How to (mostly) remove Tinder's free Passport timewasters from your stack
On March 31, Tinder announced they were making Passport free for all users around the world for the month of April. Seemingly every woman saw it and said “Perfect, now I can get validation from men in popular cities that I’m not even in... and not even have to meet them in real life!” and within hours, popular destinations like Los Angeles, NYC, Miami, London, Amsterdam, Barcelona, and Paris were flooded, making finding locals nearly impossible. Luckily, the majority of people using Passport simply type in a city name instead of choosing a point within that city manually. When this is done, Tinder locates those users in the exact center of the city. Given this fact, the workaround was fairly obvious (to me, at least), but I’ll document it here for posterity: Go to https://obeattie.github.io/gmaps-radius/ and navigate to your city. Select a swipe distance that you’re comfortable with, and click a point on the outskirts of your city such that your radius excludes the city center Go to Tinder, open the now-free Passport, manually choose the center of this radius, and set your distance to match Gmaps Radius. alt text There you go! Now you can swipe in a very specific radius while avoiding most of the Passport timewasters, who are all clustered in the center of your city. Once you exhaust all the profiles in this radius, simply repeat the process until you’ve worked your way around the city, avoiding the center (by that time, April should be over, anyway).