Tinder's a dating application where you swipe left or right to declare your interest in the candidate. If there's mutual interest you can communicate with the other person.
Depending on how starved you are, you might find yourself swiping in one direction way more often than otherwise, thus automating it kinda makes sense, but obviously defeats the point of Tinder (especially if everyone would start to use this script)
Based on Cammi Pham's story[0] it sounds like auto-liking profiles en masse is not all it's cracked up to be. Summarizing her post (and probably forgetting a detail or two), you end up with tons of worthless results you don't really want, and you're so inundated with "connections" - messages from other eager people - that you can't get through them quickly enough to get to the good ones before they get sick of waiting and block you.
Neat mini-project, but it might be more interesting to see what kind of cool stuff you can do with Tinder beyond this.
That's likely for female profiles, but the situation is usually reversed for men. Liking everything means that the smaller number of women that swipe right on your profile will instantly match, and then you can decide to reply or not.
I think the stereotype is that men are not as discerning as women when dating. That is, if a straight man is presented with 100 random women, he'd be more likely to consider a larger number of them to be dateable, than if a straight woman were presented with 100 random men.
I'm pretty sure this question was explored in a really interesting OKCupid blog post (I think it was in their "Why you should never pay for online dating" post) but that entry disappeared when they were acquired by Match.
That's from the perspective of an attractive young lady. A male, let alone an unattractive one, will have much higher chances of getting any response at all with the en masse approach.
This script also has an unintended consequence: it can roughly measure how attractive you are to the population. Assuming that everyone you auto-swipe will also respond (and truthfully, not using this script) this could give you some very sobering results if you're not the most attractive. Imagine the guy who runs this and gets 10-15 likes. It's like automating going to a bar and getting stuffed all night long, only quicker! It could also of course end up boosting your ego a lot, but I suspect for many it will not. Stay thirsty, my friends.
Which brings an interesting improvement to the game: Testing pictures.
So far I've had the most success with a simple picture of me stretching when I was tired one morning and sister had my phone and was bored. I think the main feature is that you can see my forearms are veiny. But most of my face is obscured by sunglasses, may hair is covered by a wool hat, and I'm generally being tired, sleepy, and uninteresting.
> it can roughly measure how attractive you are to the population
You could even push that concept further, and test a picture in different cities/countries. That way you can find where in the world people find you most attractive :D
I tried the automated-liker approach a few months ago. While post-processing makes more sense in theory, Tinder's algorithms will penalize you for having a poor match/message ratio.
What I found to be a lot more fun is to run your hits through Google's reverse image search to see who they are in real life before striking up a conversation.
You go on actual dates with women you meet from Tinder? Edit: It's an electronic meat market... c'mon. Don't make it too hard. Just say you have Netflix = done.
For me as guy it's always a numbers game.
For my female friends it's a filter game.
I'm on okcupid for like 3 years now and I never got any messages.
My girlfriend was there for 3 months and said, she didn't write any messages, because she got about 20 per day.
I founded & ran a big dating site (big for my country); the most successful dates / marriages (it's been 6 years since we sold and we still get a lot of cards from people about getting married / having kids) where not from the way most people meet on / use these sites. People very much use them wrong imho; guys pay 0 attention to their profile besides their pic and just mail every face they like and women pay attention to their profile and read the ones the guys put up. So they will never match. Both sides lie and the least attention they pay to their own profiles, the more lies are in them as they don't see it as anything to worry about. The most successful ones are when guys pay a lot of attention and are honest (about yes they get hammered every weekend and they want girls who smoke and hate children; things which don't make you popular maybe, but if it's so, it's so), don't mail just everyone (and copy/paste the same; 'hi you are cute, here is my number') and take their time before trying to squeeze out as many 'real life' dates (and sex) as possible.
Obviously there is room for both and both work, but we talked to many people, guys and girls in that time and in the end they want something real; most people on dating sites are just doing it wrong; it's not the dating site. We ended up selling 'profile help' where we would sit down and talk to (both sexes) and fix up their profiles and their communication. It seems obvious to people here (well ...) that if you meet in a bar later in the evening after one message online and jump in bed that night you'll probably won't be moving in soon and more than often actually stuff gets stolen that way as well (from phones to TVs to cars...). By keeping it online for a while with someone you not only learn a lot about eachother, but you weed out the perverts, criminals, sex addicts etc. Unfortunately, people are impatient and generally for some reason, lose all common sense when it comes to online dating.
I have never used Tinder, but if I understand it correctly men and women must mutually "like" each other before messaging, but what happens in practice is that men like almost every female profile?
Why not just drop the pretence and build an app which allows women to message men, but not vice versa?
But if the like threshold is so low that people are automating it then is it even useful? Perhaps a better solution would be to allow women to select men that they are interested in and then those men get the option of messaging the women?
If someone bothers to message you it would be a better signal than swiping the screen but then it might be depressing if you select some men and then none of them message you?
Oh, don't get me wrong, I think online dating is broken to the core :D
I just try to understand the people using it :)
In the last 12 months I met about 7 people with romantic interest in me only one of them was from a dating site AND she I already knew her from a party.
But theoretically I should meet more on dating sites.
On average that makes sense, but it breaks badly for some critical cases such as very attractive men. If those users are driven away then the application becomes less attractive to women.
I always assumed Tinder would have something in place to stop people (/guys?) just swiping 'Like' to every picture? Decrease the percentage that person gets shown to the opposite sex, for instance, in favour of people who are actually swiping like with some discrimination. Anyone with a working knowledge of the system care to comment?
That said I know plenty of guys who just swipe yes to everyone (à la this script), and then just remove people from their matches if they don't like them.
Is it just me, or is it ridiculous that their API isn't more protected than this? Most popular apps these days require signed requests, and then store those signing algorithms in places where they are extremely difficult to get (in Android apps, signing algorithms are almost always stored in native libraries). Tinder didn't even attempt to implement request signing.
This, and of course the $1 million investment in the Yo app, just keep piling up the evidence that VC's and even potential acquirers just don't care about how beautiful or secure your code is, even if poor security and code quality threaten the value of the entire business. They just want users, and even that seems to be negotiable if you have a solid background.
Well to be honest it's not hard to secure your app once you have the users. Getting users when you have a "beautiful or secure" app on the other end...
They're making money. They use SSL and OAuth. that works 99.9% of the cases. The rest would be nerds like me who would go on hacking the damn thing. I've gotten a few dates but nothing interesting. The previous API version had real birthdates, full names and geolocations. That was gold!
57 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 113 ms ] thread(edit: wtf. minus three? For me asking why you would automate ratings in a dating app?)
Depending on how starved you are, you might find yourself swiping in one direction way more often than otherwise, thus automating it kinda makes sense, but obviously defeats the point of Tinder (especially if everyone would start to use this script)
Neat mini-project, but it might be more interesting to see what kind of cool stuff you can do with Tinder beyond this.
0: http://www.cammipham.com/tinder-hack/ (and incredibly not posted to HN as far as I can tell)
Edit: I realise this should really be posted on the Github page but I don't have an account and can't be bothered to register a new one.
https://gist.github.com/than2/26bf8c79052acc2804bd
here, i fixed it and disabled the logging and added a counter
So far I've had the most success with a simple picture of me stretching when I was tired one morning and sister had my phone and was bored. I think the main feature is that you can see my forearms are veiny. But most of my face is obscured by sunglasses, may hair is covered by a wool hat, and I'm generally being tired, sleepy, and uninteresting.
Pic in question: http://instagram.com/p/lm5FNjkxp1/?modal=true
I made http://tinderus.com/ the other day, essentially just to give people an alternative perspective on their profile and images.
You can read about it here: https://medium.com/p/8e02c9a3c33b
I run http://catchlondon.com/ - a PR Agency focused on technology that I founded one year ago.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-social-thinker/20100...
You could even push that concept further, and test a picture in different cities/countries. That way you can find where in the world people find you most attractive :D
What I found to be a lot more fun is to run your hits through Google's reverse image search to see who they are in real life before striking up a conversation.
And [surprisingly?] more likely to end in somebody's bed.
What's the difference between a date and an actual date? You seem to imply there is.
For me as guy it's always a numbers game. For my female friends it's a filter game.
I'm on okcupid for like 3 years now and I never got any messages. My girlfriend was there for 3 months and said, she didn't write any messages, because she got about 20 per day.
For me all dating sites have failed.
Obviously there is room for both and both work, but we talked to many people, guys and girls in that time and in the end they want something real; most people on dating sites are just doing it wrong; it's not the dating site. We ended up selling 'profile help' where we would sit down and talk to (both sexes) and fix up their profiles and their communication. It seems obvious to people here (well ...) that if you meet in a bar later in the evening after one message online and jump in bed that night you'll probably won't be moving in soon and more than often actually stuff gets stolen that way as well (from phones to TVs to cars...). By keeping it online for a while with someone you not only learn a lot about eachother, but you weed out the perverts, criminals, sex addicts etc. Unfortunately, people are impatient and generally for some reason, lose all common sense when it comes to online dating.
But if a web-service needs consulting (profile-help) to work properly, it doesn't sound that good to me.
Also okcupid got sold too and I wouldn't consider it "good", better than the most, but not really good.
There is still the problem, that women don't write messages and get dumped with messages by guys.
Why not just drop the pretence and build an app which allows women to message men, but not vice versa?
Maybe the women who use Tinder want to be 100% sure "he" liked them?
If someone bothers to message you it would be a better signal than swiping the screen but then it might be depressing if you select some men and then none of them message you?
I just try to understand the people using it :)
In the last 12 months I met about 7 people with romantic interest in me only one of them was from a dating site AND she I already knew her from a party.
But theoretically I should meet more on dating sites.
That said I know plenty of guys who just swipe yes to everyone (à la this script), and then just remove people from their matches if they don't like them.
This, and of course the $1 million investment in the Yo app, just keep piling up the evidence that VC's and even potential acquirers just don't care about how beautiful or secure your code is, even if poor security and code quality threaten the value of the entire business. They just want users, and even that seems to be negotiable if you have a solid background.
I know how to use Charles just don't know where to luck and what variables to look or where is it generated.