YouSaid · the spoken record

Zach Stafford

lines on the record: 82
first: 2017-12-27
most recent: 2017-12-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Enough. My different women. I will just say that from what I Women that use apps, everyone's afraid to make the first move. And so I think that women just need to Make the freaking move. Like they're all too afraid to be an aggressor. Like to put ourselves out there and to be. In the relationship, then we're vulnerable as hell. You can't turn it off the way things are online dating.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What's another one? Point out something in the background of a photo, so a detail. So if someone's running, well, not too creepy, like, oh, hey neighbor, you're on my block, but like someone has, they have a certain type of dog, begin the conversation there, begin a conversation about the t-shirt they have. But it also depends on what you're looking for. Because if you're looking to have a real conversation, then that's where you start. If you're just wanting a quick back and forth and maybe to hook up with someone, then you can just say, hey, what's up? That's easy enough.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, you know how I'm sure you could think of the photo that just like bomb for you. Like the photo, you know, you look so good in and someone would click on. So think about it a little bit. So you have that one photo. Think of the photo that's right below that. And that is your profile photo. Because if you start there at two, then you hit them with number one, which is like the really hot photo. Then you have their attention because then they're going to want to see more content, want to talk to you. They think things are only going to get a little better. Oh, I see. It's a bad photo. So not bad photo, like.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tip or two. My biggest tip for any online dating don't lead with your best photo. You always want to get them with the number two. So you hook them with number two, which is the kind of like the cue photo you on vacation is maybe a little distance.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“York, and we did an article informing people. I think people would click in. It's just been where you're at in your day and what you're looking for.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's People are really excited about that because it's dangerous. So, for us, we have this thing called Grinder for Equality, which operates outside of the editorial arm. And that's led by our colleague Jack Quintana. And that specifically uses the app to alert people around safety issues. So he oversees all of the programming and content that goes to places like Egypt to work on with the activists there to figure out how to get them in safe spaces, how to get the resources they need. We do HIV programming through all of that. A lot of that's not very public facing because as you've noted, a lot of people don't want that to be, they don't think of Grindr only in that way, but a lot of it's about the safety of the user. So we can't tell them about the tactics in which we do to intervene and police entrapment. But in the places that people want that information, they do choose to opt into it. So we always give people the option to opt in or opt out. So with the content, you can press an X or you can press click here. But it depends on where you're at. In New York, people aren't as interested in safety. But if there was an outbreak of an STI.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and we did one of the first pieces we commissioned was we sent a writer from Western Texas up to Oklahoma to go visit a moon dance, a two-spirited people. And it's a dance that they do once a year under a certain moon. And we sent an illustrator because we could photograph it. And no one else would invest in this road. And I was like, well, that has an audience with us. It could be a long-form essay written by Indigenous folks. That's queer. And we're going to respect that we can't photograph. So let's find ways that work with both of us. And it's because we know what it's like to be exploited and taken advantage of. So we were every day or maybe too sensitive about certain things. And we're willing to work with people to find things.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it also sounds like there's just a lot to be done with people who are transgender or gender nonconforming. There still are margins of society that are underrepresented. And it sounds, and this is actually fascinating to me, and I think it's great that one of the ways that you can differentiate yourself is just by being willing to go out on the margins where even more mainstream publications still fear the tread because those spaces still exist.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Phrases and things. We're not like super campy or cheeky, but some of the gay outlets like QueerD.com is very cheeky. We have a travel section and we send writers to go to X City and they may not even go to a gay bar, but the fact that they are queer and moving about the city to me makes it queer content. And that's kind of the space that we're trying to build. So sometimes it's the cheeky, like how gay is Star Wars. But the other days it's how to go skiing for the winter with your partner and you don't go to gay wear at all on that trip. So we just are here.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, that's the thing, too, is like, you know, us being multifaceted people. I happen to have a very gay job, and so my life is very gay. But most gay people don't go and be gay at their jobs all day, you know, like they live a pretty heteronormative life otherwise because that's the way the world is set up. So I like to think of us as the place that you come to that you would be able to see things through that queer lens, but not in a hitting you over the head type of way. Like there are like even just the Ola Hoppy column, it's gay, but it's not like overtly gay. Do you know what I mean? Like, it's a sensibility, not a, you know, we're going to just make a bunch of like inside-y baseball, like gay.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it's not the same themes for some reason the other day, someone put up the Ellen clip when she came out, which was a huge moment from a media perspective. It was really, it chilled me when I saw it. I was like, I remember this. It was like fascinating. There's no moments like that anymore because. So, what do you do then to distinguish? Because everyone, like, I don't necessarily want to read the gay take on everything, although I would read gay taken movies. Right.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That like queer people can read every review at the times for the general, but if you want to know how much gay kissing there's going to be, how much of my cell phone am I going to see? You can come to into and see that.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We do a weekly column called But How Gay is X Movie. So every week the new release and we do an analysis of like what's we have a film reviewer do it. So it's like”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That. And so my hope is that, you know, we just did this great interview with Guaramel Del Toro of how queer the shape of water is. And so, you know, there's so many different angles and aspects to things that maybe you wouldn't read in a mainstream magazine. Would you do a Star Wars then?”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, for me, I mean, I've done a lot of celebrity driven things, and that's hopefully what I'm going to keep doing with Into because inevitably that is, you know, what people are going to gravitate to and then hopefully they stay for the rest of the things. But what I really have just tried to do with my own career, whether it's been freelancing for other places because I've written for like L and Vogue and other more mainstream places that are now getting hip to the queer inclusion thing. They're like, oh, you're the lesbian. You can write the lesbian thing for us, you know? So what I try to do to approach it is what is the thing they're going to read here into that they will not get anywhere else? And so that's what I mean about writing it through a queer lens or through a queer view is having something and it's not like asking like I've read at other gay publications like who's your girl crush? Like I don't want to do that. I want to actively speak to something that's more queer even if it's not like so tell me about a lesbian kiss you had in this television show five years ago because I've done that. I did that at After Alan. We definitely did that. But now that I've done that I want to do something bigger than.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not. So we find that we're stepping into that space. Yeah. So we are stepping into that space of being like, oh, this area needs to know something. So let's locate.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, when we drop the scale of content delivery to places where it's newsworthy, so it operates like a local LGBT newspaper, high click-through rates. So in Alabama, high click”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They tried to ban drag and bar. So it was putting it as adult entertainment. And then this town didn't allow for adult entertainment. It was some craziness.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like Daniel Newman from Walking Dead did something, and we had over a million hits immediately. That's great. Drag Queens do really great. Superpaul drag racers will do stuff on there and that does well. We know that content that's regionally specific does really well. So we did a piece on Drag Queens getting, so it was a double, drag queens in the South. So there was this town on Tennessee banning drag queens. And we were tipped off because I'm from that county. And we did one of the first national pieces about this ban happening. So we published it on Into and then we pushed it to the southeastern region and it tipped off the”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay. Celebrity Works. Any famous person on the app will click through. People click through. So anything shirtless, hot, and someone famous people are interested in.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, especially we're lucky enough to live in LA where there's plenty of opportunities to meet people in the flesh and plenty of opportunities to see other people like ourselves. But I always try to remind myself of like getting outside of that bubble and going back to me that grew up in Michigan. And if I logged on to her, how many lesbians I would have access to around me? And, you know, I'm hopeful that that person, that that Michigan lesbian would, you know, feel a little more validated and not necessarily, you know, down on herself. And I understand like dating is always like there are parts of it where you do not feel your best. I understand. You'll find love or you'll marry me.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And I think that's what we're tasked to do every day is think about like I grew up on the chat rooms. That's where I met the first boy I ever hooked up with. The first boy I ever dated. All these things. So I think about those every day with Grindr because we, since we're global, we have to do with things in Egypt with entrapment and police. We have to think about the safety of the users there in Chechnya. And now content's interwoven in that. So we do know this rejection is a huge thing. So we're thinking about the layers of experience because every day it's just a person logging onto an app trying to find something. And now we have to give them some written work. Right.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I think some of the content we are doing is helping change that. We get messages from people. I was in Iowa recently. We were shooting a short documentary outside of Des Moines and a young trans woman who was at a college, a local college there called Drake University. That's it. She came to me and said, you know, I just wanted to meet you because I know that you're the editor-in-chief of Intu. And I was like, you know what Intu is? And she's like, yeah, I read it every week on my phone because, you know, here, there's not a lot of grinder users. So I noticed the messages. And she's like, and it's a nice change of pace from a bunch of older men trying to tell me I'm not trans or why am I a woman that I see trans content on here?”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Love, yeah. Love something's a connection, something. And I'm willing to, I think every day we're trying to explore what that something is. And some days it is RuPaul doing dropping a music video on Grindr and we're helping that. Some days it may, it's not Roy Moore ever. It keeps coming to the joke. But as it gets,”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I know, I really appreciate you asking that. And I guess as a grinder, user, a longtime user, as a journalist that wrote about Grindr, and now someone that's the editor-in-chief of Grindr, I think about that every day. I was in a bar in New York recently. It was right after my job was announced. And people, a lot of friends were talking about it, and I looked around and saw all these golden, you've been in the gay, right? You see men check it because it gets golden their face. And I realized that I was like, I now am tasked with pushing a magazine cover content to every person at moments like this when they're on there looking for love, for sex, for a moment of pleasure something. And it weighs on me maybe more than I want my therapist probably gets mad about it. But I think it's a great site to do that work, to kind of begin changing that kind of favorability or how much people, the experience someone's having on the app. Because we keep going back to it. Like, why do we keep going back to this? What are we looking for there?”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And, you know, so the phone would light up. It's lighting up while I'm at work. And, you know, a lot of these messages are frankly not work appropriate. And so half of your mind is like elsewhere while you're trying to work on a story. And I finally thought I need to get off this Ferris wheel. And when I saw that stat, I thought, wow, like, this is clearly an issue. Yes, a hamster wheel. This is clearly an issue for a lot of folks. I should like not to be a complete hypocrite. I should say that I did eventually download Scrub. So I scrub on my phone, which is a similar app, and it has similar issues for whatever reason. It just feels a little calmer. But I think about deleting that too all the time. But the larger issue that I wanted to get to was just this issue of the way that these apps can have a negative effect on self-esteem. They do make a portion of their user base feel bad. And whether that's something that you feel like you can reckon with add into, because whether you're at Grindr or not, I think it's undeniable that Grindr is changing the gay community.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because, you know, it was constantly lighting up. So I wound up paying for the version that actually lets you get a notification or you get a new message. So I helped pay for the launch of Into. Thank you.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Breaking graphs in more like a print news way where while sure this text would in a traditional magazine form would be really thick paragraphs like a few five six sentences we're doing one sentence graphs because the phone is such a smaller space and you have to think about attention so it's like as you scroll as I actually scrolling my phone three times I want to maybe take a break so maybe a gif pops there or another piece of artwork or how the artwork can be something that you play with so it kind of feels like childlike in many ways that you're giving someone a toy a few toys and making them stay in one place space while touching the same type of stuff so I'm always looking at my phone and I remember being at the Guardian they launched a mobile lab and that's what all people were talking about like how does how do you tell a story when you only have a few inches of digital space because when you get to these long form pieces people get tired of that like you scroll these amazing New York Times magazine stories and it's like my thumb's gonna fall off after a while so I know it's not but and there's kind of”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The goal of sustainable business on its own, right? We are attracting new advertisers with Intu. I mean, as you can imagine, Grindr had a very smaller pool when it came to advertisers being ad supported because only specific people thought about Grindr in this way. And Into has allowed us to expand it a lot and also be able to get a lot of different people who may have not advertised on Grindr now to advertise them into and kind of push that through the world. So that's kind of changing on the revenue side of it. It's a different model of thinking of how these two kind of properties working together around traffic and a media space. So yeah, it's its own person that stands alone, which can be scary at times. But in terms of mobile, you're talking about engagement of media. I think a lot about the fact that most of our content is read on a phone and there are tests. I have so many screens in my office now and I like certain screens open that are the mobile phone views of Into. And I think I scroll through and hold my breath sometimes to look at graph breaks because we're”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, like which of these people? Yeah, exactly. So, what are people responding to the most? And so luckily our social teams are also millennials who are very good at having their finger on the pulse of those things. And so that's the balance, I think, is trying to do serious journalism, but delivered in this like sort of fun way in which people are still going to be attracted to it.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. I mean, like, you know, right now we're working on something that we're launching tomorrow that's going to be a completely different look from something that we've been doing that's going to be much more magazine style. We're working with our developers to try to play around and see, you know, it has to be as mobile friendly as possible because so much of our readership is mobile, you know, especially from Grindr is just the direct to mobile. So I think right now it's really interesting being so new because it's only been around now for three months, like it's online for three months. So we're really testing a lot of different opportunities. But for me, I just think about what I respond to best, what I like best, and also we have been doing a lot of with Roy Moore, we also created a video that we then ran in our social. And it was on the app too, wasn't it? Roy Moore video and seeing, you know, what that click rate is through, you know, with some basic facts about Roy Moore, we pulled directly from the article about how terrible he is. Does that do better than, you know, just posting an interstitial that just has, you know, like a picture of him raising his finger angrily?”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But talk about how you deliver that information because I do look at the snap, discover stuff. They've actually sort of turning a corner on how people consume them or how people look at this stuff rather than just read a text. I mean, because today I was reading the Everest piece in the New York Times. I wish it was done a different way. It sounds crazy, but I love the visuals. That were on my phone, but then the text was sort of like I felt like, I don't know how they would have done it differently, but it was sort of a weird combination and I really enjoyed it and I kept thinking, how would you do this in a mobile-only mentality? How do you think like that, Trish, and in terms of making stories? Because you can't just do your typical schemes of text.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not so much now. You know, it's just like television, you don't have enough time to get through all of it. And it's so frustrating because there are so many missed opportunities. Because even with our own content, you know, we run like, we can run 20 things a day and how many things can you have on the front page at one time.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, something I think a lot about is kind of social media's impact on publishing, seeing how everything's measured around shareability on Facebook and then how Facebook can also block that. So it feels very that you put all these resources and time into content, but then you can't control who sees it or how to get it to people. So that's always been a concern of mine before I came to Grindr. And that's probably why I came to Grindr is that we can actually, we kind of step over that hurdle of social media. We can be right in someone's phone immediately. But so media just feels like kind of in flux and not around the content. I feel like people are doing amazing.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Twitter. Yeah, like Twitter. The same, like, after you hit someone a few times with complaints, it just disappears. So they're trying to work through that. And we've spoken with them and they're figuring that out, which is great. But with Tinder, they are all inclusive of everyone. Currently with content, they're not pushing it in app. They are working with celebrities to do content on their website and their social media. But I will not be surprised if they move into this field too. We do, I mean, Tinder, Grinder, we do a lot of similar things. They do in-app advertising. We do in-app advertising. So we kind of do this dance together. So I can't wait to see what their magazine's called. It's not going to be into. It'd be called”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is like there are issues that I did when I was at the gardening, I did a series on this and it was about their flagging systems when you respond and say someone's like a different gender that shouldn't be there. They immediately block them after a certain amount of”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're everything. Everything. They're everything. You know, it really plays with my self-confidence. They're everything.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Respond to that. And Grindr has a system currently that a lot of folks within a certain part of the gender spectrum really respond to. And that's why hers become a great space in really fast growing. I didn't realize how big they were until the other day. And they've done it in a very different way than us.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's when everyone thinks they see Mashable did this article the other day called How Grinder, Yes, Grinder launched the best magazine on the internet and it began talking about with, you know, you'd expect it to be this way, but you'd go to it and it's nothing like you thought, which is kind of how we think of the app in many ways. If you go in there, it's like sure you get this one picture, but you can also have a lot of different types of experiences. But it's just different. And like bringing up the female version of Grindr, we had a conversation with the her people the other day because we talk a lot within this tech space of dating. And I was talking to Robin about how just the design of her has to be very different than Grindr. Like lesbians were not as interested in a cascade. They wanted more of a profile where you had a more expansive place to talk about yourself and you had more safety around your geolocativeness. And I saw that my own work as a geographer during research was that women weren't as interested due to gender and violence and how spaces were thought of, like gay men were. So like the apps have to”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tinder for sure. Well, yeah, I mean, and I think that queer men and women for as much as we have in common, we also are very different. And I think that there would be grinder does a really great job at what it does. And I think that they want to make sure that we are, you know, capitalizing on the things that we are strong in. And then we are going to partner with other people or work on partnerships with other people that are doing. But you're not.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes Yes, we are producing content and trying to figure out ways to get content in ways similar to Grindr to lesbians. But Grindr as an app isn't becoming a lesbian app. We have left that space for her really to kind of explore. Even how they designed it is very different.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, that's a good question. I mean, like, they haven't as long as I've been there, they haven't discussed moving into that space. I think that they actually really respect her for having that space. And I'm not sure what else we can really talk about at this time regarding that sort of thing.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We are not working on a woman's app, but we are working on partnerships that will make sure that women feel included and receive our content directly. That's all we can learn and talk about right now.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're lovely people. And for us right now, having a lesbian specific app isn't on the table. We have recently expanded the user features of the app to be more gender inclusive. So there was a lot of headlines recently that Grinder is now for straight women, and that wasn't necessarily true. We just changed it to where you could self-identify your gender in really expansive ways. You could be cisgender, you could be gender nonconforming, you could be gender fluid, you could fill in what type of gender pronouns you wanted. And that was not because we saw more trans people or women on the app, it's because there always been there. And Grindr as a company, we've never acknowledged them in a public way. So we worked with Jen Richards, who's the Emmy nominated writer, actress behind this story. Thank you. And we work with her and other people like Peppermint from Boss Rag Race to kind of change the app and promote language around it to get people interested in knowing that.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Talk to people who are gender nonconforming and you want to hook up with them or you want to engage with them in a relationship. So we see our task as editors to really engage those people because they are getting that content every day. And that's where we see the most kind of hate mail is when we launch a piece that's”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's a really good question. So I think with sexual racism on the app, Grindr being the first and the biggest, people started replicating a lot of the language they found. So as a black person, I saw that a lot growing up in the South. You hear one person use the n-word and they get away with it and you see it keep happening and happening and happening. Digital apps because they're like kind of like billboards. You see how one person's doing something and you're assuming they're successful because they keep using that language. So they keep perpetuating it many times. Other times people do see this app as a place where they can really voice their very unsanitized desires and people do really not want to be with black people or Asian people. But we need to bring them to a place where they interrogate why. And I think we at Grindr, we have our customer service team does respond to issues around racism or other derogatory language when it's used to attack other people. So we do intervene in there to work with folks. But we intend to produce lots of content around sexual racism, how to”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Someone that use Grindr a lot as growing up in my early 20s, I think that is amazing that we could do that with content. And I think that's what we get to do with even lesbian content on the app is be like, hey, I know you don't go to this usually, but like here it is. It's knocking at your door. Engage with it, maybe. Give it a try.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. And so something I've reminded some folks, I think I said this at an editorial meeting and I don't remember who were there yet, but I said, you know what makes us really special, and it was mostly, it was before you were there, it was mostly gay men sitting in the room. And I was like, you know what we get to do every day is we get to push content in a place where people go to for desire. And I think as a person, desire is a great place to start changing people's lives and changing how they think about the world. And I was like, and if we can produce content, I call them thoughtful thirst traps. So you give someone a hook that's like a hot guy doing something, someone interesting, and get them engaged and then use that moment to turn it and make them think about the world more broadly. We're helping change desire. And that can help us do a lot of great work around sexual racism where people on the app are feeling rejected because they're black or Asian. We can actually produce content in the app and we do this all the time where we show a person that isn't super muscular as the object of desire when someone opens up the app at 7 in the morning. So for me, I find that to be a”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They'll be like, okay, what woman can we pull in here? And so it always feels like the women are an afterthought at those places. And so, again, my concern was for that also a grinder, but, you know, luckily so far, I have not felt that way. And so Zach has been great in helping me to make sure to commission just as many women writers, if not more lately. I can't imagine. I don't mean to be rude to gay men, but I don't think they're very interested in lesbian issues, right? Yeah, they're not. No, you're very.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All this stuff that can slide into my DMs. Yes. Okay. Moment And Gawker. Right, so I think maybe just like a little bit of a younger mentality in terms of how we approach content, then maybe the advocate and out. And also just as a queer woman, I feel like the only time I really see myself in the pages about is when they do their out 100. Because then they're like, we have to throw some women in there. We can't just do all men. I get on that list a lot. I didn't even know. I was like, I feel like.”
2017-12-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Zach Stafford and Trish Bendix, editors, Into · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT