Tinder is doing a lot more intelligent matching than you think. The CTO of OKCupid (which is owned by the same parent company) was on a podcast a few weeks ago where he briefly discussed some of the algorithmic challenges of Tinder. They include:
- it may not seem like it, but Tinder does try to pick people it thinks are most likely to produce a match, based on-- to be brutally honest-- your attractiveness (as determined by who has swiped for you) and the other person's
- it then orders them approximately from most likely to least likely, but it has to know how often to start over, because eventually as you go down the list you'll eventually start running into people that you're less likely to swipe right on than the people you already passed up
- carefully arranging things so that "super likes" have a reasonable chance of producing a match while also not inundating very attractive people with nothing but super likes from people they will never respond to (which would drive them off the service)
It's a tough challenge and Tinder is not at all a "dumb, simple" dating app.
- it may not seem like it, but Tinder does try to pick people it thinks are most likely to produce a match, based on-- to be brutally honest-- your attractiveness (as determined by who has swiped for you) and the other person's
- it then orders them approximately from most likely to least likely, but it has to know how often to start over, because eventually as you go down the list you'll eventually start running into people that you're less likely to swipe right on than the people you already passed up
- carefully arranging things so that "super likes" have a reasonable chance of producing a match while also not inundating very attractive people with nothing but super likes from people they will never respond to (which would drive them off the service)
It's a tough challenge and Tinder is not at all a "dumb, simple" dating app.