Are you entrusting your romantic future to an algorithm?
If you’re using any dating app, you’ve probably felt that the odds are piled up to find love. Almost as if the app is trying to slide you over and over again.
According to relationship scientist Dr. Gery Karantzas, your premonition is probably correct.
Gery is an associate professor and director of the Adult Relationship Science Laboratory at Deakin University School of Psychology.
He says it’s tricky to decode the code behind your matches.
“It’s very secretive,” Gery says. “It would be hard for you to get a clear idea of what’s going on.”
Make a match or pretend?
Tinder, which has 75 million monthly active users, was originally based on the Elo rating system. Users were assigned a “required or not” score, based on other users’ trips. They were then shown possible matches with similar “desirability” scores.
Since then, Tinder has claimed that Elo is “old news.” It now gives priority to matching users who are active in the app and relates them to people who are active at the same time.
While Tinder is well known as a connection app, Hinge claims to be relationship-oriented. According to its ads, Hinge is the only “dating app designed to be deleted.”
The hinge is based on the Nobel Prize-winning Gale-Shapley algorithm.
This algorithm matches users who are likely to be between them. Profiles include more personal information to help match personalities, not just appearance.
From the literature on relationships, Gery says that these applications are likely to take into account other factors, such as similar interests and values. But they also probably use AI recognition and attraction-based biometric markers, he says. (Think of it as a way to classify “heat” to the next level that makes Elo’s grading system look old-fashioned.)
This business of love
Let’s face it: the revenue of dating app creators doesn’t necessarily form well if users always find “the only one”.
“It makes sense that in the early stages of using these apps, trying to help people establish connections with people who look very friendly and very attractive with all sorts of features is in their best interest,” Gery says.
“But the question is, what is designed to make the algorithm at face value? The algorithm would be designed to help you find a match, but ultimately, like many aspects of social media, there is monetization of ‘a product’.
According to Gery, what he suggests is “not so exaggerated” if we reflect on how social media organizations have used people’s data in the past.
A numbers game
Tinder says it has had over 60 billion matches, which seems like an incredible success rate, but is it?
“One of the things that is promoted as a real strength of these apps is … the amount of connections that are made,” Gery says.
“But that in itself is a false number.”
You may have matched hundreds of potential partners, but have you formed a meaningful relationship with any of them? The research data paints a bleak picture.
In 2016, a software engineering study on Tinder led researchers to create fake profiles to test success rates. The success of their female profiles was 10%, while the male profiles were 0.6% successful.
“That tells us something about the ability of these algorithms to facilitate concordance,” Gery says.
Finding love at first glance
With all this in mind, how can users make dating app algorithms work in their best love interests?
Gery suggests moving on to voice or face-to-face notes sooner rather than later to avoid the trap of endless messages.
Going offline allows you to see how potential IRL partners behave.
“A dating app will only be able to do a lot, regardless of how it’s stacked and how it’s optimized,” Gery says.
“What people do on the ground will be a pretty big predictor of whether this relationship ends or not.”
This article was originally published in Particle. Read the original article.