Gen N - whenever someone liked YOU, Tinder would immediately bring this person to the front of your like queue. This meant that if you hadn't used the app for say, in a day, then the first X persons presented would be people who liked you and you would get a bunch of matches.
Gen N+1 - Gen N was changed, such that maybe you'd get one match if you consistently liked the first 20 or so people in your queue. However, people who liked _you_ were not filtered out by the setting on your distance filter. So, you could set this filter to distance 1 KM, and basically get a list of matches to the forefront again.
Gen N+2 - the above hack was fixed, such that these likes would be filtered out as well (bastards). And then it felt like their algorithm became more and more hostile, post-poning presentation of people who liked you more and more. Basically, they really started to gamify the system, so that you would need to get these "power" boosts to get any matches at all apparently? I quit not long after this filter-hack was "fixed", so not sure what happened then.