I met my fiancé in 2013 (on the internet, but through Twitter, which is technically not a dating app), just before Tinder really took off. I have therefore only ever briefly used it myself, although I am always an overenthusiastic backseat driver on my friend’s Tinder (and Bumble and Hinge and OkCupid) expeditions when they include me. But I did once date my high school boyfriend again after reconnecting in adulthood (it went very badly), and so I understand the potential appeal of hometown Tinder. To this end, I asked some friends about whether they used dating apps while they were home over the recent holidays, what drew them to it, and how the experience differed from using the app where they normally live.

“You kind of use it just to see what will happen,” said a friend, a 31-year-old straight woman who is currently finishing up her residency in internal medicine in a large coastal city, but who grew up just outside Reading, Pennsylvania. “You know it can’t be anything serious, because you’re going home in a few days, so if you open up the app, it’s more as a game than anything else.” Hometown Tinder, as this friend rightly points put, has much lower stakes because you’re leaving soon anyway. One aspect of the app that’s either a feature or a bug depending on your personal preference, is that it turns people into a computer game, rendering living feeling humans into collectibles, like a grown-up version of Pokémon. Hometown Tinder works in somewhat the same way that Tinder works for people who use it while traveling for work—the people are available only temporarily, so it feels less like there are real people behind the avatars.

In one way, the temporariness is what’s fun about a hometown hookup if it happens. Tinder has in recent years become less of a hookup app and more of a dating-focused one, with many people seeking long term serious relationships on it. (Which is not to say that there aren’t still plenty of “U up?” messages and unsolicited penises.) But hometown Tinder returns the app to its origin story. A hookup with somebody in your hometown is likely to be just that, a hookup. One friend, a 27-year-old straight man working in finance who is from a town in upstate New York, pointed out that things are more relaxed on the app over the holidays. “Nobody thinks that anything is something other than what it is, and nobody worries that the other person doesn’t know what’s going on here—it’s definitely not going to turn into a relationship when we’re both going home in a few days.”

But this approach, of course, leaves out the uglier side of using Tinder while visiting one’s hometown. Because people aren’t Pokémon, of course, wherever you are, however briefly you’re there. People like the man quoted above fail to take into account that using the app as a novelty during a visit somewhere can be at the very least aggravating to the people who actually live there. “Oh God, I never open Tinder over the holidays,” says one friend, a 31-year old straight woman working in education who lives outside Minneapolis. “The results are so inaccurate and almost no one ever wants to meet up, and it’s impossible to tell from their location who actually lives here. Figuring out if they’re going to be gone in two days is way too much work and not worth it.” Another friend, a 30-year old straight man who lives outside of Atlanta says, “It would great to meet more people than the ones who are usually on Tinder, because it’s the same people over and over again, but during the holidays looking at it is just a lot of false hope.”