Tinder Garten

I tried online dating briefly while at university. The only person who replied to me said:

about heart breaking: if you don't have the information that i asked so i have to prepare this information by myself by doing some destructive test, that mean i have to break it at least two or three times and put it under pressure so i can find out its properties and after that I'll know what to do to prevent breaks.

So from the start he was already planning to break my heart. Although in his defense, we were both studying engineering at the time, I asked if he could avoid breaking my heart, and that was his response. I thought it was funny at the time. We never ended up meeting each other though.

I was asked to think about Tinder from a game theory perspective. Not having used the app, I decided to see if someone else had already done it, and it turns out that there is.

From what I understand, Tinder used to allow you to swipe left (dislike), or right (like) a person as much as you liked, but now the free version restricts you to 50 right swipes per day. Apparently males would just swipe right on everyone, and only filter after people have swiped them back. So they restricted the swipes, probably to make money somehow.

So if you're not willing to pay money, you'd better be frugal with the swipes. So according to Kyle, you should always swipe right on someone you find attractive, as matches are worth more than future swipes. He even takes into account the attractiveness of your swipee, as they probably have a lower probability of swiping back. You can read his blog post for more detail.

I feel like Kyle covered everything I was going to cover, so I think there's no point in rehashing what he said. However, I do think that theory and practice are often quite different. I don't seem to have many friends who are on Tinder, but I managed to ask four people about their Tinder experience.

Agatha
Boris
Charles
Damian

Both Agatha and Charles met their current significant other through Tinder, and both the relationships are going strong. Boris and Damian have both hooked up with people through Tinder, but are now in that "seeing someone, and exclusive, but no intentions of being long term yet" phase.

I asked all of them about their strategy for managing the limited number of swipes.

Charles used it for the shortest amount of time out of everyone. He did say he had a strategy in particular, he'd just read their profile and look at their photos, and if they sounded interesting, would swipe right on them. One thing Kyle's theory didn't take into account, and it was something Charles brought up, is that you can sometimes get enjoyment from "rejecting" someone you think is extremely attractive. So if that's your thing, perhaps add that as a variable in your calculation when it comes to super attractive people. (Personally, I'm glad I'm not on Tinder, because I'd feel like swiping right to everyone, as I can't stand the idea of "rejecting" people.)

Agatha, the only female subject I was able to get, used it for a while, and met a few people through the app. She said her strategy was just to swipe right on people she found attractive.

Boris told me that he'll swipe right on anyone who catches his attention. He actually found that through using Tinder, he has discovered he has worked out what his preferred type is, and now he's usually able to tell pretty quickly whether he finds someone attractive or not.

Damian... I don't even know where to start. To say Damian is confident in his looks is probably an understatement. I asked Damian for his strategy, and he told me what he does is he sets his search radius to a small distance while at home (in the 'burbs), and swipes left to pretty much everyone who doesn't instantly catch his eye. Then he commutes into work, and leaves the app open all day, so people can find him. Once he returns home, all the locals will have been filtered out by the earlier swiping, and it seems Tinder's algorithm will preference people who have already swiped right to you. So now he knows that most of the people who show up in his search results will be people who have already swiped right to him. So he'll use his swipes on whoever he founds attractive, and he gets a match nearly every time.

I then asked about messaging strategy. I didn't ask Charles, because I felt his sample size was too small.

Despite what people say about women not having to make any effort, Agatha said she sent out quite a lot of messages. When she was actively using the app, it seemed like she had quite a few conversations going, so her strategy seems to have worked.

Boris said he always had to send a message first. He would look through their profile for something that they seemed interested in, then try to craft an humourous message, usually with some kind of pun, to get the conversation going.

Damian's strategy was just to say, "Hey ". He said he figured if they swiped right to him, they were already interested, so he didn't need to work to get their attention. Damian let me look through his Tinder message list, and there were a lot of messages. All but two of them seemed have an in-depth reply (he said some of them were quite dirty, so he didn't let me read the contents, which is fair enough).

Based on my short exposure of Tinder from reading stories from /r/Tinder whenever they appear on /r/bestOf or /r/subredditDrama, the consensus seems to be that if you're a guy, you need to send out a message that targets a girl's interest in order to get a response. Cookie-cutter messages don't cut it, and a lot of girls are able to tell when it's a generic message sent to a lot of people. However, I asked Agatha what she preferred, and she said she preferred the messages that were a simple, "Hey". It seems to be working for Damian...

One of the interviewees showed me this profile, which he said seems to be a generic profile that a lot of women have - "Only interested in X. No hook ups or games".

I guess there's still a bit of a disconnect between people's impression of whether Tinder is a dating app or a hook-up app. Both Boris and Damian said that Tinder was full of "thirsty guys", and that girls would often just want to hook-up, but not outright say so. I hear a lot more about people meeting their partner on Tinder, and not very much about people who actually use it to hook up, but that's probably because there still is a bit of a stigma for women around just hooking up with people. Damian said that Tinder was populated with more guys than girls, and I challenged him to back up that statement, but he couldn't, however, statista results for the US in 2016 seem to say that Tinder's population was 67.8% male, 32.2% female, so that seems to line up with what he said.

They also seem to be under the impression that women are constantly inundated with messages, and can have their pick of any guy who is interested in them, but Agatha said that isn't really the case. I guess the strong gender bias in favour of women doesn't help all that much.

Considering that there are twice as many men as women on Tinder, and let's say attractiveness is normally distributed:

(picture is not drawn to scale)

You would assume people would go for an equal level of attractiveness where possible, but due to the unbalanced numbers, women (bottom blocks) can go for men (top blocks) at a higher level of attractiveness. I left gaps because I assume some people would rather stay single than be with someone they didn't find attractive. I'd rather be single than be with someone who found me unattractive, but I guess that's easy to say when you know that there's someone who finds you attractive.... at least I hope he does.

I wonder how this plays out in homosexual relationships, when there is no gender imbalance.

Lastly, one of my interviewees mentioned a new dating app called Bumble. It's similar to Tinder with the left and right swiping, and being able to see people's photos, however, the difference is that in this app, women are forced to message first. So my interviewee got a match while we were eating doughnuts, and showed me what the screen looked like:

He said he prefers it, as he knows that whoever is messaging him is actually interested and not just in it for an ego boost, as they have to put in effort this time. He also likes the fact that the onus isn't on him to do everything: start the conversation, move from chatting to catching up, coming up with date ideas, etc. He said it feels a lot more equal.

Seeing as it is International Women's Day today, I think it's a great thing that there's an app out there like this. It reminded me of when I polled a few people on MSN (back in the day... when people were always online and I could do that) about whether they'd feel less manly if a girl asked them out. All the responses bar one said no. I still remember the crushing feeling of being rejected by MrMan5 after asking him out, so I can understand how hard it is to be the one doing the asking. So I think this is a great idea.