“My favorite foods are pizza and avocado toast. I love going to the beach, and my favorite thing to do is have fun. If you can’t make me laugh, we can’t be together. Looking for a serious relationship. Please, don’t message me unless you are looking for the same…”

If you’ve ever ventured into the world of dating apps, you’ve probably viewed hundreds of profiles with captions along those lines. But even if you’ve been swiping for hours a week for years, no matter how well you think you know the cesspool that is a dating site, nobody understands what is going on better than the people behind the scenes. One Reddit made that very clear by posing the question, “Redditors that worked with a dating company (Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, etc.), what’s the most insane user stat or behind-the-scenes fact you found out about?” People who have personally worked for various dating sites and apps, or have friends and loved ones who have worked for these sites, began spilling their juiciest secrets, and they did not hold back. 

Down below, we’ve gathered some of the most fascinating and disturbing stories for you to read and get an idea of what it would be like to get paid to spend your days on Tinder. Be sure to upvote the stories that shock and amuse you the most, and then let us know in the comments if you have any wild dating app tales. Then if you’re interested in reading another Bored Panda piece featuring employees spilling company secrets, check out this article next.

#1

I was scouted by Match.com to be a model and basically put up a fake profile and go on dates when needed. Match.com’s tag line used to be something to the effect of, “if you dont find anyone in 6 months, you get 6 months free.” Well with shit like what they approached me with, they made sure you never got those 6 free months. I told them no obviously, and a few months later, Match.com got sued because it was discovered they were hiring models to put up fake user profiles.

Image credits: Upbeat-Ad-2818

Once dating apps and websites infiltrated the world of those looking for love, they completely changed the dating landscape. No longer were we limited to only people living close by, people we met at work or through mutual friends, and suddenly, we could be as superficial as possible. See a photo you don’t like? Swipe left. Oh, he works for a big oil company? Swipe left. My ex boyfriend is a mutual friend of his on Facebook? Immediate left swipe. We can be as picky as we like with essentially no consequences. Everyone is being judgmental, so why shouldn’t you?

Dating apps are fascinating enough from the outside, but it’s even more interesting to hear about them from people on the inside. How the algorithms work, how photos get approved on the sites, whose profiles are promoted more than other people’s, etc. Most of us know very little about what’s happening behind the millions of polished profiles, so we’re fascinated in what these Reddit users were willing to share.

#2

A couple met on the dating app I worked on.
Unfortunately, the man passed away and the lady returned to the app where they met for remembrance.

One day, a bug in the system made some profile likes to be sent again after months and she received one from her deceased boyfriend.

Her bug report was heartbreaking.

Image credits: Sighne

#3

A dude with over 2000 right swipes and no matches.

Image credits: anon

As with any big tech company, or really any company in general, dating apps and sites have secrets too. But it makes sense given how the industry of online dating has formed into a monstrosity over the years. According to Business of Apps, the dating app market made over $5.61 billion in 2021, and over 300 million people around the world are active users on dating apps and sites. Tinder was the most downloaded dating app in 2021, and it is currently the most popular dating app in the United States. In Europe, however, Badoo has taken the first place spot. 

Among the top dating apps around the world are Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, Badoo, Happn, Grindr, Tanan, and Plenty of Fish. Not surprisingly, online dating has become exponentially more popular in recent years, as we’ve all become addicted to our cell phones and gained increased access to the internet. In 2015, for example, global dating app revenue was only $1.38 billion. It has increased over four times since then, and it is likely to continue growing.

#4

We used to create fake accounts and chat with users. It was everything from someone having a premium account that wasn’t getting responses to bored employees.

Image credits: SupermanistheDR

#5

I have a friend who works for… I wanna say Tinder. Anyway, the company isn’t important; what is important is that her ENTIRE job is to remove inappropriate images. Her JOB is to look at d**k pics all day. Five days a week. That’s all. Just a weird f*****g job.

Image credits: Lettuce-b-lovely

#6

My ex bf worked for the Yahoo Italy dating site back in the earlyish 2000s. His job was to pretend to be a woman, and message male customers just as their accounts were going to expire. This would encourage them to pay to renew their subscriptions. Once they renewed, he would ghost them.

He only lasted for a few months due to how unethical it was.

Image credits: visualisewhirledpeas

There are many reasons daters today might prefer apps and sites to starting with real life interactions or being set up by mutual friends. They can see who they will be going out with ahead of time, and they can look at a person’s social media accounts and get an idea of their interests, their job, and more. Daters also don’t have to waste their time going out with someone if they can see online that they have different political or religious views. It can be much easier to weed through incompatible people, and it is much more convenient to look online when many of us have busy work schedules and might not come across many strangers in everyday life.

Along with all the upsides of online dating come plenty of cons as well. People tend to be much more superficial when they see a photo than they would be when confronted with someone in real life. A person who might be charming and hilarious in person might not be able to show that through an online profile. There is also the danger of creating an idea of someone in your head before you get to meet them in person. It can be disappointing when they are not what you expected, and there is always a risk of catfishing as well. 

#7

Guys swipe right on 47% of profiles. Women only swipe right on 12%.

I knew some guys would swipe right more than women, wasn’t prepared for how little women swipe right!

—
edit: Here’s some more…

#Searching for serious or casual relationships for men vs women:

– 61% of men want something serious while 38% want something casual
– 87% of women want something serious while only 13% want something casual

It’s worth noting on that last one that it’s partially because of a difference in how men and women would describe themselves if they’re not sure.

Women would rather say ‘Something serious’ if they’re not sure to see how something goes but happy for it to turn casual if they’re not feeling it. While men would prefer to say ‘Something casual’ and then happy for it to turn serious if they like them.

This is why we’ve given in and added a ‘Not sure’ option in our big update next week.

#Feedback on chats/users:

We’re unique in that we only let you chat to three users at a time, so you have to end a chat to talk to someone new. When you end a chat you have to give (private feedback).

Here’s some of the feedback people choose (you can pick more than one):

– 34% ghosted/didn’t say anything
– 12% great chat
– 11% polite and respectful
– 11% not enough in common
– 8% no chemistry
– 8% hard to talk to
– 2% rude/inappropriate

#Why people ghost:

We call ourselves the anti-ghosting app because we notify you if someone replaces your chat with someone new (since you can only talk to three at a time). Doesn’t stop rejection but at least you’re not left wondering and waiting!

We did some research with users to find out why people ghost on dating apps (they could choose more than one answer):

– 43% Avoid the awkwardness of saying I wasn’t interested
– 37% They said/did something I didn’t like
– 36% Was too busy and then it was too late
– 32% Couldn’t be bothered to keep replying
– 28% I forgot to reply
– 25% Couldn’t think of a reply
– 23% Too many other people to respond to
– 22% I’ve never ghosted anyone!
– 6% Other

Source: I’m the founder of a dating app

Image credits: elatedate

#8

I worked for a dating app for a few years in a role that was pretty high up where I was privy to almost all of the inner workings of the app. I won’t say which one, but I think my experience probably is applicable to other apps as well.

1. We had a murder on our platform. The top of the company got interviewed as witnesses. TBH there wasn’t really anything we did our could have done about it, but it is crazy to think about.
2. One of our members got scammed out of six figures, and there was nothing we could do about it either. She was older, and lonely, and the person used an attractive picture and kind words to play off of that. If you let them, people will find any way to scam and abuse those who are lonely. Some of our systems for detecting and removing scammers and spammers were far more advanced than our systems for actually creating matches. Also we found older women were actually the most likely to be scammed. You can make your own conclusions from that.
3. To that point, the algorithms are less sophisticated than you think. They mostly consist of educated guesses, and then trial and error to see what creates the most engagement. This engagement could be anything from returning to the app, to sending messages. The main goal of the algorithm is always to get you to pay, never to actually ensure you meet somebody in real life, as much as we tried to lie to ourselves that it was.
4. No dating professionals or psychological professionals were ever consulted when we were building our software, software that basically plays cupid and changes the courses of peoples live. I kept thinking it would be a good idea to have experts and scientists tell us what determines attraction and sets up a relationship for success, but nobody was ever interested in hearing that. Instead we made our own choices about how to build this thing.
5. I met hundreds of our users in person, and they were all pretty great people. Many of them were willing to come in and talk because they were struggling with actually finding people and matches on our app. It was sad that our software was failing them, some of the best, most lovely people, really struggled to find a partner.
6. Almost every dating app has a significantly larger percentage of men than women.
7. We toyed with doing a test of “blind dating” where you couldn’t see a users profile picture until after a match, but that failed really quickly. People truly are superficial.
8. Contrary to many users on this thread, we were a large dating app and we didn’t actually create any fake accounts. We were certainly proud of that. That being said, there are some that do it, and it’s relatively obvious when they do. The profile is usually a very attractive person, somebody who…. probably has no need for dating apps, and it’s usually shown very early in the queue, and the photos tend to be of “instagram influencer” level quality. That’s the biggest giveaway.

I can likely answer questions too provided they are general enough.

Image credits: throwaway492130921

#9

I worked as a software engineer for a dating site in the mid-2000s. Literally every single female profile was fake, they were “generated” profiles using arbitrary data and paid-for lewd photos from various sources.

The sites we ran targeted guys paying for the site. Meanwhile if you signed up as a female, the site would be free — simply because the ratio guys to real-girls was so huge.

The fake female profiles would also message newly signed-up guys profiles almost straight away, giving the guys a confidence boost. They’d often message straight back, then after a few messages (which purposely got more “heated”, over a few different profiles), the guys’ account would get a notification saying to pay to send more messages.

If the guys’ profile didn’t pay, the site would continue to send messages from different fake profiles, all of which were behind a pay-wall in order to see more photos or reply at all.

The refund policy was super short, so if & by the time the guys’ profile realised he was just chatting to AI profiles, he’d request a refund, but often denied due to refund policy being short that he “agreed to” at sign-up.

By the time a given “site” was commonly known as being a scam, we’d spin up another site, different name, logo & design and repeat the process. This went on for months/years with 100’s of sites under various names.

TL;DR it was toxic as hell, hated it. Glad I quit.

Image credits: dazecoop

It can also be hard to discern if another person is being completely honest when online dating. Outright catfishing a person is obviously wrong, and it can lead to some dangerous and scary situations. But it can be common for daters to avoid being completely transparent about their intentions as well. In fact, one Pew Research Center study found that 71% of online daters think “people lying about themselves to appear more desirable” is very common on these apps and sites. Those lies can be anything from, “Yeah, I’m a doctor” to “Yes, I want a serious relationship” to “No, I don’t have any kids”, but no matter how large the lies are, they are frustrating for daters who are trying to take the experience seriously. Half of online daters also say it’s very common for people to set up fake accounts to scam other people, and 48% say that it is common to be sent unsolicited sexually explicit messages and images. People can always be rude in person as well, but unfortunately, there are usually less consequences for bad behavior online. 

#10

I worked for Successful Singles in 2001. It was a dating agency. We cold called customers to get them to spend $3000 to be “professionally matched”. We would get some $$ if they showed up; we got more if they spent $ on the service. They claimed to have a “highly technological matching computer”. This was actually two high school girls in a room with two filing cabinets, one labeled male, one female. All leads came from a fake profile on match that said “send me your phone number so we can talk”.

I personally shut the place down after I was fired unlawfully. Called Fox 25 news undercover and Mike Bodet came out with a camera in a purse. Place closed two days after the report.

#11

I don’t know if it’s changed but (with a classic not me but) my roommate used to work at one of the big dating apps and one of the issues they had was that their algorithm changed at one point to more emphatically enforce dating “pools” where people who got more right swipes would only see profiles of people who get more right swipes etc. With the idea being that it would put people in similar “tiers” to actually match.

One big issue they were having was … well racial “preferences” or sexual racism being pretty amplified as a result. Black women and Asian men especially were being overwhelmingly shuffled down the algorithm because there are a lot of people who will basically automatically swipe left on them as soon as they see they’re a Black woman or an Asian man, even if they were hot as hell.

Also apparently, the issue was less severe among women seeking women but even more extreme (to an insane factor) among men seeking men.

#12

This is my favorite bit from my time working at PeopleMedia, which is part of Match several years back as a software engineer.

One day while deep in the depths of code related to our spam filters (I forget what I was in there for) I stumbled across a curious code statement. It was like

“if (userId == xxxxx) return;”

Which is a very curious thing to see. It basically said that if the user was a certain person, don’t filter them as a spam profile.

Immediately I laughed and was like “uh… What in the actual &@$# is this?”

A few veterans explained that there was a guy who sent out messages at such high volume that he would constantly trigger the spam filters (which if you’ve ever been on a dating site is actually a kind of hard thing to do). And that he’d called up to complain multiple times, and they’d investigated his messaging and that not only was he messaging this many people, but that he wasn’t even copy/pasting his messages. Dude just really liked to reach out to women. Nothing inappropriate, just a true volume shooter.

So eventually someone just broke down and added a back door for him specifically to the spam filter.

It blew my mind that a single user had their own piece of code specifically to make their profile work in our code. Think millions of users across multiple sites, and this guy specifically had a little piece of it all to his own. That an engineer had taken time to write, and QA to test, and Devops to deploy. That alone had to easily offset any amount of money he’d paid over the years. But there it was.

Although online dating has completely changed the game, many people don’t seem to view it as an inherently positive thing. In fact, 50% of daters say that online dating and dating apps have had neither a positive nor negative impact on dating and relationships. Slightly over a quarter of daters actually say that it has had a mostly negative effect. But the stigma that once came along with meeting a significant other online is starting to fade. 54% of daters say that relationships that start online can be just as successful as those that start in person. So if you’re marrying your partner who you first met on Bumble, don’t feel like you need to make up a fake story about how you bumped into each other at a coffee shop. You can be honest and tell your loved ones that you decided to meet at that coffee shop through a Bumble exchange.  

#13

Pick one! This was back in 2010, but we had bots acting as women sending messages to men, we spammed people on all social media sites and via text with alluring messages to get them to signup, we stored everyone’s password in plaintext and used it to login to their own email (about 50% of the passwords were the same password they’d use for their email) and target everyone on their contact list. We spammed so much, we spun off a second business just to handle all of the captchas, and that’s the only part of the business that still exists today (deathbycaptcha).

Image credits: ShiversMTL

#14

I moderated a lesbian dating site for a short while and about 70% of the users were male fetishist, who would DM these women, thinking they would change their sexuality to do weird kink things with them. I don’t kink shame, these things were legitimately really weird, a lot of those DMs were straight up creepy.

Image credits: TheCharlienator

#15

Female dating app users tend to sign off for the day several hours earlier than male users, which results in men who login after ~10PM generally not encountering many logged in female users.

In order to keep these men feeling like there is genuine female activity on the site (and thus continuing to pay for memberships), dating apps can pay for entire armies of “ghosts.”

Ghost profiles use photos of real women, but are operated by men, typically young men in their late teens and early 20s living in France, Serbia, Ukraine, and Russia.

A single ghost employee can manage dozens of female profiles, communicating with hundreds of men, for days or months at a time.

The ghosts’ general goal is to keep the men hooked on the site and still paying, but there are several possible unexpected consequences of this activity, none of which have been studied as far as I know:

1. Getting genuine responses, even from fake users, may help with feelings of loneliness.

2. A lot of these men start messaging the women with fairly gross or sexual messages (it’s usually late at night after all, when the men are bored, lonely, and horny). However, while genuine female users might take offense and block these men, the ghosts will instead roll with it and respond to messages like “nice mouthwatering tits” with “haha thank youuu. how are you feeling today? did you have a good day?” By turning the conversation around and encouraging the men to talk about their feelings, these ghosts may inadvertently be saving actual women from having to do this emotional labor.

3. While there’s a splendid irony in a secret cabal of men being paid to covertly perform emotional labor for other men, it’s fully possible that these ghosts are actually setting millions of men up for rude awakenings when they try to use similar language in real life with actual women who aren’t paid to put up with their overly sexualized nonsense.

One positive thing about how common dating apps are now is that there is something out there for everyone. Sure, there might not be millions of users on each app, but they’re growing! Over the years, Tinder has commonly been associated with hook-ups and casual dating, but it’s not your only option today. There’s Bumble, which puts control into the palms of women, and Hinge, which allows users to curate their profiles more easily and claims it’s “designed to be deleted” when you meet your match. There is also Her, which is specifically for lesbian, bisexual and queer women, and Coffee Meets Bagel, which sends users curated matches each day at noon. There are even more specific niche dating apps like Veggly, for vegans and vegetarians, and Nuit, which is based on astrological compatibility. No matter what you’re looking for, if you can’t find it in person, there is probably an app for it. 

#16

I used to moderate OK Cupid. The amount of unsolicited d**k pictures men would send women, not even accompanied by any words was horrifying. I mean, you’d expect it because online dating is a cesspit but the sheer amount would still surprise you.

I had to look at each reported picture and say ” Yes, that’s a penis”.

Image credits: Jimmypeglegs

#17

I tested the communication feature for a dating company that shall remain nameless. Nothing unusual in itself. The message exchange function needed to be flawless (glitches ironed out etc.) Except in this case, the requirement was to establish a relationship with a user (usually 3 on the go simultaneously) and keep it going for about 2 months. Fake identity was used of course.

Months! I researched the person, likes, dislikes, interestes and so on. A whole fake relationship was build. Then, after the test run was over, ghost them, delete my profile and move on to the next subject. It was unnerving. Testing in this case is usually hit and run, but to latch on to a user and deceive them at length was just too creepy.

Couldn’t figure out the reasoning behind that. Put me off dating sites for good.

Image credits: Marzana1900

#18

Managed and worked on a short term personal security detail for one of the C listers of one of these in L.A. Not mentioning by name bc i’m not trying to get doxxed but there is a huge problem with people getting stealthed w/ HIV and other veneral disases, as well as being mugged or robbed while f*****g about on these apps and the victims will threaten to lash out at the company violently or even show up at the offices demanding to speak to someone in charge while in the initial anger stage despite the company having no personal hand in the situation beyond arranging the medium for which to meet.
Apparently the company can’t even send out a warning about the suspected user who is accused of stealthing to LE or public health due to counsel advising that it’s slander with anything less than bona fide evidence of that person being positive for the disease/committing a crime against the other and/or that person meeting the other and/or having intercourse. The companies do cooperate with law enforcement on a case by case basis IIRC but they do have the right to clam up and wait for a subpoena before they share user info/chat logs, etc.
Meanwhile there are multiple people who have been robbed of thousands of dollars, given a disease and many more victims waiting to be had while the company sits on it’s a*s and lets the complaints pile up.
Even then it’s a whole messy area where it’s cheaper to not even get involved. Even banning the user from the service involves some amount of steps.
I don’t blame the victims for being livid but what a whole-a*s-f*****g mess. Got a few still images of the people we were keeping an eye out for and they looked like completely normal guys and girls who just got pushed to their breaking point, all bc they trusted someone from a dating app.
Could happen to anyone, honestly.

Being able to order dates like we order takeout on Uber Eats is a bit strange, but we cannot deny how efficient they are. Bustle writer Natalia Lusinski wrote a piece detailing some of the best features of dating apps, and she raises some interesting points. “Dating apps have the portability factor, so you can use them while you’re on the bus or waiting for an appointment,” says New York–based relationship expert and author April Masini. “Because they’re so easy to use on phones, you can take them with you and use them all over the place. Your life can be a lot more flexible with these portable apps. They can be big time savers and success builders in dating.”

#19

women: Black females are the least sought after demographic and asian/white females are the highest (flip flops)

white/asian females have extremely high match rates

men: Asian males are the least sought after but are the most active proportionally. Black males are more likely to match with a black female than white/asian female

White males are the most sought after

(this is from a friend that worked for one not me)

#20

I read a blog by a guy who used to work for OK Cupid.

He said the creepiest thing about it is every move you make on the site, every photo you click on, every message you send is logged.

Also, they keep track of of the accounts that receive the most attention, and use their images in their advertising and around the site.

All of this in an effort to commercialize and commodify our need for intimacy and human contact, and perpetuate and reinforce culturally imposed standards of beauty.

If that isn’t creepy I don’t know what is.

#21

Semi-dating app moderator.

There’s a few social-media sites like facebook in “this country”, and I had to moderate one less well known. This site was mostly used by adults/elderly and almost abandoned by youth since there’s a way better site for the same needs this one provides.

So to say, I was a backdoor moderator who would check up on different things, starting with uploaded pictures/videos, groups, certain accounts and ending with any flagged stuff.

I felt really sorry for way too frequent sexism and women abuse on that site. In short, all I’ve seen is that men (mostly of certain age and nationality) were messaging women they “liked” and straight away asked for sex . This happened all day all the time in a extremely huge amounts. Keep in mind, this site is a niche and I could only imagine what is actually happening behind curtains in more popular social media sites.

I’ve seen some crazy a*s s**t there. The world is f****d. Just need to deal with it and keep living.

Dating apps also usually allow users to see when they have mutual friends. So if you see a profile you’re interested in, you can message a mutual friend and ask how well they know the person or if they know much about their dating history. “It’s great to see that you have mutual friends in common (on a dating app) because it automatically creates a sense of comfort and trust,” Tina Wie, VP of Marketing for Three Day Rule, told Bustle. “The stronger your mutual friend connection (i.e., first-degree over third-degree) and the context in which you know them (i.e., they went to business school with your high school buddy or used to work with your college bestie), the more likely you’ll feel that the person you connected with is a normal, interesting person. You’ll also have something in common to talk about instantly when you’re first communicating, which is nice.”

#22

Worked for Grindr a few years ago and any profile pic using that puppy tongue/ears Snapchat filter was an underage boy 98% of the time.

#23

Many apps seed attractive bots to keep people engaged. The bots will send/respond to a couple of substandard questions. ‘How was your week?’ ‘What are you looking for?’ and then ghost. Despite the ghost, the high of matching with a super attractive person who spoke to you is enough to get many people hooked and chasing the dragon.

#24

I worked for an online dating site 10 years ago on the IT side, here is a few things I remember:

– Most of the female users were fake. We would import thousands of fake profiles all the time to prop up the numbers and let the men think there were all of these women on the platform.
– Customer complaints were fun. The staff in that department were insane because they had seen and heard everything. The only way you got a refund is if you figured out all of the women were fake.
– We paid a local company to produce some “content” for the fake women. I had to move the video editors to a separate part of the office to edit videos because it was too distracting.
– We did a video of the week at our weekly meetings where videos that were complained about were shown to staff as a morale booster. It was pretty funny but sad.
– We weren’t allowed to use the dating site if we were employees. A programmer got fired because he was contacting women directly because he could look them up directly.

Oddly enough I met my girlfriend at the time on an online dating site, but through a competitor.

Dating apps have long been much appreciated by introverts and workaholics who have a hard time meeting others organically, but especially in this newly formed “pandemic world” we live in, meeting people on our phones can be a great alternative to going out. If work was one of the only places you met new people prior to 2020, but now you’ve been working from home for over 2 years, you might need a little help getting dates. Plus, why take the risk of going out on a date and getting Covid if you are not sure about the person ahead of time. Meeting someone on an app and having the opportunity to chat with them virtually or on the phone first can ensure that once you meet in person, it is worth the risk of getting ill. (Or, you know, just make sure you both get tested before the date!)

#25

Worked as a developer for a dating mobile app. We hired gorgeous women, gave them premium accounts to write guys messages. Guys who didn’t have premium accounts could just see that they have a message from this gorgeous women but could not write back unless they bought premium account. The app lasted 6 months

#26

Never worked for one but had the misfortune of finding out a behind the scenes thing that really pissed me off and could have ended my relationship. If you’ve previously used Tinder please read this, it could save your a*s if you’re in an abusive relationship.

I was on Tinder a few years ago and met my then-partner at the time on it. We hit it off and started dating officially. I’d heard that uninstalling the app wouldn’t delete your account so I made sure to be overkill when wiping my profile – I deleted all my photos and bio, THEN made it private, THEN deleted my account, THEN uninstalled the app.

Seven months later my partner’s friend came across my Tinder profile. According to him the photo was my public Facebook profile pic and there was nothing written for the bio. **I had never reactivated my profile!** I had zero knowledge of this! I tried to figure out what the f**k was happening and discovered Tinder had automatically grabbed my Facebook info and used it to recreate my account and make it public. Thank F**K my Facebook profile photo was a very lovey-dovey couples pic of the two of us so that was what Tinder used – my partner knew me well and that I detested cheaters so he trusted me fully. He also knew I wasn’t stupid enough to use a couples photo of us as my only Tinder pic, and that I would never have an empty bio. I also never put my job info on my Facebook so thankfully Tinder had left that blank. So when my then-partner tipped me off about this f****d up thing Tinder had done I was proper horrified because it turned out all my work clients and friends and whoever else that had been on Tinder must have come across that profile and assumed I was some shameless cheater.

I wanted to make sure it wasn’t a fake profile someone else was controlling so I redownloaded Tinder in front of my partner and logged in – to discover I was logging in to the exact almost-empty profile his friend had described.

It turns out Tinder does that to anyone who forgot to restrict third party app access on Facebook. At the time that was a very buried Facebook setting you needed to be on desktop to deactivate.

I went online and tried to post in a few places to warn people (I’m really big on online privacy) but I just got called a cheater who was trying to cover her tracks. No one believed me at all. I just got heaps of s**t for it even though my partner was 100% on my side and I just wanted to try and help.

I ended up deleting those posts because nobody believed me and I deeply regret that – can you imagine if someone in an abusive relationship had that happen to them?? I should have left the posts up so that could have googled and found it. My partner (we broke up years later but we remain friends) was a good man and he knew me inside out and that I would never cheat nor do it in such a ridiculous and counterproductive way. But if I’d been trapped in a relationship with someone controlling and abusive… No f*****g way would they have ever believed this story because let’s be honest it sounds pretty far fetched. Tinder automatically creating an account and making it public without ever warning the user… No one would believe them. This all took place back in 2015 and at the time I found two other forum posts discussing other people’s trouble with it happening to them so I’m not sure if it’s been changed in the last five years or not but still….

RESTRICT THIRD PARTY ACCESS IN YOUR FACEBOOK SETTINGS, PEOPLE.

Edit: I’m really f*****g over the messages I’ve been getting from incels accusing me of lying or making up fake information about Tinder deactivating any profile that isn’t active for a week. First, that’s complete b******t because I’ve had times where I hadn’t logged in for over a month but everything was still the same. Second, I have no reason to lie about something this old using such a crazy sounding tale. Third, there’s plenty of other Redditors responding with their own stories of it happening to them. F**k off and stop being so nasty over someone who is just trying to help others and spread the word of yet ANOTHER app that is violating your privacy without many people knowing.

#27

I worked customer service for a company that oversaw Christian Mingle, JDate, and some others (five sites in total). The only real dirt I had was that I, as an agent, could see every message ever sent on any given account, even if the member had deleted the messages off their account.

I did, however, have my fair share of amazingly insane conversations with people just looking for love. One I’ll never forget is a school teacher that offered me a letter of recommendation as reward for helping her get her account in order.

Whether you love or hate dating apps, we hope you’re enjoying this fascinating list of juicy behind-the-scenes details. The secret underbelly of dating sites must have many more secrets to reveal, but we’ll start with these today. Be sure to keep upvoting the stories that make you want to either immediately delete your Tinder account or inspire you to finally create one. Then let us know in the comments if you have any wild stories from your own online dating experiences. And if you have ever worked for any of these sites, I’m sure your fellow pandas would be dying to read the secrets you can reveal as well. And if you’re out there looking for love, godspeed!

#28

I ran operations for an online dating company (notably not affiliated with Match). From database analytics I can tell you a few things. Men initiate contact around 80% of the time in straight matchmaking, and if you are a woman looking to date other women and you simply initiate contact with another woman you have a good chance of success simply because it’s very very very common for women to match but then neither initiates contact. IIRC we were able to determine that it takes on average about 3 dates before sex happens (I don’t recall how we worked that out, I’m not a data analyst, but presumably it was some keyword based algorithm looking at chat messages).

We got so many requests for information from the police that we had an informal system with them, to save them from wasting time getting warrants for information about people who we didn’t have data on, they would ask about a particular name/email/whatever other identifier and we would just say yes we have data about them or no we don’t, and if we did they’d then go get the warrant to get a copy of it.

The other thing I can tell you from our analytics, that really shouldn’t be at all surprising, is to **get some decent profile photos.** Go get your talented friend or just hire a photographer to take some really nicely-lit well-composed photos of yourself and watch your match rate soar.

Image credits: jamesinc

#29

I forget the source but I remember hearing one of the sites come out with data that suggested that women were way more picky than men. Men would typically be attracted to about half the women they saw whereas women were only attracted to about 10% of men. There was also some stuff on certain sexes and ethnicities getting more attention but I don’t want to get too much into that one just Google if you are curious.

Image credits: anon

#30

I used to work for Badoo and the way the website was started (as I was told) was literally by importing all profiles from mamba.ru (which is another website the founder of Badoo owned and sold previously) and sending them an email saying something like “Hey! We’ve not seen you for a while! Why not log back in and check what you’ve missed”.

#31

I work for a cyber security company. These companies protections are a joke. Most people know how you can look in the code to unscramble your likes on tinder. But we also found a way to see everything they signed up with. Their location, phone number, and where they were at that moment. Bumble the verified profile means shit. That’s what my team was in charge of. I got verified profiles of about 10 different celebrities within 30 minutes. That blue check means nothing.

#32

I used to work at Bumble, although this was about 4-5 years ago. Globally, about 90% of the users are men, so there is a huge male to female disparity, although it’s not that bad on a per country basis (for some countries).

The most depressing stat though was the histogram of word count in messages. Something like 91% of opening messages were just one word “hey”, and ~85% of conversations were just one exchange long (“hey” -> no reply ever).

Looking at human, digital mating habits splayed out in data science form was really depressing.

Some people have asked me a lot of the same questions so am providing answers here:

1) When I worked there, we were NOT allowed to read the content of chats, only gather metadata about them (word count, number of exchanges), but we could not build models which analysed the content of chats (this chat was about food, this one was about holidays, this one was sexual). This was due to stringent GDPR draft rules/TOS/privacy rules at the time, and Bumble took user privacy very seriously, so chats were never read or analysed for content, not even by automated models. However this was 4-5 years ago, and they may have amended their TOS since then to allow it, or they might be analysing content for non-GDPR countries (USA). Therefore, as others have pointed out, we don’t know for sure that the word used most often was actually “hey”, it could have been “hello” or “howdy”. In the office, we always assumed it was “hey” due to our own experiences on the app. But we did know with certainty that ~91% of first messages used only a single word, so we guessed it was “hey”.

2) The countries which had better male-female ratios (which I can remember) were the Nordic ones, Sweden and Norway were close to 50/50, and for a time, one of them even had more women on the app than men. Not sure how it is now.

3) The GDPR rules were released in 2016 (even earlier draft rules for some industries such as banking/finance and telecoms), but were not actually enforced until 2018. This grace period of two years was so that firms could implement all of the massive legal and technical protocols for GDPR, and many compliance/tech departments in London did nothing but a mad dash sprint for 2-3 years straight to get GDPR compliant before the 2018 deadline. As such, Bumble was already GDPR compliant (at least in terms of user chats, don’t know about other aspects) well before 2018 (as I said, they took user privacy seriously, even before GDPR). We weren’t allowed to read chat messages due to a combination of user privacy TOS (specific to Bumble) and GDPR draft rules. I just wrote GDPR as a catch-all term for all of the various privacy rules in effect then (including TOS), but yes, I agree, the rules were not enforced yet. I apologise that I wasn’t specific, I wrote my reply quickly this morning not thinking it would explode like this, and so just blurted out GDPR without getting pedantic about which rules in which years. Apologies for any confusion.

4) All these numbers are pulled from my memory of what I saw 4-5 years ago, and thus are not canon law or academic paper worthy.

#33

I worked for Match for a couple years. This is probably widely known but women frequently lie about their age and weight and men lie about their height and salary. Also, it’s a big problem that women are inundated with DMs while most men get none.

#34

Most dating sites and apps are owned by one company The Match Group. They have a near monopoly. I think bumble is one of the few not owned by them.

Image credits: HueJass84

#35

Advertising on Grindr is big, big, big money. It’s much more expensive than most other forms of online advertising. I worked for a company who tried to target gay men, and Grindr seemed like the suitable avenue until we found out pricing.. absolutely insane.

#36

I worked for a dating site that promoted beauties from Asia and Eastern Europe. Every message was at least 2$ but more like 5$.

99% of profiles are fake, dudes sitting in China and Russia keeping up the pretence to keep people hooked on buying the virtual currency to keep chatting.

We are not the biggest fan of the US in my country but I genuinely felt sad for most of the clients.

Stay away from these kinds of sites, they are all scams. No model like women is leaving Russia or China to be with an average joe from the west.

#37

I worked at one of the large sites years ago and here is what I found out.

* Guys cannot comment more than a ‘hey’, ‘hi’, ‘hello’ during first message.
* People are racist, way more than I thought.
* People get scammed often. Lonely people are vulnerable and get scammed out of money and gifts.
* D**k picks are everywhere.
* Sports (basketball, football, etc), TV shows and weather affect when people sign up for the site. More so on sports than anything else.
* Request for information on divorce trials happen often.
* Marketing teams are really good at their job. The things they factor in to get you to sign up is an insane science.
* Ex-girlfriends or ex-wife’s would find out there ex was on a site and would email and call smearing them. Saying they went on a date and were raped by them. Some really ugly s**t.
* I was also surprised at the large amount of activity around political centers. Washington DC and states capitols would spike up around 11am-1PM local time. I assume this was during lunch but still surprised they were hot spots.
* Tall good looking people like to date other tall good looking people. If you’re tall and good looking you will have your pick of the 1%. This fact goes to both guys and girls. Take this into consideration when you are looking at profiles and be realistic. Edit: girls, if you’re not 5’8 or over you’re not considered tall in the dating world. Luckily most guys will overlook this but remember that guy that’s over 6’ft is also getting hit on by girls closer to his height.

#38

I was actually offered a job to act like a user. I was going to have different fake accounts both male and female but mostly female and my job was to talk to people basically. I was shocked.

#39

I read a book about precisely this topic written by one of the chief guys behind okcupid and it was fascinating. Tons of cool stats to look at. I think it was called “Dataclysm”.

Here are some interesting ones that I remember off the top of my head;

Women generally liked men who were on average a bit older than them up until the late 30s, at which point they preferred them a bit younger or a lot younger as they aged. On the other hand, the chart for men just showed they preferred their women to be 23 at most no matter their age, even if they were like 50.

On the topic of what ethnic group was the most desirable amongst other demographics, white men were the absolute winners with the most amount of other ethnicities finding them attractive. Meanwhile, black women were disproportionally rejected by everyone except black men, and asian men just saw low levels of desirability all across the board, becoming the overall least desirable demographic.

A different stat showed that the most “attractive” photos (le: ones that promptedbetter rates of interactions and messages) were made by Panasonic or Leica cameras, while the least ones were made with a Motorola phone.

And I could go on. The book just had a metric ton of different stats thoroughly dug into and explained on a escale that is unprecedented because of the nature of how okcupid works as a site. When you have a place where one of the core mechanics is sharing and disclosing personal information, and you have millions and millions of people using it, it actually becomes an amazing observation tool.

I strongly encourage everyone to give it a read some day, it’s actually fascinating. I found myself surprised with the stats throughout the whole book on a frequent basis.

#40

Late 2016 / Early 2017, I worked for a software company that startups would buy to control cost as they scaled engineering headcount. Got pretty far into the buying cycle with Grindr. I distinctly remember them talking about processing 90M messages a day. I can’t remember the number of images exchanged but it was also astronomical. Found a HBR paper from ’15, they were processing 70M messages amongst 2M daily active users. The last stat I saw clocked current DAU at 27M.

Back then they posted and boasted about their stats online. Don’t seem to be the case anymore.

#41

I used to work at a dating site in the UK. I was on the tech side but most of the staff was a group of young women who manually approved images and text changes to profiles. There was about 10-15 of them and the turnover rate was about one a week. The work was just so mind numbing.

About 10 times a day they’ed shout that they’d “got another one”. Which basically meant one of the hundreds of thousands of men on the site has differently thought “I’ve thought of something nobody else has tried, I’ll upload a picture of my c**k” at which point they’d all laugh at it, cancel the profile upload and go back to reading about people’s choice of pets or whatever else they thought was interesting

#42

Lots of gay guys get banned from grindr selling weed. Would get a lot of emails of “why am I banned”. Go to their profile and will say “HMU for that ?

#43

I would love to know how openly cynical the algorithm really is. My feed on Hinge shows absolutely no one I am interested in. And suddenly, the ‘roses’ feature pops up. I am interested in all the people in the Roses section. But – oh – it’s £4 to buy ONE rose. Which is no guarantee of a match, much less a date.

They want to keep you using the app and spending money for as long as possible and their slogan ‘designed to be deleted’ is such bs it’s comical. And you can’t turn to other apps because they’re all owned by the same corporation.

#44

Ok so I didn’t work with a dating company per se… But I helped software engineers optimize their profiles.

Men get VERY FEW matches, regardless of how good their profile is.

Women get A LOT of matches, but most of those matches are useless.

—

Edit: this has gotten a lot of attention, so I wanted to share my basic advice.

1) Don’t try to appeal mildly to EVERYONE. Appeal strongly to a small subset of people. Emphasize who you are.

2) Show don’t tell — what makes a person want to date you? Will you impress them with your volunteer work? Will you bring them fun places? Will you make them laugh?

3) Get good photos. If you have to, get a friend with a good camera to take photos of you multiple times over a day with several changes of clothes.

4) be brutally honest. Do you need to go to the dentist because your teeth are gray? Go. Do you need to get a haircut? Go somewhere that charges $50 a haircut and tell them to do what they want (if male). Do your clothes fit? Ask a fashionable friend. Remember: people are judging you on your appearance as much as you are judging them. They can’t see you’re kind of funny or interesting. They can see if you’re well groomed and making an effort.

Any more advice and I charge $50 USD an hour 😉

#45

My old boss was the financial controller of a big dating site. He kept on seeing these big invoices for modelling agencies and initially thought it was because of the big parties they used to host. When he asked about it it turned out it was just content for the fake profiles they created to lure in users.

#46

I never “worked” at OkCupid but years ago I reported a few profiles and then they made me a mod. There were more fake or scam profiles than d**k pics. We think some profiles were reported just because someone didn’t like how they acted, but once you start image searching, you would typically find that those profiles are fake, or belong to real people that are definitely not on a dating site.

There were a bunch of accurate and proven catfish reports, and a lot of cute pets (pictures have to be of you, not your dog) and we would comment for the other mods “cute dog but breaks rules”. Also google the image of the dog and sometimes find out that it’s someone else’s dog.

#47

The creator of Match.com got cheated on. She left him for a man she met on Match.com.

#48

Me and my friends used a girl filter on a boy. We posted this picture on lavoo. We didn’t expect to get this many responses because the picture looked bad, the boy still wore clothes for boys and you could clearly see an Adam’s apple on his throat (sry don’t know the English word for that). Within a week we got 1141 results from mens and a few hundred DM’s.

#49

Facebook AYI (Are You Interested) Infographic:

https://ift.tt/7tAYZbz

#50

Late to the party, but OKCupid and some other apps conducted a study on dating patterns on their website, and the conclusions blackpilled the hell out of me:

Women date up any given social ladder and men date down. This creates a problem in society as women who are ‘1’s or ‘2’s date, at the very least, men who are ‘3’s or ‘4’s, creating an underclass of men who fall below their lowest standards of attractiveness, mostly due to one’s height. 12% of the U.S. male population is over 6’, but 71% of American women on dating apps in a blind poll say that 6’ is a minimum height requirement for a mate. In one experiment, a group of women were asked, on description alone, to choose to date either a convicted criminal or an esteemed doctor. The convicted criminal was 6’2” and the doctor was 5’9”. More than 75% of the women said they would rather date the criminal. Men who are under 6’ just fall below the lower limit of attractiveness and get left behind entirely, and then the media calls them losers. 14% of men under 6’ ultimately attempt suicide and 3% complete it, an outrageously high figure especially compared to just 6% of men over 6’ attempting suicide.

In a separate study, it was concluded that 80% of men swipe right, on average, on 90% of women on Tinder, whereas 80% of women swipe right, on average, on 14% of men. The 14% on whom 80% of women swipe tend to come from the same group, suggesting that 4/5 women on dating apps are swiping right on 1/8 men. That means that 7/8 men are competing for 1/5 women, and because there are vastly more men than women on dating apps, this means that 50-60 men are competing for every woman, unless you are in the top 14% of men, in which case 4 women are competing for every 1 man.

#51

Tinder:

The vast majority of tinder profiles that are paid subscribers are men (>80%).

The first use of a matching algorithm was based on a game ranking system called “Elo rating”, and it was entirely decided upon by one guy who now works at Nike. The algorithm has since evolved and is now rooted in more black box machine learning.

The algorithm is intended to maximize ad revenue and time on app by delivering matches when the probability for the user to churn is highest. The algorithm does not prioritize matches.

Requests to rate the app occur after a match is made with the intention of biasing the user to rate the app higher.

The distribution of matches for both men and women follows a power law distribution, however the median number of matches for a women is over 7 times higher than the median for men.

On average, men spend more time using the app for swiping and women spend more time messaging.

Bumble (based on info from a former coworker) :
The women message first paradigm was largely a failure. Women did not often message at all. The decision was made to develop a feature that would simulate men messaging first without having to revamp the platform, this is known as the “extensions” feature. The idea is to clue women into knowing if a man is interested before she messages, the intention is not to give her more time to decide, but rather the probability of her sending a message without that reinforcement is low.

#52

So back before online dating, I worked at one of the telephone dating companies. Voicemails, live chat, stuff like that. They are all out of biz now.
Lots of interesting tidbits:
* The people who make the ads for those services are just regular people. Moms, little old ladies, was rarely men as you’d think.
* Only men paid to chat or send messages. Didn’t matter if you were gay or straight. Women were totally free.
* One of the services was created by a gay fellow who wanted to meet dudes. So he reviewed all the profiles for the best guys.
* The people who recorded the prompts were just regular office people not professionals. I recorded a set one time and some dude called up asking if he could meet me cause he liked my voice(no homo)
* We used to regularly review ads posted by customers to prevent prostitution ads or overly explicit public stuff. One time a guy recorded his public ad: “Hi I’m Chuck and I have a pick up truck. If you wanna f**k in my truck, call Chuck!”

#53

I did a study on how dating app usage affects someone’s narcissistic tendencies (whether adaptive or maladaptive). I found out that someone with a more pathological form of narcissism (maladaptive) is more socially and emotionally impaired when they aren’t getting the results they desire. Since narcissism runs on a continuum from grandiose to vulnerable this shows how damaging this can be for anyone expressing these tendencies.

Most people know about grandiose narcissism but many don’t know about the other side of narcissism which is the vulnerable side. The best was I can describe these people are these are the ones who look for someone to idolize and will do ANYTHING for that person. Since they are looking to fulfill a sense of self they are missing they look to others for that purpose (hence the idolizing). Dating app usage is extremely dangerous for these people because they spend hours searching for someone and when they don’t match with them it causes a narcissistic injury.

#54

My experience is ancient, from back when it was dating sites instead of apps. I wonder what has changed.

I was surprised by the insane amount of effort it took to remove nude/d**k pix.

Plus the constant onslaught of sex workers that we kicked from the site every single day.

(I’m sure they use AI now to filter all those, but it’s probably still a lot of manual work involved.)

Also, how impossible it was to get women to initiate anything. We did whatever we could to make it more appealing to women, still the difference in male to female messages – vs. the other way around – was just mind-blowing. Like 1:1000 or so.

I was actually active as a user on that platform too. If I ever received a message from a woman, I basically went and deleted that user. It was always a sex worker. Always.

Oh and I should add, the partner matching algorithm was completely honest and real. (I know it cause I coded it.) There was absolutely zero trickery on that site. One reason why I loved that job. Sadly, the company went bust in the dotcom bubble, and took some of my money with it. Never found a job that was so much fun, with so great a team. Ugh, I miss the times!

—

ETA after reading some other comments:

My own “success rate” at two or three dating sites I tried, was abysmal. I’m not pretty, for sure, but based on my insider experience I don’t think it really matters. Over the course of 5 years, I got a handful of friends out of those sites, and IIRC one(!) ONS. Oh and one serious relationship, so there’s that.

By contrast, a female friend of mine is currently on one app. She has many dates alright, but they tend to turn out creeps or uninteresting. She’s looking for something serious, and has been unable to find it. And I mean, while I might not be a joy to look at – that lady is decidedly attractive, slim and sportive with long blond hair, successful at her job, financially independent… a keeper by all means. Still. Nothing.

So what I’m saying is, the stats are matched by personal experience. Online dating plainly and simply does not work. At all.

—

ETA: “pro ladies” / “sex workers”. I was trying to be polite, but it doesn’t really work out in English, hehe.

#55

We, at college, did our own little research by combining results of 3 profiles in Delhi, India:

>Average looking guy, normal height with very interesting well-maintained bio

>Seemingly Rich tall guy with photos from foreign countries and bio that says “Gym freak, hmu if you’re down”

>Simple photo of a face of a girl with no bio

So, to put our findings in summary:

1. If you’re a guy, who’s NOT extremely good looking with chiseled features & tall height, or if you’re simply NOT rich, dating apps are NOT for you. Don’t even try, It’s just a depressing experience where you’ve close to 0.08% chance of getting matches.

2. If you Show that you’ve got money, every other “requirements” go out of question for you. You’re surely getting about 500+ matches/month and it’ll be a better experience for you even if you’re not really that good looking. If you’re tall & a bit better than normal looking, that’ll also help.

All those requirements by girls writing “SaPioSexUal” and “Not here for hookups” go out of the window if you’ve height and/or are rich.

3. If you’re a girl, just exist on the dating app. And 99+ right swipes were there in the first 13 minutes. 1000+ swipes by the end of the day. You can just have fun and get guys to do anything for you. We did, even though we shut it down so as to not get caught for catfishing or something.

#56

I wasn’t an employee but I was contracted by Match to run beer tasting events for them back when I did stand up and worked in craft beer. They split the groups for each event into age groups: 20-30, 30-40, 50+

The 20-30 group tended to be pretty chill for the most part, aside from there always being one super awkward dude who never spoke with any women and instead spent all the social portions trying to talk about craft beer with me. I’d always try to gently nudge them toward the single women and try to introduce them but they would usually either keep following me around or retreat to a corner and look at their phone.

The 30-40 group was an absolute nightmare. Regardless of gender everyone had this look of frenzied desperation in their eyes. I don’t know if it was about biological clocks or what but no one cared about the class itself and would just latch onto the first person they met regardless of chemistry (which there usually wasn’t).

The 50+ group was my absolute favorite. Everyone was chill, there was zero tension, they all just showed up, effortlessly made at least ten new friends and crushed craft beer for a couple hours.

#57

I haven’t worked in a dating company but I do run a secret geek dating group, and here are a few “fun” things I learned:

1. Men create much more dating posts, about 7-8 to 1 women, but women may get up to 10 times the amount of engagement (men get 20 likes at best, while women get between 50 to 250 likes)

2. Geek men would usually stick to one, odd tactic time after time, because it worked once or twice (I.E. they will keep mentioning their weird collection or trait, and try to boast an odd, or boastful detail).

3. Geek women are more open to polyamorous relationships and open relationships (1 out of 5 women).

4. Most guys would define themselves as Gamers, Movie-fanatics, Anime-fans or Tabletop lovers, while Women would usually talk of their love of litrature, movies, and sometimes, yet much less often, video games, manga, anime and comics.

5. Bans occur maybe twice in a span of 3 months, and the ratio is 4 guys to 1 woman, usually due to creepy comments, harassment and/or just plain being an assholes/d**k to admins and or group members.

#58

i’d really be interested in what someone working at Ashley Madison or Gleeden has to say.

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