Here’s what happened when I reactivated my Grindr profile after a two month break

What’s the psychology behind the Grindr reactivation cycle?

…Lik Sam Chan, a professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, wrote the book on this kind of thing.

Last year, he authored the study, The Politics of Dating Apps. One chapter, titled ‘Cycles of Uninstalling and Reinstalling’, looks specifically at the push-pull pattern inherent in apps like Grindr. Chan confirms this when we chat over the phone.

“Using gay dating apps such as Grindr… brings various kinds of emotions,” Chan says. “The key issue here is that users experience these conflicting positive and negative emotions at the same time, and that’s why they delete these apps only to reinstall them again.”

Chan’s research pointed to three specific emotions encountered by Grindr users: joy, anger and disgust. Joy, Chan found, is mostly observed as a result of users’ connectedness to their community, while anger and disgust are developed out of feeling harassed and deceived.

What emerges is a hotpot of incongruent feelings or, as Chan puts it, a site of “ambivalent emotional threads that constitute the Grindr user’s experience.” Continuing on, Chan says it’s the “intersection of these emotional threads [that] pushes users to keep uninstalling and reinstalling.”

Full article: https://bit.ly/3zZqF78 (Fashion Journal)