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The thread is up. Morgan enjoyed the feel-good feeling of seeing people find each other—“I love love!”—and enjoyed the real-life connections he could bring to his mind: multiple dates in his hometown of Portland, Oregon; someone considering flying to meet someone in New York because of the rope; even a short relationship. Even today, people continue to add their photos to the subject, searching for love all over the United States.
If that sounds like a bit of old-fashioned matchmaking, it is. But it’s far from the gossip neighborhood grandmas arranging a date. These transactions are often based on platforms like Twitter and TikTok and are overly focused on one person at a time, unlike dating apps that have endless menus of convenient suitors.
play with mail
Randa Sakallah launched Hot Singles To resolve her own dating blues in December 2020. He had just moved to New York to work in tech and was “tired of scrolling”. That’s why he created an email newsletter using the Substack platform with a seemingly simple premise: Apply via Google Form to get featured, and if you are, your profile – and yours alone – will be sent to an audience of thousands.
Yes, each profile contains the necessary information: name, sexual orientation, interests and some photos. But most importantly, it has a sarcastic editorial bent that comes from Sakallah’s questions and email presentation. This week’s singlefor example, it is asked which animal it will be; The answer lies somewhere between a peacock and an otter. (“My main goals in life are snacking, holding hands, and maybe splashing around a bit,” he writes.)
Sakallah says part of Hot Singles’ appeal is that only one person’s profile is forwarded via email on Friday. It’s not a stream of potential faces offered on demand, he says, which isn’t an algorithmically presented statistic, but actually makes it possible to enjoy knowing a single person as a human.
“I try to tell a story and give them a voice,” Sakallah says. “You really want to think about the whole human being.”
Dating apps may be quick and easy to use, but critics say their design and focus on images has reduced people to cartoons. Morgan, who started her long-running Twitter thread, is a black woman who says her dating app experience can be exhausting because of her race.
“My friends just put up their photos and emojis and asked someone to have a coffee very quickly,” she said. Meanwhile, “I would have to put more work on my profile and write paragraphs.” The results of his efforts were either not read or received a lot of offensive, racist comments. “It was frustrating,” he says.
scratching a different itch
There are many sources of dating app fatigue. There’s the paradox of choice: You want to be able to choose from a wide variety of people, but that diversity can be debilitatingly overwhelming. Also, geo-parameters that are usually set in such apps often make the dating pool worse.
Alexis Germany, a professional matchmaker, decided to try TikTok videos to showcase people during the pandemic and found them extremely popular, especially among people who do not live in the same place.
“What makes you think the person is in your city?” says Germany. “If it’s within a car ride or a short plane ride, it might work.”
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