Playlove App Provides Safe, Sex-Positive Space for Kink and Community

Apps are essential tools for folks looking to meet new people today; whether it’s a new friendship, relationship, or casual sex partner, the landscape for community building has shifted immensely over the past decade. Even with the abundance of new tools available, Sante Suffoletta, CEO of the Playlove app, saw there was an essential space still missing. 

Suffoletta spent most of the 90s working at clubs in Denver and Colorado Springs, eventually taking time to explore his own sexuality in relation to the swinger space and kink. Suffoletta always had a knack for technology, and in hosting events, he observed the specific needs of sex-positive and kink-focused communities, which many existing, social media platforms don’t support.

“Unless you’re going to a private, sometimes almost billed as a porn-type of site, it’s very hard to make those types of connections,” Suffoletta says. “And a lot of people aren’t looking for porn; they’re just looking for connections and friendships, right? But when they try to be fully expressed on a platform like Facebook, or Tinder, they’ll get shut down, or their profiles will get banned.”

Part of the problem is that the standards for many platforms are either very black-and-white or somewhat arbitrary. Suffoletta began developing Playlove in 2019 (previously named the Minaj Dating App) to provide a platform for people to fully express and share themselves, uncensored, but also with the “bells and whistles” they love about modern, social media. 

And in that, the Playlove team takes into account what communities crave in a more open, fluid, digital space, while still providing accessibility and user safety.

“The one thing I’ve learned from years and years of doing events is, I can’t be objective,” Suffoletta says. “Nor can our team. If it has our company name on it, and we’re making a decision around something that’s controversial, it’s going to hurt us. So, we’ve actually engaged with the NCSF (National Coalition for Sexual Freedom) to help with our consent and community guidelines, policies and procedures, things of that nature.”

Playlove has an internal team to monitor feeds alongside “very simple, strict rules” they follow and that the community must adhere to. Any reports on a user considered a predator involve an appeal process through NCSF so they don’t feel like Playlove is making arbitrary or personal decisions.

Additionally, Suffoletta recognizes that many apps today still approach gender and sexuality in a rigid way that often isn’t reflective of reality and has ensured Playlove accounts for that, too.

“People are learning that this isn’t a one-and-done type of process for most humans,” Suffoletta says. “As we go through life, on our sexual journeys and our relationship journeys, there’s a lot of different stones we want to uncover and explore. So, an app like Playlove gives people the ability that, no matter how they identify, and no matter what they’re looking for, they can find somebody else that fits that, specifically.”

While navigating sex-positive and queer communities, he says many people don’t want to subscribe to a single label, or check a single box in regard to their sexuality and identity.

“If you like to color outside the lines, so to speak, or feel like you identify or don’t identify as anything specific, or it’s fluctuating, this is an app for you. And we always find that that’s the case, too, with sexuality: People want to explore nonmonogamy, and then they’ll want to maybe explore kink and fetish, and then they’ll want to be a monogamist … We designed the app around that fluidity that we always saw in these communities.”

The Playlove team learned, with kink and sex-positivity, people craved more than just a quick, surface-level swipe feature, which they have since improved to include all profile information alongside a queue of all profiles a person might have matched with. They also have enforced a certification feature to ensure that users know the person they are talking to is a real person.

In addition, Playlove incorporates a feed feature similar to Facebook in which people can post photos and comments in order to be more interactive with their in-app communities. They plan to launch GPS and location-based search features, similar to Grindr, and push notifications soon.

The COVID-19 pandemic was a bit of a hiccup, as the nature of kink and sex-positive communities inherently involves gathering with other people, which we’re all well aware was challenging over the past year. Looking at events in relation to the Playlove platform is a major focus moving forward. Following the launch of Playlove events this summer, they are looking to continue optimizing the app to ensure it is just as “sexy and modern” as the competition.

Suffoletta says ensuring users are having a quality experience and finding the space they need in Playlove, where they can’t elsewhere, is most important. His goal is to bring on 10,000 total subscribers by the end of the year.

However, he acknowledges that, “it’s less about the numbers and more about the quality and the experience, which I’m optimistic as we come out of this event tunnel and people start going out more again, we should see that, and know what’s not working, and we’ll be able to go work on that.”

Suffoletta ultimately hopes that apps like Playlove will help to unite more people in freedom of expression as the sex-positivity movement continues to ramp up.

“When all of the (LGBTQ) sub-communities started working better together, things move forward a lot more quickly. I see the same thing with sex positivity … All these groups overlap in some ways, and all of them do their own thing differently in some ways … And advancing that by really bringing all these communities together on one platform, where you can still be selective and only get messages or see the people that you really want to see, but still support a platform or a community a world that advances all this.”

You can create a Playlove account by visiting members.playlove.co/logins/createaccount. Keep up with Playlove at playlove.co for upcoming events in the Denver area.