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How Tinder's “feedback loop” forces men and women into extreme strategies

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Re: How Tinder's “feedback loop” forces men and women into extreme strategies

#51

Post by 1812Overture »

mynegation wrote: post #42
Grishnakh wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bots are getting smarter; now they wait for you to write first, then chat you up a bit, then give you a spiel about how their boyfriend has ED and they need a hook-up.

As a person not on Tinder, I wonder: what is the endgame for bots or botmasters?

I've seen a few things: 1. "Follow me on instagram/twitter for more pics!" Getting real followers for fake social media accounts.

2. "I want to give you a sexy show, go this website!" Driving traffic to paid webcam sites.

3. "Friend me on facebook!" Similar to one, but datamining for ad networks could be the real motivation here.

4. "I want to fly out to meet you, but I can't afford a plane ticket!" Old school scamming money.

Anyone seen others?

Re: How Tinder's “feedback loop” forces men and women into extreme strategies

#52

Post by PaulMest »

tedsanders wrote: post #41
PaulMest wrote: post #25

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 D…

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 d…

I was a fairly active real user of Tinder for a while. Though, I noticed that a lot of my matches were from Spam bots who were trying to get me to go to malicious links or promote businesses. I wasn't overly annoyed by them and would report those bots to Tinder as "feels like spam". I felt like this was a known part of the ecosystem and my bots didn't feel too burdensome or evil.

The line that I drew at the time was that, aside from the initial match, the bots were never going to engage in any on-going way with the matches. So the bots could receive messages from matches, but would never send messages or post Moments (which was a feature at the time to effectively message all of your matches with a photo).

Re: How Tinder's “feedback loop” forces men and women into extreme strategies

#53

Post by cloudjacker »

Grishnakh wrote: post #34
jdavis703 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

It's well-known that there's very few single women in the Bay Area, whereas DC is the opposite, with a surplus of single women. NYC also has a large surplus of single women, and Seattle has a surplus of single men. Basically, the east coast cities have female surpluses, and the tech-heavy west coast cities have male surpluses.

The overlooked thing about this is that these gender surpluses would work for you even better in person. Despite online seemingly covering a larger spectrum of people you wouldn't otherwise meet, in person you can create scenarios with multiple people without competition.

Re: How Tinder's “feedback loop” forces men and women into extreme strategies

#54

Post by gmarx »

benten10 wrote: post #3

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 m…

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

Re: How Tinder's “feedback loop” forces men and women into extreme strategies

#55

Post by PaulMest »

tuxracer wrote: post #45
PaulMest wrote: post #25

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 D…

What were the results of your A/B tests??

I'll probably write a blog post about this in the near future. What do you think the results were?

Feel free to reach out to me privately (contact info in profile) and I'll share with you a quick digest of the results before the blog post gets published.

Re: How Tinder's “feedback loop” forces men and women into extreme strategies

#56

Post by BWStearns »

niels_olson wrote: post #46
imh wrote: post #22

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.

I had no idea there was such a market for Tinder bots. What are they all doing? Are there a variety of types?

In NYC it was mostly what I referred to as hooker-bots. They really made no effort to disguise the automation and were effectively just free advertisements. I did run into a couple bots that were at least trying to pass which was weird since I couldn't figure out their purpose. If you're looking to avoid (or create/market) sleazy dating bots bumble seems mostly sentient.

Re: How Tinder's “feedback loop” forces men and women into extreme strategies

#58

Post by autotune »

1812Overture wrote: post #51
mynegation wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a person not on Tinder, I wonder: what is the endgame for bots or botmasters?

I've seen a few things: 1. "Follow me on instagram/twitter for more pics!" Getting real followers for fake social media accounts. 2. "I want to give you a sexy show, go this website!" Driving traffic to paid webcam sites. 3. "Friend me on facebook!" Similar to one, but datamining for ad networks could be the real motivation here. 4. "I want to fly out to meet you, but I can't afford a plane ticket!" Old school scammi…

5. "I'm a hooker and want you to come to my hotel" Getting you to come to their hotel and either rob you, be a sting operation, or get an STD, or at the very least be out hundreds of dollars, which to their credit has a greater chance of actually real and attainable, though not worth the risk in my opinion.

Re: How Tinder's “feedback loop” forces men and women into extreme strategies

#59

Post by milesokeefe »

mikeash wrote: post #11
purplerabbit wrote: post #4

A couple of my guy friends have told me they swipe "Yes" on every single girl. I suspect that this isn't too uncommon.

Why put effort into making a decision now, when you can filter out everyone who didn't reject you first and then make fewer decisions later?

Because that constitutes being an irresponsible participant. If everyone did that, it just shifts the filter from swiping to unmatching.

It also signals a lack of empathy IMO. No one likes being matched and immediately unmatched.

Re: How Tinder's “feedback loop” forces men and women into extreme strategies

#60

Post by milesokeefe »

coralreef wrote: post #33
pkaler wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they realize they are being throttled? Just because one end sends a swipe doesn't mean the other end receives it right away or at all. 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.

What do you mean by throttled? As I've seen there is a daily limit on swipes (which can be bypassed with an in app purchase).

As in after a high enough number of consecutive swipes in a time period, i.e. 3 swipes a second for 30 seconds, the swipes get ignored. No one can evaluate people that quickly, so it's okay to assume the client is a bot or a human spamming likes.
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