How desirable are you on Tinder? Using the system, Tinder could, say, surface more potential dates based on score compatibility. Should Tinder make your score available to you? And if the company did, would you even want to know it? It took us two and a half months just to build the algorithm because a lot of factors go into it. How many people who you swipe right on, swipe right too? Do you include education and career information in your profile? It might be because of attractiveness, or it might be because they had a really good profile. In the gig economy, both customers and service providers now score each other with review systems that help platforms like Airbnb, TaskRabbit, and Lyft weed out bad actors. Drivers on Uber, for example, rate their passengers on a scale of one to five, a rating the ride-sharing company recently made accessible to its users. Looking up your score on Tinder is even more jarring. Rad teased me about it several times over dinner one evening, gauging what my score might be as he swiped through a slew of Tinder profiles on my phone. It was one thing to know my Uber rating, but did I really want to know my Elo score on Tinder? The beauty of Tinder, after all, is that rejection has been removed entirely from the process, since you have no idea who dismissed your profile. You know how many people you swiped on, but this also includes things like what other people have done, like how many people have swiped left on you. Then—ta-da—Solli-Nowlan revealed my score. What does that mean? I leaned into the screen to see the data up close, but Solli-Nowlan threw his hand up to block my sight.
