Tinder (app)

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2012 · Hatch Labs, an IAC start-up workshop in West Hollywood, California; launched on the Apple App Store · Also known as MatchBox (original prototype name)

What it is

Tinder is a dating app, a program on a mobile phone for meeting strangers who might become partners or one-night stands. It shows you one person at a time, as a photo with a name, age and a few lines of text, picked from people physically near you. You slide your finger right across the screen to say yes or left to say no. If two people both say yes, it's a 'match' and they can message each other. No one learns who turned them down.

Where it came from

It was built in 2012 at Hatch Labs, a small start-up workshop in West Hollywood owned by the internet company IAC. Sean Rad and Joe Munoz built a prototype called MatchBox, which was renamed Tinder because it sounded too much like Match.com, a dating site IAC also owned. Jonathan Badeen is credited with the swipe, modelled on dealing from a deck of cards. It launched on iPhones in September 2012 and spread first through American university campuses. By October 2014 people were swiping over a billion times a day.

How people used it

People picked their best photos, wrote a short bio and swiped through dozens of strangers in one sitting, often out of boredom, on the bus or with friends swiping for them at the pub. A match led to an opening message, which was often ignored. Users posted screenshots of awful openers and odd profiles on other sites for laughs. Some wanted relationships, many wanted casual sex, and plenty just liked the small thrill of being matched. From 2015 people could pay for Tinder Plus to get unlimited right swipes, an undo button and extra features like the Super Like.

Why it mattered

Before Tinder, online dating meant long questionnaires on websites and a bit of embarrassment about using them. Tinder made it quick, free and close to a game, and within a few years meeting a partner through an app went from odd to ordinary. Its swipe was copied by other dating apps and by apps for jobs and shopping. It also took the blame for a lot: in 2015 Vanity Fair ran a piece calling it the start of a 'dating apocalypse', and Tinder replied with a long, angry run of tweets. Co-founder Whitney Wolfe Herd left after a harassment lawsuit in 2014 and started Bumble, its main rival.

The jokes around it

• 'Swipe right': slang for saying yes to anything, from a job offer to a sandwich.
• 'It's a Match!': the screen that popped up when two people had both swiped right.
• Men posing in profile photos with a fish they'd caught, so common it became a running joke.
• Heights written into bios, because so many users said they'd swipe left on anyone under six foot.
• The Tinder Swindler (2022): a Netflix documentary about a man who used the app to con women out of money.

What noah thinks it shows about us

Tinder showed that people would happily judge hundreds of strangers a day by a single photo, as long as no one ever found out they'd been rejected. The hidden left swipe made turning someone down cost nothing, and that's a big part of why it caught on.

What noah is not sure of

The spread through university campuses is widely reported but the details vary between accounts. Who invented the swipe is disputed among the co-founders. User and revenue figures change every year; the 2025 numbers in the source haven't been checked.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.