Whether San Vincente took the app in the more “woke” direction is arguable. The company has since pivoted back toward what Chen tried to move away from - including the relaunch of their digital publication, “INTO,” and attempting to address social issues like removing the ethnicity filter in June 2020 during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement. In March of 2020, Grindr was sold once again, this time to San Vicente Acquisition - thus giving the app two more cis-het owners who had yet to make any media tidal waves as big as Chen and the Kunlun Tech Co. One former employee told BFN that for Chen, “anything that detracted from encouraging hookups was seen as a distraction.”
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in 2016.Īn investigation by Buzzfeed News revealed that the new president of the company, Scott Chen, viewed Grindr as a hookup app and simply focused on increasing the number of daily users rather than trying to better it. It apparently didn’t help when Simkhai sold the app to a Chinese video gaming company called Kunlun Tech Co. The app’s “only-for-hookups” stigma has stuck around since its genesis and as a company, Grindr has been trying to shake it off ever since. Grindr’s nearly 13-year history comes with an infamous past - from various types of discrimination that still perpetuate with little-to-no moderation, personal information leaks, and a scary portal of underage users put in danger due to a lack of identity verification. What he may not have realized is that aside from finding each other, they’d also find drama and discrimination - but also security, career advancement, and maybe even housing. “It has this potential for making a huge impact in your life.” He ultimately wanted to make a safer, more accessible space for queer people to find each other.
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“There’s always the possibility you will hit the jackpot and find someone who will move you, he said in a 2014 New York Times interview.
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Simkhai recognized that, outside of the gay community especially, people would view Grindr as nothing more than a hookup app, but he had much higher hopes for it from the start. Grindr was first introduced to the queer community in 2009 by a gay tech entrepreneur named Joel Simkhai, whose original intentions were to connect queer people with similar interests its geolocation grid format made it stand out from other dating apps. Over the course of the pandemic especially, Grindr has become a portal for local queer communities, helping them find necessary resources, create a sense of solidarity, and empower queer voices.īut the journey here has been a complicated one. It could be argued that Grindr has done more harm to the queer community than good, but the platform’s unique interface allows it to be an indispensable tool for those looking to use dating apps more intentionally.