“My favorite foods are pizza and avocado toast. I love going to the beach, and my favorite thing to do is have fun. If you can’t make me laugh, we can’t be together. Looking for a serious relationship. Please, don’t message me unless you are looking for the same…”
If you’ve ever ventured into the world of dating apps, you’ve probably viewed hundreds of profiles with captions along those lines. But even if you’ve been swiping for hours a week for years, no matter how well you think you know the cesspool that is a dating site, nobody understands what is going on better than the people behind the scenes. One Reddit made that very clear by posing the question, “Redditors that worked with a dating company (Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, etc.), what’s the most insane user stat or behind-the-scenes fact you found out about?” People who have personally worked for various dating sites and apps, or have friends and loved ones who have worked for these sites, began spilling their juiciest secrets, and they did not hold back.
Down below, you'll find some of the most fascinating and disturbing stories for you to read and get an idea of what it would be like to get paid to spend your days on Tinder, as well as an interview with dating sociologists and co-hosts of the Dateable Podcast, Julie Krafchick and Yue Xu. Be sure to upvote the stories that shock and amuse you the most, and then let us know in the comments if you have any wild dating app tales. Then if you’re interested in reading another Bored Panda piece featuring employees spilling company secrets, check out this article next.
#21
Most dating sites and apps are owned by one company The Match Group. They have a near monopoly. I think bumble is one of the few not owned by them.
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21points
Dating apps also usually allow users to see when they have mutual friends. So if you see a profile you’re interested in, you can message a mutual friend and ask how well they know the person or if they know much about their dating history. “It’s great to see that you have mutual friends in common (on a dating app) because it automatically creates a sense of comfort and trust,” Tina Wie, VP of Marketing for Three Day Rule, told Bustle. “The stronger your mutual friend connection (i.e., first-degree over third-degree) and the context in which you know them (i.e., they went to business school with your high school buddy or used to work with your college bestie), the more likely you’ll feel that the person you connected with is a normal, interesting person. You’ll also have something in common to talk about instantly when you’re first communicating, which is nice.”
#22
Pick one! This was back in 2010, but we had bots acting as women sending messages to men, we spammed people on all social media sites and via text with alluring messages to get them to signup, we stored everyone's password in plaintext and used it to login to their own email (about 50% of the passwords were the same password they'd use for their email) and target everyone on their contact list. We spammed so much, we spun off a second business just to handle all of the captchas, and that's the only part of the business that still exists today (deathbycaptcha).
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20points
#23
I worked at one of the large sites years ago and here is what I found out.
* Guys cannot comment more than a 'hey', 'hi', 'hello' during first message.
* People are racist, way more than I thought.
* People get scammed often. Lonely people are vulnerable and get scammed out of money and gifts.
* D**k picks are everywhere.
* Sports (basketball, football, etc), TV shows and weather affect when people sign up for the site. More so on sports than anything else.
* Request for information on divorce trials happen often.
* Marketing teams are really good at their job. The things they factor in to get you to sign up is an insane science.
* Ex-girlfriends or ex-wife's would find out there ex was on a site and would email and call smearing them. Saying they went on a date and were raped by them. Some really ugly s**t.
* I was also surprised at the large amount of activity around political centers. Washington DC and states capitols would spike up around 11am-1PM local time. I assume this was during lunch but still surprised they were hot spots.
* Tall good looking people like to date other tall good looking people. If you're tall and good looking you will have your pick of the 1%. This fact goes to both guys and girls. Take this into consideration when you are looking at profiles and be realistic. Edit: girls, if you're not 5'8 or over you're not considered tall in the dating world. Luckily most guys will overlook this but remember that guy that's over 6'ft is also getting hit on by girls closer to his height.
* People are racist, way more than I thought.
* People get scammed often. Lonely people are vulnerable and get scammed out of money and gifts.
* D**k picks are everywhere.
* Sports (basketball, football, etc), TV shows and weather affect when people sign up for the site. More so on sports than anything else.
* Request for information on divorce trials happen often.
* Marketing teams are really good at their job. The things they factor in to get you to sign up is an insane science.
* Ex-girlfriends or ex-wife's would find out there ex was on a site and would email and call smearing them. Saying they went on a date and were raped by them. Some really ugly s**t.
* I was also surprised at the large amount of activity around political centers. Washington DC and states capitols would spike up around 11am-1PM local time. I assume this was during lunch but still surprised they were hot spots.
* Tall good looking people like to date other tall good looking people. If you're tall and good looking you will have your pick of the 1%. This fact goes to both guys and girls. Take this into consideration when you are looking at profiles and be realistic. Edit: girls, if you're not 5'8 or over you're not considered tall in the dating world. Luckily most guys will overlook this but remember that guy that's over 6'ft is also getting hit on by girls closer to his height.
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18points
#24
I used to work at Bumble, although this was about 4-5 years ago. Globally, about 90% of the users are men, so there is a huge male to female disparity, although it's not that bad on a per country basis (for some countries).
The most depressing stat though was the histogram of word count in messages. Something like 91% of opening messages were just one word "hey", and ~85% of conversations were just one exchange long ("hey" -> no reply ever).
Looking at human, digital mating habits splayed out in data science form was really depressing.
Some people have asked me a lot of the same questions so am providing answers here:
1) When I worked there, we were NOT allowed to read the content of chats, only gather metadata about them (word count, number of exchanges), but we could not build models which analysed the content of chats (this chat was about food, this one was about holidays, this one was sexual). This was due to stringent GDPR draft rules/TOS/privacy rules at the time, and Bumble took user privacy very seriously, so chats were never read or analysed for content, not even by automated models. However this was 4-5 years ago, and they may have amended their TOS since then to allow it, or they might be analysing content for non-GDPR countries (USA). Therefore, as others have pointed out, we don't know for sure that the word used most often was actually "hey", it could have been "hello" or "howdy". In the office, we always assumed it was "hey" due to our own experiences on the app. But we did know with certainty that ~91% of first messages used only a single word, so we guessed it was "hey".
2) The countries which had better male-female ratios (which I can remember) were the Nordic ones, Sweden and Norway were close to 50/50, and for a time, one of them even had more women on the app than men. Not sure how it is now.
3) The GDPR rules were released in 2016 (even earlier draft rules for some industries such as banking/finance and telecoms), but were not actually enforced until 2018. This grace period of two years was so that firms could implement all of the massive legal and technical protocols for GDPR, and many compliance/tech departments in London did nothing but a mad dash sprint for 2-3 years straight to get GDPR compliant before the 2018 deadline. As such, Bumble was already GDPR compliant (at least in terms of user chats, don't know about other aspects) well before 2018 (as I said, they took user privacy seriously, even before GDPR). We weren't allowed to read chat messages due to a combination of user privacy TOS (specific to Bumble) and GDPR draft rules. I just wrote GDPR as a catch-all term for all of the various privacy rules in effect then (including TOS), but yes, I agree, the rules were not enforced yet. I apologise that I wasn't specific, I wrote my reply quickly this morning not thinking it would explode like this, and so just blurted out GDPR without getting pedantic about which rules in which years. Apologies for any confusion.
4) All these numbers are pulled from my memory of what I saw 4-5 years ago, and thus are not canon law or academic paper worthy.
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16points
Dating apps have long been much appreciated by introverts and workaholics who have a hard time meeting others organically, but especially in this newly formed “pandemic world” we live in, meeting people on our phones can be a great alternative to going out. If work was one of the only places you met new people prior to 2020, but now you’ve been working from home for over 2 years, you might need a little help getting dates. Plus, why take the risk of going out on a date and getting Covid if you are not sure about the person ahead of time. Meeting someone on an app and having the opportunity to chat with them virtually or on the phone first can ensure that once you meet in person, it is worth the risk of getting ill. (Or, you know, just make sure you both get tested before the date!)
#25
I ran operations for an online dating company (notably not affiliated with Match). From database analytics I can tell you a few things. Men initiate contact around 80% of the time in straight matchmaking, and if you are a woman looking to date other women and you simply initiate contact with another woman you have a good chance of success simply because it's very very very common for women to match but then neither initiates contact. IIRC we were able to determine that it takes on average about 3 dates before sex happens (I don't recall how we worked that out, I'm not a data analyst, but presumably it was some keyword based algorithm looking at chat messages).
We got so many requests for information from the police that we had an informal system with them, to save them from wasting time getting warrants for information about people who we didn't have data on, they would ask about a particular name/email/whatever other identifier and we would just say yes we have data about them or no we don't, and if we did they'd then go get the warrant to get a copy of it.
The other thing I can tell you from our analytics, that really shouldn't be at all surprising, is to **get some decent profile photos.** Go get your talented friend or just hire a photographer to take some really nicely-lit well-composed photos of yourself and watch your match rate soar.
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15points
#26
I worked for an online dating site 10 years ago on the IT side, here is a few things I remember:
- Most of the female users were fake. We would import thousands of fake profiles all the time to prop up the numbers and let the men think there were all of these women on the platform.
- Customer complaints were fun. The staff in that department were insane because they had seen and heard everything. The only way you got a refund is if you figured out all of the women were fake.
- We paid a local company to produce some “content” for the fake women. I had to move the video editors to a separate part of the office to edit videos because it was too distracting.
- We did a video of the week at our weekly meetings where videos that were complained about were shown to staff as a morale booster. It was pretty funny but sad.
- We weren’t allowed to use the dating site if we were employees. A programmer got fired because he was contacting women directly because he could look them up directly.
- Customer complaints were fun. The staff in that department were insane because they had seen and heard everything. The only way you got a refund is if you figured out all of the women were fake.
- We paid a local company to produce some “content” for the fake women. I had to move the video editors to a separate part of the office to edit videos because it was too distracting.
- We did a video of the week at our weekly meetings where videos that were complained about were shown to staff as a morale booster. It was pretty funny but sad.
- We weren’t allowed to use the dating site if we were employees. A programmer got fired because he was contacting women directly because he could look them up directly.
Oddly enough I met my girlfriend at the time on an online dating site, but through a competitor.
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15points
#27
Worked for Grindr a few years ago and any profile pic using that puppy tongue/ears Snapchat filter was an underage boy 98% of the time.
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15points
Whether you love or hate dating apps, we hope you’re enjoying this fascinating list of juicy behind-the-scenes details. The secret underbelly of dating sites must have many more secrets to reveal, but we’ll start with these today. Be sure to keep upvoting the stories that make you want to either immediately delete your Tinder account or inspire you to finally create one. Then let us know in the comments if you have any wild stories from your own online dating experiences. And if you have ever worked for any of these sites, I’m sure your fellow pandas would be dying to read the secrets you can reveal as well. And if you’re out there looking for love, godspeed!
#28
I used to work at a dating site in the UK. I was on the tech side but most of the staff was a group of young women who manually approved images and text changes to profiles. There was about 10-15 of them and the turnover rate was about one a week. The work was just so mind numbing.
About 10 times a day they'ed shout that they'd "got another one". Which basically meant one of the hundreds of thousands of men on the site has differently thought "I've thought of something nobody else has tried, I'll upload a picture of my c**k" at which point they'd all laugh at it, cancel the profile upload and go back to reading about people's choice of pets or whatever else they thought was interesting
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14points
#29
Semi-dating app moderator.
There's a few social-media sites like facebook in "this country", and I had to moderate one less well known. This site was mostly used by adults/elderly and almost abandoned by youth since there's a way better site for the same needs this one provides.
So to say, I was a backdoor moderator who would check up on different things, starting with uploaded pictures/videos, groups, certain accounts and ending with any flagged stuff.
I felt really sorry for way too frequent sexism and women abuse on that site. In short, all I've seen is that men (mostly of certain age and nationality) were messaging women they "liked" and straight away asked for sex . This happened all day all the time in a extremely huge amounts. Keep in mind, this site is a niche and I could only imagine what is actually happening behind curtains in more popular social media sites.
I've seen some crazy a*s s**t there. The world is f****d. Just need to deal with it and keep living.
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13points
#30
Managed and worked on a short term personal security detail for one of the C listers of one of these in L.A. Not mentioning by name bc i’m not trying to get doxxed but there is a huge problem with people getting stealthed w/ HIV and other veneral disases, as well as being mugged or robbed while f*****g about on these apps and the victims will threaten to lash out at the company violently or even show up at the offices demanding to speak to someone in charge while in the initial anger stage despite the company having no personal hand in the situation beyond arranging the medium for which to meet.
Apparently the company can’t even send out a warning about the suspected user who is accused of stealthing to LE or public health due to counsel advising that it’s slander with anything less than bona fide evidence of that person being positive for the disease/committing a crime against the other and/or that person meeting the other and/or having intercourse. The companies do cooperate with law enforcement on a case by case basis IIRC but they do have the right to clam up and wait for a subpoena before they share user info/chat logs, etc.
Meanwhile there are multiple people who have been robbed of thousands of dollars, given a disease and many more victims waiting to be had while the company sits on it’s a*s and lets the complaints pile up.
Even then it’s a whole messy area where it’s cheaper to not even get involved. Even banning the user from the service involves some amount of steps.
I don’t blame the victims for being livid but what a whole-a*s-f*****g mess. Got a few still images of the people we were keeping an eye out for and they looked like completely normal guys and girls who just got pushed to their breaking point, all bc they trusted someone from a dating app.
Could happen to anyone, honestly.
Apparently the company can’t even send out a warning about the suspected user who is accused of stealthing to LE or public health due to counsel advising that it’s slander with anything less than bona fide evidence of that person being positive for the disease/committing a crime against the other and/or that person meeting the other and/or having intercourse. The companies do cooperate with law enforcement on a case by case basis IIRC but they do have the right to clam up and wait for a subpoena before they share user info/chat logs, etc.
Meanwhile there are multiple people who have been robbed of thousands of dollars, given a disease and many more victims waiting to be had while the company sits on it’s a*s and lets the complaints pile up.
Even then it’s a whole messy area where it’s cheaper to not even get involved. Even banning the user from the service involves some amount of steps.
I don’t blame the victims for being livid but what a whole-a*s-f*****g mess. Got a few still images of the people we were keeping an eye out for and they looked like completely normal guys and girls who just got pushed to their breaking point, all bc they trusted someone from a dating app.
Could happen to anyone, honestly.
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12points
Dating apps and online forums have become the centerpiece for forming new relationships, offering both entertaining and sometimes distressing insights from those working behind the scenes. These platforms have transformed how we meet new people, but they've also been venues for troubling interactions. The uproar at the Kimpton hotel pool is a stark reminder of the discrimination faced by the LGBTQ+ community, often mirrored in virtual spaces.
Understanding societal reactions to public LGBTQ+ displays could offer some introspection on the modern challenges of online dating environments.
