From younger, faster and slicker, the online dating revolution is also turning bigger and badder. Swipe right?
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00:00So, let's get started.
00:29I didn't understand just how many people are looking for romance and also finding romance on their phones.
00:36It really has been a game-changer.
00:47Online dating really began with sites that asked people to develop big profiles of themselves
00:53and they'd often do it on a desktop computer and people would spend all night,
00:57maybe more than all night, you know, writing descriptions of themselves,
01:02biographies. So many of the single people we met said
01:07online dating, in the old way we used to do it, felt like having a second job.
01:12The game-changer in online dating is that increasingly
01:16people are using their phones, not a desktop computer. And also
01:21sites like Grindr and Tinder have effectively gamified dating.
01:27They're searchers driven largely by what someone looks like and it's gamified because if you're on Tinder and you're interested in someone you swipe right on their face and if you're not interested you swipe left and they disappear from your phone forever.
01:56One of the things about Tinder that's so interesting is that people go from the interaction on the phone to the date itself much more quickly than they used to with the old desktop sites.
02:27So ghosting is where you know you've been interacting with someone and then they just disappear, they drop you, go silent.
02:34And, you know, that's something that seemed really, really strange when it first happened, incredibly rude.
02:42People were shocked and outraged about it.
02:44So, you know, one of the things we're bombarded with messages, including messages from strangers if we're dating online, a lot of people just can't be bothered to respond and be decent.
02:54And so this is a way in which, you know, the culture of the Internet just enables us to be people in a way that we wouldn't necessarily have been before.
03:17A lot of us effectively live much of our lives in phone world these days.
03:21You know, we interact with our phone as a medium for many, an embarrassing number of hours every day.
03:27And one of the things that keeps us latched to the phone is that a lot of the apps there are gamified, they're fun to be with.
03:35And so the brilliance of a site like Tinder is it picks up on that cultural trend and makes the experience of online dating more fun.