Tinder is Thirsty for Your Souls

An interesting thing happens when you don’t log on to Tinder for a while:

The site’s desperate to get me back on, despite being entirely useless for meeting people. I was thinking about this when the following video popped up in one of my feeds:

The video is part of an old genre, popular on dating-strategy websites for years now. The user – a man who’s been frustrated with the difficulty finding matches on a dating app – decides to change his sex and post some fake pics, to see what things are like for women. What he finds is that – instead of getting two matches per month, and feeling lucky with that – he gets hundreds of matches from men, so many that he’s inundated with messages and never has a chance to parse through all the potential mates.

At least, that’s what the video thinks it’s showing. Look a bit closer. Read the messages he’s receiving. Look at the picture which shows up at 40 seconds in.

Those are not real profiles. They’re too perfect, no idiosyncrasies. Those are chat-bots…

Chad Bots?

It’s long been a thing for dating apps to post fake female profiles; pictures and bios for you to right-swipe on, to make the platform look more popular than it actually is. An illusion to entice the men. But this is next level – actively chatting up women, and getting them to spin their wheels. What is going on here?

Years back, I contrasted the modern day Night Club to the old-school village Barn Dance. The Barn Dance is set up by the community, to help the young men and women pair off so that they can become contributing members of society. It serves a vital social function. The Night Club, meanwhile, pretends to be about accomplishing the same thing, but it actually has zero investment in helping people over the longer term. The owner doesn’t care what you do after leaving the club; you’re not part of his community. He only cares what you do while at the club. A smart Night Club owner won’t be concerned with the quality of relationships that result from his venue, he’s only going to be invested in convincing you to spend money.

Similarly, Tinder is not invested in your long-term success. The moment that you log off of the site, you’re no longer a customer. The worse your dating life, the better it is for Tinder. It only needs to be good enough for you to keep coming back.

Wait, no, it doesn’t even need to be that good. It only needs you to believe that it’s the only game in town.

This got me curious about Tinder’s financials. How much money are they making anyhow? I found this:

So, 2.5% of their revenue comes from ads, the rest comes from paid subscriptions. If we ballpark the average subscription as costing $200 per year, that’s about 3 million people paying. Sounds about right. The server costs look a bit high to me, but I suppose an error-free experience is worth paying for – especially when you’re making a profit of $305,000,000.

I have to imagine that the majority of those paying for the subscription are men; so why run the Chad Bots to distract the women? I can see two possible scenarios.

The first is vicious but prosaic. By distracting the women with Chad Bots, it makes it harder for the men to meet them; thus keeping them on the site for longer.

The second is more paranoid. The Chad Bots act as mating disruptors. In the same way that industrial machinery can drown-out the mating calls of certain birds, the Chad Bots prevent men and women from meeting to produce children. Furthermore, the inability to find a mate will lead to psychological anxiety, creating a population that’s easier to influence through modern propaganda techniques, all of which function by first inducing anxiety in the target, prior to offering a ‘solution’ to said anxiety in the form of a product or a political slogan.

Three years ago I would have said it was definitely the first reason; just nasty, exploitative Capitalism. But after all of the happenings of the past few years… I’ll be honest, I’m kind of leaning towards the latter. After all, if “they” are willing to spend the money weaponizing free porn against us – why not do something like this, which is not only much cheaper to maintain, but also profitable to boot?

Whichever one is true, though, they’re thriving on your attention. The same thing goes for that ridiculous Chris Rock/Will Smith thing from last week.

“What’s that, you don’t care about the slap heard across the world? What if I told you that White people aren’t allowed to have an opinion on it? Does that piss you off? Do you care about it now?”

No, I still don’t care.

“What about the gay dogs?”

“Are there any gay dogs in the office?”

“No…”

“Then I don’t care about the gay dogs.”

Like Nick Cave said, the Demiurge’s demons aren’t here for your money, they aren’t here for your love, they aren’t here for your love of money – they’re down here for our souls.

Stop feeding them your attention.