How Do You Beat the Tinder Algorithm?

You do not beat it, and every shortcut built on a guess about the formula breaks the day Tinder changes something. What you can do is stop the habits it appears to punish and do the few things it appears to reward. Be selective with your swiping, show up often in short sessions, answer your matches, finish your page and keep women happy with how you behave. Tinder has never published its formula, so everything below comes from people who have worked with it or watched it closely.

A Tinder employee, who stayed anonymous, was once asked what the app watches. The answer was general: dating apps look at the same kinds of things and weight them differently. The employee gave five examples.

• How often you respond to your matches.
• How often you open the app.
• How long you look at a woman's bio before you decide.
• How complete your own page is.
• How often you ghost a conversation.

These trackers are not equal in weight, so no single one decides everything.

Each item on the list is also a habit you control.

Answering means you reply to the women who write to you. Opening the app often means short sessions most days, and not one huge weekend binge. Looking at a bio means you slow down and read before you decide. A complete page means four or five good pictures and a few lines of writing. Not ghosting means that if you stop a chat, you end it, or at least do not leave a string of unanswered messages.

a dating coach sees the effect of activity in his own account. If he leaves it alone for a day, he may get one match or none. After about half an hour of swiping, he gets five to eight.

My version of the algorithm is a business story. The app needs women to enjoy it, because men follow the women. So anything that upsets them can cost you. He lists getting unmatched a lot, saying harsh or polarizing things and being reported.

He also names auto-liking. It worked in the early days of online dating. Now, he says, the app reads a man who likes everyone as less attractive, and it has no reason to show him the women he would rate highest.

A former Tinder programmer has agreed on the broad shape. He called rapid right swiping a red light for the algorithm, and he said to be selective, open the cards and look at the pictures. Take that as one source from several years ago, not as a published rule.

Plenty of products claim to swipe for you or to feed the algorithm what it wants. One online dating writer's view is that automated swiping needs a connection to Tinder's systems, that Tinder can detect it and that its engineers are not easy to fool. He separates two uses of software. Getting the matches themselves with a tool is risky. Getting ideas for what to write once you already have a match is a different thing.

That is his opinion, and Tinder has not confirmed it. It does fit the obvious logic. A company that sells attention to women has every reason to stop software from spamming them.

Four things have the best support.

Be selective. Like the women you would honestly take out, and skip the rest. coach says that skipping the women you are less drawn to can make the app read you as more selective, and that it may then show you more of the women you rate highly.

Fill out your page. Use enough pictures that a woman can see your face, your build and a real day of your life. Add a few specific lines. Tinder's own figures reportedly show that verified users and fuller pages do better.

Keep your sessions regular and short. Open the app most days and finish a small batch with attention.

Answer your matches quickly, and write to them with a specific line.

My rule is to get results for free first, then try a paid feature for a month. In his view the app looks after paying members, so a paid feature works as a multiplier. A small number gets bigger. A zero stays zero. If the numbers do not move after a month, stop paying.

Pick one change, such as a new lead picture, and keep everything else the same for two weeks. Write down how many women like you back, how many reply and how many agree to a plan.

That record tells you more than any theory about the algorithm. A man who follows it for a month knows what works for his own page, in his own city, which is the only version of the formula that matters to him.