Sick Day! Tinder Changed the Game - from Land of the Giants: Dating Games

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Scott Galloway: Hi, Pivot listeners. It's Scott. Kara Swisher is out sick today. Can you believe it? Who would have thought? I've come to believe that if I stabbed her with a fork, I might get wires back in, like some sort of MSNBC editorial or producer's notes. I didn't think she would lead. Anyways, it ends up she is human. And while she gets well, we've got a great episode of Land of the Giants. This season covers the rise of dating apps. By the way, my nickname among my colleagues is Swipe Left. I don't know why they didn't call me, but it's still a good show. Enjoy, and we'll be back on Friday with more Pivot.

Sangeeta Singh: This is Land of the Giants. I'm Sangeeta Singh. I'm a senior writer at New York Magazine and The Cut, where I write about the ways that technology is changing us. I'm Lakshmi Rangarajan. I've devoted my career to helping people build genuine connections. I've run dating events. I spent several years working at Match.com, and now I host a podcast called Paired by the People on the art of the setup. In this season of Land of the Giants, we're exploring a multi-billion dollar marketplace, dating apps, the companies that rule our romantic lives.

Lakshmi Rangarajan: I don't know what it's like to date as an adult without the apps. I think when they first started, they were in it for the people, but now it's gotten worse and they're like a cash cow. And we want to know, in a modern dating landscape dominated by apps, if they actually help or hurt our chances of finding a relationship.

Sangeeta Singh: Oh yeah, and then you'd go on them and you're like, "Hmm, God's not setting his best." Tech giants like Amazon and Netflix have completely upended commerce and entertainment. But the giants of the online dating world have disrupted something far more intimate and important to our lives. Love. We're going to look at the inner workings of these apps and find out whether Big Tech's idea of success is compatible with our own. Today, Tinder. It changed everything by conquering the emerging mobile dating app market. And it did so by gamifying romance. Making the app like a game made Tinder very popular. But making the app like a game, it also made one of the most significant decisions we make. Finding a romantic partner. A game, too. And as the saying goes, the house always wins.

Jonathan Bedin: I think my biggest contribution, at least in the early days, is really having come up with the swipe, the sort of iconic swipe that people have come to love. Or hate.

Sangeeta Singh: Jonathan Bedin is a co-founder of Tinder, but he didn't always work in tech. At the end of the world, a battle still remains. Between man and zombie. He wanted to be a movie star, but his big gig? A role in the 2007 horror flick, Zombie Wars. Acting was also kind of a horror show, so he quit Hollywood and he tried something a little bit different. He taught himself to code. And in 2012, he got a job as a developer at Hatch Labs, an incubator that was focused on creating new mobile-first businesses. The mobile revolution had sparked a bit of an app gold rush, and Hatch Labs wanted to cash in. The general manager at Hatch was a guy named Sean Rad. Rad had recently pitched a dating app called Matchbox at a company hackathon. Sean was like, "Hey, you guys, you want to make this Matchbox thing, like while we're sitting around?" And we're like, "Yeah, why not?" So we put together what would eventually become Tinder in about six to eight weeks and launched it.

Lakshmi Rangarajan: The majority of online dating up until then was happening on desktop. But when Tinder fully launched in September of 2012, it wasn't just mobile first. It was mobile only. You had to use your phone. Tinder took online dating from a sit-down activity to something you could do while walking, talking, even going to the bathroom. It only took one hand.

Daneesh Morjani: I don't think anyone quite knew what the impact of the iPhone would be. That's Daneesh Morjani, the CEO of Hatch Labs. The iPhone was becoming widely available in the U.S. Higher-speed LTE connections had just launched. Nearly a billion smartphones would be put in people's pockets over the next year. The desktop landscape was dominated by sites like eHarmony, Plenty of Fish, and Match.com. For more Johnny, these desktop experiences felt musty. They had a cumbersome process of signing up, creating a profile, uploading photos, and it couldn't all be done within a mobile phone. Sites like Match and Plenty of Fish were on mobile, but their apps were basically clunky desktop versions squeezed into a four-inch screen. So we wanted to take a fresh approach. How would you do this if you were unencumbered by all of the existing dating things and make something for mobile?

Jonathan Bedin: Badin says this approach dictated the entire design and functionality of the app. First, Tinder's engineers threw out the inconvenient process of creating a profile. You could just use Facebook to sign up and your profile would be populated with your interests and photos. No slogging through a thousand personal questions. You could just dive into the dating pool in seconds. Tinder also simplified the way people talk to each other. Websites and desktop design encouraged these really long extended correspondences, kind of like emails or letters. Tinder catered to a generation of people who typed with their thumbs. Having built something for the phone, we made it look much more like iMessage and all, which lent to much shorter messages and things like that, a very, very sort of different feel. Tinder also capitalized on one of mobile's defining characteristics. It was mobile. Tinder used your location as a key point of attraction to potential matches. Dating wasn't about where you lived. It was about where you were at that very moment. The idea that your next date could be just around the corner or in the same bar as you was exciting. This is something that Grindr, the hookup app for men, had figured out a few years earlier. But Sean Radd recalled hearing this early excitement about Tinder at Google's I.O. conference in 2014, about a year after the app's launch. A lot of our friends came back to us and were like, "Wow, I connected with this girl that I would see around town and I'm going out with her tonight." And I was just like, "Wow, that was quick." It worked. And literally within 24 hours, we started seeing all these results. Friendships being formed, relationships being formed. Tinder wasn't the only app trying to hack dating in 2012. But there was something that truly set it apart from any competition. Tinder had the swipe. Swipe right if you're interested, swipe left to pass. And the swipe did a few things. If two people swiped right on each other, they could start talking. This removed uncertainty from the approach, which was a big deal. On dating sites, anyone could send a message to anybody. That meant you could send a thousand messages and never get a response. Tinder's developers wanted to remove that fear of rejection. Because, you know, you couldn't go back and see the people that rejected you. Hopefully, you wouldn't remember them. We wanted it to be a little bit of that fast experience because, you know, that was yesterday and there's no way of seeing them again. And the Swipe did something else, too, something that would ensure the success of the app for years to come. The idea for the Swipe came to Jonathan Bedin as he honed in on user experience. He been imagining a smartphone user striding through a college campus holding a coffee in one hand and their phone in the other. I had this epiphany one morning when I woke up and I basically imagined these flashcards on the screen that if you swiped in one direction, it would flip the card over. And then I imagined these sort of right and wrong piles of cards. So when we made Tinder, we ended up with a very similar, it was a portrait interface with a stack of cards. We swipe on all kinds of things now. But in 2012, this was a new way to engage with an app. The swipe was the opening move to a novel approach to dating, gamification. We used a lot of different language and stuff to everything from, "You've got a match," you know, and things like, "And keep playing." I think the animation, I'd say, was a bit inspired by gaming and all a little bit. The buttons along the bottom of the app were meant to look very much sort of like game buttons, like a game controller. And in the code itself, it refers to them as the game pad. The swipe is what made it an actual game. It functioned like a controller. You might be swiping really fast, or you might be wavering with your finger going back and forth, or it might be a hell no with a very hard swipe or, you know, okay, maybe. And it's a pretty soft swipe to the right or something like that. And it kind of worked early on in those days that people would talk about, "Oh, I'm not, it's not a dating app, it's a game." And it's like, "Yeah, whatever, whatever makes you, you know, happy to be here and eventually turns into a dating service for you anyway."

Allison Davis: Just a few months after the app launched in the fall of 2012, Dinesh Morjani at Hatch Labs got a first look at Tinder's metrics. So I'm getting the emails from the engineers, and my first reaction is, "Wow, these numbers are actually interesting." We had some users that were using the app north of 30 to 40 times a day. That is a lot for any app, whether it's a game, it's a social app, or it's something else. Morjani says a key metric for an app, daily active users, was also going off. If you're a developer, this is gold. This is engagement. So the more people that would be using this product, the more valuable it becomes to all the users in the community.

Allison Davis: There was a guy in the grocery store, like there was a person who ran the cheese counter. And I would see him all the time in real life and never talk to him. And then I matched with him on Tinder and I was like, "Oh, that person's single. I'm single. I see them like once a day, depending on how much I want cheese." And like we did go out on a couple of dates because like that was like a connection. This kind of experience felt fresh and fun to Davis. I feel like when I first started, it was like such a wonderful time because it was new and you had no expectations other than like, "What is this thing going to provide me?" And so she swiped. Swiping and matching and swiping and matching was like constant little pings and great little distractions. And then when you get a message back, it's like pulling that lever in a Vegas slot machine. Like you just feel like the king of the world, you know. And sorry, that was really dorky. You're going back to it and looking at the app six or seven or eight or nine or 10 or 11 or 12 times a day. And you don't know why you do it, but you just have to do it over and over and over again.

Michael Merzenich: There's an explanation for why swiping gives you that slot machine feeling. It's because when we do something that feels good, our brains release a chemical that says, "Hey, we should do that again." That rewarding is expressed through the release of a chemical called dopamine. And that's where the thrill and the joy comes from. And the thing is, it's an easy fix. Now, one of the wonderful things about dopamine is that you don't need the reward to actually get the dopamine. You don't actually have to have the sex or the kiss. The very act of swiping triggers those sweet little dopamine hits. You begin to get it when you anticipate it. So when I just think that I maybe got lucky. You know, and the perfect person's going to show up. And you just think that in your mind, you're rewarded. Your brain basically has given you a little chemical positive. And that's one of the reasons why you go back and back and back.

Sangeeta Singh: By 2014, Sean Radd boasted that the app had made more than 2 billion matches, meaning 2 billion pairs had chosen to swipe right on each other. The following year, he said that the app was signing up a million new users a week and that there had been more than 20 billion connections since the app launched. There were other ways to mark Tinder's success. Here's Jonathan Bedine talking about the moment it felt real to him. We got an email from a college student, and this guy said that he and his friends would walk down the street and use swipe right and swipe left as code for, I guess, the ladies that they were walking by. And after reading that email, that was, at least for me, that was the moment where I was like, "Oh, you know, we might have tapped into something." Tinder wove its way into our lexicon. The app had disrupted an old market and made online dating young, cool, and convenient. But this market was about intimacy. Tinder was disrupting romance. It was pretty much Silicon Valley growth mindset.

Drew Glicker: The more swiping you do, the better. The more matching you do, the better. The more chatting you do, the better. It was just about get the most engagement possible, get the most user growth possible. The more people who were on Tinder, the more people there were to swipe on. And the more swiping that happened on the app, the better those engagement numbers looked. But what about Tinder's users? The ones driving all this growth and engagement? What did they want? Tinder knew the answer to that. And in 2016, Sean Rad revealed it to an audience at Web Summit. We've done plenty of internal and external surveys of many users. And what you'll see is over 80% are looking for something long-term on Tinder. They're looking for a long-term relationship on Tinder. But Tinder wasn't promising long-term relationships. Just matches.

Sean Rad: First of all, we don't look at ourselves as just a dating site. You know, we're about connecting people, making introductions. For Rad, there was a lot of value in thinking beyond dating. Because from a business perspective, there was a danger baked into being a successful dating app. If you helped your users match, meet, and fall in love, there was no need for the app anymore. To get users to stay on Tinder, Rad moved the goalposts. People are coming to Tinder because they want to meet new people and they're curious about what the possibilities are. I might make a friend. I might end up in a marriage. I might end up with a short-term relationship or a hookup. If Tinder is about possibilities, then the point becomes to get as many connections as possible. It makes sense for users to swipe and match, and then swipe some more. It was a business model that worked for Tinder. By 2017, new paid features, like the ability to see who had swiped right on you, made Tinder the top-grossing product in Apple's App Store.

Kyle Miller: You know, having members find success on Tinder. If we do that great, everything else starts to take care of itself because people will want to join Tinder, want to come back to Tinder, see it as valuable and want to pay for it. What do we mean when we say having users find success? Is that long-term love or is it many great meetings? Having more members have more conversations with each other across the ecosystem is a sign that we are probably leading to better outcomes for a lot of them. Because without those conversations, how are you supposed to have anything from a first date to a fun experience and everything in between? So swiping opened the door to conversations. And those conversations were the mark of success, according to Miller.

Allison Davis: After that, it up to the user. I feel like there would be runs where I would just swipe swipe swipe match match match message message message and never meet a person for like a month in real life, you know. Allison Davis wasn't on Tinder for the sake of being on Tinder, even if the endless swiping had started to make it feel that way. But after years of the app life, she kind of felt like she had to be on it. And then it became so normalized so quickly that I was like, okay, well, this is the way that you're going to meet a partner because this is modern times. Davis was on to something here. A 2019 study from Stanford found that more heterosexual couples met online than any other way. The tipping point came in 2013. Before then, more couples met through friends or family members. The study found that online dating had displaced that kind of matchmaking. If you wanted to find a partner, it looked like you pretty much had to get on an app like Tinder. Some people did find partners, but that's not what the app was specifically designed for. And its design, the swipe function, was so popular it became a sort of de facto feature of the dating app landscape. Apps like Bumble and early versions of Hinge also featured the swipe. Tinder hadn't just gamified its own app. It had gamified the industry.

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Sangeeta Singh: Hand-wringing around online dating and how it was ruining romance predated Tinder. But by the mid-2010s, so many people were on the apps, which meant that an app like Tinder could change the way romance even worked. One of the viral think pieces of that time took on one such shift, the rise of hookup culture. Tinder and the dawn of the dating apocalypse. Now, I didn't write that headline. My editor at Vanity Fair wrote that headline. That's Nancy Jo Sales. It was 2015, and her hot take pinned Tinder as the culprit. The app was making hookups the default. It's this idea that you can access someone very quickly for something very transactional through the internet, through a mobile app. And dating apps have sort of like put it into overdrive. This idea that you're shopping, you're consuming a person. Tinder had an endless inventory of people to match with, so you could meet up, hook up, and never talk again. Repeat what someone knew the next day. I saw it in myself and I saw it in the people I was dating. There's too many people. Like, it's really a lot of the things that I felt and that I'm saying are really common sense. If you have too many choices, then you can't make a choice. It's one thing to be overwhelmed by what kind of granola to buy at the store. But these were people. The never-ending parade of profiles. The never-ending choice of people, had made potential partners feel disposable. Another symptom of Tinder's impact on dating culture, ghosting. Martin Graff is a senior lecturer in psychology at the University of South Wales. He says there's a reason you hear more and more about people just falling off the face of the planet instead of intentionally breaking things off. If you've met someone online, you're not necessarily in the same environment as them. So it does make it much easier to just disappear and probably potentially there's less likelihood you are ever going to actually meet them or cross paths with them at some stage in the future. When people met through friends or family, there was some accountability implied. You didn't ghost a friend of your sister's. She'd roast you. But now that a majority of people meet outside of their social circles, that accountability doesn't really exist anymore. And so the social norms around how we meet, spend time together, and break up are gone too. I guess if you were cruel enough, you might even go on a date with somebody and then decide that you didn't want to tell them that we're not going to see each other again, but you would just not communicate with them and never see them again without any explanation. These changing social norms, they made the dating scene start to feel sour. It got more superficial. Allison Davis again. On Tinder, she had condensed herself into a pithy collection of personality traits. Metal, cheese, and hiking. Nothing too deep. But rejection on the app still felt deeply personal. It's all about snap judgment and biases. And I'm like, you don't even know me. And maybe if you just like swiped right and messaged me and we talked a little bit and you gave me an effing chance, you wouldn't reject me because I'm awesome. Or am I not awesome? So every ghosting was an opportunity for me to look at myself and be like, well, what is wrong with me? Like, what needs to change for me to be better at Tinder or better on Tinder or more attractive to people on Tinder? The optimism that she'd had at the beginning, that maybe the next match could be the one, dissipated. When she went out on dates, she was more focused on getting the other person to like her rather than finding out if she liked them. Being on Tinder in 2017, 2018 had lost the shine of its early days. But that didn't mean investors were sad. Tinder was more than doubling revenue year over year. The app pulled in more than $800 million through subscriptions and in-app purchases in 2018. People were swiping for ease and access. There was a normalization of all these sort of bad habits of dehumanizing the person on the other end of the messages. And so people were a lot less willing to sort of engage in like, you know, what are you here for? What are you here for? Do we align? And it was more like, let's meet and then figure out what we're both here for. And generally, it was like just for sex. Or there was like a lot more direct, like, want to just come over at like 10 p.m. tonight. Just the interactions, we'd all been sort of trained to be using it in a specific way, which was like more casual, more hookup-centric, a little less honest, and a little less seeking true connection. This feeling of dissatisfaction was widespread, so much so that it started to look like a business opportunity. A slate of new apps popped up marketing themselves as anti-Tinders, geared more towards serious, meaningful relationships. So, why stay on Tinder? The thing about the game was, even when it felt bad, it still felt good. You can just kind of go down a rabbit hole and stay there for hours because you're stuck in that loop that is so compelling. Natasha Scholl is an anthropologist at NYU who studies technology and gaming design. She says that Tinder falls into a specific gaming pattern, something she first observed in Vegas Gamblers. She calls this pattern a ludic loop. In a ludic loop, there is not necessarily any plot development, any character development. There's no arc, there's no beginning, middle, and especially there is no end, right? That closure is very hard to come by. Schulz says Tinder falls into this pattern because you sign on and then it just endless swiping. If you think about it in terms of you know psychologically you got a stimulus and you got a response. Swiping equals dopamine candy. We talked about this earlier. Like your body tells you when you're full when you've eaten enough or when it comes to an app, you close Uber when you've been dropped off. But when you swipe on Tinder, there is no end point. When I spoke to Jonathan Bedin, he told me Tinder's developers had this kind of thing in mind from the very beginning. You really did something with engagement here that I haven't seen with a lot of other apps. And I wonder how you were thinking about engagement when you were building this platform and even how you're thinking about it now. It varied a bit in terms of, you know, we wanted people to go through to keep going and all. When I was in college, it was when Hot or Not came out. And I do remember that I'd be going through profiles. You know, these are people, there wasn't any chance of meeting any of these people or anything. So I don't know what the heck I was doing with this rating people. I got nothing out of it. But it was always like, oh, let me just get that one more, one more. Oh, I'm going to find that one more eight or nine or something, and then I'll stop, and then I'll stop. So there was a little bit of that. Badin left Tinder in July 2022. Current VP of product Kyle Miller says no one on Tinder's team today would describe the app as a game. He makes the point that consumer experiences, like mobile games, make money through advertising. The more time you spend in the app, the more ads you see. We don't monetize the majority of the time through advertising. Advertising is a very small part of what we do and it's not a big focus of ours. Instead, Tinder makes money through paid features that are designed to boost your chances of making more matches and starting more conversations. And so those gamification experiences outside of Tinder, you know, they're trying to keep your attention and keep your time. Where what we're trying to do within Tinder is to deliver you better outcomes regardless of the amount of time that you're actually spending here. And in doing so, trying to do it in a way that's fun and makes you feel comfortable in dating where it could feel stressful to put yourself out there. You know, we try to use fun as a way to ease the tension of the experience. But anthropologist Natasha Shull says she knows a game when she sees one. And Tinder's ability to get users sucked into the swipe. That's a game. Position of these companies, they don't really want it to have a resolution. Tinder is 10 years old. When I first saw the apps, there definitely was a sense of, there could be like a love story that comes out of this. People do meet and get married on Tinder and like, it's part of life and like, life is for meeting people and connecting to people and so is Tinder. And so like those connections could go somewhere. Eventually, Allison Davis realized that those things were not true. At least not for her. Ultimately, my romantic goals were to, like, meet somebody. And, like, always imagine, like, I'd have a long-term partner by now. I would have had more long-term relationships. Or I wouldn't find romance and, like, dating so frustrating. But here's the thing. She is able to find enough snippets of a relationship. Tinder has actually made her better at being alone. If I want sex or companionship, I can find it in these little bites enough to sustain me and make me think, well, I don't really need to try any harder than this because I sort of have my little snack platter. So why am I going to go for the entree? Cooking a whole meal sounds too hard now. So I don't necessarily know that it's a negative thing. It's just not where I thought it would be. And I think that's a result of relying on Tinder for so long.

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Sangeeta Singh: And of course, there are other downsides to relying on Tinder for so long. I've had a couple people say if Tinder was just wiped off the face of the planet tomorrow, they would have no fucking idea how to meet people. I wonder if you think that's the case for people generally, like it has developed in some kind of crutch. Yes, I agree with that. I mean, I think we all know how to meet people. We know how to go to the bar. We know how to go to the friend's party. We know how to go to a class or to, like, the gym or whatever and, like, interact with humans. But what I think the downside of having Tinder as a crutch for so long is that, like, me personally, I do not know how to read signals anymore. I don't know, like, is the person that I'm leaning against talking to in the bar and that keeps brushing my arm or keeps brushing it, like touching my fingers or whatever, is that just because they're a very friendly person and they don't understand spatial awareness or are they interested? Tinder has changed our behavior even when we do manage to close the app.

Jonathan Bedin: I think it can be exhausting dating. Now, I don't know that Tinder has exasperated that more. I think maybe it just essentially might be the thing that people point a finger at. You know, a lot of times it's the technology that people blame as opposed to normal societal things, because it's the easy thing to point to. But yeah, I think people always have these frustrations with dating. And I think Tinder sometimes just gets the bad rap for the general feelings they were going to have anyway. The app has transformed dating culture into something that nobody recognizes. This has implications for everyone, single or not. So if it feels like there's more opportunity than ever before, and it's never been harder to meet someone, Tinder was the force that shaped that world. And it turns out that behind Tinder, and behind almost all of the most popular dating apps, there is one single entity pulling the strings. In our next episode, we'll tell the story of how Match Group, the granddaddy of online dating, became the biggest player in the U.S. dating market. Archival clips in this episode are from the Found Footage Festival. Land of the Giants: Dating Games is a production of The Cut at New York Magazine, The Verge, and Vox Media Podcast Network. Oluwakemi Aladisui is the show's producer. Cynthia Betubiza is our production assistant. And Jolie Myers is our editor. Brandon McFarland composed the show's theme and engineered this episode. Jake Kastarnakas is deputy editor of The Verge. Nicole Hill is our showrunner. Nishat Kurwa is our executive producer. I am Sangeeta Singh. And I'm Lakshmi Rangarajan. If you liked this episode, please share it. And follow the show by clicking the plus sign in your podcast app. That was Land of the Giants. We'll hear more from one of their co-hosts, Lakshmi Rangarajan, next month. And we'll be back with Pivot on Friday.