KoratDating in Korat runs on the same account as chat, feed, groups and shops. That is convenient right up to the moment it is not — the risk of a dating feature bolted onto a social network is that a stranger who likes your photo can reach everything else about you within two taps. So the dating module keeps its own photos, its own profile, its own name, and its own way out, and the seams between it and the rest of the app are the part worth explaining.
Five tabs, and what each is for
The module is five tabs: swipe, explore, who liked me, matches, and my dating profile. Swipe is the card deck with like and pass. Explore is the same population as a grid or a list, for people who would rather scan than swipe through one face at a time — the two are different reading speeds over the same set, not two different products.
"Who liked me" is visible, not paywalled. Matches holds the mutual likes, and a match sheet appears the moment one happens with a button that opens a real chat rather than a separate dating inbox that will be forgotten about. There is also a list of who you liked, so a like is not a decision that disappears the instant you make it, and past passes can be recycled back into the deck — the single most common regret in any swipe interface is the one you dismissed by accident.
The gate, and what it is really for
The first gate is not a photo or a gender; it is age, and it is enforced in the database rather than by hiding a button. The minimum is not a number typed into the code: it is read from a per-country rules table, one row per country, and your country comes from your own address. When the date of birth is unknown the answer is refuse, not allow — because if unknown were allowed, leaving your birthday blank would immediately become the winning move. There is no "I am over 18" checkbox anywhere in this: a button anyone can press proves nothing about anyone. And when it refuses, it says when it will stop refusing, rather than only saying no. The same gate keeps a minor's account out of the other age-controlled features too.
You cannot browse the deck, and you are not shown to anyone else, until you have set a photo and a gender. It is a small requirement with a specific purpose: it makes browsing and being browsed the same act. An empty profile that can look at everyone while being invisible is the shape every dating product's worst behaviour takes, and requiring the minimum that makes you visible removes it cheaply.
Filters are gender, age range, and a radius in kilometres, and they are saved rather than reset each session. Distance is computed from captured coordinates, so radius means an actual distance rather than a shared district name.
A separate face, a separate name
Your dating photos are a separate set of up to six, not your main avatar. Your dating profile is a separate profile, filled in with prompt cards — question and answer pairs — rather than the same bio your colleagues read on your main profile.
The important part is what happens after a match. A chat that came from Dating shows the nickname only. Not your real name, not your email. The thread carries a "matched from dating" label so both people can see which context they are in, and tapping the name at the top opens the anonymous dating profile — not the real one — until the two of you are actually friends. Matching gives someone a conversation. It does not give them your identity, your feed or your friend list.
There is also a "what others see about me" report, which shows your dating presence back to you the way a stranger encounters it. Privacy settings that you cannot inspect the effect of are settings you will misconfigure, and this is the cheapest way to check that the boundary is where you think it is.
Dating is Android-app only. The web app does not have this module, and that is a decision rather than an unfinished job: ordering a deck by distance needs continuous location, which a browser does badly — and doing it badly here is worse than an honest "open the app".
Korat does not verify anyone's identity. The security page lists that alongside everything else Korat does not do: there is no eKYC, no ID document check, and no SMS or phone verification — the phone verification endpoint is not implemented. Nobody in the deck has been proven to be who they say they are, and no badge on this platform should be read as saying otherwise.
What trust badges do show is evidence that costs something to fake: businesses that have vouched for someone, and real paid visits recorded across shops. Every badge opens a breakdown that states plainly that no ID document has been checked. Chats and calls are not end-to-end encrypted. Meet in public, and treat everything here as unverified.
One switch that removes you
There is a global opt-out in Settings. Turning it on hides the dating menu from your app and removes you from everyone else's deck — both halves, in one action. A setting that stops you seeing dating but leaves your card circulating would be worse than useless, and "delete your profile and start again" is not an off switch, it is a punishment for changing your mind.
Blocking works across the whole app in the same way. Blocking someone from a chat or from their profile hides their chats and posts and removes them from Dating at once, rather than requiring you to repeat the action in each place they can reach you. You can also report a profile.
Where dating touches the rest of Korat
Deliberately, in exactly two places. A match opens a real chat — the same one-to-one thread as any other conversation, with voice messages, files, location and the same two-sided call consent, which means the person you matched with cannot make your phone ring until you have specifically unlocked calls in that thread. And the chat list carries a dating filter, so matches can be separated from everything else without living in a second inbox.
Everything else stays apart. Your dating photos are not your albums. Your prompt answers are not your posts. Your nickname is not the name that appears in the feed, in groups or in comments — names elsewhere in Korat are resolved live from your real profile precisely so that no private label can leak into public content.
What this module does not try to be
There is no compatibility score, no personality test and no claim that an algorithm knows who you should meet. The ranking that does exist is documented alongside the app's other scoring weights in the project's core algorithm document, and it does not pretend to be more than it is: an ordering over the people who match your filters and are near you.
There is no paid tier, no boost, and nothing about who liked you hidden behind a purchase. Korat is free to use, which also means there is no revenue model that would reward keeping you swiping. If the module works, you stop using it — which is an odd thing to build a business on, and the reason it is one small part of a larger app instead of a product on its own.