If you get a message from someone you never matched with on Tinder, it’s not a glitch — it’s part of the app’s expensive new subscription plan that it teased earlier this year, which allows “power users” to send unsolicited messages to non-matches for the small fee of $499 per month.
That landscape, in fact, is largely populated by apps owned by Tinder’s parent company: as Bloomberg notes, Match Group Inc. not only owns the popular swiping app, but also Match.com, OKCupid, Hinge, and The League.
Match Group CEO Bernard Kim referred to Tinder’s subscriptions as “low-hanging fruit” meant to compete with other, pricier services, though that was before this $6,000-per-year tier dropped.
Many years ago™ OkCupid actually had a good system, before it revamped itself and got bought by Match (Tinder).
In the old version of the website, you could answer any amount of questions from a huge catalogue of sometimes very obscure and specific questions and look for people who had very similar (or very different) answers overall. You could chat freely with everyone and had the option to look just for (platonic) friends.
I had incredibly interesting discussions with people who were at the opposite spectrum of my answers. And I made a few acquaintances and two amazing friends who still are my friends today, one is even my roommate for 8 years now! I also found a group of white hackers and Linux enthusiasts for real life meetings and we still hang out occasionally.
Two other friends of mine looked for and found romantic partners there and they are both happily married to the partners they found via OkCupid back then.
It went all down the gutter when people used the “platonic friends” option to get into your pants.
And when OkCupid tried to make more cash by pushing into the sex/romance market more and copying dating apps.
I don’t think something like this would work anymore. Dating apps and the weird culture and thinking about a “sexual market” seem to have broken humans or something. This asinine idea is just another symptom.
OkCupid really used to be awesome. I would not have met my spouse, had I not checked it out because of the amazingly interesting and varied questionnaires.
I’m so sad that it was made shitty.
My wife and I actually met on OkCupid, happily married for 8 years now, and dated a few years before that, so safe to say I haven’t been there in 10+ years.
Sad to hear it’s gone down the drain, it seemed the least vile of the available options 😓
Absolutely LOVED the questionnaire aspect of okcupid. At one point I ran out of questions you could answer. Met some fantastic people using the app.
I also met my boyfriend back then like 7 years ago. It was the best “dating platform” that I ever used. Had a lot of great conversations with many people all over the world. Came back to it a few years ago but they already changed it to a more tinder type of way. It was very disappointing.
My wife and I also met on ok Cupid. Just celebrated our 17th wedding anniversary.
Did they get rid of the questions? That was the most awesome part of OkCupid. Because you not only answered the questions but you could pick if you cared what your potential matches answers should be.
I met my wife on OkCupid, we were a high % match according to OkCupid and we did turn out to be a great match. That’s stupid if they got rid of that.
There’s a big conflict of interest in dating apps: if you’re successful you stop using the app, and of course the company doesn’t want that.
But if everyone has a shitty experience with it, they won’t recommend it or even tell people to stay away from it. But if it works well, they’ll praise it, thus gaining more users.
And enshittification and buying up competitors will lead to all sites being the same, which is exactly what has happened. Executives don’t care about providing a useful service, they just care about getting richer
Match Group has basically ruined all of online dating.
More old trivia is that the original OK Cupid system was written in C, including the actual web server that served the pages. They wrote it in C so that the matching thing could run real-time, which is super impressive, even if writing your own web server is actually pretty dumb.
I loved the days when people just wanted to make fun, useful, quirky stuff on the internet and not just peddle thirst traps and Chinese merchandise.