Do You Get a Hinge Match Again

Annotation: this piece came out in March 2015 and since then Hinge has been totally overhauled, so much of what's below is very outdated. For a more recent Hinge explainer, please read Kaitlyn Tiffany's piece here .

Tinder — the massively popular smartphone app that has radically simplified the process of online dating — is becoming a household name. But it'southward non the only location-based dating app. Hinge, for example, is also on the rise. For now, it'due south much less popular than Tinder, but ascendant social networks have been dislodged earlier, and Hinge's focus on making connections through people you already know could win out. "The best analogy is MySpace versus Facebook," Hinge founder and CEO Justin McLeod said on CNBC in February. That's a pretty rosy assessment, but the analogy is not all incorrect. Hinge is growing fast, and information technology'southward worth getting to know it.

ane) What is Hinge, in a sentence?

Hinge is a smartphone dating app, bachelor for iPhones/iPads and Android devices, that's oriented toward relationships rather than hookups and tries to match you with people your friends know and can vouch for.

2) How does Swivel work?

The basics of Hinge are very similar to Tinder. When you sign up, you are presented with a list of fellow users co-ordinate to criteria you specify (age, gender, concrete proximity to you); if you like them and they like you dorsum, you're matched and can message each other. In both apps, yous build your profile past importing pictures and other personal data from Facebook.

Just that's where the similarities stop. While Tinder gives you a never-catastrophe stream of nearby users, Swivel but provides a select list. Previous iterations of the app gave users new potential matches once a mean solar day, but now matches come in a regular trickle, like Tinder but with lower volume.

The principal difference, though, is that Hinge focuses on matching you with people you share Facebook friends with, if you take a Facebook account. If nobody is friends with your friends — or if you've already made your way through all those potential matches — the app starts recommending more tangential connections, like people whose Facebook friends share Facebook friends with you lot. But the focus is on finding people who are somewhere in your social network. Tinder will tell yous if a user happens to have mutual friends with yous, but you can't screen to see those users outset.

3) Okay, what does this look like in practise?

Hither's a typical screen a Swivel user will see upon opening the app:

(Courtesy of Hinge)

Encounter the little dots to the left? Those represent how many matches y'all have to choose from at that moment. Just you tin can't scroll through them — you have to click the heart (to like them) or the 10 (to pass) on the profile at the elevation before you tin move on.

You tin also pull upward Ed W.'s profile for more than info:

(Courtesy of Hinge)

You can see his height, his higher and grad school, any friends you share, and a variety of self-descriptive tags that Swivel lets y'all choose from (including "country clubber," "bookworm," "joker," "smoker," and "midnight toker"). You tin can also swipe through whatsoever photos he's uploaded; users also have the pick of adding a curt "about me" section.

Compare this with Tinder'due south primary screen:

(Courtesy of Tinder)

That's not too unlike from Hinge's main screen; the primary contrasts are that Tinder shows you shared interests and Swivel shows you the user'south employer and/or school, which is potentially more illuminating. But pulling up a profile (like this 1, which Jimmy Fallon and the staff of The This evening Show cooked upward for Britney Spears) looks quite dissimilar in Tinder:

(The This evening Show)

You become to meet all their pictures, how shut they are to you, how recently they logged in, and a short "about me" department. If you lot share friends or likes on Facebook, yous come across that, also. (This is a good time to recommend that yous similar Voice on Facebook, thus enabling you to match other Vocalization fans on Tinder and go along the lineage of Voice fandom running for many generations.)

Just overall, you get a lot less data than on Hinge. That'south partially past design. Part of what'southward made Tinder successful is that it profoundly reduces the amount of endeavour that goes into setting upwards an online profile; while sites like OKCupid require you to answer huge batteries of personal questions ("Do you own any die with more than six sides?" "Do yous know the first name of every person you've ever made out with?"), Tinder just requires you pick a few photos and perhaps write a witty "about me" section if you experience like information technology. Hinge takes a center ground: you lot don't have to answer questions, but you do get to include more information nearly yourself.

4) Is Hinge a location-based app, like Tinder?

Sort of? While you can specify that yous want people close to yous, there are limits; whereas Tinder lets you lot expect for users within ane mile of you, the everyman Swivel goes is 10 miles. The app too doesn't automatically update when you change locations. If yous live in Boston and continue a day trip to New York City, Tinder will first showing you lot New York matches, while Swivel will keep serving up Bostonians unless y'all manually modify your hometown in your contour.

The focus isn't on finding a quick hookup close by; it'due south on finding people yous could really date, whom you might ask out if you met at a mutual friend's political party. "It's all friends of friends," McLeod said on CNBC. "Information technology'southward quite hard to utilize it for casual encounters."

5) How popular is Swivel?

Hinge doesn't requite user numbers, just spokeswoman Jean-Marie McGrath reports that 35,500 dates per week and 1,500 relationships happen because of the dating app. "In our major markets, one in five of your friends is on Swivel," she continues. "Our users can receive upward to 20 potentials a day." If you're on the app, chances are a lot of your friends are, too; the boilerplate user has almost 50 Facebook friends on Swivel. The gender ratio is l-50, co-ordinate to McGrath, and xc pct of users are between 23 and 36, making the Swivel user base of operations noticeably older than Tinder's. (An exact comparing isn't available, but 52 per centum of Tinder users are between 18 and 24.)

As of March 2014, the app had made i million matches; by August it was up to 3 million, and over 8 million by late October. Those are impressive figures, and suggest the app is growing fast (it claims its user base grew fivefold in 2014), merely they all the same pale in comparison to Tinder. As of Jan, Tinder had made 5 billion matches, and was making 21 1000000 more every twenty-four hours. That's a difference of iii orders of magnitude. Then once more, Hinge currently is only available in 34 Us cities and 2 foreign ones (London and Toronto), whereas Tinder is available worldwide, and given that Swivel appears to be experiencing exponential growth information technology'due south non totally implausible to think it could be a existent competitor.

6) Let's take a break. Tinder's produced some pretty amazing memes. How well-nigh Swivel?

Non really, sadly. It's nevertheless hundreds of times smaller than Tinder, and it'll probably take some time for it to become enough of a cultural staple to produce Tumblrs and memes like Humanitarians of Tinder, Fishermen of Tinder, Tinder Guys with Tigers, Tinder in Brooklyn, and Hello Let'southward Date.

Only Hinge's official blog is doing its damndest to try to shut the gap, through stuff similar its 30 Most Eligible in NYC list, which collects a grouping of the app'south most socially connected and nearly oftentimes "liked" users in New York:

(Via Hinge)

It even ranked Wall Street firms based on how frequently their employees were liked versus rejected. Goldman Sachs won. Goldman Sachs always wins.

7) What'south the appeal of Hinge over Tinder or OKCupid?

The danger of most dating sites and apps is that you have basically no idea whom yous're beingness matched up with and whether they're safe to meet in person. Even now y'all'll hear concerns that your OKCupid engagement "could exist a series killer," which, while paranoid and hyperbolic, has a semblance of a point to it. There are a lot of horrible people in the world, and OKCupid and Match.com can't exercise all that much to keep yous from going to dinner with them. Moreover, dating sites aimed at heterosexuals tend to feature a lot of male harassment of female users, sometimes to the point that women's inboxes become sufficiently clogged to render the service unusable.

Tinder got around those problems to a degree past requiring users to "similar" each other to lucifer earlier messaging. That eased the message onslaught, but the relative sparseness of Tinder profiles means you take nothing to go along also your match'due south photos and messages to you, which doesn't do much to help you lot determine whether a stranger'south safe to run across at a bar.

Hinge'southward focus on matching with people yous share friends with ways you can ask those friends to vet prospective dates. That's not a perfect defense force, only it's something. "I've met upwards with someone on Hinge considering y'all have mutual friends, and then you tin can be eighty percent sure they're non a full-on wacko," one user told the New York Times' Kristin Tice Sudeman. "Hinge cuts through the randomness of Tinder … I can have some condolement that she knows some of the aforementioned people I do," another told her. A Swivel fact sheet sent forth past McGrath touts "No randos" every bit a key characteristic: "If Tinder feels like meeting a stranger at a bar, Swivel feels like getting warmly introduced at a cocktail political party."

The mutual-friends attribute also allow the process bleed into offline dating. Buzzfeed'due south Joseph Bernstein has an incisive piece on how dating apps are giving ascent to "offline-online dating" in which people use "offline life as a discovery mechanism for online dating." Tinder has contributed to this to an extent, but as Bernstein says, Swivel "represents the collapse of the offline-online dating stardom better than any other dating app, because it shows users the very people they would be likely to run into through a friend."

You might meet someone at a mutual friend's political party, hit information technology off but not exchange numbers or make plans, and so run into each other on Hinge (partially because of that common friend), giving you another shot. Or the app could provide a safe way to limited interest in a friend-of-a-friend whom you're hesitant to approach in person; after all, they only find out you like them if they like yous back.

McLeod told Bernstein this dynamic has major appeal to Hinge users. While the app stopped recommending actual Facebook friends to each other after users complained, friends-of-friends and friends-of-friends-of-friends are much likelier to friction match than people with no connexion (which, despite Hinge'due south best efforts, sometimes happens). Users like 44 pct of friends-of-friends, 41 percent of friends-of-friends-of-friends, and a mere 28 percent of people with whom they lack any connexion.

viii) How off-white is the "Hinge is Facebook, Tinder is MySpace" illustration?

Pretty off-white, albeit not in ways that are entirely favorable to Hinge. The transition from MySpace to Facebook was, as the social media scholar danah boyd has argued, a case of digital "white flying." "Whites were more likely to leave or choose Facebook," boyd explains. "The educated were more likely to leave or cull Facebook. Those from wealthier backgrounds were more probable to leave or choose Facebook. Those from the suburbs were more likely to leave or cull Facebook."

In some sense, this was baked into Facebook's premise. It started amid college students — in item among Harvard students, and and then students at other highly selective, elite colleges, and and then students at all colleges, and then on. It grew out of an initial user base that was largely wealthy and white; gradually it became associated with the bourgeoisie and MySpace with the proletariat. Facebook may or may non have been intentionally exploiting these class dynamics, but those dynamics played a very real role in the site's evolution.

If you doubt Hinge is the dating app of the privileged, consider that information technology literally ranked financial institutions by the eligibility of their single employees. (Hinge)

Hinge, similarly, targets an elite demographic. Information technology's merely available in cities. Its users are 20-somethings and almost all went to college. "Hinge users are 99 pct college-educated, and the most pop industries include banking, consulting, media, and fashion," McGrath says. "Nosotros recently found 35,000 users attended Ivy League schools."

Classism and racism have e'er been problems in online dating. Christian Rudder, a cofounder of OKCupid, demonstrates in his book Dataclysm that in three major traditional dating sites — OKCupid, Match.com, and DateHookup — blackness women are consistently rated lower than women of other races. Buzzfeed's Anne Helen Petersen put together a Tinder simulation in which 799 participants (albeit non-randomly selected ones) each evaluated xxx fake profiles constructed using stock photos, and found that people's swipes depended strongly on the perceived class of the prospective friction match. " If a user self-identified as upper-middle-class and identified the male profile before him or her as 'working-form,' that user swiped 'yes' only thirteen per centum of the time," Petersen writes. Merely if they identified the contour equally "middle-class," the swipe rate rose to 36 percent.

Hinge provides nonetheless more tools for that kind of judging. You can come across where potential matches went to college, or where they worked. Indeed, this kind of assortative mating — matching people of the same socioeconomic course with each other — is embedded into the app's algorithm. McLeod told Boston.com's Laura Reston the algorithm uses your by choices to predict time to come matches, and in do your schoolhouse and workplace, and social network in general, oft serve every bit good predictors. "McLeod notes that a Harvard student, for example, might prefer other Ivy Leaguers," Reston writes. "The algorithm would then compose lists that include more people from Ivy League institutions."

Manifestly, Hinge didn't invent this dynamic; every bit Reston notes, 71 percent of college graduates marry other college graduates, and sure elite schools are particularly expert at matching up their alumni (over 10 percent of Dartmouth alums marry other Dartmouth alums). And the Hinge fact sheet frames this aspect of the algorithm as only another manner in which the app resembles beingness set upwardly by a friend:

Think of setting up your pickiest friend. First, you'd remember of all the people you know who he/she might similar to run into. Then you would prioritize those recommendations based on what you know virtually your friend (preference for doctors, dislike for lawyers, beloved for Ivy Leaguers etc). Finally, over time y'all would get-go to acquire his/her tastes and refine your recommendations. That's exactly how Hinge's algorithm works.

In that location's the "Ivy Leaguers" example once more. Hinge has carved out a niche as the dating app of the privileged, which helps garner media coverage from reporters who fit its demographics (like, uh, me) and lets information technology cultivate an elite epitome that could wind upwards taking users of all backgrounds from Tinder, much equally the aristocracy attraction of Facebook eventually allowed it to defeat MySpace across the board.

9) What are some problems people take had with Hinge?

One major issue is you have to live in an urban area to use it, and in one of a relatively small number of areas at that. The current list is:

NYC, SF, 50.A., DC, Seattle, Atlanta, Chicago, Boston, Philly, Dallas, Houston, Austin, Denver, Miami, Tampa, Orlando, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Omaha, Phoenix, San Diego, Detroit, Portland, Charlotte, Raleigh, Pittsburgh, Columbus, New Orleans, Cleveland, Nashville, Albany, Cincinnati, Kansas Metropolis, Toronto, and London.

That leaves out some major cities, like San Antonio, Jacksonville, El Paso, and Memphis, not to mention people in rural areas, where dating pools are smaller and online dating is arguably more crucial. If yous live outside the US and non in Toronto or London, you're also out of luck. Swivel explains, "We launch cities every bit soon every bit the waitlist has reached a critical mass such that they can sustain and grow." The idea is that dating apps only really work when at that place's a reasonably large base of users, so Hinge purposely doesn't expand to a city until it can expect that to materialize.

The app has also been criticized for poorly serving LGBT users. Tyler Coates at Flavorwire reported that the app had started matching him with direct men. When he asked what was going on, a Hinge representative explained, "Right now we take a relatively small number of gay Hinge members."

He quit, so rejoined a number of months later, but got four matches a solar day, rather than the 10 the app had promised based on the size of his social network. When he asked what was up, a Hinge representative replied, "As of yet, we've done a pretty poor job of alluring a gay userbase, and so that'due south most of the problem: we're running low on people to recommend to y'all. I'one thousand guessing we'll attempt to reboot our gay marketplace at some point, but it'due south not on the docket simply withal." (McGrath, the Hinge spokeswoman, says this comment was "misinformation stated past a new employee at the time. Nosotros are very focused on actively expanding all portions of our userbase, including our gay userbase.")

The app also requires users to identify every bit male person or female and as looking for male and/or female partners, which excludes people who don't place as i of those 2 genders. Initially, it didn't let users ask for matches from both men and women, limiting its usefulness for bi and queer people.

One comparatively lilliputian complaint with the app is that it doesn't let y'all reduce the number of photos pulled from Facebook beneath 16:

You tin can reorder them, or cull a different gear up of 16 photos, but yous tin can't only testify v if there are more than on your Facebook business relationship. This is an intentional restriction, meant to prevent people from misrepresenting what they look like. McLeod explained in an interview with Business Insider: "You still accept to have a minimum number of xvi photos that we pull from your Facebook profile photos, photos of you that have to exist recent. That'southward a big piece of the states is we're pretty vetted and transparent, we attempt to evidence the authentic you, yous can't merely postal service three photos."

Watch: 'The myth of the "supermale" and the actress Y chromosome'

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Source: https://www.vox.com/2015/3/19/8257357/hinge-explained