As a below six-foot-tall man, I would hardly say I fit the tall, dark, and handsome category, but usually I could get away with it until at least the first date. However, now that Tinder has introduced a height filter, things might be a little harder for us short kings.
The option to filter by height is tucked away in the Discovery section. Here, a minimum and maximum height can be specified, for those it makes a difference too. This allows people to make sure they don’t get any funny surprises when they arrive at a date.
However, the height filter is only available to people paying for Tinder Platinum. This is good news, because anyone desperate enough to spend almost $40 a month on a dating app has something so fundamentally wrong with them, they’re probably undatable anyway. Height prefences aren’t going to help them.
“We’re always listening to what matters most to our Tinder users — and testing the paid height preference is a great example of how we’re building with urgency, clarity, and focus,” a Tinder spokesperson said.
But I think this is a little problematic.
The Problem With A Tinder Height Filter
Now, I’m not remarkably short or tall, I am bang average, so I don’t have a lot of skin in the game. But introducing physical preference filters into a dating app is a bit dangerous. Already, there are filters for age, distance, and sexual preference. But, they make sense.
Introducing a filter, even if it is on trial, based on appearance, opens a whole new can of worms. Today it’s height, but tomorrow it could be weight. If one, why not the other? Pushing it further, it could end up allowing race and ethnicity into the mix.
Tinder is already a pretty shallow platform without the height filter. I imagine most people don’t read 75% of the bios they swipe on. Nobody is pretending they’re looking for deep, meaningful openers on a bio page. But, we can at least pretend it’s not all about looks, can’t we?
Filtering people out for height is discriminating against people for something they can’t help. It’s a risky door to open.