CS371 Group 7 Final Project

       Hinge has experienced significant growth and has gained more than 10 million users over the past few years. Hinge is a private company meaning that it does not make its revenue numbers public, but it is estimated that it generates about $16.1 million in revenue. Hinge makes money through its premium subscription called the ‘preferred membership’. They also make money through the purchase of roses and boosts. Hinge has a couple of businesses models. They use the freemium business model, the SaaS (Software as a service) business model and the transaction-based revenue model to make money. This means that they do not charge for a basic account, but they charge users more for enhanced version of the account. Hinge’s transaction-based business model is when they generate money by charging for its transactions completed through its platform. Other than the add on features available in the app like roses and boosts, Hinge makes its money through its SaaS software bus...

       The user interface and features of the dating app, Hinge, are well thought out and designed. More specifically, the preferences feature of the app play a very important role in helping the algorithm present more like-minded individuals to you that you can match with. The preference feature includes three different categories of preferences: virtues, vitals, and vices which all significantly help find more compatible matches and more unique conversations (Ellis, 2019). The director of Communications at Hinge stated that “Hinge’s algorithm is specifically designed to introduce you to potential dates who meet your preferences (and whose preferences you meet)” (Mussen, 2020). The hinge app uses a very well-known, Nobel prize winning, algorithm called the Gale-Shapely algorithm. This algorithm takes as input equal numbers of two types of participants and an ordering for each participant giving their preference for whom to be matched to among the participants o...

  Hinge utilizes various features, which makes the app much more personable and successful for its users. They intend to create a user-friendly and straightforward dating app that is meant to be deleted. Although Hinge prioritizes the idea of thriving dating culture and not simply miraculous swiping to find matches which is a popularized and adopted culture in today's society (2020), this notion is reflected upon their numerous features. The features begin with the idea of Hinge creating a detailed user profile in which inhabits three prompts. Prompts are there for users to share their opinions, lifestyle, jokes, personality and interests within dating endeavours. Hinge allows users to have numerous options of prompts between light-hearted, relationship-focused, and opinion prompts to encourage users to engage with one another and express information that can inhibit another person's liking. Hinge presently obtains a picture, and newly renounced feature of voice prompts; the im...

In discussing the user interface involved in Hinge, it is directly clear that Hinge intended for its users to have easy accessibility through the process of finding the match. This is done by creating a clear and concise user interface. Hinge only includes five user interface pages with which users interact; being the discover page, the standout page, the likes you page, the matches page and lastly, the setting page. The Hinge app carefully constructed each interface to allow users to view their own and each other's profiles easily. Including utilizing features such as scrolling on the main discover page to enable users to easily view the profile,  prompts, pictures and information of other users. Similarly, by Hinge creating the likes you page, a page in which details the people who have shown interest in one's profile, the user interface displays a potential matches profile but also restrict users in only being able to view one profile at a time and this is purposely done to ...

  Graham Meikle (2016) has 3 more defining concepts of social media. The second one is that Social Media use a particular set of business models and corporate practices that optimize and individualize each user’s experience (Meikle, 2016). A common corporate practice in Social Media corporations is the collection and analysis of user data, and business models are built based upon these analyses (Meikle, 2016). Hinge tracks the tendencies of its users regarding their preferences, account options, interest ratios etc., and filters what type of people they display to your feed to match your preferences. The third defining characteristic from Meikle (2016) is the inclusion of a particular set of business organizations. The internet allows businesses to collaborate efficiently in a manner that was not possible prior (Meikle, 2016). What brings these businesses together so seamlessly is the networked communication, organization, and mobilization made possible by digital media (Meikle, 20...

  In beginning our analysis of Hinge we felt the best place to start was by applying course content regarding social media as a whole, defining it and how/where Hinge fits into these course concepts. I found a broad quote from Graham Meikle (2016) that facilitates thinking about the difference between social media and other media: “So yes, all media are social, but not all media is social media.” This quote helps explain that while all forms of media directly or indirectly facilitate social interaction to some degree, however, that does not make them social media. Graham Meikle (2016) created 4 terms/concepts that must apply to a medium for it to be considered a social medium. The first of these was that it must contain a particular set of socio-technical affordances, which are interactions between a technological device/application and its users that are facilitated to encourage social interaction (Meikle, 2016). This starts with the internet, being that the internet is required t...

  In her book, Nancy Baym uses the term boundary objects to describe the capabilities of internet technologies. Social media platforms can be recognized as boundary objects, as they are existing technologies people modified the boundaries of. The wide range of social media platforms available today would not be possible without human influence. Humans have pushed the boundaries of social media to best fit society's needs. This concept of the boundary object calls attention to the social construction of technology (Baym, 2015). The needs of modern society have helped evolve technologies like social media to places we never imagined. Dating apps such as Hinge exemplify this concept of socially constructed technology. Social media originated as a way for people to interact with friends and family from remote locations. The creation of dating apps displays how humans would alter social media technologies so that users can have a romantic life from the comfort of their own homes. The in...

       After researching the popular dating app Hinge, I felt that the app’s user experience exemplifies Meikle’s three ambivalences with social media. Meikle describes that his first ambivalence with social media is the empowerment that comes with using social media. Social media platforms such as Twitter are viewed as empowering as they give people the option of sharing their thoughts with millions of users. However, all forms of social media allow users to gain a sense of collaboration that is empowering (Gainous, & Wagner, 2014, pg.2). The anonymity of social media has allowed users to feel powerful enough to share their private thoughts with a public audience. Meikle’s second ambivalence discusses the digital surveillance of social media users. The companies that own social media platforms can manipulate their terms of service to allow for the surveillance of users. The data collected through this surveillance can be used to further manipulate users without ...

  The dating app Hinge has positioned itself as “the app designed to be deleted.” However, the app was not always used in this way. When the app first launched it became, like many other dating apps, a ‘hookup’ app with users not seriously interested in finding a long-term relationship. As many other dating apps were used in this manner, this type of reputation and business model was not sustainable and the leaders of Hinge decided a change needed to be made (Shahani, Pp.11). The way the company made the transition from hookup app to dating app, was by making some changes to the interface. They changed the layout of the app to encourage users to talk with other users with whom they had already matched. “When you open Hinge, you land in an unusual place: the people with whom you've already matched. By design, the app is encouraging you to converse -- not swipe” (Shahani, Pp.18). While many other dating apps have the option of swiping between profiles quickly, the company began to te...

  Online dating sites and apps have become more and more popular over the last few years. They have come to play an important and large role in the modern dating arena (Anderson et all, Pp.3). People of all ages join these sites, the largest percentage of dating site users range between the ages of 18 to 29 (Anderson et all, Pp.4). The ability to create long-lasting deep relationships through these apps has granted a lot of opportunities for people looking for a spouse. The ability to connect with people online and get to know them before making the decision to meet face to face brings a lot of positive opportunities for dating. However, like with many apps, some drawbacks may prevent one from choosing to go the online dating route. One of these unfavourable possibilities when using dating apps is the fear and possibility of a profile being dishonest. (Anderson et all, Pp.22). Although apps like Hinge do have strict community guidelines that must be adhered to, there is no accounta...