LOVE ME TINDER

It's been a decade since we first learnt to swipe left or right - and the world of dating has been forever transformed

- DENNIS CAVERNELIS

ROMANCE is dead, its critics crowed when it launched to great fanfare. And it didn’t take long before it became known as a place populated by sleazeballs looking for a hot hookup or quick affair.

But there’s no denying the popularity of Tinder and how it’s changed the way people date in the past decade. Young people, constantly busy and unable to find that special someone the way their parents or grandparents once did, downloaded the app by their thousands. Now it’s practically impossible to find love without using a dating app of some sort.

As it turns 10 on 12 September, we take a closer look at the digital matchmaker that altered the world of dating forever.

HOW IT STARTED The app was created by Sean Rad, Justin Mateen and Jonathan Badeen. They launched it because they were frustrated by how hard it was to find a partner.

The app was originally going to be named Matchbox “because we liked that sort of fire theme, so actually we looked through a dictionary, a thesaurus, something like that, looking for fire-related words,” Jonathan said once.

But Whitney Wolf Herd, the company’s vice president of marketing, says she came up with the term. Two years after Tinder launched, she left, sued the app’s parent company for sexual harassment and won.

HOW IT WORKS Essentially profile pictures are the driving force and users choose to connect or reject based on someone’s image.

Tinder matched members based on their “desirability,” using the same scoring system that ranks chess players, Sean told Fast Company magazine in 2016.