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.
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“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.
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.”
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.
Vince
Yes. Enough of the undesirables wasting my time. I only want to see young hotties that look like models in my area!! Yeah, that’s going to be game changer for sure. Lol
BigJohnSF
Is Motto just for queers, or can gay men use it too?
TheX86
Bingo! Because it stopped being for gay men years ago!
jsmu
Clueless libertarian-lite asshole.
Pity he got so rich from this SHIT.
james7
My Grindr experiences have all been positive. Have met some cool guys, some have become friends, and some semi regular sex partners and have had no negative experiences with men from Grindr.
[email protected]
Agree
SDR94103
never have, never will.
Joseph1971
Management at Grindr are hypocrites. They will send you a warning or ban you for a period of time for content they deem “inappropriate”. However, if you go to them and show a fellow member is harassing you, or worse stalking you, they won’t help. They tell you to block them, when they know in fact that member can create another account and come back after you again.
I had to file two police reports because a guy got my IP address and was able to track me down. My bad for not having VPN. Does Grindr have anything to say? All I heard was crickets. They’ll take your money, and make it difficult for you to cancel your account. I won’t deal with them any longer, it’s just not worth it.
bachy
omigod that sounds horrible. I’m not a Grindr user but I know what it’s like to be stalked. You were obviously the object of a seriously concerted effort. Is your stalker still harassing you?
[email protected]
They allow you to see 5 to 10 users a day. How sweet, kind of like when mommy gave us our lunch money daily in first grade. This is as lame as it gets. If people are to inept to use Grindr they should just go away it’s not the apps job to protect them. BS
Joao Lemos
yes please, add a room for single man looking for serious relation ship.
LilOralYankee
Perhaps in the beginning grinder, as with all gay Apps, appeared useful, had a positive truthful bone to it. But like all the gay apps, it became land of fakes flakes and frauds. Loaded with bot profiles and flakes that pretend and go through the motions, when it comes time to meet, they wimp. I hear this from MANY I have chatted with, that they are so sick of the flakes. I often look but rarely hook. Especially in these here parts where one who I might, MIGHT go for is a needle in a haystack. I tell them man up and step to the plate and deliver, otherwise beat it. Literally.
DrJones
Anyone who HASN’T had a negative interaction on Grindr is in a 0.1% minority. I want to believe this new “venture” could be a good thing but it seems Joel Simkhai is just out to make more money after selling out his stake to the Chinese. That, and humans ultimately act poorly wherever given a chance, so I’m sure his “Motto” will become a cesspool with enough time.
greatman05
I like being physically attractive, I like meeting physically attractive people, and I don’t like using dating apps that limit my ability to do so.
Face-to-face interactions aren’t a guarantee of positive interactions.
Humans are humans, humans have always been humans, and humans will always be humans.
Motto isn’t my motto.
mateo
I’ve never understood the appeal of Grindr, Scruff, or any of those apps. There’s no substitute for real contact and CHEMISTRY. Even if the technology had existed when I was still in my 20s or 30s (and when sex was a 24/7 kind of thing for me) I wouldn’t have been interested.
rocpitbull
Unable to locate “Motto” in Google’s (Android’s) Play Store. Humpf! [Read between the lines!]
Thad
It’s apparently only in New York and Miami. So much for the majority of us.
DavidIntl
I am in Miami, and went to check it out out of curiosity – and found that in the app they save they are live only in New York City.
Grindr has its flaws, certainly, but I also have had two serious long-term relationships stem from that app, so I don’t really understand why there is so much disdain for it. People are not saints – the apps simply reflect that reality. And most of the attempts to improve them and make them friendlier or more inclusive actually have the opposite effect.
aaronarnwine
Last thing the world needs is another ‘sex positive’ app for gay men. Our culture is drenched in sex. How about an app for men looking for vertical not horizontal relationships with other men, where they match based on interests outside of the bedroom? An app that organizes meet ups with groups of single men to meet each other in real life in a place other than a bar.
One can dream but honestly no app will solve the problem of sex-obsessed gay culture. We somehow turn every online space into a digital bathhouse.
bachy
Have you checked out Meetup dot com? Don’t know about your area but they arrange a lot of activity-focused get-togethers for interested parties (both gay and mixed groups) out here in LA. Met some cool people that way.
sojerseybill
I was going to suggest meetup dot com also. I’m on Grindr, and met a few people IRL, but have also been ghosted by some after chatting with them for weeks. I have done more non-Gay related meet-ups but belong to a few Gay specific groups and have gone to two events.
Beanie16
Oh hell NO, YOU PAY FOR GRINDR? I was blessed to meet a man 23 yrs ago in an AOL M4M chat room. And then we play for a couple of years after on sites like Dudesnude, Adam4Adam and Manhunt lol I still have cum rags that Manhunt put in the bath houses that I use as makeup towels now lol.
Invader7
Yikes. Jeol Simkhai sounds like a sleazy opportunist. He created the monster and made hundreds of millions selling to the Chinese (of all people ).Now he wants to try again-good luck with that lame , half ass attempt.. @Joseph 1971 – if what you say is true and you were stalked and Grindr management did NOTHING to protect , I would have called a big ,powerful lawyer / law firm and sued the crappy ass company in state & or federal court. And gone on the national networks to embarrass the company into reforming the site. Of course they’ll say they don’t “monitor / moderate / police ” users action /posts/etc. Which is BS.. Most ,if not ALL sites have built in algorithms & metrics that do that ALL the time. Every site does. It’s called Post 911 Big Brother Surveillance .. Joel is a sellout and a sham.. I used seversal of those sites and deleted my profiles within 24 hours or less as they were full of crappy people with toxic behavior and UGLY souls… I wouldn’t have screwed ANY of those puffed up losers if they were the last trick(s) on Earth. I have something called self worth /self esteem / self respect /self preservation. Youb know all of the Self CARE qualities..