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.
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"