Why Do You Get No Likes on Hinge?

Four things cause almost every dry spell on Hinge. Your first photo does not earn a second look. Your written answers sound like everyone else's. Your filters have shrunk your pool. Or the app has not had enough activity from you to learn who to show you to. Fix them in that order, and change one at a time so you can see what worked.

Women see your first photo before anything you wrote. If it does not hold her, your words never get read.

a dating coach calls photos the biggest thing men get wrong online. The common problems are plain ones. The face is hard to see, the lighting is bad, or the angle makes a decent-looking man look shorter or heavier than he is. Then there is the pose: the blank stare, or the apologetic smile that looks like a man waiting to be told off.

For the lead photo, use the best picture of your face you have ever had taken. Recent, clear, alone, no sunglasses. Take a lot of shots and pick one. Even photographers do not use their first frame.

If the photos are fine and the likes are still missing, read your answers as a stranger would.

My breakdowns of men's pages keep finding the same flaws. A list of hobbies is boring, because everybody lists the same ones. A prompt that asks her a question wastes one of your few chances to show your personality. And answers that are all friendly and agreeable read as needy, like the kid who is trying to be nice so somebody will like him.

The fix is to show instead of tell. "I'm adventurous and funny" is a claim anyone can type. A short, specific story with some wit in it is proof. Leave out your star sign, your politics and your religion, which are far likelier to lose you a woman than win you one.

Tight preferences make a small pool, and a small pool means few people to like you.

Hinge suggests showing profiles just outside your preferences. Go through your filters one by one and ask which are real dealbreakers and which are guesses. Keep the dealbreakers and loosen the rest a little. You are not lowering your standards, you are giving the app more women to show you to and more women to see you.

Hinge says new members should give its algorithm time to learn who they are and who they like, and that it learns from how you use it. An account opened once a week gives it very little.

Open the app regularly in the first stretch. Hinge also recommends sending quality likes rather than a high volume, because liking everyone teaches it nothing about your taste. A man who likes forty women a night and writes to none of them gets about the response he has earned.

The honest route to more likes is more women seeing a better page. Everything else is a trick.

Like the women you would genuinely take out, and add a comment on one specific photo or answer. Hinge says a like with a comment is more likely to get a response, and coach says a large share of his own matches come from a good message attached to a like or a Rose. A line about her gives her a reason to look at you properly.

Once photos, answers and filters are right, a Boost can put your page in front of more people for a short window. Do it last. Boosting a weak page just shows a weak page to more women.

Do not rewrite everything on one night. You will never know what helped.

Swap the lead photo and leave the rest alone for a week. Count your likes and your matches. If nothing moves, change the first written answer next. My rule for online dating is to test, tweak, and test again, and writing the numbers down beats guessing every time.

Some men fix the dry spell and find a new one. Likes come in and conversations die.

That is a different problem, and it lives in your first message. Pick up one thing from her page, give her an opinion or an easy choice, and keep it to two sentences. The same page that earns likes can lose them again if the first message is "hey".