Ye Wang
Zhicong Lu
Skip Abstract Section
Abstract
Gay dating applications, such as Grindr and SCRUFF, are considered the primary platforms for gay men to conduct online dating activities. However, on Zhihu, a Chinese question-and-answer website, tens of thousands of homosexual users have been searching for romantic partners, which suggests that Zhihu may have unique affordances in online dating activities for Chinese gay men. To better understand how Chinese gay men perceive the affordances of a non-dating platform for online dating, we conduct a mixed-methods study, including observations, interviews, and quantitative and qualitative analysis of users' self-presentations. We find that gay men users publish personal ads by answering "fishing questions" on Zhihu. Through our analysis, we examine how users perceive the affordances of Zhihu to satisfy their social and psychological gratifications at the self, community, and audience levels. Although gay users face the risk of disclosing homosexual identity on mainstream social media, they perceive such risk as acceptable for better online dating experience. We discuss how users respond to severe social stigma in China, and the gap between user needs and the design of gay dating applications. We elaborate on the implications of our findings to discuss the potential benefits for LGBTQ users if LGBTQ service providers collaborate with social media.
- Giorgia Aiello, Sandeep Bakshi, Sirma Bilge, Lisa Kahaleole Hall, Lynda Johnston, Kimberlee Pérez, and Karma Chávez. 2013. Here, and not yet here: A dialogue at the intersection of queer, trans, and culture. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 6, 2 (2013), 96--117.Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- Kath Albury and Paul Byron. 2016. Safe on my phone? Same-sex attracted young people's negotiations of intimacy, visibility, and risk on digital hook-up apps. Social Media Society 2, 4 (2016), 2056305116672887.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Baidu Zhishu. 2021. Zhihu user demographic profile. http://zhishu.baidu.com/Google Scholar
- Harold R. Baize and Jonathan E. Schroeder. 1995. Personality and mate selection in personal ads: Evolutionary preferences in a public mate selection process. Journal of Social Behavior & Personality 10, 3 (1995), 517--536.Google Scholar
- Bijie Bie and Lu Tang. 2016. Chinese gay men's coming out narratives: Connecting social relationship to co-cultural theory. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 9, 4 (2016), 351--367.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Jeremy Birnholtz, Colin Fitzpatrick, Mark Handel, and Jed R Brubaker. 2014. Identity, identification and identifiability: The language of self-presentation on a location-based mobile dating app. In Proceedings of the 16th international conference on Human-computer interaction with mobile devices & services. 3--12.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Jeremy Birnholtz, Shruta Rawat, Richa Vashista, Dicky Baruah, Alpana Dange, and Anne-Marie Boyer. 2020. Layers of marginality: an exploration of visibility, impressions, and cultural context on geospatial apps for men who have sex with men in Mumbai, India. Social Media Society 6, 2 (2020), 2056305120913995.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Courtney Blackwell, Jeremy Birnholtz, and Charles Abbott. 2015. Seeing and being seen: Co-situation and impression formation using Grindr, a location-aware gay dating app. New media & society 17, 7 (2015), 1117--1136.Google Scholar
- Jed R Brubaker, Mike Ananny, and Kate Crawford. 2016. Departing glances: A sociotechnical account of ?leaving' Grindr. new media & society 18, 3 (2016), 373--390.Google Scholar
- Jin Cao and Xinlei Lu. 2014. A preliminary exploration of the gay movement in mainland China: Legacy, transition, opportunity, and the new media. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 39, 4 (2014), 840--848.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Christopher J Carpenter and Bree McEwan. 2016. The players of micro-dating: Individual and gender differences in goal orientations toward micro-dating apps. First monday (2016).Google Scholar
- Andre Cavalcante. 2019. Tumbling into queer utopias and vortexes: Experiences of LGBTQ social media users on Tumblr. Journal of Homosexuality 66, 12 (2019), 1715--1735.Google ScholarCross Ref
- China Internet Network Information Center. 2021. The 47th China Statistical Report on Internet Development. (2021).Google Scholar
- Lik Sam Chan. 2017. Who uses dating apps? Exploring the relationships among trust, sensation-seeking, smartphone use, and the intent to use dating apps based on the integrative model. Computers in Human Behavior 72 (2017), 246--258.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Lik Sam Chan. 2018. Ambivalence in networked intimacy: Observations from gay men using mobile dating apps. New Media & Society 20, 7 (2018), 2566--2581.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Lik Sam Chan. 2021. The Politics of Dating Apps: Gender, Sexuality, and Emergent Publics in Urban China. MIT Press.Google Scholar
- Karma R Chávez. 2013. Pushing boundaries: Queer intercultural communication. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 6, 2 (2013), 83--95.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Alexander Cho. 2018. Default publicness: Queer youth of color, social media, and being outed by the machine. New Media & Society 20, 9 (2018), 3183--3200.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Kathryn D Coduto, Roselyn J Lee-Won, and Young Min Baek. 2020. Swiping for trouble: Problematic dating application use among psychosocially distraught individuals and the paths to negative outcomes. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 37, 1 (2020), 212--232.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Edmond J Coleman and Wah-Shan Chou. 2013. Tongzhi: Politics of same-sex eroticism in Chinese societies. Routledge.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Juliet Corbin and Anselm Strauss. 2014. Basics of qualitative research: Techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory. Sage publications.Google Scholar
- Mark Davis, Paul Flowers, Karen Lorimer, Jane Oakland, and Jamie Frankis. 2016. Location, safety and (non) strangers in gay men's narratives on "hook-up'apps. Sexualities 19, 7 (2016), 836--852.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Michael A DeVito, Jeremy Birnholtz, and Jeffery T Hancock. 2017. Platforms, people, and perception: Using affordances to understand self-presentation on social media. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM conference on computer supported cooperative work and social computing. 740--754.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Michael A DeVito, Ashley Marie Walker, and Jeremy Birnholtz. 2018. 'Too Gay for Facebook' Presenting LGBTQ Identity Throughout the Personal Social Media Ecosystem. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 2, CSCW (2018), 1--23.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Michael Ann DeVito, Ashley Marie Walker, and Julia R Fernandez. 2021. Values (Mis) alignment: Exploring Tensions Between Platform and LGBTQ Community Design Values. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 5, CSCW1 (2021), 1--27.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Chunyan Ding. 2015. Surrogacy litigation in China and beyond. Journal of Law and the Biosciences 2, 1 (2015), 33--55.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Nicole Ellison, Rebecca Heino, and Jennifer Gibbs. 2006. Managing impressions online: Self-presentation processes in the online dating environment. Journal of computer-mediated communication 11, 2 (2006), 415--441.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Julia R Fernandez and Jeremy Birnholtz. 2019. " I Don't Want Them to Not Know" Investigating Decisions to Disclose Transgender Identity on Dating Platforms. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 3, CSCW (2019), 1--21.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Andrew T Fiore, Lindsay Shaw Taylor, Gerald A Mendelsohn, and Marti Hearst. 2008. Assessing attractiveness in online dating profiles. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems. 797--806.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Jesse Fox and Rachel Ralston. 2016. Queer identity online: Informal learning and teaching experiences of LGBTQ individuals on social media. Computers in Human Behavior 65 (2016), 635--642.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Karoline Gatter and Kathleen Hodkinson. 2016. On the differences between Tinder? versus online dating agencies: Questioning a myth. An exploratory study. Cogent Psychology 3, 1 (2016), 1162414.Google ScholarCross Ref
- William W Gaver. 1991. Technology affordances. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems. 79--84.Google ScholarDigital Library
- David Gudelunas. 2012. There's an app for that: The uses and gratifications of online social networks for gay men. Sexuality & Culture 16, 4 (2012), 347--365.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Jeffrey T Hancock, Catalina Toma, and Nicole Ellison. 2007. The truth about lying in online dating profiles. In Pro- ceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems. 449--452.Google Scholar
- Jean Hardy and Silvia Lindtner. 2017. Constructing a desiring user: Discourse, rurality, and design in location-based social networks. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. 13--25.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Bettina Heinz, Li Gu, Ako Inuzuka, and Roger Zender. 2002. Under the rainbow flag: Webbing global gay identities. International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies 7, 2 (2002), 107--124.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Günter J Hitsch, Ali Hortaçsu, and Dan Ariely. 2010. What makes you click?-Mate preferences in online dating. Quantitative marketing and Economics 8, 4 (2010), 393--427.Google Scholar
- Petula Sik Ying Ho, Stevi Jackson, Siyang Cao, and Chi Kwok. 2018. Sex with Chinese characteristics: Sexuality research in/on 21st-century China. The Journal of Sex Research 55, 4--5 (2018), 486--521.Google Scholar
- I-Research. 2018. 2018 China Knowledge Marketing White Paper - Taking Zhihu as an Example. (2018).Google Scholar
- Hui Jiang et al. 2011. ICCGL: cultural communication via the internet and GLBT community building in China. (2011).Google Scholar
- Travis SK Kong. 2010. Chinese male homosexualities: Memba, tongzhi and golden boy. Vol. 52. Routledge.Google Scholar
- Benjamin Law. 2014. Gaysia: Adventures in the Queer East: Adventures in the Queer East. Cleis Press.Google Scholar
- Adeline Y Lee and Amy S Bruckman. 2007. Judging you by the company you keep: dating on social networking sites. In Proceedings of the 2007 international ACM conference on Supporting group work. 371--378.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Dennis H Li, Shruta Rawat, Jayson Rhoton, Pallav Patankar, Maria L Ekstrand, BR Simon Rosser, and J Michael Wilkerson. 2017. Harassment and violence among men who have sex with men (MSM) and hijras after reinstatement of India's "Sodomy Law". Sexuality research and social policy 14, 3 (2017), 324--330.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Yinhe Li. 1998. Subculture of homosexuality.Google Scholar
- Christian Licoppe, Carole Anne Rivière, and Julien Morel. 2016. Grindr casual hook-ups as interactional achievements. New Media & Society 18, 11 (2016), 2540--2558.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Min Liu. 2013. Two gay men seeking two lesbians: An analysis of Xinghun (formality marriage) ads on China's Tianya. cn. Sexuality & Culture 17, 3 (2013), 494--511.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Iris Po Yee Lo. 2021. (Dis) Engagement with queer counterpublics: Exploring intimate and family lives in online and offline spaces in China. The British Journal of Sociology (2021).Google Scholar
- Freddy MacKee. 2016. Social media in gay London: Tinder as an alternative to hook-up apps. Social Media Society 2, 3 (2016), 2056305116662186.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Mary Madden and Amanda Lenhart. 2006. Online dating. Pew Internet & American Life Project Washington, DC.Google Scholar
- Elizabeth A McConnell, Antonia Clifford, Aaron K Korpak, Gregory Phillips II, and Michelle Birkett. 2017. Identity, victimization, and support: Facebook experiences and mental health among LGBTQ youth. Computers in Human Behavior 76 (2017), 237--244.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Weishan Miao and Lik Sam Chan. 2020. Social constructivist account of the world's largest gay social app: Case study of Blued in China. The Information Society 36, 4 (2020), 214--225.Google ScholarCross Ref
- T Mountford. 2010. China: the legal position and status of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in the People's Republic of China. International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission.Google Scholar
- Tiffany A Pempek, Yevdokiya A Yermolayeva, and Sandra L Calvert. 2009. College students' social networking experiences on Facebook. Journal of applied developmental psychology 30, 3 (2009), 227--238.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Guilherme Colucci Pereira and Maria Cecilia Calani Baranauskas. 2018. Codesigning emancipatory systems: a study on mobile applications and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) issues. Journal on Interactive Systems 9, 3 (2018).Google ScholarCross Ref
- John R Porter, Kiley Sobel, Sarah E Fox, Cynthia L Bennett, and Julie A Kientz. 2017. Filtered out: Disability disclosure practices in online dating communities. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer interaction 1, CSCW (2017), 1--13.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Kane Race. 2015. "Party and Play': Online hook-up devices and the emergence of PNP practices among gay men. Sexualities 18, 3 (2015), 253--275.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Ellen Simpson and Bryan Semaan. 2021. For You, or For" You"? Everyday LGBTQ Encounters with TikTok. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 4, CSCW3 (2021), 1--34.Google Scholar
- Rahul Sinha-Roy and Matthew Ball. 2021. Gay Dating Platforms, Crimes, and Harms in India: New Directions for Research and Theory. Women & Criminal Justice (2021), 1--17.Google Scholar
- Statista Research Department. 2014. 1st China LGBT Community Survey. https://www.statista.com/statistics/324787/china-lgbt-community-breakdown-by-education/Google Scholar
- Lesa A Stern and Kim Taylor. 2007. Social networking on Facebook. Journal of the Communication, Speech & Theatre Association of North Dakota 20, 2007 (2007), 9--20.Google Scholar
- Donald S Strassberg and Stephen Holty. 2003. An experimental study of women's internet personal ads. Archives of Sexual Behavior 32, 3 (2003), 253--260.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Elisabeth Timmermans and Elien De Caluwé. 2017. Development and validation of the Tinder Motives Scale (TMS). Computers in Human Behavior 70 (2017), 341--350.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Matilda Tudor. 2012. Cyberqueer Techno-practices: Digital Space-making and Networking among Swedish Gay Men.Google Scholar
- Chad Van De Wiele and Stephanie Tom Tong. 2014. Breaking boundaries: The uses & gratifications of Grindr. In Proceedings of the 2014 ACM international joint conference on pervasive and ubiquitous computing. 619--630.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Tess van der Zanden, Maria BJ Mos, Alexander P Schouten, and Emiel J Krahmer. 2021. What People Look at in Multimodal Online Dating Profiles: How Pictorial and Textual Cues Affect Impression Formation. Communication Research (2021), 0093650221995316.Google Scholar
- Lita Van Wel and Lamber Royakkers. 2004. Ethical issues in web data mining. Ethics and Information Technology 6, 2 (2004), 129--140.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Jiangtao Wang, Junyi Ma, Yasha Wang, Ning Wang, Leye Wang, Daqing Zhang, Feng Wang, and Qin Lv. 2020. Will online digital footprints reveal your relationship status? an empirical study of social applications for sexual-minority men. Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies 4, 1 (2020), 1--23.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Shuaishuai Wang. 2020. Calculating dating goals: data gaming and algorithmic sociality on Blued, a Chinese gay dating app. Information, Communication & Society 23, 2 (2020), 181--197.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Shuaishuai Wang. 2020. Chinese affective platform economies: dating, live streaming, and performative labor on Blued. Media, Culture & Society 42, 4 (2020), 502--520.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Shuaishuai Wang. 2020. Live streaming, intimate situations, and the circulation of same-sex affect: Monetizing affective encounters on Blued. Sexualities 23, 5--6 (2020), 934--950.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Mark Warner, Juan F Maestre, Jo Gibbs, Chia-Fang Chung, and Ann Blandford. 2019. Signal appropriation of explicit HIV status disclosure fields in sex-social apps used by gay and bisexual men. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 1--15.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Monica T Whitty. 2008. Revealing the?real'me, searching for the?actual'you: Presentations of self on an internet dating site. Computers in Human Behavior 24, 4 (2008), 1707--1723.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Shangwei Wu and Janelle Ward. 2018. The mediation of gay men's lives: A review on gay dating app studies. Sociology Compass 12, 2 (2018), e12560.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Shangwei Wu and Janelle Ward. 2020. Looking for "interesting people": Chinese gay men's exploration of relationship development on dating apps. Mobile Media & Communication 8, 3 (2020), 342--359.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Tien Ee Dominic Yeo and Tsz Hin Fung. 2018."Mr Right Now": Temporality of relationship formation on gay mobile dating apps. Mobile Media & Communication 6, 1 (2018), 3--18.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Nan Zhang and Jing Zhang. 2010. The influence of traditional ethical views on the phenomenon of homosexuality in Chinese and Western history. Journal of Heilongjiang College of Education 3 (2010).Google Scholar
- Xianglong Zhang. 2018. How Should Confucianism View the Legalization of Same-sex Marriage? INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CHINESE & COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY OF MEDICINE 16, 2 (2018), 53--72.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Zaizhou Zhang. 2001. Aimei de lichen: zhongguo gudai tongxinglian shi/An Ambiguous Trajectory: History of Homosexuality in Pre-modern China.Google Scholar
- Tiantian Zheng. 2015. Tongzhi living: Men attracted to men in postsocialist China. U of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
- Tianyang Zhou. 2018. Jack'd, Douban Group, and Feizan. com: The impact of cyberqueer techno-practice on the Chinese gay male experience. In Exploring Erotic Encounters. Brill Rodopi, 27--43.Google Scholar
- Douglas Zytko, Nicholas Furlo, Bailey Carlin, and Matthew Archer. 2021. Computer-Mediated Consent to Sex: The Context of Tinder. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 5, CSCW1 (2021), 1--26.Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Gay Dating on Non-dating Platforms: The Case of Online Dating Activities of Gay Men on a Q&A Platform
Recommendations
Pathological narcissism, cyberbullying victimization and offending among homosexual and heterosexual participants in online dating websites
Homosexual individuals are exposed to high levels of victimization. However, no studies have examined personality risk factors for cyberbullying victimization and offending among this population. This study investigated the relationships between ...
Sexting, pressured sexting and associations with dating violence among early adolescents
AbstractMany adolescents engage in sexting, the sending of self-made sexually explicit images, within the context of a romantic relationship. The aim of the current study is to contribute to the literature by assessing the associations between ...
Highlights- We investigate the relationships between (pressured) sexting and dating violence.
How gender role stereotypes affect attraction in an online dating scenario
Today, it is not uncommon to meet someone and begin a romantic relationship online. Meeting on a dating website differs from meeting in person because a dating profile is created first that allows others to review potential romantic partners. Few ...
Comments