Dating is hard for everyone. And if you’re a person of colour, it can be even harder. For example, these are some messages I’ve gotten in the past six months:
- “U should be glad a white guy is willing to talk to u u ugly asian”
- “why are you on here? no one likes asian guys”
- “Go back to China bitch”
People say terrible things. So what’s there to do? Here are some actionable things that the many dating apps can do to stop all this garbage.
When people can’t take a hint, give it to them.
When a user messages someone several times with no response, let them know it might not be a match. It saves everyone time and grief.
And since it a lot of abuse can come from rejection, you can prompt the message recipient to block them before anything happens.
Keep people from seeing abuse in the first place.
Twitter’s doing this by pre-emptively muting people based on a variety of traits such as account age and content. For example, if the account’s first message to another person includes “bitch,” it’s probably abusive.
Make blocking and reporting a first-class feature.
When a user blocks someone, that’s a signal. Follow Tinder’s and Facebook’s examples and ask why they blocked them to figure out if the account is abusive.
Abuse doesn’t have to happen a lot for it to really stick with you. So I hope more dating apps take the time to cull the assholes from the herd and make it better for everyone.
