Jamie F
When you get ghosted on a dating app, your recourse options are usually limited to sending angry messages to your match (which then get ignored), or sitting alone in a diner for 12 hours repeating the phrase “I’m sure they’re just caught in traffic” into your milkshake. (Or, y’know, just shaking it off and moving along with your life.)
Snack, the TikTok-inspired dating app aimed squarely at Gen Z users, has introduced another option, in the form of its new anti-ghosting function. Now if you get ghosted – a match ignoring your messages and ‘disappearing’ from your chat – you can report the ghoster, and contribute to them getting fewer future matches on the app.
When you use the new function to report a person for ghosting you, it is logged by the app and you’re given the option to unmatch with them. If a user is reported for ghosting multiple times, their profile will appear in Snack match searches less frequently than normal, making it less likely for them to find matches.
The hope is that with this match-quelling threat looming over serial ghosters, users will be encouraged to do the decent thing and send messages saying they’re not interested in pursuing a match, rather than just dropping comms.
Snack bosses said that the function was designed to “bring some basic manners and decency to the dating app game”.
As well as introducing this anti-ghosting function, Snack’s focus remains firmly on a Gen Z user base by restricting access only to users aged 18-35. Snack CEO Kim Kaplan said that this was appropriate, considering that the app is based on video.
Snack’s tagline on the app’s website is: “Not your parents’ dating app”.
“If you think about people that are using a Tinder or Bumble, they’re a lot older, and it’s not a video-first generation. Yes, TikTok is ageing up, so you’re getting more Millennials engaging and using it… but it’s just not there yet,” Kaplan told SEXTECHGUIDE last year.
She added: “So to all of a sudden switch Tinder or Bumble to be video-first would be really challenging. You have this huge swathe of your user base that just isn’t comfortable on video.”
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