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.
I used to use OKCupid, and it was so much better than Tinder. Unfortunately, Tinder’s success changed the game and it seems like all the dating sites follow its general form now. On old OKC people would write freaking novels in their bios, in addition to answering hundreds of questions. On Tinder, if you have even two complete sentences in your profile, you’re an outlier. It’s an explicitly, aggressively shallow platform.
I don’t think the old message-anyone method scales well, though. Dating sites are far more popular today than they were back when I used OKC. And even back then, every woman I knew who used it turned off notifications because it was overwhelming.
I totally forgot about spark.com, or was it thespark.com?
Back in the early 2000 area if I recall correctly. I spent way too much time answering questions on there in my college computer lab, then suddenly they added dating.
They all follow that general form because the same company (Match Group) bought all of the different dating sites and changed them to the form that makes them the most money.