Start Up: Swipe by Swipe Walkthrough

Step-By-Step Walkthrough:

Step 1: Download
You can download Tinder from the Apple App Store, the Google Play Store, or directly from the Tinder website. The Tinder app is free.

Step 2: Log In
Tinder requires a Facebook profile in order to create an account. Tinder links you up with friends of your friends or nearby people based on your location. You must have the latest version of the Facebook app installed on your device in order to use Tinder

Step 3: Edit Profile
Tap the 'Edit Text' on the upper-right corner of the app. The next screen allows you to edit your photos and your brief description or tagline. You're able to choose your pictures if you want but tinder uploads the first 6 photos from your facebook account.

Step 4: Manage Settings
Open the Settings menu and tap the upper-left corner to access the app menu. The menu options include Profile, Home, Messages, Settings, and Invite. Tap on the 'Settings' menu; this menu will allow you to set your preferred gender, your proximity for matches, and more. Afterwards, set how wide the search distance for prospects the app would use; you must have GPS enabled on your device in order to use Tinder. Moving on, set the age limits (the youngest and the oldest) that you're willing to consider for your partner. Finally, identify your preferred gender so that it shows if you're interested in men, women, or both.

Step 5: Begin Matching
Tinder uses your search parameters to identify prospects for you. The Tinder home screen will display the first prospect's image, age, profile, and general location. Choose to "like" or "dislike". If you like the person, swipe right or tap on the "heart" icon. Afterwards, the message "LIKED" will be stamped on the photo; if you don't like the person, swipe left or tap on the "X "icon, and "NOPE" will be stamped instead. In order for a Tinder match to be made, both parties will need to swipe right on each other's profiles. Tinder will continue to provide you with profiles of people that match your search criteria. All you have to do is swipe right or left.

Step 6: Chat OptionIf someone you liked chose you too, you are considered a match! Tinder will send you a notification, and you can make contact with the person. For your matches, Tinder allows you to directly connect and communicate with them through the chat function in the app. Just go to the Messages in the menu and select the person you want to chat with.

Step 7: Invite Friends
Your options will widen when you add more people. Invite your friends and their friends to join. The more people you invite the more options will become available to you. Tap 'Invite' from the menu.

As you're able to see, it is quite easy to sign up for Tinder. Once your profile is officially 'ready for action' you'll be able to embark on your journey to find Tinderella.

* Q u i c k  Q u e s t i o n*

As you're clearly able to see, it seems as though almost anybody can get on Tinder. This leads me to ask: Are the people on Tinder reliable even with its effortless sign up?

Governing Hookups - How well can it be done?

  

As most people know Tinder is often not the place many individuals go to find love and is more popularly used for hook ups and joking around with other users. Tinder is the wild wild west of dating applications as insults and crude comments fly freely. However, there are some rules and regulations or governance model, as Jose Van Dick calls them, put in place in order to ensure the app runs as smoothly as possible. 

Van Dijck (2013) explains governance as implicit and explicit rules in order to regulate users;

explicit rules are also used to regulate claims of property, privacy and acceptable behavior in terms of service agreements and privacy policies (p. 38).

Tinder just like every other social media site or application has a lengthy Terms of service agreement that well many agree too, nobody actually reads. Luckily I took the time to go through it and find some interesting sections within the agreement to share. Tinder really does do their best to cover all of their bases legally and ensure they will not get sued in any way what so ever.

First off all, individuals on Tinder must have a Facebook account to be eligible. Then comes the age requirement, “You must be at least 18 years of age to create an account on Tinder and use the Service”(https://www.gotinder.com/terms). This section may be the most broken rule in the terms of service agreement, well you can not set your age under 18 very often in the users bio they will state they are actually 16 or 17 and nothing is done about it.  This promotes the sexual exploitation of minors to older individuals.Which could give tinder a bad reputation and is why Section 8 of their terms of services comes in handy, stating, users assume all liability for interactions with others off the application (https://www.gotinder.com/terms).

The company even says if you die well subscribed to Tinder that you are entitled to a full refund (https://www.gotinder.com/terms), and well the application is primarily for younger individuals, you never know...

These terms and services really are put in place to protect the users, however, more importantly are there to protect the company itself. Everybody who has used tinder knows how many rude sexual comments are made and how many spam/fake accounts there really are. These actions are said to be prohibited in the companies terms of use but rarely in someone monitoring these issues. 

Why is nothing done? The rules are put in place by tinder but the issue still exists. Terry Flew (2015) argues governance is, "more easily adopted in relatively smaller scale user communities than in the vast global social media platforms" (p. 2), proving how the pure size and reach of Tinder makes it difficult to regulate. When it is a small group of individuals there is also self regulation that is involved. However, with tinder user often feel like there will be no consequences too their actions.

All in all these governing rules are put in place to make sure the company does not get in trouble legally and that everybody using the application can be held accountable for their actions...and many who have used the app know individuals actions can be quite questionable on tinder like seen in the video below. 

Works Cited

Flew, T. (2015). Social Media + Society. Social media governance. 1-2. doi:10.117/2056305115578136

https://www.gotinder.com/terms

Van Dijck, J. (2013). The culture of connectivity: A critical history of social media. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Death by... Tinder?

The idea of meeting up with a stranger is always nerve wracking for individuals but when it is through a free hook up application like tinder the risks increase, as one never truly knows the intentions of the other individual. The application takes all necessary precautions and warns users not to go into individuals homes before you get to know them and to meet in public but obviously this does not always occur.

The overall safety of the application is a big question mark for users and my deter individuals from pursuing relationships. I know from a personal perspective that I would most likely never meet up with a stranger as who knows what this persons motives are. Well tinder tries to keep all parties safe  unfortunately bad things do happen.

For example, in 2014 a death occurred during a tinder meet up in Australia. Gable Tostee and Warriena Wright had met up for drinks after speaking on tinder and by the end of the night Wright was dead, she had fallen from Tostee's apartment balcony after an altercation. After a long trial Tostee was acquitted of all charges. (Willingham, 2016).

You can read more about this bizarre night here, http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/20/world/tinder-death-trial-gable-tostee-trnd/.


Ultimately, the factor of the unknown is something that all individuals using the application must face, this may deter users from purchasing tinder plus or even using the app what so ever.  Safety is a large issue that users on tinder have to be aware of at all times, especially when meeting up with other users for the first time.




Works Cited

Willingham, A. (2016). Bizzarre Tinder death trial comes to an end. Retrieved December 16, 2016, from http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/20/world/tinder-death-trial-gable-tostee-trnd/

You can't do "it" by yourself

Although the premise of Tinder's success is based of the human desire to want along with offering an app that allows us to do so primarily free of charge, tinder has also been able to capitalize through its partnerships with other social media forms. Upon entering Tinder's interface the user is asked to authorize his or her Facebook account and is introduced to Tinder's biggest partner. Through their partnership Tinder has been able to gather information about about their users and sell the info to advertising companies to attribute to their company earnings.

In combination with their partnership with Facebook, Tinder also boasts agreements with both Insttagram and Spotify to further develop the user-to-user relationship. Users now have options to attach and implement their Instagram profiles in order to open to window to who they are; ultimately increasing their ability to get right swipes. Obviously 6 pictures is limiting in terms of truly developing a relationship and possible compatibleness with a potential match so by introducing both Instagram Profiles and Spotify top Songs a user becomes more confident in who they are potentially matching with.

Obviously Tinder has reached success by themselves HOWEVER, through the combination of Facebook, Instagram and Spotify they have allowed users the ability to cover a plethora of potential interests, tastes and hobbies that may entice users to truly believe that their app is the number option in terms of dating apps. Thus proving its better to do it with others than by yourself.


Rannenberg, K. Application Domains I: LBS Business Models & Use Cases.

Or is this app so good I shouldn't have to swipe for free?

Originally released in 2012, Tinder was offered on the Apple App Store as a free app. However as times change so do business models so in the spring of 2015 Tinder made the full out switch from free app - to "freemium". The term freemium is a concept that has become more and more popular in this day of digital supremacy. Tinder is still a free app by trait however, with the Companies introduction of Tinder Plus, the app has attached particular benefits with subscribing to the premium service which it provides and as an effect there are limitations and restrictions attached with simply settling for the free version of the app. "Limitations on rewinding and right-swiping give users more incentive to make sure their swipes are honest," Tinder wrote on its blog announcement.

Although it sounded far-fetched and hard to conceive that people would confirm to the notion of paying for a potential hookup, currently tinder has over 1.2Million Paid Users who subscribe to the app on a monthly basis. With prices ranging from $9.99 if you choose to subscribe on a monthly basis to 6.95/m if you choose to subscribe at a annual basis, Tinder has truly found a way to generate revenue off of our innate human thirst to want. Want what exactly? The want we have to be.. well.. wanted. Tinder Plus' benefits don't simply stop at the ability to swipe more than 50 times in a day; they range from ability to change locations to anywhere you'd like - known as passport, rewinds incase you accidentally swiped the wrong way to someone, along with the ability to prevent your account from being seen by people which you did not swipe right to.

Although Tinder has seen tremendous increases in revenue since the adoption of the "Freemium" business canvas, a vast chunk of their revenue still comes from advertisements. I KNOW NONE OF US ACTUALLY PAY ATTENTION TO THEM.. I know personally i pay little attention to who I'm swiping as i refer to people like myself as a "mass swiper". Advertising companies have essentially created winder profiles and when a person swipes right - it takes them to the page in which is being advertised. Which is quite the scheme since tinder has been downloaded over 40Million times.

Perez, S. (n.d.). Tinder Sees Huge Jump In App Revenue Rankings, Courtesy Of Tinder Plus. Retrieved December 16, 2016, from https://techcrunch.com/2015/05/01/tinder-sees-huge-jump-in-app-revenue-rankings-courtesy-of-tinder-plus/


De Domenico, G. It's how people meet.

Content: Liked or Disliked?

Tinder, much like every social media platform, relies heavily on user-generated content - making every user's experience different depending on who they match with. Due to the user-generated content it is able to bring out opinion (Van Djick, 2013. P. 45).

All profiles have the exact same limitations when it comes to their profiles; each user is limited to 6 pictures and 500-word summary to essentially market themselves to local traffic. This keeps all profiles looking fairly similar and gives everybody who uses the app a fair shot at matching with people. Not only that, but they're marketing on a regional stage, as opposed to the global stage that Van Dyke talks about due to the fact that it relies on your location - which determines who you see.

They also carry Facebook's terms and conditions, which means that they are very strict on a few safeguards and are extremely fixated on trying to construct 'real identities' online. Below is a quote from Stefanie Duguay's article regarding the matter:

"Facebook’s expectation that individuals construct a real and unitary identity facilitates enforcement of its policies, since users are less likely to post prohibited content when it can be associated with real names (Omernick & Sood, 2013). Facebook’s policies and restrictions (e.g., no nudity) are imported into Tinder as safeguards on what users can display, streamlining Tinder’s approval through app stores’ selective review processes (Hestres, 2013). This coincides with Facebook’s (2015) claim that its real name requirement ‘creates a safer environment,’ implying that those who refuse to follow its means for referencing their biographies pose security threats." (Duguay, 2017. P. 362)

* Q U I C K  Q U E S T I O N*

Do you think that Tinder should ditch Facebook's policies and have their own so that profiles can contain things such as nudity, or stay with it? Why? Do you think that this would make the environment more honest or would it be more dangerous?

References:

Duguay, S. (2017). Dressing up Tinderella: interrogating authenticity claims on the mobile
        dating app Tinder. Information, Communication & Society, 20(3), 351-367.
        doi:10.1080/1369118X.2016.1168471

Van Dijck, J. (2013). The culture of connectivity: A critical history of social media. Oxford: Oxford

        University Press.

The Dating Apocalypse

The founders of Tinder, were the first to achieve something that no other dating app or site until its creation was able to do, they were able to change the way men and women have sex. Tinder has been so influential in its development, it is connecting Millions of people at any given time. According to Vanity Fair tinder has become like a “dating apocalypse” (Sales 2015). How has this idea come to place, with the aid of the hookup culture that Tinder has been a main component?

People used to meet their partners through proximity, common friends or your cousin trying for the 6^th time to convince you to take their best friend on a date. Hook up culture has changed all of this in a strange transition to sex being socially acceptable, not just to talk about but to enjoy freely in many cases with no strings attached. Users of tinder simply need a thumb and as a man in New York that was interviewed says “I can find someone I can have sex with this evening, probably before midnight” (Sales 2015). As Van Dijck states, this is the platform of the app using empowerment to help its users (pg. 26). This empowerment has allowed sex to become to easy, in many people’s minds. The days of having a conversation appear to be over when users find themselves surrounded by potential sexual partners. Tinder claims to be a dating site, and dates do occur, as well as relationships, but the social stigma has switched to criticising people who get into a relationship with the use of an app. This has totally flipped the status quo of what the social stigma used to be around sex. The evolution of human interaction has been changed in a way by tinder (Sales 2015). No wonder the owners of tinder have not sold it, who can afford a company that has revolutionised the ideology of sex? As a social service, Tinder has become the pre-emptive Apollo, producing sexually partners, not star crossed lovers.

Sales, N. J. (2015). Tinder and the dawn of the “Dating Apocalypse”. Vanity Fair.

Van Dijck, J. (2013). The culture of connectivity: A critical history of social media. Oxford University Press.

Tinder's Authenticity Concerns

Tinder is one of the premier dating apps that exist to date. There are over 1 billion swipes registered per day. This is a ridiculous statistic that needs to be further looked into in order to provide some contextual information about the nature of these swipes. Who is swiping left and who is swiping right are minor questions and, Tinder’s algorithm has dealt with these question. One of the larger questions that tinder has relates back to these 1.6 billion swipes, but it has not become who is producing these swipes. The problem of fraudulent personas along with spam accounts is something that greatly threatens the future of tinder’s worth.

Mobile dating has become a socially accepted practice in our community, however five years ago this probably was not the case. If we think back to class, many people actually put their hands up to indicate that they have used some form of online dating. The amount of hands reduced when the question was posed by Dr. Herman, who has met up with someone they met on a dating site. I think that a significant amount of people had never met up with someone because of the idea of someone misrepresenting themselves. The chance that someone has digitally changed their image to appear more attractive is almost certain in this day and age. The concerns more heavily lie in the idea that someone is pretending to be someone they are not over tinder. As Van Dijck stated, this is where users are either empowered to do this, or constrained to become victims (pg. 33). Mobile dating has intensified the ways in which potential dates are misrepresenting themselves, and has raised very real concerns about the authenticity of its users (Duguay pg. 2). The idea that a user is being lured into a “catfish” is not only a concern but a real possibility. Many people who exhibit this type of behaviour feel the need to behave this way do to personal issues (Duguay pg. 7). Tinder has provided a space that allows this type of behaviour to be centralized inside a dating app.

Tinder’s platform makes this type of behaviour almost impossible to rectify, as all the information needed to sign up is particularly easy to falsify. This does not extinguish the importance of this for the ownership group, it is a very real concern that can affect a lot of tinder users. The actor-network theory that Van Dijck states is absolutely central, needs to be incorporated by tinder to find a solution to users concerns (pg. 26).

Duguay, S. (2016). Dressing up Tinderella: interrogating authenticity claims on the mobile dating app Tinder. Information, Communication & Society, 1-17.

Van Dijck, J. (2013). The culture of connectivity: A critical history of social media. Oxford University Press.

Users and Usage: Empowered or Constrained?

In Van Dijck’s book The Culture of Connectivity, he poses the question “To what extent are users empowered or constrained by platforms to fashion their unique identity and stylize their self-presentation?” (p.32-33). In other words in what ways do social media platforms such as Tinder do to either empower self creation or restrain users from being able to express themselves. We can look at this through the implicit participation, which refers to the usage inscribed by the design of the app and the coding used as well as the explicit participation, which refers to how the actual users interact and maneuver around these mechanisms.

First, its protocols require pre-setting a limited geographical perimeter, age frame, choosing of images and device geo-localization for possible matches to appear. The users are able to set their own parameters quickly and efficiently and are able to change them at any point in time, however although these options might seem to give users optimal freedom the design of these options are actually somewhat restricting. Options such as setting your geographical perimeter only allows you to set it to a certain distance away from you unless you wish to pay for the app. As well, you are only allowed to have a maximum 6 pictures and a 500 word maximum description. Remedies created by Tinder for some of these issues are the paid options such as Tinder Plus which gives access to features such as the rewind option for a swipe mistake, the premium option which allows unlimited swipes, as well as the passport feature which allows users to set their geo-localization to anywhere in the world. In their article “Screened Intimacies: The Swipe Logic” by Gaby David and Carolina Cambre, they discuss the issues that arise in the free model of the app when paid upgrades are introduced. They stated that “after Tinder developers provided privileges based on subscriptions, the standard free model began to limit matches” (p.4). The app’s algorithms function began to decrease the number of viewable profiles as its use increases, unless paid for the free model only gives users 20 consecutive right swipes and if you run out of right swipes you become temporarily locked out of swiping. However Tinder users have managed to creatively get past this by changing the settings from “searching men and women” to “searching only men” or “searching only women,” a new cache of profiles became available.

One of the constraints of Tinder on its users has now been updated. Tinder now allows transgenders to identify themselves rather than just the standard male or female options. It now allows its users to choose transgender or gender-nonconforming identities in order to remedy the persistent harassment against trans people on the service. The abuse came from transgender users being reported as abusive on the site from others based on who they are not what they were saying or doing, these abuse reports meant that trans people were blocked from using the service by its algorithms. The Movement has now taken form in a hashtag #alltypesallswypes to bring awareness to this issue and created a video that is posted below.

https://youtu.be/XP90QAnmaA4

Work Cited:

David, Gaby, and Carolina Cambre. "Screened Intimacies: Tinder and the Swipe Logic." Social                  Media & Society, vol. 2, no. 2, 2016, pp. 1-11.

Stack, Liam. "Transgender on Tinder: Now You Can Identify Yourself That Way." New York Times15          Nov. 2016. Accessed 12 Dec. 2016.

Van Dijck, J. (2013). The culture of connectivity: A critical history of social media. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Algorithms: Hot or Not?

Technologies: Algorithms

Van Dijck:

“The computational power of social media platforms lies in their capability to include algorithms for processing data. An algorithm, in computer science, is a finite list of well-defined instructions for calculating a function, a step-by-step directive for processing or automatic reasoning that orders a machine to produce a certain output from given input” (pg.30)

Algorithms are a very important piece to online dating apps for calculating successful matches between two people, or even more. For Tinder itself as a dating app that is known for being based mainly off of images and quick first impressions based on looks uses a different type of algorithm then other main stream dating apps and websites who focus more on compatibility. Although Tinder’s algorithm is top secret and not available to the public, it claims that it tailors itself to users depending on their past use.

CEO Sean Rad did however confirm that they use an internal rating score known as an “Elo Score” which is normally used by chess players to rank skill level but instead is used by Tinder to rank your popularity on the app. Tinder Data analyst Chris Dumler calls it a “vast voting system”, meaning every time you swipe right on one person or left on another you are voting whether you find that person desirable or not. Dumler says “"Every swipe is in a way casting a vote: I find this person more desirable than this person, whatever motivated you to swipe right. It might be because of attractiveness, or it might be because they had a really good profile” (Carr, FastCompany.com). Tinder’s engineers use this information to study what profiles are considered most alluring in aggregate.

Work Cited

Alba, A. (2016). Tinder's secret algorithm matches users based on their 'desirability' score. New York Daily News. Retrieved December 12, 2016.

Carr, A. (2016, January 11). I Found Out My Secret Internal Tinder Rating and Now I Wish I       Hadn't. FastCompany. Retrieved December 12, 2016.

Van Dijck, J. (2013). The culture of connectivity: A critical history of social media. Oxford: Oxford University Press.