Based On My Profile

an nmjc investigative report

HK: Randa….these days, on a Sunday night, you’re likely to find me tucking into something I like to call “Larry’s couch time”. What is LCT? It looks like this: something cool on TV (equalizer 2, Sunday night football, episode 4 of true detective, Apple TV’s ‘Hijack’), bed pillow on the couch, oofos dangling off my feet, me just ripping hinge.

 

So this last Sunday I was tucking into a little Larry’s Couch Time and something strange started to happen…

Approximately 1 in every 15 ladies I came across had the same exact, very specific hinge prompt on their profile. The prompt read

Now this is not the first disconcertingly common hinge prompt I’ve come across. The app is riddled with folks whose love language is physical touch, or whose therapist would say that “I’m her favorite.” but those I file under a garden variety lack of creativity.

This prompt is different. It is, at the very least, a creative prompt. So I’m sitting there, totally snuggled up, debating if I should make my radius more than 3 miles, and I finally crack the code…or rather someone else cracks the code for me.

I see maybe the 7th woman on hinge with the song prompt, but this woman has extended the prompt by saying “Send me a song you think id like based on my profile…and yes I got this from tik tok” 

So i do a little googling and find out i’m not the only interested fella. The good people on the r/AskWomenNoCensor are also curious. 

As an aside, the Ask Women No Censor community appears to be having some content moderation problems LMAO.

But fr you Randa found the tik tok and sent it over

@andreea.mp3i dont gatekeep like if men are stealing it from me then u girls deserve to know it #hingeprompts #hingeresponses #hingeopeners #datingappprompts #hingeadvice

Tiktok failed to load.

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I have some thoughts about all this, but I wanna hear first where you’re at. Did you know about this trend? Would you ever use this prompt? What do we think? 

RS: I recently found myself at a vegan fast casual restaurant in San Francisco’s Hayes Valley neighborhood with a single friend showing me her Hinge profile.

HK: hell yea

RS: I loved her prompt that read “send me something from the internet you think i’d like” – I told her I wanted to steal it, which is when she told me she got it from TikTok and that the only response she’d gotten so far was a guy sending her his Substack.

I do like that the prompt encourages the responder to consider the recipient as an individual. But at the end of the day, as the girl says in her TikTok, nobody is gonna make a matching decision based on a song. You’re swiping on if you think the person is hot or otherwise like their profile, if you get a new song rec it’s a bonus.

On the other hand, I think it could make Hinge more fun which is a good and worthy pursuit. If it’s more fun, then you’ll use it more and maybe increase your odds of meeting up with someone. But I think there are better ways of making Hinge fun. For example, right now I have Faiq and Casey logged into my Hinge on their phones. They swipe on my behalf, so there are often surprises waiting for me when I open the app. I also live in fear that they’re saying weird stuff to people who then might recognize me on the street.

The other part of Hinge culture I find interesting is the pressure to showcase your individuality. Being unoriginal on Hinge is unattractive, but I think it’s a false negative. I think the people on Hinge making a stupid unoriginal joke don’t realize that all these other people have done it too. They aren’t being thoughtful about their self-presentation. If somebody made a joke about being their “therapist’s favorite” IRL it would prob at least elicit a chuckle from me. On Hinge, it renders them undateable. I think that’s silly. These people are probably normal and fine.

We are yet again confronted with the limits of dating apps and I go back to my original thesis, which is that you should swipe exclusively on looks. Because that’s really all you have. Presentation of self online doesn’t necessarily correlate to IRL chemistry.

HK: Ok much to dig into here. It does seem like the secret sauce of a good digital footprint is showcasing ones individuality in a way that doesn’t veer into either the land of totally try-hard or totally internet-poisoned. Which way Western man….

I’m reminded of the  Aziz Ansari whole foods dating app bit from Master of None. For those who don’t remember, Aziz’s character in Master of None has a strategy where he messages every girl “Going to Whole Foods, want me to pick you up anything?”

First of all, WATTBA. Whole Foods is liberal, swiping is the dominant dating app modality, Netflix is making prestige content. Oh, how we plummet when we can’t grow wings….

The Master of None pick-up line, which debuted firmly in the tail end of culture blog era, sparked a number of articles with various bloggers trying out the line. My two favorite is this breakdown from the conservative culture and politics website The Federalist, and this Refinery 29 article about why it’s “genius” according to “experts”.

There’s a funny polarity thing going on here. The early tinder era Aziz bit is dripping in playful irony, whereas this new hinge tik tok prompt is like…cards on the table impress me with a song and your analysis of me. The snake is rizzing itself up.

I wanted to hate the TikTok thing. But…I kinda like it…

To be clear,  It's obviously and unambiguously corny now because anyone who is getting their hinge prompts from tik tok is, of course, a pawn in the geopolitics of The State…but that is a conversation for another sletter…

Just taking the prompt as it is, my only problem with it is I don’t really care that much about music. I’d hit her with like “Hey what’s up Rachel I think i’m gonna go with The Percocet & Stripper Joint?...have you heard that one?”

At the end of the day, the only thing we really have are the weird little things we like. 

With all of that in mind, here at nmjc we want to be of value to our single readership, so we put together a few great hinge prompts that we’ve found really work.