Culture
Failed BAYC dating app with ‘too many bros’ wasn't real, but could have been
The Lonely Ape Dating Club was an elaborate prank by Year 4000 and came with its own press kit.
At any given moment, you can find a viral tweet that is confounding, poetic, asinine, or some combination of the three. This week’s post of the hour falls into the latter category.
The tweet in question, which has garnered over 100,000 likes at the time of this writing, comes from the appropriately-titled @CoinersTakingLs, a parody account that documents failures in the crypto space, and contains a screenshot of an announcement made last week by Twitter user @y4kxyz (Year 4000), the supposed mastermind of a Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) dating app. The announcement? The indefinite suspension of the dating app, the Lonely Ape Dating Club, due to “too many bros.”
Well, it turns out the whole thing was an elaborate prank, as pointed out by Buzzfeed.
It wouldn’t exactly be shocking that the world’s most popular NFT project, one that has been mired in controversy, is famously male-centric, and only has some 10,000 members, was difficult to build a viable dating app around. This was the logic behind the joke, which Year 4000 had attempted to get off the ground when Lonely Ape Dating Club was first announced, earlier this year. It never quite gained traction, though, outside of a post from @CoinersTakingLs in March.
Some of the supposed features of the project, aside from being the first ever dating app meant solely for NFT-collectors, included the ability to display one’s net worth and NFT collection. In conjunction with the standard courting process (i.e. having a conversation), users could send matches tips in crypto and show off how long they’ve “diamond-handed” their respective NFTs.
Low-hanging fruit — It’s already easy to make fun of NFTs, but a dating app geared towards a very small swath of the most enthusiastic enthusiasts of the web3 offering was almost too good to be true. Some of the other aspects of the app like the ability to filter out matches by “their cryptocurrency value,” or the “Coin Digger” feature which would allow non-BAYC owners to join and “connect with higher net worth individuals for mutual benefit,” was bait for NFT skeptics to eat up.
MetaversePost sniffed this out earlier and posed the following question last night: Was Lonely Ape Dating Club ever a real thing in the first place? After all, Year 4000 only has 65 followers and was created this February with the sole purpose of promoting the dating app. It was never officially endorsed by BAYC’s social channels either, which will frequently retweet other Ape-owner’s side-projects.
All of the copy in the app’s initial reveal sounded like it was directing people towards a networking event in some unidentifiable hotel conference room. Instead of gathering a host of sad-sack NFT owners, however, the aim seemed to be towards garnering a range of media coverage ready to dunk on a dating app meant to match people according to their net worth. In that sense, the mission was accomplished.