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.
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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
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.
Don't discount the number of ultraconservatives who secretly use the app and don't want to feel oppressed!
Yeah. The cognitive dissonance is massive and depressing.
Politics is when you favor certain people. AI-first is when you favor imaginary people.
So religion, but for techbros?
Maybe the data leaks from not having humans secure the data will be fun to play with.
By "non-political" he means pro-MAGA.
You beat me to it. I was gonna say "non-political" means "make it harder to spot and avoid the Republicans".
Look at how often grindr crashes during right wing events. It’s already political, maybe just not in the back end.
It's Grindr, almost everything is in the back end.
sometimes the front too.
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.
I'd argue that that's probably already the case. Sunk cost fallacy at play. Your posts, comments, blocks and stuff don't follow you from one account to another.
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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.
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 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 wonder who sees something "AI" and sees it as a plus. For fucks sake, the other day i saw a gas station sandwich that read: made with an AI recipe. Who is this for? Is it just buzzwords, like HD? Where people sold HD sunglasses or HD pullovers.
I wonder who sees something “AI” and sees it as a plus.
CEOs and Investors who don't know shit about fuck about tech and how it works but believe AI can solve their problems.
Trying to get all they can out of the last great tech bubble before total collapse.
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.
All I read was "data collection first"
Gay sex is famously apolitical. 🙄
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.
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Nobody but scammers even uses grindr anymore. This is to impress shareholders, not users. The users migrated to sniffies already.
I... wh... sniffies?
It’s like grindr as a web app. You install nothing. There’s a paid tier but it just removes ads and expands the radius.
Cool features... wild name.
Don’t decode this one. Just observe. You’ll just end up doing a rule34 in a recursive loop.
It's furries that go as Snuffleupagus.
Post more than your chest. It's not the scammers. Believe me.
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.
Of course not. If he was into politics, he'd have to admit primarily that gay, white male conservatives who are so far in the closet they visited Narnia are the apps main base.
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