Depending on where you look, Grindr CEO George Arison's net worth is $20–80 million.
He joins a growing list of gay executives hell-bent on proving that enshittification isn't just for the straights.
this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2025
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The crazy part is they basically own this space. An upstart app with AI that can turn the paradigm on its head is highly unlikely.
I'd imagine they're basically like steam. Just keep printing the money if you don't fuxk up.
It smells more like Facebook than Steam to me. they can print money for now because they have established scale and customer base, but it feels a bit slimy to where it might not be that appealing to new users. Dating services in general have a bad vibe-- bot problems, low quality matches, dark patterns, so authenticity is a big selling point, something AI drives a huge stake into.
I'd expect that thr gay community, after decades of being a target for abuse, tends to be a bit more sensitive of red flags and looking for truly safe spaces. The Facebook comparison breaks down there, as it has 700 million Aunt Martha users whose most politically sensitive post is in defence of Miracle Whip on salads.
Peter Thiel says hi
What does it means being « Ai-first » and « non political » because from where I stand from it’s a big political choice choosing AI over the security of your clientele
Politics is when you favor certain people. AI-first is when you favor imaginary people.
So religion, but for techbros?
Anything catering to the queer community will automatically be political on account of a lot of people still working to kill us.
I don’t even see how AI is going to be applicable in Grindr. Such a weird decision.
Maybe the data leaks from not having humans secure the data will be fun to play with.
Look at how often grindr crashes during right wing events. It’s already political, maybe just not in the back end.
Just like straight capitalists, he doesn't care about the politics of the people that are using his service as long as he gets their money.
Why can’t people just have an app that prioritises what it was originally supposed to do?
We do. It's called Romeo. No nonsense. No AI. Just people. They listen to their users.
Support your local European companies.
If it ain't open-source and federated, it's only a matter of time until it enshittifies too.
Maybe. Though I haven't seen anything of that sort over the years. They've been around quite a while and long ago they removed all ads from their platform.
Even federation isn't a permanent solution. Mark my words, users will eventually act like changing instances is a high cost.
Is this really a question you need an answer too? Asking before it's to late to ask.
I predict it'll go Meta and have fake accounts to keep engagement up plus a "AI matchmaker" assistant that will tell you its "advice" on the situation, mostly to get you to add more personal information.
The company is probably already using user data to build gay-interest advertising models for capitalism and gay-dar models for tyrants, but this policy will let them more openly sell that data.
The app’s already made up of mostly fake accounts. There’s more bots on Grindr than actual people.
I'm sorry, how the fuck can an app made for men to find other men to get their back blown out be AI first.
Can we just stop with this whole "AI First" shit? Can we just stop? We don't want our apps to be AI, they know this, we know this, but they don't care.
'AI First' means AI comes before the users, which can be true for any service. It was never an app for you. Just an app that you happened to use.
I’m sorry, how the fuck can an app made for men to find other men to get their back blown out be AI first.
AI is pretty good at fucking people in the ass.
AI is only as good as a sum of its human created algorithms and its human created training sets.
Which means, there’s no escaping the influence of politics; AI just means it will be permanently skewed and not as responsive to current political events.
The training sets aren't all human created. They have models that feed other models training data. That doesn't change your point, but you should know it's worse than you think.
That's just pedantic. Those other models were also either trained on human created data, or other models themselves... and those other models.... etc etc etc.
When you go back far enough, it's all human created data. The person you responded to didn't spell all of that out because they didn't need to to make their point.
No kidding. I know it doesn't change their point. You could tell by the way I said it doesn't change their point. The original commenter might not have known it's to the point of models consuming their own synthetic data. They may have learned something.
I didn't say it changed their point. I said it was pedantic.
All I read was "data collection first"
Gay sex is famously apolitical. 🙄
So basically Abandon Ship if you use Grindr.
Just a reminder for anyone that has a problem with this, but still uses the service... You're part of the problem. If you don't like it, boycott.
Nobody but scammers even uses grindr anymore. This is to impress shareholders, not users. The users migrated to sniffies already.
It's still very popular where I live.