This Guy's Tinder Bot Proves Dating Is Terrible

At 31, Sebastian Stadil was just out of a serious relationship and realized that if he was going to make his dreams of having a family someday come true, he'd have to make dating for The One a priority. How does someone make finding their One True Love, the future carrier of their children, a quick priority? By downloading, and then hacking, Tinder, and several other dating apps.

"I decided to hack the system and go for volume instead of personalization," Stadil wrote of his dating experiment in an essay for the Mission. "To hell with romance. I was determined to find the One, even if it meant swiping right the whole Bay Area." But swiping takes time, messaging takes even more time, and getting and organizing phone numbers is so hard. So to speed up and automate the process, Stadil coded a bot to swipe right on every woman his Tinder profile came across, send messages, and save any phone numbers he received.

The bot worked by sending a series of messages to matches until he got a response. Stadil gave an example of what those conversations looked like:

Stadil: "Bonjour ! I read your profile and think we might get along; want to grab coffee some time next week?"

If he got no response after a day, the second message would look like this:

Stadil: "Perhaps I can tempt you with some pastries instead? I know of place with fruit tarts, chocolate pies, and macaroons. :)"

After another non-response, the bot would wait another day and send a third message:

Stadil: "Fine, if you don't like coffee nor pastries, we can do tea. How does tea sound?"

And then, finally:

Her: "You're confident, I like that. Tea sounds good :)"

Stadil coded a series of messages to send to matches, the first of which was always, "Bonjour ! I read your profile and think we might get along; want to grab coffee some time next week?" But when he got no response (a regular occurrence) the bot sent follow-up messages. This is the list of follow-ups, according to Stadil's essay:

1. "Bonjour ! Care to meet over coffee some time next week?"
2. "Perhaps I can tempt you with some pastries instead? I know of place with fruit tarts, chocolate pies, and macaroons. :)"
3. "Can I interest you in a chai latte then? Better than coffee, and we can still get the pastries!"
4. "Fine, if you don't like coffee nor pastries nor chai, we can do tea. How does tea sound?"
5. "Yeah, you are right. Tea is a little boring. We should get ice cream! How about the Bi-Rite Creamery?"
6. "Ice cream is too cliché anyway. We should do something no one else does on a first date, like meet at a gas station and get beef jerky! Think of the stories we could tell our grandkids!"
7. "Alright, I'll admit that meeting at a gas station isn't the most romantic. And let's be honest: American food portions are so large we don't need more calories. How about a boat ride on Stow Lake? We can get a nice pedal boat and get fresh air and plenty of exercise. How about that?"

Stadil's coding also allowed him to gain perspective basically everyone with a Tinder profile craves — what do other people on this app like? He was able to A/B test profile pictures to find one that garnered more matches, and because of the sheer volume of matches and messages his bot was generating, was able to give rough percentages of how many messages it takes to get a woman to reply (the majority, 43 percent, responded after one), and how many women just went ahead and sent the first message (about 11 percent).

A phone app saved all new numbers his bot requested, and from there would send text messages and arrange dates. "I was now dating at scale, I could handle the influx of new leads," Stadil wrote. "But my goal wasn't to fuck around, I was here to find that special someone."

To make his process more efficient (the name of the game here), Stadil had some policies in place for dating. Like he set up coffee dates only (they're cheaper), arranged for Ubers for dates who lived far away, and arranged up to three dates in a day. He also had a spreadsheet, he wrote, so he wouldn't mix up details of his date's lives. This did not always work.

"I once asked a girl who had spent the entire first date telling me a very sad story about her being an orphan," Stadil wrote. "On our second date, I asked her how her parents were doing. That was an awkward moment. If you're reading this, I apologize."

All this coding and bot messaging resulted in 150 dates over the course of four months — that's more than a date per day for four straight months. That sounds ... exhausting. And awful. But in the name of finding someone to love, Stadil went for it. But did he find what he was looking for? Did he find The One? Nope. He didn't.

"I went on 150 first dates but didn't manage to find the One," he wrote "Most of the first dates led to nothing: we didn't have much in common. Dating at scale doesn't go well with well fitting areas of interests."

Most of Stadil's dates resulted in little to no chemistry. Others he clicked with disappeared, or had interest in him when he had none in them. He was frustrated by the lack of feedback. "Dating is like enterprise sales," he wrote. "When your customer goes for a competing, more compelling product, you're never told and you don't get any feedback. You just don't hear from them anymore. As such, you never know what you did wrong."

Stadil did have one compelling first date (and then second, third, and fourth date) with a woman who worked for Google. He said he could tell she was special right off the bat, and therefore broke the routine of coffee shop dates to take her to Golden Gate park. On the fourth date, he said he wanted to tell her he liked her. On the fifth date, she confided that she wasn't ready for a relationship.

In the end, Stadil found flaws with his process. Because his bot opened up the possibility of meeting so many people each week, he developed an interest in meeting everyone. But it's hard to form human connections when you're dating for volume, rather than genuine interest. And the issues he ran into that prevented him from finding The One were standard dating issues — it's not a problem of Tinder. It's more a problem of people. Stadil's process may have been flawed from inception, but so is the concept of dating in the hopes of finding someone great.

As Stadil concludes, he's given up his dating app robot. "It's time for another approach A drastic change. But not tonight," he wrote. "Tonight, I have a date."

Resource:cosmopolitan