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Notes -
I don’t think it’s entirely unrealistic tbh. But I think you have to have a fair amount of experience with dating apps to know that.
There are a lot of factors that influence your popularity on dating apps, besides of course your traditional ones re: appearance. One of them is that the apps tend to give you a “new user” bump in visibility for the first few days you’re on the app. They show your profile to pretty much everyone, because a) their algorithms need to find out who likes you and who you like, and b) they want to get you a match quickly so that you get addicted to the app. Another factor is the preferences you set in the app. How big of an area range are you swiping on? What age range? Have you set any preferences regarding race, religion, height, etc.? If you keep your preferences set to the default (default being incredibly broad, which I assume this guy did, given he is new to the apps) then that shows your profile to a lot more people than if you set more narrow preferences. Finally, the metropolitan area you are in plays a factor. It’s a lot easier to rack up matches in the NYC area than it is in New Mexico, for example. I remember vacationing in Santa Fe and there were 5 girls in my age range on Bumble within 25 miles. I had to extend the range to like 60 miles to reach Albuquerque to see more matches.
The “new user bump” could explain why people changing their titles to something fancier didn’t experience a boost in popularity, since they were doing it with an existing account and had already been seen by the majority of the people within their range. On top of that, you don’t post your salary on dating apps. These folks claiming they make more money than this guy, kudos to them, but that’s not something you’re able to evaluate from a dating app profile. Most job titles tend to be illegible signals as to how much money you make. “Partner at X Firm” on the other hand, is a highly legible signal that the guy is successful (even assuming you don’t know much about VC, you might assume partner at a law firm and still correctly believe he is successful). “Portfolio manager” or something at a hedge fund is less legible, unless you know something about how hedge funds are hierarchically structured.
Premium memberships also play a role. Every app has a swipe limit; buying premium allows you to bypass the limit and swipe as much as you like. It’s easy to swipe on a hundred people per hour, if not more. When I was in college, I would buy premium and then set the minimum radius to one mile and swipe until I ran out of people. Then two miles, then three. The first two miles would only take me a couple hours of swiping in Boston. So I don’t think “he would have had to swipe right on 400 people at a 50% rate” is really a great argument for saying the post is fake. He could have swiped right on 10k people within a hundred mile radius in a day or two. Two hundred matches is a 2% match rate, which judging by the numbers I used to see from the bumble subreddit seems to be around the average for men (bumble lets you request your user data and see how many people swiped left/right on you). As for why he would keep swiping while not messaging anyone? For starters, I bet he was a kid in a candy store getting all those matches. He probably kept swiping for the pleasure of seeing who else would match with him. But also, he’s never asked someone out on a date before. Would he even know what to say?
Premium also tends to let you see who has already liked you and match with them immediately. When I have signed up for Tinder in the past, it wasn’t unusual for me to get hit with the “99+ people like you, upgrade your membership to see them!” ad after a day or two, seeing as I have lived in major metropolitan areas (Boston/NYC). It’s possible he used one of the other premium features (called Spotlight on Tinder, forget if the other apps have it), to place his card at the top of the in the stack and be shown to more people for a short period of time (30 minutes). This would allow more people to like him first and rack up matches quicker.
The last premium feature I can think of which might have played a role is the concept of priority likes. This is a feature typically reserved for the highest tier of premium membership. How it works is that your card will be shown before non-premium users and lower tier premium users when you like someone. Unfortunately, it’s one of the only ways some guys get matches on Tinder, because they get buried beneath the hordes of other men competing for the relatively smaller population of women on the apps.
To be clear, I’m not saying he did all of these things. However, a combination of just one or two of these premium features combined with the right circumstances could produce a high number of matches in a short period of time.
Finally, regarding the incel tropes being a tell. Those stereotypes exist for a reason. There are a lot of shy, nerdy dudes out there with not a lot of dating experience. The “red pill” experience of realizing that women are attracted to status is a common enough experience that an entire internet subculture emerged around helping men come to terms with the realization and helping other men reach the same realization. I imagine it is a similar realization for women, realizing men only like them for their bodies. Is it really that hard to believe that this dude with very minimal dating experience suddenly gains some social status because of his job and is shocked by how differently people treat him? We read stories all the time about people who experience dramatic weight loss being treated much differently. Why should this be different?
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