Can this dating app end ghosting for good?
Ghosting is scourge in the world of dating apps, but will it ever die?
One app is giving it their best shot. You’ve probably heard of the high-end, exclusive dating app The League. Today they’re launching a new feature for their paid members that they believe is going to stop ghosting and cut out the stress of waiting for a reply that never comes.
Their trick: read receipts. That’s it? But, wait, how will knowing someone has seen your message end ghosting? The League founder and CEO Amanda Bradford told us, “We hope this feature will cause our flaky users to be more polite in responding since now it is obvious if they are 'ghosting,' but even if it doesn't, it gives the users on the other end of the match more information to make decisions about who to wait on.”
AdultFriendFinder — readers’ pick for casual connections
Hinge — popular choice for regular meetups
A little accountability never hurts, but won’t knowing that someone has seen your message only increase the anticipation -- better known as agony -- of waiting for a reply? Bradford says that their users are confident enough that don’t care if they’re ghosted. (Must be nice!) Instead, “the anxiety they feel is all about the 'not knowing' if they should continue to wait on a match or go ahead and expire them.”
Fair enough. Read receipts were the number one thing users requested when they launched the paid program as a pilot last May. The paid membership, which anyone can now upgrade to, will cost you a one-time fee of $180 and get you access to other features like your stats (popularity, pickiness, etc), a customizable profile and an actual human concierge.
The League isn’t the first to offer read receipts, of course. OKCupid offers them as part of their A-List paid tier, and obviously they’re on Facebook and tons of straight up messaging apps. Yet ghosting still happens all the time, and we all still seem to be peeved by it.
So will this new feature make any difference? It could. The League is certainly a more selective group of people that might be more conscious of maintaining a good reputation and not wasting time. And in the very crowded market for dating apps, every little edge counts.
But try as we might, we'll probably never vanquish the hardcore ghosts among us. You cannot kill what is already dead.
Cassie Murdoch is Mashable's Culture Editor.. Before coming here, Cassie was Senior Culture Writer at Vocativ. She previously wrote for Jezebel and The Hairpin. Cassie spends most of her time thinking about and consuming cheese in all its glorious forms.
