How Tinder's “feedback loop” forces men and women into extreme strategies

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601909/how-tinder-feedback-loop-forces-men-and-women-into-extreme-strategies/

by arto • 10 years ago

74 74 10 years ago

technologyreview.com

brixon• 10 years ago

TL;DR: Men are not picky, but women are. Men can get more matches with a bio and more pics.

ljk2• 10 years ago

1. be good looking

2. don't be not good looking

ljf2• 10 years ago

Said they used 'ordinary' looking profiles

benten10• 10 years ago

Finally, 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• 10 years ago

What 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• 10 years ago

The 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.

ch4s3• 10 years ago

Maybe you stand out more in D.C. Are you something(professionally) other than a lawyer?

Jtsummers• 10 years ago

I was traveling a good bit when I gave Tinder a shot (several months). Different cities gave me very different results. Hometown - nothing, not enough users so a lot of bots. Atlanta - tons of responses. LA - not quite as many, I probably didn't look as interesting compared to the other guys on there? Rome - Decent number, better than LA, not as much as Atlanta.

Then I met someone and we've been dating for 6 months so hopefully I don't get to test it out much more.

Grishnakh7• 10 years ago

It's well-known that there's very few single women in the Bay Area, whereas DC is the opposite, with a surplus of single women.

NYC also has a large surplus of single women, and Seattle has a surplus of single men.

Basically, the east coast cities have female surpluses, and the tech-heavy west coast cities have male surpluses.

jseliger• 10 years ago

What 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

SF has an unusually lopsided gender ratio, with more college-educated men than women, while almost all other major metro areas skew towards having more women than men. Jon Birger's Date-onomics covers this: http://jakeseliger.com/2015/09/19/briefly-noted-date-onomics..., and I rather liked it.

xemdetia• 10 years ago

While not expert in Tinder specifically this seems to come up in most digital matchmaking scenarios in my experience in variety of areas. If you keep your ear to the ground long enough you can identify broad archetypes, the same way as if you watch how people write search queries. You can quickly identify who is new, who has been around for years, who just came back and is out of date, who only knows one trick that worked for them in the past, the desperate, the overdetailed, the ascetics, the repeaters, the copycats and so on.

It was a little more interesting when things were more anonymous, but nowadays since identity and digital identity are strongly coupled I assume less dupes, alternate accounts, and full-identity copycats. In my opinion it's just a characteristic of the medium of digital matchmaking. The goal outcome is a match, that's all you want. There is a temporal lingua franca of the moment with trends, and you are either following it or you are not. Because the other users are only able to see this particular payload of images/bio/whatever, all inferences towards this goal must be evaluated from only this input and so it does tend to be exhausting.

I think to answer your question more succinctly, I haven't seen a digital matchmaking service that doesn't act like this.

gmarx• 10 years ago

The women who put their heights and remark they don't know why it matters? They see height in all the profiles they view (i.e. men's) and figure they should put it in their own even though they don;t get. Men do this because for almost all women this is a selection criterion and cannot be expressed readily in photos

purplerabbit• 10 years ago

A couple of my guy friends have told me they swipe "Yes" on every single girl. I suspect that this isn't too uncommon.

JoeAltmaier• 10 years ago

Sounds like they need a 'selectivity rating' so you can tell they aren't serious. Like your seller rating on EBay.

mwfunk2• 10 years ago

Oh, 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.

posterboy• 10 years ago

Yes, complete with comments and criticism.

mwfunk2• 10 years ago

I've heard this as well. It's the shotgun effect, it's not that different from how many/most guys find dates. Ask 100 girls to get 10 dates to maybe get 1 date that isn't a total disaster. For something like Tinder that a lot of people just use for hookups, it's going to be even more pronounced because guys will be even less picky.

mikeash2• 10 years ago

Why put effort into making a decision now, when you can filter out everyone who didn't reject you first and then make fewer decisions later?

milesokeefe2• 10 years ago

Because that constitutes being an irresponsible participant. If everyone did that, it just shifts the filter from swiping to unmatching.

It also signals a lack of empathy IMO. No one likes being matched and immediately unmatched.

niftich2• 10 years ago

It's the digital equivalent of the stereotyped 'bar/club tactic' of trying to pick up every girl in a bar. Most will decline, but after a week's worth of attempts, their chance of still not having succeeded will approach 0%.

gallonofmilk• 10 years ago

I guess I'm the outlier then... :/

lloyd-christmas5• 10 years ago

I do exactly this because it's informative. I don't actually follow through with anything, but it's interesting to find out types that find you attractive.

pkaler• 10 years ago

Do they realize they are being throttled? Just because one end sends a swipe doesn't mean the other end receives it right away or at all.

Men who send a lot of swipes get their outgoing swipes throttled. Women who receive a lot of swipes get those swipes throttled, too.

Think about if you were the programmer working on Tinder. The first thing I would build is swipe spam detection.

coralreef• 10 years ago

What do you mean by throttled?

As I've seen there is a daily limit on swipes (which can be bypassed with an in app purchase).

Dr_tldr2• 10 years ago

I know someone who works on the Tinder team, and if this is happening, it's news to them. Ie, you have no idea what you're talking about.

If both parties have to swipe in order for them to receive spam, why does Tinder care? In your head, do you think server costs are their primary concern?

lloyd-christmas5• 10 years ago

quickly adds more photos

Retr0spectrum• 10 years ago

I 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-christmas5• 10 years 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• 10 years ago

21% 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-christmas5• 10 years ago

Yeah, 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).

Grishnakh7• 10 years ago

The 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.

niels_olson• 10 years ago

I had no idea there was such a market for Tinder bots. What are they all doing? Are there a variety of types?

BWStearns• 10 years ago

In NYC it was mostly what I referred to as hooker-bots. They really made no effort to disguise the automation and were effectively just free advertisements. I did run into a couple bots that were at least trying to pass which was weird since I couldn't figure out their purpose. If you're looking to avoid (or create/market) sleazy dating bots bumble seems mostly sentient.

PaulMest3• 10 years ago

I 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.

tedsanders3• 10 years ago

Honestly 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.

thatswrong0• 10 years ago

If you're a man on Tinder, you play a numbers game and assume a relatively low response rate. It doesn't take to long to send that first message

iaw• 10 years ago

On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog.

PaulMest3• 10 years ago

I was a fairly active real user of Tinder for a while. Though, I noticed that a lot of my matches were from Spam bots who were trying to get me to go to malicious links or promote businesses. I wasn't overly annoyed by them and would report those bots to Tinder as "feels like spam". I felt like this was a known part of the ecosystem and my bots didn't feel too burdensome or evil.

The line that I drew at the time was that, aside from the initial match, the bots were never going to engage in any on-going way with the matches. So the bots could receive messages from matches, but would never send messages or post Moments (which was a feature at the time to effectively message all of your matches with a photo).

niftich2• 10 years ago

This argument is fallacious because a real person, upon being sent a message, is not obligated to reply, irrespective of a mutual match having been obtained.

By questioning the bot author over the morality of their methodology, your post appears to suggest that people who don't reply to messages would be equally perceived as having wasted the time of message authors, which is a view that your downvoters find troubling. That may not have been your intention, given your disclaimer and edits, but I can see why it could be construed that way.

vu4374fv18• 10 years ago

In response to your meta question, I found it weird that you specifically asked if the parent felt bad about the 4000 men but not the 34000 women. Though I didn't downvote.

tuxracer• 10 years ago

What were the results of your A/B tests??

PaulMest3• 10 years ago

I'll probably write a blog post about this in the near future. What do you think the results were?

Feel free to reach out to me privately (contact info in profile) and I'll share with you a quick digest of the results before the blog post gets published.

silverlake• 10 years ago

The imbalance in swiping effectively turns Tinder into Bumble. Women are really making the first move, which is great.

Dr_tldr2• 10 years ago

Nearly all of the data contradicts what you're saying.

carsongross• 10 years ago

A 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• 10 years ago

true story

How Tinder's “feedback loop” forces men and women into extreme strategies

Related Stories