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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

#71

Post by vu4374fv18 »

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…

In response to your meta question, I found it weird that you specifically asked if the parent felt bad about the 4000 men but not the 34000 women. Though I didn't downvote.

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

#72

Post by Dr_tldr »

silverlake wrote: post #68
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…

The imbalance in swiping effectively turns Tinder into Bumble. Women are really making the first move, which is great.

Nearly all of the data contradicts what you're saying.

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

#73

Post by Dr_tldr »

pkaler wrote: post #26
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.

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.

I know someone who works on the Tinder team, and if this is happening, it's news to them. Ie, you have no idea what you're talking about.

If both parties have to swipe in order for them to receive spam, why does Tinder care? In your head, do you think server costs are their primary concern?

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

#74

Post by Grishnakh »

cloudjacker wrote: post #53
Grishnakh wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem here is that you have to actually have some kind of venue for meeting people in person. Frequently, people turn to online dating precisely because they've exhausted all their usual social circles for prospective partners.

I'll use myself as an example: I'm a software engineer (big surprise on this site!), so I don't have any female coworkers who are eligible, I'm not a college student any more, I'm not religious so I don't go to church, I'm not a drinker so hanging out in bars isn't really fun for me, and I don't have any friends left who have single female friends to introduce me to. So that leaves me with things like 1) hobby/social groups on Meetup.com, 2) hanging out in coffee shops, 3) going to bars even though I don't drink and don't like the atmosphere, and 4) online dating. FWIW, I've been doing #1 (I've tried #2 but it has such a terrible success rate in actually meeting anyone I gave up; you'd have to spend a LOT of time to meet just a few people, unless you're in your 20s and in a real hot-spot for this kind of thing, like on a college campus), and not experienced any success there at all: I go to hiking meetup, but it seems most of the women who attend these in this area (and there's a lot, sometimes a 3-1 ratio F:M!) are retirement-age. Sorry, I'm not into dating women old enough to be my mother.

Online dating exposes you to people you would never meet in real life; that's why people do it. There's just no way around it. You can talk all you want about how it's better to meet people in person, but our society simply does not have many venues for this any more. In the old days, people met through friends, family, and church. These days, people like us are non-religious, we've moved away from our hometowns and move periodically for work so we don't have many friends to put us in contact with possible partners and family lives too far away. Online dating also lets you filter people out easier: I can look through someone's profile in less than 60 seconds and determine she's not someone I'd be interested in dating for various reasons (religious, extreme or conservative political opinions, etc.), things which aren't immediately obvious if you just walk up to someone in a bar and start chatting, and which may take a long time to find out through normal conversation.

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

#75

Post by tedsanders »

vu4374fv18 wrote: post #71
tedsanders wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In response to your meta question, I found it weird that you specifically asked if the parent felt bad about the 4000 men but not the 34000 women. Though I didn't downvote.

Whoops, that was entirely unintentional. I think my eyes were drawn to the parallel 1000s on lines (2) and (3). I feel weird about missing the women and I apologize for the omission. Everyone's time is valuable.

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

#76

Post by tedsanders »

niftich wrote: post #64
tedsanders wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This argument is fallacious because a real person, upon being sent a message, is not obligated to reply, irrespective of a mutual match having been obtained. By questioning the bot author over the morality of their methodology, your post appears to suggest that people who don't reply to messages would be equally perceived as having wasted the time of message authors, which is a view that your downvoters find troublin…

Thank you for your reply. To be honest, I still don't see why an obligation to reply makes my argument fallacious. Email spam is universally considered bad, despite the fact that no one is obligated to reply to email spam. Maybe I am misinterpreting what you wrote.

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

#77

Post by Grishnakh »

fizzbatter wrote: post #39
Grishnakh wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I'd rather be picky and get nothing if the alternative is having to sleep with someone I'm totally not attracted to. Porn is more satisfying, and with porn I don't have to worry about hurting the girl's feelings. That said, however, you do have to be realistic about what kind of woman you can attract. Also, if you get distracted by someone you're really not into, that can keep you from meeting someone who…

I've always felt people on both sides of the fence are too picky. I met my soon-to-be wife on a dating site, so i'm sure i'm biased, but i've always felt they are the way to go. Not specifically Tinder, but rather a good algorithm that improves your signal to noise ratio. The problem there, as i see it, is always users though. Even if the site has an awesome pitch, you need critical mass to feel you have a shot at it…

>Perhaps Facebook should buy and integrate something like OkCupid. A data-centric approach to matching, combined with the largest data set (albeit, not tailored for OkCupid..) seems like a very interesting prospect.

OKCupid has already been bought by the company that owns Tinder and Match.com (unfortunately). This was a year or two ago I think.

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

#78

Post by cloudjacker »

Grishnakh wrote: post #74
cloudjacker wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem here is that you have to actually have some kind of venue for meeting people in person. Frequently, people turn to online dating precisely because they've exhausted all their usual social circles for prospective partners. I'll use myself as an example: I'm a software engineer (big surprise on this site!), so I don't have any female coworkers who are eligible, I'm not a college student any more, I'm not re…

You talked exclusively about a gender deficit, I mentioned gender surplus.

You also mentioned the pros of online dating, everyone is aware although it sounds like you've had to explain this to other people in your age range and older, you neglected the cons. Females get a gender surplus of men on online dating, if you want females you should pursue situations with a gender surplus of females, and this distinctly excludes online dating.

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

#79

Post by Grishnakh »

cloudjacker wrote: post #78
Grishnakh wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem here is that you have to actually have some kind of venue for meeting people in person. Frequently, people turn to online dating precisely because they've exhausted all their usual social circles for prospective partners. I'll use myself as an example: I'm a software engineer (big surprise on this site!), so I don't have any female coworkers who are eligible, I'm not a college student any more, I'm not re…

You talked exclusively about a gender deficit, I mentioned gender surplus. You also mentioned the pros of online dating, everyone is aware although it sounds like you've had to explain this to other people in your age range and older, you neglected the cons. Females get a gender surplus of men on online dating, if you want females you should pursue situations with a gender surplus of females, and this distinctly excl…

>if you want females you should pursue situations with a gender surplus of females, and this distinctly excludes online dating.

Yes, I realize that, however the venues for this are very limited in my experience; I already listed out everything I could think of.

Usually, when this discussion comes up, people will recommend things like "find groups that do things you like, and you'll meet women you like there!" Sorry, but I'm not likely to meet any desirable and single women at a Linux or programming group. And I do attend some outdoors groups, but IME there the women are generally much older than me (and I'm not young either). I'm not really sure what the single female 30-45 crowd does in the DC area, but it's not hiking. From my limited dating experience in this area, their general free-time activity appears to be hanging out with their female friends and complaining that they can't find a husband while their biological clock is running out so they're going to start on IVF from a donor.

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

#80

Post by ljf »

ljk wrote: post #61
ljf wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Said they used 'ordinary' looking profiles

aren't stock photos usually of moderately decent looking people? i'd imagine those photos are better than the average tinder users

Fair comment!
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