After a dating app outed married users, 450 men deleted their accounts
LatestLast week, dating app Hinge announced that it would start showing users which of their matches were married, engaged, or in relationships, using self-reported relationship data from Facebook. This came after finding that 1.6 percent of their users were married or engaged, and that another 2 percent were in a relationship.
That change didn’t sit well with 450 of Hinge’s male users, who fled the service after it was announced, according to the company. “We see a natural attrition rate week to week, but this was nearly 40% higher than normal for men. Women, on the other hand seemed to appreciate the news, with 26% more than normal joining,” said Hinge’s vice president of marketing, Karen Fein, in a statement.
Hinge doesn’t know how many of the 450 account-deleters were in relationships because, according to a spokesperson, they hadn’t yet tabulated that data. So it’s unclear how many of the deletions were directly caused by the policy change. Hinge also didn’t provide information about how many women left the service over the same time period.
Clearly, even though cheating happens in both sexes, the company is implying a direct link between its reporting of relationship status and potential male cheaters fleeing its service. But then again, we didn’t need data to know that the world of online dating includes some serious sketchballs.
Daniela Hernandez is a senior writer at Fusion. She likes science, robots, pugs, and coffee.