There is no right/wrong here, Tinder is a business, not a public square or a public service, you choose willingly to use their service so they can charge whatever they want, nobody is forcing you to use it.
Just like in a night club or country club, the house is free to set whichever memebership rules it wants, if you don't like them you are free to go somewhere else.
Unlike the jobs market, the dating market and its (discriminatory) dynamics is not something the government could regulate.
If it was employment, would you hold them to the same standard? They too are businesses after all; by your logic, they get to pay you more or less depending on factors like gender, age, etc.
You're applying this corporate-libertarian ideal to this situation but only a small change to your statement undermines it.
So are you fine with a service that charges black people more? Or a private company that decides not to hire gays? They're both not public squares or services, right?
Because publicly funded universities hold different ethnicities to different standards which favor particular underrepresented groups simply due to their group identity rather than to a consistent, objective standards.
I asked because the response to that question helps me understand w the point of view one is coming from
They're not suggesting that another injustice might not exist in higher education, more that it has nothing to do with the hypothetical of a dating app charging more based on race.
Just because there's publicly funded precedent, doesn't mean it's not something that should be tackled and fixed.
This practice only works if companies keep paying male workers more, since essentially this is getting males to pay for those services keeping the lights on. The beneficiaries probably won’t complain since they pay less, but charging guys more is an inherently sexist practice which only makes sense continuing in a world with sexist salary and compensation practices.
Having too many men can impact the experience women have, and if they leave then the entire platform collapses. The cost to "host" a user is the same regardless of gender but platforms like these work only if the gender ratio is at least somewhat balanced - the fee seems to help with that, just like it does in a physical club(where it also doesn't cost any more to host a man than it does a woman).
Well yes, but at least in some places companies introducing different prices based on things like gender or race are not legal. Recently in the UK there was a case where a pub had a promotion where men paid more for drinks on the International Womens day, and someone took them to court over it and won - the court agreed that such pricing based in gender is not legal in the UK. On the other hand, clubs do this all the time without a fuss, but I suspect it's because no one challenged them legally on it yet.
In general I'm not a fan of the "gay people can just chose not to pay" argument - it sounds too similar to the one where some companies argued they should be allowed to deny gay people service, since they can simply go somewhere else.
It's perfectly normal that these decisions aren't necessarily being made because of operating costs, pricing in general is arbitrary and does not have to have any relation whatsoever with costs.
Meh, it's just like cover prices at a club. As a guy, you can let the "unfairness" bother you, or you can realize it's in your best interest to minimize barriers for women because basically everything is a saugagefest otherwise.
Then again, the actual figures in the article tell a different story than the title does.
- Queer female under 30: $7/mo
- Straight female over 30: $30/mo
- Straight male over 50: $35/mo
So it's really age in general.
Though I'm a male in my 30s in a metro center and it's just showing me $8/mo. Though that's probably just Tinder's AI recognizing me as the gift to women that I am.
Also, Tinder Gold is optional. I'm a heavy dating-app user and would never pay for premium features.
Commerce has never been done on the basis of operating costs. Go look at the price difference between a cheap shirt and an expensive shirt. The change in operating costs is nothing compared to the price difference.
You'd think with rules on the books against discriminating on the basis of sex that it would be a slam dunk case, for this and night club covers, but there must have not been a serious legal challenge to the practice yet.
It's probably counterproductive. Yeah, you can sue and maybe you can win. But are you sure you want the end result?
Human attraction, unfortunately, is not very fair, and definitely doesn't really follow anti-discrimination practices, from everything I've read so far.
Charging people different prices based on factors they can't control, and in secret to boot, is just wrong. Whether it's age or race or eye color, it's wrong. Why are people so greedy that they need to push against such simple principles so hard?
I'd say yes in principle, because the cost of providing insurance is mostly the cost of risk which objectively and significantly correlates with age. Same for health insurance for example. Taking more profit off younger drivers would still be wrong though imo.
If the underlying cost of the service is legitimately and significantly affected by age, sure, charge accordingly. Tinder's case seems different.
The examples above are about age because any rules about age at least apply more or less consistently to all people as people age over time. I'm not saying that doing the same kind of pricing by other personal traits such as race or gender or eye color would be ok, just so that we're clear.
I disagree that it costs Tinder the same amount for all users, regardless of age.
Consider their COGS to be user acquisition costs. Serve too many unattractive people and those costs go up as people leave the platform.
With the amount of data they have, I'm sure you could reliably estimate the cost of any given profiles being shown to any other given profile.
This could be used to determine who profiles are shown to, and how often. One implication is that attractive but dead accounts will be shown more often to unattractive but highly active accounts. Another is that unattractive but highly active accounts must be charged more to maintain the same margins.
I am equivocating attractiveness with age here, but presumably there would be too much public outcry if they charged by attractiveness alone, so they my guess is they use age as a proxy.
The age as a proxy for attractiveness issue is better solved by matching algorithms that take age difference into account. I'd be surprised if they didn't do this already.
And tbh the whole attractiveness argument smells a lot like how black people were considered unattractive customers that would make it harder to sell to white customers in real estate transactions in 1950s America.
It's not unreasonable that marketing a fair platform would cost more than a discriminatory one, just as it's not unreasonable that e.g. mitigating pollution at a factory costs money.
Regulations should address such things to level the playing field of course, but shit companies trying to sneak in practices like this should be condemned.
No, it isn't, I've been making this argument for years. In all of EU it's illegal to charge more for insurance based on gender, it should also be illegal to charge more based on age. Only your actual driving record, type of car being insured and possibly location should be taken into account when calculating the premium.
In practice this argument leads to insurance companies charging thousands per year for all new drivers, and then giving discounts to drivers willing to install surveillance devices that report all aspects of the driver's driving.
I don't see how an insurance company could judge your driving without telemetry unless you've been wrecking cars and racking up points on your license.
And I don't see how it's a problem, unless you make a claim on your car insurance, the car insurance provider should assume you drive like a saint.
After all, you would never agree to have trackers in your house just so the insurance company can judge if you're a safe home owner and lower your home insurance premium - why agree to it in cars?
Yep. My sister had the tracker because her insurance required it, and it was a complete nightmare. They threatened to cancel her insurance multiple times due to "dangerous speeding", after calling them they would say the tracker registered her driving 70mph in a 20mph zone, so we would request they send the data proving so.....and every single time, the tracker would register her driving on a small 20mph road going underneath a motorway where she was actually driving doing a legal 70mph. I mean, just looking at the GPS trace it was obvious that she was on the motorway for the last 50 miles, and now for that one read she was on a smaller road crossing the motorway? She would have had to teleport to do that.
As for the G-force tracker - it's also shit, she was getting points docked constantly for "smoothness" of driving, because every time you went through a speed bump the tracker would register "abrupt braking event" and recommend "smoother braking for better scores". It was such a shit system that she willingly paid 2x the premium on her next insurance to not have a tracker.
Couldn’t you argue that’s what’s happening? As in, would you support a lower rate for people with X years of no crashes? (Meaning teens wouldn’t be eligible because they just started driving)
Sure, in an ideal world an 18 year old who just started driving and a 50 year old who just got their licence should have identical rates, but in practice that's not the case - the older person will have a lower premium despite also having zero experience behind the wheel. Having a clean record is a thing you can work towards and can be rewarded with a lower premium - being older is not.
It does work like this in some places, and younger drivers aren't any better off in terms of pricing, speaking from personal experience. So this is 95% just pricing by age "with extra steps" as they say.
Consider this: if the first accident happens to an average person after 10 years of driving, young people will take a loooong time to build a driving record that can even be considered average let alone good. And you can't start charging higher rates only after the crash, such rates would need to be so high as to be ompletely prohibitive. Bottom line, young people will never be paying as good a price as older people under any system that has a semblance of fairness to it. Sadly.
Sure, but the exact same argument applies to charging men more - we know as a matter of fact that men get into more accidents than women do, for various reasons. Yet at least some places decided it's illegal to charge men more - so knowing that it's a statistical inevitably that men will cause more accidents, now both sexes pay more, but at least the premiums are equal. Is it better overall? My internal logic tells me that it is, because it's not your fault that you're a man, so just because other men crash more often why should you be charged more?
(This can get into a really long discussion about a lot of things that can correlate with higher accident rates and how sometimes it's a false correlation, like how in some places black people have more accidents, but it's not because they are black but because they are poorer on average and drive older less safe cars - but filtering by race could be used as a quick filter which is, obviously, unfair(and illegal))
Age is different because it is much more equitable. Everyone was young and most people will grow to be old so most people will see both the upside and downside of fair-risk pricing by age.
Not the same with gender or race, you're stuck with what you're born with (statistically insignificant numbers of transitions notwithstanding).
I think this is a meaningful, if not perfect, distinction.
And yet when it comes to insurance (car or otherwise), in my country at least the area you live in changes the cost of insurance; some areas have a higher rate of theft, some brands are more likely to be stolen, and some demographics are more likely to end up in an accident (due to inexperience or recklessness).
It's a difficult one; objectively speaking, cost is a factor of risk, and risk is what insurance is for. But at the same time, it's discrimination based on age - not ALL people who just got their license are reckless.
In Australia they don’t charge more on the policy, but if you have an accident your co-pay is higher if you are young, have had your license for fewer than X years, the car is high power e.g. sports car.
But if you don’t crash you pay the same as the next regular Joe.
Not just straight men. Gay men too. I complained to Apple about this and they didn’t care.
On iOS at least you can get around this. Create a profile aged 18 and purchase a subscription. Now sign out and create your real profile and use the “restore purchases” option.
I never used Tinder myself but based on what I’ve come across on Reddit, if your profile is “premium” you can just hide your age? I guess that could mess up your target matches but you can presumably still set your own age range filter.
To anyone that knows anything about tinder having age hidden implies that you have premium implies that you are desperate. Only a fool would use the hide age option.
Haha I haven't considered that. Damn, the economics & related behaviours (signalling, honest signals, supply & demand etc.) of dating are brutal! I'm fortunate I'm off the market (currently).
Adjusting prices by demographic is so common in many industries.
Charging less for children, families and the elderly is the same thing. Charging less for women in clubs. Same with booking hotels and flights, based on browsing history, IP address, cookies and the extrapolated demographic.
Even a repair contractor adjusts his prices up for someone who lives in a mansion with expensive cars in the driveway, and down for a single mother with three young kids running around her.
Of course Tinder charges more for older men, why wouldn't they. Every industry ever wanted to be able to do this, and some can now automate it easily with all the available demographic data they collect.
> "Nowhere on Tinder's website, privacy policy, or in its terms and conditions does the company say that it will charge you a different price based on your personal data," Choice's Erin Turner said.
This is the key bit here. You go in expecting a level-ish playing field (it's not really level, obviously, but for other reasons.) Turns out that to even get access to the same service as young people, you have to pay 5 times as much as them. Dating when you're older is already difficult so making it even more difficult isn't exactly great.
Now, the argument here is that Premium is a choice, you don't have to get it. That's true but I still find it unfair that certain categories get an artificially inflated price. I'm fine with discounts for younger people as they tend to earn less (especially queer women, which are noted as having the lowest asking price for Premium.) However, it shouldn't come at the expense of other users.
> Dating when you're older is already difficult so making it even more difficult isn't exactly great.
Honestly 50 people have given this similar vibe. You people make it seem like someone has a gun to your head, forcing you to use a dating app. There are alternatives. It's a free market. If you don't like something, don't spend money on it.
> Discrimination based on sex/gender or age is (usually) prohibited in Europe
From museums to bus fares, europe is littered with discounts for 65+ and <12 or <18.
So is this a case where government run orgs get to price discriminate but business can't, or where the laws make explicit exceptions for gigantic subsets of the economy (I'd call transportation a pretty big sector), or... what? Your claim that price discriminating based on age is illegal in the EU is hard to believe without some proof.
- make non vulnerable people behave like if they were on a social network
Having different price, per geography, gender and age is just a consequence of the first.
It is not surprising that you can't see anymore the instagram handles of people on tinder. Instagram is a direct competitor to tinder for most of their users ( the non vulnerable ones).
Actually that's very smart, Tinder is probably the only big social network (tinder is not a dating app) which didn't require ads or a lot of funding to get big, only because one small portion of their user are willing to pay to be part of their community
Tinder removed the IG handles more likely because men were stalking women’s instagrams and it wasn’t immediately obvious connecting to instagram was going to display your username for all to see.
Bumble did it for that, probably not tinder. Most people who put their insta expect others to be able to add them on insta. This is the whole point of insta, it is to have the most people as possible watching at you. Tinder has always struggled to keep users in their app, which is the most important goal when you are a social network
Tinder is still there for the "discovery" of the people to add on Instagram, that is not going to change. Tinder doesn't make any extra money after people match, whether they continue to chat in or out of the app. Once connections are made and the users move out of the app, they still come back to Tinder for more discovery.
Thank you. You said what I was thinking. It’s a parlor trick to get people to lower their guard like they do at a club with chill vibes and good people through subtle polish and serviceable functionality. It’s not Wolfram they’re coding at Tinder but I am curious what they are coding there. It’s a mystery.
Not only this, at least last year (when I abandoned Tinder for good) they were charging women more for the "daily picks" feature (it selects top ranked profiles).
What does this feature do? Does it basically stack your match deck so high ranks are top pull every time? Really makes Tinder seem like a one-armed bandit. Either you pay and get quality folks on balance, due to ratings and such washing out the boys from the men, or you play your hand on randos. And people actually pay for this privilege?
Not really, men don't want high value women since men rarely get matches even when they reject nobody and get the less selected women. Women get matches all the time so they reject almost every candidates to get to the good ones, so to them the feature to remove results they would probably reject anyway is more important. However even for women with this feature you only get men who has plenty of options and is still looking, do you really want that? You are very unlikely to get a long term relationship that way.
> you only get men who has plenty of options and is still looking
plus people that are ranked on a single dimension, so you only get the same kind of polished person that is liked by the majority.
Now if Tinder would offer some sort of selection by categories like activities, tastes etc, that's a feature I would happily pay for. Other apps already have that.
They’re actually adding interests now as part of their matching algorithm, but the top picks are unique to each person, based on a number of different data points.
I've only done a quick bit of research but can't seem to find a clear list of protected characteristics in Oz like we have in the UK, age being one of them.. I don't use tinder but just looking up their pricing model it's £3.99 for under 28yo and £14.99 for 28yo and over in the UK... how is this not a breech of the Equality Act 2010?
They should be more transparent about their pricing, but it seems to me like they offer different demographics fundementaly different services so charging different amounts isn't unreasonable.
I get the feeling you may respond telling me that people over 30 are looking for a different type of relationship, to which I say that no type of relationship has a feasible monetary induction price, and even if it did, it is impossible to know which users are looking to have a fling and which are looking for an SO.
To add to this, as someone who has used the app before I'd be genuinely surprised if the experience they are given was in fact substantially different enough to warrant some people AU$7 while charging others over AU$30 (!!). The paid version allows you to change your swiping location (meaning you can match with someone in a different city), have a few more "super likes", and a couple other features. It's possible there are things I don't know about, or that some of the shoppers also added on the extra "gold" membership[1] in the article, increasing the price, but considering the experience already I think they're just doing differential pricing based on demographics and not actually giving a different experience.
1: The paid membership gives you a lot of features, but one thing you can additionally pay extra for is the ability to see who has liked you directly, so called "Tinder gold".
As a woman that uses Tinder, I can say first hand that the experience for women on the app is completely different. Paying for Tinder Gold lets you see the likes, infinite swipes, etc. like it does for men, but the value of that data is less useful. I buy Gold because I liked the features nonetheless, but the list of likes is useless - I’m constantly pegged at 9,999+ likes, the list freezes every five seconds, and there’s no meaningful way to sift through it.
People have wildly different experiences on tinder based on gender and age, among other things. It would follow that they value the premium features differently and be willing to pay more or less for them too.
>to which I say that no type of relationship has a feasible monetary induction price
It doesn't actually follow though does it? Some uber christian 20 y/o girl may want to get married and have kids within the year. Some 46 year old man might just be looking to bone down with his peers.
Someone can use any of those premium features to facilitate any of those possibilities, and more. Having more likes or options to message along with a super-like doesn't mean someone is looking for anything in particular.
It is simply true that some people
> value the premium features differently and be willing to pay more or less for them too.
But that's it. There's nothing about age or whatever in there.
The primary way that different demographics have different experiences on tinder is not related to who they're looking for, it's related to who's looking for them. Users that get lots of matches with minimal work fundamentally aren't going to pay as much for a product that is designed to get them more matches.
So to follow your logic further, would you have any problem with charging black women and asian men more than everybody else too, as fewer people are looking for them, and they are more willing to buy a product designed to get them more matches?
It's literally the same thing but with age. Just how much do you think we can squeeze out of 30+ black women eh?
The practice is despicable. I'm not saying you're advocating for the above, but if the approach is to just extract the maximum because you can extract the maximum, which is the logic you're advocating, this is an expected result.
Women don't need infinite likes, their match rate is very high so 100 likes per day is more than enough to get more conversations than they can handle. So in practice women already have infinite likes for free since they aren't used up anyway. Men's match rate is often less than 1%, so they need hundreds of likes just to talk to a single woman, without infinite likes chances are they will use up all their likes for the day and not get a single match.
So, if we take that into account women get maybe 25 free matches per day and men maybe 0.5 free matches per day. Men pay so they can get more matches per day, women don't. The service cost is per match and not per like. A man liking 1000 candidates costs as much as a woman rejecting 1000 candidates.
Dating apps are probably one of the best examples of conflict of interest: Your purpose is to help people stop using your service!
When money comes into play, you obviously don't want your users to leave.
Honestly, at this point, who is to say that the good matches are not paid employees acting as real users, or that "ghosting" (ending matches or blocking messages) isn't forced by the service, to induce an addiction? Clearly they can get away with scummy tactics, so why not milk all the money they can?
> Dating apps are probably one of the best examples of conflict of interest: Your purpose is to help people stop using your service!
Most companies that offer some product are in this dilemma. You want to satisfy your customer's demands but not too much so that they come again. You could sell them a laundromat or fridge that lasts 40 years, but you rather sell them one that lasts 10 and welcome them back in your shop much sooner. Planned obsolescence basically.
I used to work for the third largest online dating company in the world, and we had a tedious 150 questions quiz even before user were allowed to login in the app. And guess what: this test was only used to define a pricing bucket for the user depending on their past dating experience, how desperate they are, location, device os and other factors. There were some psychology related questions and a decision tree to dig deeper in one's soul.
And their whole business model was built around an idea to trick user into paying yearly subscription for the first year and then do whatever it takes to make them pay for the second year. Cancelling subscription was a quest itself, and given that couple of company's brands are targeting >50 years old people, it was relatively easy to scam them and not return the money
I doubt this is (potentially illegal) age-based discrimination, more likely it's sexual-market-value-based discrimination. It's easy for Tinder to determine who is or isn't attractive - older men just happen to be at a disadvantage here. It's not Tinder making that choice, it's the women on the platform.
Charging more in this case is arguably in the interest of older straight men. The experience of a woman on a dating platform is to get bombarded by hundreds if not thousands of messages. Do you, an affluent man in his best years, want your profile to be drowned by out by hundreds of losers that never stood a chance? One way to mitigate that is to limit exposure to people willing to afford a modest amount of money.
Let's face it, if you are old and you can't afford 30+$/month for something as significant as dating, you are not going to find a woman anyway, might as well take you out of the game so as not to annoy the women on the platform with your unsightly presence.
To the people complaining this isn’t fair, let’s agree that:
* they’re not doing this to make more money off the higher charges cohort as that doesn’t make sense
* they’re trying to make they most money, period, and that is done by attracting the most people overall
* in order to do that they’re trying to maintain a ratio that attracts all cohorts of all sexes, ages, and orientations
* because there is some non-reciprocal demand among cohorts (more older men like younger women than vice versa)
So if they just charged everybody an equally low rate you’d wind up with a lopsided population that none of the cohorts want and people would leave. Nobody wants this.
So arguing it’s not fair because discrimination isn’t fair as a rhetorical argument feels intellectually dishonest since the state you’re advocating for is a failed one.
I don’t agree with discrimination in pricing or any other kind in that sense on the platform side. Never paid for Tinder either, but for what it’s worth I did meet my wife on there. And she’s amazing, so there’s that.
To me, this isn't a discrimination thing as much as it is simply different prices for different products. Dating sites offer men and women wildly different products. Men (especially older men) are paying for volume--a steady supply of potential matches, since matches are extremely rare. Women are paying for a filter, since otherwise they would all be inundated with matches all the time. Totally different products. I'd imagine the product for men is likely a lot more difficult to provide, too, hence the higher price.
Great in theory, in practice you'll land in a hugely competitive market and you'll be struggling to find enough people to sign up.
Actually you'll likely find plenty of men, but women - actual, genuinely interested women, not bots / scam accounts - is a lot more difficult.
Personally, I think one should create social communities and have things develop from there, not dating sites where the only reason to go there is to find a match.
Source: met my girlfriend via gaming forums. I mean sure it took over ten years between first seeing each others' usernames on there and her moving in, but still.
Genuinely curious - do you think such a mechanism like yours is really relevant to the rest of the population?
I'm not sure what you were doing in those 10 years leading up to you two getting together... but most of us want to be dating someone in that time - not waiting 10 years for a single match.
> It found that queer females aged under 30 were charged the least, at just $6.99 per month, while city-based straight men over 50 were charged the most, at $34.37 a month.
Any Australians care to comment on the use of queer?
It's pretty derogatory in the UK (in the context of sexual orientation)
The Q in lgbtq is queer, a term reappropriated a long time ago by the non-cis communities. I don't know of anywhere that thinks of it as a slur, unless you use it like one. Similarly, you can make any descriptor a negative with the right intonation.
I am not a native English speaker, but queer is repurposed by the LGBT community to include everyone, under a single name [1]. It can even include heterosexuality [2]. I definitely do not read it in any derogatory way, and would identify myself as queer.
Yeah, I think this is partly a generational thing. My step-mum (in her 50s) was a bit taken a back when I used the word queer casually in conversation. But my 20-something friends in the gay/trans community pretty much all use queer to describe themselves.
I think it became popular partly as a reclamation of the word, and partly because the LGBTQIA acronym got so long and unwieldy. People want to be inclusive, but nobody wants to say LGBTQIA often.
I'm in the UK and I don't get the sense that it's derogatory (though I'm a straight male myself, so maybe I'm not the best judge)
Isn't "queer" the Q in LGBTQ, an acronym that most will happily identify with? Perhaps it _used_ to be derogatory, but it appears has been redefined into something positive.
Not much different than real life... in many clubs women can go inside for free while men have to pay entry ticket fee.