I Try: Hater
On my quest to ThursDate my way through the men of New York City, I’ve turned to more and more offbeat methods — Hinge, last week, and now Hater.
It’s not a complicated app. There are four tabs:
- your profile
- voting on things
- potential matches
- matches/messages
All self-explanatory except the voting — essentially, one ‘thing’ at a time pops up (from ‘chocolate’ to ‘Moonlight the movie’ to ‘Donald Trump’) and you can either swipe that you love, like, dislike or hate that thing — or you can skip it (which they call ‘neutral’).
When you go to swipe either up, down, left or right you see the percentage of users who have responded each way. Unsurprisingly, 71% of people love dogs and most young urban people are pretty liberal.
As for my experience, I find the actual app easy to use and understand, but it doesn’t really draw me in or make me want to keep using it.
For example, maybe it’s my midwestern upbringing, but there are so many things that I feel uncomfortable expressing strong opinions about. Sure, I hate ‘black licorice’ and ‘hangovers,’ and I love ‘filling up on bread’ and ‘camping,’ but things like ‘Rolex watches’? I’m just… not usually in the path of those? I tend to just skip most of the options presented because I can’t stand the idea of being the kind of person who actually has a strong opinion on ‘meat eaters’ as a concept.
The idea is that you rank things for a while, and then you go and swipe through people, whose minimal profiles (age, location and a few pictures) are sorted for you by percentage of things on which you have similar opinions. In that way, it’s kind of OkCupid-like (not that I’d know. Seriously, we here at ThursDating are in no way that desperate for love.), but there’s something about the whole thing that I am not into.
One thing that I’m a little put off by is the idea of how little information you get about potential matches. I’m used to at least Tinder levels of information, if not Bumble, if not Hinge, where you can get to know someone’s age, height, religion, job, college and most embarrassing moment before you even say yay or nay.
I think, though, the major issue is that Hater has decided that location controls should be taken out of the user’s hands. Yes, people on dating apps don’t know what’s best for them (present company 100% included), but this takes it a bit too far for me.
When you try to change your location preferences, the app pops up a box that says “Hater finds the people nearest to you. If everyone is far away, it’s because you’re the coolest kid in the neighborhood… you found Hater first!”
I’m assuming this is some algorithm that cross-references your preference percentage with your distance and pops out the best happy medium, but considering that I live in New York City (population 8.5 million) and my first match option was 4869 miles away, I think there are some tweaks needed. I’d rather date someone that has different opinions than me on ‘the Bachelor’ and ‘margaritas’ but, y’know, lives on this continent. Relationships are all about compromise, if I’ve been properly informed — he can get a beer, aaaaand… we’re still gonna watch the Bachelor.
Another promising week (no thanks to Hater!) of ThursDating awaits in just two short days… see you soon!
