Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

AYASOFAYA t1_jc23pny wrote

Reply to comment by elhospitaler in [OC] Results after a little over a month on Hinge (M/27) by elhospitaler

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.

29

elhospitaler OP t1_jc288rw wrote

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 :).

14

AYASOFAYA t1_jc2mdoj wrote

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.

4

elhospitaler OP t1_jc2n1di wrote

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

5

CWF182 t1_jc2tsvq wrote

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

3

Busy-Mode-8336 t1_jc3f7nq wrote

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.

3

elhospitaler OP t1_jc3jcd2 wrote

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.

1