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How Hinge's algorithm decides who you date

83 points by ourmandave 3y ago

bradley13 3y ago
Look at the incentives. Dating apps want you to keep paying. That means they don't want you to meet someone worth entering a long-term rrlationship with. They want you to have just enough success to stay a customer. The occasional, not-awful date. Like playing the slots: you get occasional, small payouts, and you hear about other people winning jackpots (oops, they slipped up), so you keep putting money in. A believable service needs to align its interests with yours, in some believable way.
- rqtwteye 3y ago
  When I used Hinge, I never saw a reason to pay for it. Match is basically useless without paying and for Bumble it also helps to pay. Not so much with Hinge.
- zdragnar 3y ago
  This erroneously believes that the owners think the following: 1- it is possible to completely tap the dating market and long term customers are necessary 2- customers all have a similar threshold at which they are just-successful enough to stay engaged long term Neither of these things are true. The more people "win the jackpot", per your analogy, the more people will use the platform. The market is big enough they don't need to fool you into paying to be unsuccessful.
  - yomlica8 3y ago
    > 2- customers all have a similar threshold at which they are just-successful enough to stay engaged long term Don't they just create fake bot accounts to draw you back in when they detect you've abandoned the app? I'd imagine the app is tuned to maximum scam based on the individual user not using a single set of values.
    - water9 3y ago
      Yes the less users on the app, the more bots they have to employe to make it not feel like dead Internet conspiracy
  - spott 3y ago
    Not if they don’t believe that customers will be able to tell the difference between stringing along and honestly trying. The problem is hard. It can’t be deterministically solved. Any likely statistical improvement is unprovable in a marketing sense (a competitor that is as good as possible at finding matches cannot prove it to the market that they are actually better at finding matches than a method that strings people along). Your points are only true if there isn’t an information asymmetry, but there is. I don’t think they are necessarily stringing people along on purpose, but they don’t have incentives to tell people they can’t help them, and they don’t have incentives to improve the product for those who aren’t successful. Those who are successful are probably going to be successful regardless of the platform they are using, and those who are unsuccessful aren’t going to be successful anywhere. And fixing that (rather than just milking money from the unsuccessful) isn’t really worth anything to them.
- freejazz 3y ago
  This is a bit paranoid - if no one found good matches through these services, no one would ever use them. It definitely sucks if you are on the losing end of the dating spectrum, but some of those people seem to have some sort of belief that they are entitled to dates, when they aren't. If you weren't getting action in real life, I don't think it's likely that people are going to be more desirous of you online. I've used these services and have had plenty of matches and luck, without ever needing to pay for it, with some of the matches working out for years(I don't blame the dating apps that we didn't get married), so I can't really agree with your perspective at all.
- tayo42 3y ago
  that doesnt make sense, there would always be a new generation entering the dating age. Otherwise the marriage industry would be optimizing for divorces too.
  - lelanthran 3y ago
    > that doesnt make sense, there would always be a new generation entering the dating age. Otherwise the marriage industry would be optimizing for divorces too. Don't they? I mean, maybe not intentionally, but it certainly evolved to be that way. The more they can get you to pay for a once-off party, the less money you have entering your marriage. The less money the man pays, the more encouragement is bride is given to be bitter. This results in entering a marriage with less financial stability than you'd otherwise have. They sell the message constantly that it's okay to forgo things like home ownership as long as you get the "perfect" (i.e. most expensive) marriage. There's ever more useless things added to the ritual, resulting in an ever more stressful time due to more friction and more bitterness afterwards. They have spoken rules about how much you should spend based on a multiple (not a fraction) of what your income is. They don't care, and often even encourage, allowing the future in-laws to make a loan so that the couple can get the best marriage. That certainly looks like optimising for divorce to me. They sell it as a once in a lifetime experience, but they already know from their own experience that it's 50/50, if that. To me it looks like they are optimising for revenue, which indirectly means optimising for divorces.
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catlover76 3y ago
I've used Hinge a lot as a heterosexual male, and it's pretty obvious they want dudes to pay for Roses to message attractive girls. For me and most of my friends who have used it, the disparity between the normal, free feed and the "Standouts", for which one must use Roses, is comical. I don't see how that's too mysterious, and, for the most part, I don't hold it against Hinge, which has to try to make money. edit: also, the other thing I forgot to say, is that I have also just keep deleting and recreating my account for every dating app. I don't do that to "game the algorithms" for these apps, though that may be a secondary benefit. I do it because I get tired of them, find them toxic/unhealthy, etc. I kind of just assumed most people did that, and I bet if the author's friend just shrugged and did that in the first instance instead of alleging foul play and conspiracy, they would have had a better time. IIRC, Hinge always starts off by showing a good number of very attractive people in the main feed regardless, which I always assumed was partly to impress a new user with how worthwhile the app is, as well as trying to figure out how attractive the user is by seeing if attractive people respond to them.
- omeze 3y ago
  I think the standouts are generally people who are highly liked/rated. Id see a lot of people there before & after I saw them in my normal feed. Roses just give an escape hatch for pay to play but they’ll show up in your feed normally if the recommendation system thinks so.
- delta_p_delta_x 3y ago
  > and it's pretty obvious they want dudes to pay for Roses to message attractive girls. Pretty much every dating app makes its money off (thirsty) men. Average women get hundreds of matches a day; ten a week is a very good rate for the average man.
- commandlinefan 3y ago
  > pay for Roses to message attractive girls I'm too old to have used dating apps, but IIUC the conspiracy theory is not just that you have to pay a premium to message the attractive girls, but they're actually paid by the dating app itself to interact with you. (I'm too old for dating apps, but I'm not too old for certain types of "clubs" whose business model was the same).
TrackerFF 3y ago
I downloaded Tinder right after I got single, back in 2015? It was glorious. It really did feel fun and exciting - I'm by no means a model-looking dude, but I got hundreds of matches in a fairly small place (think city with population of 50k), and people just felt more genuine and interested on the various apps back then. Next time around I tried Tinder et. al. was a couple of years later(2018/2019), and I immediately noticed less matches, less convos, and the app being more pushy. I recently, as in this year, tried some of the apps again...it's a total shit show, to be honest. I've never tried any apps that applied so many dark patterns. It all feels like one big funnel where the goal is to extract money off you through gold memberships, boosting, extra swipes, and what not. I noticed "fake" notices, spammy notices, just a constant barrage of notices and messages NOT from actual people. After a couple of days I concluded that most (all?) of these dating apps are pay-to-play. You start off with some initial amount of matches, which drop off sharply - then nothing. I asked a friend in the same room if she could see me on Tinder, but no dice, I didn't even show up on her feed - though she came up on mine. These apps used to be easy and fun - now they just feel like the most pushy and parasitic apps out there.
- latchkey 3y ago
  > Next time around I tried Tinder et. al. was a couple of years later(2018/2019), and I immediately noticed less matches, less convos, and the app being more pushy. They also filter you based on age. When I turned 40+, everything changed in terms of presentation and matches literally the next day.
  - strulovich 3y ago
    Isn’t turning 40 just likely to remove you from all users filtering up to 39, which sounds like a natural setting many users would choose?
    - latchkey 3y ago
      Often those settings are ignored or fuzzy. Tinder also doesn't show you what someone else's settings are, so you can't game that. When I'd set my age ranges to 30+, I'd still see people younger than that because the person on the other end would put older ranges in. It is kind of a two way fuzzy search engine. I built a super popular dating app right before Tinder came onto the market... our search was intentionally pretty fuzzy in this regard.
at_ 3y ago
Haven't been on 'the apps' in a good while, but it was my belief that they all work a bit like this, no? The algorithm sizes you up, you get put in a bucket, and you are matched with those who are in an equivalent bucket. Bucket hopping is then made available at a cost.
hospitalJail 3y ago
I wonder why these Algorithms need to be opaque? If everyone knew the rules, it would be a level playing ground. Instead it allows the people who have all day/financial incentives to learn the rules.
- jeffbee 3y ago
  > If everyone knew the rules, it would be a level playing ground. I see you have never worked in anti-abuse.
- laurent123456 3y ago
  If you had read the article, you'd know the answer to your question: > Rule breakers often make new accounts after an outright ban, so the subtle yet frustrating shadowban can be a better way to curb misbehavior.
  - hospitalJail 3y ago
    I read the article, that isn't relevant to my original post. The 'Algorithm' applies outside of one dating app.
swimorsinka 3y ago
I definitely fell into this category. None of my messages ever seemed to go through. I tried everything to fix it. The only thing that worked was getting a new phone, new number, and never connecting to my wifi. I have no idea what I did to get my account into that state but it really sucks. It damages your self esteem, but this is modern dating I guess. Talking to people in real life is quite a bit better.
landr0id 3y ago
>Anthony couldn’t think of anything that might have gotten his account flagged. Regardless, Hinge didn’t offer an explanation for his experience. It's been a while since I've been on Hinge, but Hinge is not like Tinder in terms of edgy/risque conversation, and I played every conversation with a match safe. I woke up one morning and was banned. They say you can appeal, but this seems like mostly something to make you feel like there's a possible recourse. What I gathered from Reddit is that it's actually rather easy to get banned by simply not talking to people. There were a few times where I wouldn't message someone right away from not having a good ice breaker, I was busy, or the conversation just went nowhere and people would unmatch. When you unmatch with someone it asks if you'd like to report them as well. Since Hinge is meant to be a more serious dating platform, not talking to people can be seen as not taking the platform seriously and trying to hook up or something and if this happens enough times it seems Hinge will flag your account.
- water9 3y ago
  On Bumble if you get a bunch of matches and don’t reply within 24 hours it basically makes the girl feel like you ghosted them and the report and unmatch button are right next to each other. What do you think a woman scorned is gonna press?
- edgyquant 3y ago
  That sounds pretty good to me, the most annoying part about these dating apps is that people match with dozens of other people and then don’t message or respond.
- mentalpiracy 3y ago
  One important detail to add: hinge limits users to one new match per day. This fact also goes into the calculation when grading user interactions.
  - landr0id 3y ago
    I paid for whatever the premium version that lifts such restrictions is called. I'm fairly confident that I messaged everyone that matched and if the conversation died I would unmatch to clean things up.
mikeyouse 3y ago
Many of the popular dating apps are all owned by Match group -- Tinder, Match.com, Meetic, OkCupid, Hinge, Plenty of Fish, OurTime, etc. etc. It was a huge private equity play under IAC for awhile and then they spun out and IPOed but the universal dark patterns and enshitification isn't coincidental.
- coldcode 3y ago
  It's like Expedia owning many of the familiar travel brands: in reality they are all serving up the same content, but with different marketing, yet many people think it's a different company. You might think a brand is different and it might appeal to a different clientele but underneath its the same entity making all the decisions. It allows the brand to target different people without confusing everyone with a single brand saying different things; yet still allow for economies of scale. Great business for them, may seriously suck to be a customer since the alternatives are potentially no better if you don't like one.
  - kridsdale3 3y ago
    Same as all the junk food being owned by just 2 or 3 players in actuality. The vertical integration must be excellent for supply-chain dominance.
  - Gibbon1 3y ago
    I've been thinking of late that we need to add some sort of five year sunset rule about brands and acquisitions to antitrust laws. So after an acquisition the buyer has a couple of years before they have to stop using the acquired companies name and brand.
    - extraduder_ire 3y ago
      Wouldn't that just lead to the brands themselves being sold off or licensed? Or, if such things were prevented somehow, many sorts of things being terribly confusing. Like, needing to go down to the "Yum! Brands" to get take-out, no not the pizza one, the chicken one. Other chicken one. Reverse-mergers would be a nightmare too.
lapcat 3y ago
> With the exception of Bumble and Grindr, almost every popular American dating app is owned by a single company called Match Group, including Hinge, Tinder, Match.com, OkCupid, Plenty of Fish, and many others. This is truly a nightmare. How did we allow such a crucial human function, finding a mate, to become monopolized? Both Democrats and Republicans need to date (though maybe not each other), so the issue should be bipartisan. I feel like ever since Microsoft got a slap on the wrist back in 2001 (a few days before 9/11), antitrust law has more or less ceased to exist.
- toasted-subs 3y ago
  One company who owes all of dating apps which decides almost a third of all relationships means they are responsible for almost every negative thing that happens. The job is also a bit too germanic for me, they are effective causing a holocaust.
  - water9 3y ago
    3 Keys to dating: Workout don’t talk about yourself don’t be reactive.
    - pmg102 3y ago
      Maybe don't talk incessantly about yourself. But I think being open about your thoughts, feelings, fears and hopes is attractive. What do you mean by "reactive" here?
  - jrflowers 3y ago
    I am sure that your problem is apps. The impulse to label things you don’t like as holocausts is endearing and sure to attract myriad possible mates
- veave 3y ago
  You can find a mate without using a smartphone, you know...
matt3210 3y ago
The top profiles are not real people. Especially with AI now we could generate 50 ideal matches which only take paid-likes and has generic AI responses if any
stuff4ben 3y ago
And like most large faceless companies, if you're somehow banned, you have no recourse. I have no idea what I did, when I did it, or who I supposedly did something to, but I can't use Hinge anymore on my phone number. Also banned from Match but not Bumble or Tinder. The apps are indeed a shit-show and I no longer use them. Facebook singles groups and going out in real life are how I'm meeting people now. Much more satisfying and engaging than endless swiping and rejection. FWIW, I'm a genx male, divorced with kids 50/50, and a stable job. A little dad-bod, but not grossly overweight. I'm not a 10 but I'd rate myself a probably a 6-7.
82123throwaway 3y ago
Stop using apps, especially if you're worried about "shadowbanning". The open secret is that people use then to meet sex workers, who in turn sometimes troll people who they perceive as "harassing" them by reporting unwanted spam. Imagine being lonely, going into a space to find a date, and having someone make your mental health worse because you wouldn't pay them for sex, when the whole reason you joined such a site is because you want an emotional connection and everything else aside... just don't want that. I haven't used hinge, but I ended up deleting Tinder and OkCupid -- having coauthored a whole ass paper on the latter. People need to be better about not using a PhD as a way to lift yourself out of economic precarity if you are unlucky enough to have affluent and absusive parents.
kimbernator 3y ago
I wonder how dating apps will fit into society in 10+ years - they are dominant now as the way for young people to find romantic partners, but from the accounts I've heard (all second-hand, I haven't used one in ~5 years) they appear to be getting worse and worse for people who are anything below average attractiveness (or perhaps are just bad at making an appealing profile). It makes me wonder if there will be a correction in the opposite direction where those people go back to meeting in bars, work, school, gyms, etc while the "very attractive" crowd remains in the dating app pool instead. I have no data to suggest this will happen aside from the fact that there's a large segment of the population that is having more and more trouble finding partners this way due to algorithmic changes forcing them out of eligibility to talk to people they find attractive. I've had at least one friend get permanently banned for violating a rule she didn't violate on Hinge, and their policy was essentially "tough luck, nobody gets unbanned for any reason". If such a shift did occur, it would be an interesting reversal from the early days of online dating (eharmony, match.com) where the perception was that it was a fallback for people who were unable to meet someone in person.
- soupfordummies 3y ago
  I think it's already shifting back. Everyone couple I know under the age of 30 met IRL
- failuser 3y ago
  Most young men in the US are already alone[1]. And this will get only worse unless something radical happens. The dating apps strategies do not help. Reverting to offline dating will need to restore the environment that facilitates it. [1] https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/3868557-most-young-men-are-single-most-young-women-are-not/amp/ https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/3868557-most-yo...
wnevets 3y ago
In general people throw the term shadow banned around too much. Whenever someone's content does poorly on youtube or tiktok they start claiming they've been shadow banned instead of considering their new content isn't worth watching.
- water9 3y ago
  Yeah, and then there’s also Twitter which testified Congress that they don’t do it and as soon as Elon took over lo and behold, there’s a shadow ban option for your account.
- kimbernator 3y ago
  I agree this is an incorrect usage of the term. Had they simply been unable to match with anybody but still saw everything as the same, that would be a shadowban. I'm not sure what the correct term is for gently nudging people to get off the platform by making their experience worse.
  - jj999 3y ago
    I don't know how to call it but it seems to be a process similar to Mormon's lost boys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_boys_(Mormon_fundamentalism) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_boys_(Mormon_fundamentali...
kazinator 3y ago
My hot take: instead of writing articles complaining about online dating, the author should work on going out to meet women.
- water9 3y ago
  Yeah, but that’s like hard
at_a_remove 3y ago
If we could drop some of the more poisonous attitudes ("entitlement" is key) and rid ourselves of many of our ideological blinders (men and women are totes the same and have the same dating needs, unless this is a conversation where I can say the opposite to win the argument) we could have some real discussion about this. There's just some basic things at play that we should stop denying, and I think the most important of which might be formulated like "Men are more 'thirsty' than women are." Of course, we would have to season every sentence with some statistical weasel words ("tends to," "more likely to," "on the average," and so on) and we would have to risk bumping up against someone's carefully crafted worldview in an injurious manner. So be it. Recall the now-vanished (Thanks, Match.com!) OKCupid blog posts regarding the different statistical spreads between the sexes. The more we try to obscure these differences, the more warped the strategic arms race between The Algo and the Lonesome Losers* will become, as The Algo will try to hide any unfairness and keep you playing. However, there are a lot of different parties who are quite invested in avoiding bald statements about the reality of the situation. I don't see this changing. * Lonesome Losers, named after the Little River Band song, strike out but they still keep on trying. They will, however, try to adapt. (As a side note, "shadowbanning" is just gaslighting by moderators and/or The Algorithm. It's gaslighting, pure and simple.)
gyudin 3y ago
I’m pretty sure that’s just an old bug they don’t care to fix. I know too many friends including me that are shown ONLY morbidly obese girls on Hinge :) unless you limit search distance to like 5 miles. People have been reporting it for many years by now.
doctorpangloss 3y ago
> How dating app algorithms work This section is full of mistakes. Especially: > To use an overly simplistic example, if a lot of 25-year-old women who like Star Wars keep tapping “like” on one man’s profile, the algorithm might show him to more sci-fi fans in that age range. The example here shows the author fundamentally misunderstands how collaborative filtering works. I am not saying it couldn't technically happen, just as many things are technically possible in a variety of circumstances, but that this is indicative of a Dunning Kruger esque mistake and jeopardizes the rest of his analysis. > Can you hack the dating app algorithm? These guys are trying. The simplest and most validly performance-improving hack is to create a new account, which isn't discussed here. The recommendations otherwise gathered are incorrect. In the context of the author's poor understanding of the underlying facts, it makes sense why this was printed though. If you want to learn accurate things about online dating algorithms, take a look at the resources here: https://monstermatch.hiddenswitch.com/algorithms https://monstermatch.hiddenswitch.com/algorithms
carabiner 3y ago
Someone needs to recreate the original okcupid. Back when it was a quirky site made by a handful of Harvard and MIT math grad students. It was the best dating site ever.
psychphysic 3y ago
I have been in a relationship since before tinder and it continues strong. When tinder came out my single friends all jumped on it. I probably went hoarse with all the tinfoil hat warnings I doled out. Eventually I shrugged my shoulders and admitted maybe corps aren't as evil as I imagined. Looking at this article I realise I was a fool to try and judge them during the onboarding phase. They are worse than I'd imagined.
standardUser 3y ago
Companies should be required by law to publish a standard service agreement and to inform a user if any changes are made to their account that deviates from that agreement. It's a necessity for companies to be able to manage their user community, but who among us wants a company to secretly change or restrict an account we use regularly without our knowledge and no recourse? And sure, restricted users will make new accounts, but that's a problem as old as the internet and something companies just have to fucking deal with.
jimnotgym 3y ago
If you are less choosey, and happy to choose 'ugly' people, can you still have a good time on these apps. I'm married and not interested in trying it. I'm just interested in how it works.
tennisflyi 3y ago
Uh, the most simple explanation is that’s he’s not attractive enough?
tivert 3y ago
> There are plenty of alternatives, but it’s less of a choice than you might think. With the exception of Bumble and Grindr, almost every popular American dating app is owned by a single company called Match Group, including Hinge, Tinder, Match.com, OkCupid, Plenty of Fish, and many others. I don't know how that situation is allowed to persist. There should be some serious antitrust action is this space. What Match Group is going is 100 times more blatant that anything Facebook's done. At a minimum they should be forbidden from acquiring any more competitors.
thefz 3y ago
Don't use dating apps, then. Not everything needs to be an app.
pixel_tracing 3y ago
It’s quite outright torturous. During the first year of COVID in San Francisco I had a date with a girl who I found completely annoying, she was rude to the waiting staff and insisted on finding “sugar daddy.” I couldn’t believe I was listening to the delusional beliefs this woman had, especially regarding she lied to me about her career after I sat down with her. I told her exactly how I felt about her and that she really needs to fix her attitude towards people and men, and that I’m done with the date. I left, and never contacted her again. Coincidentally the next day my tinder account got flagged and banned. I knew it was something to do with her and she was spiteful (though I couldn’t prove it), but the timing was impeccable. Someone had filed a report against me and the automation system at Tinder wouldn’t allow me to speak to anyone. I couldn’t find a partner and every bar / club / restaurant / location in the city was closed for MONTHS! Tinder was literally exiling me to my room and closing off dating matches (I realize there are other apps but the pool is huge on tinder and I always found the most matches there and best outcomes for my lifestyle). I think this should be against some policy or something. If folks just understood the isolation I felt those months, going from meeting women every week to 0 was very bad on my mental state.
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csw-001 3y ago
As someone who dated and got married prior to dating apps, and has never used one, this reads like dystopian science fiction.

83 points by ourmandave 3y ago

Look at the incentives. Dating apps want you to keep paying. That means they don't want you to meet someone worth entering a long-term rrlationship with. They want you to have just enough success to stay a customer. The occasional, not-awful date. Like playing the slots: you get occasional, small payouts, and you hear about other people winning jackpots (oops, they slipped up), so you keep putting money in. A believable service needs to align its interests with yours, in some believable way.

rqtwteye 3y ago
When I used Hinge, I never saw a reason to pay for it. Match is basically useless without paying and for Bumble it also helps to pay. Not so much with Hinge.
zdragnar 3y ago
This erroneously believes that the owners think the following: 1- it is possible to completely tap the dating market and long term customers are necessary 2- customers all have a similar threshold at which they are just-successful enough to stay engaged long term Neither of these things are true. The more people "win the jackpot", per your analogy, the more people will use the platform. The market is big enough they don't need to fool you into paying to be unsuccessful.
- yomlica8 3y ago
  > 2- customers all have a similar threshold at which they are just-successful enough to stay engaged long term Don't they just create fake bot accounts to draw you back in when they detect you've abandoned the app? I'd imagine the app is tuned to maximum scam based on the individual user not using a single set of values.
  - water9 3y ago
    Yes the less users on the app, the more bots they have to employe to make it not feel like dead Internet conspiracy
- spott 3y ago
  Not if they don’t believe that customers will be able to tell the difference between stringing along and honestly trying. The problem is hard. It can’t be deterministically solved. Any likely statistical improvement is unprovable in a marketing sense (a competitor that is as good as possible at finding matches cannot prove it to the market that they are actually better at finding matches than a method that strings people along). Your points are only true if there isn’t an information asymmetry, but there is. I don’t think they are necessarily stringing people along on purpose, but they don’t have incentives to tell people they can’t help them, and they don’t have incentives to improve the product for those who aren’t successful. Those who are successful are probably going to be successful regardless of the platform they are using, and those who are unsuccessful aren’t going to be successful anywhere. And fixing that (rather than just milking money from the unsuccessful) isn’t really worth anything to them.
freejazz 3y ago
This is a bit paranoid - if no one found good matches through these services, no one would ever use them. It definitely sucks if you are on the losing end of the dating spectrum, but some of those people seem to have some sort of belief that they are entitled to dates, when they aren't. If you weren't getting action in real life, I don't think it's likely that people are going to be more desirous of you online. I've used these services and have had plenty of matches and luck, without ever needing to pay for it, with some of the matches working out for years(I don't blame the dating apps that we didn't get married), so I can't really agree with your perspective at all.
tayo42 3y ago
that doesnt make sense, there would always be a new generation entering the dating age. Otherwise the marriage industry would be optimizing for divorces too.
- lelanthran 3y ago
  > that doesnt make sense, there would always be a new generation entering the dating age. Otherwise the marriage industry would be optimizing for divorces too. Don't they? I mean, maybe not intentionally, but it certainly evolved to be that way. The more they can get you to pay for a once-off party, the less money you have entering your marriage. The less money the man pays, the more encouragement is bride is given to be bitter. This results in entering a marriage with less financial stability than you'd otherwise have. They sell the message constantly that it's okay to forgo things like home ownership as long as you get the "perfect" (i.e. most expensive) marriage. There's ever more useless things added to the ritual, resulting in an ever more stressful time due to more friction and more bitterness afterwards. They have spoken rules about how much you should spend based on a multiple (not a fraction) of what your income is. They don't care, and often even encourage, allowing the future in-laws to make a loan so that the couple can get the best marriage. That certainly looks like optimising for divorce to me. They sell it as a once in a lifetime experience, but they already know from their own experience that it's 50/50, if that. To me it looks like they are optimising for revenue, which indirectly means optimising for divorces.

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catlover76 3y ago

I've used Hinge a lot as a heterosexual male, and it's pretty obvious they want dudes to pay for Roses to message attractive girls. For me and most of my friends who have used it, the disparity between the normal, free feed and the "Standouts", for which one must use Roses, is comical. I don't see how that's too mysterious, and, for the most part, I don't hold it against Hinge, which has to try to make money. edit: also, the other thing I forgot to say, is that I have also just keep deleting and recreating my account for every dating app. I don't do that to "game the algorithms" for these apps, though that may be a secondary benefit. I do it because I get tired of them, find them toxic/unhealthy, etc. I kind of just assumed most people did that, and I bet if the author's friend just shrugged and did that in the first instance instead of alleging foul play and conspiracy, they would have had a better time. IIRC, Hinge always starts off by showing a good number of very attractive people in the main feed regardless, which I always assumed was partly to impress a new user with how worthwhile the app is, as well as trying to figure out how attractive the user is by seeing if attractive people respond to them.

omeze 3y ago
I think the standouts are generally people who are highly liked/rated. Id see a lot of people there before & after I saw them in my normal feed. Roses just give an escape hatch for pay to play but they’ll show up in your feed normally if the recommendation system thinks so.
delta_p_delta_x 3y ago
> and it's pretty obvious they want dudes to pay for Roses to message attractive girls. Pretty much every dating app makes its money off (thirsty) men. Average women get hundreds of matches a day; ten a week is a very good rate for the average man.
commandlinefan 3y ago
> pay for Roses to message attractive girls I'm too old to have used dating apps, but IIUC the conspiracy theory is not just that you have to pay a premium to message the attractive girls, but they're actually paid by the dating app itself to interact with you. (I'm too old for dating apps, but I'm not too old for certain types of "clubs" whose business model was the same).

TrackerFF 3y ago

I downloaded Tinder right after I got single, back in 2015? It was glorious. It really did feel fun and exciting - I'm by no means a model-looking dude, but I got hundreds of matches in a fairly small place (think city with population of 50k), and people just felt more genuine and interested on the various apps back then. Next time around I tried Tinder et. al. was a couple of years later(2018/2019), and I immediately noticed less matches, less convos, and the app being more pushy. I recently, as in this year, tried some of the apps again...it's a total shit show, to be honest. I've never tried any apps that applied so many dark patterns. It all feels like one big funnel where the goal is to extract money off you through gold memberships, boosting, extra swipes, and what not. I noticed "fake" notices, spammy notices, just a constant barrage of notices and messages NOT from actual people. After a couple of days I concluded that most (all?) of these dating apps are pay-to-play. You start off with some initial amount of matches, which drop off sharply - then nothing. I asked a friend in the same room if she could see me on Tinder, but no dice, I didn't even show up on her feed - though she came up on mine. These apps used to be easy and fun - now they just feel like the most pushy and parasitic apps out there.

latchkey 3y ago
> Next time around I tried Tinder et. al. was a couple of years later(2018/2019), and I immediately noticed less matches, less convos, and the app being more pushy. They also filter you based on age. When I turned 40+, everything changed in terms of presentation and matches literally the next day.
- strulovich 3y ago
  Isn’t turning 40 just likely to remove you from all users filtering up to 39, which sounds like a natural setting many users would choose?
  - latchkey 3y ago
    Often those settings are ignored or fuzzy. Tinder also doesn't show you what someone else's settings are, so you can't game that. When I'd set my age ranges to 30+, I'd still see people younger than that because the person on the other end would put older ranges in. It is kind of a two way fuzzy search engine. I built a super popular dating app right before Tinder came onto the market... our search was intentionally pretty fuzzy in this regard.

at_ 3y ago

Haven't been on 'the apps' in a good while, but it was my belief that they all work a bit like this, no? The algorithm sizes you up, you get put in a bucket, and you are matched with those who are in an equivalent bucket. Bucket hopping is then made available at a cost.

hospitalJail 3y ago

I wonder why these Algorithms need to be opaque? If everyone knew the rules, it would be a level playing ground. Instead it allows the people who have all day/financial incentives to learn the rules.

jeffbee 3y ago
> If everyone knew the rules, it would be a level playing ground. I see you have never worked in anti-abuse.
laurent123456 3y ago
If you had read the article, you'd know the answer to your question: > Rule breakers often make new accounts after an outright ban, so the subtle yet frustrating shadowban can be a better way to curb misbehavior.
- hospitalJail 3y ago
  I read the article, that isn't relevant to my original post. The 'Algorithm' applies outside of one dating app.

swimorsinka 3y ago

I definitely fell into this category. None of my messages ever seemed to go through. I tried everything to fix it. The only thing that worked was getting a new phone, new number, and never connecting to my wifi. I have no idea what I did to get my account into that state but it really sucks. It damages your self esteem, but this is modern dating I guess. Talking to people in real life is quite a bit better.

landr0id 3y ago

>Anthony couldn’t think of anything that might have gotten his account flagged. Regardless, Hinge didn’t offer an explanation for his experience. It's been a while since I've been on Hinge, but Hinge is not like Tinder in terms of edgy/risque conversation, and I played every conversation with a match safe. I woke up one morning and was banned. They say you can appeal, but this seems like mostly something to make you feel like there's a possible recourse. What I gathered from Reddit is that it's actually rather easy to get banned by simply not talking to people. There were a few times where I wouldn't message someone right away from not having a good ice breaker, I was busy, or the conversation just went nowhere and people would unmatch. When you unmatch with someone it asks if you'd like to report them as well. Since Hinge is meant to be a more serious dating platform, not talking to people can be seen as not taking the platform seriously and trying to hook up or something and if this happens enough times it seems Hinge will flag your account.

water9 3y ago
On Bumble if you get a bunch of matches and don’t reply within 24 hours it basically makes the girl feel like you ghosted them and the report and unmatch button are right next to each other. What do you think a woman scorned is gonna press?
edgyquant 3y ago
That sounds pretty good to me, the most annoying part about these dating apps is that people match with dozens of other people and then don’t message or respond.
mentalpiracy 3y ago
One important detail to add: hinge limits users to one new match per day. This fact also goes into the calculation when grading user interactions.
- landr0id 3y ago
  I paid for whatever the premium version that lifts such restrictions is called. I'm fairly confident that I messaged everyone that matched and if the conversation died I would unmatch to clean things up.

mikeyouse 3y ago

Many of the popular dating apps are all owned by Match group -- Tinder, Match.com, Meetic, OkCupid, Hinge, Plenty of Fish, OurTime, etc. etc. It was a huge private equity play under IAC for awhile and then they spun out and IPOed but the universal dark patterns and enshitification isn't coincidental.

coldcode 3y ago
It's like Expedia owning many of the familiar travel brands: in reality they are all serving up the same content, but with different marketing, yet many people think it's a different company. You might think a brand is different and it might appeal to a different clientele but underneath its the same entity making all the decisions. It allows the brand to target different people without confusing everyone with a single brand saying different things; yet still allow for economies of scale. Great business for them, may seriously suck to be a customer since the alternatives are potentially no better if you don't like one.
- kridsdale3 3y ago
  Same as all the junk food being owned by just 2 or 3 players in actuality. The vertical integration must be excellent for supply-chain dominance.
- Gibbon1 3y ago
  I've been thinking of late that we need to add some sort of five year sunset rule about brands and acquisitions to antitrust laws. So after an acquisition the buyer has a couple of years before they have to stop using the acquired companies name and brand.
  - extraduder_ire 3y ago
    Wouldn't that just lead to the brands themselves being sold off or licensed? Or, if such things were prevented somehow, many sorts of things being terribly confusing. Like, needing to go down to the "Yum! Brands" to get take-out, no not the pizza one, the chicken one. Other chicken one. Reverse-mergers would be a nightmare too.

lapcat 3y ago

> With the exception of Bumble and Grindr, almost every popular American dating app is owned by a single company called Match Group, including Hinge, Tinder, Match.com, OkCupid, Plenty of Fish, and many others. This is truly a nightmare. How did we allow such a crucial human function, finding a mate, to become monopolized? Both Democrats and Republicans need to date (though maybe not each other), so the issue should be bipartisan. I feel like ever since Microsoft got a slap on the wrist back in 2001 (a few days before 9/11), antitrust law has more or less ceased to exist.

toasted-subs 3y ago
One company who owes all of dating apps which decides almost a third of all relationships means they are responsible for almost every negative thing that happens. The job is also a bit too germanic for me, they are effective causing a holocaust.
- water9 3y ago
  3 Keys to dating: Workout don’t talk about yourself don’t be reactive.
  - pmg102 3y ago
    Maybe don't talk incessantly about yourself. But I think being open about your thoughts, feelings, fears and hopes is attractive. What do you mean by "reactive" here?
- jrflowers 3y ago
  I am sure that your problem is apps. The impulse to label things you don’t like as holocausts is endearing and sure to attract myriad possible mates
veave 3y ago
You can find a mate without using a smartphone, you know...

matt3210 3y ago

The top profiles are not real people. Especially with AI now we could generate 50 ideal matches which only take paid-likes and has generic AI responses if any

stuff4ben 3y ago

And like most large faceless companies, if you're somehow banned, you have no recourse. I have no idea what I did, when I did it, or who I supposedly did something to, but I can't use Hinge anymore on my phone number. Also banned from Match but not Bumble or Tinder. The apps are indeed a shit-show and I no longer use them. Facebook singles groups and going out in real life are how I'm meeting people now. Much more satisfying and engaging than endless swiping and rejection. FWIW, I'm a genx male, divorced with kids 50/50, and a stable job. A little dad-bod, but not grossly overweight. I'm not a 10 but I'd rate myself a probably a 6-7.

82123throwaway 3y ago

Stop using apps, especially if you're worried about "shadowbanning". The open secret is that people use then to meet sex workers, who in turn sometimes troll people who they perceive as "harassing" them by reporting unwanted spam. Imagine being lonely, going into a space to find a date, and having someone make your mental health worse because you wouldn't pay them for sex, when the whole reason you joined such a site is because you want an emotional connection and everything else aside... just don't want that. I haven't used hinge, but I ended up deleting Tinder and OkCupid -- having coauthored a whole ass paper on the latter. People need to be better about not using a PhD as a way to lift yourself out of economic precarity if you are unlucky enough to have affluent and absusive parents.

kimbernator 3y ago

I wonder how dating apps will fit into society in 10+ years - they are dominant now as the way for young people to find romantic partners, but from the accounts I've heard (all second-hand, I haven't used one in ~5 years) they appear to be getting worse and worse for people who are anything below average attractiveness (or perhaps are just bad at making an appealing profile). It makes me wonder if there will be a correction in the opposite direction where those people go back to meeting in bars, work, school, gyms, etc while the "very attractive" crowd remains in the dating app pool instead. I have no data to suggest this will happen aside from the fact that there's a large segment of the population that is having more and more trouble finding partners this way due to algorithmic changes forcing them out of eligibility to talk to people they find attractive. I've had at least one friend get permanently banned for violating a rule she didn't violate on Hinge, and their policy was essentially "tough luck, nobody gets unbanned for any reason". If such a shift did occur, it would be an interesting reversal from the early days of online dating (eharmony, match.com) where the perception was that it was a fallback for people who were unable to meet someone in person.

soupfordummies 3y ago
I think it's already shifting back. Everyone couple I know under the age of 30 met IRL
failuser 3y ago
Most young men in the US are already alone[1]. And this will get only worse unless something radical happens. The dating apps strategies do not help. Reverting to offline dating will need to restore the environment that facilitates it. [1] https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/3868557-most-young-men-are-single-most-young-women-are-not/amp/ https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/3868557-most-yo...

wnevets 3y ago

In general people throw the term shadow banned around too much. Whenever someone's content does poorly on youtube or tiktok they start claiming they've been shadow banned instead of considering their new content isn't worth watching.

water9 3y ago
Yeah, and then there’s also Twitter which testified Congress that they don’t do it and as soon as Elon took over lo and behold, there’s a shadow ban option for your account.
kimbernator 3y ago
I agree this is an incorrect usage of the term. Had they simply been unable to match with anybody but still saw everything as the same, that would be a shadowban. I'm not sure what the correct term is for gently nudging people to get off the platform by making their experience worse.
- jj999 3y ago
  I don't know how to call it but it seems to be a process similar to Mormon's lost boys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_boys_(Mormon_fundamentalism) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_boys_(Mormon_fundamentali...

kazinator 3y ago

My hot take: instead of writing articles complaining about online dating, the author should work on going out to meet women.

water9 3y ago
Yeah, but that’s like hard

at_a_remove 3y ago

If we could drop some of the more poisonous attitudes ("entitlement" is key) and rid ourselves of many of our ideological blinders (men and women are totes the same and have the same dating needs, unless this is a conversation where I can say the opposite to win the argument) we could have some real discussion about this. There's just some basic things at play that we should stop denying, and I think the most important of which might be formulated like "Men are more 'thirsty' than women are." Of course, we would have to season every sentence with some statistical weasel words ("tends to," "more likely to," "on the average," and so on) and we would have to risk bumping up against someone's carefully crafted worldview in an injurious manner. So be it. Recall the now-vanished (Thanks, Match.com!) OKCupid blog posts regarding the different statistical spreads between the sexes. The more we try to obscure these differences, the more warped the strategic arms race between The Algo and the Lonesome Losers* will become, as The Algo will try to hide any unfairness and keep you playing. However, there are a lot of different parties who are quite invested in avoiding bald statements about the reality of the situation. I don't see this changing. * Lonesome Losers, named after the Little River Band song, strike out but they still keep on trying. They will, however, try to adapt. (As a side note, "shadowbanning" is just gaslighting by moderators and/or The Algorithm. It's gaslighting, pure and simple.)

gyudin 3y ago

I’m pretty sure that’s just an old bug they don’t care to fix. I know too many friends including me that are shown ONLY morbidly obese girls on Hinge :) unless you limit search distance to like 5 miles. People have been reporting it for many years by now.

doctorpangloss 3y ago

> How dating app algorithms work This section is full of mistakes. Especially: > To use an overly simplistic example, if a lot of 25-year-old women who like Star Wars keep tapping “like” on one man’s profile, the algorithm might show him to more sci-fi fans in that age range. The example here shows the author fundamentally misunderstands how collaborative filtering works. I am not saying it couldn't technically happen, just as many things are technically possible in a variety of circumstances, but that this is indicative of a Dunning Kruger esque mistake and jeopardizes the rest of his analysis. > Can you hack the dating app algorithm? These guys are trying. The simplest and most validly performance-improving hack is to create a new account, which isn't discussed here. The recommendations otherwise gathered are incorrect. In the context of the author's poor understanding of the underlying facts, it makes sense why this was printed though. If you want to learn accurate things about online dating algorithms, take a look at the resources here: https://monstermatch.hiddenswitch.com/algorithms https://monstermatch.hiddenswitch.com/algorithms

carabiner 3y ago

Someone needs to recreate the original okcupid. Back when it was a quirky site made by a handful of Harvard and MIT math grad students. It was the best dating site ever.

psychphysic 3y ago

I have been in a relationship since before tinder and it continues strong. When tinder came out my single friends all jumped on it. I probably went hoarse with all the tinfoil hat warnings I doled out. Eventually I shrugged my shoulders and admitted maybe corps aren't as evil as I imagined. Looking at this article I realise I was a fool to try and judge them during the onboarding phase. They are worse than I'd imagined.

standardUser 3y ago

Companies should be required by law to publish a standard service agreement and to inform a user if any changes are made to their account that deviates from that agreement. It's a necessity for companies to be able to manage their user community, but who among us wants a company to secretly change or restrict an account we use regularly without our knowledge and no recourse? And sure, restricted users will make new accounts, but that's a problem as old as the internet and something companies just have to fucking deal with.

jimnotgym 3y ago

If you are less choosey, and happy to choose 'ugly' people, can you still have a good time on these apps. I'm married and not interested in trying it. I'm just interested in how it works.

tennisflyi 3y ago

Uh, the most simple explanation is that’s he’s not attractive enough?

tivert 3y ago

> There are plenty of alternatives, but it’s less of a choice than you might think. With the exception of Bumble and Grindr, almost every popular American dating app is owned by a single company called Match Group, including Hinge, Tinder, Match.com, OkCupid, Plenty of Fish, and many others. I don't know how that situation is allowed to persist. There should be some serious antitrust action is this space. What Match Group is going is 100 times more blatant that anything Facebook's done. At a minimum they should be forbidden from acquiring any more competitors.

thefz 3y ago

Don't use dating apps, then. Not everything needs to be an app.

pixel_tracing 3y ago

It’s quite outright torturous. During the first year of COVID in San Francisco I had a date with a girl who I found completely annoying, she was rude to the waiting staff and insisted on finding “sugar daddy.” I couldn’t believe I was listening to the delusional beliefs this woman had, especially regarding she lied to me about her career after I sat down with her. I told her exactly how I felt about her and that she really needs to fix her attitude towards people and men, and that I’m done with the date. I left, and never contacted her again. Coincidentally the next day my tinder account got flagged and banned. I knew it was something to do with her and she was spiteful (though I couldn’t prove it), but the timing was impeccable. Someone had filed a report against me and the automation system at Tinder wouldn’t allow me to speak to anyone. I couldn’t find a partner and every bar / club / restaurant / location in the city was closed for MONTHS! Tinder was literally exiling me to my room and closing off dating matches (I realize there are other apps but the pool is huge on tinder and I always found the most matches there and best outcomes for my lifestyle). I think this should be against some policy or something. If folks just understood the isolation I felt those months, going from meeting women every week to 0 was very bad on my mental state.

deleted 3y ago

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csw-001 3y ago

As someone who dated and got married prior to dating apps, and has never used one, this reads like dystopian science fiction.