Oh, Okay: Tinder Is Secretly Ranking Your "Desirability"
Great.
While you may think of Tinder as a fun game of left and right swipes and maybe an ego boost to boot, welcome to the dark side—apparently, you have an internal Tinder score, a score that's calculated to reveal the most (and least) desirable people swiping on the app.
Referred to as an "Elo score," in reference to a chess ranking, the score is—according to Tinder—a way to better facilitate matches. But as one writer pointed out on Fast Company: "To me, and likely most Tinder users, it's hard not to perceive the rating as a definitive scoring of our attractiveness, a supercharged Hot or Not-style algorithm culled from thousands and thousands of signals."
Tinder points out that your desirability score isn't just about how many people swipe right on you. "It's not just how many people swipe right on you. It's very complicated. It took us two and a half months just to build the algorithm because a lot of factors go into it," CEO Sean Rad told Fast Company. Uh huh...go on.
"Every swipe is in a way casting a vote: I find this person more desirable than this person, whatever motivated you to swipe right. It might be because of attractiveness, or it might be because they had a really good profile," Tinder data analyst Chris Dumler said.
Sure. Because everyone knows Tinder is all about the profile. (That's sarcasm, folks.) Now on to the next Tinder investigative feature: Where is everyone finding these tigers?!
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Samantha Leal is the Deputy Editor at Well+Good, where she spends most of her day thinking of new ideas across platforms, bringing on new writers, overseeing the day-to-day of the website, and working with the awesome team to produce the best stories and packages. Before W+G, she was the Senior Web Editor for Marie Claire and the Deputy Editor for Latina.com, with bylines all over the internet. Graduating from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University with a minor in African history, she’s written everything from travel guides to political op-eds to wine explainers (currently enrolled in the WSET program) to celebrity profiles. Find her online pretty much everywhere @samanthajoleal.