How to Use the Filters at the Top of Your Hinge Discover Feed

If you subscribe to Hinge+ or HingeX, you can tap a filter at the top of your Discover feed to apply it. The options include Age, Height, Dating Intentions, Active Today and New Here, and you can combine more than one at a time. Tap a filter again to remove or adjust it. Every member, subscriber or not, can still filter by age.

Hinge's help page on the Discover feed keeps it simple. To turn a filter on, tap the one you want at the top of your feed. Once it is on, Hinge shows you a profile that matches what you selected, and whenever you add or remove a filter, a new profile appears in your feed.

To change your mind, tap the same filter again to remove it or adjust it. Because the filters sit at the top of the feed, you can change them as you browse.

One thing the filters will not do is find a particular person. Hinge says plainly that it does not offer a search option for specific people. The filters narrow the kind of person you see, not the individual.

You can apply several filters at once. Hinge's own example: to see someone of a certain height who is also active today, you tap both filters.

Stacking is powerful and easy to overdo. Each filter you add removes people from the feed, so two or three together can shrink it faster than you expect. If the feed starts feeling thin, take one off before assuming there is nobody out there.

Age is the one every member keeps: Hinge says all members can still filter by age, subscriber or not. Keep the range honest rather than narrow. A few years either side of your ideal costs you almost nothing and can turn up the woman you end up liking most.

Height is the one men use least well. For many men it filters out women they would have enjoyed meeting, over a detail that stops mattering once you are sitting across a table from someone. Use it only if it genuinely changes who you want to date.

Dating Intentions is the most useful of the paid filters for a lot of men. If you know you want something serious, or know you do not, filtering on it spends your likes on women who are looking for the same thing.

These two are about timing rather than type.

Active Today ties to Hinge's Last Active status, the Active Now or Active Today label next to a member's photo. A woman who was on the app today is in a position to see your like soon, which matters more than many men think. Members can hide that status, and Hinge says that if they do, they also cannot see other people's.

New Here ties to Hinge's New Here badge, which appears next to a new member's name and stays for about a week. Hinge encourages taking a chance on someone with that badge. A woman in her first days on the app may not have a pile of likes waiting yet, so a thoughtful comment has a better chance of standing out.

Hinge's help pages describe two separate places to shape your feed. One is the Dating Preferences screen, where you set your preferences and can mark a preference Flexible. The other is the row of quick filters at the top of Discover.

Think of the preferences screen as your standing setup and the quick filters as something you tap while you browse. Keep your standing setup broad and honest, and use the quick filters for short, focused sessions.

Subscribers can send unlimited likes, which is exactly when the quick filters matter most. It is tempting to like everyone once there is no cap. Hinge says its algorithm learns from your activity, and suggests liking the people you actually think would be a good fit rather than liking as many as possible. It also says that if you send too many likes, it cannot tell what you really want.

The quick filters help you do the opposite. Turn on the one or two that matter, slow down, and like fewer women more carefully, with a comment on something specific. That gives Hinge a clearer read on your type and gives each woman a better reason to reply.

Quick filters are for focus, not for every session. If you leave three or four stacked all the time, you end up browsing a small corner of the app and wondering why it never changes.

Hinge's own advice on getting more matches is to widen your preferences, and it says that doing so lets you see more people and lets more people see you. A good habit is to browse filtered when you want a focused session, then clear them and browse wide for a while. That way you find out whether the filters were actually helping, instead of assuming they were.