The Most Unusual Dating App User Statistics According To Employees

Some Men...

"I have a friend who works for, I wanna say Tinder."

"Anyway, the company isn’t important; what is important is that her ENTIRE job is to remove inappropriate images."

"Her JOB is to look at d*ck pics all day."

"Five days a week."

"That’s all."

"No stat."

"Just a weird f**king job."- Lettuce-b-lovely

"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 member' 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."- mvrander

Catfishing, Much?

"My ex bf worked for the Yahoo Italy dating site back in the earlyish 2000s."

"His job was to pretend to be a woman, and message male customers just as their accounts were going to expire."

"This would encourage them to pay to renew their subscriptions."

"Once they renewed, he would ghost them."

"He only lasted for a few months due to how unethical it was."- visualisewhirledpeas

The Cold Hard Facts

"Guys swipe right on 47% of profiles. Women only swipe right on 12%."

"I knew some guys would swipe right more than women, wasn't prepared for how little women swipe right!"

"Searching for serious or casual relationships for men vs women:"

"61% of men want something serious while 38% want something casual."

"87% of women want something serious while only 13% want something casual."

"It's worth noting on that last one that it's partially because of a difference in how men and women would describe themselves if they're not sure."

"Women would rather say 'something serious' if they're not sure to see how something goes but happy for it to turn casual if they're not feeling it."

"While men would prefer to say 'something casual' and then happy for it to turn serious if they like them."

"This is why we've given in and added a 'not sure' option in our big update next week."

"Feedback on chats/users:"

"we're unique in that we only let you chat to three users at a time, so you have to end a chat to talk to someone new."

"When you end a chat you have to give (private feedback)."

"Here's some of the feedback people choose (you can pick more than one):"

"34% ghosted/didn't say anything."

"12% great chat."

"11% polite and respectful."

"11% not enough in common."

"8% no chemistry."

"8% hard to talk to."

"2% rude/inappropriate."

"Why people ghost."

"We call ourselves the anti-ghosting app because we notify you if someone replaces your chat with someone new, since you can only talk to three at a time."

"Doesn't stop rejection but at least you're not left wondering and waiting!"

"We did some research with users to find out why people ghost on dating apps, "they could choose more than one answer:"

"43% Avoid the awkwardness of saying I wasn’t interested."

"37% They said/did something I didn’t like."

"36% Was too busy and then it was too late."

"32% Couldn’t be bothered to keep replying."

"28% I forgot to reply."

"25% Couldn't think of a reply."

"23% Too many other people to respond to."

"22% I've never ghosted anyone!."

"6% Other."

"I'm the founder of a dating app."- elatedate

A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words... Plus More Swipes Right

"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."- jamesinc

So Many People At A Loss For Words...

"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."

"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 analyzed 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 analyzed 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 analyzing 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'."

"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."- trias10

Perhaps knowing this information might ease the minds of those dismayed by their lack of luck on dating apps.

Or, at the very least, encourage them to begin chats with more clever than a simple "hey".

Maybe that way, someone will finally respond.

...speaking for a friend....