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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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
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.
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).
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%.
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] PaulMest|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tuxracer|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] silverlake|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benten10|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xemdetia|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] imh|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lloyd-christmas|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] niels_olson|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carsongross|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brixon|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ljk|9 years ago|reply
2. don't be not good looking
[+] [-] purplerabbit|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikeash|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] niftich|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pkaler|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lloyd-christmas|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mwfunk|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JoeAltmaier|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Retr0spectrum|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lloyd-christmas|9 years ago|reply
They do exactly this. It's their pay model, buy more swipes.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] lloyd-christmas|9 years ago|reply