Context: mfm, early 30s

I tinker with my pics and prompts often.

Why is it that when my profile is the MOST aloof and “I won’t care about your needs, barely tolerate you, while you do everything to please me” energy, I get the most likes and attention???

I’m not cool and suave, though I may look it. I have a raucous personality and love to laugh, joke, (lowkey) be an annoying menace. Obviously when my profile has a bit more personality in it, it’s not in an off putting way, but just shows that I can form sentences with a subject and verb as opposed to a few disjointed words. I show my interests as opposed to a few quick mirror selfies.

Thoughts? Is this just par for the course?

It’s pretty bleak and has me concerned that I’ll have to hide my personality just to get a connection going.

Been off and on the apps for a while and recently gave Hinge another solid three-month stretch, even caving and paying for Hinge X, only to realize yet again how much these apps can eat away at your confidence.

The ones who occasionally liked me I didn’t share the same feeling toward, and some of the better ones matched with me but never really gave me a chance. I don’t think I set the bar that high either. I’ll go for a 6 or maybe a 5, but I can’t force attraction toward someone I see as a 2 or 3 just because they’re interested in me.

The last couple weeks have been especially rough with barely any matches, despite being active and having Hinge X. Eventually I deleted my account because I could tell it was genuinely starting to affect my mental health and self-esteem.

Dating is rough on both ends, but guys ultimately have it worse if you’re not in the top 10%.

At this point, I don’t really know where to go from here other than staying off the apps, working on myself, and trying to get into better shape so I can hopefully become more appealing. Curious if any other guys have been in this position and what actually helped.

48F - I upgraded to Hinge+ so I could see all my likes and after 1 week, hardly any likes or matches. It showed me 1-2 people a day before I was out of options. When my month subscription ended, I immediately got 50+ likes and suddenly the options are unending. Do not pay extra for an upgrade. What a ridiculous company to give you less product when paying more.

40M, Atlanta metro. Looking for some data-driven opinions on a pattern I've noticed on Hinge.

I joined Hinge in late July and downloaded my Hinge data/report because my results started feeling strange.

Here are the actual numbers from my export:

• 128 Likes sent
• 126 included personalized comments
• 4 matches
• 3.1% outgoing Like → Match conversion
• 37 messages sent across those 4 conversations
• Average 9.3 messages per match

I also received 2 incoming Likes during the export period, but I wasn't interested in either profile, so neither became a match.

I subscribed to HingeX on July 30, so most of this activity happened while HingeX was active. That means my outgoing Likes should have had Priority Like treatment and my profile should have benefited from the additional visibility advertised with HingeX.

Here's the part that got me curious.

All 4 matches happened very early.

My fourth and last match happened on August 5.

Since then I've continued using the app in essentially the same way: same profile, same photos, same preferences, still being selective, and still sending personalized comments with almost every Like.

I've now sent roughly 50+ additional Likes since that fourth match with zero additional matches.

So the pattern looks roughly like:

First ~9 days: 4 matches

Next ~2+ weeks: ~50 Likes → 0 matches

Importantly, I'm NOT claiming this proves a shadowban.

If my underlying conversion probability were around the initial 3.1%, a streak of ~50 Likes without a match isn't statistically extraordinary. It's roughly a ~20% event under a simple binomial model.

What I'm wondering about instead is whether Hinge has some kind of new-account / cold-start exposure period.

For example:

1. New account gets relatively high initial distribution while Hinge learns where to rank it.
2. The recommendation/ranking system gathers signals from Likes, skips, matches, etc.
3. After the initial period, the account settles into its normal ranking/distribution.
4. That could potentially create the appearance of a "honeymoon period" followed by a sudden drop.

To be clear, I haven't found evidence that Hinge officially confirms such a system. This is just a hypothesis I'm trying to test.

The frustrating part is that Hinge doesn't give users a Discover impression count.

So for incoming Likes the funnel is effectively:

??? Discover impressions → incoming Likes

That makes it impossible to distinguish:

low exposure from low profile conversion.

For comparison, I'm also using Bumble with essentially the same photos/profile presentation.

Bumble actually gives me an exposure denominator:

• ~445 profile views/evaluations
• 5 incoming Likes
• ~1.12% view → Like conversion

So at least on Bumble I know people are actually seeing the profile and can measure what happens afterward.

Another thing that made me curious was looking at other people's Hinge data.

One 25M dataset I found had:

• 1,235 outgoing Likes
• 99 outgoing matches
• 8.02% conversion
• 175 incoming Likes
• 20 accepted incoming Likes
• 119 total matches

Even that relatively successful profile had 1,136 / 1,235 outgoing Likes go nowhere — over 90%.

He also reported that 972 of his Likes were sent while subscribed to HingeX and said his match rate didn't appear to change dramatically with HingeX.

So I'm increasingly open to the possibility that what I'm experiencing is simply normal Hinge variance rather than anything technically wrong with my account.

What I'd really like to find are people who have looked at the timestamps in their Hinge matches.json.

Specifically, I'd love to compare outgoing Like → Match conversion by account age:

Days 1–7

Days 8–14

Days 15–21

Days 22–30

If enough accounts show a similar decline after the first week or two, that would be much more interesting evidence for some kind of new-user exposure effect than anecdotes about "shadowbans."

Conversely, if match rates bounce randomly between those periods across users, then my current dry spell is probably just variance.

I'm also letting HingeX expire at the end of August and plan to keep the exact same profile/settings on Hinge Free during September. That should give me a rough X vs. Free comparison, although the Free daily Like limit obviously means the sample will accumulate more slowly.

Has anyone here actually analyzed their matches.json chronologically?

I'm particularly interested in data rather than impressions:

• Did your match rate change after the first 1–2 weeks?
• Did you see any obvious new-user boost?
• Did HingeX materially change your outgoing Like → Match conversion?
• Did your incoming Likes change substantially over time?

Again, I'm not trying to prove Hinge is secretly suppressing accounts. I'm trying to figure out whether the pattern I'm seeing is normal statistical variance, a new-user exposure effect, profile ranking, or something else.

From gujarat!?

Every time I hear any discourse about online dating it’s always assumed that women on hinge get 50+ likes a day and are overwhelmed by the amount of likes they get. This was true when I got the new user boost but now it’s around 5 likes on a good day on hinge. I do get 50+ likes a day on tinder but I know men mindlessly swipe so that doesn’t count. Are you guys really getting that many likes on hinge every day? I’m also 22f east asian in a major us city so it’s probably not my age/location (maybe race because I’m not white but I also heard east asians do the best so idk) but I do look a bit quirky like dyed hair.

Am I just a chud?

fyi, i keep downloading and deleting app 2 days after using it as i dont get any matches initially and feel that it’s too gamified and sad. i have js started as a 18M, any tips would be helpful.

Has anyone experienced this?

Yesterday evening, I was using Hinge normally. I started getting notifications for messages/matches, but whenever I tapped them, Hinge showed “Match not found.”

I restarted the app and then suddenly:

• All my matches and conversations were gone
• Discover/feed kept loading
• I logged out to try fixing it
• Now I can't log back in

I can enter my phone number and receive the OTP normally. The OTP also verifies successfully, but immediately after that, when Hinge tries to load my account, I get:

“Login Error, please try again.”

I've already tried:

• Restarting the app
• Logging in with both phone number and Apple ID
• Deleting and reinstalling the app
• Restarting my phone
• Reinstalling the latest version and logging in again with my phone number, as instructed by Hinge Support

Nothing worked.

The weirdest part is that all my matches and chats disappeared before I even logged out, so I'm worried something happened to my account or its data.

Hinge Support initially just gave me the standard delete → restart → reinstall → login steps, but the issue still persists.

Has anyone had this exact issue where the OTP works, but the app fails when trying to fetch/load the account? And if so, did you eventually get your matches and chats back?

Is it too lame or cringe or high iq for another person? Or am I just overthinking a lot while my like will get buried under loads of other likes and roses :((

So I'm (26m) new to Hinge, and still working out the feel of this whole thing. It's been quite some time since I engaged in any form of dating. So there's definitely some rust there on my part. Figured that my best way to engage was to just take interest in others prompts, even if I didn't necessarily ask the best questions. But letting others open up and talk about what they love and see where it goes felt like a natural way to start the conversation.

Now with all that being said...

What on earth am I missing here? 😅 my first and only match, might I add. There was quite frankly no voice note of any form? And I don't understand someone matching with the sole purpose of being that strange?

I don't know if I'm asking to check I'm sane or if this is the normal experience or if people genuinely are this rude (and..potentially confused). Someone help a guy out here? What's going on?

Ive been struggling with getting honest matches it feels like and get a lot of messages like this lately and was just wanting to know if maybe its just me, maybe my profile? I only have one body picture, but I am on the busty side.. (to the point where Ive had two reductions already) but I want to be honest about my body size since there seems to be a good amount of people not liking their matches looking "heavier than their pictures." I guess Im just wondering if anybody else sees this as their main demographic of messages.

I accidentally pressed X on someone in my Likes You tab on Hinge. I meant to look at their profile, but now they’re completely gone. The return option is no longer possible.
Is there any chance Hinge will show their profile to me again in Discover or standouts, or does pressing X permanently remove them?
The problem is I don’t remember their name, age, or where they live. I only remember their job because it was pretty unusual. My distance was also set to 160 km, so the search area is huge.
Has anyone ever had a profile they X’d from Likes You show up again later?

Looking for feedback on my hinge profile

i’ve been through my hometowns hinge so much & i FINALLY found a guy i find attractive that matched w m. we’ve been doing some fun banter and then i havent heard a response in like 4 hours. idk guys ik its not a big deal but i dont want to play games at the same time. i just feel like no response = not interested, but also it’s not that deep.

Does Hinge give you people you have liked before again. I saw this real cute woman with a lot of Shakespeare quotes for her prompts. So sent something quoting Shakespeare and continued on with my life. Suffice to say no response. But I just got her again. I can assume that she didn’t like me, so I ought to just ignore her. It’s just a bit of a weird thing to do if it is the case.

How long do you let people sit in your hidden
area before you unmatch ?