
How Tinder's “feedback loop” forces men and women into extreme strategies - arto
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601909/how-tinder-feedback-loop-forces-men-and-women-into-extreme-strategies/
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PaulMest
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.

~~~
tedsanders
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.

~~~
niftich
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.

~~~
tedsanders
Thank you for your reply. To be honest, I still don't see why an obligation to
reply makes my argument fallacious. Email spam is universally considered bad,
despite the fact that no one is obligated to reply to email spam. Maybe I am
misinterpreting what you wrote.

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benten10
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
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."

~~~
Grishnakh
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.

~~~
cloudjacker
The overlooked thing about this is that these gender surpluses would work for
you even better in person. Despite online seemingly covering a larger spectrum
of people you wouldn't otherwise meet, in person you can create scenarios with
multiple people without competition.

~~~
Grishnakh
The problem here is that you have to actually have some kind of venue for
meeting people in person. Frequently, people turn to online dating precisely
because they've exhausted all their usual social circles for prospective
partners.

I'll use myself as an example: I'm a software engineer (big surprise on this
site!), so I don't have any female coworkers who are eligible, I'm not a
college student any more, I'm not religious so I don't go to church, I'm not a
drinker so hanging out in bars isn't really fun for me, and I don't have any
friends left who have single female friends to introduce me to. So that leaves
me with things like 1) hobby/social groups on Meetup.com, 2) hanging out in
coffee shops, 3) going to bars even though I don't drink and don't like the
atmosphere, and 4) online dating. FWIW, I've been doing #1 (I've tried #2 but
it has such a terrible success rate in actually meeting anyone I gave up;
you'd have to spend a LOT of time to meet just a few people, unless you're in
your 20s and in a real hot-spot for this kind of thing, like on a college
campus), and not experienced any success there at all: I go to hiking meetup,
but it seems most of the women who attend these in this area (and there's a
lot, sometimes a 3-1 ratio F:M!) are retirement-age. Sorry, I'm not into
dating women old enough to be my mother.

Online dating exposes you to people you would never meet in real life; that's
why people do it. There's just no way around it. You can talk all you want
about how it's better to meet people in person, but our society simply does
not have many venues for this any more. In the old days, people met through
friends, family, and church. These days, people like us are non-religious,
we've moved away from our hometowns and move periodically for work so we don't
have many friends to put us in contact with possible partners and family lives
too far away. Online dating also lets you filter people out easier: I can look
through someone's profile in less than 60 seconds and determine she's not
someone I'd be interested in dating for various reasons (religious, extreme or
conservative political opinions, etc.), things which aren't immediately
obvious if you just walk up to someone in a bar and start chatting, and which
may take a long time to find out through normal conversation.

~~~
cloudjacker
You talked exclusively about a gender deficit, I mentioned gender surplus.

You also mentioned the pros of online dating, everyone is aware although it
sounds like you've had to explain this to other people in your age range and
older, you neglected the cons. Females get a gender surplus of men on online
dating, if you want females you should pursue situations with a gender surplus
of females, and this distinctly excludes online dating.

~~~
Grishnakh
>if you want females you should pursue situations with a gender surplus of
females, and this distinctly excludes online dating.

Yes, I realize that, however the venues for this are very limited in my
experience; I already listed out everything I could think of.

Usually, when this discussion comes up, people will recommend things like
"find groups that do things you like, and you'll meet women you like there!"
Sorry, but I'm not likely to meet any desirable and single women at a Linux or
programming group. And I do attend some outdoors groups, but IME there the
women are generally much older than me (and I'm not young either). I'm not
really sure what the single female 30-45 crowd does in the DC area, but it's
not hiking. From my limited dating experience in this area, their general
free-time activity appears to be hanging out with their female friends and
complaining that they can't find a husband while their biological clock is
running out so they're going to start on IVF from a donor.

~~~
Grishnakh
I see I got an upvote here, so just in case anyone's interested in a funny
anecdote about the IVF comment, I met a 43yo woman on Tinder a few months ago
in the DC area. We talked on the phone before meeting in person, and one of
the first things she told me after we got started chatting was how she had
already tried one round of IVF...

Dating at this age really sucks.

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imh
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-christmas
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).

~~~
Grishnakh
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.

~~~
mynegation
As a person not on Tinder, I wonder: what is the endgame for bots or
botmasters?

~~~
1812Overture
I'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?

~~~
autotune
5\. "I'm a hooker and want you to come to my hotel" Getting you to come to
their hotel and either rob you, be a sting operation, or get an STD, or at the
very least be out hundreds of dollars, which to their credit has a greater
chance of actually real and attainable, though not worth the risk in my
opinion.

------
carsongross
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
true story

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

~~~
ljk
1\. be good looking

2\. don't be not good looking

~~~
ljf
Said they used 'ordinary' looking profiles

~~~
ljk
aren't stock photos usually of moderately decent looking people? i'd imagine
those photos are better than the average tinder users

~~~
ljf
Fair comment!

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

~~~
pkaler
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
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).

~~~
milesokeefe
As in after a high enough number of consecutive swipes in a time period, i.e.
3 swipes a second for 30 seconds, the swipes get ignored. No one can evaluate
people that quickly, so it's okay to assume the client is a bot or a human
spamming likes.

~~~
lbotos
Do you have proof of this? 3 swipes in 30 seconds sounds way low. (imho)

~~~
khedoros
> 3 swipes a second for 30 seconds

They're saying 90 swipes in 30 seconds.

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Retr0spectrum
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-christmas
> 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.

------
lloyd-christmas
_quickly adds more photos_

