Pickiness and Tinder

[ThePhoenix]

 
 
I figure I should at least try on‑line game before writing off my country completely and moving to Africa, as much as I ultimately want to do that anyway. Iʼve been dragging my heels over on‑line for a long time, because I have no enthusiasm for it. Conceptually I find the whole psychology of on‑line game profoundly inferior to day game, and Iʼve gotten laid from day game, too. With that said, approach anxiety continues to amplify the relative scarcity of black women here, so augmenting my day game with on‑line is probably a good idea. So Iʼm finally going to give Tinder a quick shot. Not a remarkably thorough or protracted effort, but something.

The thing is, Iʼll only touch what is in this country a visible minority, so there are some policy details that could bite me in the ass. I expect that of the local women on Tinder, Iʼll probably be willing to sleep with maybe 5% to 10% of them after a reasonable age filter. In day game I just walk past the other 95%, but Tinder will put them in my face, leading to some technical issues:


1. Penalty on Pickiness

Iʼve read that Tinder specifically penalizes users who reject most of the cards by giving them less opportunity. I donʼt know if this is gender-asymmetric, since from what I hear most women reject most cards, and I assume they get away with it.

Obviously the less cards you like, the less matches you get, and if you only like the hottest chicks and you donʼt have a killer profile, youʼre going to get starved. Iʼm not talking about that. Iʼm talking, the cards youʼre liking are comparatively arbitrary, and the matches youʼre getting are much less/worse for the number of cards youʼre liking than youʼd expect based on the match ratio you get when youʼre liking more of the cards presented. Or, Tinder just slows down or stops giving you cards where it wouldnʼt if you were liking more of them.

I do have a tech system by which I can easily track and condition the percentage of cards Iʼm liking, so I can always like cards I donʼt really like, just enough to reach the alleged optimal like ratio minimum of 30%. But then I have to dodge matches I didnʼt really want.


2. Daily Limit

Iʼve also read that Tinder implements some kind of rate limiting on swiping, meaning that once youʼve swiped a certain number of cards, it stops giving you cards for a while even though there are obviously more users available in your area.

What Iʼm not sure of, and Iʼve read conflicting reports, is whether this is a limit on the number of likes or on the total number of swipes.

This makes a big difference to my strategy. If the limit is on the number of likes, then Iʼm best to actually swipe according to my pickiness, because every non‑black or fat ugly black girl I “like” means one less cute black girl I might get to match soon.

Conversely, if the rate limiting is primarily on the total number of swipes, then itʼs easier to just thoughtlessly right‑swipe all the black girls, which I can do quickly. Plus, just in case issue #1 is actually a thing, I can ask my automated tool to randomly right‑swipe some fraction of the non‑black girls to keep my like ratio just over 30%.

I should note that the rate limiting Iʼm referring to may be distinct from the penalty for “swipe bombing”, or just right‑swiping everything blindly. I have absolutely no intention to swipe bomb because in this country most of the matches Iʼd get would be unwanted.


3. Ghosting Penalty

Iʼve also read that Tinder penalizes users who match people and then donʼt talk to them, by giving them less opportunity.

If this is true, this will be particularly annoying in combination with issue #1, because now I have to actually talk to matches I donʼt want. Ugh. This would be an incentive to be pickier and only swipe on what I actually like.


Does anyone have experience that could confirm or deny the above purported “features” of Tinder?
 

 

[Michal]

About 8 months ago when I still used it regularly, there was a limit of likes per 12h / 24h you could give. But also total limit on total swipes you make (both left and right) per day, which I read somewhere was around 1200ish.
The "not engaging your matches" part seemed to have an effect as well. Swiping right on everyone penalized you. Swiping right on only the hottest chicks penalized you, but for a different reason. Supposedly, the algorithm takes into account your "hit ratio" as well, meaning the desire score of people you:
Swipe right on and match with you
Swipe right and do not match with you
Swipe left if they liked you previously
Swipe left if they did not liked you previously

Based on this, it computes and adjusts your desirability score and shows you (to) different people. So if you swipe only on hot girls with 2200 rating while you have 1300, but even girls with 1200 score swipe left on you, it will just push you down and make you like 1100. And the explaination was "because that is where you objectively fit in your desirability".
I heard from a collegue they improved the location part and now being closer to one another has more impact to who gets shown to you compared to previous versions. But still, if you have a killer profile, you should clean up.

The penalties make sense (not engaging, not swiping right on the girls who liked me, and swiping right too much on girls who did not like me) and would fit what happened with my profile and why I ultimately decided to quit that.

 

[ThePhoenix]

 
Yeah, Iʼve read about the Elo score which a Tinder exec has even let on to. However, Iʼve also heard that itʼs marketing bullshit and that in reality it all comes down to noob boost or pay.

I guess the only way we can really know for sure would be a controlled experiment. Have handsome and buck ugly catfish accounts, with all other factors identical. Have both accounts swipe a fixed number of cards using mechanical randomness. Then have a pool of raters blinded to the study assign an average score to each card that was observed, and see if there is a statistically significant difference in the average of those ratings given to the cards seen by the ugly vs handsome account. Alas, I doubt anyone has done such an experiment.

More generally, I think confounding factors are a problem in most anecdotal reports about what Tinder does. For instance, does liking too low a fraction of cards itself have any effect? That may be difficult to answer, because most people who reject most cards are also probably cherry-picking the hottest cards. So, is Tinder penalizing them because they are rejecting most cards, or is it penalizing them because theyʼre “playing out of their league”? The only way you could really know is by liking a low but random fraction of the cards and seeing if that still has an impact.

In my particular situation, my “pickiness” would appear more random to a computer than most peoplesʼ. If I was to just swipe what I personally would consider at least fuckable, Iʼd be rejecting a lot of girls who probably have a high rating just as likely as ones with a low rating.

In fact, my pickiness might appear even somewhat backwards.

Ideally, if you average preferences across a whole population, race should disappear as a factor in attractiveness — some individuals may have a racial preference, but they should be balanced by others with the opposite preference. Because race is irrelevant to purely objective, unbiased measures of beauty in biological terms. However, in our fucked up society that is not the case, as several studies given access to back‑end data have shown that, for instance, black women tend to get less matches in these apps, particularly from non‑black men, especially when compared with East Asian or white women. (The same studies also found East Asian males at a disadvantage.)

If thatʼs the case, Iʼd probably be rejecting most of the highest ranked girls and only liking some smallish and apparently random subset of the medium-ranked girls and maybe a few medium‑low ranked here and there. What exactly would that do to my score?  LOL

...there was a limit of likes per 12h / 24h you could give. But also total limit on total swipes you make (both left and right) per day, which I read somewhere was around 1200ish.

I think this is the most clear, definite factor.

Between the fact that there is a more restrictive limit on likes than on the total number of cards, and the fact that there is possibly a penalty for not engaging matches (and also for getting unmatched), it seems that I may be best off to just swipe on girls I actually wouldnʼt mind laying.

I mean, what good is Tinder to me if in order to keep it happy I have to interact with girls I donʼt want to interact with? (I wish it would let me pick race. In a way I get why they donʼt, but people are going to do it anyway.)

I heard from a collegue they improved the location part and now being closer to one another has more impact to who gets shown to you compared to previous versions.

Hm, that could help me, both in logistics and demographics. I live fairly close to several areas with somewhat higher black population — not ideally high, but better than the wider average.
 

 

[Michal]

The pay to win aspect is most likely there. But the anecdotal stories are ranging to all extremes. Hot guy not paying and slaying, hot guy paying and having one match a week from overweight girls... Given that the app is purely based on looks, it is hard to research anything, the data will always be skewed in a way. There were some personal experiments people did where they took a stylish looking guy and made his profile look as if he was rich or poor. Or they took obesse guy and did the same. I think in those cases there was no real difference. Maybe like 1 match.
Point being I would not lose much time overanalyzing this that much. Just tailor your profile to the audience you want to target (hood chicks, business women, party girls, ...) and then swipe on those you like.

 

[ThePhoenix]

Given that the app is purely based on looks, it is hard to research anything, the data will always be skewed in a way.

You could get meaningful results if you used a large and diverse enough pool of raters to overcome individual subjectivity, a sufficiently large number of sample points to obtain decent statistical power, and a careful experimental design to minimize confounding factors. However, itʼs way outside the scope of what I or most guys would be willing to do just to get more Tinder matches. Iʼd rather blow the same time and money to go hit on chicks in the malls and street markets of Kampala or Nairobi.  LOL

There were some personal experiments people did where they took a stylish looking guy and made his profile look as if he was rich or poor. Or they took obesse guy and did the same. I think in those cases there was no real difference. Maybe like 1 match.

Considering that Tinderʼs more or less known to be for hook‑ups, that actually makes sense! Try it on OkCupid or somewhere where chicks are looking for husbands and the result might be different.

Point being I would not lose much time overanalyzing this that much. Just tailor your profile to the audience you want to target (hood chicks, business women, party girls, ...) and then swipe on those you like.

Yeah, Iʼve basically come to this conclusion also. I have to remind myself that my life doesnʼt depend on Tinder. Iʼm basically just trying it out in order to lower my resistance to accepting the large disruptions associated with moving to Africa when I havenʼt even exhausted obvious less extreme measures. If I get no matches on Tinder itʼll just push me onto that airplane I want to be on anyway, that much faster.
 

 

[Fuck This]

So why not usea dating site focused on Black people instead?

 

[ThePhoenix]

So why not usea dating site focused on Black people instead?

This is, at least in principle, a good idea. Iʼve looked into it somewhat.

One problem is that, while there are a number of black focused and interracial focused dating sites, they are mostly, if not entirely, of the “traditional” dating site paradigm — i.e., setting up an extensive commonality-based profile (which I suspect tends to encourage boyfriend‑zoning), and sending members unsolicited winks and messages which they see prior to expressing any interest in you.

Iʼm much more inclined towards the more Tinder-style apps, in part because I think having the girl not even see your interest without having to first admit interest in you, sets a better frame from the start. Also, matching on minimal info I think more closely mimics seduction in real life.

With some casual searching, I was only able to find one Tinder-style app that had been geared to dating black people, but it was a start‑up that has since been absorbed by a much larger outfit that doesnʼt specialize in that way.

There are some extant Tinder-style apps that, unlike the bigger players, do allow choosing race. One was founded by an Asian guy who started the app somewhat ironically due to feeling he was being overlooked due to being Asian. Well, he figured, people are going to filter anyway, why not let them search what theyʼre looking for and that way, on the other end, youʼre more likely to be fed profiles of people who are actually open to you.

The problem with those sites is that they have such a vastly smaller user base than the major players that even in spite of black women being a minority, Iʼm still liable to find far, far more on Tinder than on XYZ little tiny site. Of course, this also somewhat depends on how representative of demographics you find on the big sites.

Iʼve been fucking with Bumble, and on there, I was initially disappointed to find that for every two black women I would statistically expect to find, I only find about one. Mind you, that was with a wide distance setting. I live in a multicultural city, but with a number of satellite cities, most of which are predominantly white and Asian. The suburb I live in, by contrast, has several pockets with a significant fraction of black people, and when I adjusted my distance down to 6mi/10km, though still not perfect, the ratio improved drastically. Unfortunately, I also ran out of cards fairly quickly. Perhaps Tinder would fare better, being more popular.