Tinder
Good design is not just about structure—it’s about the emotional weight of space, rhythm, and silence.
Category:
Trust and Security
Author:
Nishant
Read:
11 mins
Location:
California
Date:
Dec 17, 2025
01. The Ultimate Friction is Fear
We typically define friction in product terms: too many clicks, slow loading times, or a confusing UI. But in the dating ecosystem, the deadliest form of friction is fear. It is the split-second hesitation a user feels when they get a match. Is this a real person? Is this a crypto scammer? Is this a bot farm? When a user has to ask these questions, the product has already failed. This psychological friction is far more damaging than any login captcha or ID verification step. Trust and Safety is often viewed by leadership as a "blocker" to growth because it adds hurdles to the funnel. This is a false narrative. The lack of safety is the actual blocker. If we do not solve the identity crisis on the platform, we aren't just losing users to competitors; we are losing them to apathy. The severity of this issue is absolute. When the marketplace loses trust, the network effect reverses. Users don't just delete the account; they "quiet quit." They stop messaging, they stop swiping, and the liquidity of the entire ecosystem evaporates.
02. Weaponizing Friction
A Product Manager in Trust & Safety must stop trying to eliminate all friction and start curating it. We have to live with the uncomfortable truth that a perfectly frictionless sign-up flow is a welcome mat for bad actors. If the door is wide open for legitimate users, it is wide open for bot networks operating at industrial scale. The solution is not to build higher walls that block everyone. The solution is to design "Strategic Friction." We need to move away from static gates—like forcing every single user to verify an ID—and move toward dynamic, behavioral hurdles. This means differentiating between the user who is swiping too fast (bot behavior) and the user who is just excited (human behavior). If a user’s behavior triggers a risk signal—perhaps they are pasting the same phone number into ten different chats—we ramp up the friction instantly, forcing a video selfie or a challenge. If they are behaving normally, the path remains clear. We don't remove the wall; we just make it invisible until someone tries to crash through it.
03. The Zero-Fraud Fallacy
We have to be honest about the trade-off. The only way to achieve 0% fraud is to have 0% users. You can lock the door so tight that no scammers get in, but you will lock out your growth in the process. We cannot "solve" friction; we can only manage the ratio. Every security measure carries the risk of a "False Positive"—banning a genuine user by mistake. In the dating world, banning a real human who is looking for love is a catastrophic user experience. They will never come back. Therefore, the job is not to build a fortress. It is to build an immune system. An immune system accepts that some germs will enter, but it isolates and neutralizes them before they cause organ failure. We must shift our metrics from "number of accounts blocked" to "time to detection." The victory isn't stopping the bad actor at the front door; it’s detecting the anomaly in their behavior and ejecting them before they create a victim. We accept the risk of entry to preserve the user experience, but we counter it with the speed of removal.
