Can Tinder Fix The Dating Landscape It Helped Ruin? | WIRED

Overview

Can Tinder Fix The Dating Landscape It Helped Ruin?

Tinder made Lauren Grauer feel like a delinquent dater.

Details

While watching videos on You Tube last month, the New York talent marketer was served an ad for “Double Date,” a new feature the dating app launched that lets users pair their profiles with friends to swipe on other paired matches.

Grauer was shocked by the news. Four years ago, she’d essentially thought to do the same thing by making a double date profile of her and a friend. The idea got her kicked off the app.

“The reason I got banned from Tinder is what they’re advertising now,” Grauer says in a Tik Tok video. “I don’t want to be back. You don’t need to un-ban me—it’s fine. But you made me feel like a criminal.” (The company’s community guidelines prohibit account sharing.)

Double Date is one of more than a dozen features Tinder has announced as part of its ongoing rebrand under its latest chief executive, Spencer Rascoff, who wants to create a fresh identity for the world’s most popular dating app around social, low-pressure connections.

Unlike every other dating app battling for engagement, Tinder has uniquely struggled to innovate in a field where it was once considered the standard. Though Grindr launched in 2009 as the first geo-location hookup app—tailored specifically around gay desire—it was Tinder, which arrived in 2012, that completely overhauled online dating. Swiping for love was a big hit among love-sick singles, and burgeoning apps, including Bumble, Feeld, and Raya, flooded the market in the following years.

By 2016, Tinder had an estimated 50 million users and was the biggest dating app in the US, with 25 percent of the market share. As time passed, though, daters began to treat digital courtship like a game—swiping until they reached the final level. Vanity Fair once called it the “Dawn of the Dating Apocalypse.” In the final quarter of 2025, paying Tinder members dropped 8 percent, to 8.8 million.

This month, during a media event at the El Rey Theater in Los Angeles, Rascoff officially reintroduced Tinder to the public. Where swipes were once a measure of success, the company’s benchmarks have changed when it comes to user satisfaction. “Just getting matches is not the goal,” Rascoff said of shifting priorities. “People are craving connection. Humans need humans.”

Like every other dating app on the market, Tinder is betting on AI to not only innovate but reestablish trust with users. But can the app revitalize the dating landscape many say it ruined?

In addition to a profile redesign, two of its new marquee products include astrology mode, which pairs people based on their zodiac compatibility, and Chemistry, an AI-powered tool that analyzes a user’s camera roll to learn more about their interests and personality. The company, which was subject to an alleged data breach in January, says it does not store the data analyzed from photos.

Tinder is also making AI upgrades to its Are You Sure? feature, which alerts users of potentially “harmful language” they’ve typed before they hit Send, and “Does This Bother You,” which detects potentially profane messages being sent to users, automatically blurring the text so the receiver can’t see it without tapping through. (Auto-blur is just for text messages; Tinder, like all Match-owned apps, does not allow private image exchange.)

But “harmful language” is a somewhat subjective concept. And the apps can often be particularly brutal for marginalized people.

Kobe Mehki, a 23-year-old singer-songwriter in Los Angeles, who is trans and rejoined Tinder in January, says she is constantly having to defend her identity. “So many men were saying, Hey, you’re so pretty. But would ask, Are you trans? Are you trans? It was so jarring. I’ve never had it happen so much,” she says. “Men are only hypersexualizing me or asking questions about me as if I’m not even a real person. They discredit anything else—my heart, my personality, my ambitions—and it makes me want to just retreat and not even approach dating.”

According to Yoel Roth, Tinder’s head of trust and safety, the company’s LLM, which previously targeted key words and phrases, is being trained to “understand a little bit of the nuances around how words and phrases are being used, whether it’s playful profanity or abusive profanity.” The company says its AI also considers intent, including patterns associated with harassment, hate speech, sexual harassment, threats, coercive or controlling behavior, and other disrespectful or degrading language.

For some daters, Tinder has devolved into a kind of “humiliation ritual,” where people are either looking for “intimacy without commitment” or “keep it installed out of habit” with no real interest in making a connection.

Bobby Fitzgerald, a 32-year-old nonprofit worker in Kansas City, first quit the app in 2018 because “it felt like the movie Groundhog Day, doing the same thing over and over again.” The experience had become formulaic. “Everyone was playing a part. I would see people’s ‘About me’ and I’m like, you clearly copied and pasted that off of the internet.”

Tinder is hoping AI both on the backend and for users will help draw people back. Rascoff says his team has “completely rebuilt” the algorithm, and AI currently writes more than half of the company’s new code. (In May 2025, Rascoff cut 13 percent of Match’s workforce only months into his role.)

According to the company, Tinder’s LLMs, which were built internally, are trained on user interactions and real-world performance to consider the overall messaging context. The new features, says Mark Kantor, Tinder’s head of product, are specifically geared toward women (according to a 2024 analysis, 75 percent of its US users identify as male) and Gen Z because “if we solve this, then it ultimately helps the entire ecosystem.”

A 2025 Singles in America survey found that 26 percent of US singles have used AI to help build their profiles, help them flirt, or otherwise enhance their dating experience.

Tinder is also investing $125 million into trust and safety this year and is making Face Check—its face verification process for new users that first launched in California last October—mandatory worldwide. Security-wise, fake accounts remain the biggest issue; they account for 98 percent of the content moderation on the app.

“I think distrust is a dynamic that all of tech and all of social media are facing,” Roth says.

But will the changes be enough for disillusioned daters?

Fitzgerald logged back on in early February, just before Valentine’s Day, with high hopes that the platform had improved. “I just didn’t enjoy the experience at all. It was tough to discern if anyone was actually there earnestly trying to meet another human being,” he says.

He’s decided to take a break from dating apps for the time being, and meet people where he prefers: in real life.

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Key Takeaways

Can Tinder Fix The Dating Landscape It Helped Ruin
Tinder made Lauren Grauer feel like a delinquent dater
While watching videos on You Tube last month, the New York talent marketer was served an ad for “Double Date,” a new feature the dating app launched that lets users pair their profiles with friends to swipe on other paired matches
Grauer was shocked by the news
“The reason I got banned from Tinder is what they’re advertising now,” Grauer says in a Tik Tok video