Sorry to hear that mate. Hope things are better for you now.

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.

Yeah I think it’s wild that one company owns all the apps except bumble. I do think of the apps in the match group portfolio, hinge is the least exploitative?

I think the demographic that matches with me happens to be very “serious dating” mode and is therefore more likely to be willing to respond to my message.

Haha I have considered tweeting at hinge to try to snag a free premium or something.

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

Lol yeah... this barely scratches the surface of how much of a nerd I am

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 :).

Maybe one day I'll see if I can export my chats to CSV and then make a whole battery of visualizations haha.

I recommend going on the hinge subreddit and getting their advice.

Yeah I'm quite extroverted but it's starting to be draining.

Yeah I figure I'd just like to get some ROI here before ending things, if you get my drift.

I agree. The hinge system seems to work much better in generating engagement from girls where they'd otherwise be overwhelmed with choice on tinder/bumble etc.

Yeah it's been fun but also kind of draining. I'm not used to dating around, I previously just went almost straight into new relationships after a brief "just long enough that new relationship doesn't feel like a rebound" period single so I'm trying to force myself to not do that this time.

All but one date I initiated, one girl messaged me spontaneously to go out that same evening.

I've generally paid for everything, and have taken the initiative to do so so there was no awkwardness around that. I'm personally more comfortable / feels more natural if I'm paying for most of the early dates. Most first dates were just coffee/boba so nothing too expensive either. A few dates were "two things" (dinner + drinks, activity + drinks etc) and all but one girl offered to pay for the second thing after I paid for the first.

Four special cases here:

• The girl who invited me out, we just got boba, I paid.

• One girl on a second date we cooked together, I got the ingredients but she brought a small dessert.

• One girl on the second date offered to split the bill on brunch but I declined (warmly, "oh no don't worry I got it :)" type rather than "no I will pay!" haha) and she got the boba after.

• One girl we got dinner and then went for ice cream for the first date (my plan), I paid for dinner then was kinda expecting her to jump in / offer to get the ice cream but she didn't. The second date we did an activity, got a drink at the bar attached to the activity, and then got dinner (my plan again, dinner was kinda spontaneous). After the activity + drink, I'd spent a total of ~ $120 over the two dates so far, so I expected her to offer to pay for or split dinner but we ended up splitting dinner without explicitly discussing it because the restaurant had one of those "order and pay all on your phone even though you are eating in" ordering systems. It's strange also because she definitely makes the most money, by a significant margin, out of all the girls I've gone out with (experienced software engineer in fintech). If we go on future dates I'll probably suggest free activities. But of the three second dates she's also the person I'm least interested in so might not even bother.

Makes sense, yeah I feel like this graph looks very different from the woman's side, I'd be interested in seeing something like this for a woman after a month on hinge haha.

Yeah, some weekends were pretty packed, also some dates were just simple coffee dates in the middle of the weekday

Sounds about right, although from what I can tell I can't see a meaningful difference in the quality of the opening lines in the convos vs no responses. I generally make some statement about the thing and ask a follow up question.

Not particularly attractive tbh, I think I have a decent and interesting profile but in terms of pure looks probably more of a 6/7?

The fizzles were conversations where the person responded at least once but didn't lead to a date and eventually fizzled. The one ghost was after we went on a date, gave me her number, but then never responded.

Made with https://sankeymatic.com/build/

Data source: me

For context - Straight, 27 y.o. Asian American male in a major US metro, grad student in a STEM field. All second dates will probably become third dates. And on other apps (bumble, okcupid), I've had basically zero responses/dates.

On hinge you get 8 likes to send per day, and I've been swiping pretty much every day, so I've probably sent likes to around 300 people.