After more than a year of serving as a cautionary tale of dating-app woe, furniture designer West Elm Caleb has finally met his match — none other than Hinge’s latest nuisance, Tyler, aka @EthnicSteve.


Better known by his Twitter username, the drama surrounding @EthnicSteve’s dating-app bad behavior started circulating earlier this week after he shared a screenshot aggressively slamming a tongue-and-cheek message from a potential match.



“Your profile is insanely catered to the female gaze,” joked the potential suitor in the now-viral screenshot.


Unfortunately, her meta crack failed to land. “Yeah it’s a dating app you dumb hoe,” he captioned the image. Quickly racking up views and likes within its first hours on Twitter, the post made its way back to his match, who questioned him about his propensity for sharing Hinge screenshots on social media.


“Do you tweet all of your hinge conversations HAHAHAHA,” she asked, a question that, to @EthnicSteve, warranted a scathing four-paragraph reply.


“No but I did tweet this one and it’s up to about 6k likes because everyone thinks you’re a fucking weirdo,” he wrote, before ever-so-kindly informing her that she had been blessed with the privilege of being given “the chance to defend” herself.


“Lol Imagine if I asked ‘hey do you objectify yourself on purpose for attention’ like do you have BPD or something or do you just want [sic] too many pseudo intellectual TikToks,” he continued, further decrying her opening message as “bizarre” and “stupid.”


He capped off his diatribe with an extra hit of condescension. “‘It seems like you’re here to attract women’ damn nothing gets by you,” he concluded. “No wonder she’s at Georgia Tech with brains like that.”


Fortunately for his scorned match, @EthnicSteve received a taste of his own viral medicine once his responses started making the rounds. “This is a psychotic reaction to a girl trying to flirt with you, my man is on some Elliot Rodger shit,” wrote @trevorcumb  referencing the Isla Vista incel killer, alongside both screenshots. “if a woman negs you like this it means she’s interested!” she elaborated in a follow-up post. “she’s giving you an opening lmao she’s not on dating apps to bully people.”





“men would literally rather be misogynistic online than actually get a date,” observed @judysquirrels.


As the reactions began pouring in, one woman purporting to have matched with @EthnicSteve in the past chimed in, proving this was far from an isolated incident. “Screaming realizing this is the same man AND he knows where I work,” wrote @Asapfeminasty, showing a string of unanswered and increasingly concerning Hinge messages from the alleged harasser.




Starting with a few fairly innocuous messages, mainly consisting of @EthnicSteve bumping his DM to the top of her inbox, things took a turn for the stalkerish as he confessed to lurking near her place of work. “Hey, trying again,” he wrote. “Went back to [REDACTED] last night and tried way too hard to look hot hoping you’d be there and got so cold after the sun went down.”


Despite the icy temps — and her reasonably cool reaction to being followed — he was undeterred. “Going to continue to humiliate myself,” he wrote to her nearly three months later.




Naturally, this second set of screengrabs quickly minted @EthnicSteve as Twitter’s resident Hannibal Lecter.




Who would have thought being considered the next West Elm Caleb was the preferable option?