Communication

Female Tinder users have dealt with a lot of inappropriate messages from men when dating through the app – it’s one of the issues challenging dating apps today. Men are particularly aggressive in their flirting, crossing boundaries with their sexual suggestions and then wondering why they don’t hear back.

A California-based computer engineer, who incidentally met his girlfriend on Tinder, had heard a lot of his female friends complaining about the guys messaging them over the dating app. In an interview with website The Verge, he disclosed that he had been able to hack Tinder, matching straight guys with other straight guys to see how their typically aggressive flirting progresses.

"The original idea was to throw that back into the face of the people doing it to see how they would react," the hacker said.

His program identifies two men who swipe right on one of his bait profiles (one using a prominent vlogger’s image, the second one of a friend who had let him use her photos). Then they are matched to each other (since they already have the woman they were originally attracted to in common). The suitors’ messages, according to The Verge, were all “unabashedly flirtatious” and relayed back and forth to each other through the dummy profile. Sometimes, it took several messages before the duped men started to figure out something was off.

The creator of the hack apparently stepped in before things got to heated and the matches decided to meet in person. Most of them seemed very confused after exchanging a few flirtatious emails, only to discover later that they weren’t flirting with women, but other men. The hacker witnessed about 40 conversations in the first twelve hours.

It has been reported that Tinder is vulnerable to hacks. There have been a few instances of people tweaking the app to “mass-like” several women at the same time, improving their odds of getting a match exponentially.

The Tinder hacker looked into Tinder’s API and discovered it had few safeguards. “Tinder makes it surprisingly easy to bot their system,” he said. “As long as you have a Facebook authentication token, you can behave as a robot as if you were a person.”  

When asked how he feels about hacking into Tinder’s system, he has mixed feelings. "They ignore all the signs, they ignore all the weird things," he says of the users. "When someone is so quick to meet up without any detail or know anything about the person at all — maybe it’s deserved."

Before flirting with someone you just met over Tinder, you might want to ask a few basic questions first.

Have you ever swiped right on a Tinder match only to discover her profile isn’t real? Since the famous dating app partnered with mobile identity company TeleSign, it claims spam is down as much as 90%.

Spam has been a growing problem for Tinder– prostitutes masquerading as potential love matches eager to sell their services, hackers using the dating app to obtain valuable user information, and even companies like The Gap aiming to capitalize on the 18-25 market with clever marketing campaigns. (Last month they set up their campaign ads as Tinder user profiles without explicit permission from the company – and were asked to take them down.) Also, there was the incident of a hacker tinkering with their API to match straight men with other straight men, which ended up confusing and embarrassing a lot of users.

Even though Tinder verifies people through their Facebook accounts, many people have become adept at creating fake social media accounts, too. So Tinder’s new deal with Telesign seems to be alleviating the problem.

Telesign works by analyzing massive amounts of real-time and historical data on phone numbers, including associated contact information, phone types, geographies, and carriers. Their technology uses PhoneID verification to determine how potentially risky a phone number is, and whether the number really belongs to the person creating the account. If the score is high (meaning high risk), the user is blocked. Telesign also recommended that Tinder implement rate limits. This means that Tinder can set a limit for the number of accounts created using the same phone number. The companies did not say whether the analyzed information from Tinder users is kept private, or how it could be used by TeleSign or Tinder.

Ryan Ogle, Tinder’s CTO said in a statement: “Once we had TeleSign in place, we were able to block fraudulent accounts in a much more sophisticated way. It’s been 100 percent accurate and we’ve seen about a 90 percent reduction in spam traffic as a result, from day one.”

Tinder has taken other steps to cut back on spammers, including limiting the amount of swipes people can do in a 24-hour period with the free service. If they want to swipe indefinitely (as spam bots often do), they will have to pay for Tinder Plus.

This is another big step for the company, which seems to be making significant changes in recent months. IAC, the parent company of Tinder, has brought in a new CEO, and in March, Tinder rolled out its first paid service, Tinder Plus.

Check out our review of Tinder for more information on this popular dating app.

Online dating is hard. Dating is hard, period. What could be weirder than two total strangers trying to become not-total strangers? Let's just say the potential for comedic (and not so) mishaps is high.

With all that weirdness waiting to be unleashed at any second, it's no surprise we're desperate for any tip, trick, or nugget of wisdom that might stave it off. We've studied some seriously strange things in the name of cracking the online dating code, and although some are as weird as the weirdness they're trying to prevent, they're always interesting.

Check out a few unusual online dating facts below. You're bound to be surprised by at least one.

1. Men aren't into receiving short messages. Forget all the stereotypes about men hating it when women talk too much. A message from a woman to a man is 40% more likely to get a response if it's longer than a tweet (140 characters).
2. Men are, however, into women who make the first move. Women are 73% more likely to get a response if they mention “dinner,” “drinks,” or “lunch.” Speaking of stereotypes, maybe the one about “the quickest way to a man's heart” is true.
3. Online dating has a seasonal peak. The busiest time for online dating is between Christmas and Valentine's Day. According to Zoosk, the single most popular day is January 5, when 54% more people sign up.
4. There's an art to using smileys. Put aside emojis for a second and go back to the good old days of the classic smiley. If you send one with a nose :-), you're 13% more likely to get a response. If your smiley is lacking that key facial feature :), it's 66% less likely to get a message back.
5. Being active is attractive. Ok, maybe this one isn't so surprising, but it's still interesting. Wired made an infographic showing 380 of the 1,000 most commonly used words in profiles. Active, outdoorsy words like “surfing,” “skiing,” and “yoga” topped the list.
6. People actually prefer selfies. Joke about selfies all you want, but they're shockingly effective if you're looking for a date. A Zoosk study found that 84% of people favor selfies over formal profile pictures.
7. Too much online chit-chat can ruin a good thing. Because safety is a consideration when meeting a stranger over the Internet, you may think it's best to prolong the convo for as long as possible before meeting up in person. However, a 2013 study in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication suggests that too much communication could be problematic. The more you talk before a first date, the more time you have to idealize the person and the greater the risk of a letdown when you finally meet face-to-face.

Real talk about Tinder: it can be a frustrating, maybe even scary, place to be a woman sometimes.

In fact, any online dating site fits that description. The entire Internet fits that description. Give people an anonymous username to hind behind, and suddenly all their worst behavior is on full display. I'm not saying it's everyone, but it's enough people to make it a serious problem.

Normally serious problems require serious solutions, but a California-based programmer decided to take a more humorous approach.

According to The Verge, the unnamed programmer tweaked Tinder's API, turning it into “a catfish machine that fools men into thinking they’re talking to women – when in fact they’re talking with each other.” He began by creating bait profiles, one using the image of a popular vlogger and the other using the image of a friend who gave her consent.

He then developed a program to identify men who indicate interest in one of the bait profiles. Once it finds two, the program matches them to each other and lets them begin the awkward, hilarious process of striking up a conversation. Within minutes of activation, the program was hard at work.

The programmer – who The Verge calls “Patrick” – estimates he witnessed 40 conversations within the first 12 hours. He developed a code to scramble phone numbers and stepped in if a real world meeting was in the cards, but says he feels torn about the ethics of his prank.

"They ignore all the signs, they ignore all the weird things," he told The Verge. "When someone is so quick to meet up without any detail or know anything about the person at all — maybe it’s deserved."

Patrick's prank was inspired by his female friends who often complained about their interactions on Tinder. His first plan was to build a Twitter bot that tweeted every first message received by a female friend, but after looking into Tinder's API, he discovered it had few protections and his vision grew.

"Tinder makes it surprisingly easy to bot their system,” he says. “As long as you have a Facebook authentication token, you can behave as a robot as if you were a person."

Patrick is far from the first to reveal the weakness of Tinder's API, but he's certainly the funniest and most socially relevant. Other hacks can be and have been used for morally ambiguous, or even dangerous, purposes. This one is good for a few laughs and makes a valid, important point about the way we treat each other online.

To read some of the priceless exchanges, check out the original post on The Verge. Check out our review of Tinder for more about the dating app.

Online dating services like eHarmony and Match have long touted the science behind their matching process, claiming that specially designed algorithms hold the secret to lasting love. But how accurate is this claim? That is, are people who join online dating sites finding long-term relationships easier to come by?

Not according to a recent study by a group of researchers from five different universities in the Midwest, South, East Cost, and West Coast. The authors found that online dating sites offer a different experience and more opportunities compared to conventional dating, but the success of these sites is not clear – namely, the matching algorithms haven’t proven their anticipated success.

“There is one fundamental problem with all of these algorithms,” Eli Finkel, a psychologist at Northwestern University who was one of the researchers for the study, told the San Francisco Chronicle. “They have set themselves up with an impossible task: They assume that they can take information from two people who are totally unaware of each other’s existence and determine whether they are compatible. That is completely false.”

According to the study, the algorithms are misleading, because research has found both similarity and “complementarity” – the basic tenants of online match-making – have little impact on relationship quality overall. Not to mention, people are confused about what they actually want. For instance, in some studies of speed dating, the participants’ ideas of the perfect match often don’t align with who they end up being attracted to in person.

This conflicts with a 2013 study from researchers at the University of Chicago, who found that online couples have happier, longer marriages - assumingly because of the matching process.

Online dating has been around for over two decades, but until recently (thanks to the soaring popularity of apps like Tinder) – was not something the majority of singles pursued. Now, the tables have turned. According to Match, 40 million Americans have used an online dating service. On top of that, a study in 2013 (funded by eHarmony) showed that almost a third of marriages were made through online dating. So why are researchers poking holes in the science now?

“He is debunking a problem no one believes exists,” OkCupid coFounder Christian Rudder told The San Francisco Chronicle. “We’re there to get you that first date. We do use math and we do get people dates.”

Real connection however, according to Finkel, happens with face-to-face interactions, or virtual ones, through Skype of Facetime – which aren’t part of the online matching process. Tinder for instance, doesn’t claim to make good matches, but it does the job of getting people more dates.

The study was conducted by Eli J. Finkel (Northwestern University), Paul W. Eastwick (Texas A & M University), Benjamin R. Karney (UCLA), Harry T. Reis (University of Rochester), and Susan Sprecher (Illinois State University).

To help promote the global launch of Tinder Plus, co-founder and soon-to-be former CEO Sean Rad has been in the news a lot lately. Recently, he hopped on Reddit to answer questions from the general public about Tinder, the launch of its new premium service, and what’s next for the company.

Because of the recent backlash about Tinder Plus, people were interested in the reasons behind the pricing of the new service - $9.99 for those under 30, and for those 30 and older, $19.99. According to Rad, “months of testing and thought went into the feature and price mix for Tinder Plus. We tested a broad range of prices and found that users that saw value in Tinder Plus were more than willing to pay at the existing price points.” He goes on to talk about Passport and Rewind, the two most-requested features offered in the new service, which allow you to check out people in other cities and also to reconsider someone you rejected before.

Rad also fielded questions on whether the app creates feelings of rejection – after all, you can be rejected with one swipe in less than a second on Tinder. Rad countered this question by explaining how Tinder works. People won’t know that you liked them unless they swipe right on your profile. “We call this the ‘double opt-in.’ Even if you don’t match with another user, there’s no certainty that they saw your profile.”

Tinder’s history holds a series of lucky accidents – for one, it was almost named Matchbox. The first version of the app didn’t even have swiping, Tinder’s signature feature. Co-Founder Jonathan Badeen explains: “I snuck it in a few weeks later and told everybody after it was released that they could swipe. The swipe was born out of a desire to mimic real life interactions with a card stack. When organizing cards you put them into piles. Swiping right fittingly throws the card in the direction of the matches…The swipe just made sense in this case and seems stupid simple in retrospect.”

One of the participants asked how the founders came up with the idea of Tinder, to which Rad replied: “…we had this obsession with breaking down the barriers in meeting people around you. We noticed that people grew closer to their small groups of friends but grew farther apart from the rest of the world in the process. We knew that if we could simply take the fear out of meeting someone, that we could bring the people closer together. And we've done just that.”

Please read our Tinder review for more information on this popular dating app.