New Dating App Is the Latest to Try to Weed Out the Shitbags

Touted in a press release as “the first dating platform to ban users who ‘fail’ to meet quality standards and receive ‘failing grades,'” The Grade makes use of some secret algorithm that assigns actual letter grades to users. (Just like you can fail school, you can fail dating!) The letter grades are assigned using information like popularity (how often you are “liked” on the app), responsiveness (how often you respond to matches) and message quality (how full of misspellings and idiotic comments your messages are):

To improve your profile popularity grade, please try uploading several quality photos. Make sure to have a few photos of just yourself. Please also have interesting information in your ‘about me’ such as your hobbies, interests, favorite travel destinations, and occupation.

The response rate grade is based on how often you respond to messages and they respond back. Remember, you can only messages people you’ve matched, so there’s no excuse to not respond to them!

To improve your response grade, please make sure to respond to the messages that interest you with interesting content.

The message quality grade is based on several factors including grammar, spelling, and inappropriate content.

According to The Grade, if you don’t have a passing grade between A+ and D, you’re “expelled” from the app (expulsions can be appealed). After doing research (aka reading this webblog you are currently on), the app’s founders found that “A recurring theme, particularly from women on popular mobile apps, was that they were unhappy with the quantity of low-quality daters and the frequency of inappropriate, hostile, and sexually suggestive messages.” No! No way!

On the one hand, it’s pretty fascinating to set up a new technology that immediately acknowledges that there are startlingly shitty people out there, instead of trying to combat the issue after the fact. On the other hand, it’s a crowded market out there for dating apps so it might take more than promising women that this one will change things to make a dent.