I think the main complaints overall with apps like Grindr, Lex et al comes in a few parts:
1) Mainstream dating apps are full of very profit driven patterns, and feel manipulative and corporate. A fair followup would be why would t4t not eventually become like this? I think probably the main differentiator is that t4t is written to run extremely cheap, and my goals for it are mostly just for it to support me financially. I have gotten quite far as a single person team, and currently I am using something like 2% of the processing power within my payment tier on Supabase. There is huge growth potential with little cost increase.
2) Probably the bigger issue is that there is a generational divide between "old queers" and "young queers", and the divide does seem to fall largely on trans comfort. Many older gays feel like their space is invaded, and many younger ones feel discriminated against. I think this pattern plays out regardless of gender. It is helpful to set intentions from the start, and so the intentions of this app from the start are to be most friendly to the "new school" way of seeing things.
3) Finally, these apps are all pretty explicitly sexualized. I know that might sound funny given how sexual the app I created can get, but I am not really pushing that. This is just a free and open community space nothing more. You can use it for whatever you like. You can date on it but you can also just share hot takes and thoughts.
OP, I love your passion, but as someone who's been in these trenches for a long time as a visibily queer person, you are a Titanic heading for an iceberg of legal issues in the US, UK,and a few other places. You are putting yourself and your users at an extremely high risk of outing, doxing, and potential legal issues. The fact that you haven't addressed these issues scares me and it should scare you.
My personal experience as a trans woman? The space is full of men who want to have sex with trans women, while most of these trans women are interested only in people similar to themselves. IE, queer, non binary, trans.
And you get spammed dickpicks by the hundreds. Even if you explicitly say "I DON'T WANT DICKPICKS AND I WILL REPORT YOU IF YOU SEND ME A DICKPICK" and then you receive a dickpick? And point to the report thing?
You get sent another dickpick by the same person at a different angle.
Happens to me almost daily.
Almost nothing I do works. No moderation settings, no report features, no profile texts.
Grindr is best for gay men and bi men. Trans women, trans men and non binary people are not treated as first-class citizens by the values they care for the most.
> most of these trans women are interested only in people similar to themselves. IE, queer, non binary, trans
That sounds kind of odd to me. I don’t have any experience or insight to people’s experiences here but I would assume that most trans people are trans because they want to be the opposite sex, not because they want to be trans specifically. This statement here suggests they’re identifying as trans more so than the gender they’re transitioning to.
This is talking about sexuality, not gender identity. Who you want to have sex with is not determined by your sex or gender. It is correlated, but not determined (as in more cis men are bi and straight than gay, thus a random man is more likely to be bi or straight than gay).
In this case, she's talking about her preferences which can be any identity, sex etc.
For example, a trans person may prefer to date other trans people because they will have more common experiences and there will be less explaining if how things work on their body etc. Others might have preferences based on primary or secondary sex characteristics. Others may only date people who like a specific type of cheese.
As a queer person who hasn't used Grindr but has heard about it from others, my understanding is that it has a reputation for being more for hookups than actual dating. Heard a story about a gay male friend-of-a-friend setting up an account on it and getting 4 unsolicited dick pics within a very short period of time.
Obviously this is just secondhand anecdotal evidence—I'm sure someone who has personally used the app could chime in and correct me if I am wrong.
... talk about colonization to lump in an indigenous concept with a bunch of western concepts. (If anybody else tried this it would be "cultural appropriation")
Perhaps I and my fox want to "belong" in general (to the community of life on earth) but they don't want to take on other people's baggage (belong to a community that excludes participation in other communities)
> "Cultural appropriation" is a fancy way to say "I only want to learn from people just like me".
Cultural appropriation is learning about things only from people like you, not from the people outside your culture who created it and who may have jarring perspectives and expressions of them.
For example - just something I recently saw - lots of 1950s-60s rock musicians like Elvis and the Rolling Stones appropriated music from black musicians and cashed in on it with legions of white teens. The teens never heard the original musicians or music; they got sanitized, safe, and familiar forms of it - they never encountered much of the original culture or heard from the original people. Apparently some RS performances were note-for-note, vocal-riff-for-vocal-riff copies. (To be fair, the RS apparently often toured with some of the original musicians as opening acts.)
exactly! to the point that that music is now synonmous with Elvis and the original culture is lost.
I dont even think 'Cultural Appropriation' describes like, what we ought to do about that in any specific terms. maybe nothing. it more just identifies a problem
"To be fair, the RS apparently often toured with some of the original musicians as opening acts"
What more would you like? These notes have been played this way before, therefor no other group will ever play them again?
Yes, the exploitation of other (especially minority) cultures is an issue. And that's very much not how "cultural appropriation" is used any more - it's very specifically used as "this belongs to that other group, nobody else can have it". And thus precludes any learning.
It is, in its common use, asking for fully siloed cultures. I don't think humanity benefits from those siloes.
For people who are really interested: A big part of the problem is that the black blues musicians were excluded - they were kept out of the mainstream, which created opportunity for people like the RS to cash in on the black artists' music.
For example, imagine if today people of East and South Asian descent were excluded from SV. Then white developers stole their ideas and code, changed a few things and put their own name on it, and cashed in.
Art has many more cultural consequences than for-profit software, of course.
Worthy of note here is the Rolling Stones learnt about US "black music" from UK record stores, many run by former post WWII US servicemen who preferred the UK to the US South and Jamacian and Trinidadian musicians from the former British slave colonies.
They attended "black" clubs and jammed with black musicians .. they had an experience uncommon in US.
Cultural Appropriation is super often misused (as it was in this case), but does describe a real thing.
Just like how people complain that 'crypto' now only means cryptocurrency, or people complain that the new star wars movies 'killed their childhood' etc, having something that you have a strong connection to have its meaning distorted sucks.
Imagine if seeing a holy cross, the first thing you thought of wasn't the religious meaning but that it was the logo for some company.
One of many terms that got taken way out of context and abused by lots of people, some with good intentions and some not
Is this a joke (I'm asking in seriousness)? Don't matter how they "advertise themselves", it's a hookup app. There aren't even any features (like forums or public postings) that would be necessary to call themselves a "community app".
