Tinder's new "Swipe Night" is download video sex rion uncensoreda ... product? Experience? TV show? Last night during the series' premiere, the company tried to explain to reporters why it got into the content game. Honestly, it kind of made sense.
Every Sunday in October from 6 p.m. to 12 a.m. local time, U.S. Tinder users will be able to access a new five-minute scripted episode of "Swipe Night," an interactive series following a group of friends in the last three hours on Earth before a comet destroys us all.
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It's all viewed through first person, as if you are a character in the story and member of the friend group, too. And it's even further "interactive" in that users determine the course of events through choose-your-own-adventure-style scenarios, which you "swipe" to choose.
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But it's more than just a content offering or game. Tinder says that the choices you make in the game will get integrated into its matching algorithm, another data point for compatibility. Additionally, some of the "Critical Choices" you make in the episode (did you decide to save a person, or save a puppy?) will show up on your actual Tinder profile. On premiere night, when users weren't as wise to how their choices might appear on their profiles, that became extremely revealing.
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To celebrate the launch on premiere night Sunday, Tinder invited reporters and influencers to its West Hollywood offices. Thematic decorations like comet projections and tinfoil-covered computers, and snacks like Pop Rocks, asteroid Cheetos, margaritas in a shade of radioactive red, and, of course, champagne, abounded.
Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable 
Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable Tinder says that one of the biggest goals of Swipe Night is to give users something to talk about. Speaking to reporters, Tinder CEO Elie Seidman explained that Tinder made approaching new people easier than in the real world. Conversely, what you talk about once you approach someone is harder in the digital realm, where there's not really a "Come here often?" line of conversation available.
"When you’re staring at that messaging screen with that match, both men and women struggle a lot with 'What do I say?'" Seidman said. "There isn’t a contextual environment. We’ve been wrestling with that challenge, and would like to offer some help."
Enter Swipe Night, a common experience where you and a match can talk about the choices you made. Is that need for conversational ~tinder~ a little depressing? Maybe. But for anyone who's received "hey" after "sup" after "heyyyyy" in their messaging screen, it also makes sense.
SEE ALSO: 'Covered for Graham'? Tinder's 'Swipe Night' debut revealed a moment of rare honestySearching for answers about how choices in a five-minute game get analyzed by the love formula, I asked Tinder's chief product officer, Ravi Mehta, whether Swipe Night players will get matched with users who made the same choices they did, or different ones. It turns out it's a combination of both.
"There’s the old adage that opposites attract," Mehta said. "When you make the same decisions as someone else, there’s less to talk about."
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After the party, I played Swipe Night with my sister, who uses Tinder regularly, if begrudgingly. The way matching actually seemed to work was that, after the game, you were served up Tinder users like normal, and their profiles indicated if they had played Swipe Night. If they had, it would show if they ended up in the same location as you (there are three possible "endings" to episode 1), and my sister frequently matched with people who had ended up at "Molly's House," like her. However, she frequently didn't get people who made all of the same "Critical Choices."
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This, to me, is the best part about Swipe Night: that it makes matching, and the whole Tinder experience, more fun. In addition to the actual show being entertaining, my sister and I spent an hour in the app afterwards, laughing through swipes as we tried to guess which guys would have made which choices.
In between enthusing to me about how Tinder was trying to appeal to Gen Z, the UCLA college brand rep for Tinder U (whose Instagram is below) said that she'd felt a lull with Tinder of late; that swiping had become a bit of a slog for her. But Swipe Night was something new that gave her a reason to go back.
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My sister agreed.
"Way to make the depressing swamp of swiping through profiles fun again, Tinder," she said.
That, and a whole new product experience, was cause for celebration. Swipe Night team members all wore black bomber jackets emblazoned with the logo. While big wigs and us reporters were shepherded to the roof for a cocktail hour, the engineering team in the Swipe Night "war room" drank beer and ate pizza, while allegedly analyzing the data that was pouring in in real time.
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At the party, Tinder really did commit to the theme. The plot of Swipe Night involves a comet careening into Earth, so everything — drinks, desserts, decor — was vaguely space oriented. The whole offices and party area kind of looked like a bubblegum mashup of retro neon '80s style that had been invaded by aliens.
Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable 
Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable 
Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable Reflecting the anecdotal sentiments of the Tinder U brand rep and, um, my sister, there have been reports that Tinder engagement is lagging. While it continues to amass users, third party analytics companies like SensorTower report that the time people spend in the app, and sentiment about the app, is decreasing.
Swipe Night could be the neon-infused juice Tinder needs. On Sunday, there was a lot of talk from executives about how Swipe Night was meant to appeal to Gen Z, or to give people something to talk about, or to create an Authentic experience. But overall, the novelty, and the fact that it is quick (just five minutes!), and actually fun, seems to be what Swipe Night has going for it.
And that's certainly worth a party.
UPDATE: Oct. 8, 2019, 12:15 p.m. EDT
A previous version of this story included a quote from a Swipe Night writer that stated that Tinder has 50 million users. Tinder said this number is inaccurate. However, most recent estimates do put Tinder's user count at around 50 million.
Tinder also stated that it currently has 5 million paid subscribers, an increase from 2018's count of 4.1 million paid users.