Debugging My Love Life

Desperate Times

Years back, I got lonely and paid for a Tinder subscription. I don’t remember what the plan was at the time, but it let me down in the end regardless. Despite transitioning the entirety of who I was—from a respectable man to a walking, talking sponsored result on a casual hookup app—I carried on with “getting none,” as the kids would say. And quite right: I slayed nothing.

At a point, I remember asking myself if 5’11” was too bold an embellishment for the audience. But then I realized that I’d just spent five solid hours right-swiping blindly with no rhyme, no reason, and little hope. Why did I care what they thought of my padded shoes? Would have been weirder to use fractional metrics. Wouldn’t have resulted in marriage.

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I did have a girl get me with a tape measure once. Pretty cute at first, then just a pinch traumatic when I saw she wasn’t kidding. Win some, lose some... I did win that one, though, several times over.

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Suffice to say that my self-worth took a hit. Big time. Nearing emotional rock bottom, I began to question: Was it just me all along? Was I to blame for this failure to launch? Could I do better? Did I need to change?

No way, José. Definitely not. After several minutes of soul-searching, I had determined well beyond a shadow of a doubt that there was absolutely nothing wrong with me, my pics, my bio, nor my strategy.

Hair was cut recently, but not so recent that I looked uncomfortable. I wore a nice enough shirt in my main photo, wasn’t that wrinkly. So the bait was there—and highly appealing—but my profile still had a certain “stink” to it. What was that smell, though? Reminded me of the Billboard Top 20...

Identifying the Bug

Eureka! I know a bug when I smell one, especially a flaw so potent, so I set off to troubleshoot the app in an effort to finally present myself as a viable romantic prospect to neither NPCs nor e-girls, but the real hot singles in my area whom I’d heard were dying to meet me already.

Following the putrid and steady scent of rejection, it didn’t take long to notice that my Top Spotify Artists section was terribly misaligned with my true-to-life music taste (that I'd admit). My taste is only marginally better than results given, but at least more reflective of who I was as a hyper-eligible bachelor.

So yeah, I cracked the code. It’s not even that I’m ugly, annoying, dense, or write bad articles; was just that my taste in music had been misrepresented by Tinder. Just like that, everything about my dry spell made sense.

In what can only be described as a 21st-century mating call, I did some research to figure it out and posted the results on r/Tinder (removed by mods over 3 years later).

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Who the heck is BROCKHAMPTON? Literally never heard of Shakey Graves in my life. Miguel? Maybe I skipped a song of his in Discover Weekly.

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Issue Description

It looks like Tinder uses Spotify’s API to grab your personal top 50 artists based on “calculated affinity,” a fancy Spotify term that presumably translates to “how much you like this music in comparison to other stuff you’ve heard on Spotify.” The list that Tinder presents is only 20 songs in length, so they have to truncate that list of 50 and omit most artists.

Rather than taking Spotify’s original sort order as returned from the API, in order of affinity, they sort in descending order of popularity—a global measure of popularity amongst all listeners—and take the top 20 from that list. This omits 30 artists—the bulk of what’s obtained from Spotify—who may well be your true favorites, but are perhaps less popular than some other 20 you only ever play when handed the proverbial aux.

The effect of that, in my view, is counterproductive toward what I’d think is the goal of the feature: To find what you and a match have in common, distinct from how you relate to half of their whole user base.

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In my book, this shallow intel makes for horrible conversation—can’t very well connect on the topic of liking what most everyone likes—and this ultimately seems to remove any “foot in the door” that may have been enjoyed from mutual interest in lesser known, more obscure music.

Daaamn, that’s craaaazy... We’ve both heard of The Beatles?!

Hearing that someone sometimes has Kanye West or Ed Sheeran playing on their phone tells me just precisely nothing.

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To put this issue into perspective, consider my all-time favorite artist that I couldn’t pay Tinder—which I have—to feature on my profile: IBM 7094, best known for its hit single Daisy Bell. This is how you attract a soul mate.

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Steps to Reproduce

Follow these steps to generate the list of artists that Tinder will offer up as your favorites as of this writing.

1. Navigate to the Spotify dev console. Use the following params:

• type = artists
• time_range = short_term
• limit = 50
• offset = 0

These params were figured out through trial and error over several days and tests. Fairly confident these are correct, but not 110%.

2. Get an OAuth access token by clicking GET TOKEN.

3. Submit the query and copy the massive response.

4. Take the massive payload returned, paste into this CodePen:

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Scope of Impact

I don’t even know the scope of impact here. You might be wondering “who cares,” but that’s kind of the point: I have no idea who might have cared. If I had to guess, we’d be married by now. Music is an ice-breaker I need.

From the sum total of luck I have enjoyed on Tinder, one lucky shot leading to a relationship of over five years, I can count on zero hands the number of times those engagements stemmed from my bio or employment rather than mutual friends (from Facebook), interests (FB), or rounded-up height.

I bet music would also be a great feature if it showed what we had in common for real. With common interests, you’re given a selection of everything you’ve liked on Facebook and just select what you think is important to show. Mutual Friends is pretty straightforward and works wonders (from my experience over the years).

Top Artists works differently. Wish it were more thoughtful.

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Suggested Changes

There are a number of things that Tinder could do to improve these results. In order of how I would estimate the complexity of each to implement, here are some options for their team.

A. Ask Spotify for the top 20 artists.

You can limit the list to 20 using the limit parameter—or not using it at all since 20 is the default value—and see what it yields in terms of user experience. Probably about right.

B. Truncate to 20, persist original order.

You could probably just keep the original call to their API (grabbing the top 50), changing none of the parameters at all, and truncate the list as it’s provided (i.e. with original sorting).

Even if the sorting is completely random on Spotify’s end, and/or only happens once per refresh, it at least ups the chances of displaying a user’s favorites who just can’t match the global demand of Taylor Swift, or literally any artist with more Spotify success than those favorite artists.

C. Sort it in ascending order? experimental

Maybe it would be better to actually show mutual matches that are lesser known as a design choice. This would be experimental, and for sure you would want to keep the full list private and show only the mutual favorites, but I wonder what the effect on outcome would be there.

D. Let users choose their own favorites.

Even if I haven’t listened to an artist in a while, they might still be a fixture of some subculture. If a girl has Tipper as a top artist, for example, then she is absolutely a wook and probably enjoys her festivals. So, if you’re looking for a date to Tipper & Friends, you can sort of work the system that way to find people who are likely to be there anyway. Just an example.

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Conclusion

I wasted a lot of time on this article. Way too much... The bottom line is this: Tinder could make very small changes to help its users connect over less mainstream genres and artists, but they opt instead to present you as a more attractive prospect to those who have listened to even one song from a mainstream artist. It’s whack. Should Tinder implement any change to this system, I shall not have lived in vain (so far, looks like I have been).

I’d love to hear from someone on Tinder’s development team regarding this feature and the design choices surrounding it. I’ll update this article if I learn anything new. This is just an opinion piece, and the rationale for the parameters chosen could very well make sense.