It would be great if Grindr’s team used AI to help match people based on what time of day they’re usually “looking.” Many people tend to want sex at a certain time of day, and the app could implement a feature that analyzes whether your habits match those of someone you’re talking to. Moreover, this may be relatively straightforward to implement (I hope). By looking at when users take the initiative of sending most of their messages (e.g. “hey,” “u looking,” etc.), Grindr could look at trends and estimate a certain user is usually serious around, say, 8 pm to 10 pm. If permission is granted, an icon could be displayed near the user’s online icon (say, a fire emoji) showing that that person is more likely to be serious at that time. And, maybe you could filter by people serious at a certain time as a pro feature. Grindr devs could even use this inferential data for ad targeting, etc, so it’s worth investing in!
I think many of us have experienced two things on this app: (1) people have sexual-timing habits (well established in the literature), which is often one of the last pieces of information you pick up since it’s rarely a direct matter of conversation, and (2) a lot of people go on Grindr when they’re bored, which can slow down and frustrate the process.
By looking at simple heuristics for seriousness and intention to meet up, such as the relative quantity of cold outreach messages, semantic content (“looking?”), duration of time spent soliciting a partner, relative speed of opening the app after receiving a notification, and the like, the app could help differentiate when someone is simply online and bored, and ready for fun. As far as privacy, I anticipate this could be an opt-in feature, where you only see it if you’re participating (or maybe pay extra, too). I suspect most people wouldn’t really mind giving permission for this, as it would make the process of finding someone much more efficient. I personally would love a way of knowing who’s serious…
Any thoughts?