This new site wants to help Reddit users get a date
Reddit has been involved in a very public civil war these past few weeks, with management and users duking it out in a seemingly endless swirl of drama. But Checkly, a new website uncovered by Product Hunt’s Ryan Hoover, is trying to reverse that trend by helping Reddit users find love instead of hate.
Checkly starts from the premise that Reddit, at its core, is a community where people come to share their interests. This means the Subreddits you subscribe to can say a lot about you, and can serve as a shortcut to seeing who you might want to be friends with, or date. Mostly date.
Checkly works by matching you with people who subscribe to similar Subreddits in the hope that once you get talking, the sparks will fly. And for Checkly's creator, Jari Zwarts, there might a little bit of self-interest at play. When Ryan Hoover asked Zwarts whether he was single and if he’d built the site to help find himself a date, Zwarts responded like this: “Yes, and I can neither confirm or deny that. Yes, probably.”
While most dating apps and sites try to take your "interests" into account, Checkly’s solution is a particularly elegant one. Adding “interests” on a dating site profile can feel performative, like you are trying to curate the coolest aspects of yourself into something sellable. And just importing your Facebook likes doesn’t always give a great picture of a person’s true interests.
But by importing the Subreddits someone subscribes to, Checkly is getting a fairly reliable gauge of what a person likes to read and talk about, with minimal input or effort required on either the user’s end or the site administrator’s. And at the very least, you’ll know what topics to bring up during any first date awkwardness.
SEE ALSO: Reddit is losing the war against its own users
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