[OC] Results after a little over a month on Hinge (M/27)Submitted by elhospitaler t3_11q221u in dataisbeautiful
PhilosophicWax t1_jc134ln wrote
How attractive do you rate yourself?
A 50% response rate for a guy seems like you're an 8 or 9.
IpsoKinetikon t1_jc148i7 wrote
That would have more to do with the matches. Which was 40 out of 300.
Response rate is more likely tied to how well he started the conversation.
Being attractive helps, but people place too much importance on that, and not enough on things like not being boring.
elhospitaler OP t1_jc14oa0 wrote
Sounds about right, although from what I can tell I can't see a meaningful difference in the quality of the opening lines in the convos vs no responses. I generally make some statement about the thing and ask a follow up question.
IpsoKinetikon t1_jc150ns wrote
It's certainly better than starting with "hi there".
And opening with a question seems like a good start, I would try some without that and see if your response rate drops significantly.
I think it especially helps if the question is something about them, people love talking about themselves.
Zenla t1_jc1ltvt wrote
As a woman, you get so many matches that you start having to come up with crazy criteria to limit them. Because there's just no way you can maintain a conversation with 70 people at the same time. So you start being picky in ways that you wouldn't normally. Looks are almost never important, to me at least. But I will say the one thing I look for is for the guy to send a worthwhile first message. Guys who start a conversation with "hey" or "hello" are unmatched immediately. It just feels lazy and like they're not interested.
elhospitaler OP t1_jc1n3c9 wrote
Makes sense, yeah I feel like this graph looks very different from the woman's side, I'd be interested in seeing something like this for a woman after a month on hinge haha.
AYASOFAYA t1_jc23pny wrote
You can probably understand this as an Asian man but words cannot express how much its mainly White and East Asian women who get numbers like this. Brown women of all types get match rates more like men’s, no matter how attractive they are. Countless studies document this. If privacy wasn’t a concern and the OPs from these graphs shared their profile screenshots, we would quickly realize there are a couple more requirements than “girl,” and ethnicity is number one.
Hinge’s algorithm makes this worse by trying to figure out your “type.” Even if a dude doesn’t have a racial preference, Hinge will create one for them. If most of the people in their area are White and East Asian women, they’re mostly liking profiles of White and East Asian women, Hinge thinks they mainly like White and East Asian women, and the app is less likely to show them anyone else.
Anecdotally, I’m a decently attractive black woman and hinge is an utter ghost town, no likes, no matches, because I’m less likely to be “put in the same room” as the guys who will like my profile as I would on say, Bumble, where I get better (but not great) results, because everyone is mixed in with everyone and it’s more organic. Last time I downloaded my Bumble data my match rate was about 8%.
I'm not saying all this to "woe is me." I work with what I got. Just as data nerds we like to paint a full picture with the numbers, and the common "All you have to do is be a woman" story is woefully misleading.
Edited to add links.
elhospitaler OP t1_jc288rw wrote
Fascinating, thanks for sharing and being open. I can definitely relate - comparing my success on this app with that of white male friends is always a bit sad haha.
Hinge has actually quite aggressively pushed me toward exclusively asian girls despite me not setting any filters of my own and not having strong racial preferences. I think what happened is that the app realized that I'm much more likely to get matches with asian girls and so has been showing me to them and showing me them, with little regard for my own preferences. In the beginning the app was pretty race-blind, I got what felt like a pretty statistically random sample of the population of my city. But then I got a few matches with asian girls, went out with one, reported that I had in the app (presumably so did she), and boom! Every single girl I'm shown after that is asian. Currently of my 40 matches, 36 are east asian, 3 are white, 3 are indian. And this is despite swiping right on lots of black, brown and white girls. So the preference goes both ways - clearly my "match rate" aka "rate of women who matched me back after I liked them" broken down by race is something like "0% black, 0% brown, some decent % asian (10% maybe?), small nonzero % white, small nonzero % indian)."
I'm glad to hear that bumble works for you - it doesn't for me but I guess that's down to the different policies of the app like you say.
And you shouldn't sell yourself short - you're quite a bit more than decently attractive. I'm not your friend, I'm a random person on the internet so you can trust me :).
AYASOFAYA t1_jc2mdoj wrote
I almost want to advise people who use hinge to make a common practice to periodically go through the settings and uncheck the top 2 ethnic groups they see in their feed. Take time once a week maybe to explore the groups of people the algorithm is hiding from them.
Maybe the algorithm is right after all and you are more likely to match with certain groups, but maybe it’s not perfect and it’s artificially limiting people’s opportunities.
This advice is especially for straight men, as anecdotally the match rates are low across all demographics.
>you shouldn’t sell yourself short
The way I describe it is: if you ask men to describe their “type” (hinge) they will almost never describe someone who physically looks like me. But if you show a man my photo and ask “smash or pass” point blank (bumble), I usually do okay.
elhospitaler OP t1_jc2n1di wrote
Oh interesting, specifically force the algo away from what it is currently prioritizing. Might have to try that myself.
CWF182 t1_jc2tsvq wrote
You are much more than "Decently Attractive". Very pretty, don't sell your self short. Saying this as a white male.
Busy-Mode-8336 t1_jc3f7nq wrote
That really sucks.
I think, with this data, if I were single, I would switch to focusing on black girls as sort of a moneyball exploit of a market inefficiency.
I wonder if it is just pair matching, where black women too are way more likely to swipe right on a black guy, and it’s just that there’s an uneven distribution of ethnicities?
If an app had 100 guys and 100 girls, and people were 33% likely to swipe on similar skin color, but only 10% likely to swipe right on different skin color.
If 90% were white and 10% were black, the white people on average would get 10 white matches (90 x .33 x .33) and 0 black matches (10 x .1 x .1).
Black people would get 1 black match (10 x .33 x .33) and 1 white match (90 x .1 x .1).
Either way it’s basically racism/prejudice. But it’d less terrible if it were reciprocal, rather than one race rejecting the other disproportionately.
Actually, I was curious, so I looked it up.
It turns out that black women do strongly prefer black men over white men, to a slightly strong degree than white men prefer white women.
What’s missing is the black men do not seem to prefer black women. It’s one of only two exceptions to people preferring the same race aside from white men slightly preferring Asian women.
The most mutually disagreeable combination seems to be asian men and black women who just avoid each other like the plague.
It seems like the most charmed life’s are Asian women, Latina women, and white men.
And, you’re absolutely validated in your assessment that black women get it the worst.
elhospitaler OP t1_jc3jcd2 wrote
Thanks for doing the research. Super interesting. Wish it were easier to have a conversation about this in public. I love the idea of exploiting a moneyball style inefficiency.
BaguetteBlocker t1_jc1x9vu wrote
> you get so many matches that you start having to come up with crazy criteria to limit them
That's a completely self-imposed problem though, isn't it? Don't both people need to swipe right to match?
IpsoKinetikon t1_jc23lw0 wrote
No, it stems from the imbalance in demographics. If a man and woman both swipe right on 100 people, she'll get a lot more matches than he will.
The only thing she can do differently is swipe right less, and then you're going to have guys complaining that they hardly ever get a match. They'll only be swiping on 9's and 10's. If your personality is doing all the heavy lifting, this would make dating sites unusable.
Zenla t1_jc4bryp wrote
Yes, but if I swipe right on 100 people it doesn't mean I want 100 boyfriends or even 100 hundred dates, it's essentially just a "I think this person looks nice." If 15 of those people like me, great, I can come up with one or two dates to see if things work out based on our chat. If 80 people like me, well, that's too many people. A lot of guys swipe right on all girls, so some don't ever even message me, some just send hi, some just want casual dates, etc. But it's more options than any one girl can really ever deal with. Imagine if you went to a bar and 80 people asked you to dance.
hyperpigment26 t1_jc1mxop wrote
So what intro caught your attention?
Jacksrolling t1_jc1tl9h wrote
So how often do you send the first message?
xxxHalny t1_jc1u3zu wrote
Why would she do that when she has 70 unread messages from men?
Jacksrolling t1_jc1ukkc wrote
well maybe she was the one that matched so could take the initiative no? Idk I unmatch an girl that matches but expects to not have to start the conversation. Whoever swipes and matches should start the conversation simple equality and mutual respect…
ForgotMyOldAccount7 t1_jc1zve8 wrote
When you've got 1 match and she's got 100, I'm sure she'll sleep just fine knowing that you unmatched her.
Jacksrolling t1_jc24esz wrote
Just as I‘ll sleep fine. Geeez can‘t even ask a question. Gotta love the white knights coming to save the day 🏇🏇
Arkslippy t1_jc1u36p wrote
Jesus, that's strict !!!
Howyoudoin ?!?!? in a Joey Tribianni type way then ?
[deleted] t1_jc4rloq wrote
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iThinkaLot1 t1_jc1unjb wrote
Where does it say there was 40 out of 300?
IpsoKinetikon t1_jc1veux wrote
OP posted a comment shortly after the post. He sent out a total of 300 likes and got 40 responses.
Apparently this site only lets you send 8 likes per day.
elhospitaler OP t1_jc142pu wrote
Not particularly attractive tbh, I think I have a decent and interesting profile but in terms of pure looks probably more of a 6/7?
[deleted] t1_jc2k6wa wrote
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