What’s Your Score on Tinder? (Media Content Analysis)
The Tinder Algorithm
We all know how this most popular dating app works but except we don’t. I was really curious about how does it works and so I did the media analysis of the dating app and the findings really amazed me. Before jumping to know how it really works, let me tell you how you think it works and if you haven’t heard about it before this will be the introduction.
Tinder is a social media platform where you find new friends, dates and relationships in your proximity. It basically works in 3 steps -
- Setting up the profile
- Swiping other people’s profiles
- Getting a match and texting them
If you swipe a profile to right (means liking a profile) and the same profile swipes you right too you both get a match. Now you might think it randomly shows your profile to others in your proximity but let me tell you it does not work that way. To whom your profile are shown and who’s profile are you seeing on your screen plus where does it land on that stack of a number of profile is decided based on your rank. Now what is this rank and how is it calculated? It all starts with your ELO score.
The ELO Score
Every profile gets a score and based on this score your ranking is done. Your ELO score is never shown to you and is neither accessible, it stays in Tinder’s internal data stores. Before telling you how is it calculated first let me tell you when is it calculated at the first time. When you create your profile for the first time (a new comer), your profile gets a boost for two days (not the paid boost) and is shown to a wide variety of other profiles randomly. After those two days the boost gets over and your profile comes back to a normal profile and that is why you get more matches in first two days and less matches later. And now it’s time to let you know how is it calculated and what factors influence it. The honest thing is we don’t know the whole of it because Tinder won’t reveal it but we know most of it. Some of this information is extracted from official Tinder announcements and articles, some of it is almost certain based on personal experimentation done by experts and anecdotal evidence.
How your score is calculated -
- A combination of % of people who like you as a whole
- % of the people you like who like you back
- Getting attention from big players : Getting liked by a profile whose rank is higher than you boosts your score. It is just like case when in cricket a team wins against a team placed above it in ranking chart, it gets more points than winning against a team who is placed below it.
- Your swiping pattern : Both swiping right to everyone and to almost no one are penalized, though mass swiping right a lot more severely than being too picky. A right swipe quota of 30–70% seems to be the sweet spot.
- Whether you actually send messages to most of your matches : Sending messages, as well as receiving replies earns you some score.
- Stay active, stay up in the stack : Your placement in the stack of number of profiles gradually gets worse while inactive.
- Tinder Plus users who make liberal use of the unlimited swipes feature may be bricking their account. Swiping too often per day, or hour, may get you marked as a bot by Tinder, resulting in a very low score.
- Testing suggests 2000 swipes per hour in any direction will get your account “locked” for 12 hours and will also cause a loss in the ELO score.
- It is possible to influence your score throughout the lifetime of your account, for example by taking some better pictures of yourself, but it will take time for any changes to be noticeable. The easy way to do this is to reset your account.
How the profiles are shown -
The Tinder algorithm works in such a way that for example if you get a score of 6 then you will be shown to profiles with scores between 5 to 7 regularly and rarely to the profiles beyond that gap(<5 or > 7).
So this is how Tinder really works (though we don’t know everything) and I hope you will have a better swiping in future now.
