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Tinder is doomed to failure - but not for the reasons you might think

The startup bug. Everyone has it. From conferences to school corners, we’ve all fallen in l...
Newstalk
Newstalk

13.51 11 Jul 2014


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Tinder is doomed to failure -...

Tinder is doomed to failure - but not for the reasons you might think

Newstalk
Newstalk

13.51 11 Jul 2014


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The startup bug. Everyone has it.

From conferences to school corners, we’ve all fallen in love with the idea of becoming the next ‘big thing’ in tech, or at the very least investing in it. The way people talk, you’d swear startups had replaced the Euromillions or something.

They talk about their near wins, their ‘I coulda thought of that, buts’, the billion-dollar idea they’ll never bother to pursue… and of course what they would do once they had all that money. Just like the lotto, the appeal for most is in the potential low-investment high-return outcome; and just like the lotto, we ignore the thousands upon thousands of failures for that thrill of ‘it could be you’.

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And of all the apps that have fueled this buzz in recent times, few have been quite so prominent as Tinder. Now as I’ve written before, I ain’t exactly a fan of this app, which allows you to select prospective partners based on a photograph and matches you up with the ones who have selected you in return. But I am fascinated by it.

The app is the current darling of the tech world but, like so many new ideas, we need to hark back to what we know about basic human behaviour if we want to have the slightest inkling about whether the latest tech hit is going to stand the test of time. And it seems to me that behavioural economics stamps this venture with a dirty big ‘Epic Fail’.

And why? Well, it ultimately comes down to the basics of how men and women behave differently. And if you still believe true love can be found in online dating, I urge you to ‘swipe left’ now.

Tim Harford – author of The Logic of Life – highlighted an economic study on speed dating in his book, which gives us a huge insight into the pros and cons of this approach to romance. Speed dating, he argues, gave bored ole economists new and exciting data to play around with.

Because of the nature of the game, speed dating allowed them to make observations about people’s selection of a partner in a relatively short space of time through a much simpler hook-up system than ‘normal life’… and thus spot patterns that would normally take years of individual stalking and a whole army of creepy economic peeping toms in trench coats (I don’t know why they’ve trench coats, guess I just felt they need a little flair).

So economists – over the period of just one evening – were able to see who ‘matched themselves’ with whom and start discerning patterns that had never been seen before. Some of what they found wasn’t exactly a revelation – women like tall successful men with all their own teeth, blah blah blah. But the interesting patterns really began to emerge when they started messing around with mismatched numbers.

"Love is opportunistic and more about ‘you’ll do, considering the circumstances‘,
rather than finding The One."

Supposing 20 men ‘walk into a bar’ for speed dating night, but there or only 10 women, or maybe 10 ‘eligibles’ and 10 ‘duds’ (it doesn’t really matter) – the same number of men were, on average, likely to ‘register interest’ about a member of the opposite sex than on a night when there were 20 ‘eligibles‘.

So what’s the insight from this pattern, which emerged over and over again? Pretty pessimistic you can suppose… love is opportunistic and more about ‘right place, right time’ or even ‘you’ll do, considering the circumstances‘, rather than finding The One.

Well, you can’t say I didn’t warn you!

But it gets worse, because women don’t act the same way. If the situation is reversed and 20 women walk into a speed dating scenario where there are a shortage of eligibles, they’re more likely to go home empty handed. It appears that, in general, our ‘basic instinct’ is far less opportunistic than males – or at the very least, what we consider an ‘opportunity’ is very different.

So what does this mean for online dating, and, more specifically, Tinder?

Well initially when Tinder reached our shores it had some merit. You (the female in this case) carefully combed dozens, maybe hundreds of profiles and selected a few potential winning catches amongst the fish. Then – wow – the flattery, that person actually liked you back! A conversation got going. Some good, some bad, some just downright weird but it all worked, sorta.

But then men (and not all men, granted)… well, then men learnt to play the game. They began to apply the same old rules to Tinder as they would have used in speed dating; they started ‘liking’ everyone.

From their perspective it’s pretty simple logic. Send out an open invitation first, filter later. And this is more than just anecdotal research amongst peers – there are even apps developed so that your phone could automatically like every new profile as it popped up. You don’t even have to look at the pics!

But what’s happening from the females perspective? Well simply put, we got pissed off – and pretty quickly too. First of all, the rates of abusive messages women get online from men far outnumber the abusive messages males get from women. So in stark economic terms, this has associated a ‘risk’ with liking, meaning we are hardly going to act the same way and send out an open invitation… it runs too high a risk of being made feel ‘bad’.

Secondly, there was the rejection factor. Where initially people were matched and a conversation sprang up, now females are matched with guys they really liked the look of, and totally ignored. More risk; more feeling bad.

And what happens? The women are leaving the room empty handed, again.

At best, it stops being ‘the new awesome dating app’ everyone wishes they invented and becomes just another sleazy hookup app/website. There are plenty of those already out there, and I don’t need to tell you what happens when a shiny start-up suddenly loses its unique selling point.

It seems to me less like tinder and more like dying embers…

This article was originally published, in longer form, on Rachel Ray's blog FurCoatsNoKnickers.com


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