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How Tinder's “feedback loop” forces men and women into extreme strategies
- brixon 10y agoTL;DR: Men are not picky, but women are. Men can get more matches with a bio and more pics.
- ljk 10y ago1. be good looking 2. don't be not good looking
- benten10 10y agoFinally, a topic I can consider myself some kind of expert in! 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?
- jdavis703 10y agoWhat I found interesting is that I (a straight, male) get a far higher match percentage in the D.C. area than in the S.F. Bay Area. This happens every time I travel back to D.C. I imagine that there are a lot of interesting variables that go into this, making this research not applicable for the "real world."
- toomim 10y agoThe sex ratio in DC has more females. But also your matches will tend to build up behind the scenes when you are away, as people swipe your now-relocated profile, so when you return, they'll unleash like a torrential orgasm.
- purplerabbit 10y agoA couple of my guy friends have told me they swipe "Yes" on every single girl. I suspect that this isn't too uncommon.
- JoeAltmaier 10y agoSounds like they need a 'selectivity rating' so you can tell they aren't serious. Like your seller rating on EBay.
- mwfunk 10y agoOh, they are serious. That's just what a lot of people have to do to get anywhere with anyone. The alternative for most guys is being picky and getting nothing.
- Grishnakh 10y agoPersonally, I'd rather be picky and get nothing if the alternative is having to sleep with someone I'm totally not attracted to. Porn is more satisfying, and with porn I don't have to worry about hurting the girl's feelings. 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.
- antisthenes 10y ago> the alternative is having to sleep with someone I'm totally not attracted to. 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?
- Unklejoe 10y agoBasically, no. You'd be surprised what the imagination can do.
- 10y ago
- lloyd-christmas 10y agoquickly adds more photos
- Retr0spectrum 10y agoI suppose a solution would be to somehow limit the number of right-swipes that can be made, or enforcing a swipe ratio. However, that would probably end up reducing overall usage of the app, so Tinder is unlikely to adopt such a strategy.
- lloyd-christmas 10y ago> I suppose a solution would be to somehow limit the number of right-swipes that can be made They do exactly this. It's their pay model, buy more swipes.
- imh 10y ago21% of women sending a message first seems surprising. I only skimmed the paper, but it doesn't seem like they removed bots from their data. Back when I was single, the vast majority of women messaging first were bots.
- lloyd-christmas 10y agoYeah, this is definitely the case. I swipe right on everyone. It's an extreme rarity to find a woman who texts first. I'd put it at easily less than 5% (if they aren't a bot).
- Grishnakh 10y agoThe bots are getting smarter; now they wait for you to write first, then chat you up a bit, then give you a spiel about how their boyfriend has ED and they need a hook-up.
- mynegation 10y agoAs a person not on Tinder, I wonder: what is the endgame for bots or botmasters?
- J_Darnley 10y agoMost of the screenshots of the crap ones usually advertise some webcam sex show which requires a credit card for age verification (what they really mean is for scamming you out of money).
- 1812Overture 10y agoI've seen a few things: 1. "Follow me on instagram/twitter for more pics!" Getting real followers for fake social media accounts. 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?
- PaulMest 10y agoI wrote a Tinder bot a couple of years ago and ran some interesting studies: 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.
- tedsanders 10y agoHonestly curious: Do you feel guilty for wasting the time of 4,000 men? To me, it feels selfish to value your own learning over the time of thousands of other strangers. Of course, you and others may feel differently than me. What's your approach for thinking about where to draw the line? 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.
- 10y ago
- carsongross 10y agoA man can have 10 children in a day. A woman can have 10 children in a lifetime. Only this ridiculous age could be surprised by the behavioral outcomes of this basic fact.
- rsmckinney 10y agotrue story
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]