Tinder is full of gorgeous women and well, the profiles just don’t seem right somehow.
Compared to genuine profiles which have ordinary looking women, with profiles that have narrative text, real locations, it’s easy to see which are the fakes and which are real.
Obviously it’s Tinder posting the fake profiles because they want men using their software.
But I wonder is there any way to prove that Tinder is cat fishing it’s own users?
What's far more likely as a source of random bot traffic is that a click farm is using real devices (it can take a bit to get abuse banhammered), and I'm guessing you're in a major metro area where a few bots are more likely to sneak under the radar. Elo[1] is deprecated these days, but much of ranking leans on 2nd- and 3rd-degree evaluation of both yourself and the other person, implying those users are generally evaluated as real and not reported much. Bouncer[2] helps the engine take this kind of data into account.
All this is to say if someone seems suspicious, leverage that Safety Toolkit. But Tinder seeding in fake users themselves would be quite visible externally after a quarter, cause a big spike in reports over time, damage user retention, daily sessions, and stickiness massively, all of which negatively impact ARPPU and paid conversion rates. Throwing tons of standard KPIs isn't worth a fractional boost in sales with the kind of revenue and growth factors[3] they're driving.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/15/18267772/tinder-elo-score...
[2] https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/03/tinder-tests-limited-right...
[3] https://ir.mtch.com/overview/default.aspx
I have used Tinder a lot, but not in the US. Where I am it's obvious that 95%+ of profiles are fake. However, I don't believe they are created by Tinder themselves. It's a combination of scams/bots, people looking for followers, prostitutes, fake profiles to try Tinder, and other stuff.
On Tinder's side, a few things happening:
- Tinder actively surfaces old/abandoned profiles to make you waste your swipes and super swipes. It's safe to assume that the vast majority of profiles you swipe on are no longer active or signed up once but never used Tinder.
- Tinder picks a subset of profiles (again, mostly abandoned ones) as "upsells" to make you buy likes. They are even labeled "upsell" in their API and it's the same profiles over and over again when you sign up.
- Most people that you swipe on will never see your profile.
While Tinder themselves does probably not create profiles, they are doing absolutely everything they can to make you spend money and give you the minimum amount of real matches they can get away with. Their goal is to give you the minimum to keep you on the app as long as possible, nothing more.
The system is completely broken and Tinder is extremely malicious. It's almost a scam. Less than ~1% of what you see are actually real people actively looking for matches. I am still using it because even 1% is better than nothing, but I hate the company with a passion.
Also, it has gotten significantly worse in the past ~5 years.
Is any evidence for your belief? Not having a bio text doesn't indicate a fake profile.
Alternatively, you could try setting up a fake profile of a really handsome guy. I think you will see that the girls you thought were fake, are not only real, but happy to text, engage, and even call or meet up with you.
Not the OP but in my European country a number of the pictures of women appear oddly "American" in style. Especially when there are indicators like foreign products or foreign electrical sockets in the background. Although those might be in fact catfishing profiles. For me personally, Tinder has been hardly more than an exercise in frustration and disappointment in my fellow humans.
How is this at all obvious? I mean, even if we assume they're definitely fake profiles, wouldn't the more likely explanation be that they're individuals engaged in catfishing?
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2019/09/ftc-s...
Online dating dynamics are very broken, particularly for men who are reduced to blindly swiping on all profiles. The only well designed dating app I’ve seen is The League, where its founder took a systematic approach to incentivizing interactions between users. This has the effect of making the app less of a time sink and chore, and more of a productive way to meet new people. See this past talk from their CEO, where she explains some of their design choices: https://youtu.be/_MUOpgS6TTg
It seems like it would simply be easier to stop using Tinder if you don't like the service.
No, it would be better to make any fraudulent and scammy practices public so people and even government be aware of growing scams against citizens.