Out of all of the social media apps available, Tinder is the most fascinating. For the unfamiliar, here’s how it works: link your Facebook to the app for a photo and a few other details, set a search radius and preferred gender(s), and swipe the endless stream of potential partners left for no, or right for yes. When one of those partners also swipes right, a thread opens so the two of you can chat. It’s speed-dating with a group that never ends.
After getting bored with this objective–read: no 20-something sorority girls were swiping right for me–I gave myself a new goal for Tinder. Swipe right for everybody, and talk to any matches as if we were conducting woman-on-the-street interviews. Only use current events as topics, and see how the conversation develops.
Considering Tinder uses a search radius according to your current location, some of the chosen topics were specifically related to New York. Others were not. Immediately, I found out that more of the serious topics—like the NSA, or the use of drones—usually amounted to a blank screen.
Unsurprisingly, the softer topics got a better reaction.
This wasn’t an absolute, though.
Here was my most enlightening conversation.
What can we learn from this experiment? Talk about cronuts, don’t be shallow, and don’t send unwanted photos of your genitals to anyone. That last part wasn’t tested, I swear–it just seems like a good reminder.
