Tinder secretly measures how “desirable” you are and uses that score to match you with people with similar ratings, according to a report in Fast Company.
To put it bluntly, it's like Tinder is using this ranking to make attractive people appear attractive to others and ugly people appear ugly to others. Of course, the scoring is based on swipes, and theoretically, these aren't just based on the attractiveness of each person, since each profile also includes a short description as well as school and work, so the final score technically represents how well each person presents their profile. But of course, this assumes that everyone relies on more than just photos to choose a match. Tinder has yet to respond to this.
Fast Company doesn't know many details about how this metric works. A Tinder engineer pointed out to Fast Company that not all people value the same things. Some people like beards, others don't. The same goes for tattoos, photos with children or pets, etc.
Tinder CEO Sean Rad said there's a level of complexity to this count. "It's not just how many people swiped right on your photo. It's very complex. It took us two and a half months just to build the algorithm, which relies on a lot of factors," he said.
A data analyst for the app describes a piece of its inner workings, saying that your score goes up more when someone with a high rating likes your photo than when someone with a low rating does. The analyst compares this to the ranking system used by Warcraft. “Whenever you play with someone with a really high rating, you end up earning more points than when you play with someone with a low rating,” he said.
