Tinder: How does one of the largest recommendation engines decide who you'll see next?
We've heard a lot about the Netflix recommendation algorithm for movies, how Amazon matches you with stuff, and Google's infamous PageRank for search. How about Tinder? It turns out Tinder has a surprisingly thoughtful recommendation system for matching people.
This is from an extensive profile, Mr. (Swipe) Right?, on Tinder founder Sean Rad:
The average active user spends an hour a day on Tinder
“We learn all about a person,” Gould says, “and then they go to a different place and act totally differentlyAnd with billions of matches, it has an enormous trove of data
At first, Gould tells me, the app had a ruling class of “the matching 1 percent,change the trend by showing these profiles less frequentlyThe company calls this “smart matching”: bringing justice to the dating world by balancing the playing field and making sure that members less likely to get matches still get some.
They also change the system for bad actors, limiting the number of swipes per day
Gould and Badeen see these interventions as a moral obligation
Gould echoes this sentiment: “Listen, architects design buildings that set up how people are going to live. City planners set up towns and roads. As the designers of a system that helps people with dating, we have a responsibility to build those contexts — we’re responsible for a decent percent of the marriages on this planet every year. That’s an honor and a responsibility.
