
Smart Photos - domrdy
http://tech.gotinder.com/smart-photos-2/
======
Houshalter
The simplest thing would be to just give people that list of tips from the
beginning of the article. That would help them find the best photo a lot
easier than this. There's also a lot of studies from ok cupid on profile
picture optimization.

Second, how many people get enough matches to get any statistically useful
information? The people that need this the most are the least likely to
benefit.

Third, epsilon greedy isn't the best algorithm to use. Thompson sampling is
theoretically optimal, and pretty simple. Here is a cool simulation of it in
your browser. I find it fun to play with (sadly the graphs no longer render
properly on this archived version. I have no idea why. But it used to display
a beta distribution for each bandit, and you could see it shrink over time.):
[http://web.archive.org/web/20160310000407/https://e76d6ebf22...](http://web.archive.org/web/20160310000407/https://e76d6ebf22ef8d7e079810f3d1f82ba1e5f145d5.googledrive.com/host/0B2GQktu-
wcTiWDB2R2t2a2tMUG8/)

Lastly it would be interesting to train a neural network to predict how good a
profile picture is. This has sort of been done by Karpathy here:
[http://karpathy.github.io/2015/10/25/selfie/](http://karpathy.github.io/2015/10/25/selfie/)
Tindr has an enormous amount of data that could be used.

~~~
otto_ortega
> how many people get enough matches to get any statistically useful
> information? The people that need this the most are the least likely to
> benefit.

Exactly. I totally agree with that.

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greggman
I don't just want any right swipe. I want a right swipe from the type of
person I want to meet. The image tinder claimed was best is IMO not
representative of me. I have it in my set of images to show I "clean up well"
but if someone chooses me for that picture I feel like they'll be disappointed
and most likely not my type therefore I don't have it as my first picture.

~~~
jakeway
Then perhaps you shouldn't have that picture in your profile at all and you
won't run into that problem.

~~~
nicky0
What problem?

~~~
jakeway
The problem of people on Tinder swiping right to a photo he doesn't want them
to swipe right on.

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kweks
"Smart Photos" are fascinating. I travel frequently, and depending on the
country that I'm in, within 24 hours, a new smart photo will filter to the
top.

I'd love to see research into this - revealing which cultures / countries /
societies place importance on which elements.

For example:

\- France, Italy: Suit and tie selfie springs to the top, constantly. Means
that french / Italian women are more looks focused?

\- Australia, Spain: Outdoor / adventure photo, straight to the top. Probably
no surprise, Australians tend to be more outdoorsy.

\- Asia: Presentable smart casual goes to the top. Looking more for 'cute' or
'presentable' ?

It'd be very interesting to apply the same profile to all countries to see
what floated to the top.

------
ktta
I love Machine Learning. I think it is one of the biggest breakthroughs of
this decade.

The Big Data + Computing power recipe is something that I thought will bring
sweeping changes to society. But with Amazon's Echo look, and now this, I
don't know if I'm ok with where this is going.

I thought it'll help us in fields like architecture, physics modelling,
medicine, but they all seem to be on paper. OTOH, uses like this seem to be
the ones that actually come to market and make the best use of the Machine
Learning talent.

Maybe I'm being cynical, but please someone prove me wrong. Am I missing
Machine Learning being used in new applications in the market, or is the
situation as I see it is?

~~~
mbaha
You're completely right.

I'm seeing a more general trend which I find equally worrying: Software is
eating the world, and the best tech is currently produced by the likes of
Facebook, Google or Amazon.

I'm fine with this, but I'm seeing governments and other "serious" businesses
like health, physics... seriously lagging behind.

I don't know what to do with this assumption, though...

Google will run the world? I'm saying it's too good to be true.

~~~
toomuchtodo
The entire world run by an org full of data driven engineers? I'll take the
nanobots turning the world into gray goop or paper clips first please.

------
CameronBanga
Tinder has a company hackathon, where the grand prize is getting the feature
on the product roadmap?

What an extravagant prize.

~~~
NDT
it's not too different from what Facebook does.

~~~
spyspy
This is the deal at every company. Every employee (and the company itself)
wants to be able to say they turned a hackathon idea into a real thing.

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accountyaccount
Tinder uses machine learning but I still have to fax my doctor.

------
rawland
Does anyone know, how he created these beautiful figures?

Especially:
[http://tech.gotinder.com/content/images/2016/10/figures-03-2...](http://tech.gotinder.com/content/images/2016/10/figures-03-2.png)

I really like it.

------
mistircek
Even though this is better than the lack of it, I find it weird that they're
not using Contextual MAB and instead just went with the MAB. You've got the
preference of your users anyhow, why not show the picture first that will
perform best according to that specific user?

~~~
jameslk
I'm guessing the reason was that this was born out of a hackathon. E-greedy is
likely the easiest algorithm to implement for a MAB problem like this. Given
that they mention there's an API to specify sort order (assuming it was on a
per-view basis), the specific algorithm could be swapped out for something
smarter.

I think a contextual bandit algorithm would be interesting in this case,
although I wonder if there would be enough data behind photo swipes to back
each context meaningfully.

------
minimaxir
An odd caveat of Smart Photos on Tinder is that _Tinder doesn 't tell app
users_ that their public photo may not be the same as the one that they
themselves have assigned. It might be a smart business idea for Tinder to
charge for profile-pic analytics.

~~~
PStamatiou
No they do - if you go to your profile settings it shows the correct order.
And you get a notification whenever it changes the top photo.

~~~
minimaxir
Huh. I noticed in the profile the pic order changed, which made me think it
was a bug until I remembered Tinder is more data-savvy, but I never received a
notification.

------
auganov
Sounds like the algorithm doesn't care whether or not you liked somebody. So
even for a very indifferent person liking, say 1 in 2 people you're still
likely getting a nonoptimal result. And AFAIK the whole point of this app is
mutual likes?

~~~
jameslk
I think the algorithm solves the problem of which photo, out of a set of
photos, is the best one to show. So nothing has changed regarding the
mutuality aspect, only which photo of the user is their best photo based on
data collected from past swipes. In other words, they're continuously rotating
through a user's photos, trying to find the one that gets the most positive
feedback and showing that one more often than the user's other photos.

~~~
wapz
I think the algorithm would show which photo the "most" users would like is.
What if you're someone who loves cats like no other and puts a cat on your
shoulder (or wears a cat t-shirt or something). You're probably going to have
a lot less "likes" than a "normal" picture of you, but the odds of you getting
along might be much lower (I'm sure the average individual likes cat people
less than the person who picked a person with cats in their picture).

~~~
jameslk
It seems the shallowness of starting on the footing of what someone looks like
alone kind of renders this point moot. If you're trying to identify
compatibility based on who a person really is, their profile photo may be the
least ideal place to start. If anything, I think this at least gets the user a
foot in the door more often.

------
bvi
Interesting post - I'm fascinated by this space myself. I launched a site
([http://judg.me](http://judg.me)) a few years back with a slightly different
take on how users perceive your profile photos.

~~~
polymeris
Wow, amazing how consistent the crowd's impression are with my own, based on
those tiny pics. We are prejudiced bunch.

------
kcon
I understand this article is a little dated, but for a follow-up blog post,
I'm interested in hearing more about Tinder's internal hackathons. What
motivated hosting an internal hackathon? What format was chosen, i.e.
duration, criteria for projects, criteria for participants, etc.? How often
are they held? Do employees retain any rights for the projects they work on?
How is participation encouraged?

~~~
maffydub
I don't know about Tinder, but the (telecom) software development company I
work for holds internal hackathons twice a year (one in May, one in November).
We've been doing this for about 6 years, with over 150 attendees each time
from offices around the UK. We normally have teams of 3-5, with a focus on
innovation (e.g. bots, IoT, AI). Each runs for 24 hours from 17:00 on Thursday
through to 17:00 on Friday when pitching/demos start (2 minutes each) followed
by prizes and food/drinks/party. Any work produced belongs to the company
(bear in mind this is mostly during work time) although we look at most
innovative ideas for patent angles, and we get bonuses for patents that get
filed as a result. Prizes are relatively token, but prestigious. Participation
hasn't actively had to be encouraged - most engineers who are available
attend. The main motivation for the hackathons are innovation and morale
(everyone seems to enjoy them), but other benefits are education (learning new
skills, languages, APIs, etc.), working with new people/teams and personal
development (e.g. it's not unusual for new employees to take on technical lead
roles that they wouldn't have normally).

We also hold "vacathons", which are hackathons just for the interns in the
summer. There are about 50 attendees, and because they haven't always done too
much software development beforehand, these are 3 days long and people are
less likely to work through the night (although we lay on food in the evening,
and people often stay until 10ish). The theme for these is more general -
anything loosely to do with communication is accepted. As with the full
hackathons, teams form and generate ideas themselves, but we also assign a
mentor (a full-time employee) to each team to help them with any technical
problems as well as planning/working as a team.

Hope that's informative!

------
stared
Related (from OK Cupid):

[https://theblog.okcupid.com/dont-be-ugly-by-
accident-b378f26...](https://theblog.okcupid.com/dont-be-ugly-by-
accident-b378f261dea4)

and

[https://theblog.okcupid.com/the-4-big-myths-of-profile-
pictu...](https://theblog.okcupid.com/the-4-big-myths-of-profile-
pictures-41bedf26e4d)

------
radicality
Let's add `2016` to the title, was wondering what new feature this is as I
remember seeing it in Tinder for a while already.

------
angry_octet
The problem is that swipers are not uniform. You might strongly select for cat
people with a photo of you with a cat, but negatively with hotties. So unless
you can boost your ELO into the next strata with the aid of cat people,
beware. And even then the stats of each stratum may differ, so you could
oscillate up and down.

------
foobarbecue
Silly feature. It kept telling me the photo I had put up as my first profile
picture was the best one. No shit, Sherlock.

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lemonsqueeze
"Tinder made sure we had all the resources we needed: hackathon contenders
received sleeping masks and first dibs on all of of the couches..."

Yeah,that's all your engineers need alright. Apparently clean clothes and a
good nights sleep is not one of them.

~~~
saym
This reads like it was written by a person on the hackathon team, who truly
believed in his project. I sincerely doubt those two things were all the perks
provided.

To me, he's just trying to paint a picture filled with drive. One where he
planned on working overnight on something in which he believed. No need to
insinuate tinder doesn't care about its engineers or draw cynical conclusions.

~~~
nimchimpsky
No need to defend a multi billion corporation getting its engineers to do
unpaid work either (unpaid overtime I assume), but hey there's a sofa to sleep
on - f __k that.

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101km
Very frequently on tinder I've seen profiles where from amongst a set of
unremarkable photos the one picture of the users derriere was selected.

Whether or not this is a case of overfitting I leave up to you to decide.

I did ask a user in person once, she wasn't pleased.

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iamleppert
Isn't this false advertising? If someone doesn't have the wherewithal to know
how to choose a picture that best represents themselves, then I don't want to
talk to the actual person.

Stop trying to optimize everything for my engagement and fix other people's
stupidity.

The next thing you'll be telling me is you're automatically removing blemishes
and making people look more attractive.

Tinder is a glorified personal ad. Stop thinking you're some kind of advanced
tech shop worthy of such algorithms with fancy-sounding curves.

~~~
omarchowdhury
I'd say worthiness of such algorithms and "fancy" curves from having the large
data set of active people to test and learn from.

