Dating app Hinge isn’t Tinder and it doesn’t want to be. Tinder is random. It’s the big wide scary world brought to your touch screen–no safety net. Or better said, no web that connects one potential meet-up from another
Hinge, on the other hand, does a little culling. Hinge narrows your choices to friends of friends and third-degree connections. It puts a modern technology spin on how people used to meet–being set up by friends or at a party or at school, some place with connective tissue in place. It may have seemed random, since you didn’t know the person before you met, but there were invisible strings of data that connected you. Nowadays it’s far easier to see those strings. Hinge is making a big bet that people want those strings–they want the connective tissue, even if it’s slight. (Maybe especially if it’s slight.) Hinge thinks people don’t want to meet just anybody. They feel more secure when they have at least some kind of connection.
