Whether you’ve grown up in a remote rural village or one of the world’s most populated cities, you’re familiar with the ingenuous yet profound art of the meme. We’d even go as far as saying that few things have connected the world more than our affinity for them, weaving their way through our social fabric to become cultural staples.
But memes have officially taken on new heights. A newly launched matchmaking app called Schmooze will connect you with others based on your meme preferences—and the only thing that’s surprising to us about the app, is why it didn’t exist until now.
Spearheaded by Stanford student Vidya Madhavan, the app works with what she’s dubbed a ‘humor algorithm’. The concept is simple. If you’re on the internet, chances are you’ve already slid into someone’s DMs with a meme hoping to connect with them based on shared humor. If not, you have at least a friend or two with whom you communicate largely with memes. Madhavan’s algorithm was inspired by these types of relationships, using tagging, machine learning and bios written by users to matchmake based on their meme likes.
Once you download the app, you’ll be prompted with a landing page where you’ll be asked to enter the handles to your favourite Instagram meme pages among other details about yourself. The fun starts right after, where all you have to do is swipe right or left on a plethora of memes on Schmooze’s database. The algorithm will then match you with people who have a similar taste in memes, and you’ll be able to move to the in-app messaging to chat with them.
According to their website, there have already been 100k+ matches made to date.
