A Review of the Dating App, Hinge

KB11/20/2018 10:25 PM

For the unfamiliar, Hinge is a dating app, which has apparently skyrocketed in popularity amongst younger adults over the past few years. Truthfully, I hadn’t even heard of it until recently, when a “friend” of mine who now refers to himself as “The 6 God,” passionately recommended it in a group chat. He included enticing words like “better than Tinder” and boasted that he’s been using it to score frequent dates with mildly attractive girls in his city. Some might accuse me of living under a rock for not knowing about Hinge, but in reality, I was just living in Youngstown, Ohio where people use more primitive methods to find sexual partners.

As someone who’s always been less of a dating app guy and more of an “I’d rather just not fuck at all” guy, I had my qualms with downloading such nefarious hogwash. But for the sake of research and curiosity, I decided to dive penis head first into the polluted waters of Hinge and get right into mindless swiping. Except, sike! Hinge prides itself on being above the superficial rubbish of merely swiping right or left on someone’s picture based solely on whether or not you think physical contact with their naked body would be somewhat bearable. Instead, it offers a [wide variety] of question prompts for you to answer in order to inject more personality or pizzazz (intentional foreshadowing) into your profile.

These are just a fraction of the possible prompts you can choose to answer on your profile. As you can see, the feature serves as a beneficial tool and fun way to stand out from others and show your unique characteristics, interests, opinions, preferences, and life experiences.

So rather than only relying on physical traits through photos, users get the opportunity to thoroughly examine detailed information about potential soulmates, before “liking” one of their specific photos (chaotic horny) or prompt answers (intellectual horny).

Or, you can simply pulverize an X button on their profile, thus, deeming them too repulsive to even attempt to converse with you.

Hinge also conveniently lets you know when someone already liked your profile, in turn, giving you the straightforward option to accept their advance and “match” with them or reject their advance and digitally banish them to your genital radar’s untraceable voids.

I was having a blast learning interesting cultural facts about the young women in my area. It was a lot more intriguing and eye-opening than just senselessly swiping through pictures on Tinder and looking at short, unremarkable bios. And every once in a while, I would come across someone like Erica, who flaunted her creativity and uniqueness by doing things like adding extra Zs to the word, pizza:

I found myself quickly becoming infatuated with the app in the least sexual and most platonic way possible. Regardless of whether or not I was accruing matches or scoring dates, I was finding out so much about girls in my age range—things that I could have never discovered by just following them on social media.

Neat!

At first glance, this might look like a careless mistake. However, Megan purposely included “Netflix” a second time in her answer to emphasize her love for the popular streaming service in a silly manner.

Consider me stumped!

In my opinion, the Three Emoji That Describe Me prompt was the most effective way to learn more about girls on Hinge.

(Side note: is the plural of emoji actually emoji and not emojis?)

For example, it allowed me to conveniently discern that Margaret was some type of rare, interstellar hybrid of a rose and a crystal ball.

More than just likes!

When you come across something cool or attractive in someone’s profile, you can like AND comment on it to make them feel more inclined to match with you and keep the conversation going. Admittedly, I didn’t have much success with this tactic, but I can see how it would work for others.

Lies and deceit!

One of the main advantages of Hinge is that it allows you to edit or adjust your profile in order to “target” or increase your chances of scoring a match with a specific girl. For example, one young woman named Melissa particularly caught my eye, but I was worried she was out of my league and wouldn’t even consider matching with me.

I did some examining and noticed she used one of her prompts to indicate that she was interested in dating an “NJB.” After a quick google search, I found out that NJB is an acronym for Nice Jewish Boy. Since I only meet 1/3 of those requirements in real life, I decided to do some editing to my profile (one of Hinge’s advantageous functions) in order to increase my chances of appealing to Melissa and eliciting a match from her.

Aside from changing my religion, I removed all the photos displayed on my profile that could potentially blow my cover and make me look like someone who wasn’t actually nice and Jewish. With that said, the pictures of me dressed like a gigantic bag of cocaine and wearing a Christmas sweater had to go:

Then, I edited my personal question prompts to sufficiently but subtly give off the impression that I was an NJB:

I didn’t want to overdo it and look like I was trying too hard to come across as Jewish, so I made sure to strip any petty stereotypes (like frugality) from my personality. I wanted to show Melissa that I would be a perfectly suitable kindhearted, Jewish boyfriend who was also willing to spoil her and show her a good time.

Just as I expected, I successfully tricked her into falling for my ruse:

So, by utilizing Hinge’s “edit profile” and question prompts features, you can elicit matches from people who would otherwise not even think about giving you the time of day. And all you have to do is tell problematic lies and completely alter your identity.

I did further experimentation with the strategy, but this is just a review of the app, so I’ll save my personal experiences and fraudulent conversations for another blog.

Lastly, I forced a bot to look over 1,000 random Hinge profiles and then asked it to create a resume for the hypothetical super crossbreed of those 1,000 girls. This is what it came up with: