But you’ve got all, you’ve got, most of the men are getting no bites, they’re getting no dates.
So I think we’re gonna look back on this and say the dating apps had all these unintended consequences. I’ve been.
Reading online about how hard it is for single people during lockdown, as if being in a relationship is a Disney esque fantasy world where no one ever argues about whose turn it is to load the dishwasher. Here’s how Kinder is ruining your dating life. Dating apps, more like data apps. Where’s my BBC sitcom? Dating apps use machine learning to try and find you matches. Dating apps get your data in three distinct ways. 1, the data you give them, like your name, age, and the you’re interested in. Two, what you accidentally give them access to when you’re trying to seem interesting, like your Spotify or Facebook. And 3, the actions you take on the site itself. So if you’re keeping a ton of friends on Facebook for the sake of it, their actions and opinions will be affecting your score in the ranking. Yeah, I’m talking to you covid denying uncles equally. If you list yourself as a rocket scientist who likes listening to Shenai Twain, you’re probably out of luck because that don’t embed me.
The app takes all this information and tries to match you with people who you might like. So if you’re constantly swiping right on women who look like Mila Kunis, it’s more likely they’ll try and find you women who look like me, lacunas. But it works both ways because the app is deciding where you’re being seen and by whom. Your basic information and social media accounts will only take machine learning so far.
What the app needed to do now was get you hooked on some features so that it could customize your results and find you better matches. That’s when it invented the swipe feature. I’ve no idea of, and it was the first app to invent the swipe feature, but it was a game changer. There are even Oxford Dictionary definitions for swipe left and swipe right.
The online one, obviously not the real one. The premise was simple. If you like him, you’re swipe right. If you wouldn’t bang him, you’re swipe left. If dating is a numbers game, this really narrows down your odds quickly. But the problem is you’re often judging people by unreliable data that they put there themselves. The swipe motion has gamified dating. And although dating is a game, it’s one with people involved and they shouldn’t be this disposable. It makes you think that you have unlimited options. And as a result, you can pass people up for the smallest of deal breakers, whereas some profiles have more red flags than China. I’m quite worried. He’s only two miles away. You’re literally tossing people aside while you take in your dirty boxes at 2:00am. But you’re not a pauper. You’re a king on your phone making your way through an endless reamer potential suitors.
The swiping motion is a type of operant conditioning. This is where you learn certain behaviors is based on reward and punishment. Is a scientist rewarding a pigeon for pecking when it’s been shown the word peck? Slowly, the pigeon is learning to behave the way the scientist wants. In The Big Bang Theory, Sheldon uses this same method by giving penny a chocolate every time she does something that he wants. One feels like science and the other feels toxic, which is very most dependent on whether you’re a member of Peter. Once conditioned, our minds are flooded with dopamine when we anticipate a reward, often that feels better than the actual reward itself. This is why swiping left and right is often more satisfying than going at and making a connection with someone in real life. A quick, easy hit of being told that you’re a man and therefore attractive to someone else is a lot more satisfying than going out and forming a long lasting connected relationship to another human being, which is apparently the reason why you join the act in the first place.
Part 3, judgment or . Tinder is a very visual app and as a result, it makes everyone incredibly judging. Hot take. I know on the screen itself, you’re presented with their face, age and very little else, like a wanking version of Fruit Ninja. You think you’re judging people on their looks, but more often than not, you’re actually judging people on their ability to use Photoshop. A recent ish article showed that about a quarter of online datas have enhanced their photos. With advancements in AI, this is becoming increasingly easy to do. In an ideal world, we’d all be putting up recent and untouched photos of ourselves. That’s just not happening. Some people have been putting up photos nearly 8 years old just to minimize their chance of dying alone.
I realize we like to all just think that our online cells are an extension of our offline cells, but they’re just not. Our offline cells exist 247 and have to do boring like cleaning the bathroom or taking the bins out. Whereas our online sales are highlight reels where all we do is bungee jump, roller skate and loads of other activities. At 90s Tampon Ads said would be easier if we use their product.
Part 4, unrealistic expectations. When a person is just an image on a screen, you can make all sorts of assumptions about them in the same way that every woman called Karen now has to carry around that stereotype from no fault of their own. On dating sites, you can see what you want to see and there’s no way for them to defend denial, to change their opinion because they don’t even know you’re looking at them. This is only amplified when it’s coupled with online stalking. Everyone only puts their best bits on social media. So by reading what they’ve shared, if you ever do meet, you can end up thinking, 1, that’s too good for you, or 2, they’re not good enough because they don’t know about to what you found online, much like ordering a 2 for Tuesday Domino’s Pizza. So we keep using the app. We get a dopamine hit whenever we get a match.
Part 5, the Elo score. In order to find you the best possible matches, tinder can’t just show you everybody randomly on the app. So tinder designed a ranking system. We realized that ranking women out of 10 was crass, so why not get an AI bot to do the dirty work for you? The Elo School was originally designed for zero sum games like chess. Tinder ranks us on attractiveness, and your attractiveness is based on many things. Your ranking will go up or down if one or more of these things happen. The number of people who swipe right on you, whoa, people super like you, and the ranking of the person who did the super liking and when you match with a highly ranked person, whoa, okay, but much like investing in GameStop stock, your value can go up and down. Wild me in a day bowling for suit were right. High school never ends. And if you’re not in with the cool kids early, it’s very hard to climb that social ladder. But have no fear.
Because in March 2019, Tinder released a reassuring and not at all dead behind the eyes blog post, saying that its users would no longer be living in an episode of Black Mirror and they’d be using another method to rank each user, which sounded suspiciously vague and similar to the Elo scoring method. No machine learning is gonna be perfect. First of all, it doesn’t take into account my amazing personality. But much less importantly, it often perpetuates or exacerbates harmful biases, often about race. But this algorithm can increase your chances of getting a match. However, there is one dating cliche no AI algorithm will ever be able to get rid of. And that is, if you’re ugly, you’re gonna need to be able to offer something else. And in Tinda’s case, that’s money.
Part 6, the Mini Max problem. Mini Max is a zero sum game theory in which players. Not that type of player, well, maybe want to cull their list of matches down to a list of people they actually have a chance with. But every day, more and more people use the app, which means the potential number of matches you could get is always going up. This, coupled with people’s toxic relationship with fear of missing out, leads to an infinite number of choices and potential suitors. Wasn’t it easier when your dad could just sell you for a how? Having too many options leads to a problem called Overchoice. It’s not the options are a bad thing. It’s just you can have too many. Like, have you ever opened up Netflix and for I’ll just watch one show and spend most of the time I’m scrolling through options deciding what to watch. It’s the same thing, but with feelings. It makes you believe that maybe, possibly, perhaps, there’s someone slightly better than the person you’re with. And why should you have to settle? I’m a king, , part 7, tinder. Plus, it’s always worth remembering that dating apps are for profit. And where there’s a potential profit, there’s a potential for morally compromised behaviors.
To try and solve the Mini Max issue. In March 2015, Tinder limited its users to 100 swipes a day and launched Tinder Plus. It was basically a way to get you to pay to meet more people. By this point, you’re so conditioned that the dopamine hit when you get a match would be worth the 499 a month to help you swipe your heart’s content. But by swiping over and over again just to get a match, you are lowering your bar to the level of a world class limbo dancer. You also got access to their rewind feature, which allows you to undo a mistake that you’ve made in the app, not in real life. It can’t undo that one night stand. They’ve got Euclidea again, as well as Tinder’s Passport feature, which allows you to search for matches anywhere in the world.
But the comments were disabled. The like to like ratio was hidden. And everybody was credited in the making of the video except the actress herself for obvious reasons. I can see why they did this. Like most adver, this one wouldn’t be half as effective if they just used an average looking man. The the I’m gonna die alone.
And although my European fridge magnet collection is coming along leaps and bounds, it isn’t the reason I join the app. I’ve since seen how popular it is for men, and it is usually men. I’ll explain that in a minute, to shoot their shot and create a Tinder Gold and Tinder Platinum, allowing you to bypass the swipe feature altogether and message anyone who comes up on your feed.
Part 8, the golden ratio on every single dating app, men massively outnumber women. This is a particular problem on grinder. For most dating apps, it’s nine men for every one woman. This means that much like shopping for a barbecue, you’ll always end up with more sausages and not enough buns if you only buy one pack of each. Does that analogy work? Doesn’t matter. Basically, there’s a lot of sausage out there and you don’t always know what’s in it.
So if tinder had a million users, only 100,000 of those would be women, which means if you’re a man interested in women, the chances of you matching with someone are a lot lower than if it was the other way around. A London based study shocked nobody when it discovered that over a four hour timespan, mail accounts would get under 100 matches, while our female accounts would get over 600. This means that although everyone gets the same 100 free swipes a day, it’s very unlikely that a single man will get a single match. For all that RSI. The fewer matches you get, the sadder you feel, the more likely it is you’re gonna spunk money into their system while you can’t spunk anywhere else. And the amount you’re charge will often depend on who you are and what you’ve told them about yourself. Tinder lost a discrimination suit for charging 30 something males more than 20 something females for use of its premium features. Although discriminatory, it is an effective way for them to monetize their platform and find your single friend a date to stop them from complaining about being lonely on social media. Yeah, I’m talking to you, Greg. This kind of ain’t helping you. What can we do about it? Nothing. I mean, we’re all stuck inside. And meeting people, IRL, is becoming increasingly hard to do, I will say try and avoid apps that have a bad reputation or don’t offer you the thing you’re looking for. For example, if you’re scared of women in uniform, don’t go to uniform dating.com. Put out into the world the behaviors you’d like people to do to you. Try not to ghost, try not to run back to the app just cuz you’ve had a bad date. Maybe go to a therapist and work on your phone. Enjoy dating because although being in a relationship is great, you will miss some of the freedoms that you had when you were single on a bubble. Never send an unsolicited pick. Only send unsolicited dog pigs.
Thank you for coming to my Ted talk. Thank you very much for watching. I hope you really enjoyed that. If you did, don’t forget to swipe up like the video and subscribe because I make one new comedy video every single week.