Paul Watson
Match, the world’s biggest online dating app is celebrating a legal win in the Netherlands where a court has ruled that Apple’s app-store payment policies are unfair due to the substantial 30% commissions which app owners are expected to pay.
Shar Dubey, who leads the company also responsible for Hinge, Tinder and OKCupid has been kicking up a fuss about the payment policies for a long time. The policies force developers to use Apple’s payment services exclusively.
The complaint was filed in the Dutch court in 2019 and originally included more issues than the payment terms alone but was pared down to focus solely on those issues.
The vast majority of people using Match Group’s apps download them from either Apple or Google’s app stores. Which Dubey has called “the gatekeepers of the Internet”
The commissions are so hefty that Match has been forced to raise its prices so that consumers are ultimately the ones picking up the check.
This year’s transaction fees for Match Group are estimated to be around $500 million and that’s through Apple and Google alone.
It’s hardly Match’s first time at the legal rodeo though – they’ve been involved in a number of high-profile court cases. Most notably perhaps, the one which involved Sean Rad. Rad, the originator of Tinder, was embroiled in a scandal involving Whitney Wolfe Herd’s complaints about their fellow founder Justin Mateen with whom Wolfe Herd had been in a relationship.
Mateen was found guilty of sexual harassment following the case and Rad didn’t get off blameless either. As CEO of Tinder, he was found to have been neglectful of his duties to Wolfe Herd and had stood by whilst she suffered at the hands of Mateen.
Rad later made headlines for his clumsy attempts at self-promotion and for his apparent lack of understanding of the English language.
But the system hasn’t changed everywhere so the bill will still be a large one – it won’t be a battle easily won but Match Group are likely to tackle it one country at a time.
Woman Shares “Disgusting” Hinge Message and Goes Viral
A woman from Liverpool UK has shared a comment she received on Hinge in the hope that others might be forewarned.
Stephanie Campbell, 22 says she is not worried about what the man wrote because she receives similar messages on a regular basis. What she isworried about is what women who don’t have such thick skin might go through if they were to receive similar messages.
The man had liked one of Stephanie’s photographs and after accepting the invitation to chat, he wrote “Yeah f**ck it, you’ll do” and Stephanie, growing tired of rude and abusive behaviour on Hinge, decided to share it on Twitter.
She posted a screen grab and immediately received hundreds of supportive messages – but also abusive ones.
Stephanie said, “I feel like it’s quite a regular thing with dating apps,” and admitted that sometimes she tries to “banter” with the offenders in order to lighten the situation.
Since sharing the post to Twitter, Stephanie has taken a break from the platform due to the amount of abusive messages she has received.
Sadly, Stephanie’s story is nothing new. An Australian woman named Stacey Koniaras has shared how her online dating efforts turned into a nightmare with many abusive messages and one man who turned stalker and forced her to get a restraining order.
Ms Koniaras said, “I would block him and then he would start up another messenger account — calling me, calling my friends.”
The truth is that many of the abusive messages are sent by men who have no plans to meet up with the women they’re messaging, they simply want to be mean or if they do originally plan to meet up, when faced with rejection, they turn nasty.
This sets a worrying precedent in which women on dating apps are coming to expect to be abused via messages.
Additionally, a 2020 study by the US-based Pew Research Centre revealed that almost half of all women aged between 35 and 49 who used dating apps like Hinge had reported that some men continue contact even after they have said they were not interested.
This worrying fact doesn’t sit well with an increasing amount of women.
Should we be surprised though? Hinge is owned by Match Group which also owns Tinder. And it was Tinder that was at the center of a sexual harassment case not so long ago.
The woman who brought the case to court? Whitney Wolfe Herd, now famous as the creator of Bumble, the wildly successful dating app but then one of Tinder’s original founders.
She’d been dating a fellow founder, Justin Mateen whilst working at the burgeoning giant of a company and it was when she split with him that things turned nasty.
Mateen and a third founder, Sean Rad, subjected Wolfe Herd to a period of extreme harassment and the whole case resulted in Mateen’s removal from the board and Rad’sdemotion.
Rad isn’t the best advertisement for a dating app either. He was in thepress for his questionable statements about a mystery supermodel and for his lack of understanding of the term sodomy.
As more women stand up for their rights and refuse to accept sexual abuse or violent speech, what will happen to apps like Hinge and Tinder?
That remains to be seen but there’s a lot of talk about background checks lately – so it possibly won’t be long before repeat offenders get ousted before they can get abusive.
