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Data source: me

For context - Straight, 27 y.o. Asian American male in a major US metro, grad student in a STEM field. All second dates will probably become third dates. And on other apps (bumble, okcupid), I've had basically zero responses/dates.

On hinge you get 8 likes to send per day, and I've been swiping pretty much every day, so I've probably sent likes to around 300 people.

How do you define fizzle vs ghost?

The fizzles were conversations where the person responded at least once but didn't lead to a date and eventually fizzled. The one ghost was after we went on a date, gave me her number, but then never responded.

How attractive do you rate yourself?

A 50% response rate for a guy seems like you're an 8 or 9.

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?

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.

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.

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.

You have all these dates overlapping?

Woow u actualy doing great!

That’s a lot of dates in a month!

I’m really not a fan of the limited likes. This is a numbers game for guys.

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.

I'd be curious to see the numbers of how many times did you initiate the request for the date, how many times did you pay for the whole date vs her offering to pay half or the full amount if she asked you out on date, ect.

So what intro caught your attention?

Yeah, some weekends were pretty packed, also some dates were just simple coffee dates in the middle of the weekday

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.

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All but one date I initiated, one girl messaged me spontaneously to go out that same evening.

I've generally paid for everything, and have taken the initiative to do so so there was no awkwardness around that. I'm personally more comfortable / feels more natural if I'm paying for most of the early dates. Most first dates were just coffee/boba so nothing too expensive either. A few dates were "two things" (dinner + drinks, activity + drinks etc) and all but one girl offered to pay for the second thing after I paid for the first.

Four special cases here:

• The girl who invited me out, we just got boba, I paid.

• One girl on a second date we cooked together, I got the ingredients but she brought a small dessert.

• One girl on the second date offered to split the bill on brunch but I declined (warmly, "oh no don't worry I got it :)" type rather than "no I will pay!" haha) and she got the boba after.

• One girl we got dinner and then went for ice cream for the first date (my plan), I paid for dinner then was kinda expecting her to jump in / offer to get the ice cream but she didn't. The second date we did an activity, got a drink at the bar attached to the activity, and then got dinner (my plan again, dinner was kinda spontaneous). After the activity + drink, I'd spent a total of ~ $120 over the two dates so far, so I expected her to offer to pay for or split dinner but we ended up splitting dinner without explicitly discussing it because the restaurant had one of those "order and pay all on your phone even though you are eating in" ordering systems. It's strange also because she definitely makes the most money, by a significant margin, out of all the girls I've gone out with (experienced software engineer in fintech). If we go on future dates I'll probably suggest free activities. But of the three second dates she's also the person I'm least interested in so might not even bother.

Yeah it's been fun but also kind of draining. I'm not used to dating around, I previously just went almost straight into new relationships after a brief "just long enough that new relationship doesn't feel like a rebound" period single so I'm trying to force myself to not do that this time.

OK, but when the same 90% of guys are sending all of their likes to the same 10% of women... those women end up ignoring/ghosting almost all of them.

Having limited likes means you have to think about whether or not you have a chance with someone before shooting your shot.

Fourth one would be a huge turn off for me. If she is already bottom of the pile then she would definitely drop off the dates list imo.

I agree. The hinge system seems to work much better in generating engagement from girls where they'd otherwise be overwhelmed with choice on tinder/bumble etc.

Yeah I figure I'd just like to get some ROI here before ending things, if you get my drift.

So how often do you send the first message?

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Jesus, that's strict !!!

Howyoudoin ?!?!? in a Joey Tribianni type way then ?

Why would she do that when she has 70 unread messages from men?

You must be an engineer, you are too logical for dating !!!

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…

Where does it say there was 40 out of 300?

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That seems really promising, I'm gonna give it a try. Thanks.

Ok yeah, 11 dates in a single month for a guy honestly feels like a lot.

The numbers game is when the guy puts out hundreds of low effort attempts per week. Limiting how many likes people can use is the opposite of that.

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.

Yeah I'm quite extroverted but it's starting to be draining.

I recommend going on the hinge subreddit and getting their advice.

Maybe one day I'll see if I can export my chats to CSV and then make a whole battery of visualizations haha.

The dating apps are mostly owned by one company (the Match Group) and basically designed to not get people into a permanent relationship - the podcast Land of the Giants just did a series on dating apps and their issues that may very informative for anyone using them.

Sounds like me when I was depressed. Don't miss dating.

> 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?

> I’m really not a fan of the limited likes. This is a numbers game for guys.

Ok, but OP has clearly had vastly greater success on that platform.

When you've got 1 match and she's got 100, I'm sure she'll sleep just fine knowing that you unmatched her.

hi there, do you like talking about yourself?

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.

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.

I'm sure you being single has nothing to do with the fact that you've made your dating life into a flow chart haha

Just as I‘ll sleep fine. Geeez can‘t even ask a question. Gotta love the white knights coming to save the day 🏇🏇

Great filter question

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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 :).

Lol yeah... this barely scratches the surface of how much of a nerd I am

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50% response rate, you must be marriage material. 25% is lucky.

good job on the 3 second dates

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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.

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

…or it’s a sneaky ad for Hinge. Not accusing OP…I just hate that I can’t trust anything online without wondering if someone is trying to buy my eyeballs.

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You are much more than "Decently Attractive". Very pretty, don't sell your self short. Saying this as a white male.

Very interesting, I do enjoy the extra details in these kinds of sample sizes.

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I did online dating for, like, two or three years. Everyone's expierence is different but after all that time, I came to the realization that if you're willing to go through all of *that* - the no replies, the ghosting, the first dates, the approaching multiple women and at least trying to write a personalized message for each, the failures, the hassle, etc for just the occasional "success" (which is rarely ever permannt), you're either a serial killer or literally can't live without having a partner. Online dating by its very nature is dumb and after a while, it just gave me a headache. I'll either meet a woman the old fashion way or not at all, idc.

Haha I have considered tweeting at hinge to try to snag a free premium or something.

I think the demographic that matches with me happens to be very “serious dating” mode and is therefore more likely to be willing to respond to my message.

Yeah I think it’s wild that one company owns all the apps except bumble. I do think of the apps in the match group portfolio, hinge is the least exploitative?

Great results! I'm in a big city and get a lot more matches, but end up on fewer dates. I get bored really easily and have also been ghosted, too. I've done 3-4 dates in the past months and almost instantly lose interest, as at my age (39), most people have some pretty heavy baggage that turns me off. I'm still happy as can be single, but wouldn't mind finding that special partner.

Congratulations on being a top>5% in attractiveness. That amount of matches is absolutely fucking insane.

And Grindr, apparently...but I not sure which is least exploitative, fortunately not needing to use those myself!

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.

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.

The same thing happened to me with Hinge. I got divorced, downloaded Hinge and with the help of friends wives I made a profile that seemed to have a good amount of success. As I got my dating confidence back I started to get exhausted from all of the chats and first dates that I got Hinge burnout.

Too much attention on that app is exhausting for Men, you're basically expected to lead every conversation, more or less plan every date, meet up etc. It was all my free time for a while.

I had absolutely zero luck with Tinder by the way, what a trash, spam filled app.

Well this is thoroughly depressing I can’t even get a girl to respond.

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.

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Sorry to hear that mate. Hope things are better for you now.

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