I love gaming the algorithm to meet hotter* people than I would meet using the apps the most intuitive way.
*It's not subjective, there are profiles that attract way more attention and would either: never be shown to you, or you never shown to them.
If that's true, how anyone thinks that isn't totally fucked is beyond me. I mean, I'm seriously, deeply concerned by this notion more than the usual privacy, data etc that big tech concerns me with, they're literally shaping future generations according to their "algorithm", by deciding that one person shouldn't even be allowed to know another even exists, let alone have an opportunity to interact with them.
They even tell you when you're "doing well".
The popular profile that chooses a high percentage of others is not a real human being and/or is selling sex. A pretty irrelevant signal for desirability. It's quite simple. Just like in the real world in that regard, people want higher signals of why they were chosen and it is accurate to be skeptical of an undiscerning attractive person because it usually is a low signal since they don't actually want you, they want to sell something.
Game the system by being more discerning. This is counterintuitive for people wanting matches by statistical probability as it seems like matching faster and arbitrarily will help, but that behavior ensures being downranked to the doldrums with other actually unattractive people.
Otherwise, the matchmaker ends up losing reputation and participants trust them less due to higher chances of failure. It works the same way in business relationships too.
A broker’s value is in increasing the probability of transactions closing by restricting the pool of candidates to those likelier to close. Otherwise, they have no value.
The desirability of your profile aside, it's entirely credibly that any profile you create is a poor representation, many people may not know what it is about themselves that others like.
Basically your selection (match, don't match) isn't just a personal choice. It alters the other person's desirability based on your current desirability. Its a weighted choice that affects how they are bracketed to everyone else, people in the same brackets match each other.
Now of course, this is similar to the outcome in real life. But there is a level of consent to these personal choices, and there are way more inputs before this outcome occurs.
Knowing that some derivative of this is employed allows you to game it, which makes it much less objectionable to me, but I greatly disagree with the idea that other people aren't aware. At this point my biggest issue with dating apps is that nobody moderately attractive has their notifications on, so it's easy to forget to check the app for a conversation (after you matched) but at the same time its still uncouth to ask for a phone number or other way of messaging right away, so a simple conversation could take weeks or months or more likely never occur. (Many people have their instagrams or snapchats written on their profile, but its an additional greater gamble to get a response through those as they are inferior forms of inboxes too).
I know its common for married people to think "omg dating is so nightmarish now, this justifies staying with my spouse through anything because I wouldn't know what to do", its not really that different, think of a dating app like a someone at the pier with 5 fishing rods out in the water. 2 of them are dating apps, 3 of them are other things. Its just an additional option to meet people outside of your network.
How?
the opposite than how I hear other guys use these apps.
Like in chess, they show you very high rated people at first, to ascertain your initial rating and above all to hook you with all the attractive profiles. As your rating becomes more and more accurate as people in your pool swipe you, your range of matchable profiles narrows down.
(Edit: As another user said, you may sometimes lose rating by matching low-rated or too many people, but the exact details may change a lot.)
The main target demographics are the really high rated people (who entice everyone else) and the really low rated people, who pay up for every premium feature in order to get noticed, i.e. artificially boost their rating. (But just because you have a GM's rating doesn't mean you have a GM's skill, so the gains are hollow and you have to keep paying to stay above your original rating range). The equivalent would be chess beginners paying up for an Open Tournament in order to help subsidize the GMs appearance fee and prizes.
And as in chess, an elite of very high rated people has all the fun while everyone else sorts of sucks and flounders. That's not because of evolutionary psychology or some fundamental truth of human nature, that's just how rating (and by extension any kind of skill following a power-law distribution) works.
I agree, it comically sucks that people are letting themselves being paired by a shitty implementation of League of Legends.
There are many people that do decently with attraction in person who wouldn't do as well in a visual app. Attraction in person is weighed by energy, actions, social validation and also looks. This method is more useful for people that can do that, but don't match preconceived visual ideals that the potential mates have, but passable.
So replicating that in an app trying to emulate that with match scores means you have to at least reduce the chance of getting matched by others with a low match score. Leave your pending matches pending forever, dont get desparate to match arbitrarily. If attractive people still don't match (give it a month, per area), nuke the profile and try again with different pictures and content.
If you dont have any of that then you need a different strategy.
Many people never get matched because there was never even a chance to get matched. Thats the only observation and mitigation presented.
If you want to meet new people, find yourself new real-life hobbies.
So, naturally, there's never been a better time than this for some bad-faith behavior and profiteering.