[cassonmars]

For starters, the pool of people on say, Tinder, for example, is already disproportionately imbalanced in terms of represented populations (as I said, 10:1). Assuming an even distribution of “attractiveness” (which obviously isn’t straightforward to quantify and varies by locale), there’s already a huge discrepancy: even a woman of average attractiveness (of ten women 1-10, she ranks a 5) has fifty (given ten women, there are a hundred men in total) that rank below, in terms of attractiveness. When you have a limited number of right swipes a day, well below the number of available options that _do_ qualify, and nearly every right swipe is a match, it leads to a conditioned behavior of selecting well above one’s “rank”. Of course, online dating apps have no interest in removing the barriers that result in this condition — it makes men pay more for more swipes, higher priority in the stacks shown to women, and the option to see who swiped on them. In other words, it’s a rigged game.

[honkdaddy]

Thanks for the detailed reply. This matches my experience fairly well.

With the dynamics of the game laid out the way you said, do you see any reason to right swipe on someone of a relatively similar attractiveness to you? Or given it’s current parameters, does it always make more sense for women to try to match “up” and aim for men objectively more attractive than them?

[cassonmars]

Admittedly, I’ve had a very unusual experience on Tinder. Attraction is important, but it’s not the be all end all for me, as there are way more important things. That being said, I also know I rank pretty high on their scoring mechanics, based on the characteristics of who they show to me, and how I am shown to others (for example, Tinder primes people to swipe right by showing a high scoring user when you first open the app, many close friends have informed me “Tinder keeps showing me you when I open the app”, but there are other considerations you can use to assess your internal score). So I match with interesting choices on other attributes. And of the crowd I match with I have built a workflow to manage the volume (literally, I have over three thousand matches as of writing this, historically a total of over 7,000 in the year and a half I’ve used the app) — I reverse engineered their API so I could pull the matches and messages and create JIRA tickets automatically so I could bucket conversations based on initial intentions. It sounds pretty horrible once I write that out, but on the other hand I feel it’s pretty horrible that people don’t get a fair shake because of the way this game is rigged, and this ensures better “fairness”, at least in some way. Also not to mention, about half don’t message first, and of those that do, about a fifth of the time they’re pretty unsavory openers.