Gay Dating on Non-dating Platforms: The Case of Online Dating Activities of Gay Men on a Q&A Platform
This post summarizes the paper Gay Dating on Non-dating Platforms: The Case of Online Dating Activities of Gay Men on a Q&A Platform by Ye Wang, Zhicong Lu, and Roger Wattenhofer, which has been accepted to CSCW ’22.
Chinese gay men use a non-dating platform called Zhihu for online dating.
Since the late 1990s, finding dating partners online has become a popular activity in gay men’s daily lives. With the development of mobile communication technologies and underlying infrastructure, gay dating applications have become the most popular channels for socialization among the gay community. However, in China, more and more Chinese gay men have moved from gay dating applications to mainstream social media, such as Zhihu, to conduct online dating activities. Zhihu (zhihu.com) is a Chinese question-and-answer (Q&A) website where users can create and edit questions, publish answers, and post articles.
Conduct a mixed-methods study, including observations of online dating activities on Zhihu, and interviews with experienced gay users.
To better understand how Chinese gay men perceive the affordances of a non-dating platform for online dating, we conducted a mixed-methods study, including observations of online dating activities on Zhihu, interviews with experienced gay users (N = 16), quantitative analysis of dating ads of 9,031 users, and qualitative analysis of 93 ads randomly sampled from the dataset. We observe that online dating activities on Zhihu always happen under “fishing” questions. Users answer these questions with their personal ads. If other users read these personal ads and consider the authors as potential romantic partners, they will interact with the authors by voting and commenting, and contact the authors for further communication by private messaging. We further utilize a framework of social media affordances to analyze user experiences of online dating on Zhihu.
Chinese gay men have perceived the affordances of online dating activities at self, community, and audience levels.
Through our study, we find that gay users perceive Zhihu’s affordances for online dating from three levels: presentation flexibility, presentation diversity, and self-promotion at the self-level; public socialization and information recommendation at the community level; audience accessibility, audience suitability, and communication effectiveness at the audience level. Rather than looking for physical(sex) gratifications, social (friendships, romantic relationships) and psychological (sense of community) gratifications motivate gay users to conduct online dating on Zhihu. Moreover, based on their dating experiences, users perceive that identity disclosure on Zhihu does not bring them serious consequences. Meanwhile, they are willing to take the risk of disclosure compared to the benefit of online dating.
Provide potential significance in better understanding the online dating activities of LGBTQ people in different scenarios.
Our findings reveal that some Chinese gay men perceive their dating experiences with dating applications as unsatisfying because they can hardly find people who have the same dating needs. Apart from the various dating needs of Chinese gay men, the gaps between user needs and the application design are another critical factor that leads to the dissatisfaction of users with their experience with dating applications. We do not claim that it is wrong for dating applications to satisfy users’ sexual needs, while we also notice that it is important to consider the various user needs of minorities.
From the dating application perspective, we argue that collaborating with mainstream social media may provide users with a better online dating experience. For example, LGBTQ service providers could provide dating services on mainstream social media. On the other hand, they could also utilize users’ information on mainstream social media, which may not be gay-related content, to find proper dating partners. This paper might inspire future work about the online dating practices of LGBTQ communities in different cultures and countries.
