The Hater App: What You Need to Know

Dating apps are like weeds — get rid of one, and three more pop up in its place.

I deleted Dine, the app that (falsely) promises more first dates and less pointless texting, because 1) it has so few users they kept sending me the same people, and 2) most of the guys who asked me out were 19–26 years old, even though I’d set my minimum age to 35. I’m legitimately tired of being treated like a CWILF (Childless Woman I’d Like to Fuck) and am looking for an actual relationship, not a romp in the playpen with a curious Baby-Man.

Hater is trendy. Or, as we now say, trending.

That was clear because my sister, who has been happily married for 20-plus years, first told me about it.

Hater seemed like the perfect app for me: I do hate a lot of shit. I even have a little notebook on my coffee table that my mom gave me entitled “My Pet Peeves.”

Hater is intuitive enough to figure out: Topics (“cards”) pop up on the screen, and you swipe right if you like them, left if you dislike them, up if you love them and down if you hate them. The app then calculates your average compatibility with other users based on your preferences and gives it as a percentage. This is literally all you know about anyone else, other than their age and distance from you. There is no space to fill out a bio or even write your height.

At first swiping on the cards is fun. I didn’t realize when I was initially swiping that all of my answers would then be visible to anyone who looked at my profile. So if you swipe “love” on anal sex, as I soon discovered so many of the male users did, the world will know. Every man whose preferences I checked seemed to have swiped “love” on anal sex and “hate” on monogamy. That did save time but was somewhat discouraging. I’d swiped “hate” on anal sex before I realized all my answers were visible, but had I known, I would not have changed my answer.

Even though Hater is trending, it doesn’t have a ton of users. I keep being sent the same people repeatedly, just like on Dine. Recycling users seems to be a big problem for the apps that don’t have Tinder-volume users. Maybe they’re going for a saturation advertising-type effect and think that the same users will become more attractive when you’re presented with them over and over again. It also keeps telling me that I’m out of haters and to expand my location range, even though I set it to 60 miles, way farther than I want to date in LA.

I will classify Hater like Bumble: an app where you get a lot of matches and few, if any, dates.

Yes, I did manage to get a date set up with a guy soon after I started using Hater. He owned a Mediterranean restaurant downtown and was Turkish and Armenian. He only had a few pics up, but he looked cute, and I love men who cook, so his restaurant was a huge plus.

Then I started scrolling through his opinions. Under “Loves” was Vladimir Putin. That had to be a mistake, right? I’d made a couple faulty swipes myself, and there was no way to undo them once you’d swiped.

I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt.

So I asked: Do you like Trump?

He responded: I don’t like him or Hilary I was hoping Bernie will come out but he couldn’t against that crook

So his punctuation was lacking, and I wasn’t sure who the crook was in his mind, but had a bad inkling it was Hillary.

I replied: Putin is basically a dictator, like Trump is trying to be. That doesn’t disturb you?

To which he replied: People of Russia has not Risen against him. And I personally don’t care what happens to them. Long as I’m concerned is what happens here in the states. Only reason Trump won is because people didn’t want Hillary in office

I should have stopped responding there, I know. Disqualify! Next!

He was disqualified, but I still had to say something.

Actually, I typed, Putin kills, arrests and/or tortures people who speak out against him, that’s why they can’t “rise against” him. And Trump won because of the electoral college. Hillary got more votes.

Then I blocked him.

This Putin exchange was a couple months ago, and despite having at least a dozen matches on Hater, I haven’t been on one actual date. At least on Dine I had some good dinners.

When you see that someone hates paying $2 for fresh guacamole before you even meet, that person becomes less desirable, and let’s be honest, seemingly less worthy of your valuable and limited time. Now multiply that by 50 or 100. The downfall of the Hater app is that it tells us too many negative things about potential matches before meeting, and so instead of finding “love through hate” like the app claims and bonding over our shared dislikes, we don’t even want to bother to meet anyone we match with.

Maybe instead of Hater they should rename it Asshole.