21 Dating App Employees Shared The Secrets And Stories From Their Jobs, And I'll Never Swipe The Same Way Again
Have you ever wondered what goes on behind-the-scenes of dating apps? We definitely have, so we asked former and current dating employees what ✨secrets and stories✨ they have from their jobs. Here's what they shared with us.
Please note that some of these responses are from Reddit since they were just too good not to include!
And of course, there's no way we can verify if these responses are 100% accurate.
1."My ex-boyfriend worked for a dating site back in the early-ish 2000s. His job was to pretend to be a woman and message male customers just as their accounts were going to expire. This would encourage them to pay to renew their subscriptions. Once they renewed, he would ghost them. He only worked there for a few months due to how unethical it was."
2."I have a friend who works for a dating app. Her ENTIRE job is to remove inappropriate images. Her JOB is to look at dick pics all day. Five days a week. That’s all."
3."The amount of people who get scammed is unbelievable. We had a user in her 80s reach out to reactivate her account so she could find the love of her life again, the same way she did when using our site two years ago.
"She included her wedding site that she created with the previous person who had recently died. The wedding site showed two years worth of a scam relationship. Pictures of her receiving flowers, teddy bears, and cards from him every six months. She had printed photos of his face (he was in his 20s) photoshopped next to her face. She took photos of electronics and other high-value 'gifts' she would send him. There was also a video of when he proposed via Skype, and you could clearly see he was a scammer. She had paid for a venue, posted the guest list, and two days before the scheduled wedding, she posted a note saying his brother had called to let her know that he had gotten malaria and died. Three months later, she was ready to sign back up for the same experience. Unbelievable."
—Anonymous
4."Guys swipe right on 47% of profiles. Women only swipe right on 12%."
5."The most depressing stat was the histogram of word count in messages. Something like 91% of opening messages were just one word 'Hey,' and ~85% of conversations were just one exchange long ('Hey' and no reply ever)."
6."My old boss was the financial controller of a big dating site. He kept on seeing these big invoices for modeling agencies and initially thought it was because of the big parties they used to host. When he asked about it, it turned out it was just content for the fake profiles they created to lure in users."
7."There were a bunch of accurate and proven catfish reports, and a lot of cute pet pictures. But sometimes, you'd google the image of the dog and sometimes find out that it’s someone else’s dog."
8."A couple met on the dating app I worked on. Unfortunately, the man passed away, and the lady returned to the app where they met for remembrance. One day, a bug in the system made some profile likes to be sent again after months, and she received one from her deceased boyfriend. Her bug report was heartbreaking."
9."We got so many requests for information from the police that we had an informal system with them to save them from wasting time getting warrants for information about people who we didn't have data on. They would ask about a particular name/email/other identifier, and we would just say yes, we have data about them, or no we don't. If we did, they'd then go get the warrant to get a copy of it."
10."I worked for a sugar daddy dating website. Some guys were really sweet, some were gross, but the number of underage girls on the site was disturbing. Some of the guys were really good at finding them as well. Also, the company policy was to delete the account and wipe it from the servers so that if the police ever got involved, we didn’t have anything we could give them. Also, we could read all their convos. I read things I cannot unread."
—Anonymous
11."I used to work for a major dating app, although this was about four or five years ago. Globally, about 90% of the users are men, so there is a huge male-to-female disparity, although it's not that bad on a per country basis (for some countries)."
12."Lots of gay men get banned from Grindr for selling weed. We'd get a lot of emails asking, 'Why am I banned?' and then you go to their profile, and it'll say 'HMU for that 🌳.'"
13."This is probably widely known, but women frequently lie about their age and weight, and men lie about their height and salary. Also, it’s a big problem that women are inundated with DMs while most men get none."
14."I’ve been an application developer for many years and have worked on several dating sites and apps. In every case, the companies had uploaded hundreds or even thousands of fake profiles, usually of younger, very attractive people. The profile descriptions often implied that they were looking for middle-aged men (since they were more likely to spend money on in-app purchases). If a user hadn’t logged in for a while, the fake profiles would send out a message like 'Hey, nice profile!' to get people to come back to the app or site."
15."We pre-vet all of our profiles, and the number of dick pics we have to reject is incredible! And yes, we can see all the photos you choose to delete."
—Anonymous
16."Pro tip: If there's a cute animal in your profile, you're way more likely to be approved (and to get matches!)."
—Anonymous
17."Men initiate contact around 80% of the time in straight matchmaking, and if you are a woman looking to date other women and you simply initiate contact with another woman, you have a good chance of success simply because it's very, very, VERY common for women to match, but then neither initiates contact."
18."Get some decent profile photos. Go get your talented friend or just hire a photographer to take some really nicely-lit, well-composed photos of yourself, and watch your match rate soar."
19."We can see how many likes and matches a person has, and it really was disheartening to see just how much less Black women are swiped on than anyone else on dating apps. We also used to manually boost profiles of good-looking people (to keep people hooked on the app), and it was amazing to see the unconscious biases people had. For example, the office was predominantly white men, and the 'good-looking' profiles that were boosted tended to be women with Eurocentric features."
—Anonymous
20.“We used to create fake accounts to chat with users. We did it for people who had premium accounts but weren’t getting a lot of responses, so sometimes, employees would message random users whenever they were bored.”
21.And lastly: "I remember seeing a dude with over 2,000 right swipes and no matches."
—Anonymous
Answers have been edited for length and/or clarity.
