Photo: Courtesy of Wyldfire.Anyone who's ever been on Tinder can attest to the inevitable horrors of the app. It ranges from the harmless (way too many shirtless profile pics) to the downright weird and scary (inappropriate and unwanted sexual advances). To combat the annoyances and the dangers of more "traditional" online dating, developers Brian Freeman and Andrew White created Wyldfire.
It's a a female-centric app that requires male users to be nominated by a woman before they can become members. The founders told New York Magazine that they created the service around the needs of women, to prevent their female friends from getting creeped on by guys. While the objective is admirable — the world could certainly use more men who are concerned about the safety and sexual wellbeing of women — it might not be that great in practice.
New York points out that relying on women to nominate their male acquaintances to join the app means that those men must first have been deemed undateable by the nominators themselves. Now, sure, maybe the woman is in a relationship or there are other extenuating circumstances, but it certainly doesn't bode well for the app's success rate. The selected men might be great, but that doesn't help if there are nowhere near enough to go around.
The other issue is that there's no cut-and-dried way to weed out bad seeds. After all, men don't always go around advertising their inappropriate behavior. No app, invite or not, can truly prohibit "creepiness" (in men or women). That said, it doesn't mean we're not willing to give it a shot — at this point, anything is preferable to swiping through the scores of self-obsessed bros on Tinder. (New York Magazine)
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