By the time Renate Nyborg quit her job in 2022 she had become accustomed to receiving death threats from her customers. She was advised to use fake names and wear baseball caps when she travelled — a habit she still keeps — so her harassers wouldn’t know who she really was: the boss of the world’s most popular dating app, Tinder.
She only kept one of the letters, the very last one she received, right before she quit as chief executive. The writer was filled with rage, blaming Nyborg: he was single, isolated and feeling cheated out of the money he’d spent trying to find a real connection. “Your algorithm turned a man seeking peace into a man set to destroy”, he wrote. “I will watch your . . . entire family, often. Until the day I decide to tear your family apart.”
It was clear to Nyborg that apps such as Tinder were failing their users: designed to keep them coming back, rather than to find a partner and never return. In that moment, it wasn’t fear she felt but empathy. Through letters like this one she had learnt a lot about a particular group of Tinder’s users: those who were “incredibly lonely”.