Celebrity culture ruined television, social media, and 24-hour news networks. Now it’s trying its damnedest to ruin online dating.
Badoo is an online dating app (yes, another one) with a unique new feature. Instead of swiping right on the people you’re least disgusted with on Tinder, Badoo wants you to bypass the shallow bullshit of checking profile photos (or pretending to read a bio) and instead skip to the even shallower practice of searching for your next date by which celebrity they most closely resemble.
According to Badoo’s Miles Norris:
People are looking for quick, fast, and easy ways to start connections. And if someone looks is a good on-boarding to that, then we want to make it easy for them.
Unsurprisingly, Kim Kardashian-West, Justin Bieber, and other people you might expect to take up a 20-minute block of a 30-minute CNN news show all made the cut as some of the most-searched celebrities. But perhaps the biggest surprise of all is: people are actually looking to date men that resemble Donald Trump.
Let that sink in for a minute, I’ll wait.
Badoo representatives say they don’t want the new feature to emphasize physical appearance over personality and interests, but… really? It’s hard to envision a scenario where a user finds a Kardashian look-alike and strikes up conversation in hopes they’ll have a mutual interest in stamps.
And if you’re a privacy-conscious user — or perhaps one that believes your self-worth isn’t closely tied to which celebrity you look like — you can opt-out of the facial recognition results entirely.
The feature is set to roll out to users in the coming weeks. Until then, you’ll just have to manually sort through the app’s 60-million active users in search of your own celebrity doppelgangers. Or, maybe question your life decisions. You know, whichever.
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