Yesterday the fabulously named Sean Rad (that’s the billionaire 27-year-old founder of Tinder for all you not up on your mega-loaded tech start-up Gen Y-ers currently making you feel shit about your minimum wage job) gave an interview at the Forbes Under 30 summit where he announced that Tinder is going to launch a premium service. Which is a nice way of saying, they're ‘going to charge you money’.
Sean said of the new move, ‘We are adding features users have been begging us for. They will offer so much value we think users are willing to pay for them.’ Don't panic, though, the original features will remain free.
Sean didn’t expand on exactly what these new features might be, but Forbes have speculated that paying users will be able to turn off the function that limits you to users within a specific distance. Which seems kind of silly. Unless you only want to meet people that live far enough away that a train ticket to their house costs more than your weekly salary.
Here’s a few features that we might* actually be willing to pay for.
*Which of course we won’t, because paying for apps is stupid. Very stupid. Learn from the £21.50 shaped hole in our bank account from that month we bought The Sims app. Before buying our Sims virtual furniture. With real money. FFS.
A Tinder feature that disables drunk friends from swiping right 256 times
‘Can I “play” on your Tinder?’ Your coupled-up friends ask about 30 times a day. First up, chaps, it’s not ‘playing’ is it? What’s essentially a hilarious ‘game’ to those with a boyfriend has slowly but surely become a carefully cultivated way of life for you. So no, it’s not funny when ‘friends’ swipe right for everyone within a 25km radius when you nip to the loo at the pub. Even less funny is the mildly racist and faintly sexist message they sent out to all of your new matches, too. Even the good ones.
A Tinder feature that weeds out any man wearing a checkered trilby
Ditto a diamond earring. Also, anyone with a Spencer Matthews haircut. How this would work we’re not entirely sure but in a world where we (we say ‘we’ like it's our creation, it's not) can literally create an invisibility cloak, surely there’s some sort of photo scanning technology available that can analyse pictures for atrocious fashion choices, delete the wearers from Tinder and send a drone round to their house to play Macklemore songs until they give up the offending items?
An ‘is this really you?' request button on Tinder for when you stumble across ‘celebrities’/Dean Gaffney
There’s two prongs to the celebs on Twitter thing. One is the ‘is that really that guy in that guy from The Apprentice?’ (see also: Made in Chelsea,* The X Factor*) Because we’d like to know before we agree to a ironic date. The second is: have you ever come across Lily Allen or Katy Perry on Tinder? Or heard of anyone else who has? Nope, us neither. And yet they say they’re on it, so the A-list celebs must be operating under fake profiles. Could paid users get some sort of heads up that ‘Charlie, 27’ is actually ‘Douglas Booth, 22’? Because *that *we’d pay for.
READ MORE: What Happened When We Used Quotes From The Greatest Love Letters From All Time on Tinder
An "Are you alive?" mayday callout for the disappearing men of Tinder
Buggering off into the far recesses of the internet after only a few messages is standard Tinder practise, and we’re not going to take it personally, because, well, we do it all the time. What’s more worrying, though, is the chaps that disappear AFTER a couple of dates. No ‘this isn’t working’ or ‘I’m back with my ex’ message like you’d hope you’d get in real life, they just vanish. So, seeing as they’re all probably dead, perhaps a mayday alert button that sends police round to their house just to check they’re still breathing? Too far? Probably.
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This Tinder Experiment Shows How Depressingly Shallow Men Are
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.