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A new Tinder test lets people pay to turn read receipts on for specific chats

A new Tinder test lets people pay to turn read receipts on for specific chats

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Plus a new Super Boost test

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Tinder

Tinder’s beginning two tests today that might entice more people to pay for the dating app. One of the tests builds on top of the app’s paid subscriptions — Tinder Gold and Tinder Plus — by offering some subscribers the opportunity to break the algorithm and push their profile to the top of people’s potential match stacks. Non-subscribers can participate in the other test that allows them to pay to view read receipts on chats.

These users can pay to turn read receipts on for individual chat threads, so they’ll be able to see if and when a match read their message. Only the person who upgraded the chat will be able to view the read receipts, but both people will have the option to turn read receipts off. Read receipts will be turned on by default, however, so be sure to turn them off if you don’t want other people to know you’ve read a message. The read receipts feature can be purchased in packs and then applied to specific chats.

Other dating apps also offer read receipts as a paid upgrade, including The League and OkCupid, but bringing them to Tinder feels particularly ruthless if only because it’s an app where lots of people match and then drop off from chatting. I like to convince myself someone stopped responding because they fell in love and stopped checking the app, and it’d be terrible to know a message was read and deemed not worthy of a response. Still, I’m sure plenty of people will want an answer — what if their date died or something — so it seems like this could be a promising feature, at least for generating money for Tinder.

The second update is relatively minor, but could be intriguing for people who are convinced the reason they aren’t getting matches is because their profile is never actually surfaced. Super Boost promises to promote a user’s profile to 100 times more people than usual. It’s unclear how long the promotion lasts, but Tinder says the option to use Super Boost will appear during “peak night hours,” or when people are most likely to be swiping. Super Boost is a juiced-up version of Boost, which gives users 10 times more profile views. We don’t have pricing information on either feature, and they’re both just tests for now, so not every user will see them as purchase options.