Grindr.

[Marlin]

Has anyone else noticed how "glitchy" Grindr is lately. Site does not refresh all the time, messages are slow, and taps often don't show up. 
What are others experiencing?

[topblkmale]

 

They want you to subscribe to XTRA or Unlimited.

 

[NordicBtm]

I bought a year of Xtra about 8 months ago and the glitchy thing has been very true for me since about 1 month ago for sure. Taps don’t show up until after the fact and everything is just so much slower in general. Really like a downgrade.

[blackrobe]

3 hours ago, topblkmale said:

They want you to subscribe to XTRA or Unlimited.

That's part of their strategy.

By sequestering more and more basic functionality behind their paywalls, they *are* looking to drive subscription rates up. At the same time, they are making the "free" experience so compromised in terms of user flow and actions (frequent advertising interruptions) that users are driven to find a solution by either subscribing or closing the app frequently.

Grindr is also flooded with a plethora of bad actors targeting different groups with various scams and Personally Identifying Information (PII) mining. In the US and in my location, I'm targeted by between 2 and 10 fake profiles a day from the *same* Chinese PII data-mining organization. These profiles are all looking for relationships, all have stilted English language profiles, very Euro looking Asian model pictures, and all volunteer their names, jobs, and location before beginning to ask increasingly personal questions about your job, employer, personal life, etc. I've irritated four of the people behind the fake profiles to the point of them cussing me out badly in English (they are mostly native Mandarin speakers) and monologuing on how their organization is going to get all of our money from stupid Americans like me.

Frankly, Grindr is completely overwhelmed and outgunned by the various organizations and individuals unofficially extracting value from their ecosystem. So outgunned, in fact, that I'm lead to believe there is a powerful self-interest in having these entities creating fake profiles and contacting users for the purposes they do. I suspect that if we look into the user engagement and other success metrics, we'll find that the bad actors significantly drive up these metrics. Ergo, making the effort to keep up with the bad actors latest tactics and actively disrupting them doesn't positively affect their success metrics and share price.

Grindr's engineering and release management is also appallingly sub-standard. They are not investing in engineering to make their app a good experience for users. They are optimizing value for their shareholders and that means some of the most intrusive data-mining and telemetry capture capabilities so they can sell actionable information about their users, and sell intrusive and badly designed ad products and inventory. Grindr's crown jewel is their user base, with a >90% reach in the LGBT+ market. 

Grindr forced 80 of ~179 employees to resign in the second half of 2023 if they would not show up to hub offices 2 days a week. This is largely seen as a retaliatory response to employees attempting to unionize under the umbrella of the CWA. Is it any wonder that the app user experiences have suffered? I've found so many bugs the iOS app I gave up on the idea of reporting them.

Grindr users are a product to be sold and a revenue stream to be maximized, not a community that they feel a responsibility to deliver great and safe experiences.

[meetme]

Very interesting to read.  These services offered on line are not working to hook me up and I get weary of the constant grabs for more money.

[RawNYTop]

When I search for local guys "currently online" there are 15 profiles displayed, I have to upgrade to view the rest. Fuck that.

[TallAussieBtm]

4 hours ago, RawNYTop said:

When I search for local guys "currently online" there are 15 profiles displayed, I have to upgrade to view the rest. Fuck that.

Exactly! Me too. I feel like Grindr is basically just a scam nowadays. It used to be the most reliable hookup site but no longer. 😕

[Marlin]

18 hours ago, topblkmale said:

 

They want you to subscribe to XTRA or Unlimited.

 

I do have XTRA and have for a while....This is a recent phenomenon 

[Marlin]

14 hours ago, blackrobe said:

 

Grindr is also flooded with a plethora of bad actors targeting different groups with various scams and Personally Identifying Information (PII) mining. In the US and in my location, I'm targeted by between 2 and 10 fake profiles a day from the *same* Chinese PII data-mining organization. These profiles are all looking for relationships, all have stilted English language profiles, very Euro looking Asian model pictures, and all volunteer their names, jobs, and location before beginning to ask increasingly personal questions about your job, employer, personal life, etc. I've irritated four of the people behind the fake profiles to the point of them cussing me out badly in English (they are mostly native Mandarin speakers) and monologuing on how their organization is going to get all of our money from stupid Americans like me.

I get an asian profile contact me a few times a week....and you described them perfectly. Very attractive, groomed and buff. They always ask me what brought me on, they want a relationship, ask what my job is and ask if I want to invest with them. No matter what my response is they continue the same conversation. Sometimes I say I want a monogamous husband, sometimes I tell them I'm poz and want someone to take my toxic load....lol and I get the same response....

[ellentonboy]

I stopped using them during the pandemic when I realized that this was an organized attempt to separate me from my "not so" hard earned dollars.  There are basically the same 15 members in my area, who are also on other sites that don't charge and are easily accessible there.   They make cancellation difficult on Apple phones by stating you must go through Apple first, you can't just cancel with them   At least that was the way it was when I was on there, from what I hear that may have changed.  To call them "user friendly" is a joke, they don't like their customers and are not in any way interested in helping you hook up with someone.  These layers they keep adding to add to their profits margins are obscene.  When you repopulate your screen, it's the same 15 guys that were there eight hours earlier. The are multiple duplicate accounts on the site, some guys running three and four profiles, and if you mention the constant solicitation to management they do absolutely nothing.

[polyglutton]

Yes, taps are coming in many hours later.

If I didn't live in a rural area, I wouldn't use grindr and just stick to other apps, but the other apps have fewer than 30% the number of users that grindr has here. 

[Iker80]

I like scruff for a bunch of reasons. Sounds like the app works better too. I've still got a grindr I drop in and out of occasionally, but yeah, it's doing weird stuff and not sending messages a lot and I have to try again a few times.

[RawNYTop]

3 hours ago, Marlin said:

I get an asian profile contact me a few times a week....and you described them perfectly. Very attractive, groomed and buff. They always ask me what brought me on, they want a relationship, ask what my job is and ask if I want to invest with them. No matter what my response is they continue the same conversation. Sometimes I say I want a monogamous husband, sometimes I tell them I'm poz and want someone to take my toxic load....lol and I get the same response....

Got that all the time, I fell for it initially and agreed to move the conversation to Whatsapp. He was telling me how much money he just made in daytrading and wante to show me how to make money too. He would not pick up the phone when I Facetimed him, but moments later he messaged and continued the conversation of earning money. He wanted me to download the cash app and send him a screen shot of my account once opened so he can show me how to earn money. 

After that scam I noticed several times a hot asiam guy would contact me and ask me what I do for a living. I started to say I am in the Cybersecurity field and they block me.

[Thoron]

There are better apps like Scruff, yet nobody thinks to use it. Grindr Xtra undoes restrictions on conversations and makes the ads go away, which makes the app functional, but unlimited is overpriced at $40 a month with no cheaper yearly option. Scruff, the subscription is at $120(?) for a yearly subscription (can't recall the monthly rate) but the app is still functional when not subscribed, just more limited in how many conversations you can access at a time and how far back the chat logs will go plus ads. All the functions that are free on Scruff, though more limited are completely behind a paywall on Grindr.

[blackrobe]

10 minutes ago, RawNYTop said:

After that scam I noticed several times a hot asiam guy would contact me and ask me what I do for a living. I started to say I am in the Cybersecurity field and they block me.

I told them that I worked in machine learning building systems to identify fake profiles like theirs. They then tried to prove how "not fake" they were. I thanked them for becoming part of the training set for the ML system I was working on, and for having such clear tells in their fake profiles and behaviors. It was around here that I got a lot of directions to have sex with my mother in improbable ways and told they would get all my money. These were the profiles that would block me.

If you get a profile that presents as local, but you suspect they are spoofing their location the quickest way to sort the genuine from the fake if by asking them what neighborhood they are in. Real locals know what neighborhood they are in and will share the name of theirs with you. The fakes don't have the local knowledge and will send a location pin where they allegedly are. A real person would be very, very unlikely to share their real location. If they give a neighborhood, you can also ask them about landmarks that only have local context. 

Grindr's Tap feature is the way these bad actors reached out to me most often, so the recent app change so that free profiles can only see taps in the last 3 hours renders the feature almost useless for bad actors as well as us. It also means that all the attempts to do demand generation for social media homepages, massage and sex worker profiles, etc. are blunted when they target free accounts. With the Tap features engineering problems on top of this, we can expect all solicitation to shift from taps to direct messaging fairly soon.