How Tinder's “feedback loop” forces men and women into extreme strategies
technologyreview.com
technologyreview.com
1) I placed a male profile in ~10 different cities, auto-swiped for a few days, and waited for matches and messages to flow in. I found the match/message rates to be significantly different for each city. Sample size of ~34,000 right swipes.
2) A/B test two female profiles with exact same photos and bio except 1 was a CEO and 1 was Graphic Designer. Swiped on 1000 men in NYC and 1000 men in SF.
3) A/B test two female profiles with exact same photos and bio except 1 was listed as 29 and 1 was listed as 31. Swiped on 1000 men in NYC and 1000 men in SF.
Through my experience in this, I can see the methodology they used in this study could be flawed. Specific concerns:
* While I don't have any real inside knowledge into Tinder's "recommendation" algorithm of who they show to you, I assume there is a strong preference to show active users first. So if they are swiping on hundreds of thousands of profiles, they are probably burning through the legitimately active users in a region pretty quickly... that's one reason why they get a lot of matches quickly and not as many matches over time and end up with a 0.6% match rate.
* The number of messages that guys send (at least as of 2 years ago when I ran my studies) is wildly more than women. The male profile was seeing an 11.8% match rate, and a message rate of 15.3% from the matches for an effective message rate of 1.8%. Whereas the women were getting an 81.5% match rate, with 63.9% message rate from those matches for an effective message rate of 52.1%.
* I believe there is now rate-limiting on the right swiping, so after ~100 or so right swipes, you have to wait 12 hours until right-swiping again. Really not sure how they could have made it through hundreds of thousands of profiles unless they paid for the premium membership.
Anyway, interesting stuff regardless, happy to release more data when I have time, if there is interest.
Edit: To those downvoting, could you explain why? I'd be happy to improve my comment, if I knew how. I am honestly interested in discussing the ethics of bots that pose as humans.
The line that I drew at the time was that, aside from the initial match, the bots were never going to engage in any on-going way with the matches. So the bots could receive messages from matches, but would never send messages or post Moments (which was a feature at the time to effectively message all of your matches with a photo).
By questioning the bot author over the morality of their methodology, your post appears to suggest that people who don't reply to messages would be equally perceived as having wasted the time of message authors, which is a view that your downvoters find troubling. That may not have been your intention, given your disclaimer and edits, but I can see why it could be construed that way.
Feel free to reach out to me privately (contact info in profile) and I'll share with you a quick digest of the results before the blog post gets published.
For the record, here are my credentials: I've tinder-valeted multiple guy friends, selecting women and conversing with them and warming things up for them. My friends happen to be across a wide variety of attractiveness and success spectrum.
Observations:
1. As is obvious, attractive/successful men get a lot more likes than women.
2. Guys who get lesser matches get increasingly desperate, and start liking everyone.
3. Being 'picky' for guys is hard work. It seems funny when I put it this way, but going through hundreds/thousand(s) of women, and even making a binary choice of yes/no is actually pretty tiring. Even my better guy friends have tended to go on the safer side and pick the earlier choices, because oh god it's a tiring head-aching process, even if you have a group of friends assisting you with the choice and the conversations.
Going through Tinder so much has made me very very very cynical either about people, or the kind of people on Tinder. We're all stereotypes. Really. One picture with mountain in the background, one with a beach, one in Europe, one with friends, one with pet/lonely pouty picture. Bios mentioning 1) 'sarcasm' 2) love of beer 3) love of scotch/whisky. Some mention their heights, most add ' I don't know why this matters but here it is'. Almost everyone desirable puts 'not into hookups', but rarely means it. So many other things. It was only after I started heavily using Tinder (for others) that I really appreciated meeting/dating people more in person/talking over the phone and got really into 'old school' dating.
Anyone else have very different experience?
Then I met someone and we've been dating for 6 months so hopefully I don't get to test it out much more.
NYC also has a large surplus of single women, and Seattle has a surplus of single men.
Basically, the east coast cities have female surpluses, and the tech-heavy west coast cities have male surpluses.
I'll use myself as an example: I'm a software engineer (big surprise on this site!), so I don't have any female coworkers who are eligible, I'm not a college student any more, I'm not religious so I don't go to church, I'm not a drinker so hanging out in bars isn't really fun for me, and I don't have any friends left who have single female friends to introduce me to. So that leaves me with things like 1) hobby/social groups on Meetup.com, 2) hanging out in coffee shops, 3) going to bars even though I don't drink and don't like the atmosphere, and 4) online dating. FWIW, I've been doing #1 (I've tried #2 but it has such a terrible success rate in actually meeting anyone I gave up; you'd have to spend a LOT of time to meet just a few people, unless you're in your 20s and in a real hot-spot for this kind of thing, like on a college campus), and not experienced any success there at all: I go to hiking meetup, but it seems most of the women who attend these in this area (and there's a lot, sometimes a 3-1 ratio F:M!) are retirement-age. Sorry, I'm not into dating women old enough to be my mother.
Online dating exposes you to people you would never meet in real life; that's why people do it. There's just no way around it. You can talk all you want about how it's better to meet people in person, but our society simply does not have many venues for this any more. In the old days, people met through friends, family, and church. These days, people like us are non-religious, we've moved away from our hometowns and move periodically for work so we don't have many friends to put us in contact with possible partners and family lives too far away. Online dating also lets you filter people out easier: I can look through someone's profile in less than 60 seconds and determine she's not someone I'd be interested in dating for various reasons (religious, extreme or conservative political opinions, etc.), things which aren't immediately obvious if you just walk up to someone in a bar and start chatting, and which may take a long time to find out through normal conversation.
You also mentioned the pros of online dating, everyone is aware although it sounds like you've had to explain this to other people in your age range and older, you neglected the cons. Females get a gender surplus of men on online dating, if you want females you should pursue situations with a gender surplus of females, and this distinctly excludes online dating.
Yes, I realize that, however the venues for this are very limited in my experience; I already listed out everything I could think of.
Usually, when this discussion comes up, people will recommend things like "find groups that do things you like, and you'll meet women you like there!" Sorry, but I'm not likely to meet any desirable and single women at a Linux or programming group. And I do attend some outdoors groups, but IME there the women are generally much older than me (and I'm not young either). I'm not really sure what the single female 30-45 crowd does in the DC area, but it's not hiking. From my limited dating experience in this area, their general free-time activity appears to be hanging out with their female friends and complaining that they can't find a husband while their biological clock is running out so they're going to start on IVF from a donor.
Dating at this age really sucks.
SF has an unusually lopsided gender ratio, with more college-educated men than women, while almost all other major metro areas skew towards having more women than men. Jon Birger's Date-onomics covers this: http://jakeseliger.com/2015/09/19/briefly-noted-date-onomics..., and I rather liked it.
It was a little more interesting when things were more anonymous, but nowadays since identity and digital identity are strongly coupled I assume less dupes, alternate accounts, and full-identity copycats. In my opinion it's just a characteristic of the medium of digital matchmaking. The goal outcome is a match, that's all you want. There is a temporal lingua franca of the moment with trends, and you are either following it or you are not. Because the other users are only able to see this particular payload of images/bio/whatever, all inferences towards this goal must be evaluated from only this input and so it does tend to be exhausting.
I think to answer your question more succinctly, I haven't seen a digital matchmaking service that doesn't act like this.
2. "I want to give you a sexy show, go this website!" Driving traffic to paid webcam sites.
3. "Friend me on facebook!" Similar to one, but datamining for ad networks could be the real motivation here.
4. "I want to fly out to meet you, but I can't afford a plane ticket!" Old school scamming money.
Anyone seen others?
A woman can have 10 children in a lifetime.
Only this ridiculous age could be surprised by the behavioral outcomes of this basic fact.
2. don't be not good looking
That said, however, you do have to be realistic about what kind of woman you can attract.
Also, if you get distracted by someone you're really not into, that can keep you from meeting someone who's a better match for you.
Not specifically Tinder, but rather a good algorithm that improves your signal to noise ratio. The problem there, as i see it, is always users though. Even if the site has an awesome pitch, you need critical mass to feel you have a shot at it.
Perhaps Facebook should buy and integrate something like OkCupid. A data-centric approach to matching, combined with the largest data set (albeit, not tailored for OkCupid..) seems like a very interesting prospect.
edit: Not sure what being picky has to do with dating sites... think i wandered, apologies.
OKCupid has already been bought by the company that owns Tinder and Match.com (unfortunately). This was a year or two ago I think.
I'm not sure how people can sleep with someone they're not attracted to. Isn't being attracted required you know for getting a physical response?
It's complicated, and there's more than one dimension.
I could list a dozen questions about each genders respective choosey levels and tactics.. they're quite common and well known. But at the end of the day, are they even effective? Does each gender even have the same goals? Are males and females even happy with the result of their (conscious or unconscious) behavior?
The two parties in question have such different tactics and tend to play the game so differently. Yet they're dependent on each other (barring additional genders or gender preferences, which only complicate matters in this already confusing discussion haha).
It's all quite puzzling. Personally, i view myself as very different in this data sample, so perhaps i'm so puzzled because i'm so different.. for better or worse. Regardless, i don't understand.
It also signals a lack of empathy IMO. No one likes being matched and immediately unmatched.
Men who send a lot of swipes get their outgoing swipes throttled. Women who receive a lot of swipes get those swipes throttled, too.
Think about if you were the programmer working on Tinder. The first thing I would build is swipe spam detection.
As I've seen there is a daily limit on swipes (which can be bypassed with an in app purchase).
They're saying 90 swipes in 30 seconds.
If both parties have to swipe in order for them to receive spam, why does Tinder care? In your head, do you think server costs are their primary concern?
They do exactly this. It's their pay model, buy more swipes.