Make sure there is a mix of head shots, body shots and if you are adventurous, include an active photo – But in all, do not include selfies. Research shows that outdoorsy photos get 19% more swipes, and selfies get 8% fewer swipes. Mainly, you want to highlight your best features.
36 Tinder Hacks & Tips 400% More Tinder Matches | How Tinder Works
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To get more matches on Tinder, go into “settings” and slide the “maximum distance” slider to the right to expand your geographical area. Additionally, expand your age range by as many years as you are comfortable. Alternatively, make your written profile more attractive by crafting a unique tagline, such as “Outdoors lover, Columbia graduate, writer, and into the finer things in life.” You should also fill out all the sections of your profile to give potential matches a good sense of who you are. To learn how to choose the perfect pictures for your Tinder profile, keep reading!
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If there’s one thing I know about love, it’s that people who don’t find it have shorter life spans on average. Which means learning how the Tinder algorithm works is a matter of life and death, extrapolating slightly.
According to the Pew Research Center, a majority of Americans now consider dating apps a good way to meet someone; the previous stigma is gone. But in February 2016, at the time of Pew’s survey, only 15 percent of American adults had actually used a dating app, which means acceptance of the tech and willingness to use the tech are disparate issues. On top of that, only 5 percent of people in marriages or committed relationships said their relationships began in an app. Which raises the question: Globally, more than 57 million people use Tinder — the biggest dating app — but do they know what they’re doing?
They do not have to answer, as we’re all doing our best. But if some information about how the Tinder algorithm works and what anyone of us can do to find love within its confines is helpful to them, then so be it.
The first step is to understand that Tinder is sorting its users with a fairly simple algorithm that can’t consider very many factors beyond appearance and location. The second step is to understand that this doesn’t mean that you’re doomed, as years of scientific research have confirmed attraction and romance as unchanging facts of human brain chemistry. The third is to take my advice, which is to listen to biological anthropologist Helen Fisher and never pursue more than nine dating app profiles at once. Here we go.
A few years ago, Tinder let Fast Company reporter Austin Carr look at his “secret internal Tinder rating,” and vaguely explained to him how the system worked. Essentially, the app used an Elo rating system, which is the same method used to calculate the skill levels of chess players: You rose in the ranks based on how many people swiped right on (“liked”) you, but that was weighted based on who the swiper was. The more right swipes that person had, the more their right swipe on you meant for your score.
Tinder would then serve people with similar scores to each other more often, assuming that people whom the crowd had similar opinions of would be in approximately the same tier of what they called “desirability.” (Tinder hasn’t revealed the intricacies of its points system, but in chess, a newbie usually has a score of around 800 and a top-tier expert has anything from 2,400 up.) (Also, Tinder declined to comment for this story.)
In March 2019, Tinder published a blog post explaining that this Elo score was “old news” and outdated, paling in comparison to its new “cutting-edge technology.” What that technology is exactly is explained only in broad terms, but it sounds like the Elo score evolved once Tinder had enough users with enough user history to predict who would like whom, based solely on the ways users select many of the same profiles as other users who are similar to them, and the way one user’s behavior can predict another’s, without ranking people in an explicitly competitive way. (This is very similar to the process Hinge uses, explained further down, and maybe not a coincidence that Tinder’s parent company, Match, acquired Hinge in February 2019.)
But it’s hard to deny that the process still depends a lot on physical appearance. The app is constantly updated to allow people to put more photos on their profile, and to make photos display larger in the interface, and there is no real incentive to add much personal information. Most users keep bios brief, and some take advantage of Spotify and Instagram integrations that let them add more context without actually putting in any additional information themselves.
The algorithm accounts for other factors — primarily location and age preferences, the only biographical information that’s actually required for a Tinder profile. At this point, as the company outlined, it can pair people based on their past swiping, e.g., if I swiped right on a bunch of people who were all also swiped right on by some other group of women, maybe I would like a few of the other people that those women saw and liked. Still, appearance is a big piece.
As you get closer and closer to the end of the reasonable selection of individuals in any dating app, the algorithm will start to recycle people you didn’t like the first time. It will also, I know from personal experience, recycle people you have matched with and then unmatched later, or even people you have exchanged phone numbers with and then unmatched after a handful of truly “whatever” dates. Nick Saretzky, director of product at OkCupid, told me and Ashley Carman about this practice on the Verge podcast Why’d You Push That Button in October 2017. He explained:
Maybe you really did swipe left by accident the first time, in which case profile recycling is just an example of an unfeeling corporation doing something good by accident, by granting you the rare chance at a do-over in this life. “Every time you swipe, the next choice should be a little bit worse of an option”
Or maybe you have truly run out of options and this will be a sort of uncomfortable way to find out — particularly unnerving because the faces of Tinder tend to blur together, and your mind can easily play tricks on you. Have I seen this brown-haired Matt before? Do I recognize that beachside cliff pic?
Don’t despair, even though it’s tempting and would obviously make sense.
There’s a prime time to be active if you want to get swiped right
Theres loads on the internet about when the best time to swipe on Tinder is. But according to Stefan-Pierre you need to be on the app at 2pm on a Sunday. He says its “because everyone is so hungover, feeling a bit sorry for themselves and literally everyone is indoors on their phone – especially in the winter.”
If youre busy then, he recommends you swipe for new matches after 10.30pm on a weeknight. This is to catch the prime time for people checking all their social media apps before they go to bed.
FAQ
How many Tinder swipes do you get a day?
How many Tinder swipes do you get per hour?
How long does it take to get more Tinder swipes?
How many swipes Do guys get on Tinder?
We don’t know exactly how this is calculated, but it likely has to do with your gender, age, location, and/or how you use the app. Statistically, it looks as though young women are getting closer to 100 swipes, while men are getting closer to 50.
