Grindr—“the world’s largest social networking app for gay, bi, trans, and queer people”—this month launched Kindr, a long-overdue attempt to tackle discrimination on the app. Is this a sincere attempt to combat discrimination in the dating world, or just a way for the app developers to shift the blame?

Dating and hookup apps, perhaps more so the latter, tend to be plagued with discriminatory language disguised as ‘tastes’ or ‘types’. “No fats, no femmes, no Asians” is the stereotypical Grindr bio tagline that epitomises such exclusionary efforts. I have unnecessarily exhausted myself on multiple occasions explaining why this is so problematic. Of course, everyone is entitled to their type, but to express this in negative terms comes from a distinctly discriminatory place. It’s also important to note that often this can be subconscious; such tastes are surface manifestations of underlying, latent cultural beauty standards, which celebrate certain bodies and skins while sidelining or even fetishising others.

I list my ethnicity as “mixed” (the somewhat America-centric options are: Do Not Show, Asian, Black, Latino, Middle Eastern, Mixed, Native American, White, South Asian, Other), and have been asked countless times “What mix are you?” (None of your business/I can’t be bothered to explain) or “So where are you from?” (answering “England” merely elicits the more pointed “But where are you really from?”). I’m baffled why such information matters but, apparently, it does.

With Kindr (as in more kind, not the brand of chocolate), Grindr is instigating a crackdown on this sort of language. “At Grindr, we’re into diversity, inclusion, and users who treat each other with respect. We’re not into racism, bullying, or other forms of toxic behavior,” it explains. “Everyone is entitled to their opinion. Their type. Their tastes. But nobody is entitled to tear someone else down because of their race, size, gender, HIV status, age, or – quite simply – being who they are.”

Kindr is also releasing a series of videos exploring the impact of such discrimination on Grindr users; the first looks at sexual racism and one quote from RuPaul’s Drag Race alum The Vixen particularly hit home: “You just start to wake up in the morning and look in the mirror and count all the reasons that nobody is going to love you.” It makes for an uncomfortable watch but this is an all-too-common experience for many of us that straight/cis/white people are often oblivious to.

Several months ago, rival gay dating app Chappy introduced a pledge that each user must agree to when signing up for the app, which reads: “No Hate, Just Dates… By pressing AGREE you commit to treating all guys on Chappy with kindness respect and love.”

But do such pledges really make a difference? After all, these apps thrive on surface appearances and encourage superficial interactions. If everyone immediately found something meaningful from such apps, they would lose users. Grindr, which eschews the swiping system of Tinder and Chappy and instead lists everyone nearby, lets its users filter by age, tribe, what they’re looking for (i.e. chats, dates, “right now”), and, for premium users, height, weight, body type, and ethnicity. It’s not surprising that discrimination is rife within a community that so obsessively categorises and classifies.

However, Grindr does offer some hope. Last year, it added gender identity and pronoun boxes to user profiles (a lot of trans and non-binary individuals use the app); the app provides a sexual health FAQ and can send reminders for HIV testing. INTO, the online magazine run by the company provides diverse, critical and insightful queer journalism. Grindr is actively encouraging users to report breaches of the updated guidelines, with promises of moderation and banishment.

Can apps really affect change amongst their user base? As many turn to guides on how to master dating apps like Tinder with the Best Tinder Icebreakers: Everything You Need to Up Your Dating Game, Twitter is perhaps the most prominent brand currently grappling with this question. Once behaviours become deeply-rooted, it takes supreme effort to effect lasting change, in part because users often assume they have unfettered access to such resources: that “free speech” somehow permits discrimination that outwardly defies user agreements.

Here, though, I am quietly hopeful. The chat box that used to say “say something” now says “say something kind…”

The first online dating site, Match.com, was launched in 1995, three years before Google. 20 years forward, dating apps have become close to synonymous with our relationships. We agree to give them access to some parts of our lives (to an extent), and they guarantee to provide us with better matches and more interesting dates than the ones we usually get. At the same time, dating apps like Tinder, Bumble, Grindr, and many others, allow researchers to access more data about our dating lives and ‘mating patterns’ to further their studies on compatibility. Dating apps also reveal the potential of sharing your private information with an algorithm in the name of love—a small price to pay to meet the right person, right?

In a study conducted on 4 million users of an unnamed dating site (sounds like Tinder to me), Elizabeth Bruch and Mark Newman from the University of Michigan found some results that anyone with dating experience would find predictable. For example, reciprocated messages mean that there is a mutual interest between two potential dating partners, and men tend to initiate contact first, which also doesn’t sound surprising.

Then, by coming up with a ‘desirability score’ for each of the participants, Brunch and Newman found some more customary information. An overview of the results showed that, “Older women are less desirable, while older men are more so. The average woman’s desirability drops from the time she is 18 until she is 60. For men, desirability peaks around 50 and then declines.” This comes as no surprise in the dating world.

The final aspect they analysed was people’s education level. For men, a woman with an undergraduate degree was most desirable, whereas for women, further education was always more appealing. Keeping all these results in mind, it makes sense that dating apps and dating websites are under quite a lot of pressure to make sure you are matched with the right person for you.

Even before the Big Data boom—when we are finally able to store large amounts of data automatically—users of online dating sites were required to fill in online questionnaires and profiles. Now, algorithms can collect more data on you than you can imagine (like your location, your bio, your Facebook profile, and images) to easily predict your next match of the day, without you having to answer a set of lengthy questions, or even do anything at all.

By manually filling an online questionnaire about our qualities and flaws, there’s a chance that some of our answers won’t always be completely honest. Algorithms can use our online behaviour to learn the real answers to questions we might lie about otherwise.

When The Guardian’s Judith Duportail asked Tinder for all the information it had collected on her over time, the company sent Duportail a profile report spanning over 800 pages. The report was a sort of tipping point for big data collection and our understanding of it; it revealed how apps can work out our personalities and lifestyles through our social media activity, our likes, our Spotify playlists, and Instagram photos. While many find this type of data mining an invasion of privacy, others look at it as the only real way to find their perfect relationship.

Dating apps promise to connect us with people with compatible traits. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t. As machine-learning algorithms become more accurate than ever, dating companies will be able to learn more about who we are and who’s the right fit for us. But there are a few steps still missing in the quest for this.

Apps can track where we’ve been, how long we stayed there, and if we went home with the person we were meeting. Still, few ask users for the outcomes of actual dates. The harvesting of our personal detail goes far beyond what many of us could imagine—Google can track you through your phone, it knows everything you’ve searched, the apps you use, which events you’ve attended, and it even has the information you’ve deleted. So how come, with all this data out there for grabs, dating apps continue to overlook the importance of not only whose profile photos we like but also who we felt chemistry with in person.

It is clear that dating apps have the possibility of changing our dating lives for the better by using even more of our information and data. With ameliorated algorithms, the future of online dating looks bright. But maybe the delay in improvement is not coming from the technology apps are using but from the CEOs themselves—because finding love is big business, and as long as we keep searching for and not finding our perfect match, these founders are only getting richer.