Why there are so many horrible people on Tinder, and how to find the few good ones
Here on Medium, I have seen several articles listing archetypes of horrible men and women behave on Tinder.
An academic study called The Dark Side of Tinder concludes that Tinder users have more dark personality traits than non-tinder users.
I even once created a female profile, which deserves its own article, but in short, I can confirm that the horror is real, and no Gender can take the moral high ground.
So how did Tinder become like this?
Survivorship bias
Most of the problem can be explained by a simple mathematical concept called survivorship bias.
The story is quite simple; imagine an okay boy and an okay girl signing up for Tinder, they match, chat a little, go on a date, fall in love, and then both delete the app.
Those people exist. We all have at least one friend who found love this way.
Now imagine one of those people having a terrible personality: sexist, arrogant, scammers, over-demanding, only want hookups, etc.
That person will not get a second date, probably not even a first one. They will find themselves self-right back at swiping.
This means that Tinder is essentially a filter letting datable people quickly pass through while concentrating undatable people until the entire platform is one big swamp of human toxicity.
Now it should be obvious how to find a datable person on Tinder. Think back on your friend’s story and how they found love on Tinder? Some may even describe it as love at first swipe, in any case, for all those stories, at least one of them had a newly created account.
I also found my girlfriend this way (she was the one with a new account). But even before I met her the best indicator that a girl would be worth dating was a profile saying, “I am new here”.
Tinder will turn you into a horrible person
I also need to address how Tinder will turn you into one of those horrible people if you use it for long.
The story goes, you set up a Tinder account, swiped a little, and got a few matches, but none of them seemed good enough.
If you in this saturation keep swiping, you will soon find yourself an addict, where Tinder is no longer a way to meet people but more like a Pokémon game where your Gotta Catch ’Em All or a unicorn hunt where you search for a mythologically perfect creature that doesn’t exist.
When first you reach the point where swiping to get the next match is more important than connecting with your existing matches, you stop seeing profiles as real human beings, thus you lose your ability to connect in any meaningful way.
This is by design. The whole system is like a casino where you get a dopamine rush for every new match. The irony is that to get you hugged on this new drug, the algorithm will show you all the datable profiles in the first hundred swipes. It may depend on your local population density, but generally, after hundred swipes, all that’s left is the before-mentioned swamp of toxicity and inactive profiles.
But that doesn’t matter to your brain if your first addicted.
Should you delete Tinder?
This article may sound like Tinder is a horrible place that should be avoided at all costs, but at least at the first hundred swipes in a new place, you may meet okay people.
If you insist on using Tinder after your first hundred swipes, buy premium and wait for a new user to like you. If your time is in any way worth anything to you, it would quickly pay off.
You may also wish to update your profile and most importantly, ask yourself the hard question: am I an undatable person?
