This just popped up on my radar: Tinder Disrupt. As we’ve seen in the past, online dating can make for some popular entertainment. Some of these have questionable consent practices, but this seems mostly good (unless your friend goes rogue).
While this is meant to mimic something like TechCrunch Disrupt, but outside of the Bay area it reads more like unscripted TV (Shark Tank?). This is similar to those things, but the non-broadcast nature allows for a greater degree of intimacy.
This also relates to old-fashioned matchmaking via friends and family. The chain of trust (match working through a trusted intermediary) was thought to remove the risk in dating ‘strangers’, but that logic starts falling apart when you look at the reliability of the matchmaker, their level of familiarity with the other person, and just plain old things people hide about themselves.
So what are we left with? One person vouching for another. You will know that at least one person looks favorably on the match – you probably don’t know either of those people. Also, it gives an external perspective on the match. We know that people are unreliable with skewed, distorted, inflated, deflated, or outright wrong self-assessments.
In the app world, we’ve seen Wingman, blindmate, and Ship taking the opportunity to involve friends in the process. This relies on many factors including:
Friends is engaged and continues to be engaged on your behalf to swipe/write profile/maybe message
You are engaged and continue to be in the app
Your (ideal) match and their friend has good engagement
You have friend(s) willing to do this for you and those friends aren’t distracted by their relationships
Your match has these types of friends
All the other restricting factors in dating apps
As we see with ghosting, one of the factors against dates is misalignment of engagement/interest. They give up on the app because of lots of work and no reward – but a great match could be in their inbox at that very time. Life gets in the way with work, death, and disaster. Now take that alignment and add in some friends so that even more stars must align for a relationship to start.
Back to Tinder Disrupt… This has a gameshow type format (see UpDating for same ballpark with different vibe). Does this scale? Have we seen a gameshow scale? (Yes, see HQ)
