Grindr is dying. The final nail in the coffin is ads

The Print

3 days ago

For some time now, the app had begun to get tiresome. No matter how many Western TV shows talked about it, each new batch of profiles would feature 'looking for gym-toned' or 'don't text if girlish' in their bio. But even as my generation—the Gen Z elders—navigated the problems of fatshaming and transphobia, we clung to hope.
Some have already quit, while others have become infrequent users. And there are those who have been 'Grindr sober' for months.
It's the end of an era. Grindr is dying, and it's not the 'paid top' profiles, the 'high fun' peddlers, or even the safety risk that is doing it—it's the ads.
We'd ignore the homophobes and the closet cases. We'd let down the people we weren't interested in with a gentle 'sorry', rather than the industry-standard block.
Naturally, it was also a hotbed of insecurity. If someone sent their pictures and you didn't reply within five minutes, there was a good chance they'd block you. Or send a cryptic question mark. And if you ask me if I've been guilty of this, I'd request you to get in touch with my lawyer, please and thank you.
It was a brutal place. It's where closeted college bros came to get their weekly fix, where bicurious men toed the edge of desire, and sometimes, where a cis woman could be found casually hanging out. While the last one remains a mystery to me, I also found lovers and formed friendships on the app.
Before I got my first phone—a cute Samsung Galaxy J2—Facebook was where I'd find other gays. It was fairly straightforward—visit a cyber cafe, pay Rs 20 for an hour, use a fake profile to join a group called 'Gays in Nashik', and voila! All the gays in the city at your fingertips, from married grandpas to mean twinks.
And then Grindr came on the scene. It was perfect. You could be anonymous, and it showed how far a guy was, so you'd know to block a profile if it was 1 metre away. Even better, you didn't have to bother opening Facebook anymore.
I remember counting the profiles in my town and feeling a sense of relief—there were more like me out there. Once in a while, I'd find myself staying up till 3 am, telling a guy my life story and hearing his in return. Granted, there were the fake profiles and the creeps and the fear of being kidnapped by an older man. But those of us who were lucky learned our way around the potholes.
Also read: Modern romance comes with EMIs & Splitwise accounts. It really isn't a sport for the broke
Who is Grindr for?
Grindr was a brutal place, but it offered freedom. And now, you can't even text the gentleman with a peach emoji as his username without getting an ad for inDrive.
The bigger problem is, not a single person I know uses inDrive. I wouldn't be able to tell you if it is an obscure software or the newest clean energy 'solution'. But here I am, trying to hit the microscopic 'close' symbol on the ad and getting redirected to the inDrive webpage instead. All when I should be texting a semi-desperate 'heyy' to the cutie on metro, as god willed it when he compelled that Israeli guy to create Grindr in the first place. The app has lost its way.
Who is Grindr serving these days? Not the trans girlies, not the geriatric twinks, not the moustached uncles—just Swiggy Instamart and 'best no wifi car games'. That's the real insult—the ads aren't remotely queer. Where are the tote bags with Rekha's face on them? What about dangly earrings, black nail paint, graphic eyeliner? You know it's the end times when capitalism doesn't bother to be convenient anymore.
To be fair, Grindr is neither the only app to run ads, nor is it the first one. I've often closed Tinder after being redirected to Myntra. The latter has a much greater variety of bottoms, after all. But there's a key difference: the other apps still let the user, well, use them. With Grindr, what began as a polite nudge to get the 'Xtra' plan is now the only way it'll let you use the app.
Over the last few years, Grindr has slowly moved one feature after another into its paid category. Once upon a time, you could see the profiles that had checked you out—a cue I believe some gay intern passed along to LinkedIn eventually. You could see all the profiles that had 'tapped' yours—a way of showing interest in a low-key, chilled-out, non-cringe manner. And before all this, there were 'tribe' grids to help you filter the kind of people you wanted to meet: twinks, bears, trans folks.
In the words of a friend, 'When I couldn't find geeks from 60 km away, that's when Grindr died.'
There are those (allegedly) thriving on Grindr Xtra. They can access 600 profiles, see who's tapped them, and create multiple albums to keep their nice pictures separate from the naughty ones. But most people scoff at the idea of paying for a hookup app, especially one that crashes every five minutes.
As Redditors often do, one summed it up best. 'Why would you pay for this garbage.'
The problems were always there. The app broke down too often, it was hilariously unsafe, and prolonged exposure left you feeling ugly and doomed to loneliness. The ads are just the final nail in the coffin.
'I'm almost on the verge of quitting,' said a junior from school. 'What's keeping me here is the lack of an alternative.'
While many like him are waiting for a better gay app to come along, an exodus has already begun. Gays, I hear it, are migrating from Grindr to Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge. Some are even turning to PlanetRomeo, Grindr's older, but less popular cousin. Most likely, they won't find much luck there—dating apps are failing across the board.
So what happens now? Is it time for the gays to emerge, blinking, from the caves of digital desire? To face the nauseating prospect of flirting in real life, perhaps? To see people in their context? It's best to be safe before one goes and does something rash, though. Who knows, PlanetRomeo might just turn out to be lovely.
Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)