Tinder Auto-liker script in 70 lines | Hacker News Reader

Tinder Auto-liker script in 70 lines

gist.github.com

41 pointsnojvek50 comments

This script also has an unintended consequence: it can roughly measure how attractive you are to the population. Assuming that everyone you auto-swipe will also respond (and truthfully, not using this script) this could give you some very sobering results if you're not the most attractive. Imagine the guy who runs this and gets 10-15 likes. It's like automating going to a bar and getting stuffed all night long, only quicker! It could also of course end up boosting your ego a lot, but I suspect for many it will not. Stay thirsty, my friends.

Which brings an interesting improvement to the game: Testing pictures.

So far I've had the most success with a simple picture of me stretching when I was tired one morning and sister had my phone and was bored. I think the main feature is that you can see my forearms are veiny. But most of my face is obscured by sunglasses, may hair is covered by a wool hat, and I'm generally being tired, sleepy, and uninteresting.

Pic in question: http://instagram.com/p/lm5FNjkxp1/?modal=true

Interesting.

I made http://tinderus.com/ the other day, essentially just to give people an alternative perspective on their profile and images.

How many sales have you made at $50?

Over 100.

Neat! I'll be honest, I wouldn't have thought so many but sounds like you've found a good market.

Well done. Would you mind sharing details of how you got your press coverage?

Of course!

You can read about it here: https://medium.com/p/8e02c9a3c33b

I run http://catchlondon.com/ - a PR Agency focused on technology that I founded one year ago.

I did some A/B testing with an similar auto-swipe script two months ago: A smile on the face with a red shirt performed best for me.

Incidentally I remember this study a while back stating that red indeed is a colour that can make both men and women more attractive:

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-social-thinker/20100...

A very interesting study on this topic from OkCupid: http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-4-big-myths-of-profile...

> it can roughly measure how attractive you are to the population

You could even push that concept further, and test a picture in different cities/countries. That way you can find where in the world people find you most attractive :D

I read somewhere that some men do this at speed-dating: tick every box so they get to find out all of the women that ticked their box.

Based on Cammi Pham's story[0] it sounds like auto-liking profiles en masse is not all it's cracked up to be. Summarizing her post (and probably forgetting a detail or two), you end up with tons of worthless results you don't really want, and you're so inundated with "connections" - messages from other eager people - that you can't get through them quickly enough to get to the good ones before they get sick of waiting and block you.

Neat mini-project, but it might be more interesting to see what kind of cool stuff you can do with Tinder beyond this.

0: http://www.cammipham.com/tinder-hack/ (and incredibly not posted to HN as far as I can tell)

That's likely for female profiles, but the situation is usually reversed for men. Liking everything means that the smaller number of women that swipe right on your profile will instantly match, and then you can decide to reply or not.

Why would it be different for men?

I think the stereotype is that men are not as discerning as women when dating. That is, if a straight man is presented with 100 random women, he'd be more likely to consider a larger number of them to be dateable, than if a straight woman were presented with 100 random men.

Also, there tend to be many more men seeking women profiles than women seeking men so the men have to work harder to stand out.

I wonder why that is, in my experience single women hate being single at least as much as men do.

I'm pretty sure this question was explored in a really interesting OKCupid blog post (I think it was in their "Why you should never pay for online dating" post) but that entry disappeared when they were acquired by Match.

That's from the perspective of an attractive young lady. A male, let alone an unattractive one, will have much higher chances of getting any response at all with the en masse approach.

I always assumed Tinder would have something in place to stop people (/guys?) just swiping 'Like' to every picture? Decrease the percentage that person gets shown to the opposite sex, for instance, in favour of people who are actually swiping like with some discrimination. Anyone with a working knowledge of the system care to comment?

That said I know plenty of guys who just swipe yes to everyone (à la this script), and then just remove people from their matches if they don't like them.

I tried the automated-liker approach a few months ago. While post-processing makes more sense in theory, Tinder's algorithms will penalize you for having a poor match/message ratio.

What I found to be a lot more fun is to run your hits through Google's reverse image search to see who they are in real life before striking up a conversation.

I go for the opposite approach. The less I know about the person before we first meet IRL the better. Makes dates more fun.

And [surprisingly?] more likely to end in somebody's bed.

You go on actual dates with women you meet from Tinder? Edit: It's an electronic meat market... c'mon. Don't make it too hard. Just say you have Netflix = done.

Jesus man, what else will people think of? Going on dates with people from an photo A/B testing site? Wow.

Isn't that like the whole point of the app?

On the other hand, women go on actual dates with a guy from Tinder, lol.

A date is when a man and a woman get together in meatspace to gauge potential for bumping uglies.

What's the difference between a date and an actual date? You seem to imply there is.

I have never used Tinder, but if I understand it correctly men and women must mutually "like" each other before messaging, but what happens in practice is that men like almost every female profile?

Why not just drop the pretence and build an app which allows women to message men, but not vice versa?

There are a bunch of sex-date-sites on the web, where guys have to pay if they want to message women and women can message them for free.

Maybe the women who use Tinder want to be 100% sure "he" liked them?

But if the like threshold is so low that people are automating it then is it even useful? Perhaps a better solution would be to allow women to select men that they are interested in and then those men get the option of messaging the women?

If someone bothers to message you it would be a better signal than swiping the screen but then it might be depressing if you select some men and then none of them message you?

Oh, don't get me wrong, I think online dating is broken to the core :D

I just try to understand the people using it :)

In the last 12 months I met about 7 people with romantic interest in me only one of them was from a dating site AND she I already knew her from a party.

But theoretically I should meet more on dating sites.

On average that makes sense, but it breaks badly for some critical cases such as very attractive men. If those users are driven away then the application becomes less attractive to women.

Is it just me, or is it ridiculous that their API isn't more protected than this? Most popular apps these days require signed requests, and then store those signing algorithms in places where they are extremely difficult to get (in Android apps, signing algorithms are almost always stored in native libraries). Tinder didn't even attempt to implement request signing.

This, and of course the $1 million investment in the Yo app, just keep piling up the evidence that VC's and even potential acquirers just don't care about how beautiful or secure your code is, even if poor security and code quality threaten the value of the entire business. They just want users, and even that seems to be negotiable if you have a solid background.

Well to be honest it's not hard to secure your app once you have the users. Getting users when you have a "beautiful or secure" app on the other end...

They're making money. They use SSL and OAuth. that works 99.9% of the cases. The rest would be nerds like me who would go on hacking the damn thing. I've gotten a few dates but nothing interesting. The previous API version had real birthdates, full names and geolocations. That was gold!

To anyone wishing to use this, there is a missing opening " on line 5 just before facebook_token.

Edit: I realise this should really be posted on the Github page but I don't have an account and can't be bothered to register a new one.

its also missing another semicolon

https://gist.github.com/than2/26bf8c79052acc2804bd

here, i fixed it and disabled the logging and added a counter

I was removing my actual facebook token and reducing profanity. Fixed the issues!

Could someone explain briefly how you get facebook token which is necessary in script ?

I know how to use Charles just don't know where to luck and what variables to look or where is it generated.

The fact that this is a thing, and represents a general "strategy" when using Tinder, means to me that Tinder has failed.

Isn't this the case with every dating site?

For me as guy it's always a numbers game. For my female friends it's a filter game.

I'm on okcupid for like 3 years now and I never got any messages. My girlfriend was there for 3 months and said, she didn't write any messages, because she got about 20 per day.

For me all dating sites have failed.

I founded & ran a big dating site (big for my country); the most successful dates / marriages (it's been 6 years since we sold and we still get a lot of cards from people about getting married / having kids) where not from the way most people meet on / use these sites. People very much use them wrong imho; guys pay 0 attention to their profile besides their pic and just mail every face they like and women pay attention to their profile and read the ones the guys put up. So they will never match. Both sides lie and the least attention they pay to their own profiles, the more lies are in them as they don't see it as anything to worry about. The most successful ones are when guys pay a lot of attention and are honest (about yes they get hammered every weekend and they want girls who smoke and hate children; things which don't make you popular maybe, but if it's so, it's so), don't mail just everyone (and copy/paste the same; 'hi you are cute, here is my number') and take their time before trying to squeeze out as many 'real life' dates (and sex) as possible.

Obviously there is room for both and both work, but we talked to many people, guys and girls in that time and in the end they want something real; most people on dating sites are just doing it wrong; it's not the dating site. We ended up selling 'profile help' where we would sit down and talk to (both sexes) and fix up their profiles and their communication. It seems obvious to people here (well ...) that if you meet in a bar later in the evening after one message online and jump in bed that night you'll probably won't be moving in soon and more than often actually stuff gets stolen that way as well (from phones to TVs to cars...). By keeping it online for a while with someone you not only learn a lot about eachother, but you weed out the perverts, criminals, sex addicts etc. Unfortunately, people are impatient and generally for some reason, lose all common sense when it comes to online dating.

Thanks for the insight :)

But if a web-service needs consulting (profile-help) to work properly, it doesn't sound that good to me.

Also okcupid got sold too and I wouldn't consider it "good", better than the most, but not really good.

There is still the problem, that women don't write messages and get dumped with messages by guys.

But women do write messages (in my experience), just not to bad/bland/standard profiles.

Explains why 99% never starts a discussion, got a bit bored of it after a week.

why

(edit: wtf. minus three? For me asking why you would automate ratings in a dating app?)

because boobs

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