Hinge Is Hiring An Anti-Retention Specialist To Get Users Off The App & Dating IRL

Typically, you hear about companies trying to keep their customers. They're trying to protect themselves against their competition, get the customers hooked, and keep having the same loyal following for life. It's all about retention — or at least, it usually is. But now Hinge, the relationship app, is hiring an Anti-Retention Specialist. That's right, an anti-retention specialist — in other words, they're looking for someone to get users off of their dating app.

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You could be flirting on dating apps with paid impersonators

Every morning I wake up to the same routine. I log into the Tinder account of a 45-year-old man from Texas—a client. I flirt with every woman in his queue for 10 minutes, sending their photos and locations to a central database of potential “Opportunities.” For every phone number I get, I make $1.75. I’m what’s called a “Closer” for the online-dating service ViDA (Virtual Dating Assistants). 

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Meet Tinder's In-House Sociologist

One day, as I swiped my way through Tinder, a pithy line on someone’s profile gave me pause: “If I was looking for a relationship, I would be on OkCupid.” Every dating app has its own reputation: eHarmony for the older generation, Raya for celebrities, Bumble for women wanting to make the first move. For Tinder, now nearing release in 200 countries worldwide, “hookup app” persists as the unshakable reputation. But Jessica Carbino would like to add a bit of nuance to that perception.

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Matchmaker, Matchmaker, Make Me A Spreadsheet

In mid-August, couples and lonely hearts packed a Brooklyn basement to hear scientists make sense of something the crowd could not: love. It was the 11th meeting of the Empiricist League, a kind of ad-hoc, small-scale TED Talks for scientists and the New Yorkers who adore them. In the back corner of the room, Christian Rudder sat by himself at the bar, nursing Stephen King’s “It.”

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How A Math Genius Hacked OkCupid To Find Love

Chris McKinlay was folded into a cramped fifth-floor cubicle in UCLA’s math sciences building, lit by a single bulb and the glow from his monitor. It was 3 in the morn­ing, the optimal time to squeeze cycles out of the supercomputer in Colorado that he was using for his PhD dissertation. (The subject: large-scale data processing and parallel numerical methods.) While the computer chugged, he clicked open a second window to check his OkCupid inbox.

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