TechCrunch is reporting on Sonder, a new dating app that has made friction a deliberate feature rather than a bug. The app's sign-up process is, by design, cumbersome, and its profile format is entirely unstructured — closer to a personal art project than a form to be filled out. According to TechCrunch, the results suggest the approach is actually drawing users in rather than repelling them.
To understand why this is worth paying attention to, it helps to step back and look at what the major dating platforms have converged on over the past decade. Apps like Tinder, Hinge, and Bumble have all, in their different ways, optimized relentlessly for ease of entry. The logic has always seemed sound: reduce the steps between download and first swipe, remove any moment of hesitation, and the funnel fills faster. Profile structures became standardized — a handful of photos, a short bio, a set of multiple-choice prompts engineered to signal personality without demanding much actual thought. The result is an ecosystem where tens of millions of profiles are, in a functional sense, interchangeable. The person on the other side of the screen is performing a version of themselves that the app's own template called into existence.
Sonder's bet is that this standardization is not a neutral outcome but an active problem. The MySpace comparison that TechCrunch reaches for is genuinely instructive. MySpace, for all its chaos, produced pages that were unmistakably individual — garish, sometimes unreadable, but expressive in ways that told you something real about who had made them. LinkedIn, the other end of that comparison, produces profiles that communicate professional competence through a format so rigid that the person behind it almost disappears. Dating apps, the argument goes, have drifted toward the LinkedIn end of that spectrum without anyone making a conscious choice that this was desirable.
There is a strand of design thinking that has been building toward exactly this kind of reaction. Scholars and critics who study platform behavior have long noted that when interfaces make something too easy, they can hollow it out. The deliberate inconvenience Sonder imposes on new users functions as a filter, but it also functions as an invitation — to put something of yourself into the process, to treat the profile as a small creative act rather than a bureaucratic requirement. The friction is reframed as meaning. Whether users experience it that way in practice, or whether they simply abandon the app at higher rates, is the empirical question the company is apparently finding an encouraging answer to.
The consequences of this, if Sonder continues to grow, run in a few directions. For users, the most immediate effect is a different quality of self-presentation and, downstream, a different quality of first impression. A mood board or digital collage reveals taste, aesthetic sensibility, and a willingness to spend time — all things that a five-photo grid and three Hinge prompts are structurally unable to communicate. Whether that translates into better matches or simply more interesting ones is a distinction worth drawing, and the app will live or die on which of those it delivers.
For the broader industry, the likely reading is that Sonder represents a genuine strategic divergence rather than a marginal tweak. The incumbent platforms are not well positioned to replicate this approach. Their scale depends on keeping onboarding fast and their user bases enormous. A deliberately slow, expressive sign-up process would create churn at the top of their funnels that their business models are not built to absorb. This suggests Sonder is not really competing with Tinder for the same users — it is making a claim on a subset of the market that has grown dissatisfied with what frictionless matching actually produces, which is speed without depth.
There is also a cultural signal worth noting. The nostalgia embedded in the MySpace reference is not accidental. A generation of younger users who never experienced early social media as a space for self-construction has nonetheless absorbed, through cultural osmosis, an idea that something was lost when platforms became optimized and uniform. Sonder is, in part, making a product out of that sentiment.
What to watch for next is straightforward in outline if uncertain in timing. The first question is retention — whether users who complete the demanding sign-up process stay and engage, or whether the novelty wears off once the collage is built. The second is whether the unstructured format produces the matching outcomes that would justify the effort, or whether it turns out that some standardization in profiles serves a genuine navigational purpose for users trying to decide quickly. And the third, if Sonder's growth continues, is how the larger platforms respond — whether they experiment with expressive features of their own, or decide that their users have already revealed, through their behavior, that they prefer the LinkedIn version of themselves.
