Tinder is shit


  • BINNED

    Tinder is such an amazingly shitty piece of software I'm almost speechless. It's particularly interesting because... well it's big, isn't it? Everyone under the age of like 30 knows what it is, it's so much a part of popular culture, there's actually a good amount of people from Blekistan on it, and I'm not even anywhere near the capital where all the cool and hip globetrotting people who speak English live. For comparison, OKCupid as well as pretty much any local dating site are barren wastelands that God forsake, with literally 10 or fewer people roughly my age active in the last month within 50km of me.

    (On one of them I keep getting messages from dudes. "Where do you work out?" Mother fucker, if I ever walked into a gym, they'd have to call a priest of Brodin to reconsecrate the place. I also got a message from one chick with an obvious skinhead fetish and one ~40yo Nazi who must have fallen out of a 1930s "Slavs are Untermensch" propaganda poster. #justbaldthings)

    Aaaaanyway, back to shitting on Tinder. This app is so unbelievably bad, it's like some kid coded it as his first mobile project after only reading the table of contents of App Development For Dummies. It does absolutely nothing right. It's staggering for something this popular. Yes, I know being garbage and being used a lot isn't mutually exclusive, shush.

    It consistently fails to send notifications, I open the app after not thinking about it for a week and suddenly see I have new matches. YOU HAD ONE JOB, YOU USELESS PIECE OF SHIT. Do I need to pay them for that now or something? I did get a notification about a match like once or twice in the past, but nothing in ages. If they did actually turn that into a premium-only feature they did a really bad job at communicating this...

    The "membership" is also really steeply priced, and by the way, it blows my mind that they offer discounts if you pay for more than one month. What kind of train of thought goes through someone's head when they pay for 12 months of premium Tinder? "I wanna find matches better and meet that special someone, but realistically, I'm gonna need at least a year to find someone worthwhile, so I might as well save half"? That might be realistic but it's so totally sad and defeatist, I'm pretty sure it's a self-fulfilling prophecy because I don't think anyone finds that attractive. Seriously, who thinks like that? Also, who spends 5 to 10 dollars a month on this shit?!

    You can't even log into the fucking thing without a Facebook client installed on your phone. Of course, I don't want any dating profile to be in any way associated with my actual facebook profile, even if I just use FB for chat and the occasional event organization - so I have a second one that's completely blank just to get around this. Good thing I don't care about FB Messenger on mobile, because having to switch back and forth between multiple profiles... ugh.

    For the longest time it was almost impossible to scroll between multiple photos on the same profile profile and to get to the profile details on the 1st try because somehow, they managed to fuck up swiping on an app that's literally built around the swiping motion. If you ask anyone if they know what Tinder is, they'll probably answer "that's the app where you swipe left or right on people, isn't it?". They fixed that some time ago by changing the UI so you tap on the sides/bottom to move between photos/see details. It works alright now, except when it doesn't, which I'm about to get into.

    Yesterday this piece of shit got an update, which also reminded me it existed in the first place, so I opened it again. First thing I saw was some dude's profile. Good job, Tinder. (Ok, maybe it wasn't the app's fault and some genius just fucked up his profile settings, even though sex is the almost only thing you can actually set there... anyway, no thanks.)

    The next profile was a woman (yay!), so I tap on the bottom to see the bio, and the app crashes. NICE UPDATE YOU FUCKING SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT MAGICIANS. Let's try one more time! I open the app, see another woman (the original one is presumably lost in time forever, THAT COULD HAVE BEEN MY SOULMATE, THANKS A LOT YOU USELESS DICKS). Try to get into profile details again, the piece of shit crashes again.

    Then I opened it for one last time time and now it just says there isn't anyone near me. Maybe my city just got nuked and the house I live in just has so much lead paint on the walls it's like a nuclear bunker... OOOOOOR MAYBE THIS APP IS JUST A COMLPETE TRAINWRECK. God damn.

    Another problem is that when you actually match with someone and try to have a conversation, you'll quickly discover that you need to find literally any other way to talk, because the incredibly primitive messaging "system" is, you guessed it, also absolute fucking garbage. If you get a message, a lot of the time you don't see a notification (do I have to pay for that, too?!). Sometimes you do. When you do and you tap that notification to open the app, it takes forever as usual, then the message window finally loads, and sometime later that week the actual new message you got finally loads as well. I'm not talking about messages with several megabyte GIF here, just short plaintext messages, which Tinder already has, because it (maybe) showed me a notification which included at least a part of said message, so it's already in there somewhere, it just takes ages to actually appear in the message window. :wtf:

    I'm not even going to go into how I hate the entire way this app works - I know it was meant for hookups and I'm using it wrong (I'm not the only one, but it's really the only decently active service like that around these parts). And it's Garage material anyway. Problem is, the way this app actually works, which is barely, is a huge clusterfuck.

    inb4 "you should get grindr instead"


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @blek said in Tinder is shit:

    Tinder? "I wanna find matches better and meet that special someone,

    I thought the whole point of Tinder was casual hook ups.:belt_onion:


  • BINNED

    @boomzilla God dammit, there was another paragraph there that would make that make sense, but I got rid of it because it was Garage material and I wanted to focus on why the app itself is garbage, not why it pisses me off. Yes, buying 6 or 12 months at a time makes sense if you treat it like a steady source of ass. You can use the money you save on premium to buy your gonorrhea meds, it's actually really smart.




  • BINNED

    Oh by the way, another incredibly bad thing about this is that unless you buy the premium thing, any profiles you see (and that see you) are based on your current proximity - the thing requires location access. You can't normally set your location to a specific city and browse profiles that also have their location set there, you get whoever is near your current position, so if you want to use this while short-term traveling, you're shit outta luck.

    I keep seeing profiles that say they live in another country a lot, presumably because these people are traveling through somewhere nearby. It's very helpful.


  • BINNED

    @magus The red pill thread is :arrows:

    (But yes, if I see one more fucking instagram dog face filter I'm going to just delete this and get Grindr.)



  • @blek It's mostly just a dumb comedy channel, that I immediately thought of after reading your post. Been a long time since I've actually watched the video.


  • BINNED

    @magus I know, the huge faces seem familiar, I've seen something from them before. I just wanted to focus on the actual app being terrible instead of the people on it, there's plenty to rant about there as well but it's hard to write about that without looking like a rabid MGTOW or an incel.



  • @blek It's just another case proving the point that people still don't seem to understand:

    Things are not popular because they are the best. They are popular because someone was convinced they are the best. Maybe they were first, or maybe a small trickle turned into a movement.

    Most people don't care about details. I think in Tinder's case, the only detail they care about is the number of people on it. They'll put up with things no one should ever have to put up with for that.

    But that's basically just how humanity works.


  • BINNED

    @magus Yeah, sure, but it's been a while since it became so extremely popular, and I'm sure plenty of people use the premium thing and pay them heavy money, a quick google tells me the company was valued at 1.35 billion dollars in 2015 - so I'm sure they could hire one somewhat competent person who could probably rewrite the entire app and make it miles better in like a week. It's a really simple app, I'm sure there's some deep hidden logic in the algorithm that decides what profiles you see but I was complaining about the client which is extremely bare bones and still broken in ways even my cynical ass wouldn't expect. They broke swiping.


  • area_can

    I agree that the app sucks, but

    @blek said in Tinder is shit:

    You can't even log into the fucking thing without a Facebook client installed on your phone. Of course, I don't want any dating profile to be in any way associated with my actual facebook profile

    Perhaps this is because I'm in North America but I'm not able to repro this

    I'm able to log in without any fb app installed. It just shows me an embedded web view:

    0_1510183906827_15101839061660.jpg

    They also appear to have an option for phone number login

    0_1510183956596_15101839561390.jpg



  • @blek Optons:

    1. Keep making money
    2. Keep making money, but spend some of it.

    They'll totally go for option 1.


  • BINNED

    @bb36e Hm. I've had it on my phone for at least 6 months, probably more, so I suppose it changed in the meantime. Neither the webview login form nor the phone number option were there when I installed it. Yay for adding features, I guess, but phone number? Can't I just use a user name? Sigh...

    @Magus I knooooooow, but seriously I'm 1000% sure a halfway competent hobbyist programmer could write a vastly better client with the same functionality for like 10 thousand dollars, and I'm really highballing it here. Or hire one in Blekistan, they'll do it for 1k and they'll consider it a great deal.


  • Considered Harmful

    As much as I hate the mob mentality in most things, with Tinder it at least makes sense. A dating app is only as good as the people on it. But I really fucking hate its freemium mentality. Hell, so do its users; so many profiles I've seen say that they directly refuse to respond to Super Likes. Not to mention the fact that it still retains its hookup-app design despite the majority of its users trying to use it for legitimate dating.


  • Considered Harmful

    @blek If it didn't need to be so flashy, I could write a client with identical functionality in a weekend for $0.



  • @blek said in Tinder is shit:

    inb4 "you should get grindr instead"

    Obviously you're joking about this, but if you think Tinder is bad, Grindr is unbelievably worse.


  • kills Dumbledore

    @blek said in Tinder is shit:

    I'm sure they could hire one somewhat competent person who could probably rewrite the entire app and make it miles better in like a week

    I often complain that Facebook could do the same.



  • @magus said in Tinder is shit:

    Things are not popular because they are the best. They are popular because someone was convinced they are the best.

    Or they’re popular because they’re perceived to be popular. Say, a journalist writes an article that mentions (let’s pull a name out of thin air) Tinder specifically, simply because that’s what this journalist has tried for the article, not because it’s any good or because it’s already popular. People read the article, and think that because this “Tinder” is mentioned in the article, a lot of people must be using it. And Shirley, anything anyone else does, is clearly an example to be followed. (I grant you that with dating apps, there’s logic to that reasoning — but not for a lot else that becomes popular for the same reason, whether apps or whatever.)


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blek said in Tinder is shit:

    I'm going to just delete this and get Grindr.

    ...and you think that would be any better?


  • area_can

    @douglasac said in Tinder is shit:

    @blek said in Tinder is shit:

    inb4 "you should get grindr instead"

    Obviously you're joking about this, but if you think Tinder is bad, Grindr is unbelievably worse.

    Damn, and they ripped grindr off too (IIRC)



  • @bb36e said in Tinder is shit:

    @douglasac said in Tinder is shit:

    @blek said in Tinder is shit:

    inb4 "you should get grindr instead"

    Obviously you're joking about this, but if you think Tinder is bad, Grindr is unbelievably worse.

    Damn, and they ripped grindr off too (IIRC)

    Eh, not really. They're both awful location based apps for dating and whatnot, but they go about it differently.

    Grindr shows you a list of the closest 100 (or 300 if you are foolish enough to give them money) people you can chat with, Tinder does the swipe left\swipe right thing.



  • @magus said in Tinder is shit:

    Things are not popular because they are the best. They are popular because someone was convinced they are the best.

    This also applies to Windows, right ? 🍹


  • kills Dumbledore

    @timebandit Haven't you heard? Minix is the most popular OS



  • @jaloopa Not sure if you can tag "popular" something almost nobody knows they're using 🤷🏿♂


  • kills Dumbledore

    @timebandit said in Tinder is shit:

    @jaloopa Not sure if you can tag "popular" something almost nobody knows they're usinghow to use 🤷🏿♂

    Which is why Linux will never be popular


  • area_can



  • @pie_flavor
    It's called the network effect, and it sucks.

    You have to use Tinder because everyone else is on Tinder. You have to use Facebook because everyone else is on Facebook. You have to use Windows because all the programs you need are on Windows. You have to use Android because all the apps are on Android.

    Once there's a clear winner, it's practically impossible for it to change. You could literally have every single Tinder user dislike it and they'd still use it.


  • BINNED

    @anonymous234 said in Tinder is shit:

    You have to use Facebook because everyone else is on Facebook.

    Toby Faire, a lot of people are leaving Facebook precisely because everyone else is on Facebook, including their 80 years old grandma, the village idiot, and millions of bots. Almost nobody I have in my friends posts more than maybe once a week, most never post anything on their timeline.


  • Banned

    @anonymous234 said in Tinder is shit:

    Once there's a clear winner, it's practically impossible for it to change. You could literally have every single Tinder user dislike it and they'd still use it.

    Sometimes it does change. There was that Polish IM app called Gadu-Gadu. It was shit, it used numbers instead of usernames, it had no spam protection, the application was IE-based, and it had shitton of ads. But everyone had it so no one used anything else. Until someone made Nasza-Klasa, which was basically Facebook for former and current classmates. It became a generic social site and the only way to communicate over the internet, so everybody had an account there (IIRC it had 13 million active users in 40-million country back in 2009), and Gadu-Gadu became a desert. After a couple years, everyone moved to Facebook so everyone moved to Facebook.



  • @blek said in Tinder is shit:

    Toby Faire, a lot of people are leaving Facebook precisely because everyone else is on Facebook, including their 80 years old grandma, the village idiot, and millions of bots.

    I like being avant-garde for once in my life. (One of my principal reasons for not being on Facebook is because everybody is on Facebook. I don’t know why, but the more popular something seems to be, the less I tend to be interested in it — unless I discover I have a use for it on my own accord.)

    @gąska said in Tinder is shit:

    It became a generic social site and the only way to communicate over the internet, so everybody had an account there (IIRC it had 13 million active users in 40-million country back in 2009), and Gadu-Gadu became a desert. After a couple years, everyone moved to Facebook so everyone moved to Facebook.

    Similar thing happened in the Netherlands with Hyves. It was hugely popular until Facebook took hold, and then Hyves became an empty husk.



  • @gurth said in Tinder is shit:

    @blek said in Tinder is shit:

    Toby Faire, a lot of people are leaving Facebook precisely because everyone else is on Facebook, including their 80 years old grandma, the village idiot, and millions of bots.

    I like being avant-garde for once in my life. (One of my principal reasons for not being on Facebook is because everybody is on Facebook. I don’t know why, but the more popular something seems to be, the less I tend to be interested in it — unless I discover I have a use for it on my own accord.)

    ⚠ Hipster alert! <nuke-it-from-orbit.meme> 🚎



  • @blek said in Tinder is shit:

    I know it was meant for hookups and I'm using it wrong

    I keep going to the Red Light District in Amsterdam. I just don't understand why I haven't found my wife yet...


  • BINNED

    @wernercd No, that's not it. I'm not American, and people in my country don't really use it as a hookup app - generally I'd say we "hook up" way less than Americans or western Europeans do. I saw some analysis about it some time ago - specifically about how people in different countries use Tinder and what kinds of expectations they have - but I can't find it now.

    Also I specifically tried to avoid complaining about the people who use the app, the whole post is about the app itself being a dumpster fire.

    The point is the app was made for hookups, so we use it wrong around here and it sucks to use it for any other purpose, but that's not really something I can blame the app for. The crashing and the shitty interface, though...



  • @jaloopa said in Tinder is shit:

    @blek said in Tinder is shit:

    I'm sure they could hire one somewhat competent person who could probably rewrite the entire app and make it miles better in like a week

    I often complain that Facebook could do the same.

    And therein lays the problem...


  • BINNED

    @douglasac
    I actually think Grindr came first, which I find kind of ironic (unless the similarity in name is not a rip-off but some deeper meaning I'm missing).

    I once tried to check out Tinder ("let's see what straight Grindr looks like"), but deleted it the second it asked for Facebook credentials. What the heck is this, FarmVille?!

    Anyways, I doubt Grindr is actually worse than what Blek described here, but it is incredibly bad. And expensive as hell. I would actually pay like 5-10€ for a decent full version once, but that's about what they ask for a single month. Why? To get extremely basic things like push notifications for messages. :rofl:
    Fuck right off.
    There's only two things to do there anyway. Block someone after you got a ton of unsolicited ugly dick pics (hey, if I do want to see it I will literally just ask), or get the phone number and move to a normal messaging app.
    There's actually an alternative app some people use here, it is way better, and it's been around longer too. But since it's a local thing and not some "disruptive" thing out of California, it's missing the everybody-uses-it networking effect. Sigh.


  • BINNED

    @blek said in Tinder is shit:

    a lot of people are leaving Facebook precisely because everyone else is on Facebook, including their 80 years old grandma, the village idiot, and millions of bots.

    👋


  • sekret PM club

    @antiquarian I'm still on Facebook for two reasons:

    • It's the only communication method I know I share for certain friends who no longer live near me
    • It allows me to play and save progress in some timewaster flash games that I can use to shut my brain up for a couple minutes every now and then

    If it weren't for these two, I'd delete my profile and be done with it.


  • BINNED

    @e4tmyl33t Yeah, I'm on FB because of friends too. Most of them even live near me, it's just that facebook makes organizing things convenient and I don't know of anything that has private chat, group chat, and event organization tools at the same time.



  • @topspin
    Yeah, Grindr definitely came first (2009 I think?)

    But if it is not at least worse, it's just as bad, what with, as you said, needing to pay for things like push notifications and the userbase being somewhat, uh, obscene.

    Then there's only recently sorting out the spam problem, having arbitrarily enforced policies (so you can't have too much showing, fine, but apparently photos of lines of cocaine is acceptable), no ability to transfer messages across devices, has random fits of unreliability, the fucking awful video ads (I have seen three variations of one for something called Wizard of Oz slots, worst of all is one that goes for thirty seconds) and along with their rather lax approach to security in the past, particularly around location sharing.

    Tinder gets a mention in this video, but they spend a good quarter of an hour talking about Grindr specifically. If you've got 45 minutes to kill it's an interesting talk. I don't know if Grindr have fixed the bugs properly since (the video is a couple of years old), but given that video, I doubt it.

    I'm not sure what the alternative app is used there, but Hornet here is not as popular as Grindr but is definitely better in every way (the ads aren't obnoxious! Notifications are free! You can have multiple pictures on your profile! The app actually works 99% of the time!). It would be nice if more people used it because the amount of issued I had with it were far, far less than those I've had with Grindr.



  • @benjamin-hall said in Tinder is shit:

    ⚠ Hipster alert! <nuke-it-from-orbit.meme> 🚎

    I’m not sure if you’re accusing me of being a hipster, but I suspect you are. Let me assure you I’m a child of the ’90s.



  • @gurth said in Tinder is shit:

    @benjamin-hall said in Tinder is shit:

    ⚠ Hipster alert! <nuke-it-from-orbit.meme> 🚎

    I’m not sure if you’re accusing me of being a hipster, but I suspect you are. Let me assure you I’m a child of the ’90s.

    I was joking based on the "if it's cool I don't like it phrase."

    Here's a joke--why did the hipster burn his mouth?

    He drank his coffee before it was cool.

    Yes, I know, the bad joke thread is :arrows:


  • Considered Harmful

    @blek said in Tinder is shit:

    I keep seeing profiles that say they live in another country a lot, presumably because these people are traveling through somewhere nearby. It's very helpful.

    For casual hookups, of course. People trying to find a soulmate on Tinder is a use case they understandably didn't foresee.

    @blek said in Tinder is shit:

    @magus The red pill thread is :arrows:

    You want the blue one.


  • BINNED


  • ♿ (Parody)

    I cannot help but think of this song whenever I see this thread's title:

    Slipknot People=Shit Music Video – 03:39
    — Nihl



  • Official Thread Shitpost: the whole datinghooking up for casual sex app thing never made sense to me, nor do personals/hook-up ads in general. However, this may be due primarily to seeing the human/dumpster-fire hybrids my father found through them. The fact that he was looking for horribly broken people whom he could break even further did sort of bias me against that sort of thing.

    Or it could be the whole "complete inability to understand ordinary people" thing on my part. I dunno. 🤷♂



  • @scholrlea said in Tinder is shit:

    complete inability to understand ordinary people

    Oh, that's easy: they're a bunch of idiots :sadface:



  • @timebandit said in Tinder is shit:

    @scholrlea said in Tinder is shit:

    complete inability to understand ordinary people

    Oh, that's easy: they're a bunch of idiots :sadface:

    That criterion has insufficient resolution. I need a diagnostic tool which differentiates them from, for example, myself.



  • @scholrlea said in Tinder is shit:

    I need a diagnostic tool which differentiates them from, for example, myself.

    You have to talk to them for a while.

    That's the painful part 😉



  • @timebandit said in Tinder is shit:

    @scholrlea said in Tinder is shit:

    I need a diagnostic tool which differentiates them from, for example, myself.

    You have to talk to them for a while.

    That's the painful part 😉

    For me, or them? (Actually, I'm pretty sure it would be 'both'. That word seems to be the leitmotif for me when it comes to the subjects of sex, gender, and romance, really.)



  • @benjamin-hall said in Tinder is shit:

    I was joking based on the "if it's cool I don't like it phrase.”

    Thought so, though that’s not exactly what I said :)