Tinder and the City. p.1: Hacking Myself With Tinder
This is the first post in series:
- Hacking Myself With Tinder
2. Tinder&co as an industry
3. Why does Tinder work and which consequences does it have
4. Reflections on hybrid space and Tinder
DISCLAIMER
- This is a very subjective research which I initiated as a normal user of Tinder but then understanding its functionality I started to experiment with it. It is based on the fact that I constantly get involved into loop of self reflection about everything and then as a designer try to find examples of similar behaviours and their explanations. In a way it’s also a kind of speculative ethnography
- No human beings were harmed in the making of this research
- It’s not gonna tell you how to improve your Tinder performance, I’m not a tinder hacker, I was hacking MYSELF using Tinder! If you wanna hack tinder — check some of this kind of resources
p.1 how I’m hacking myself with Tinder
First of all a little bit about me to understand both socio-cultural background as well as behavioural issues:
I found out about Tinder 2 years ago from my Italian friend and never paid serious attention to it at that time. But in this period a lot has changed in the perception of online dating, especially among young people. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/02/29/5-facts-about-online-dating/
Now Tinder claims to have more than 50 milllion active users, so I remembered about it as an interesting tool to test some of assumptions about my own relationships/dating behavior. Especially as they introduced the feature of “virtually traveling” around the world — being able to see people not only in your city, but in other places.
In process some design-research experience and experimentation spirit took over me and I’ve spent 4 months writing down the statistics of my app use, observing the friends and other users with whom I’ve been interacting directly, as well as reading a lot about the topic.
All my research was based on 1 “problem” and 3 assumptions
“Problem” was that I’m single since I came to Italy with just few cases of short-term interest in relationships with some people. And assumptions which could explain that were the following:
1. If the reason is in not meeting enough people in daily life due to my lifestyle, it will be automatically solved by the app where there are many more people;
2. If the reason was in being frustrated in general app will not help anyway;
3. If I was especially incompatible with people in Milan it would become clear when comparing my results with those of other cities, here I especially wanted to see both sides of the situation:
if it’s about me not liking guys;
or that they don’t like me
Then of course I also wanted to fulfill some communication practice goals— embrace diversity, chat with strangers, go on dates, etc…
Tinder profile
Here is how my profile looked like, it’s a bit better — just cause smiling more — version of myself =)
First impression when just registering and opening app was quite confusing, I felt super uncomfortable, then got over it and tried interacting, all pretty much like these girls in video picturing first use of Tinder perfectly. Then I also got stalked as I added instagram profile which probably wasn’t the best idea. But then I got on it back as I’ve formulated experiments.
EXPERIMENT 1
Quantifying and comparing (my) attraction to people in different locations.
It was super simply structured:
- Count how many profiles I swiped in total
- Count how many I liked out of them
- Get percentage
- Compare results in different cities
So comparing how many people I liked in Milan and Moscow I found not that big difference — just 1% which can absolutely be a result of some statistical error. In general my percentage of profiles liked was much lower than average female’s on Tinder (14% according to statistics). When I was swiping together with friends actually we got to some number very close to it — 13%.
It’s quite clear that there is no objective but neither repeatable way to evaluate your attraction. Sometimes I could see perfectly how my mood or settings and events were affecting numbers. For example after the first date when the guy turned out looking completely different from picture I became super suspicious and liked very few, in a good mood or on the contrary being bored I was accepting some profiles which I would absolutely reject in other situations, etc. This is well seen in the following graph — it represents the sessions total number vs those liked:
EXPERIMENT 2
Quantifying and comparing my attractiveness and behaviour of people in different locations:
What I had to do was to swipe right 50 profiles in a row, count how many matches it would bring, count number of discussions initiated by guys, observe how discussions go, how many dates invitations are reached in 72 hours, compare results in different cities.
Experiment was based on this video idea.
In total the difference between activity of guys in Milan and Moscow was quite drastic, I got 32 matches less in Moscow out of total 50. Then also the conversations seemed to be not that vivid in Moscow. Of course it doesn’t give any absolute result and understanding on where is it better to meet someone, but still it’s evident that taking the Tinder users of Milan and Moscow the difference between how many I like is not that big, while the reciprocal activity differs a lot:
General observations:
Out of 100 new “acquaintances” in two cities no one has behaved in offensive way which is often associated with Tinder, most of them were starting talking with normal greetings and calling me by name. The only example of the objectification I was encountering in further conversations was in the questions about my height and age. Many were wondering also what am I looking for at Tinder and whether I’m really single. Also no one has ever reacted inadequately to the rejection or sudden silence. Well, some tried adding me on Facebook after that, but also there have never reached the point of any offensive messages. And only few people stated purely sexual nature of their interest.
That being said it is also true that there were no especially exciting discussions neither, mostly just basic stuff about what are we doing in life, where I am from, etc.
A lot of people wanted to pass to other platforms — especially Whatsapp, then Facebook, but after getting there most conversations were just fading after a while.
It was interesting to see also how different were the photos in profiles of Italians and Russians, how they present themselves differently as well. Normally Italians, if they write anything at all, would put some effort in describing good about themselves. Russians on the contrary often try to diminish themselves (“in general I’m just a terrible person”).
Since the new feature of mentioning the education and workplace it is also easy to see what’s the nature of cities economy — where do people work more, whether they’re managers or scientists, or services workers, etc.
In general in Milan guys were more active in asking lots of questions, showing some interesting to getting to know me. In Moscow they seemed less interested in the online chat preferring to meet ASAP. There were also many more married (and writing that openly in profile) or divorced people. Also it seemed that Tinder is more popular among sex-workers there, at least many profiles were stating specifically that they’re not interested in those offers, while I have never seen anything like that written in Milan.
At least one third of users in Moscow were foreigners and many of them were not currently present there, but choosing the city as location to swipe from other places in the world.
There can be various interpretations of the differences in activity of guys in Milan and Moscow. Maybe Tinder is not that spread there yet or the winter holidays had its effect on it. It can be also that my profile is already aesthetically closer to what is preferred by European culture rather than Russian, or maybe on the contrary the “foreigner-effect” has place. All those interpretations are anyway speculative with not enough information to build the hypothesis, but on quantitative side the same effect of Russians being less active was confirmed also by my friends.
I also went to some dates with people I got to know. At first I have underestimated influence of Tinder (or any other digital app in general) on the behavior at dates, I thought that its effects end with the screen conversation, but that was not completely correct and asks for more explanation in the further posts on how the general hybrid space works in this field.
Conclusions:
Getting back to my initial hypothesis it appears that my problem was in the combination of the first two aspects: on Tinder I found out that I’m very picky comparing to average female, but even despite that I managed to find some interesting people online, which means I was just not meeting enough in daily offline life. And it appears to be not the case of some cultural incompatibility with people in Milan as numbers showed.
In general it was a very interesting and mostly positive experience for me. I got to know a lot of people, practiced social skills of chatting with strangers, have seen some interesting new places, also have understood some parameters about what is attracting me in others and where are my boundaries.
As a bonus — a very speculative comparison of Tinder vs public space. It happened that in one discussion a friend suggested that according to him public space is still much more convenient environment to meet new people rather than some apps. Well I have something to say on that as well =) As we’ve created this temporary public space in Milan — #nevicata14 — and had to be documenting and communicating its life for 6 months of its existence, I had to spend really a lot of time there, mostly alone, pretending to be relaxing sitting there while actually taking photos and observing. In those 6 months just one guy has ever approached me asking for a phone number…
Eventually I got super fascinated by the general mechanics of app and industry surrounding it and also tried to look for some deeper observations and interpretations of Tinder users behaviors, which I will discuss the following posts ;)
