I love Tinder. Sorry mom. Catch me swiping on the toilet, in class and while I’m writing this article. If that makes me a trash person, I’m proudly a trash person.
So this past Friday, when my girlfriends and I found ourselves without plans, we decided to give Tinder Social a try.
Instead of swiping and matching with people you are attracted to the way you do on regular Tinder, on Tinder Social, you can form a group with your friends and swipe on other groups of friends. Once your friend groups match, you get put into a group chat where you all can talk to each other.
What I found was that Tinder Social is a lot like regular Tinder in that it’s a sausage fest. Most of the groups we interacted with were groups of all guys trying to find groups of all women. It seemed like people used the app more so to go on casual group dates rather than friend dates. The thirst was real.
Because there’s no direct message feature, men were really in the group chat claiming specific women. “You guys are all cute. Especially you, Mariam ;),” one guy sent, calling out my friend by name. We cringed.
We ended up accumulating a lot of matches — but actually conversing with them was as difficult; it was overwhelming.
There was at least three groups that started conversations with “How much does a polar bear weigh?” Most preferred to start conversations with terrible gifs. How do you even respond to a gif of Bob Saget raising his eyebrows? I was shook.
As a group of black women, we expected not to get a lot of matches. However, what happened was that groups swiped right because we were women and then later realized we were black. The worst of it came from two groups of white men.
“We’re in the KKK” one troll squawked. Our next troll was not so creative. He just called us the n-word. With the hard r, y’all. I almost broke my finger un-matching.
