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by Analemma_ 3163 days ago
Tinder is doing a lot more intelligent matching than you think. The CTO of OKCupid (which is owned by the same parent company) was on a podcast a few weeks ago where he briefly discussed some of the algorithmic challenges of Tinder. They include:

- it may not seem like it, but Tinder does try to pick people it thinks are most likely to produce a match, based on-- to be brutally honest-- your attractiveness (as determined by who has swiped for you) and the other person's

- it then orders them approximately from most likely to least likely, but it has to know how often to start over, because eventually as you go down the list you'll eventually start running into people that you're less likely to swipe right on than the people you already passed up

- carefully arranging things so that "super likes" have a reasonable chance of producing a match while also not inundating very attractive people with nothing but super likes from people they will never respond to (which would drive them off the service)

It's a tough challenge and Tinder is not at all a "dumb, simple" dating app.

3 comments

Maybe he missed out on some of the other important things Tinder does on the "addiction" side of things.

When the app first came out (or possibly when you first start using it), the first person is/was always a match. Then they got clever about hiding matches deeper in the swipes.

This triggers addictive behaviour because the "match" reward is inconsistent. Though, clearly, before you start swiping, Tinder knows which matches it is going to present to you. It's a delicate balance to judge how long you will spend swiping, when to show you your match and how to make sure you swipe right a few times to keep the funnel loaded.

This bolsters the point that the future of online dating is not a computer estimating compatibility with creepy accuracy, it's someone engineering an app to be addicting to get the largest userbase.
Understood. But they have so far avoided asking the user for structured data that they could use to vastly improve their matches. Clearly it took a back-seat to usability.

Perhaps I shouldn't have used the word "dumb" - I do not mean to imply the Tinder strategy or algorithms are stupid. Just meant that instead of prioritizing matching to the best of their ability, they prioritized usability.

Do you have a link to the podcast? Would be super keen on listening in :)
It was the first episode of “Why’d you push that button”.