It has been seven years ever since the release of Tinder, the app where you swipe right if you want to meet a person, and swipe left if you don’t want to. Tinder is, by far, the most used dating app in the UK and the US. The app is download 300 million times and has over five million paying subscribers, making it the highest-grossing app of any kind in the world, according to the analysts App Annie.
For Americans, apps and online dating are the most common way to meet a partner. “It’s an amazing responsibility, and an amazing privilege,” says Elie Seidman, Tinder’s 45-year-old chief executive. If he finds it less daunting than others might, that’s because, before he took over Tinder in 2018, he was in charge of OkCupid, the Tinder of the 2000s. He has spent much of his working life helping people to find love.
“The vast majority of our employees are energised by that very mission,” he says. “We’re not selling plumbing supplies, right? Obviously, plumbing is really important, but ours is a really noble and exciting mission. So, when we’re taking new risks – new challenges, new chances – we know that, if we’re successful, it’s about helping members connect.”
At times, however, the app seemed to chase that goal with too much passion. As it launched on college campuses before it expanded to New York, London, and then to everywhere, Tinder became less of a dating app, and more of a “hook-up” app.
In its early days, Tinder leaned into this reputation. Perhaps the most notorious feature was the introduction of a secret “Elo ranking”, a term borrowed from the chess world to describe a way to score people based on their previous matches. With the Tinder version, your score went up a lot if hot people swiped right on you; if ugly people swiped left on you, it went down just as much. Whether your matches were hot was based on their own Elo ranking, and so on.
For Seidman, this feature was a big mistake.
Find out more about this topic over at SCMP.
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