Should dating apps tell us how sexy we are?

Marks out of 10: how attractive do you think you are? Perhaps you’d describe yourself as a six on a good hair day, or seven when you’ve caught the sun? Attractiveness, after all, is subjective, and can change from day to day. Besides, isn’t beauty in the eye of the beholder? But the truth is, if you have ever used an internet dating app, your desirability has been rated. It has to be. User rankings are integral to how most mainstream dating apps, purportedly including Tinder and Bumble, function. So would you want to know how you scored?

Last week, the dating app Once emailed users (including me) to tell them that they can now discover how they have ranked. “To help our matching algorithm, we ask our users to rate each other [sic] pictures,” reads the email. “We have decided to be transparent and release this rating.” It was nearly 4pm and as a long-suffering glutton for pain, I jumped at the chance to ruin my day. I logged in – for the first time in several years – to find out how I ranked based on photos from younger, thinner times in my 20s. I thought I’d be crushed, and readers, I was right.

Dating apps use rankings to decide which other users are shown to you. To understand why, consider how apps make money: by getting users to pay for membership or perks. To do this, an app must keep you engaged. It has to keep you swiping. After all, when boredom hits, a cancelled subscription is likely to follow. And what keeps people on dating apps? Matches.

For a match to occur, both parties need to express an interest in the other, so it makes sense that the app shows you people likely to do so. That’s where the rankings come in. There is no point showing the average person a rolling feed of elite supermodels. While Joe Bloggs might feel a spike of excitement to be a few clicks away from his dream date, it won’t last long if the interest is not returned. Instead, while Bloggs is scrolling on the app, other users are scrolling past him, and expressing interest, or lack of interest.

There are many data points at play – for example, listing your political views could nudge you up or down depending on the user seeing you – but broadly speaking, how many yeses or nos you get in this hot-or-not competition will determine the ranking. It’s why when you join an app you might see “hotties” first – they need to hook you in, and at this point there is no data to inform the app that you aren’t best placed to see these profiles.

Rankings are also why you might feel you’re seeing the same people over and over if you’ve been using the app for a while. It’s unlikely to be because it has run out of users to show; rather the app is running out of users that it has deemed to be at your level. The problem is, people’s decision-making on apps often happens near instantaneously, powered by instinct and often bias.

Much of the data around internet dating is kept private, but from what is available a trend has emerged. Success follows social hierarchies. If you’re white, thin, able to pass as straight and look like you earn a decent salary, chances are you’ll be a high-ranking app user, even if you are the most boring person on Earth. On the other end, black women and Asian men tend to rank low regardless of their achievements or looks. And with people increasingly meeting through apps, not in real life where “not my usual type” loves can blossom, this could create a world where opportunities for love are reserved for a select few.

Consider also the design of these apps. The gamified approach replicates neurological sensations seen in addicts. The match comes in, and pow! There it is, the rush of dopamine. It prompts users to keep going, to look for their next hit. But do apps also provoke us to direct our hopes “upwards” and to value the attention of those in the upper echelons more?

Luckily for me, I knew all of this before I was hit with my desirability ranking. Despite Once’s best attempts to sugarcoat my score (“Coco, you’re in the top 54% of attractive people” which upon reflection also means, I’m close to the bottom half of all humans) I knew it was nothing to brag about: 2.14 out of 5. It was a strange comfort, to shake off the humiliation in the knowledge that the system degrades us all, not just me. It’s unclear whether other dating apps will follow suit and let users see their attractiveness score. Would anybody even want such a feature? If romance is about hope and possibility, that could be the death of the dating app. Given how they work, perhaps that wouldn’t be such a bad thing after all.

Coco Khan is a columnist for Guardian Weekend

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