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Older men charged more for using Tinder's premium service

abc.net.au

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Re: Older men charged more for using Tinder's premium service

#71

Post by nicoburns »

reallydontask wrote: post #6

> It found that queer females aged under 30 were charged the least, at just $6.99 per month, while city-based straight men over 50 were charged the most, at $34.37 a month. Any Australians care to comment on the use of queer? It's pretty derogatory in the UK (in the context of sexual orientation) edit: added, in the context of sexual orientation edit 2: looks like my knowledge is outdated then :)

> looks like my knowledge is outdated then :)

Yeah, I think this is partly a generational thing. My step-mum (in her 50s) was a bit taken a back when I used the word queer casually in conversation. But my 20-something friends in the gay/trans community pretty much all use queer to describe themselves.

I think it became popular partly as a reclamation of the word, and partly because the LGBTQIA acronym got so long and unwieldy. People want to be inclusive, but nobody wants to say LGBTQIA often.

Re: Older men charged more for using Tinder's premium service

#72

Post by EE84M3i »

theelous3 wrote: post #70
EE84M3i wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have wildly different experiences on tinder based on gender and age, among other things. It would follow that they value the premium features differently and be willing to pay more or less for them too. >to which I say that no type of relationship has a feasible monetary induction price I'm not sure what you mean by this.

It doesn't actually follow though does it? Some uber christian 20 y/o girl may want to get married and have kids within the year. Some 46 year old man might just be looking to bone down with his peers. Someone can use any of those premium features to facilitate any of those possibilities, and more. Having more likes or options to message along with a super-like doesn't mean someone is looking for anything in particul…

The primary way that different demographics have different experiences on tinder is not related to who they're looking for, it's related to who's looking for them. Users that get lots of matches with minimal work fundamentally aren't going to pay as much for a product that is designed to get them more matches.

Re: Older men charged more for using Tinder's premium service

#73

Post by mrtksn »

qshqwudhoquc wrote: post #26
skocznymroczny wrote: post #20

OKCupid also charges men, especially more than women for their premium service. It's common on online dating apps. Not much different than real life... in many clubs women can go inside for free while men have to pay entry ticket fee.

My issue with this is that these decisions aren't necessarily being made because of operating costs. It doesn't cost more to host a man than a woman.

The cost doesn't have anything to do with the price(except for setting the bare minimum if you want to break even).

If the price is higher that what it should be, there's your opportunity to sell your matching service at lower prices.

Re: Older men charged more for using Tinder's premium service

#74

Post by gambiting »

clusterfish wrote: post #62
gambiting wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, in an ideal world an 18 year old who just started driving and a 50 year old who just got their licence should have identical rates, but in practice that's not the case - the older person will have a lower premium despite also having zero experience behind the wheel. Having a clean record is a thing you can work towards and can be rewarded with a lower premium - being older is not.

It does work like this in some places, and younger drivers aren't any better off in terms of pricing, speaking from personal experience. So this is 95% just pricing by age "with extra steps" as they say. Consider this: if the first accident happens to an average person after 10 years of driving, young people will take a loooong time to build a driving record that can even be considered average let alone good. And you…

Sure, but the exact same argument applies to charging men more - we know as a matter of fact that men get into more accidents than women do, for various reasons. Yet at least some places decided it's illegal to charge men more - so knowing that it's a statistical inevitably that men will cause more accidents, now both sexes pay more, but at least the premiums are equal. Is it better overall? My internal logic tells me that it is, because it's not your fault that you're a man, so just because other men crash more often why should you be charged more?

(This can get into a really long discussion about a lot of things that can correlate with higher accident rates and how sometimes it's a false correlation, like how in some places black people have more accidents, but it's not because they are black but because they are poorer on average and drive older less safe cars - but filtering by race could be used as a quick filter which is, obviously, unfair(and illegal))

Re: Older men charged more for using Tinder's premium service

#75

Post by username90 »

aspenmayer wrote: post #38
sasaf5 wrote: post #21

Not only this, at least last year (when I abandoned Tinder for good) they were charging women more for the "daily picks" feature (it selects top ranked profiles).

What does this feature do? Does it basically stack your match deck so high ranks are top pull every time? Really makes Tinder seem like a one-armed bandit. Either you pay and get quality folks on balance, due to ratings and such washing out the boys from the men, or you play your hand on randos. And people actually pay for this privilege? What a world.

Not really, men don't want high value women since men rarely get matches even when they reject nobody and get the less selected women. Women get matches all the time so they reject almost every candidates to get to the good ones, so to them the feature to remove results they would probably reject anyway is more important. However even for women with this feature you only get men who has plenty of options and is still looking, do you really want that? You are very unlikely to get a long term relationship that way.

Re: Older men charged more for using Tinder's premium service

#76

Post by gridlockd »

I doubt this is (potentially illegal) age-based discrimination, more likely it's sexual-market-value-based discrimination. It's easy for Tinder to determine who is or isn't attractive - older men just happen to be at a disadvantage here. It's not Tinder making that choice, it's the women on the platform.

Charging more in this case is arguably in the interest of older straight men. The experience of a woman on a dating platform is to get bombarded by hundreds if not thousands of messages. Do you, an affluent man in his best years, want your profile to be drowned by out by hundreds of losers that never stood a chance? One way to mitigate that is to limit exposure to people willing to afford a modest amount of money.

Let's face it, if you are old and you can't afford 30+$/month for something as significant as dating, you are not going to find a woman anyway, might as well take you out of the game so as not to annoy the women on the platform with your unsightly presence.

Re: Older men charged more for using Tinder's premium service

#77

Post by theelous3 »

EE84M3i wrote: post #72
theelous3 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't actually follow though does it? Some uber christian 20 y/o girl may want to get married and have kids within the year. Some 46 year old man might just be looking to bone down with his peers. Someone can use any of those premium features to facilitate any of those possibilities, and more. Having more likes or options to message along with a super-like doesn't mean someone is looking for anything in particul…

The primary way that different demographics have different experiences on tinder is not related to who they're looking for, it's related to who's looking for them. Users that get lots of matches with minimal work fundamentally aren't going to pay as much for a product that is designed to get them more matches.

So to follow your logic further, would you have any problem with charging black women and asian men more than everybody else too, as fewer people are looking for them, and they are more willing to buy a product designed to get them more matches?

It's literally the same thing but with age. Just how much do you think we can squeeze out of 30+ black women eh?

The practice is despicable. I'm not saying you're advocating for the above, but if the approach is to just extract the maximum because you can extract the maximum, which is the logic you're advocating, this is an expected result.

Re: Older men charged more for using Tinder's premium service

#78

Post by Udik »

skocznymroczny wrote: post #20

OKCupid also charges men, especially more than women for their premium service. It's common on online dating apps. Not much different than real life... in many clubs women can go inside for free while men have to pay entry ticket fee.

I know it's common, but shouldn't it be illegal?

Re: Older men charged more for using Tinder's premium service

#79

Post by sasaf5 »

username90 wrote: post #75
aspenmayer wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does this feature do? Does it basically stack your match deck so high ranks are top pull every time? Really makes Tinder seem like a one-armed bandit. Either you pay and get quality folks on balance, due to ratings and such washing out the boys from the men, or you play your hand on randos. And people actually pay for this privilege? What a world.

Not really, men don't want high value women since men rarely get matches even when they reject nobody and get the less selected women. Women get matches all the time so they reject almost every candidates to get to the good ones, so to them the feature to remove results they would probably reject anyway is more important. However even for women with this feature you only get men who has plenty of options and is still…

> you only get men who has plenty of options and is still looking

plus people that are ranked on a single dimension, so you only get the same kind of polished person that is liked by the majority.

Now if Tinder would offer some sort of selection by categories like activities, tastes etc, that's a feature I would happily pay for. Other apps already have that.

Re: Older men charged more for using Tinder's premium service

#80

Post by username90 »

qshqwudhoquc wrote: post #19
EE84M3i wrote: post #7

They should be more transparent about their pricing, but it seems to me like they offer different demographics fundementaly different services so charging different amounts isn't unreasonable.

I don't think a different algorithm counts as a different service, and other than that what could be different about it?

Women don't need infinite likes, their match rate is very high so 100 likes per day is more than enough to get more conversations than they can handle. So in practice women already have infinite likes for free since they aren't used up anyway. Men's match rate is often less than 1%, so they need hundreds of likes just to talk to a single woman, without infinite likes chances are they will use up all their likes for the day and not get a single match.

So, if we take that into account women get maybe 25 free matches per day and men maybe 0.5 free matches per day. Men pay so they can get more matches per day, women don't. The service cost is per match and not per like. A man liking 1000 candidates costs as much as a woman rejecting 1000 candidates.

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