
Grindr has faced a federal investigation, layoffs, mismanagement, and turmoil - minimaxir
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/grindr-chinese-owner-company-chaos
======
hn_throwaway_99
> Despite the app's success, some executives worried that it wasn’t
> sustainable and that the company needed to diversify by creating LGBTQ
> content to diversify beyond hookups and one-night stands.

Men wanting to fuck is not sustainable?? TBH, this whole article strikes me as
after-the-fact hand-wringing and blame-gaming about how Grindr "never achieved
its vision", a vision I guarantee 99% of its users couldn't care less about.
Grindr was always about men finding other men to fuck (and sure, sometimes to
go out on a date with or hang out and chat with), but the idea given in the
article of it morphing into some sort of "queer Atlantic" has all the
hallmarks of a completely out-of-touch and delirious exec.

~~~
davesmith1983
Many websites now want to play at social engineering the populace. They forget
what their users want, try socially engineering those users which a great
number of them reject and users move elsewhere when something better turns up.

~~~
criley2
I think it is less about wanting to social engineer, as it is becoming
indebted to early investors who invest not in a small, simple and useful
service but in the vision of this service being a huge profitable thing. I'd
wager that many of the worst 'social engineering' pivots by websites/apps are
either because they're struggling to keep up with early investor expectations,
or because they've gone big and are struggling to keep up with growth and
profitability at scale. Facebook didn't just wake up one day and let foreign
governments undermine elections with advertisements, but, profitability is
undoubtedly why they got there.

~~~
davesmith1983
That doesn't fit in with what we have seen. Many sites start socially
engineering when they think they are big enough to dominate. I am not an
expert on dating apps (especially ones for homosexuals), however the language
quoted about "creating a better place" etc. Is exactly the same language I've
seen by other sites that want to socially engineer. It cannot be a coincidence
that many of the companies use a lot of the same phrases and language.

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perardi
Not that I'd ever admit to using Grindr…but I've used Grindr and Scruff, for
exactly what you'd think.

The article goes on and on about creating a kind queer space and the new
owners not understanding the community. Except, having actually used Grindr,
this is a perfect summary of the experience.

 _“Scott openly mocked Kindr,” a former employee recalled. “He didn’t
understand why we wanted to celebrate what he saw as ‘fat people.’”_

That is, in fact, Grindr in a nutshell. It's for anonymous torsos looking for
action while their boyfriend/wife/roommate is gone. There is no kind community
on Grindr. Scruff, maybe. But Grindr is just lust and body negativity laid
bare.

~~~
azinman2
Which is exactly what many people want!

~~~
perardi
I mean, honestly, if I'm using Grindr, it's what I want. I am a bad cisgender
gay male who sometimes doesn't need to see full-screen ads about genderqueer
art while cruising at 2am.

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ssnistfajen
Grindr is a quintessential example of first-mover advantage. Countless follow-
up competitors have failed to challenge Grindr's market dominance, despite
these competitor apps being vastly better designed and more feature rich. The
app itself remained practically stagnant (because the first-mover advantage
was so immense there was no real need to improve the product) for years until
it was bought by Kunlun Tech who actually employed enough people to work on
releasing new features. Multiple profile photos weren't supported until this
year, while most of its competitors have had the same feature for years or
even close to a decade (e.g. Jack'd).

The world has been better for queer people living in many civilized & tolerant
countries compared to 10 years ago when Grindr was first released. How much
role Grindr had to play in this is extremely doubtful.

~~~
perardi
Bingo. Grindr was a terrible app. Inconsistent push notifications, lots of
lost chats, and it took forever to support new phones. _(I was using it back
during the iPhone 5 era, and it was apparently a 6-month technical slog to
update a simple collection view to target that SDK.)_

But it was first, and the network effects were obvious. You had other apps in
use in large gay cities in the States, but while traveling, and you want that
fun hotel action, you pretty much had to go with Grindr.

~~~
mutt2016
By fun hotel action, you mean sex right?

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NelsonMinar
Worth reading the article. It's very little about the details of gay men's
sexuality and mostly about the disaster of a Chinese acquisition and
completely the wrong CEO. The LGBT community suffers as a consequence, not the
cause.

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jdofaz
It made mine better, met my partner there 6 years ago.

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lanrh1836
Surprised Match hadn’t bought Grindr long ago.

~~~
cududa
They were bought by a Chinese bank. I don’t understand how that was allowed to
happen in the first place... The security implications are mind boggling

------
joshstrange
Disclaimer: It's been over 2 years since I used Grindr/Scruff/etc.

Grindr is a truly terrible app. Not because it allows men to hookup with other
men but because it is just a very badly designed app. It would go for YEARS
with barely a change at all then they would add some stupid useless feature
that was a direct copy from Scruff (and friends).

It was impossible to manage your conversations, there was a constant stream of
new messages and if you deleted a message thread you lost ALL the history.
This means you could either delete threads of people you weren't interested in
so you could keep track of the ones you were but then if you got messaged
again by someone you deleted it was impossible to know if you had talked to
them before. It was extremely frustrating to use.

I didn't like to delete messages because often a profile picture would be
blank or a (misleading) torso/other. Then in the thread the person would send
me pictures and I would know that I had talked to them and wasn't interested.
The number of people who signed on, created an account, "got off", deleted the
app, then created a new account the next time they logged on was STAGGERING.

The problem was that if I wasn't interesting in them and deleted the message
then the next time they messaged me I wouldn't have any of those
pictures/chats to remember who they were. It was a catch-22, either clean up
your message threads and risk have the SAME conversation over and over again
OR keep all your message threads and make it impossible to find the threads of
people you wanted to talk to.

Also IIRC, Grindr would SCROLL TO THE TOP of your messages when you backed out
of a thread. This meant if you were searching for someone with a non-
obvious/blank profile picture you would scroll down, click on one, see the
chats and know it's the wrong person, then have to remember how far you had
scrolled down so you could go that far then keep looking. It was infuriating
to use the app.

Couple all of that with the spam, harassment, new account creation to evade
blocks, pissed off people because you weren't interested in fucking them,
confusing UI/UX, inconsistent push notifications for paid accounts, and
more.... I fucking hate Grindr. At least Scruff had a nice UI and
tools/features that I actually liked using but the user-base.... Grindr
DWARFED Scruff's user-base, it's why on Scruff you would stay "on the grid"
for like 24 hours after opening the app while on Grindr it would be like 1hr.
They had to make it seem like there were more people than there were.

I sincerely hope that my days of gay hookup apps are 100% behind me. It's a a
cesspool that I never want to set foot in again. That said... If I ever become
single again I'll probably be back. For all it's failings it's where I met my
BF.

~~~
vinni2
I couldn’t agree more. Just to add to the list anyone can create an account
with an invalid email address. Just enter any gibberish in the email field you
can still register. You don’t even need a throwaway email address.

And the spam and phishing accounts have become rampant.

Their APIs are still open for anyone to access and get location information of
all the Grindr users and spam them. There is nothing stopping anyone. Which is
the reason for rise in spam.

~~~
joshstrange
Yeah using some code I found on github I was able to triangulate anyone’s
location. Ended up using it to help confirm the identity of someone stalking a
friend of mine (we were pretty sure we knew who it was and pinpointing them to
the same location we knew he lived confirmed it). That was cool to play with
but freaky to see “the grid” on a map laid out bare.

------
_red
Dont the chinese own grindr now? is it fully legal to use in china?

~~~
dymk
Read the article to find out :)

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o_p
Its great for selling drugs at least.

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methodover
Scott Chen should've been fired a long time ago.

Given his actions on these issues _that we know about_ , what about all the
stuff we _don 't_ know about?

For all we know, they've had tons of data breaches and covered them up. I
wouldn't put it past this guy.

Is it okay for a CTO to give HIV data, photos — probably explicit photos given
the nature of the platform — to China’s government, without permission of the
user? I don’t think so.

~~~
dang
Please don't complain about downvotes in HN comments. It just invites more
downvotes, this time for the legit reason that it breaks the site guidelines:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

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throwanem
When was Grindr ever for queer people in any way? Gay people, yes. But us
queers?

~~~
gurumeditations
Gay people are queer. Queer means everyone who is not straight.

~~~
Raphmedia
On paper maybe but only a fraction of the gay population identifies as queer.
Visit any gay bar and ask around. You'll quickly see that not everyone
identifies to that label.

If Queer was a fully synonymous with gay, the acronym wouldn't be "LGBTQ+" but
simply "LGBT+".

~~~
gurumeditations
For classification purposes, queer is accurate. It’s so we can avoid a
thousand-letter acronym.

~~~
vsef
There are two different usages here: queer as umbrella term inclusive of LGBT
etc, and queer as a specific identity. The usage as identity of its own is
intentionally ambiguous/expansive but frequently implies some form of gender
fluidity.

The term can also ambiguously imply a particular political stance with regard
to the role of gender in society, or more strongly a particular leftist
philosophy.

I am gay man, I do not identify as queer, I think that is pretty common. I'm
fine mostly with the umbrella term, but also don't identify with enough parts
of that politics that I wouldn't use the term myself ever.

The original commenter is right that the apps don't necessarily seem welcoming
to the specifically queer identified.

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pcdoodle
buzzfeed is cancer.

~~~
dang
Maybe so, but could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker
News?

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SCAQTony
The trademark "Grindr" does not exactly resonate that goal. Sexual Lexis
defines "Grinder" as #4. A man in the act of copulation.

[http://www.sex-lexis.com/Sex-Dictionary/grinder](http://www.sex-
lexis.com/Sex-Dictionary/grinder)

~~~
cr0sh
It used to mean something better than that - a "grinder" was someone in old-
school parlance a "wirehead".

That is, they were someone who uses or tries to use technical and/or
electronic means to "hack" their brains, for stimulation, improvement (memory
or other cognitive function), etc.

A mild version would be something like using a tDCS system (especially if
home-brewed). A hardcore version (I do not know of any real-world examples)
would be some kind of homebrew brain implant.

Note: Such individuals are not the same as those who implant things like
magnets or id chips under their skin for various purposes - though there is
overlap of the two communities.

I'm not sure what - if anything - "grinders" call themselves today, or if
there isn't any issue at all (part of me suspects the latter).

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rolltiide
How to make millions: Identify an interesting problem, make a totally random
solution and conflate that as being intrinsically linked to your perceptive
capabilities of identifying the problem.

