So you thought you had complete control; that swiping away less desirable faces on Tinder (Tinder, Inc.) could eventually lead you to virtually anyone. You were wrong; it turns out that Tinder has been selecting the appropriate people for you commensurate to your level of popularity, or unpopularity. Tinder ranks your desirability before anyone else does. This is an ‘internal rating’, that the consumer is not, and will never be, aware of.

In an article covering this revelation Fast Company wrote, “Referred to inside the company as an ‘Elo score,’ a term the chess world uses to rank player skill levels, Tinder’s rating system helps it parse its user base in order to facilitate better matches.” The writer goes on to ask if this Hot or Not-esque scoring system is not a little unfair, dividing people Tinder thinks should be divided without informing the unwitting consumers.

Tinder CEO Sean Rad, who has an ‘above average’ Elo score apparently, confirmed this with Fast Company. Rad defended the modus operandi of Tinder by saying that ‘desirability’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘attractiveness’. “It’s not just how many people swipe right on you,” Rad said to Fast Company. “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.” In spite of this, the amount of votes you get does matter a lot.

Tinder data analyst, Chris Dumler, confirms this by saying, “Every swipe is in a way casting a vote: I find this person more desirable than this person, whatever motivated you to swipe right. It might be because of attractiveness, or it might be because they had a really good profile.” Analysts then use this information to find overall what kind of people are attractive.

Tor Solli-Nowlan, data engineer at Tinder further defends the Elo score by saying that attractiveness follows no standards, explaining that some people find tattoos attractive, others like beards (on men perhaps), while some people might find a man skydiving the epitome of cool, while others may decide in all probability he has a low IQ.

Regardless, Tinder will rank you, and you will in turn find yourself swiping people in your allotted nexus of profiles. That doesn’t, however, always mean handsome skydivers will see pretty skydivers, but also perhaps that highly rated literary novelists find themselves ranked with highly rated soldiers with a penchant for beating up intellectuals. Perhaps we are more generic than we think we are. Maybe the Tinder Elo score does actually work and pair people more fluidly than letting them join the interminable scrum of possible lovers. Still, it might also deprive you of the love of your life.

Photo credit: Adam Freeburn via Flickr