Tinder, Smarter Than You Think

The digital has changed the world of dating. Meeting people online is now a common concept.

There is plenty of dating app like Meetic, Tinder, adopteunmec.com, etc.

Tinder has a « matching » type of concept so it makes it funnier to meet people.

But do you really know how it works?

Articles came out, revealing that Tinder rated its users according to an evaluation system used in chess, the Elo ranking. In chess, the idea is that if you play against a highly rated player and you win, you win a lot of points. In contrary, if you lose against a poorly rated player, you lose more points.

Many factors are taken into consideration to determine what type of profile you are and what type of profile you will be presented to.

How are you rated?

The system would potentially be able to take into account our level of intelligence (by analyzing the variety of words used in the exchanges). But also our level of income (from Facebook data). It would also be possible to create a false sense of destiny during a match. For example, by linking profiles that have the same date of birth, etc.

It rates differently differences and demographic similarities by gender of the user. So that younger women with lower incomes than men appear faster on their list. On the contrary hypothesis, younger men with lower incomes than women would be less likely to be in their list of results.

It’s also hard to deny that the process does not depend on physical appearance.

According to your profile and score, only a certain type of people will be presented to you.

If you are scored a 6, you will only be presented to people who are 5 to 7. Not above nor bellow.

If you are liked a lot, you will be well graded, and if you are liked by people who are high graded, you will upgrade, because the algorithm will consider your level of « desirability ». And the other way around, if someone who has a « bad grade » like you and you like back, your grade will fall down.

If you like people who like you back, your score upgrade. If you send messages to your « match », it is beneficial to your score, if you don’t, it’s not.

Are your Tinder matches even YOUR choice?

This app has a lot of information about you, has access to your messages and uses it to rate you. The fact that you are ranked according to your appearance, desirability, intelligence, and that you only see profiles that Tinder considers as « your level », is a little bit scary. It completely changes the way we see two people meeting and dating.

Maybe, in that case, digital transformation is not the best at changing and we should just keep the old fashion way to meet and date people.

You can read the book of Judith Duportail's “L’Amour sous algorithme” (Editions Goutte d’Or) for more information about how she discovered she was ranked by her dating app.

L'Amour sous algorithme