Swiping people left and right: the Tinder/hook-up culture discussion

for a while i spoke to this woman who was a truck driver - she explained she sometimes slept in her truck with a baseball bat.

i guess it was interesting to think how it could put you in touch with someone so radically different from your hipster friends.

or to imagine the rich material for a play us going on a date would have been

ugh

i've seen a few celebs on it too actually...

surprising number of profile pictures for women feature them in Venice IIRC, that faded relic of past glories.

they clearly don't make celebs like they used to..

So I got this app last week and since then, I have apparently swiped ... Everybody? it says "there's no one new around you" :( Is that normal? I'm in the ~25th largest city in the US..
― Nobody ever knows anything. (sleepingbag), Wednesday, May 27, 2015 7:04 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Closer to 20th biggest actually, just had to dbl check myself. I mean, I know there are a Lott more ppl in ny or Chicago, but.... One week of only moderately obsessive swiping and that's it?
― Nobody ever knows anything. (sleepingbag), Wednesday, May 27, 2015 7:07 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I have, uh, gotten a lot better at using this app since last week 😜

did you have the radius set to like two blocks?

Swiping left is mostly permanent - a very smart trick is that the premium version gives you a 'cancel last swipe' button.

But yeah you can create a second one - I had a description-less one for brief ego boost then deleted it and signed up again saying "Hey just out of serious long term relationship, not looking for anything permanent" - obviously got a different set of matches than the first.

I got hit by the compulsiveness too, swiped everyone within 2 miles - there are probably more women with the top range (25 miles?) than in Ireland, but that's London for you.

Also yeah it's incredibly performative, all of a dating profile shrunk into 500 characters so there a lot of heavily laden words about being Fun! and Genuine! and er Tall! pinging past.

Also a lot of travelling, leading up to this encomium on the Travelling Girl (warning: Elite Daily).

Not just all words to be fair - lots of photos of Machu Picchu and Everest Base Camp. They don't let just anyone in there!

~1/10 of the women on tinder here (zurich) have the quote 'travel is the only thing you buy that makes you richer'

i went on a few dates from it but i'm also thinking of deleting it now. it's such a great rush when you swipe right and get a match with someone cute. seemed to happen a lot when i first installed it or when i'm back in london for the weekend. it's awful when you start to worry that you've swiped through the whole city.

sorry but 'travel' is not a hobby imo

biggest tinder celeb spot: violinist for the trans-siberian orchestra

"hobbies" are for savages

this encomium on the Travelling Girl (warning: Elite Daily)

this is such a horrible barf-inducing article. "There is something to be said about a woman with stamps in the pages of her passport." somehow, "she is wealthy" entirely escapes the discussion.

lol elite daily

I think I removed several people on facebook who shared mostly stuff from that site, then blocked the site.

Oh yeah obviously what is being performed is "I have quite a bit of money (or at least know how to produce this impression)".

The way in the Avengers film where Ultron bathes in the cliche of consuming All The Internet and learning about humanity - you could connect a decent AI to a Tinder device in Trafalgar Square and it would hum for a bit and declare it now understood the British class system. Less mountains of skulls, too, in general.

the skulls are already buried across the imperial diaspora

*frequently what is performed

i defiantly have started seeing ppl i've swiped left on pop up again

just started noticing it in the last month or two

definitely not "defiantly"

Right, but since deleting your profile is two taps and importing again from Facebook is like four taps, that's not that surprising, right?

Slavoj Žižek to thread: http://bigthink.com/videos/online-dating-and-synthetic-sex

Is the Facebook requirement keeping people away from this?

In other words, does it make public on Facebook the fact that you've installed it and are seeking out matches?

Prolly not

no, and no

it isn't a "Facebook app" or w/e, it just uses the info to log in and grab age/selected photos

Also connections / shared interests, which are among the data it shows you about profiles. So if'd be a bad idea for someone to ask a friend "hey saw your friend on Tinder, are they cool?" then I'd go with manually creating a profile / pictures.

true!

imo that's a strength, not a weakness, but if you find online dating shameful I guess you can go undercover

girl i am currently seeing made a fbook account just to get on tinder and then subsequently deleted it

Right, but that's so cumbersome

Are they funded by Facebook?

a little curious why one of the most popular and profitable apps can't muster an ipad version.

just install the phone version

a few days ago i was in bed about to go to sleep but just before decided to message a girl i matched with a few months ago. i think she was actually the first person i matched with after a pretty horrendous breakup so i was a bit reluctant to msg at the time. anyway....ended up getting up out of bed and going out to meet her. had the most amazing night of wandering around the city and talking. we ended up drinking in a square until about 3am like teenagers. i've seen her every day since and it's turned into a bit of a whirlwind romance. tinder is cool?

that is a v great story

thinking of c&p-ing that into my abt me as what i aspire to

that rules! aww.

Tinder can be very cool! The first response after I recreated my profile got a date arranged after three hours - kissing at the end of the first date, going to the movies and completely ignoring the movies for the second (Could <I>not</I> recommend Will Smith / Margot Robbie vehicle Focus highly enough for this purpose - bright and engaging out of the corner of your eye and you can miss more or less all of it with no ill effects). She's finishing her PhD in September and moving away, I'm out of a serious long term relationship and not looking for another, so Tinder found us each other for fooling around and watching Father Ted.

Vanity Fair weighs in

This article kind of disturbed me.

seen that roundly criticized already on twitter, but i haven't read it yet.

couldn't read past that ridiculous "expert" quote tbh

yes this article is one of those insufferable NYC-center-of-the-universe table talk pieces

Nick, with his lumbersexual beard and hipster clothes, as if plucked from the wardrobe closet of Girls, is, physically speaking, a modern male ideal. That he fulfills none of the requirements identified by evolutionary psychologists as what women supposedly look for in mates—he’s neither rich nor tall; he also lives with his mom—doesn’t seem to have any effect on his ability to get rampantly laid. In his iPhone, he has a list of more than 40 girls he has “had relations with, rated by [one to five] stars…. It empowers them,” he jokes. “It’s a mix of how good they are in bed and how attractive they are.”

Am trying to have a hard time figuring out how women feel safe on Tinder at all.

most men aren't Nick

It's no less safe than blind dates or meeting someone in a bar - your first experience alone with the person should be a public place.

thoughts: a) the whole piece is kind of sad
b) i need to go to the gym so I can attract these loose women with shirtless pics

it empowers them, he jokes