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Grindr founder Joel Simkhai believes he created a monster. Now he wants to slay the dragon

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Alex Hostetler and Joel Simkhai

When Joel Simkhai first launched Grindr in 2009, it quickly became the most popular app for queer guys to chat, meet, hook up, and date. In the years that followed, he delighted in hearing about men who connected and even found love through the app.

But by the time he sold Grindr in 2018, it had become infamous for facilitating endless scrolling, faceless profiles, catfishes, scammers and toxic harassment.

Since then, the app has made several efforts to address these issues, but any regular Grindr user knows they haven’t disappeared. When reached for comment, Grindr’s current Global Head of Communications, Patrick Lenihan, responded that “While we’ll never stop working to deliver for our users, we are proud of what we’ve done, particularly in the past two years, to make Grindr a supportive platform where our community can freely and comfortably connect.”

Simkhai wanted to start from scratch and recently launched Motto, a new matchmaking app for queer men. He tells Queerty he hopes it can help undo some of the negative social shifts that Grindr helped create.

“I created [Grindr], you know, so I guess I’m responsible for what happens on Grindr to some extent. Under my watch, there were negative things,” Simkhai says, adding that most technology creates good and bad consequences.

“I left five years ago, and I’ve got to say that a lot of these negative things [from the app] have kind of sat with me in a bad way, kind of sat on my conscious,” Simkhai says.

His departure also netted him a fortune — Simkhai reportedly walked away from the company with hundreds of millions of dollars.

“[At first, Grindr] really didn’t modify what you stated in your profile,” he explains. “We still had kind of a laissez-faire approach… a hands-off approach on how do we work, how people interact with each other, how the community would interact. And, kind of, my view was ‘Let the community manage itself… Who am I to tell anyone how to behave?'”

Simkhai admits that Grindr’s numerous profiles, chat interactions, and endless scrolling helped generate advertising revenue, but, he now says, “It creates a lot of negative behaviors when folks can completely, freely express themselves.”

“I recognize some of the negative externalities of something that I created and am not in a position to solve at Grindr anymore,” Simkhai says. “[One of my goals with] Motto is to create a product that is really built from the ground up with the knowledge of all these things, and with a commitment to try to stop it,” he says.

While developing Motto, Simkhai and his co-founder Alex Hostetler say they “used research and input from thousands of people and talked to many of them” to understand the unique principles and approaches people use in online matchmaking.

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A screenshot from Motto

To help reduce some of the catfishes and other toxic behaviors that became commonplace on Grindr and elsewhere, Motto requires all users to upload three face pictures, including a picture — taken directly through the app — of the user making a particular hand gesture.

The app will use artificial intelligence and user notifications to help flag bad behavior, but Simkhai and Hostetler hope that showing people’s actual faces will encourage everyone to have more positive interactions.

Also, as more studies connect long screen time to anxiety, depression and other negative mental health effects, Motto’s co-founders say they’ve developed a possible way to decrease the time that users spend on their phones.

“We’re spending too much time on our apps, too much time on our phones,” Simkhai says. He estimates that users spend an average of 61 minutes a day on Grindr. Comparatively, he hopes that users will spend no more than 10 minutes a day on Motto.

To accomplish this, Motto will drop the usual “endless grid” that shows all nearby users, something that Simkhai feels can contribute to a dehumanizing “meat market” mentality. Instead, each day, Motto will show users 5 to 10 profiles of other users in their area. Users can then reject or chat with any profiles they’re interested in as well as ones that are interested in them.

Over time, the app’s algorithms will develop a sense of the profiles that individual users enjoy interacting with and will curate daily profiles that a person is more likely to engage with. The hope is that this, and the face pic requirement, will help people connect and meet in real-life more quickly rather than force people to spend long times scrolling and haggling for face pics.

This curated experience may especially come in handy for Motto’s transgender and non-binary users, especially since these communities have reported experiencing exclusion and harassment on other apps.

“We welcome the queer community,” Simkhai says. “That’s not just queer men… We all have the challenge of finding one another, and so we built this app for everyone.”

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A screenshot from Motto

Motto’s founders also aimed to make it a “sex-positive app”, opining that apps like Tinder and Hinge seem less so. Those apps, Simkhai says, treat matchmaking with a “serious” and somewhat traditional matter. Conversely, Motto allows its users to specify how quickly they’re looking to meet, their preferred sexual role, and other info that can facilitate dating and hookups in a lighter yet intentional way.

They chose the name Motto as a way to signify that the app’s users and overall community are willing to take a stand, to refuse to hide in the world, and to be forthcoming about their authentic selves.

“We built an experience that empowers people to be confident about themselves and embraces their uniqueness. There’s no two people who are the same. And we really want to embrace them, and we want to celebrate that,” Hostetler says.

“We’re gonna measure our success by how people are treating one another,” Simkhai adds. “We do have a responsibility to fight against racism. We do have a responsibility to fight against discrimination. We do have a responsibility for the mental health of our users, and we can’t put the business before users.”

“My hope is that that will come across in the product and in the community that we’re building,” he adds.

Motto is only available in New York City and Miami, but will roll out in more U.S. cities in the coming weeks. While the app may eventually go international, Simkhai says it may not be available in countries where police use apps to monitor and harass LGBTQ people.

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