In today\’s digital age, there are dating sites for just about every special interest and subculture known to man. Over the last five years or so, the landscape of online dating has changed from something that we associate with only your parents desperate and perpetually single friends in their 40s who insist that \”if you can\’t handle me at my worst, you don\’t deserve me at my best\”  to something that is an integral part to meeting new people, flirting, and dating and is commonplace among people of all ages and backgrounds, no matter what kind of special someone you\’re looking to meet. There\’s Farmers Only for people in rural areas, Tinder for those looking for hookups, OurTime for seniors lookin\’ for love, Ashley Madison for Evangelical Christian reality TV stars, and countless others. And the rise in online dating makes sense: the more people you engage with, the better chance you\’ll have of finding someone that you connect with, so people are casting as wide of nets as they can and seeing what they can reel in. Now that EDM has become one of the biggest cash cows in the world across countless platforms, it seems only natural that there would be an app for festival and concert goers to find their own rave bae: it\’s called Mix\’d, and unfortunately, it is fucking horrible.

In order to help you to fully understand the magnitude of the awfulness of this app, I actually created a (fake) account and took a nose dive into the depths that is Mix\’d. Now, fair warning, this is all new ground for me. I\’ve been in a relationship for about two and a half years, and even when I was single it was not commonplace in my circles to use dating sites (well, and tell your friends about it, at least!), so I really have no experience with it other than horror stories I\’ve heard from lovestruck acquaintances, giddy after chatting with the \”perfect guy\” on match.com, only to finally meet him and find him to be 100% horrible. But I\’m definitely going to keep an open mind about this and see what kind of (fake) love I can find.
Alright, let\’s dooooooo this!
When you open the app (it\’s iPhone only by the way), the first thing that pops up is a \”Log in using Facebook\” button. Oh man. They\’re not messing around. If you\’re gonna use this app, you\’d better be prepared for everyone you know to know it. It requires you to give the app permission to post to your wall too, so have fun explaining that one to your Aunt Cathy, with whom you are still inexplicably Facebook friends with, when you see her this Thanksgiving. So I made a fake profile, found a girl who was hot but not unbelievably so, added some fake friends, liked a few mainstream EDM artists in order to maximize my matches, put some Marilyn Monroe and Fake Drake quotes in my profile and I was ready to go.
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\”Mix\’d? Does she need help with her blender?\”
The main idea of this app is to find people to meet up with at concerts and festivals that have similar musical taste as you. When you fill out your profile, you write a short bio about yourself, choose your favorite artists, and include what events you\’ll be attending in the next few months. The app matches you with people who will be at the same events as you and share similar favorite artists. My cynical spidey-sense is tingling! \”Why does this need to exist?\” it pleads in the back of my head. \”Couldn\’t you just, like, talk to people while you\’re at these events since you definitely have the same taste in music?\” But I try to shut it up for he sake of this article. After all, this is how people date nowadays, or so I hear.
The main interface of looking through profiles is one you\’ll instantly be familiar with: it\’s exactly the same as Tinder, in which users see a pic and short bio of the person and swipe right if they like them an left if they\’re not interested, and you\’ll then be paired with your matches and be able to chat. It\’s a simple system that avoids the common dating site problem sites like OkCupid users experience where guys have to send out dozens of messages to get a single response, and womens inboxes get flooded with unwanted messages. It\’s basically micro-dating: People have wizened up to the fact that you really can\’t get to know someone based on a few sentences they write in a bio, you really need to be chatting with and meet people to determine if they really are what you\’re looking for.
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Then comes the liking of pages, and what I feel the biggest flaw the app has: You\’re only allowed to view FIVE PEOPLE PER DAY. It doesn\’t matter if the five people you view happen to be Cthulhu and his four goat-faced sons, you gotta wait until midnight to find new potential masses. This is completely unacceptable for a generation that is used to swiping through a seemingly endless pool of profiles on Tinder, and I doubt that many people will have any patience for it. It really shows too. I used the app for a little over a week, and I only got two matches, neither of which sent me a message. That\’s a pretty fatal flaw. It seems like people are downloading this app, making their profile, and then abandoning it after realizing what a joke it is. You need a decent pool of active users to be a viable dating platform, and Mix\’d definitely does not have it.
As if all these flaws weren\’t enough, the software is extremely buggy and would often crash or freeze. I\’d have to reconnect my account to my facebook page, put in my password, and wait anywhere from 30 seconds to a minute for it to get up ad running again. It\’s definitely not the phone either, I was using an iPhone 5s that\’s only a few months old.
Overall, Mix\’d is way too much drama to deal with, and I didn\’t even get to talk to anyone on it! I like the idea of a dating app that pairs you up with people based on your taste in music, but I don\’t really understand why such an app even needs to exist in it\’s current state. EDM events already have very social atmospheres where people freely mingle and socialize with new people based on common musical interests. Why should we need to preclude that interaction with a few awkward text messages beforehand? They should just remove that part of the app altogether and have it just be an app for music lovers that matches you based on favorite artists. That, along with a brief personality assessment, would yield a much better matching system.
The only type of people I can see using this app is someone who is going to a festival and wants to hook up with someone afterwords.  If that\’s what you\’re looking for, you may want to consider adding Mix\’d to your online dating roster, but I really can\’t speak to what your success rate will be, since mine was absolutely miserable.

 

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