I’ve barely used any dating apps. My history with them generally involves installing, swiping for a few minutes, feeling self-conscious, and uninstalling again.
But despite my non-committal interest, it’s a huge industry, and one Reddit user wanted to peek behind the curtain.
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? from AskReddit
There were THOUSANDS of insights. Here are some of the most interesting!
1. What a job.
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*cking job.
– Lettuce-b-lovely
2. Going undercover.
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
3. Some solid stats.
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!
– elatedate
4. Let’s dig deep.
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
5. Lotta fakes out there.
My old boss was the financial controller of a big dating site.
He kept on seeing these big invoices for modeling agencies and initially thought it was because of the big parties they used to host.
When he asked about it it turned out it was just content for the fake profiles they created to lure in users.
– jimpez86
6. It’s more powerful than you think.
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.
– HueJass84
7. Talk about ghosting.
This was years ago now, but I used to work with a guy who had been an engineer for Match.com. He said 99% of the profiles were inactive, and that 80% of the active profiles were men.
He didn’t provide numbers but also said the was a huge disparity between the average number of messages sent to women versus those sent to men.
According to him, all told the site was mostly men reaching out to dead profiles and never getting responses.
As I said however, this was years ago, so it’s entirely possible that they’ve cleaned the site up since then.
– CastSeven
8. A heartbreaking story…
A couple met on the dating app I worked on.
Unfortunately, the man passed away and the lady returned to the app where they met for remembrance.
One day, a bug in the system made some profile likes to be sent again after months and she received one from her deceased boyfriend.
Her bug report was heartbreaking.
– Sighne
9. Not so subtle.
Lots of gay guys get banned from grindr selling weed. Would get a lot of emails of “why am I banned”.
Go to their profile and will say “HMU for that 
– PayneTrayne
10. You WHAT?
We used to create fake accounts and chat with users.
It was everything from someone having a premium account that wasn’t getting responses to bored employees.
– SupermanistheDR
11. Careful about the pics.
I never “worked” at OkCupid but years ago I reported a few profiles and then they made me a mod.
There were more fake or scam profiles than d*ck pics.
We think some profiles were reported just because someone didn’t like how they acted, but once you start image searching, you would typically find that those profiles are fake, or belong to real people that are definitely not on a dating site.
There were a bunch of accurate and proven catfish reports, and a lot of cute pets (pictures have to be of you, not your dog) and we would comment for the other mods “cute dog but breaks rules”. Also google the image of the dog and sometimes find out that it’s someone else’s dog.
– taffypulller
12. Why oh why.
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*ck” 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
13. Everybody lies.
I worked for Match for a couple years.
This is probably widely known but women frequently lie about their age and weight and men lie about their height and salary.
Also, it’s a big problem that women are inundated with DMs while most men get none.
– ChickumNwaffles
14. Yikes.
A dude with over 2000 right swipes and no matches
– [user deleted]
15. Oh, the irony.
The creator of Match.com got cheated on.
She left him for a man she met on Match.com.
– GreyFoxNinjaFan
So the next time you use a dating app, remember, it’s a business. And when dealing with a business, you gotta look out for yourself.
Do you have a crazy dating app story?
Tell us in the comments.
The post People Who Work For Dating Apps Talk About the Tricks of the Trade appeared first on UberFacts.
(@nikkmitchell) 
