Is the Tinder Algorithm Rigged Against Men?

Not in the way most men mean it. Tinder does not publish its formula, so anyone who claims to know it exactly is guessing. What feels like rigging is mostly competition: far more attention is aimed at each woman than she could ever answer, so most men's likes are never weighed at all. The part you can change is your own behavior, and that part counts for more than most men think.

Picture what a woman sees. She opens the app and finds a stack of men, and she answers only a few of them. a dating coach makes this point plainly: women online ignore far more men than they respond to.

A man reads that as the app hiding him. Usually the app did show him, and she moved on in a second. Some women on Tinder collect hundreds of messages in a few weeks. No code is needed to explain why yours did not get an answer.

That is supply and demand, and it is not something you can argue with. It does tell you where to work. If most likes die in a glance, the glance is what you have to win.

Tinder is a business, and My reading of the business is straightforward. The app wants women to stay and enjoy it, because men follow the women. So it has every reason to care about her experience first.

That is a bias, but it is toward keeping the app profitable rather than against men as a group. A man who makes the app pleasant for women is on its side. A man who does the opposite is not. coach says, from his own experience and from friends he has watched, that getting unmatched a lot, sending harsh or polarizing lines, or being reported can cost you your standing. The result is being shown to fewer of the women you wanted, and sometimes to almost no one.

Tinder has never listed everything it weighs. Still, two sources agree on the broad shape. coach teaches from years of testing. A former Tinder employee has said that dating apps all look at the same kinds of things and simply weight them differently.

Here is what they point to:

• How selective you are. coach says an app that sees a man like everyone is likely to read him as less attractive, and has no reason to show him the women he would rate highest.
• How you behave in chats. Whether you answer, how often you open the app, and how often you vanish from a conversation all get noticed, according to that employee.
• How you read pages. Spending time on a woman's page, instead of flicking through at speed, was named as something the app watches.
• How complete your own page is. A page with two selfies and no words gets treated as a page nobody put effort into.

Treat all this as informed reports rather than official statements. The useful part is that every item is something you can do differently tonight.

Automating your swipes, or liking every woman in sight, are the two routes men try first. My view is that auto-swiping works against you on most apps now, because it makes you look unselective. The same former employee has said an app can tell when software is doing the swiping.

You gain nothing from fighting the system. It is far easier to look like the man the system is happy to show.

Photos are where most of the damage happens. My argument is simple. If the first photo turns her off, she swipes left before she ever sees your bio, your interests or the rest of the set. Everything behind that photo is wasted.

He also says that better photos help twice. A woman is more likely to like you, and the app sees that more women like you, and treats you accordingly. A man who fixes his lead photo is working on the person and the algorithm at the same moment.

You do not need to be handsome for this. coach says good light, a good angle and someone who knows how to take a photograph cover a surprising amount, and that average-looking men do well online with photos like that. It is also worth practicing how you look in front of a camera.

My view is that apps look after paying members. They want those members to feel it was worth the money, so a paid account can be shown to more people. That sounds like a fix, and it is only a multiplier. A page that already gets likes gets more of them. A page that gets none still gets none, only to more people.

If you want to try a paid tier, take a short stretch, count what changes, and drop it if the numbers do not move.

Skip the argument and run a test. Spend two weeks swiping only on women you would genuinely like to take out, with a lead photo you replaced first. Reply to every match on the day it appears. Count how many likes come back, how many of those become chats, and how many chats get a plan.

If the counts are poor, change one thing and count again. A man who does that for a month will know more about his own results than any article about the algorithm can tell him.