Hurry! There are Hot Singles in Your Area!
Advertisements claiming to have “hot singles dying to chat,” are rife on the internet with nearly every category of ad being represented. These ads can be found in your spam folder, the side of a website and everywhere else there is ad space on the internet. Tinder is an extremely popular dating app with about 80% of its audience being between 16 and 34 according to 2015 statistics. The beauty of Tinder is that it utilizes your location and information you have provided, along with a complex series of processes, commonly known as “algorithms,” to match you with the surrounding “hot singles.”
The first step of the matching process in Tinder is determining your location so that the app knows what area it can show you singles from. With the recent launch of Tinder Online and the ability to use Tinder from a web browser, your location is determined via your computer and network. On the app, where most users reside, location is a much more sophisticated system. Tinder uses the location provided by the GPS, or global positioning system, in your phone. GPS is simply a system of 30 satellites that orbit the earth. Your phone acts as a receiver, and in the simplest of cases, talks to at least 3 of the GPS satellites. By measuring the distance between your phone and the satellite, the GPS system generates a sphere of where you could be around the satellite. By using three satellites, the three spheres overlap with a degree of precision high enough to determine your exact location. This process is called triangulation. Now that Tinder knows your location, it allows the user to set a distance away from themselves that they would like to be their area in which they can see other users. The range go be as small as one mile, all the way up to 100 miles.
After locating all the users within the designated area, Tinder narrows down the pool to people based on two main criteria: who you are looking for, and the age range of who you want to date. The former gives only three options to choose from: men, women, and men and women. When it comes to age, there is much more flexibility, understandably. The lowest age you can set is 18 and the highest age you can set is 55+. The smallest range that can be designated is four years.
However, the user does not interact with these parts of the app for very long. After granting Tinder access to your location, it is automatically updated whenever the app is open. In addition, after initially setting the preferences, this information is rarely changed. The main part of Tinder comes in the form of the “stack” or the list of all your potential matches. The most straight-forward approach to present these singles to you would be to give them to you in no order. Tinder is in the business of making matches quickly and thus have implemented a series of algorithms to attempt to rig the system.
The first aspect that Tinder uses to gauge its user is known as the ELO score, which is a scoring system typically used to rank chess players. The ELO score assesses all the data collected by the app to develop a “desirability score.” Sean Rad, the CEO of Tinder, insists that it is not a measure of attractiveness as it takes everything into account. Every swipe on your profile is a “vote” on you. The possible swipes are left, right, or up, which correlate to dislike, like, and a super-like, respectively. A super-like notifies the user whom you liked that you liked them. It is only usable once a day, unless more are payed for, and is generally reviewed as creepy, or overbearing. Each vote will weigh in on everything in your profile that one might not think is important such as length and content of bio, how many photos, what is in the photos, etc. This will result in a slight tweak of the ELO score. One implementation of this ELO score is that the votes of those who are more desirable (higher ELO score) are weighted more than those who are less desirable (lower ELO score). This means that if two people both like or super-like you, the user with a higher ELO score will have a greater impact. Another effect of the ELO score is that Tinder will put you in a group of people with similar ELO scores and only show you those people.
Since Tinder is trying its hardest to generate as many matches as possible, it also carefully manipulates who it shows you and in what order they show them to you in. When the app is first opened, the user will be greeted by anywhere form 10–15 people who are rated as more attractive or desirable based on their ELO score. These people have not necessarily swiped right on you, but they are there to convince you that there are many hot singles in your area. In addition, Tinder uses the way you swipe to determine who to show you. For example, if you are less active on Tinder, your profile is shown to less people to avoid their disappointment if they swipe right and never hear from you. On the other hand, if you are active, Tinder will show you to more people and eventually refine it to those who are active at the same time as you. Also, if Tinder sees that you swipe right on literally everybody, Tinder will show you to less people because the system will label you a spam bot. If you swipe left on everyone though, Tinder will label you as too picky and will not show you to people too. These two things are done so that people make a larger number of matches in a small period without being disappointed that those they swipe right on do not swipe back.
While the internet trained us to ignore the “hot singles” ads, Tinder has made those ads a reality and provides some validity to the statement using GPS and a series of algorithms.
