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How Does Tinder Work?

How does Tinder actually work?

 

Although the algorithms that lie behind Tinder are kept secret in order to stop copycat apps from appearing, I stumbled on this article that theorizes how Tinder might actually work. Upon reading the article I began to draw parallels between some of the theories and the content we have been talking about recently in class about connectivity and information filing on the web.  It starts off by describing how Tinder analyses your behavior and preferences by noting how many times you swipe left and right and how many times other people swipe you left and right. The algorithm gets a feel for your tastes and preferences and figures out how “attractive you are”. Essentially the site gives your behaviors “authority” scores and it uses them to find your best potential matches. A proxy for determining best matches are activity on the app, that is to say the more active you are the higher you will appear on people’s list. Someone who hasn’t logged in for a long time we could say has little “authority” and they will not be at the front of a user’s cue as they have a low chance of making a match with them. Another proxy is the actual time you are active so people using the app at the same time are more likely to be matched together. Furthermore, Tinder takes into account how many times you swipe right and how many times you swipe left to determine if you are potentially a bot or just picky. The app is theorized to prefer people who like and dislike more evenly and these people get a higher authority score. Lastly, Tinder places a higher authority on people who have a lot of right swipes and low authority in people who have a lot of left swipes and it is claimed that Tinder deliberately places people into an “attractive bracket” and places these in the front of your queue to convince users that tinder contains attractive people and its worth using. Moreover, people with a low amount of likes are typically placed at the back.

Putting these ideas together it seems like Tinder uses the ideas of connectivity and matching markets that we have been discussing in class. Tinder assesses your authority score by the proxies stated above and the site itself acts as the hub which then connects you to people with similar authority scores as you. Building on that people with higher authority scores are more likely to appear on more people’s feeds because they are probably more active, don’t behave suspiciously and are considered “attractive”. This mechanism also works like a matching market. Tinder is taking two people that are similar and matching them together hoping to maximize social surplus by the resultant matchings. It would be inefficient to put two people together with contrasting authority scores because the likelihood of a match would be low. If tinder didn’t use this authority/ranking system to match people then the app could become laborious and receive more negative feedback potentially causing less people to use it.

Charles Ferguson

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