> 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.
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.
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.
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.
In a perfect world, someone with some backbone in leadership should be able to identify that the product isn't going to meet the company's goals, and a new sponsor should be spun off or selected to inherit the product. Examples I would point to would be Flickr finding a welcoming home (SmugMug) after being tossed from one useless org (Yahoo) to another (Oath). Or what Delicious might have been (Yahoo again).
It's unlikely such a world will ever exist, but I'm a dreamer. Don't kill what has value if it can be self-sustaining somewhere.
Oh man I didn't even know Flickr found a good place... that saga has been endless.
Yeah I see a lot of purchases that make no sense, not going to get along with their parent company.... and they just trash something that might be worthwhile.
It’s hard to believe they felt like Grindr was “unsustainable”. It’s completely ubiquitous in the gay scene across every country I’ve ever been in. I mean there’s a lot more variety now, lots of competing apps, but for years Grindr ruled the day for tens of millions of people!
The stories about them sharing HIV data with the Chinese government is horrific. Pretty sure they could microtarget that into individuals.
Heh, even if not that small (2%-5% of the population?) I think homosexual men would be an interesting "niche" market to cater, but I wonder besides Grindr and some night clubs what other kind of business have a proposition which would only be of interest to gay men.
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.
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.
I use Grindr to find like minded people, not necessarily for sex. it works great. I’ve found some of my best friends on Grindr. Recently they are even improving the app for “us” that aren’t into quick sex dates. I love where they seem are heading to.
It's interesting how an app can be used in creative ways by its users.
When I moved to a different country and knew literally no one there, I turned to the app exclusively to make friends. It worked, but my boyfriend at the time did not believe my story.
Back to my country, I used similar apps more than once to find people willing to play football with me and my friends. Unfortunately, this never worked and we had to play with uneven teams.
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.
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.
It's such a squandered opportunity from a product prospective.
Yes, sure, Grindr started with being just about sex. But there's a huge interest amongst gay people for long term relationships and a dearth of apps that cater to them.
OKCupid was, for a time, a go-to app for gay men interested in LTRs. But OKC never capitalized on that opportunity -- never built features, or outreach, or anything to grow that niche. Plus, a couple years ago they dramatically changed the app (in ways to address issues for straight users) which negatively affected gay LTR-oriented men.
Tinder is now the primary app for LTR-oriented gay men, and it's terrible. Filtering
options suck. The matching system is terrible.
Grindr could've been more than it is. It could've had a monopoly over the entire gay men dating app vertical -- for short term and long term relationships. But they squandered that opportunity. If the software had been better, and if the management and community side had been better, I think we'd be talking today about Grindr as a successful model for a startup. But nope, we're reading articles like this instead.
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.
Yes, IAC's Match Group (Tinder, Match, PlentyOfFish, OKCupid...) seems to be where these things end up. IAC is the huge Internet company that gets little attention. They have over a hundred major web sites, which they run successfully, but don't try to make into one giant brand.
Publishing an advocacy magazine, with a paid editorial staff, was strange for a for-profit company. The article's main criticism of the new management seems to be that they focused on the core business of the company.
Agreed that IAC is an under-the-radar Internet behemoth. The Masters of Scale episode with Barry Diller, the founder of IAC, is worth listening to if you haven’t yet: https://mastersofscale.com/learn-to-unlearn/
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
Fun fact: Grindr majority stake is owned by a Chinese mobile game company and has been ordered by the US Government to divest as it poses a national security risk.
Yeah, US national security risks such as not being able to teach government & military personnel the very basics of how to pre-emptively avoid being blackmailed.
If such personnel willingly uploads compromising photos of themselves online, then it's their own fault, not the platform or the platform owner's.
"Mr. Smith that works for government/corporate office of company, we have chats of you trying to solicit other men, tut tut, what ever will your wife and daughter think, we don't have to tell them but you'll have to do something for us in return".
This is literally the kind of stuff that agencies like the Defense Security Service looks for when investigating people to issue security clearance, in the case of DSS for stuff under the Department of Defense umbrella. It's just one way you can be exploited.
Similarly, I have a bankruptcy, that makes it difficult for me to ever have a security clearance again, especially anything greater than Confidential. My poor credit choices make me a 'security risk' because I might amass debt again and be easily influenced eyeroll.
Are government/military personnel somehow entitled to being able to cheat and solicit casual sex? If someone does that while possessing top security clearance or sensitive info, they have clearly demonstrated themselves as vulnerable to exploitation. This is first and foremost an internal personnel problem. If such behaviour happens on U.S.-owned platforms it is still problematic.
Sex, debts and gambling are THE go to blackmail avenues for recruiting assets.
It needn't be someone cheating either, being gay is still not socially acceptable in MANY circles remove wife/daughter from the above and change it to pastor, co-worker, employer, mother, father.
It doesn't have to be just the fact that the individual is gay or bi either, a listed kink could be used to coerce someone into a mildly compromising situation to maintain their privacy, then once you get them to do something compromising with their employer you now have even more leverage "oh well we could tell them you did this for us, so you'd better keep co-operating".
This is also used in television, an example being I believe season 2 of Madam Secretary with the gay Russian student at the war college and the FBI secretary in The Americans is compromised through a vanilla heterosexual relationship.
It's also used in non-espionage/corporate sabotage stages, like sextortion with both adults and minors by ether coercing someone into doing sexual things on camera or hacking a webcam/hiding a camera and catching them doing something sexual (or just naked) and using it as leverage against them.
This is a fairly competent wiki article with the TL:DR being
>There have been various attempts to explain why people become spies. One common theory is summed up by the acronym MICE: Money, Ideology, Compromise or Extortion
Grindr is just one tool in a long list of possible extortion opportunities. And no, a gay pastor being blackmailed is nowhere near a "national security risk". This should strictly concern people who work for the U.S. government, intelligence, and military agencies.
None of the security concerns you mentioned will be solved if Grindr is placed under "trusted" ownership. Having a Grindr profile is a choice, not an entitlement or obligation. This is being framed as a national security issue 3 years after Kunlun Tech acquires majority stake in Grindr and 18 months after it fully bought out Grindr, because hate-fearing all things (and people) Chinese is too in vogue in the U.S. right now to not join on the bandwagon.
I never said 'a gay pastor' I said someone can be blackmailed with the threat of being revealed to their pastor, as an example, so someone like you didn't come along and Go "yeah but no but yeah but no but yeah but nooooo no one would ever threaten to report someone to their dog's groomer's uncle's cousin's girlfriend, so unbelievable".
The fact is this is an app owned by a Chinese company that is being used by a vulnerable, often still persecuted, community to hook up with anonymous individuals that may or may not be openly gay.
It is worth noting that homosexuality was illegal until 1997 in China, was classified a mentall inless until 2001, in a country that still regularly bans LGBTQ events, that does not allow homosexuality in television shows or movies as part of a list that also includes 'sexual perversion, sexual assault, sexual abuse, sexual violence, and so on', in a country where creating content on the internet that contains references to homosexuality and the scientifically accurate words for genitalia is strictly banned.
If that's not enough reasons for you to scratch your head at a Chinese company owning a gay hook up app... then I suppose we'll have to agree to disagree.
And? You think Chinese Gov will spend the time and effort to blackmail some random civilian on the other side of the world? Is this some regurgiated version of the false spiel claming that "all companies are direct arms of the Chinese government"?
When Kunlun Tech's ownership of Grindr was labelled as a national security risk, the U.S. government certainly did not take China's LGBT rights record or the privacy of regular American civilians into consideration. It was strictly about government & military personnel. I applaud your vivid & divergent thinking skills buy I'm afraid you've gone too far from the actual issue.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nah, it is just startup culture. A world where a company that produces AI enhanced user tracking for ad purposes can have a tagline of "improving humanity" or some such nonsense.
Maybe it's because I do most of my socializing among furries, a diverse and primarily queer crowd[1], but I had never heard anyone suggest queer didn't include gay people until your comment. Where did you hear that?
Among a crowd that includes a lot of furries, actually! "Queer" as an identification has lately been picked up (revived and reclaimed, really) as, among other things, a way of opting out of a lot of the assimilationist and gym-clone tropes that've taken over so much of what it means to be "gay". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queer has a reasonable overview, to which I'd add only that it's also a good term of identification for men who love men, but who find "gay" to be so rigid and prescriptive in its meaning that it fails to accurately describe us.
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+".
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.
Even that article lists that definition as an "understandable" one and then explicitly phrases the subsequent commentary as the author's "interpretation". It seems like you're looking for a reason to be a victim of the wording used in the article.
It seems like you’re looking for reasons to ignore the possibility that there’s a useful distinction to be made between the two terms. That seems like a more interesting discussion to have than any involving ad hominem such as “you’re looking for a reason to be a victim”.
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.
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).
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.