elhospitaler OP t1_jc288rw wrote on March 13, 2023 at 2:47 PM

Reply to comment by AYASOFAYA in [OC] Results after a little over a month on Hinge (M/27) by elhospitaler

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 on March 13, 2023 at 4:21 PM

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 on March 13, 2023 at 4:25 PM

Oh interesting, specifically force the algo away from what it is currently prioritizing. Might have to try that myself.