When it comes to exercise, so many people — beginners; die-hard enthusiasts; reluctant participants; and everyone in between — are searching for holy grails: workouts that involve the least amount of time and effort and offer maximum results. 

We live in the most scientifically advanced age of fitness. Exercise is a multibillion-dollar industry, and a lot of that money is spent on new research and development of new technology. If there were an easier way to get the benefits of a squat or a pull up without having to actually do a squat or a pull-up, you’d think we would’ve found it already. 

Despite the absence of a magic pill or a one-minute, low-impact total body workout that will burn fat, build muscle, and prevent all serious health problems, the industry is full of savvily marketed plans and potions, promising the world for just a little bit of time and work.

The latest trendy regimen to fall into this category is the cardio workout known as 12-3-30. Devotees say that 12-3-30 lives in that ideal intersection of minimal effort and maximum results. 

Could this be true? Have we unlocked exercise’s biggest secret? Or is this yet another lie perpetrated by Big Treadmill?

The coaches and personal trainers I spoke to said 12-3-30 is a net positive. People moving their bodies is generally better than people not moving their bodies, and anything that gets folks exercising is a good thing. But they also believe that 12-3-30 offers a look into how people have traditionally thought about exercise as being complicated, and how much simpler it can be.     

What is 12-3-30?

No one alive today can truthfully claim they invented walking uphill. But fitness influencer Lauren Giraldo is largely credited with rebranding this physical act as 12-3-30. Giraldo posted a YouTube video about 12-3-30 in 2019; in 2020, she claimed that walking on the treadmill at a 12 percent incline at the speed of 3 mph for 30 minutes helped her lose 30 pounds and keep the weight off. In an interview with Good Morning America, Giraldo said she began using the 12-3-30 formula because it was a way to work out that wasn’t intimidating.     

The nice thing about 12-3-30 is that it’s simple. There are a finite number of settings on a treadmill, and the most difficult thing about this routine is remembering which number goes where. The incline is set at 12. The speed input is where the three goes. And 30 is the number of minutes needed to complete this ritual. 

“12-3-30 works for what it was designed to do: a low-impact cardio workout that’s easy to repeat,” Charlee Atkins, a certified personal trainer and the founder of the guided exercise app Le Sweat, told Vox. “I’d categorize 12-3-30 as LISS, or low intensity steady state cardio.”

Atkins explained that 12-3-30 and other LISS routines are effective because they allow you to get your heart rate up with relatively lower effort and less wear and tear on your body than something like running. This makes 12-3-30 particularly attractive to beginners, folks coming back after an injury or extended break, and anyone who wants to do the recommended amount of cardio for better health but doesn’t want to make it their full-time job. 

James McMillian, a certified personal trainer and president of Tone House, a strength and conditioning facility in New York City, agreed with Atkins that 12-3-30 is good for a lot of people. Because it doesn’t require a particularly high skill level and is relatively easier on joints, its barrier to entry is lower. People turned off by more challenging forms of cardio, like running or group cycling classes, may find 12-3-30 more doable, which could lead to more consistency. 

“You’re walking at an incline, so your heart rate stays up, you’re burning calories, and you’re getting some lower body endurance work in without beating yourself up,” McMillian said. “The more you remove friction, the more people stay consistent.” 

I tried 12-3-30 at the gym this week and was surprised: I didn’t expect walking at this seemingly measly pace to be difficult enough to work up a sweat. Yes, 12-3-30 is super simple (almost annoyingly so), but it’s not really something you can coast through either. The pace is just a smidge above a brisk walking speed, the kind you would use to pass someone lollygagging in front of you on a sidewalk. The incline feels like a steep-ish hill. And while it certainly isn’t as challenging as the spinning or HIIT classes that I’ve taken, I did work up a sweat. (I generally don’t trust treadmill calorie counts but, for what it’s worth, the machine told me I had burned 390 calories.)     

The experts I spoke to told me that to really get the most of the workout, you shouldn’t hold on to the treadmill’s hand rails. If you take that advice, it makes for a cardio experience that’s uncomfortable enough that you actually have to pay attention (I couldn’t text or scroll on my phone while doing it) but wasn’t impossible to finish either. 

While experts I spoke to said that 12-3-30 isn’t a magic bullet and strength training might be more beneficial if your goal is getting stronger or enhancing athletic performance, there’s also a saying in the industry that the best workout is the one that you actually do. 12-3-30 is plan that a lot of people can perform consistently. By that standard, it’s a good one. 

How much of 12-3-30 is just great marketing? 

While effectiveness and consistency are crucial components, perhaps the biggest factor when it comes to 12-3-30’s popularity is that it’s easy to sell. 

“12-3-30, it’s like the $5 footlong,” Bobby McMullen, a personal trainer and founder of the fitness app Adonis, told Vox. McMullen’s app matches clients with personal trainers based on goals, budget, and location, and he spends a lot of time thinking about how to meet gym goers where they’re at. 

McMullen pointed out that workouts like P90X and Hard 75 become immensely popular in part because of how they’re packaged. It turns out that some people enjoy when their workouts, like their sandwiches, feature a numerical identifier. Branding matters, in part because partaking in the hot, number-named workout that everyone else is posting about can be a form of motivation. 

“It sticks with you, so you know exactly what to do,” McMullen said. “You press a few buttons, you don’t change it for 30 minutes. It’s just a very catchy viral workout.”

McMullen and the other experts I spoke with noted that the gimmick of 12-3-30 also works because of the simple fact that many people go to the gym and either don’t know what to do or want/need to be told exactly how to use their time. Working out is an escape for a lot of folks, and who wants to think when they’re actively trying not to think?

Unlike the allure of bootcamps and other workouts that are proud of pulverizing you, 12-3-30’s charm is that it’s supposed to be easy enough — something that a wide swath of people can, in theory, accomplish. Its approachability is its strength, and a big part of why it’s so popular. McMullen said that one could even customize the program, and tinker with the speed to make it as easy or as difficult as needed. (But, he said, “going steeper is crazy.”) 

“Moving your body at all is a win, and I will not, nor should any trainer, pooh-pooh any sort of overly marketed three-number system that gets you to move your body,” McMullen said, adding that the most important thing about 12-3-30 is that it’s showing people that working out doesn’t have to be as complicated as it seems. 

“Whatever you can fit in is better than nothing,” he said. “If it’s all you have time for, run up that hill like Kate Bush, baby.”

Or, you know, walk.

Here is what you need to know about the man known to hundreds of thousands of people as Kismai: Kismai is not his legal name; he is incapable of eating cheeseburgers without getting some on his shirt; and he hates when people are wrong on the internet. Separately, those three distinct characteristics could describe anyone. Together, those elements make for a hero to the people who seek laundry advice on Reddit. 

“You would not know [from looking] at me that I am good at laundry,” Kismai told Vox (his full username is KismaiAesthetics, a joke from the first season of the sitcom Letterkenny.) “You would be more inclined to think I smell like Post Malone. I think that’s part of my charm. I’m not Martha Stewart. I am not stereotypically fastidious. I do this because I am a fat, sweaty slob who eats with wild abandon and apparently never learned to use cutlery as a toddler.”

Kismai is a savant when it comes to getting clothes clean.

He has singlehandedly changed the way people do laundry. He is the reason the word “lipase” has become a topic of conversation across elder millennial group chats. He can move the market. His adherents clamor for their faceless champion to give them advice. They praise him for a 12-hour process called “spa day” and post their disgusting but satisfying results for the world to see. The small monetary tips they’ve sent him in appreciation have paid for his health insurance for the entire year. 

Kismai never intended his laundry posts or his alter ego to ever get this popular, but this celebrity makes sense. Millions of us do laundry, and even though we live in the most technologically advanced age of washing machines and have an astonishing amount of detergents at our disposal, our clothes, sheets, and towels all suffer from persistent problems: foul pit funks, color transfers, graying whites, relentless stains, etc. 

Spending the time and energy to do laundry and not come away with clean clothes is frustrating. We ruin our favorite shirts, cycle through socks and underwear faster than we’d like, throw away musty gym attire, and ultimately spend more money on both new clothes and new detergents in hopes to break free. 

The act of doing laundry is predicated on the idea of washing away past grimes and past mistakes. When someone provides a method to this madness, shows their work and the results, and maps out an end to our collective annoyances, people will listen. Even if that person is a self-described slob.

“It’s this universal human experience, right?” Kismai said, trying to explain his popularity and the nerve he’s struck. “And for me, this all started with: How the fuck do I get the cheeseburger grease out of cotton?” 

Why everyone suddenly wants detergent with lipase

One of the crucial tenets of Kismai’s laundry strategy is centered on lipase, a naturally occurring enzyme that can also be industrially prepared. Enzymes are especially good at breaking down different kinds of stains, which makes them an important component of laundry detergent. Lipase’s specialty is tackling lipids and fats (think: cooking oils, butter, and some oily body secretions). 

“Some of the most common fat molecules are ‘Y’-shaped molecules called triglycerides,” said Nathan Kilah, a professor at the University of Tasmania who specializes in synthetic chemistry. “The ‘arms’ of the ‘Y’ are fatty acids that are linked into a central glycerol group. The lipase can break the connection between the fatty acids — Y arms — and the glycerol — central bit — which makes them into smaller molecules that can more readily dissolve into water.”

This science isn’t new; the first patent for animal derived enzymes in washing was granted in 1913. Kilah told Vox that different enzymes are quite common in detergents, and they generally help remove specific types of stains. For example, proteases are good for tackling protein stains like blood, while pectinases can target fruit-based stains like juice and wine. 

Given the sheer amount of laundry products currently on the market, you’d think that you’d easily be able to find something that works. But there’s a catch if you live in the United States.

Most of the world uses powdered laundry detergent, which allows for more enzyme flexibility; Americans generally prefer liquid, which doesn’t always contain these precious enzymes. Kilah, who lives in Australia, said that the challenge with liquids is making sure all the components work together in the wash while remaining shelf stable. (Put another way, a liquid detergent may not include lipase if it won’t play well with the solution’s other elements.) In powder form, every ingredient can be physically separated as a different granule, which makes it easier to create a shelf-stable, water-activated mix. 

“You do find liquid detergents with enzymes added, but I think in general they are more common, and likely more reliable, in powdered products,” Kilah said. 

Jennifer Ahoni, a principal fabric care scientist at Procter and Gamble, said that while lipase isn’t necessarily a silver bullet, nor does its presence mean a detergent is automatically a good one, the best detergents generally have a mix of different enzymes, surfactants, and polymers. 

“I understand where that trend for looking for an ingredient like lipase is coming from,” Ahoni told Vox. Enzymes can be very good at tackling off-putting phantom smells, which explains why so many people who take Kismai’s recommendations come away feeling like they’ve had their lives changed.

 “Consumers are just really looking for a good clean, and greases and body soils are some of the toughest soils that consumers are encountering,” Ahoni added.

But since enzymes are not a staple of American liquid laundry detergents, anyone who wants to make this change would have to do a fair amount of legwork and read a lot of ingredients. That’s where Kismai comes in. 

He has a spreadsheet called the “Lipase List,” which contains a catalog of detergents that contain the enzyme. It also goes a step further and identifies if it has any other enzymes, as well as oxygenated bleach, surfactants, and various other elements that his conscientious launderers are looking for. There are also tabs for pre-treaters and laundry boosters that contain useful ingredients. 

Once you’ve seen his Reddit posts and then the list, you’ll become hyper-aware of the lipase you’ve been missing out on if you’ve opted for, say, Tide pods over powders. You may even spend your free time trying to track down Miele’s UltraColor Floral Boost, which boasts multiple enzymes that can theoretically tackle a variety of tough stains and odors.

“I’ve always assumed that I write in obscurity on the internet,” he said, but the Lipase List’s expansive reach changed his mind. 

One day, Kismai found himself running out of Whole Foods’s 365 Sport Laundry Detergent, one of the rare North American liquid detergents that contains the enzyme DNAse, which tackles soils like sweat, those yellow underarms stains on T-shirts, the brownish tint of old socks, and stinky gym gear.

“Three or four different Whole Foods — it’s out of stock,” he said. “ I go to the customer service desk. I say, What’s going on with this? They said…we’ll get more of it. Then they say some lady came in two hours ago asking about the exact same thing, and she said she heard about it on Reddit.”

That shortage wasn’t a one-off. Redditors frantically post when 365 Sport has gone missing from local shelves or isn’t stocked on Amazon. 

Everyone loves to see disgusting photos of grimy water

Kismai’s most famous invention is known as “spa day,”which he posted on Reddit back in August and continuously updates with new information about the best products to use and more thorough directions. It involves finding the largest bucket, cooler, or basin in your house and intensely soaking and agitating your items (generally high-use pieces that have a lot of buildup or enduring stains like heavily worn T-shirts, sheets, towels, etc.) in a solution that contains lipase, oxygen bleach, surfactant-rich detergent, and water, before washing it with a dose of ammonia. The soak takes the better part of a day, at least eight hours. It is also one of the most disgusting things to behold. 

Spa day aficionados affectionately call the soaking water “soup.” Those who have tried the process for themselves know that what begins as a mix of water and detergent ultimately becomes something different. It takes on a haunting texture — there’s a thick sliminess, a scrim of glossy oils, a visible filth that resembles melted dirty snow that was collected from a parking lot. 

Perhaps even more distressing than what it looks and feels like is the unavoidable knowledge of where the soup came from: you. It’s on the towels you dry your hands and body with, the pillowcases your rest your face on, and the clothes you live in. 

This soup is partly you.  

“​​Filthy water is like catnip,” Kismai said. Many humans that have created their own personal soups vouch for its success (including myself and my editor), and judging by the endless scroll of new spa day posts, it seems like every day more and more people attempt to experience its horrors and benefits. 

Kismai created “spa day” not because he has a voyeuristic desire to see other people’s dirty water. He was simply tired of seeing people ask about lingering stinkiness on r/laundry. 

“It was post and post and post every day,” he said, referring to a common problem of just-washed, seemingly clean clothes becoming stinky after a tumble dry or when worn for a short period of time. 

Experts call that phenomena odor rebloom. 

Odor rebloom “is a nice way to talk about bringing that funk back,” Ahoni, the P&G scientist, said. It’s one of the fastest-growing complaints that Ahoni and her colleagues deal with. 

The primary culprit of odor rebloom is sebum, which she bluntly calls “body grease.” It’s hard to see, and can persist on clothes even through several wash cycles. Clothes might smell clean coming out of the wash, but when sebum and other body oils are warmed up, the  pungent sleeper cells reactivate. 

Kilah, the chemistry professor at the University of Tasmania, said that the combination of ingredients in the recommended detergents for spa day do a lot of heavy lifting to get clothes back to looking and smelling normal. But what makes it uniquely effective is that you give these various cleaning agents extra time to work on stains, smells, oils, and grime.

“The key to any chemical reaction taking place is time and temperature,” Kilah said. “We can’t increase the temperature too much…but we can use time to get a more complete process.”

What if being better at laundry could save the world (a little bit) 

Kismai’s extensive knowledge of laundry chemistry, musty garments, and human soil soup comes from his general curiosity surrounding chemistry and textiles, and from being around laundry his whole life. 

“My mom was ridiculously fastidious. I think that’s the nicest way to put it,” he said, explaining that, as an only child, he often helped his mother do chores. She was an analyst at a regional bank, but also was, like many women (at the time and to this day), in charge of the housework. Kismai described himself to me as incorrigibly messy, so one can only imagine the kind of stains — dust, grease, melted popsicle juice, etc. — his mom tackled. 

Now, at 52, he is still a sloppy eater. Getting better at laundry, he said, was a more solvable problem to him than consuming food more elegantly. The better he got at doing laundry, the more it extended the life of his garments. The longer his clothes last, he realized, the less clothes he had to buy. 

More ethical clothing consumption has become his North Star.

Every piece of clothing we wear has an environmental cost, whether that’s water or electricity or the food given to a flock of Merino sheep or the carbon emitted shipping the garments. “I’m not super crunchy about this, but I want to be aware of it,” Kismai said when describing his views on consumerism. “The shirt I’m [theoretically] going to wear is grown primarily in Egypt. The fabric is dyed and woven in Switzerland. It’s cut and sewn to my order in Malaysia and is delivered to a Nordstrom store — that’s a lot of impact for something to look good in.”

If something as simple as a T-shirt requires all those resources, Kismai wants to make it last. This thinking made him curious about textile care labels and led him to look into what chemicals do to clothes. 

Now, in his spare time, he sets alerts for laundry in academic journals, particularly nature ones, because they publish a significant amount of research on the best ways to lessen the environmental toll of laundry. 

Sharing information on Reddit about how he’s saving his T-shirt can teach someone else how to do the same, even if they aren’t thinking about their carbon footprint when they log on. “I just want other people to benefit from the knowledge,” he said. “I want stuff to smell good and feel good and look good, and I want to extend the minimal effort and not fuck anything up while doing it.”

There’s a popular laundry philosophy that frames the act of washing clothes as therapy, if not service. It’s a nice idea — that the cleaning of one’s clothes could also rinse away one’s problems. But that’s not Kismai’s belief system. His philosophy is less aspirational, and more gruff: We’re perpetually stinky messes. Cleaning up is the least we could do. 

“Yeah, look, no — this is a task to be dealt with, not an expression of your filial piety,” he said.

Unlike some laundry experts and influencers, Kismai doesn’t monetize his solutions. Both the Lipase List and the spa day instructions are free, and Kismai said he does not take any industry money. He does have a Buy Me a Coffee page, allowing grateful readers to send him small tips for his work. 

“Since December, I’ve paid my health insurance for the year,” he said. 

That generous response helped convince him to pursue being a laundry savant full time. He now has an agent and is working on a proposal for a book about laundry that he’s hoping will come out in late 2027. 

The most difficult part of all this success, Kismai told me, is that eventually he may have to actually reveal his true identity: a guy named Eric. 

“There are very few people in the world that know that Kismai and Eric are the same person — my friends, my family, my literary agent,” he said. “I have this alter ego who is much nicer, much more giving, much more outgoing. [I’m] trying to keep him and his online activities away from Eric’s.” 

Vox agreed not to print Eric’s last name. He said he isn’t ready for the type of fame that Kismai has, nor does he want to devote his life to being his alter ego. “I like that, at the end of the day, I can in fact turn off Kismai’s life for the night, and resume being Eric,” he said. 

Still, during our conversation he recalled a moment recently in a Chipotle where he caught a strong whiff of Gain and told his husband — he could pinpoint who it was, and he asserted that the burrito-buying patron wasn’t just washing his clothes with Gain, but was also using at least two more Gain-scented products. It could be that not being Kismai’s is a little difficult at this point — even more difficult than doing laundry.  

What is Grindr supposed to be?

I’m not sure if this existential question is one that keeps anyone up at night, but with the recent announcement that the hookup app is rolling out EDGE, an up-to $500 per month plan powered by “gAI” (pronounced gay-eye) technology, it’s an inquiry that came to my mind. I had a few more, too. 

Has arranging sex become so complicated that robot assistance is now needed? At up to $500 per month, wouldn’t hiring a sex worker be more economical and more climate conscious? Have computer scientists researched what happens when you feed an artificial intelligence a steady stream of horny chats? 

Perhaps the most important question: Do the people who run Grindr know what Grindr is?

The introduction of AI feels unnecessarily complicated, throwing more technology and friction onto a platform that’s supposed to be direct. According to users I spoke to, it feels like one more thing that the company is working on instead of making the app more user-friendly. For a company that made hooking up so efficient and easy, something about its current form feels exhausting. 

The collective dissatisfaction coupled with the rise of newer, more direct hookup apps might be the death knell for Grindr. But there’s also something anchoring this fatigue: Beneath the sticker shock and that gay-eye pun is a deeper story of what happens when gay culture becomes comfortably mainstream and what it means to be on Grindr in a world where so many people don’t think they need it anymore. 

How Grindr became such a pain to use

For an app that’s supposed to be sexy and fun, a lot of the conversation surrounding Grindr is decidedly not sexy or fun. The way many users talk about it comes from a place of frustration and even embarrassment for using the app at all.   

Over the past few years, Grindr users have complained it’s become simultaneously more unusable and more expensive. To the people who have used it for nearly a decade, it’s a clear example of what’s known as  “enshittification,” a term coined by Cory Doctorow to describe the phenomenon in which businesses degrade their product to maximize profit. Enshittification is good for business and for executives, but bad for users. 

Ryan, a former marketing employee who left in 2023, says the turning point happened in 2022, when Grindr had its IPO. (Ryan asked for anonymity to be able to speak freely about his time at the company. Meanwhile, most of the other men I interviewed for this piece were given pseudonyms to be able to speak frankly about their sex lives.) 

After the company went public, Ryan says, the focus shifted from Grindr’s users to its investors. New CEO George Arison had a vision for the company that was more aligned with a burgeoning tech company (e.g. an obsession with AI) than it did an irreverent queer startup. 

“Grindr really changed the game in a lot of ways; it was a different type of cruising,” Ryan said, explaining the app’s subversive roots. “It was, at the time, so cool and inventive, but now, it’s taken on a Silicon Valley shape.” 

I asked AJ Balance, Grindr’s chief product officer, about the criticism that Grindr has strayed from its core mission of making hooking up easier. He said that the hookups are just one segment of the app, and that the company is interested in building other segments. “Some of the principles we have in building our products is giving users choice…and control over what products they want to use,” Balance told Vox. “If users don’t want to engage [with these products], they don’t have to go there. They can also opt out of these features if they don’t want to participate at all.” 

To hear Grindr users tell it, the current direction isn’t resonating with the people simply using Grindr as god intended: to get laid.

“There’s a kind of feedback loop,” Jack, 46, told Vox. “It gets sh*tty. More people leave because it’s sh*tty, and they [Grindr] have to make it even sh*ttier for the remaining users in order to mid-max for revenue, not for user experience.” 

Jack originally downloaded Grindr back in 2009, when he got his first iPhone and around the same time that he moved to New York City, where he currently lives. That version was free and allowed users to browse 100 profiles. At the time, you could spend $2.99 per month on an ad-free version that doubled the number of accounts you could look at. Jack said his peak usage was from around 2009 to about 2012, and he fully stopped using the app in 2022 — the same year that Ryan, the former employee, also says was the turning point. 

According to Jack (as well as other current/former Grindr users I spoke to), the app’s sh*ttiness comes in two main forms: ads and bots. 

Seemingly, every time you tap within the app — whether you’re opening a message, receiving a photo, loading more profiles, etc. — you’ll be hit with an ad that interrupts the action. For a service that’s supposed to promptly connect excited users to each other, it does its fair share of cockblocking. It’s made worse by the content of some of the ads, which can be pretty unhinged. They may involve a game where you save a baby or puppy from lava or ask you to comfort a bald, pregnant woman enduring a miserable life. 

Meanwhile, bots are fake profiles that send spam messages to users, often linking to third-party websites or asking for credit card information. Because they’re so prevalent, and some are attempting to do legit crimes, Grindr has a “Scam Awareness Guide” instructing users on how not to get phished. While a knowledgeable Grindr user may not ever fall for a bot, these fake profiles still take up space on grids; can count against the total number of profiles you can view; and can inundate your inbox with messages and taps (similar to sending someone an emoji reaction on an Instagram), triggering rounds and rounds of pointless notifications. 

According to Balance, the company takes both ads and bots seriously and is looking to “continue to improve the ad experience.” He said that complaints with the ad experience may have to do with Grindr’s privacy concerns. 

“We actually serve ads with the least possible amount of information to share with advertisers because of that,” Balance said. “And so we don’t share personal information beyond IP address and advertiser identifier with user consent. As a result, our ads are less personalized and targeted.”

Want to make these annoyances go away? For now, you’ll need to start looking into Grindr’s paid model. 

That initial $2.99/month price is long gone. Instead, users have the choice between two paid tiers: Xtra and Unlimited. Xtra removes the ads and unlocks the 500 profiles nearest in proximity. Unlimited, the more expensive option, unlocks all the profiles along with additional features, like being able to send photos that disappear after they’re opened. The pricing is roughly $15 per week or $150 to $300 per year (there’s a slight discount for paying up front, and Grindr offers sporadic sales). According to Balance, there are roughly 15 million active users and 1.2 million users who pay for some kind of premium version of the app. 

A core tenet of enshittification is that the user pain points aren’t bugs but features. The worse a free experience, the more people will pay to avoid it or to restore it to its original use. In this model, there isn’t any incentive to make things better, because that isn’t what makes money. 

Did gay guy culture move beyond the need for Grindr?

As Grindr’s user experience has changed, the culture it helped mainstream changed, too — maybe to the point where Grindr has become obsolete.

Brian Moylan, a culture writer, told Vox that Grindr’s trajectory from novelty, to the apex hookup app, to another player in a crowded field isn’t that surprising; he’s seen it happen before. Prior to Grindr, gay guys were on websites like Manhunt and in Gay.com chatrooms. Grindr disrupted those platforms by offering something location-based and conveniently accessible by smartphone. 

Moylan, 47, believes that the Grindr audience seeking out hookups who are annoyed by the app’s declining usability have moved to Sniffies, a competitor that launched in 2018 and that puts more direct emphasis on hookups and public sex. Though Sniffies has a paid version ($19.99 per month, with a discount if you pay for three or six months at a time), the basic features are available to users, and the ads in the free version are minimal and easy to click out of. 

“People are fed up with the apps in general, not just Grindr, and want more real-life experiences,” Moylan said. “That’s why you’re getting this rise of Sniffies, which is making it more like how cruising used to be. It’s also about glory holes, and groups, and anonymity.” 

Sniffies’s more subversive, sex-forward attitude is also more in line with how gay hookup culture has changed. Moylan says that innovations like PrEP and more general knowledge about safer sex has given queer men more sexual freedom — which includes freedom to explore the kind of kinks and fetishes that Apple’s app store restricts but Sniffies caters to. (Sniffies is primarily web-based; the company officially launched an app for iOS in 2025, but it was pulled because of restrictions on adult content.) That newfound freedom coincided with Americans’ increasingly open attitudes about being LGBTQ+. (Remember: Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court decision that legalized gay marriage, was still many years away when Grindr launched.)

When Grindr debuted in 2009, it made hooking up with other men extremely easy. All you ostensibly needed were (at least) two men who had the app. But as LGBTQ+ culture, and specifically gay men’s hookup culture, becomes more mainstream and socially acceptable, that connection isn’t inherent or exclusive to Grindr.  

“It’s just like when you realize you don’t need Grindr to hook up, there’s no reason to go back to Grindr,” Phil, 29, told me. Phil first used the app when he graduated in college in 2018 but stopped after moving to the South a year later. Now, he and his husband find social media to be more effective and efficient than any gay-specific dating apps. “I don’t need to get on Grindr to find somebody that I want to hook up with,” he said. “I already know that because we’ve been in each other’s DMs on Instagram or Twitter.” 

“It’s so much easier to find a gay guy now,” Moylan said. “Now, you go on a hot guy’s Instagram, and there’s a rainbow flag in the bio, and like, ‘Oh, okay, I can message you.’” 

Perhaps it’s a sign of progress that we no longer need a specific gay hookup app to orchestrate a gay hookup. 

Meanwhile, Grindr itself has also become mainstream, cementing its place in pop culture. The app has been the subject of late-night sketches. Sabrina Carpenter sampled its distinct notification sounds. It’s the punchline in jokes about its own ubiquity. There’s also the shopworn trope or gimmick that the people who use Grindr the most are the ones — Republicans, religious figures, etc. — most hostile to gay men. 

All of that universality sands away some of its appeal. Shouldn’t Grindr, a platform that’s about hookups and sex, have some kind of edge to it? Why would gay guys want to be on a site that so many straight people know about? 

The men I spoke to for this article did note that, even though they personally have outgrown Grindr, it still serves a purpose: It’s likely to be more valuable in small towns, for example, where LGBTQ+ culture might not be as accessible. It also allows younger queer people and men who are in the closet to explore their sexuality. For those users, Grindr is easier to find and more accessible (e.g., on Apple’s app store) compared to a site like Sniffies, and it has a bigger user base to connect with. 

Grindr’s cultural presence as an app that isn’t primarily for hookups feels in line with what the company envisions. Balance, the Grindr chief product officer, used the term “gayborhood” multiple times in his conversation with me, explaining that he sees Grindr as more of a community than a hookup space. 

“We think the gayborhood concept is a good metaphor for it. Within the neighborhood there are places and spaces for the more hookup or casual encounter-forward aspects of gay life and there are places and spaces for dates and friends and travel,” Balance said, noting that the AI assistant would probably be more inclined for the latter, because it could streamline and organize those recommendations. 

In a sense, the community vision might be in line with how Grindr’s users now see it. Many of the men I spoke to said Grindr’s most useful quality is that it makes traveling easier. In those instances, they don’t necessarily use the app for sex, but to connect and ask people for recommendations about which bars to go to, good restaurants to try, and what parties are happening — essentially a social media app.

“I have it because when I go to a new city or I travel or something, it’s nice to see who’s around. But I wouldn’t say that I use it as often,” Ryan, the former Grindr employee, told me. But he said that, while helpful, asking gay guys where to eat and what bars to go to isn’t what it was made to do and what it should be.  

I ask what it should be. 

“Helping gay guys f*ck faster.”