If you use Tinder, your popularity is secretly being assessed by the company. And where you rank, from least to most “desirable”, could be determining who sees your profile.
Don’t go rushing to find out your score (known inside Tinder as an “Elo” score, like in chess rankings) just yet — they aren’t available to the public.
A report from Fast Company revealed the details of the ranking system, which is geared for users to find a better match.
“It’s not just how many people swipe right on you,” says Sean Rad, CEO of Tinder. “It’s very complicated. It took us two and a half months just to build the algorithm because a lot of factors go into it.”
“Whenever you play somebody with a really high score, you end up gaining more points than if you played someone with a lower score,” revealed Tinder’s VP of Product Jonathan Badeen, comparing the ranking system to Warcraft.
“It’s a way of essentially matching people and ranking them more quickly and accurately based on who they are being matched up against.”
“Every time you swipe right on one person and left on another, you’re fundamentally saying, ‘This person is more desirable than this other person’,” says Tinder data analyst Chris Dumler.
“Every swipe is in a way casting a vote: I find this person more desirable than this person, whatever motivated you to swipe right. It might be because of attractiveness, or it might be because they had a really good profile.”
All of this information is then used to determine user’s Elo score, and rank in order of who is more “desirable”.
Would you want to know your Tinder score?