3 ms·

> Most men get somewhere like 0-4 matches a week and most women get somewhere like 100-1000. That’s a 25x difference best-case scenario and often it’s over 100x

> Most men get somewhere like 0-4 matches a week and most women get somewhere like 100-1000. That’s a 25x difference best-case scenario and often it’s over 100x. Which is kind of insane considering there are about 50/50 men to women ratio in real life. How is this statistically possible? Women getting way more _likes_ is plausible if men swipe right much more than women do. But each _match_ involves a man and a woman getting a match.

rtpg 4y ago
I'm not sure of that extreme of a ratio, but many of my single women friends will use the app, match with people, and it turns out that loads of the guys are just really useless... so it's not clear whether the matches are actually worthwhile. Imagine a guy with a very interesting profile, who swipes right all the time. People match with him cuz he has the nice profile. Turns out that he sticks around on the platform for a long time. Suddenly this one person is responsible for loads of matches. So if you have these long-term users, they can generate disproportionate amount of matches with themselves, biasing the pool. This could be even more accentuated by Tinder-style algos. Somebody's popular? Of course their profile will show up more often! If you combine this with people on the other side matching pretty conservatively... then suddenly you can have a handful of men receiving the large majority of the focus. Paraphrasing some tweet, at least at parties the most popular guy can only talk to so many people at once!
- ratww 4y ago
  Yep, exactly. That's what the grandparent post [1] meant with "Because a lot of men like to swipe right on nearly everyone and buy passes which get them unlimited swipes". This is where the majority of Tinder's money is coming from, so I doubt this will be ever be curbed. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31749379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31749379
bongoman37 4y ago
cthor 4y ago
Ratio of women:men using the service. Say there are 10 women and 30 men on the service, and each woman matches with 3 men. 30 matches total. Assuming equal distribution, the men have 1 match each. You can also then have a more extreme distribution. 3 of those men could have 10 matches and the other 27 have zero. Median man has zero matches, 80th percentile ("top 20%") has zero matches.
cromd 4y ago
I think you're right about 100-1000 being a count for "likes" rather than "matches" (terminology would differ by platform). If a woman had 100 people with a mutual interest, ready to talk, they wouldn't keep swiping to get to 200. (Not super relevant to your point but maybe to the whole page) I think many swiping apps mostly show people that are already interested, which seems reasonable as a prioritization method. So a "like" from a woman is converted into an instant "match". I've heard some women brag like "90% of guys I swipe on like me back", but there's some bias in there. I've also known men who are perfectly likable, who took a more passive approach, and never received a single incoming "like" from a woman in months. It's inconceivable that in a city of millions, _nobody_ finds the man attractive, not even the bottom 1% of women. It's just that they're not showing the profile much, and it's unclear if they're even giving it a tiny amount of random exposure. Even if you swipe, it's probably not enough to get to the top of the pile of thousands of horny dudes. So one has to buy the exposure for an hour or so then, possibly for hundreds of dollars a month. It's a good scheme, and the platforms like the information asymmetry on how it all works too - many people are guessing about things in these threads, which platform employees know the simple answer to.

rtpg 4y ago

I'm not sure of that extreme of a ratio, but many of my single women friends will use the app, match with people, and it turns out that loads of the guys are just really useless... so it's not clear whether the matches are actually worthwhile. Imagine a guy with a very interesting profile, who swipes right all the time. People match with him cuz he has the nice profile. Turns out that he sticks around on the platform for a long time. Suddenly this one person is responsible for loads of matches. So if you have these long-term users, they can generate disproportionate amount of matches with themselves, biasing the pool. This could be even more accentuated by Tinder-style algos. Somebody's popular? Of course their profile will show up more often! If you combine this with people on the other side matching pretty conservatively... then suddenly you can have a handful of men receiving the large majority of the focus. Paraphrasing some tweet, at least at parties the most popular guy can only talk to so many people at once!

ratww 4y ago
Yep, exactly. That's what the grandparent post [1] meant with "Because a lot of men like to swipe right on nearly everyone and buy passes which get them unlimited swipes". This is where the majority of Tinder's money is coming from, so I doubt this will be ever be curbed. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31749379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31749379

bongoman37 4y ago

cthor 4y ago

Ratio of women:men using the service. Say there are 10 women and 30 men on the service, and each woman matches with 3 men. 30 matches total. Assuming equal distribution, the men have 1 match each. You can also then have a more extreme distribution. 3 of those men could have 10 matches and the other 27 have zero. Median man has zero matches, 80th percentile ("top 20%") has zero matches.

cromd 4y ago

I think you're right about 100-1000 being a count for "likes" rather than "matches" (terminology would differ by platform). If a woman had 100 people with a mutual interest, ready to talk, they wouldn't keep swiping to get to 200. (Not super relevant to your point but maybe to the whole page) I think many swiping apps mostly show people that are already interested, which seems reasonable as a prioritization method. So a "like" from a woman is converted into an instant "match". I've heard some women brag like "90% of guys I swipe on like me back", but there's some bias in there. I've also known men who are perfectly likable, who took a more passive approach, and never received a single incoming "like" from a woman in months. It's inconceivable that in a city of millions, _nobody_ finds the man attractive, not even the bottom 1% of women. It's just that they're not showing the profile much, and it's unclear if they're even giving it a tiny amount of random exposure. Even if you swipe, it's probably not enough to get to the top of the pile of thousands of horny dudes. So one has to buy the exposure for an hour or so then, possibly for hundreds of dollars a month. It's a good scheme, and the platforms like the information asymmetry on how it all works too - many people are guessing about things in these threads, which platform employees know the simple answer to.