I tried Hinge

Holy shit it is bad.

I thought Tinder was the worst of the worst, but Hinge is on another level.

Match Group advertises Hinge as being designed to spark intelligent conversation. Good luck with that. You can have a maximum of three answers on your profile, each with a character limit (150 characters), so it’s unlikely you’ll be able to say anything of substance. For context, that last sentence is 164 characters (including spaces and punctuation)… 14 character more than you could fit in an answer on Hinge. The character limit is transferred across to messages as well, so expect conversation to be stymied somewhat.

It is also advertised as not having swipes. I mean, technically, you don’t physically swipe the screen to like or dislike someone, but the basic premise is the same: vapid, superficial, instant decision on whether to like or dislike a random person… the same as Tinder and OkCupid. This basic format is what I term “swipe culture”, whether you physically swipe of not.

Where it departs from Tinder (and OkCupid, for that matter) is in messaging. You can send messages to other users without matching first. But there is a catch. You can only like/message someone if you complete your entire profile. This isn’t like how OkCupid used to limit how many people it showed you on the home screen based on how much of your profile you’d filled out. That was incremental. This is all or nothing. This means answering three questions and uploading six pictures. Ah, there’s the superficiality of the app again. Style (pictures) seems to be more important than substance (words), which is why it seems mainly to attract vapid, fake, wannabe Instagram models. There’s also the question as to whether the recipient receives messages before liking the sender (much like OkCupid’s short-lived intros that were scrapped earlier in the year). I cannot answer this question definitively (yet). However, considering it has “roses” (akin to OkCupid’s “superlike”), I’m guessing not.

It also feels rather cookie cutter. As mentioned earlier, you’re giving stymied answers to three questions from a list of around 75 pre-set questions. Again, because of the character limit, it can be hard to get across anything of substance. I mean, I struggle with Twitter’s 280 character limit, so cutting that in almost half is a nightmare for me. You can kind of caption your six pictures… kind of. You can use one of around 70 pre-set captions. Because of these limitations, it can be hard to show any personality you may have (which probably explains why no one I saw on there seemed to have a personality).

Ultimately, I would not recommend the app.

One thought on “I tried Hinge

  1. robert

    hi

    im glad I found the site. well done. I wish youd do an article on the various shady practices match group does with OKCrap (as it should be called now after they destroyed it)

    they deceive people to buy membership by deception.

    https://www.reddit.com/r/OkCupid/comments/vfle9d/statistical_analysis_of_the_691_likes_i_paid_to/

    the like counter goes up and then when you pay, you come to realize the likes are95% from 3rd world countries and not local. this is deceite.

    also the day when membership finishes, the likes jump through the roof and when you pay its all the same likes you had before but had passed on them.

    they were sued by the ftc and did have and even now have a class act lawsuit against them. I really wish a law firm would have at them for this specific deceite they do. I sent a few emails to a few law firms who deal with corporate class act suits. well see

    they do no split the like counts for local or out of country profiles. on the reddit sub there are tons of posts of this scam. they allow tons of social media whores to solicite men. they allow men to solicite women on bitcoin.

    many have left and are not active. they do not delete deleted profiles either. my profile was shown to me after 6 months from deletion in a female friends phone feed. im sure many other shady tactics too. they send people notifications that they were matched with, then when you come online, no one is there. this is a way to get people online and use it. so if you are already online, they might as well swipe and send some messages.

    you can write to me and id be happy to talk about it.

    quite the scumbag company

    did you notice how they are trying to hype up hinge as the next big thing?

    Reply

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