Tinder Experiment Updates: My God! What have I done?
So, I was watching Real Time with Bill Maher last week and something funny occurred (beyond the normal comedy). Bill and his guest, Professor Scott Galloway, were discussing the topic “Why are men in crisis?” during the panel segment. Eventually the topic veered to discussing online dating and Tinder. Starting at 4:01 in the video Professor Galloway mentions Tinder inequality and then says, “If mating was a country, it would be more unequal than Venezuela.” Prof G also posted the clip on his twitter feed.
I instantly recognized that the fact he was quoting came from a graph in a blog post I published on Medium way back in 2015. The post was titled “Tinder Experiments II: Guys, unless you are really hot you are probably better off not wasting your time on Tinder — a quantitative socio-economic study.” That graph looks like this:
Notice how in the graph I called out Venezuela as a country with lower inequality than that estimated for Tinder. I was pretty sure Scott’s mention of Venezuela couldn’t just be coincidental. So how did information from a blog post I wrote in 2015 get mentioned on national TV by a guy with close to 500K twitter followers? An investigation was required.
Beam Me Up Scotty
I used my top-tier google skills to search for Scott Galloway and Tinder. From this I was able to come up with a general timeline of Scott’s obsession with my quantitative socioeconomic analysis:
On October 1, 2021 Prof G wrote a blog article titled, “A Few(er) Good Men” on his website.
In that blog post he included this graph:
Does it look familiar?
The most amusing part is that he cited his source as “The Economist via Freedom and Prosperity Blog.” This hilarious misunderstanding stems from a Freedom and Prosperity Blog about my post. In that blog post the information from my blog post is located directly after a quote from an article in The Economist. Scott’s mistake seems understandable and forgivable in that context (but still). Also, I can now claim on my resume that I was a writer for The Economist and cite Scott Galloway as the reference. To Scott’s credit, he links to my blog post in the text of the article and only the graph is cited incorrectly. For some reason I think it is also worth mentioning the bio of Dan Mitchell, the author of the Freedom and Prosperity Blog post: “Dan Mitchell is co-founder of the Center for Freedom and Prosperity and Chairman of the Board. He is an expert in international tax competition and supply-side tax policy.”
Since then, Prof Galloway has used my blog findings as an example (of fact) several other times:
- Scott used the same graph in a Business Insider Opinion piece on Oct. 21, 2021.
- He has also mentioned it in his youtube series “So how did you two meet?” | Chart of the Week on March 14, 2022.
- On April 20, 2022 he posted on Twitter, “The bottom 80% of male #Tinder users, based on likes received, are competing for the bottom 22% of women. If it were a country, Tinder would be among the most unequal in the world. #nomercynomalice #masculinity” This of course was also directly taken from my blog. There was no citation in this case (but I don’t really expect people to cite sources in a Tweet).
I maybe am missing a few of his references to my work, especially since Scott doesn’t always cite his sources, but all this eventually led to him mentioning it on Real Time with Bill Maher (right after Bill made a joke about dick pics). Mystery solved.
Well, how did we get here?
All this attention made me revisit the blog I put together in 2015. It was something I first created on a lark and hadn’t really paid much attention to since. I was quite surprised to see that my Tinder Experiments post had 12,600 “claps” (which I guess is Medium’s equivalent to likes). Digging deeper into the numbers (which is kinda my thing) showed that the post has (as of September 2022) over 1.6 million page views. 1.6 MILLION! There was also a robust discussion in the comments with opinions ranging from “This man is a pathetic incel who doesn’t understand economics or statistics” to “Give this man a Nobel Prize.” (Why not both?) It turns out that writing that blog post was the most important thing I ever did in my life (even more so than that day I cured cancer and saved a kitten stuck in a tree).
My post was mildly popular and wildly more popular than I expected. Why had over 1.6 million people viewed this article, let alone thousands taking the time to clap for it? I used the free backlink checker from ahrefs.com (https://ahrefs.com/backlink-checker) to search for links to my blog post. The blog domain itself was not very popular (0 backlinks), but the url for the Tinder Experiments II post had 2,785 backlinks from 615 different domains.
My favorite backlink by far is the official Wikipedia page for the Gini coefficient. Let me repeat: Someone had added a link to my blog to the official Wikipedia page for the Gini coefficient! The Wikipedia entry now contains the following text, “The Gini coefficient has also been applied to analyze inequality on dating apps.” High praise indeed!
My second favorite backlink is the google books page for a book entitled, “Modern Indices for International Economic Diplomacy edited by Vincent Charles, Ali Emrouzneja.” If you want to know the proper way to cite a random blog post by an anonymous writer (with a funny name) in a fancy official publication it is apparently this:
Worst-Online-Dater. (2015, March 25). Tinder experiments II: Guys, unless you are really hot you are probably better off not wasting your time on Tinder — A quantitative socio-economic study. Medium. Retrieved October 10, 2021, from https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-guys-unless-you-are-really-hot-you-are-probably-better-off-not-wasting-your-2ddf370a6e9a
This citation was sandwiched between a paper from Nature entitled, “Initial community evenness favours functionality under selective stress” and a paper from the journal Democratization entitled, “Income inequality, distributive unfairness, and support for democracy: Evidence from East Asia and Latin America.” A non-peer reviewed study based on results from catfishing on Tinder is definitely the meat in that academic sandwich.
Worst Online Dater’s Incellent Adventure
Of course, not all the backlinks were from curious economists. The blog post garnered most of its attention from the incel and anti-incel communities. This is best exemplified by the number of subreddits that linked to my blog. A partial list includes
I didn’t make this blog post specifically for the incel community, but it makes sense why they would value it. Whining about relationships (whether it be ones you are in or ones you are trying to get into) seems to me about as fundamental as human nature gets. It also makes sense because there is probably some truth contained in the data I collected. I likewise think there are many people misrepresenting what I was showing. I am hoping to write at least one more blog post clarifying some of these things when I find the time and motivation (apparently not in the last seven years).
I am not against incels. The one thing I am against (and will adamantly protest) is if people try to use these data to encourage, incite, or endorse violence and hate. This is wholly unacceptable to me. Please don’t attach my anonymous name to it.
If it makes sense for incels to value these data, it makes just as much sense that others would fight back against it. I am not against those people either. There are a lot of fair (and unfair) criticisms of my post. Maybe that will be another blog post someday. Instead, for now, I will leave you with this insight I found on the r/FeMRADebates subreddit by user Pseudonymmed:
“As for the 80/20 thing, it’s just one of these small things that gets passed around over and over until most of the people who take it for granted as some “fact” couldn’t even tell you where it came from accurately. Guys pass it around online to justify why they can’t get laid, that’s all it’s about.”
Thank you for being one of the ones that know where it came from accurately, even if you are only using it to justify why you can’t get laid.
- Worst Online Dater
P.S.
I really hope Scott Galloway becomes famous enough so that John C McGinley can portray him some day.
