Tinder brings to the mainstream what the gay population had since 2002 [1].

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20020903191409/http://www.adam4a...

Edit: changed to reflect actual date of a4a going live.

Probably merits a NSFW.

This is exactly it. It's fundamentally a numbers game, and then there's a lot of romanticizing from people who prefer to believe otherwise.

That, and Tinder understands that people prefer being shallow. So it optimizes for that.

Yes.

But I think Tinder could be optimized for real (long-term?) dating.

I mean 90% of the women on Tinder have nice pictures. But My experience has shown that I have a specific taste, that doesn't have much to do with looks. So if I first choose by photo and later by, lets say, character similarities, Tinder is wasting my time.

Something like the matching of OKCupid would be nice. So I don't "like" 90% of the women there just to find out that only 5% of them were what I wanted.

Attempting to do so creates a system that incentivizes dishonesty and spamming. It's what happened to OKCupid.

Plus, as OKCupid demonstrated pretty well, people really choose almost entirely based on photos. Add in decision paralysis and an overwhelming number of choices, and optimizing around anything but incredible shallowness starts to seem silly.

Incidentally, I've tried a series of other dating sites that try to optimize around different things. In general, the userbases are quite small.

Sure, I wouldn't choose people with "bad" photos, but as I said, the amount of women with good photos is much much bigger than the amount of women with a good match.

I've seen all the Tinder-Swipe Apps, because of this. "Just swipe all women in your area right and choose afterwards"

At the end you sit there and have to talk with 20 women just to find out that only 1-2 of them don't think you're a weirdo. :D

That's much better than the alternative scenario. There, you talk to five women just to find out that all of them think you're a creeper weirdo.

They didn't think I was creepy, just weird :( ;)

I didn't have the impression that people I talked to cheated on the OKCupid questions.

But I had the impression that most questions are irrelevant.

Totally agree. What I found to be most effective with OKC was spending the money on A-list status and only messaging women who favorited my profile (or liked, or whatever the terminology is). The response rate I saw was well above 50%.

Spending money on A-list isn't even really necessary -- OKC bumps those who have liked you to the top of your "Quickmatch" queue -- from which you can like them back (or not) and discover if you are a match.

Huh, interesting. Thanks for the info. Hopefully I never need it :)

It seems to be an engagement issue. Populations that don't message or participate or show interest should be encouraged to in some way - like "your profile will only be viewable for x number of days unless you start messaging other people"

Unengaged users are an immensely valuable asset. Show a guy that there are three thousand women in his city, and he'll be very interested. Show him that only three of them have logged in in the past week, and he'll be a lot less interested.