🆕 Never Post! Georgia Gets Banned From Hinge Forever [Archive Pull]

Originally published on May 22nd, 2024 in our episode Looking For Love In All The Wrong Places, enjoy Georgia's segment where she investigates the walled garden of dating apps, and pays dearly as a result. 

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Never Post’s producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show’s host is Mike Rugnetta.

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Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure and is distributed by Radiotopia

Hello, everyone. It's producer Georgia here. For this month's archive poll from the Never Post episodes of Yore, we are bringing you a very special segment that I wrote in the 2024. This segment is the thing I almost always mention to people when they ask me what kind of stuff I do for work. It's become a joke among my friends, a story that always gets a laugh at parties, and is the segment that has, without a doubt, had the most tangible effect on my personal life.

This is the segment where I got banned from Hinge forever. More broadly speaking, this is an episode about dating apps and the digital walled garden they create. If you've dated at all in the past, oh, five years of your life, You know firsthand that platforms like Tinder and Hinge may claim that they are simply here to help you find love or sex or some confusing and ultimately devastating third thing. But what they really want is to get you to spend money on the premium version of the app and stay there, swiping away forever. Two years ago, when I wrote this piece, Hinge was the worst perpetrator of this.

And as far as I can tell, from my perch outside of its fortified walls, it still is. Now, Hinge has two tiered payment options for an advanced quote unquote better version of the app. For one single month of Hinge plus, which is the cheaper of the two options, you would have to pay $30 at the time of this recording. The price goes down if you buy multiple months at once, but still, it's a lot of money. And now, premium paid options are a baked in part of virtually all dating apps, including newer ones like Field.

I had originally been very interested in this weird interplay between an app like Hinge desperately trying to keep its users on the app and the way the rest of the social Internet engaged with online dating. At the time I wrote that segment, there was this wildly popular TikTok trend where people would pull up Hinge profiles and lip sync to the audio prompts people had left for prospective dates. That's still a thing, by the way. I see those videos all the time. But back then, the apps were kind of the epicenter of the conversation around modern dating.

They were the problem. They were the butt of the joke. They were the reason why finding a partner was so hard. And in the single week I was on Hinge interviewing people, that's exactly what I heard. People complained in mass about how awful it was to use Hinge or any dating app.

It was exhausting, numbing, depressing, and a lot of people I talked to really did seem to want romance and the kind of vulnerability that helps breed love. But nobody seemed to believe that any of that could exist on Hinge, not unless they got very, very lucky. In the two years since the segment has come out, dating apps haven't really changed at all. If anything, there are even more payment options for you to choose from. But what has changed is the way people talk online about dating, like, in general.

The fact that the apps are unhelpful is old news. The question now is whether dating, even relationships, are worth it at all. Remembering all those messages I got for this segment, now they kind of feel like the foundation upon which we got to this place. In these two years, I have seen all that exhaustion and resentment and fear kind of crystallize into this cynical mindset that broke containment from the apps. Now we're in a place where, if you saw that Vogue article from October, the sheer concept of having a boyfriend and, god forbid, posting about him to your social feeds is embarrassing.

You're gonna hear me talk about that next week, because the apps are still a part of it. Frankly, the foundation of our current dating landscape is due in large part to platforms like Hinge. And I don't think I really knew that that was where we were going back in 2024.

But I can see it

now, and maybe you will too.

Oh my god. Okay. I just I I I just got an email. Let me find it. Hold on.

Okay. Sent today at 04:08PM, Sunday, April 28 from the Hinge team with the subject heading, your account has been removed. Oh, no.

I never get a chance to do this, so you'll have to forgive me. But, yep, that's me. I bet you're wondering how I got here.

Okay. I'm gonna read what it says. Hi, Georgia. Your account was banned for violating one or more of our policies. Click here to log in to Hinge, where you can learn more about why you were banned and how to appeal if that information is available to you.

Okay. We're gonna click. Okay. It says I violated their policy on promotion, advertising, and solicitation. Okay.

Okay. I can appeal. I can appeal. We're gonna appeal. Well, it it'll be fine.

Right? It'll be fine. I'll just appeal and say, it's for a podcast. Podcast. I'm I'm a a journalist.

Journalist. Please. Please.

So I've I'll wanted just to write a story about dating apps for a long time. More specifically, I wanted to write a story about Hinge. Compared to the other big name apps like Tinder and Bumble, Hinge takes itself a lot more seriously as a kind of dating CV. The design of your profile almost looks like a resume. It's the LinkedIn of dating apps.

In addition to adding photos and basic information about yourself, you also have to respond to a few pre made prompts. Unlike Tinder, which offers similar options, on Hinge, there's no choice.

What I order for the table. Oysters. If loving this is wrong, I don't wanna be right.

The 2004 movie version of the Phantom of the Opera.

A quick rant about

Okay. We actually don't have time for that, but you get the idea. Hinge makes it clear. It is the one in the driver's seat. On the free version of the app, you can like eight people per day.

Over time, the app's algorithm gathers your best matches into a section called standouts. You send standouts a rose instead of a like. But unless you want to pay for premium,

you

can only send one rose per week, leaving

the

rest of your best matches in what some people call rose jail. This pay to play model is not new, and it's not unique to Hinge. But on this app, the strings ambulating the puppet are especially visible. While using Hinge, it's extremely clear that you're really at its mercy. But there's another part of the Hinge prompt experience that complicates this idea.

Since 2021, Hinge has offered something called voice prompts. Instead of typing a response, you record a clip of your own voice. And this feature quickly became popular off the app, specifically on TikTok. There, you can find countless videos that compile outrageous voice prompt responses such as

My best celebrity impression.

Link from Zelda. Hi. Yeah. Yeah.

Or proof that I have musical talent.

As this trend continued to grow on TikTok, a subgenre began to emerge. And in these videos, a woman will record her friend who has some guy's Hinge profile pulled up on her phone. She'll hit play on the audio, and the camera will pan up to the woman herself. And we'll see that she's lip syncing.

Alright. So like, I have this thing with pickles. Okay? I hate pickles. Absolutely despise pickles.

Always have, always will.

Here, a woman's lip syncing to a guy's audio response to the Hinge prompt, the one thing you should know about me is. She's drawn on a fake mustache and she's wearing a backwards hat.

Like, if I go to McDonald's and I'm like, hey, I want a burger plain, no pickle.

Now, she's delivering these lines outside, standing in front of the McDonald's drive through menu.

And they put pickle on it anyway?

Now, she's in a car showing the camera a burger with pickles still on it. She slams the bun down looking dejected.

I can't eat the burger.

Searching Hinge audio prompt will get you a cavalcade of videos just like this. Sometimes, it's these lip syncing clips, or it's just a recording of someone's phone as they play prompts directly from some guy's profile. You can see his name, his photos, everything as he tries to stick some kind of humorous landing on the prompt,

biggest risk I've taken.

I'm about to jump into the world's largest blender. It'll be the greatest thrill of my life.

Now, I love this trend. I think it's hilarious. But it also points to a larger tension. Hinge advertises itself as your digital wingman, giving you all the tools to find your perfect match. But it also works extremely hard to keep you siloed in this hyper individualized algorithmic space where you send only so many roses and can like only so many people.

It's technically social media, but antisocial in a very essential way. You have a literal cap on how many people you can interact with, and you only interact with them one by one. But, and here's another tension, these audio prompt memes are very social off the app. And when they leave Hinge, these clips become something different. They aren't a useful tool for sussing out someone's personality.

They're hokey and goofy and decidedly unserious. They're jokes.

Hey. Thanks for stopping by. Here's some background music while you look at my profile.

I'm not interested in deciding whether or not Hinge is good or whether it works. But I did want to hear more about how people felt about this tension between private and public. So I decided to go the investigative route. What I'm saying is, I downloaded Hinge.

Downloading.

I included real photos of myself, real information about my height, and where I live. But when I responded to the prompt

I'm looking for blank.

I said that I was looking for information for this segment. I ignored Hinge's prompts. I wrote, how private do you think your Hinge is? Who do you expect will see it? Just your matches, their friends, all of the Internet, and so on.

I finished my profile

And waited.

When you make a Hinge profile, the algorithm places you front and center. You get a lot of attention. And sure enough, in the first day, I received 40 likes. Most of them were people who liked my pictures without any message, or sent me something like, you have a beautiful smile, or did it hurt when you fell from heaven? But as I continued to use the app, I also got some fascinating responses.

Turns out, lots of people want to talk about their complicated relationship to dating apps even while using them. Some people messaged me saying they assumed anything they published online, even on a dating app, could be seen by anyone. Others felt the opposite and told me they sincerely hoped that no one would share their profile or their messages. But everyone seemed to know it was a possibility. These conversations also often ballooned into discussions about how weird it is to navigate Hinge, period.

One guy told me he'd been on the app for two years and gone on 50 individual dates. Not that he was bragging, as he was quick to say. Another person admitted he often uses it for a quick serotonin boost from someone matching with him. Here's an especially interesting response I got, which was shared with me with permission to publish it in this segment. Here, they're talking about the structure of Hinge prompts.

We're all sort of made to fit into the responses to these questions or into the responses of not even what we think the other person might like, but what we feel the app might like so that we have a greater chance, quote unquote, of getting a match, and then hopefully, like, that leading into something else.

This is very similar to something that authors Carolina Bandinelli and Alessandro Gannini write about in their research article, Dating Apps, The Uncertainty of Marketized Love. They explain that contemporary dating often does away with the old school processes of finding a partner through institutions or social communities, and instead has the individual be responsible for all elements of the process, which they align with the larger concept of negative freedom. Bandinelli and Gandini go on to say that dating apps present themselves as solutions to this problem. Writing, dating apps promise to operate a rationalization of intimacy, subduing the mystery of romantic alchemy to the scientific work of data. But by doing this, the authors argue that dating apps basically reproduce the very problem they claim to be solving, a dating landscape where the abundance of individual choice is valued more than actual connection between people.

As I started to talk to people, I found a lot of responses that basically gestured toward this problem. The general consensus was that folks saw how the app limited them, didn't especially like it, but sort of begrudgingly used it in the hopes that something good came out of it anyway. A date, a hookup, or being part of a funny TikTok.

Loaded Hinge for the new update and wow.

Daddy. No. It's it's it's just it's just Jacob. I'm sorry about that. I got I got excited.

I'm just trying I'm just fuck.

Almost all of the conversations I had on Hinge were about a general dissatisfaction with dating apps. But I have to say, I was having the time of my life. I regularly refer to myself as being allergic to dating apps. It's hard to motivate myself to talk to anyone, and when I do, the conversation feels stilted because all I have is this cheat sheet of pithy factoids about this person. It never feels real.

And the idea of actually meeting up with any of these people feels nuts. Like, am I going to meet up with did it hurt when it fell from heaven guy?

Username denied.

But reporting on this piece, I was having these fabulous conversations. The people who matched with me were not shy. I'd get these walls of text from people wanting to talk about Hinge, and Tinder, and apps, and dating. It dissolved the artifice that I struggle with, dragging my feet through digital small talk with strangers. I feel like I had broken out of the dating app CV template.

Suddenly, it felt like I was talking to real people who wanted to talk to me too. Maybe I'd finally figured out how to use dating apps in the way that felt good to me. But Hinge did not like that. When we started, I had just gotten the initial email saying I was in violation of their policy on solicitation. I had explicitly said I was looking for information for a segment I was writing.

But mind you, the second they banned my account, all of the conversations I had, the audio clips people had sent me, they were instantly gone. I had one one chance to appeal my ban. So I wrote a whole thing explaining that I'm a journalist. I'm not paying anyone for information. It was just research.

And, well, if you wanted a happy ending to this, I have bad news for you.

Okay. I just got the email notification. I saw it was from Hinge. Hinge Trust and Safety Team, your appeal decision. Okay.

Hi, Georgia. Thank you for contacting us regarding your Hinge account. Our team has reviewed your appeal request and confirmed that you are in violation of our terms of service and our community guidelines. Therefore, this is in all bold. Therefore, your account will remain banned.

This decision is informed and final, and subsequent appeals will not be considered.

Okay.

Let me look something up. If I'm banned on Hinge, am I banned on Tinder? A ban on one platform means an automatic ban on the other because Match Group owns Tinder and Hinge. And if I'm banned on Hinge, I'm banned on Tinder. Well, that's a wrap, I guess.

Damn. They got me.

I had been catapulted out of the walled garden forever. There is a hilarious irony here, of course. The app that locks you out of building relationships locked me out for the rest of my life. Suddenly, I didn't even have the option of canceling on Hinge dates anymore. That was it.

But it also came to me as a genuine tragedy. The second I started having fun, started thinking, maybe I actually don't mind this. That is when daddy dating apps told me, no, not like this. Match group decided I am no longer allowed to participate in the modern experience of dating because I was doing it wrong. I guess I'll just take my wares elsewhere.

If you see me out and about waving a handkerchief going, yoo hoo, mind your damn business. There's a lot more I could say about this. But for now, I'm interested to hear about your experiences with the structure of dating apps. How do they work for you or against you? Have you been banned from the apps?

Send us an email. Leave us a voice mail. The different ways you can contact us are in the show notes. And I guess, see you in the real world.

That is the archival episode we have for you today. If you'd like to listen to the original upload with news and interstitials, you can find a link in the show notes. Never Post is primarily listener funded. So if you enjoyed this segment, please consider becoming a member at neverpo.st. You can gain access to an ad free member feed while helping us keep the show going.

Never Post's producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton, and the mysterious doctor first name last name. Our senior producer is Hans Buto. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholzer, and the show's host, that's me, is Mike Rignetta. Never Post is a production of Charts and Leisure and is distributed by Radiotopia.