Tinder has a secret rating system which ranks how desirable you are

It’s not about which picture you put first or how much you give away in your bio, your success on Tinder is actually down to a hidden rating which the app has assigned to you. It looks like Tinder is more of a popularity contest than before, as it works by counting every swipe as a vote on your attractiveness.

They analyse every swipe (left or right) and keeps an eye on how many photos there are on your profile, how long the bio was,  your age and whether you connected Instagram. This all helps to calculate your “desirability score”.

In an interview with Fast Company, Tinder CEO Sean Rad revealed the secret scores he’s keeping on everyone. The man who even uses his own app when he comes to London admitted that rankings aren’t just based on looks alone. He said:”It’s not just how many people swipe right on you. It’s very complicated. It took us two and a half months just to build the algorithm because a lot of factors go into it.”

Tinder data engineer Tor Solli-Nowlan was less vague: “People are really polarised on even just a photographic level. Some people really favour facial hair, while some do not. Same thing with tattoos, photos with pets or children, excessive outdoors shots, or photos of you with a tiger.”

This is the guy who is rating us

Putting it bluntly: “Every time you swipe right on one person and left on another, you’re fundamentally saying, ‘This person is more desirable than this other person’.  Every swipe is in a way casting a vote: It might be because of attractiveness, or it might be because they had a really good profile.”

Making Tinder seem even more like a game than usual, they revealed people who have just made their Tinder account are exposed to more “experienced” Tinder players. The kind of people who for some reason have 1,000 matches. They said “It’s a way of essentially matching people and ranking them more quickly and accurately based on who they are being matched up against.”

The downside is, you can’t actually see your ranking score. Tinder are really strict about keeping it secret, claiming they’re there to help you find compatible matches – basically exposing you to people within your own ballpark. Really, it’s probably a way to preserve our self-esteem if we’re less than a five.