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Depending on where you look, Grindr CEO George Arison's net worth is $20–80 million.
He joins a growing list of gay executives hell-bent on proving that enshittification isn't just for the straights.
The crazy part is they basically own this space. An upstart app with AI that can turn the paradigm on its head is highly unlikely.
I'd imagine they're basically like steam. Just keep printing the money if you don't fuxk up.
It smells more like Facebook than Steam to me. they can print money for now because they have established scale and customer base, but it feels a bit slimy to where it might not be that appealing to new users. Dating services in general have a bad vibe-- bot problems, low quality matches, dark patterns, so authenticity is a big selling point, something AI drives a huge stake into.
I'd expect that thr gay community, after decades of being a target for abuse, tends to be a bit more sensitive of red flags and looking for truly safe spaces. The Facebook comparison breaks down there, as it has 700 million Aunt Martha users whose most politically sensitive post is in defence of Miracle Whip on salads.
Peter Thiel says hi
What does it means being « Ai-first » and « non political » because from where I stand from it’s a big political choice choosing AI over the security of your clientele
Politics is when you favor certain people. AI-first is when you favor imaginary people.
Maybe the data leaks from not having humans secure the data will be fun to play with.
By "non-political" he means pro-MAGA.
Anything catering to the queer community will automatically be political on account of a lot of people still working to kill us.
I don’t even see how AI is going to be applicable in Grindr. Such a weird decision.
Look at how often grindr crashes during right wing events. It’s already political, maybe just not in the back end.
It's Grindr, almost everything is in the back end.
Just like straight capitalists, he doesn't care about the politics of the people that are using his service as long as he gets their money.
AI is only as good as a sum of its human created algorithms and its human created training sets.
Which means, there’s no escaping the influence of politics; AI just means it will be permanently skewed and not as responsive to current political events.
The training sets aren't all human created. They have models that feed other models training data. That doesn't change your point, but you should know it's worse than you think.
I'm sorry, how the fuck can an app made for men to find other men to get their back blown out be AI first.
Can we just stop with this whole "AI First" shit? Can we just stop? We don't want our apps to be AI, they know this, we know this, but they don't care.
I’m sorry, how the fuck can an app made for men to find other men to get their back blown out be AI first.
AI is pretty good at fucking people in the ass.
Trying to get all they can out of the last great tech bubble before total collapse.
'AI First' means AI comes before the users, which can be true for any service. It was never an app for you. Just an app that you happened to use.
Nobody but scammers even uses grindr anymore. This is to impress shareholders, not users. The users migrated to sniffies already.
I... wh... sniffies?
It’s like grindr as a web app. You install nothing. There’s a paid tier but it just removes ads and expands the radius.
Cool features... wild name.
Don’t decode this one. Just observe. You’ll just end up doing a rule34 in a recursive loop.
It's still very popular where I live.
Lots of conservatives there?
Not that I know.
Gay sex is famously apolitical. 🙄
All I read was "data collection first"
I predict it'll go Meta and have fake accounts to keep engagement up plus a "AI matchmaker" assistant that will tell you its "advice" on the situation, mostly to get you to add more personal information.
The company is probably already using user data to build gay-interest advertising models for capitalism and gay-dar models for tyrants, but this policy will let them more openly sell that data.
The app’s already made up of mostly fake accounts. There’s more bots on Grindr than actual people.
So basically Abandon Ship if you use Grindr.
Why can’t people just have an app that prioritises what it was originally supposed to do?
We do. It's called Romeo. No nonsense. No AI. Just people. They listen to their users.
If it ain't open-source and federated, it's only a matter of time until it enshittifies too.
Even federation isn't a permanent solution. Mark my words, users will eventually act like changing instances is a high cost.
Maybe. Though I haven't seen anything of that sort over the years. They've been around quite a while and long ago they removed all ads from their platform.
Support your local European companies.
Is this really a question you need an answer too? Asking before it's to late to ask.
this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2025
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