I have the absolute pleasure of sharing my knowledge, experiences and thoughts about online dating (or as I prefer dating generally) as a ragged university talk at one of my favourite venues, the royal exchange in central Manchester.
It on Sunday 1st November from 2pm – 5pm and its free to attend, so there is no excuse for not coming out to listen and take part in the discussion! I won’t even be using slides this time, it will be just me talking and throwing some thought out for people to discuss and fire back at me. Its going to be pretty raw or even ragged… (pun!)
It won’t just be me, there will be Amber from Bristol University talking about the Mafia if you are less interested in the ways people meet and date in the 21 century.
I was introduced to Ragged talks when I attended one a while ago in the Castle Hotel. I liked the idea and instantly signed up to give a talk about something , of course I was pleased when I was given the green light to talk about dating and how much its changed from previous years gone by.
I couldn’t even bring myself to finish the VF article. Story after story about relationship-challenged New Yorkers. Men in New York treat women terribly and brag about it in Vanity Fair. Wow, you don’t say?
The VF article is a retread of a topic that’s been beaten to death by the media and dating bloggers for almost two years, but VF decided to hang out with a bunch of New Yorkers who rack up Tinder sex-mates like there’s no tomorrow and talk to them like they are adults or something. The writer clearly emerged from a cave last week and the first thing they did was go on a Tinder date and now she’s scarred for life.
Tinder is simply a throw back to old skool dating (when it was al about looks and not the personality), but it doesn’t stop a whole host of articles, posts and shows being written about it… even in mid 2015! Tinder has become the symbol of our misogynist culture much like how the game was a few years ago?
“It’s an eye-opener and validation of a woman’s worst fear. The guys are swiping right to hook up and it’s all just a game.” Give me a break. The women who enable men to behave this way are just as complicit in the degradation of modern courtship as Tinder is. And Tinder is at the bottom of the pile, along with Ashley Madison.
Its so clear there is a problem, as many people including Sherry Turkle and even comedian Aziz Ansari’s modern romance, identifies. They wonder about current social impact of not just its users but on the mating process as a whole!
David really gets into to the metric problem of the throw away action of a swipe.
…Tinder’s definition of a match as two people physically moving their fingers about a quarter of an inch to the right compared with writing and responding to emails. Comparing swipes to responded-to emails is ridiculous; they’re not even comparable. But we’re talking about Tinder here, so anything goes.
How about this. Whenever two people like or favorite each other’s photos on a dating service, they are a match. Is that comparable to Tinder mutual swipes? I don’t know and I really don’t care anymore. And neither does anyone else, because all I read about in the media are stories about people on Tinder hooking up three times a week and 25 million matches a day.
He’s right, no body is really thinking about what the metrics mean when writing about Tinder. It might as well be 25 millions acorns! There is so much more David writes in the post but I love the ending line, and I’m really starting to agree (even though I know a few friends who have successfully had serious relationships via tinder)…
Tinder is the worst thing to ever happen to the online dating industry. End of story.
Interesting email sent out to members of plenty of fish recently…
I am Markus the creator of plentyoffish. We recently added a new field to profiles that asks you how ambitious you are. Go to edit profile and update your profile now. This new field will start showing on the web immediately and in the mobile apps in a week or two when we release a new version.
Ok nothing that special… Although its a interesting field to add to a dating profile. I think its a bit pointless as the options are not ambitious, somewhat ambitious, ambitious and very ambitious. I don’t know who would put not ambitious? Honestly?
Anyway that wasn’t all which was said. Marcus took the time to educate us all about the truth surrounding hookup culture, which made a interesting kicker…
A Florida woman has filed a $1.5 billion class-action lawsuit against online dating site Match.com, alleging the website allowed photos of her and thousands of others to be used illegally to create phony profiles intended to dupe romantic hopefuls out of money.
The website “conspired with criminals operating from locations including Internet cafes in Nigeria, Ghana and Russia” who created fake profiles for romance “scams,” according to the lawsuit which was filed last week.The suit also says that Match.com, owned by media mogul Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp, was aware of the fake profiles as the company approves, edits and posts each profile.
Rad said he couldn’t share user counts, but he did reveal that the app sees 3.5 million matches and 350 million swipes a day. (About 30 percent of those are the right swipes that indicate interest.) And the app has seen 30 billion swipes and 300 million matches total.
