Grindr brings out the worst in gay men, it is an STD sharing application and often enough it makes me feel ashamed to be gay.<p>I believe that all in all it made the world worse for gay men.
I think the central point of the article is:<p>> The Uber opportunity for Grindr is to establish itself as the leader of a new social movement that encompasses gender, racial, and religious equality and freedom.<p>I don't think the author sufficiently explained what exactly they mean by this nor why this should be true.<p>It's unclear to me what exactly is envisioned by, "a new social movement that encompasses gender, racial, and religious equality and freedom" in two ways.<p>First: what specifically are the proposed changes to the current service designed "to connect gay men for physical encounters" to meet this new mission or goal? For example, does the author envision that Grindr should move from a single service to a broader social media platform? Does the author envision Grindr expanding its user base beyond "gay men"? Does the author envision Grindr extending services beyond "physical encounters"? I feel that without concrete proposed changes it is unclear to me what the author imagines the future Grindr would look like.<p>Second: what specifically is meant by "equality and freedom"? Perhaps this is an unfair criticism because these terms are contentious, more abstract, or simply outside of the scope of what the author intended to discuss. The author does mention a future Grindr that takes "strong social positions" and which would cause "[s]ocial change ... followed by political change and then policy change". But since the author did not define what they meant by "equality and freedom" nor did they offer examples of social, political, or policy changes, it is unclear to me what the author is envisioning the future Grindr would actually accomplish.<p>By the end of the article I don't have a good sense of what the author thinks future Grindr looks like, what it does, what its new mission is, nor how it accomplishes it. I feel that there is a big discontinuity between a suggested short-term goal of fixing the existing app because it has a two-star rating to a suggested long-term goal of the CEO winning "the Nobel Peace Price just like Martin Luther King Jr." Hyperbole or not, I feel that there are several important conceptual steps missing in between these two.<p>Since the thesis was neither explained nor proved as a result hile reading the article I kept asking myself, "Why Grindr? Why not Kickstarter, or Kiva, or Facebook, or some other existing service with users?"<p>What ever it is the author was trying to convey, I don't think the article's reasoning is clear, sound, or complete.