📝📝: Relationship Dilemma in the Dating Market｜Your Popularity on Tinder

If you want to mention the overlord of the international dating software/dating platform, then Tinder must be firmly on this throne; with nearly 70 million monthly active users, accounting for at least 50% of the users of the global dating software; Tinder is also all the dating software. Among the most "young", 50% of the users are in the age range of 18 to 25. It can be said that it is the most popular dating app among the Z generation.

This article mainly records that when users use Tinder, the system scores and ranks each individual, and the secret algorithm (Elo Score) and analysis of the dating ecology I have seen on the platform.

Software Overview and ELO Score

Almost every dating app has an unbalanced ratio of male to female users, and Tinder is no different; on average, male users are almost three times as many as female users. It's just that the imbalance between men and women on Tinder is not as serious as Tantan. Even so, it still makes both parties use the software on different starting lines, so the boys around me who have used Tinder think that they are relatively girls on the platform. It is easy to be right-swiped (right-swiped: like, left-swiped: dislike), but they feel right.

A team of researchers from the University of London found that Tinder does present an unfair matchmaking mechanism for male users; on average, women have a 10% chance of being right-swiped, compared to 0.6% for men. For male free users, it takes 167 swipes to be right-swiped once, and the more likes, the gap between male and female users will gradually widen.

Alright~ Then I'll just buy a membership! ?

Officially, there are two options , Tinder Plus and Tinder Gold .

• Tinder Plus : 1 month: $300, 6 months: $1140, 12 months: $1490
• Tinder Gold : 1 month: $950, 6 months: $3590, 12 months: $4690

Buying a membership should be able to eliminate this gap, right? No, the point is your age . In 2015, Tinder just launched a personal subscription plan that does not charge equally; a 50-year-old male user living in an urban area would pay $34.37 for a Gold membership, whereas a 30-year-old female user in the same area would only be charged $6.99 That's it.

In light of this, the Federal Trade Commission ( FTC ) filed a lawsuit against Tinder alleging gender and age discrimination in its membership fees; the lawsuit, filed in California in April 2018, accused Tinder of charging people over the age of 30 Charged twice as much as its subscription service, in 2019, Tinder agreed to settle an age-discrimination class-action lawsuit for $23 million. At present, Tinder has no difference in membership price based on age.

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However, even if there is no longer price discrimination, Tinder still has an algorithmic mechanism Elo Score that wanders on the edge of morality

Elo Score is an internal algorithm of Tinder, and officials hope to use this mechanism to better arrange appointments. Tinder obtains the user's Elo Score through internal data collection and calculation, which is the user's attractiveness index; this index is used to distinguish the overall user ranking on Tinder. According to the level of the attractiveness index, the system will make users with high scores Pairing , conversely, people with low scores will also be paired with each other (the attractiveness index will only show that the user is above average or below average )

Tinder will collect users' data within 24 hours. In addition to the objects swiped left and right, it also includes personal photos, interests, hobbies and even locations. After 24 hours, the system will re-collect data, analysis and rankings; however, these data The collection will extend to the more intimate personal realm, and Tinder can even know your sexual preferences through the data.

French journalist Judith Duportail asked Tinder for information about her, and finally the official provided at least 800 pages of paper documents ; the content covered matching with 870 different users, launching the software 920 times, 1700 chat messages, and of course her Charisma Index (above average). Tinder decided to terminate the Elo Score mechanism in 2019, and Tinder still has not officially disclosed how the calculation mechanism works; in fact, the official statement will revise the current ranking mechanism. In other words, the Elo Score has disappeared, but the ranking mechanism still exists , and user data will still be collected as the material for analysis.

How does the new ranking mechanism work?

At present, Tinder still uses a new version of the ranking mechanism . The official statement is to make it easier for the masses to like each other, and it claims that it will not sell user data to third-party organizations. Tinder's privacy policy states:

"You should not expect your personal information, chats or other communications to remain secure at all times."

According to the information collected by the unofficial website "Swipe Helper" , there are currently three main ranking indicators:

． The desirability score

． User activity ( Visibility )

． Potential match object ( Type match )

The attractiveness index is still presented in the form of scores, but the website does not explain how the new version of the attractiveness index will work, and Tinder officials have stated that this will not be the main indicator that affects user rankings. The latter two are newly added calculation indicators, and the activity is based on the user's online frequency as the calculation standard.

Potential matches are about finding people among all users that the user might like, but this time Tinder uses Amazon's AWS image recognition technology, which can identify material in photos, such as playing guitar, surfing, coffee shop, seaside ...Through the number of times a user likes a certain type of user, the system will recommend potential objects that the user may like.

Two other notable metrics are Your Desired Age Range and Your Pickiness . The former is to standardize the age range of the person you like. If the person you like is too far behind you, the system will deduct your points (Grandpa Sun Lian, Luo Likong will not have to play) The latter is for all right swipes, Users who almost swipe left will deduct points. According to the website’s analysis, a better range of right swiping times will fall within about 30% to 70% of the overall swiping times.

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Tinder's Dating Ecosystem

The original meaning of the word Tinder is "fire" . The users of this platform are like fire, and as long as it is ignited, the entire platform will be covered with fire; Tinder users seem to be burning themselves, looking forward to letting them live in the vast and boundless network. Your own fire can be seen, the question is "how much capital do you have to burn?" . Tinder is just like Facebook's criticized design. There will only be two women on the screen, and users only need to click on which one looks better. However, 20 years later, such a ranking mechanism has been revived, and it has far exceeded the number of users at that time. - Every user is ranking users around the world.

Tinder's internal ranking mechanism is called "class anxiety" in the real world. People of all classes will work harder to maintain their current status; Tinder has created an online version of class anxiety. In fact, this That's what they're for, Tinder is a for-profit company, not a charitable enterprise, with rankings that make users feel less confident about themselves, and then sell you the company's services so you can climb the ladder.

This kind of people treat themselves and users as commodities, make lists to filter users, swipe left and right without stopping, take good-looking photos and apply filters, and use photos as the only source of knowing each other. As social behavior professor Berry. "The Paradox of Choice" ( The Paradox of Choice ) mentioned by Barry Schwartz , more options will not bring better results, but because too many options make us unable to choose the one that really suits us , will always be dissatisfied with what you have at hand and open the next selection.

The influence of the consumer society on human life is that people can always make, consume, and discard without limit; now, we bring such a metaphor into the dating market, and new users will always register, and they can freely swipe left and right. If you can throw it away, there will be another one . The ingenious loop of this design will never let people "slip" to the end. Users will start to wander back in the "mechanical zone", not knowing what they are looking for, but they do not want to leave here .

Tinder's excessively large head post ratio, coupled with the self-introduction field squeezed by photos, seems to be the platform only takes out one photo and asks you "How do you think she/he, do you like it?" Five tabbed interest fields can be filled, all of which force users to shorten the selection time. Users who mistake entertainment as a hobby make the platform show a trend of collective entertainment. Instead of coming up to find a partner, make friends, chat, and have a heart-to-heart talk, they will come up to find playmates of online games, and make friends with software. The original intention of the two who like each other is now reduced to a playground where they can only call allies, or as a temporary reception place to connect their personal Instagram.

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I end with a story

 A man often goes to a certain casino in the town to gamble, but every time he visits, he will lose a lot; one time his friend asked, "If you have never won money, why do you keep going to that place? What about a casino?"

The man responded:
"Because other casinos are pretty bad too."