If you think the people you see on Tinder are shown to you randomly, you're mistaken.
As part of a profile of the company's CEO Sean Rad, Fast Company writer Austin Carr was given access to his hidden "desirability" score on Tinder, which the company assigns to every person who uses its dating app. People who work at Tinder call it the "Elo score," which is a term used by chess players to rank their skill levels, according to Carr.
Here's an excerpt from Carr's story for Fast Company:
Rad, who tells me his Elo score is "above average," stresses that the rating is technically not a measure of attractiveness, but a measure of "desirability," in part because it’s not determined simply by your profile photo. "It’s not just how many people swipe right on you," Rad explains. "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."
Jonathan Badeen, Tinder’s VP of product, compares it to the video game Warcraft. "I used to play a long time ago, and whenever you play somebody with a really high score, you end up gaining more points than if you played someone with a lower score," he says. "It’s a way of essentially matching people and ranking them more quickly and accurately based on who they are being matched up against."
Tinder not only uses your score to match you with people who have similar scores, but it also uses the info "to study what profiles are considered most alluring in aggregate," Carr writes.
Be sure to read Carr's full stories on Tinder's polarizing CEO and how the app's matching algorithm works.
