Online Dating for Lesbians: Has Dattch Rewritten the Rules?

SEXUALITIES, 31 Mar 2014

Eleanor Margolis – The Guardian

The award-winning UK-based app Dattch says it’s the first of its type designed specifically for women. So has it improved the online dating experience for lesbians?

For too many lesbians, seeking out dateable women is an ordeal. Some would much rather stay at home watching Scandinavian crime dramas with their cats than spend several hours a week listlessly flapping their limbs at a specially themed R&B club night or being dragged to the pub again. Others are understandably wary of the countless dating sites and apps geared towards heterosexuals.

Enter Dattch. The free UK-based lesbian dating app has just launched in the US at the inaugural Lesbians Who Tech summit and has also won an award for best-designed app at the Launch Festival. It faces competition from Brenda, which is like Grindr for lesbians, and the predominantly hetero Tinder. But unlike either of those, Dattch (a combination of date and catch) claims to be the only one designed specifically for women, rather than aping existing straight or gay-male versions. “We’ve found that girls often need a helping hand to get talking,” says Dattch CEO and founder Robyn Exton, who set up the company after noticing marked differences in behaviour between men and women dating online. “Guys will see a picture, send a girl a message and see what happens. Whereas girls will look at a picture two or three times before deciding to send a message,” she says.

So how has Dattch approached the problem of dithery would-be daters? When the app started out, profiles consisted of a big picture and a bit of text for a bio. “The conversations that started were terrible,” says Exton. “They were opening with, ‘You look nice’, ‘You have nice eyes,’ etc. And who thinks that’s an exciting thing to reply to?” In response, the app took a much more visual turn.

Based on the Pinterest model, where users upload pictures of things they like (be it tables, Beyoncé, curry), Dattch allows users to create a kind of personality mood board, making profiles much more revealing. Exton compares it to looking at someone’s Instagram feed: “You get a sense of who they are really quickly.”

The second upshot of an image-heavy profile is that it does away with self-deprecation. Exton believes a lot of women habitually focus on what they perceive to be their worst traits in order to “manage expectations”. With Dattch, they are steered away from the all-too-common “Argh, I’m so bad at this” stuff.

Perhaps the most striking difference between the Dattch app and all the rest is its focus on the security of its users. A new member will verify her account by linking it up to her Facebook page – essentially proving that she’s an actual, real-life queer woman, rather than a clammy, lesbian-obsessed pervert called Craig.

And, so far, this system is working. Exton says they haven’t had a single fake or misleading profile. But that’s not to say that the fakes have given up on trying to break in. Dattch has received a lot of press recently, because of the number of men trying to use the app. Perversely, just after each article about this problem was published, the app was inundated by men who fancied their chances at bypassing the verification process.

Reassuringly, the site has attracted interest outside London and the big cities to towns where there may not be as strong a gay scene. The West Country in particular has some of the most engaged users, and “people in the countryside are spending twice as much time on the app,” says Exton.

Now that Dattch is available in the US, Exton is setting her sights on Australia. An Android version is in the making (it’s iOS only, at the moment) and, further in the future, expansion to China is a possibility.

Go to Original – theguardian.com

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