Tinder just resurrected romance then killed it dead again.
When Tindering the night away, do you ever realize that most of your matches fall within roughly the same attractiveness level?
You're not imagining things. Tinder has actually pre-selected these matches for you based on a bullshit secret "desirability rating" they assign you without your knowledge. This rating is then used to "help facilitate better matches among its users" in that people with similar ratings are suggested for each other.
According to Tinder, the rating isn't solely based on looks, but … it's mainly based on looks.
“It’s not just how many people swipe right on you,” Tinder CEO Sean Rad said during an interview with Fast Company’s Austin Carr. “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.”
… Like how many people swipe right on you. But it also considers the kind of people you swipe right on yourself.
For example, if you tend to swipe right on a lot of tattooed, bearded men who take photos with small dogs, that's what Tinder is going to send you. If you're super into chicks who post group photos for their profile picture so you have zero idea which one of them they actually are, then congratulations, you'll continue to be puzzled by this in the future.
How do you find out what your secret desirability rating is? Short answer: You don't.
The rating is not available to the public, so you have no way of knowing how desirable a flock of nerds at the Tinder headquarters find you. However, if you’ve noticed that Tinder keeps sending you an influx of barely fuckable clones, there's a good change your desirability rating isn't that high. Or, on the other hand, if you're getting nothing but babes, then congratulations, Daddy's plastic surgeon did a great job on your facial reconstruction.
But, regardless of how your desirability rating is calculated, it’s easy to understand why some people might view the numerical rating as a snapshot of their own self worth.
During the interview, Carr's own score was revealed to him. Even though it was considered to be in the “upper end of average,” it left him feeling less than confident.
“Something about ‘upper end of average’ didn’t exactly do wonders for my ego," he said, all dejected and emo-like. Boo-hoo.
If you ask us, this secret rating this is horse crap. There's a lot more to mutual attraction than a shared attractiveness level that's been given an arbitrary number by a room full of programmers in another state. Yeah, looks matter, but sometimes you want to bang someone in a different league than you because you've literally had sex with everyone on your level within a 20-mile radius. And when that happens and Tinder doesn't send for a better-looking crop of potential lays, you end up dying alone from a slow death of over-masturbation. It's just science.
Stop being douche-bags, Tinder.
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