I think that "hey you looked at my profile" is simply a starting place for people to actually start talking, which can lead to more in depth connections and conversations you may have not normally, especially if you had originally filtered them for not being a 22-23 year old white girl with athletic body type within 5 miles who is Jewish, only drinks socially but does hard drugs, and has a had a job for more than 3 years. The ability to filter, or lack thereof, is one of the reasons Tinder works so damn well. You can't browse profiles in the typical sense. You swipe, you like, and only if they like you too, can you begin to talk. This fact alone initiates conversations that are more likely to be responded to, and you are unable to not see someone because they don't meet one of your criteria that you think you want.

Tinder also prohibits you from seeing anything beyond 6 photos, 500 characters (ish), and your mutual friends and mutual likes on Facebook. You can't filter. You can't sort. You can't spend more than a minute per person bc there's only a minute's worth of information to consume.

The downside, of course, is that the tiny amount of information and the prominence of photos over text, leads to people judging on looks alone. It's reputation as a hook up app doesn't help this fact. Guys have been known to swipe as fast as they can without even clicking on profiles just so they can see who liked them and then ween out the ones they don't want. I, as a fairly okay looking girl with a nice selection of photos and a text section that spoke to my likes, interests, and goals, got to the point where I would swipe 112 people in a row and match every single one of them. Note: my roommate did this while we were drunk and I had to unmatch all those poor souls, hungover the next morning.

Regardless of the obvious flaws, it does some things really well and it does get people who would never connect elsewhere to connect. And that can lead to good things.

I never did okcupid (which is what the author is presumably using) but I did occasionally look at my roommates okcupid matches. The scope of information on most of the profiles was absolutely insane. You have age, race, and body type. You have occupation and interests. You have drugs and alcohol and religion. You have 10,000 words of copy for each of the 10,000 sections. You have questions with answers. You have quizzes they've taken. And of course, all of this is then pushed through algorithms that determine how much of a match you are, which is depicted prominently on the page as a percentage (91% match vs 54% enemy).

I think that the tinder methodology without the photo prominence and hook up reputation would be a very successful app.

I'm on mobile so maybe someone else can find the link to some of okcupids blog posts and data analyzing. It's super interesting what happens when you have that much data. You can determine factors that lead to conversation, don't lead to conversations, determine length of conversation, etc. very easily - and they (the okcupid admins) do. It's remarkable. I think I posted one to hubski and it had to do with running experiments on its users. Fantastic shit, as long as you are watching from afar. <- Found it: https://hubski.com/pub?id=170031