Tag Archives: dating app

Popular Chinese Lesbian Dating Site Removed From Internet, Leaving 5 Million Users Clueless

A popular Chinese dating app for lesbians has been shut down, along with its website and main social media account, just as the gay community celebrates Taiwan’s decision giving same-sex couples the right to marry, a first for Asia.

With over 6.5 million registered users, Rela’s website and main social media account mysteriously disappeared.

Users began noticing last week that the app, along with its Twitter-like Weibo account and website, was no longer accessible, according to users posting on Weibo under the hashtags #rela and #relahasbeenblocked.

The service was temporarily suspended due to an “important adjustment in service,” Rela told users on its WeChat app account.

“Rela has always been with you and please await its return!” it added, but gave no details of why it was suspending service.

“This is discrimination against us lesbians,” wrote one user on Weibo.

“Not being able to open it feels like being jilted,” wrote another.

It was not immediately clear why Rela has been shut down.

The company did not respond to an email seeking comment.

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The state internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), has not commented on the shutdown.

Some users have suggested that it was connected to Rela’s support for parents of LGBT children who wanted to take part in a “marriage market” in Shanghai on 20 May.

The group joined the weekly event in People’s Park where older parents try to find partners for their unmarried sons and daughters, and handed out “educational flyers”.

According to Sixth Tone, security officers ordered the group to leave the park, saying they had not registered their “advertising event” with the police.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRNX9pdqspw

It is not illegal to be gay in China, but homosexuality was considered to be a mental disorder until 2001 and attitudes towards it remain conservative.

It is not illegal to be gay in China, although the country regarded homosexuality as a mental disorder until 2001. Many large cities have thriving gay scenes, but gay individuals still face a lot of family pressure to get married and have children.

Gay activists say deeply conservative attitudes towards homosexuality in some parts of society have contributed to occasional government clampdowns.

In April, another gay Chinese dating app, Zank, was also shut down after operating for about four years.

In a message on its Weibo account, which is still available, Zank said it had been accused by the internet regulator of broadcasting pornographic content and so had been closed down.

Still, gay dating apps are big business, even for Chinese companies.

Last week Beijing Kunlun Tech Co Ltd said it would buy the remaining stake in global gay dating app Grindr that it did not own.

China Released An App To Make Your Family Believe You’re Straight

There’s an app for everything, from calculating the best times to use the bathroom, to hunting ghosts and locating potential cuddle buddies. And in China, there’s an app to make your parents think you’re straight.

In China, it’s not illegal to be gay, but it’s not socially acceptable, either. Many young women feel pressured to be married by a certain age. These women have two choices: force themselves into a heterosexual lifestyle to please their parents, or defy their families by continuing to live as a lesbian.

iHomo offers a third option. Gay men and women can use the app to arrange heterosexual marriages of convenience (xinghun) with each other. These marriages are based on mutual agreement: A gay man and a lesbian get married in front of both of their families and then, having satisfied their parents, the gay man and the lesbian return to their respective partners in secret.

ihomo-event-beijing

Xinghun operate like business contracts. Couples decide in advance whether they will cohabitate, have children, visit each other’s parents and even get a divorce.

Ou Xiaobai, a thirty-two-year-old lesbian, designed iHomo, which has arranged over one hundred marriages to date. Xiobai married a man in 2012 in order to placate her mother, and is currently helping her girlfriend find a “husband” as well.

Says Xiobai:

We want to use marriages of convenience as a pragmatic way to ease the conflict so that homosexuals can live the life they want. We know how extremely difficult it will be, but we will fight for what we believe in and keep going forward.”

iHomo is not the first service of this kind. ChinaGayLes.com is a xinghun dating website that has arranged over 20,000 marriages since 2005. The dating app Queers, which does the same, currently has over 10,000 users. International Business Times estimates that there are over 100,000 gay and lesbian Chinese citizens currently seeking an arranged marriage.

As for Xiobai, she is currently expanding the app into in-person networking, socializing and match-making events.

Lesbian Dating App ‘Her’ Opens its Doors to the Whole of America

Her, the app for lesbian and queer women, is opening its doors to the whole of the US today after seeing unprecedented demand for the app from women across the country.

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With requests tripling over the past 2 months, Her has seen a huge growth from women across the country requesting it to launch in their cities.

The growth has been since introducing more social features to the app, such as the Feed section, with users coming back on average 5 times per day (but up to as many as 35 times).

Founder Robyn Exton said,

The feed has had the most crazy response, especially the events section. People love finding out what’s happening in their city and getting to meet women before so they have a friend to go with. We also have a new feature called Question Of The Day where everyone chats about LGBT topics and meets women with similar interests”

Exton also explained that there has also been a change in the way women are using the app; and the way they are choosing to identifying their sexualities.

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The number of women choosing to take no label as their sexual identifier has grown from 1% to 9%.

We’ve focussed on making this a space women can come to meet other women, no matter what they are looking for. We’ve always had an amazing lesbian identified audience but now there’s this huge growth coming in from women that aren’t looking to identify with any label”

Leading Lesbian App Dattch is Relaunched as HER, After Receiving $1million Investment

After receiving $1million investment, Dattch, the leading app for lesbian and bisexual women, is relaunching as HER.

The Lesbian App

The name change signals the next stage of growth for the app, as it takes on a stronger social focus in preparation for expanding across America and launching internationally.

HER has also closed a $1million seed round of investment from leading investors Alexis Ohanian, founder & Chair of Reddit, Michael Birch, founder of Bebo, Andy McLoughlin, founder of Huddle, AngelList and 500 startups.

Also: What Women Want From Dating: An Interview with DATTCH Founder Robyn Exton

Created by Robyn Exton, the app combines Pinterest style layouts and Tinder functionality with queer events and the best content from across the web.

Multi Screen shot

Announcing the relaunch, CEO and founder Exton said:

“HER is about creating a space where lesbian, bi, queer, curious, flexisexual, pansexual and not-so-straight women can meet and find out what’s going on in their lesbian world. Dattch taught us a huge amount and you’ll see the best parts of it in HER, along with a whole new experience incorporating everything our community kept asking us for.

More social, less dating. Women aren’t looking for a ‘Hot or Not’ – they want to chat & meetup, make friends, meet girlfriends, find events. HER is a complete lesbian community” 

The app, which launched in London in 2013, is now available in the UK, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Miami and New York. Phoenix is the most-requested city so it’s next on the docket, and will be available to women there by next month.

HER is available to download on the Apple app store & will be available on the Android store soon.

Meet Every Lesbian

 

Lesbian Dating App Market is Getting Bigger, as ‘Scissr’ the Female Version of Grindr Comes to Town

Why should gay men get all the fun? Not only do they get most of the representation in pop culture and are largely regarded as the face of the gay rights movement they also get to make good use of Grindr.

A dating app for gay men, Grindr’s selling point is that it allows you to find other gay men to hook up with. The app allows them to flirt and exchange messages before arranging to meet up.

Sadly the equivalent apps for gay women have never been as good or as popular. Until now, as one woman has now created ‘Scissr’, which is looking to be the premium lesbian dating app on the market.

Scissr was thought up by Allison Ullrich, who, after ending a relationship she moved to Chicago looking for a new job and a new love. With the job opportunity secured, it was her love life that was causing her trouble as she was unable to find other women to date.

She explains:

“I think what spawned the idea was life — reality — and conversations I’ve had with my friends regarding relationships and women. Women have this conundrum about meeting other people, but no one was working to find a solution.”

Allison Ullrich

This is quite right as although the ‘Gaydar’ has been something often joked about in pop culture, it doesn’t actually exist, not really. And so the task of finding out if another woman likes women too generally requires you to ask her point blank, which is more than a little daunting.

How Scissr plans to fix this is by allowing women to upload three photos (and a 300 word bio) to the app and establish whether they want a hookup, love and a relationship, networking or friendship. The app makes use of the GPS system on your phone to figure where you are and who is close by – and it’s not geo-fenced either so you have as much of a chance of finding love in New York City as you do in the middle of Sheffield.

Scissr will also have “crush” and “wish list” functions too. Denoting a crush allows you message the other user whilst the wish list will remain private so that you can keep track of who’s giving you the hots in secret.

Also important to note is that while Scissr is being promoted as a “lesbian” dating app (Ullrich says it will offer a “mind-blowing” experience to lesbians) it is actually inclusive to other queer women. Identity options in the app are lesbian, bisexual or ‘curious’ which isn’t exactly the most comprehensive list we can think of (I’d argue that it would just be better to let users type in their own identities rather than select them) but it’s a start.

Scissr will launch for free either this week or next.

 

Source: DNAinfo

The Ladies of Second City Read Hook-Up App Messages Aloud

The ladies of Second City have created another video to highlight the ridiculous Hook-Up App Messages men send other men, and it does not disappoint.

These messages are taken from Grindr, Scruff, and other hookup dating sites, and are then read aloud by the group of comedians for us all to enjoy. Most are nasty, but the reactions are very funny.

The Second City, is a famous Chicago, Toronto and Hollywood based comedy theatre and school of improv that post very funny videos to YouTube

Watch the video ‘Ladies Looking 2 Sloppy Seconds’

What Women Want From Dating: An Interview with DATTCH Founder Robyn Exton

With its innovative features and cool design, the DATTCH app is a phenomenon in the world of lesbian dating. Recently named the Huffington Post’s Entrepreneur of the Week, founder Robyn Exton is expanding the app into the US, Australia and Canada. Tom Sykes asked her about the secret of her success.

Tom Sykes: How and why did you first set up DATTCH?

Robyn Exton: I used to work for a branding consultancy and one of my clients was a dating business. I learned a lot from them about the business. Later on I was in the pub helping a friend sign up to a dating site. It was basically a site for gay men, which had been re-skinned for gay women. It asked questions like “How much body hair do you have?” That may be relevant to a bear or a twink, but not really to a lesbian!

There were fake accounts on this site and you’d get straight guys sending you messages trying to “convert” you or asking for a threesome. So I realised that lesbians had two choices: these re-skinned sites or straight sites where, even though you’d select “interested in women”, you’d still get harassed by straight men. Seeing a gap in the market for a lesbian-specific dating site, I quit my day job and spent 6 months raising the bootstrap funds for a brand new app. It launched in the UK in September 2013.

TS: What features did you build into the app that would distinguish it from the competition?

RE: We architected our app around what women want from dating, which is very different to what men want. We started with a standard engine – the type that all the other dating sites use – and found it didn’t work for females. Our users weren’t messaging each other and the interaction was really poor.

Unlike other sites we don’t show you the user who is nearest to you geographically because girls tend to find that a bit creepy. We discovered that women are really bad at describing themselves as compared to men. On gay male apps we found that men tend to exaggerate characteristics like height, saying they’re 6 foot instead of the truth which might be 5 foot 9. On the other hand, women tend to undersell their body types. They won’t, for example, say they have an athletic body type unless they go to the gym every single day.

We took the emphasis away from writing about yourself and onto using images to describe who you are. DATTCH is a mobile platform and our phones are filled with images of how we spend our time and where we’ve been going out and so on. In many ways our pictures are a far more accurate reflection of the kind of person we are. So our profiles on DATTCH have Instagram built into them so you upload images that show how you spend your time, the food you eat, the sports you play etc. It’s also possible for users to “like” each other’s content.

We also have an interaction game called ‘Would You Rather’ where you get shown the profiles of two girls and you decide which one you’d rather have a conversation with. If it’s a mutual match then DATTCH will let you know. Our ‘Relationship Mode’ allows users to retain membership even after they have found a steady partner. Your profile is updated to say that you’re off the market, even though you can still access the blog and chat with other users

TS: There’s been a lot of bad press about fraud and abuse on dating sites. How does DATTCH safeguard against those threats?

RE: We verify everyone who joins the app, ensuring that they are both female and genuine. We mostly use Facebook to do that as well as Skype and phone calls. Obviously we can’t guarantee that at some point somebody who shouldn’t get through will get through, but so far the system has worked fine.

The downside with our approach is that some people who we’d like to join aren’t able to at the moment. While we are accepting female-identified trans users we are not accepting male-identified trans users, but that could change in the future.

TS: Have you tried it DATTCH yourself?

RE: Yeah!

TS: Was it successful?

RE: I have gone on dates through it, but I’m not now in a relationship as a result. However, I did meet a couple recently that, having met on DATTCH, are now moving in together. They described each other as “soul mates” which was really nice!

TS: So where next for DATTCH?

RE: The Android version has just come out and last Friday we launched in New York. We are then expanding across the US city-by-city before hitting Canada, Australia and then the non-English speaking countries.