If you get a message from someone you never matched with on Tinder, it’s not a glitch — it’s part of the app’s expensive new subscription plan that it teased earlier this year, which allows “power users” to send unsolicited messages to non-matches for the small fee of $499 per month.
That landscape, in fact, is largely populated by apps owned by Tinder’s parent company: as Bloomberg notes, Match Group Inc. not only owns the popular swiping app, but also Match.com, OKCupid, Hinge, and The League.
Match Group CEO Bernard Kim referred to Tinder’s subscriptions as “low-hanging fruit” meant to compete with other, pricier services, though that was before this $6,000-per-year tier dropped.
There’s a big conflict of interest in dating apps: if you’re successful you stop using the app, and of course the company doesn’t want that.
But if everyone has a shitty experience with it, they won’t recommend it or even tell people to stay away from it. But if it works well, they’ll praise it, thus gaining more users.
And enshittification and buying up competitors will lead to all sites being the same, which is exactly what has happened. Executives don’t care about providing a useful service, they just care about getting richer
Match Group has basically ruined all of online dating.