Thoughts on the Dating App Screenshot

And recreational surveillance in a lonely, paranoid age

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Photo by Alexander Sinn on Unsplash

Love! Long has it vexed mankind, making fools and hypocrites of us all. Though the rituals of courtship have changed with each passing generation, one thing remains the same: romance is a haphazard, embarrassing undertaking. And with the advent of social media and dating apps, never before has the potential for humiliation on the battlefield of love been quite this public. Picture Juliet posting a screenshot to Twitter of Romeo hitting her up on Hinge. 

“A filthy Montague hath sent me a rose! So tedious is this day.” 

Yes, the “dating app screenshot” has emerged as a popular genre of content on social media, inviting the digital public to weigh in on cheesy pickup lines, red flags, and cringe-inducing bios. Sometimes this works out for the person who posted the screenshot, garnering them positive replies and assurances that the person who messaged them is a certified weirdo. Sometimes, though, it blows up in their face. 

Humiliating people on social media to farm engagement is nothing new, of course. But I wonder if there’s something else we can glean from this phenomenon. Dating trends hold a lot of valuable information about their time. They tell us about how people connect with each other, what their priorities are, what their gender politics broadly look like, and what they think their role in their society is or ought to be. It’s fertile grounds for excavation. What I wouldn’t give to travel back in time to ancient Rome or Egypt and see what it looked like to curve someone! 

So, what does the modern day trend of dating app screenshots say about us? Not just about the people who share the screenshots, but also about the people who engage with them and, to zoom out even further, about the broader cultural landscape from which they have sprung in such abundance like so many thorny rosebushes? Is the viral dating app screenshot phenomenon a match with any other elements of our zeitgeist? Let’s see if there’s chemistry. 

My colleague (?) Miles Klee over at Rolling Stone wrote an excellent piece about what all this means for the apps themselves. Tinder is losing users, and the next generation of would-be right-swipers is showing waning interest in digital matchmaking. “This, apparently, is the way we fuck now,” Klee writes. “Zero human contact, maximum hostility, right in front of the whole internet.”

Indeed, while it’s reported that people are having less sex on the whole, the “dating app screenshot” genre is flourishing, even as the dating apps themselves are losing ground. A prominent example shown above sees a Hinge match shamed for deigning to have a conversation without having the requisite number of stamps on their passport. 

Another post, which has since been deleted but, I recall, drummed up quite the buzz, saw a Hinge user taking to Twitter to post a screenshot of some sap who’d invited her on a first date that was in his neighborhood, a clear sign that he didn’t want to spend much money and was obviously looking to hook up with her afterward. Responses were divided. 

Content like this reminds me of the prevalence of “Am I The Asshole?” (AITA) Reddit posts that gamify etiquette by asking people to weigh in on all manner of social situations before delivering a verdict on who’s right and who’s wrong. Although, typically, AITA posts obscure identities, including the identity of the original poster, while dating app screenshots aren’t usually submitted anonymously. 

In any case, neither AITA posts nor dating app screenshots represent the only forms of entertainment (if you could call it that) that rely on the instinct to name and shame bad actors in the digital town square. I suppose I’ll stop winking and flirting with the point and head straight to third base. If the flourishing dating app screenshot genre has anything to say about the times we live in, it’s that we are paranoid, self-obsessed, and lonely. 

Social media has made it easier than ever to disseminate information into digital communities populated with vague entities that have no real material stakes in our wellbeing. Technological advancements like Ring cameras have allowed us to monitor our homes and the homes of our neighbors from our phones, neighbors we likely do not know, because it’s increasingly common for the bulk of human interactions to take place on the internet and not outside. 

The self in 2023 is often a solitary project beset on all sides by threats both real and imagined, and a chief goal in these fraught, anxious times is keeping yourself safe from the predators that lurk around every corner who wish you harm, or who want to leech your time and energy, or who want to take advantage of you in some way. Pop culture tells this story as well. 

This summer, trailing just behind ubiquitous box office hits like Barbie and Oppenheimer was The Sound of Freedom, a thriller about a former U.S. Homeland Security agent battling human trafficking in Colombia. The film gained traction among QAnon, a burgeoning political force in the country that holds, among other tenets, that Donald Trump is fighting a secret war against a cabal of satanic child abusers in the government and in Hollywood. 

An extreme case, to be sure, but conspiratorial thinking has come to dominate many facets of American culture. One of the most popular genres of entertainment at the moment is true crime, a medium that thrives on paranoia and speculation, forming internet communities around grisly unsolved murders (I can hardly judge, I regularly watch videos like this myself). There’s a participatory element to this form of media. It asks the audience, “what do you think? Who did it? Why did they do it?”

On the aforementioned social media, on places like YouTube and Twitter (RIP), trending topics often include the exposing of niche celebrities for their various misdeeds, which, more often than not, involve sexual debauchery or predation. If I copped to watching true crime videos, then I should probably add this to my rap sheet as well. While drawing on my iPad for work (alone in my hovel, naturally), I will sometimes allow these “drama” or “tea” YouTube channels to play, keying me into the lore of many, many felled internet personalities who flew too close to the sun. 

The hosts of these channels, the good ones, anyway, will do the diligent fact checking of an impartial journalist at a major newspaper, but will present the salacious details like a friend sitting next to you at a bar dropping some juicy gossip about someone you hate. In the collective, these videos offer you the satisfaction that yet another villain has been unmasked and weeded out from our ranks. Good riddance!

Relatedly, we are in a sort of a golden age for the influencer therapist, a person who builds their audience by weighing in on reality TV stars or famous singers or even regular citizens who happen to go viral. These mental health specialists will sometimes have a disclaimer saying something like, “I’m not diagnosing anyone here, but…” Or they will issue broad warnings about all sorts of monsters hiding right under your nose, things like, “actually, people pleasers are the most manipulative individuals out there.” You get the idea.

But wait, hold on a second, how did we go from “viral dating app screenshots on Twitter” to all this? Oh dear, it seems like I’m that one date who started out strong but then got one Old Fashioned in him and went on and on about all the wild conspiracy theories he believes in. Let me try to circle back here and salvage the night. 

I’m not saying there aren’t people in this world who want to hurt you, that the world isn’t a dangerous place, that predators don’t exist, or that dating apps aren’t chock full of freaks saying the weirdest, most off-putting things you’ve ever heard. Trust me, I know. I’m on these apps. I know just how weird and off-putting things can get! I’m also not making one-to-one comparisons between, say, people who post a silly screenshot of a Grindr conversation and people who think John F. Kennedy, Jr., is going to rise from the dead and throw the Clintons into tartarus. 

No, I actually don’t have much to say about individuals at all. What I want to get across is that, taking these trends all together, they seem to point to a broad consensus forming that we live in a wicked world populated by predators who are hiding in the periphery of your sight, waiting for the very second that you put your guard down, giving them the opportunity to strike. 

In such a world, vigilance is an absolute must, isolation is a wise choice, and boredom is incredibly rampant, leading to what I think of as recreational surveillance. Monitoring other people’s behavior and sending up the worst of it is both a public service and an opportunity to signpost your savviness, to proclaim to the world that you’re not the one to let this kind of deviant behavior get past you. 

Plus, it gives us all something to do. We can argue about it, laugh about it, send it to our friends in group chats, and have the whole thing hold our attention for a little while. And we are desperate to put our attention to something, anything, to get us through the monotony of our days. 

Sorry, maybe that’s just me.

Regardless, I see in dating app screenshots traces of similar elements present in other forms of popular content right now. I see some “look at this freak” and some “keep an eye out for people like this” and some “here’s the right way to approach me” and some “I am lonely and frustrated” all blended together, and it makes me a bit sad. 

It’s not that I think people occupying our moment in time are uniquely evil. I am of the perhaps controversial opinion that people have been pretty consistent throughout the ages, that despite all the progress we’ve made, if we were to observe our distant ancestors, we would be surprised by just how similar they are to us, and that we as human beings simply respond to the environment we are placed in.

And our environment right now is one where we have become more physically remote from one another while our access to information, be it good or bad, useful or useless, has shot up exponentially in a brief matter of decades, breakneck speed in the grand scheme of things. We are inundated with messages vying for our attention, and in that contest many of the messages have evolved to become more urgent, more frightening, more dire, and I think that’s affecting every aspect of our lives from how we spend our leisure time to how we connect (or don’t) with each other romantically. 

The fact is, we do not trust each other. It is becoming increasingly common not to think of other people as complex beings, but as digital abstractions, or as enemies hiding behind a screen. When the mask slips, everyone must be warned so that the monster can be identified and rooted out. Hunting these monsters has become something of a sport, and every social media platform, be it Twitter or a dating app, is a hunting ground. 

Again, I can’t say this instinct is anything new, but it’s an instinct that’s found many new conductors and circuits to travel along. We can try to establish norms that make it taboo to shame strangers on the internet, and I think we should, but I don’t think digital etiquette will resolve the heart (❤️) of the issue. I think a much broader cultural shift has to take place, one that affects our perceptions of community, for things to meaningfully change. 

I think cringe content and the naming and shaming of strangers can only really thrive in a world where we interact with more strangers than friends on any given day, and what is the internet, if not the greatest congregation of strangers ever assembled in the history of mankind?

Meanwhile, though, happy hunting! Here’s my favorite dating app screenshot of a Grindr message I once received.