they grew up or went to college), are less religious, online dating makes the most sense for anyone who isn't a big drinker.
Dating requires more than physical attraction. To do more than hook up, one must determine compatibility, and Tinder provides nothing but the most shallow and difficult tools to accomplish this. You'd have better luck walking around with a list of your favorite interests and biggest deal-breakers taped to your back.
I can only think of two better ways to meet people online: a referral-approval system for friends-of-friends, and actual interaction in a group setting, but online - like Facebook groups or more old-school chat rooms. Both have their problems, but they also rely on good old human interaction to determine compatibility. Whether a friend thinks you're both a good match, or whether you just like someone's snarky commentary on a forum, you're using your human heuristics to find a match instead of computerized heuristics. It makes more sense to me since you're trying to date a human and not a computer.
Dating requires physical attraction, and a way to meet people you're attracted to. Tinder satisfies that, just as going to a bar does.
>To do more than hook up, one must determine compatibility, and Tinder provides nothing but the most shallow and difficult tools to accomplish this.
Tinder provides better tools for this than walking up to a stranger in a bar. A person in a bar doesn't carry a sign around saying a few things about them, such as that they like dogs or cats, follow a particular religion, aren't interested in casual sex, or whatever they choose to advertise about themselves. You can only find that out by starting a conversation with them and asking them these things. On Tinder, there's at least an opportunity to put these things out there, and then someone looking at your profile is able to screen you out.
>You'd have better luck walking around with a list of your favorite interests and biggest deal-breakers taped to your back.
No, you wouldn't, unless you happen to know a place that's packed full of hundreds and hundreds of singles of the sex and age range that you're looking for, and isn't limited to a self-selected group of people that may not be the group you're interested in (for instance, people who drink a lot).
>I can only think of two better ways to meet people online: a referral-approval system for friends-of-friends
That's pretty lousy because it limits you to people within your social circle. If you don't have a lot of friends, or you've moved, that isn't going to help you. A lot of people simply do not make a significant number of new friends after they're 30+ years old.
What would be better is something more like OKCupid, where you're basically forced to create a pretty extensive bio for yourself, which people can use better to look for a good match. The problem with this is that people have been abandoning OKC and other traditional sites for Tinder (IME), and for good reason: the traditional sites let anyone message anyone, and as a result, women get bombarded with message from men they're not interested in, and men waste all their time writing thoughtful messages to women who never respond. Tinder fixes that by only allowing people to message each other if they both "like" each other. Men still waste time writing messages that never get responses, but now it's more like a response rate of 25-50% rather than a response rate of 0.5%. And women seem to like it a lot more too, because they don't get overwhelmed with messages (this happened to my ex-wife after we split: she had to disable her OKC profile because she was just getting too many responses).
If you're able to meet eligible people through your social circle, great. But that doesn't work for a large and growing segment of the population.
Honestly, you sound like a college student to me. We older people don't have time for the stuff you talk about.
If the profile isn't blank, it's probably still equivalent to going to a particular kind of bar on a particular themed night and walking up to someone who looks like they share interests with you. It's just as banal to talk about someone's hair or tattoos as it is to talk about their cat or religion. But as a ton of Tinder profiles actually comment on, many people ignore the profiles anyway.
OkC sucks because of many reasons, but the unwanted messages still happens on Tinder, as both women and men are encouraged by Tinder to 'just swipe right' and figure out if you're compatible once you match on physical attraction. OkC provides filters to cut down on unwanted messages, but yes, it is problematic. There are several things they could do to fix this, but they aren't interested, as increased engagement or investment in "Plus" service = more $$$.
I get that, as a human, you do tend to see the world as more similar to yourself, but Tinder's user base is 16-34 year olds. I don't know what other people do, but i'm pretty sure that in order to meet new people it helps to go outside your social circle, so that's what I do. If you think you're too old to meet new people, I have some 54 year old friends I can hook you up with?
>as both women and men are encouraged by Tinder to 'just swipe right' and figure out if you're compatible once you match on physical attraction.
No one's forcing you to "just swipe right", and if you're getting too many matches (esp. not-so-great ones), a rational person would become more selective with their right-swipes. Most men don't have this problem; they get very few matches.
>I get that, as a human, you do tend to see the world as more similar to yourself, but Tinder's user base is 16-34 year olds.
I completely disagree. I don't know what the actual proportions are (you'd have to get that data from Tinder), but as an early-40s male, I see absolutely no shortage of women in the 30-50 age range on there. It's not just a service for young people any more.
I mean, it's fine if you disagree... but i'm going by the actual numbers[1]. This[3] shows that the 16-24 group and the 25-34 group take up about 39% and 41% of the user base, respectively. The majority of the remainder is 35-44, with 45-54 taking up 4% and 55-64 taking 1%. Compared to a survey from 2014, it does look like the older crowd's use is growing[2].
Based on my own anecdotal use, I find it useless for real connection, only partly due to its lack of tools to determine a good match. I've had long conversations and had plans to meet up more than once, only to be "ghosted" shortly afterward. The only people i've met from Tinder were looking for a hookup. But mine is just one story[3].
> What would be better is something more like OKCupid, where you're basically forced to create a pretty extensive bio for yourself, which people can use better to look for a good match.
I no longer think this is the case. I think on OkCupid, the huge bio and list of likes and dislikes tends to just serve as a way to generate reasons to disqualify someone: "Oh I could never date a vegan/Republican/heavy metal fan/cat owner/gun owner/lesbian bookshop owner." In reality, many very good relationships survive in spite of (because of?) some quirk or quirks between the two parties that seem contradictory.
On Tinder, you get enough of an idea from the photos and short bio whether someone is attractive enough and remotely in your social sphere, and then the conversation and first date let you know if your personalities click.
Answering the OkCupid personality questions was fun, and I had one very long-term relationship that came from OkCupid, but lots of my other successful relationships we probably would have disqualified each other unnecessarily.
I completely disagree. I agree there's an element of disqualifying someone, but I disagree that this is that much of a problem; with a larger dating pool you should find someone you get along with really well.
And yeah, if you're not a Republican and the other person is, that's a very good reason to disqualify them. You're not likely to get along well when you have such a completely different worldview. But regardless, people disqualify each other on Tinder based on that too; I frequently see "Republicans swipe left" on there.
I've found people I really thought were great matches on OKC, the problem is there's too few of them, mainly because everyone's gone over to Tinder, and the other problem is it's hard to get a woman's attention on there since she's getting swamped by so many messages. If OKC would simply adopt Tinder's mechanism of requiring both parties to "like" each other before being able to exchange messages, I think OKC would be the superior platform for mature people who are picky about who they want to date.
hookup = sex with no strings in this context, so it's not ridiculous. They want to talk, and they want a date (or that's what they're asserting). Sex may happen, but that's not the initial intention, that's a part of the eventual goal (steady relationship).
