Slashdot Mirror
Tinder Announces New 'Height Verification' Feature. But They May Be Lying (gotinder.com)
"The Tinder dating app will soon be asking men to submit photos in order to verify their height," writes long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike, sharing a post made Friday (March 29th) on the official Tinder blog.
Let's be real, when it comes to online dating -- honesty is the best policy. Yes, your height matters as long as every other shallow aspect of physical attraction does. Please try not to take it to heart...
Height-lying ends here. To require everyone under 6' to own up to their real height, we're bringing truthfulness back into the world of online dating. Introducing Tinder's Height Verification Badge (HVB), because yes -- sometimes it matters. It's the tool we've had in our back-pockets for years, but we were hoping your honesty would allow us to keep it there... Simply input your true, accurate height with a screenshot of you standing next to any commercial building. We'll do some state-of-the-art verifying and you'll receive your badge directly on your profile.
Oh, and by the way? Only 14.5% of the U.S. male population is actually 6' and beyond. So, we're expecting to see a huge decline in the 80% of males on Tinder who are claiming that they are well over 6 feet.
The post concludes that "Tinder's HVB is coming soon to a phone near you," and Tinder's official Twitter account described the feature as "the thing you never asked for, but definitely always wanted," with a short video showing their app displaying errors for incorrect heights. (The second error message reads "Seriously... Please enter your correct height.") The video has been viewed 2.78 million times. Its tagline? "Let's bring honesty back to dating."
"It's unknown at this point if this is a real feature that the company is adding to its dating app," reported one local news site, "or an early April Fool's joke."
Height-lying ends here. To require everyone under 6' to own up to their real height, we're bringing truthfulness back into the world of online dating. Introducing Tinder's Height Verification Badge (HVB), because yes -- sometimes it matters. It's the tool we've had in our back-pockets for years, but we were hoping your honesty would allow us to keep it there... Simply input your true, accurate height with a screenshot of you standing next to any commercial building. We'll do some state-of-the-art verifying and you'll receive your badge directly on your profile.
Oh, and by the way? Only 14.5% of the U.S. male population is actually 6' and beyond. So, we're expecting to see a huge decline in the 80% of males on Tinder who are claiming that they are well over 6 feet.
The post concludes that "Tinder's HVB is coming soon to a phone near you," and Tinder's official Twitter account described the feature as "the thing you never asked for, but definitely always wanted," with a short video showing their app displaying errors for incorrect heights. (The second error message reads "Seriously... Please enter your correct height.") The video has been viewed 2.78 million times. Its tagline? "Let's bring honesty back to dating."
"It's unknown at this point if this is a real feature that the company is adding to its dating app," reported one local news site, "or an early April Fool's joke."
Honesty is the best policy? How about you clean up the ladies bios and pictures? Oh - the picture looks like you weigh 100 pounds less? Must be the camera angle.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
where the company wants to float an idea that might be offensive but wants plausible deniability in case it is.
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Since it appears that there's a significant problem with men misrepresenting themselves in their online profiles, I don't mind men being targeted for some brutal honestly.
Of course, this also means I FULLY expect a new Tinder policy that requires every woman's profile to include a full body shot (to include whatever algorithmic hashes are necessary to disprove image manipulation), as well as a makeup-free selfie. There's ZERO reason we should allow the women to get away with misrepresentation.
I think I've also pointed out the obvious differences between the genders. Careful what you wish for ladies. We men might end up demanding you provide the same, in the name of equity.
Obtaining a date is easy if you lie - look forward to being downrated, commented on, blocked, etc. though. That's why there are trends for "date reviews" nowadays, to ward off others from the creeps and work on a reputation-based system (whether that's "he was a really good shag" or "he's a wonderful guy, we're really good friends, but we just aren't quite right for each other).
But if 80% of men are saying they're over 6 foot, there's no way that those 80% of men aren't getting repeat dates, hence the only people actually fooling themselves are the women who think they have to have someone over 6 foot and would notice, and men know that and so know they can lie about it and get away with it.
Maybe if we were all a bit less shallow, these things wouldn't matter. Maybe if they opened up their "essential" criteria a bit, it would help everyone. But women get swamped with guys so they can literally afford to filter to what they think is the "perfect" guy. Guys can't be as picky, fact of life. They might all clamber for the young leggy blonde but fact is that they have to await acceptance from the women on such platforms, not the other way around, hence they will lie to pass that filter.
It's one of the reasons that whenever I'm dating online I ignore absolutely any statistic and go entirely by the chat. I don't care if they're 4 feet or 20, what their cup size is, what they claim their age to be, and so on. It literally means nothing because virtually everyone lies about those things and the people who think it's important enough to actually put on their profile are the type of people I don't want to date (sometimes you can't avoid putting it on, but you can make it clear whether you give a shit about matching on that or not).
Even for a one-nighter, if you're that vain that you'll only sleep with people over 6-foot, then I don't really want to know you, whether I'm 6-foot or not.
Now there are some attributes that are worth knowing for elimination purposes - smokers, for instance. But I have to say that all the vital statistics in the world are useless in gauging how much you enjoy someone's company.
Honestly, there's a lot to be said for "online blind dates". Just chatting to someone who you know absolutely nothing about.
But lying about a vital statistic is dumb, and this kind of "verification" will just be photoshopped into oblivion.
Weird, only 14.5% of US males being over 6'.
I'm born in 1952 and when I was drafted (1970) the average height of my age was 6'2"...
(I'm from the Netherlands)
Still weird because in my youth I was always told about these tall US soldiers that in 1945 came to liberate us.
What happened between say 1935 and 2019?
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Having jumped into this world recently, I have some observations...
At least in my age-bracket (early 50-something, but trolling for 40-somethings and even 30-somethings that are interesting), nearly all the women on Tinder want to replace their lost soul-mate and they want to do it yesterday. This seems to be true of most of the dating sites I'm on. And if you are not existentially clamoring for the same thing then you must be just a serial-dater or a hookup guy and are a waste of their time.
The notion that a soulmate is a difficult thing to find, and that sometimes it needs to develop organically, is just lost on them. Seems they'd rather sit at home alone rather than entertain the notion that perhaps getting out and about with a less-than-ideal match might be a better use of their time. They might even learn something about how other people work/think/behave, and maybe learn something about themselves in the process. And if that less-than-ideal match is physically attractive, not the end of the world to let off some steam in the pent-up-hormones dept.
Personally I try to go in with an open mind, and if the date goes nowhere, I got an evening out at the very least. Or it might cultivate a beneficial platonic relationship, which has happened more than once for me. If it's a good fit and grows into something more, then I'm open to that too. You know, just like how real dating works. But the "ya-gotta-be-looking-to-get-married-and-yesterday" filter is a huge obstacle for everyone involved.
I *am* puzzled at the blatant dishonesty on physical attributes. Lying on your height? Really? And I've gotten really good at reading between the pixels, as it were, on the women's photos. Or at the very least, figure they will be one or two notches less attractive in person. But I'm open to the notion that after a couple of hours, if a person's personality is attractive, the physical appearance truly does go down in importance. Which is one of the biggest limitations in online dating, which is that it's a rare photograph that also conveys a person's soul (to be a bit melodramatic).
My pictures are representative of how I look. And of course I pick ones that make me look good, but not deceptively so. The only fudging I do is with age. And I'm unapologetic about it. There are a statistically unlikely distributions of 39 and 49y/o women on the site. Sorry, no way. The only explanation is they are trying to game the age filter. In my case, losing 25lbs and hitting the gym regularly means an age filter would unfairly bias me out of searches. *Every* time I've come clean on my age after meeting someone, I always get surprised reactions that I really do look mid-40's (I usually advertise upper 40's), and a few times people have commented that my upbeat demeanor is more of a upper-30/lower-40's person.
So I won't be happy if they somehow implement age verification, as I truly believe that people put more importance on it than they should. But I imagine that the women will be even less happy, based on the number of 9's I see in the ages.