Finding a spouse in China is clearly not as straightforward as it once was, as there are approximately 200 million single adults in China currently.
As online dating was proven popular in the country, women often said they feel harassed on such sites due to user gender imbalance. A dating app is trying to combat this by protecting women users through their new app features.
Online dating has been the global modern-day answer to courting. Momo, China's biggest online dating app, has currently received 23 million active users. Due to issues on gender imbalance and the hostile online atmosphere of Momo that women refers to as "stalking," its user numbers started plummeting by 50 percent in 2015.
Tantan, often referred to Chinese Tinder, is trying to combat this by placing safeguards against inappropriate content.
Tantan is a location based application wherein users swipe the profile pictures of people recommended to them depending on the user's liking. Swipe right if you like the user and swipe left to skip the user. The conversation begins when both users reply with "like" swipes.
The company placed a security feature wherein users only matched after manually verifying both of their profile pictures and personal information to prove authenticity. They also placed an automatic notification to the female user if a male user either sends any suspicious content or makes overt sexual references to her.
If the female confirmed the notification, the male's account is deleted.
The new features of the app have proven to be effective, as the company indicates that it keep the male to female ratio to approximately 6:4. and the abuse reporting rate on Tantan is now at 1 percent.
According to Yu Wang, the CEO and founder of Tantan, the daily active users of the app has also increased due to the increased sense of security women feel.