Positive or Negative?
- Xinmeng Jiang
- Nov 28, 2021
- 3 min read
Updated: Nov 30, 2021
In Using Digimind
The previous articles mainly focused on introducing Grindr's brand, culture, philosophy and so on, while interviewing Grindr user offline to listen to the voice of the real user, and the content contained is more positive and friendly. However, as an old saying goes, where there are people, there is a battlefield. And if there is positive emotional feedback, there will be negative sentiments spreading.
Today, I will use Digimind as a tool that can help me have a deeper understanding of Grindr to analyze it as a global dating app providing products for gay, bi, trans and queer community worldwide and getting negative feelings from our society. But first, we need to learn what Digimind is. The French company Digimind is the world's leading competitive intelligence software provider. It automatically monitors thousands of online network resources (webpages, blogs, forums, RSS subscriptions, super network searches) and converts the results into business intelligence to help customers create and maintain their competitive advantage.
By analyzing Grindr sentiment in the past year in Digimind, I was surprised to find that Grindr's positive and negative sentiment percentages are almost the same, 43% and 37%, respectively.
This picture showed that the overall trend of negative sentiments from November 2020 to November 2021 had not changed much, but the highest two numbers of negative mentions are 48565 in January 2021 and 86941 in June 2021.
In January, the chart soared to 20096 on January 10. According to this trend, most key concepts in these mentions were related to crimes, especially hate crimes against homosexuality. For example, someone pretended to be homosexual on Grindr and asked people to meet offline, and after luring them to a residence, attacked and robbed gay men because of hate crimes. From key word “Crime”, it can reflect that there are still many prejudices against LGBTQ+ group in the current society, and even the hatred of this group leads to the occurrence of crimes, and at the same time brings risks and uncertainties to the safety of this group.
Therefore, as a dating app for gay, bi, trans, and queer, Grindr should strengthen platform risk management, strictly control the review issues of each user, strengthen platform supervision, and ban users who verbally insult and discriminate against others and remind users of the risks of offline hook-up.
However, in another peak, the number of negative mentions reached 37094 on June 14, 2021, and the most key concepts among them were about "Apple Banned Grindr", which was also reflected in the crying emojis. Many Grindr users have expressed their incomprehension and protested the news that app store would prohibit the release of Grindr. Finally, it was confirmed that Apple's new policy did not mean that it would forbid Grindr. At first, the relevant news about the banning came from Apple’s supervision and purification platform that prohibits sexual services, Internet fraud and other improper behavior.
In response to these policies, it is reported that Grindr would be banned. This aspect can reflect the society's prejudice and incomprehension towards gay, bi, trans and queer groups. Mentioning this group may associate them with stereotype vocabularies.
According to the Grindr community guideline, Grindr does not allow prostitution and actively prohibits users from doing such behaviours. On the other hand, it also shows that Grindr should continue to build a transparent, safe, and clean platform. Thus, it should keep on forbidding pornographic content and explicit nudity in public profiles so that the user experience must be able to stand in the compliance review of Apple and Google app store decision makers, otherwise it will be rejected by their platform.
Overall, Grindr should always adhere to its development, and is committed to calling for social fairness, reducing prejudice, and creating a positive, safe, harmonious and healthy platform for the LGBTQ+ community to continuously improve user experience and enhance its advantages. And how to positively change or influence more people’s perceptions towards LGBTQ+ groups is what Grindr should do now.
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