I tried to hack Tinder and it was a disaster

PUAs told me how to game online dating. They were wrong.

I was so ashamed the first time I made an OkCupid page that I deleted it after a couple of hours. I let the society we live in convince me only losers used OKCupid and I didn’t need to resort to geeky online dating . A few years later, online dating became ubiquitous enough to no longer carry a stigma. Besides, bars and clubs weren’t my scene; there was no other way for me to meet women other than OKCupid.

I’m the kind of person who gets nervous ordering takeout, so messaging strangers of the opposite sex I thought were cool elicited promising job interview-level nerves. To say it in meaner terms: I sucked at OKCupid. Few women responded to my messages, and even fewer actually sent me messages first. The only girl who went on a date with me did so because she thought I worked for BuzzFeed (which I Lettiska flickor heta only contributed to as an unpaid “community member” at the time).

After over a month of poor luck, I saw a Daily Dot article about a woman soliciting OkCupid profile rewrites for only $25. I contacted her. When I finally gave her the green light, she never answered the email. I like to think she got a real gig and didn’t need to stoop to something so low anymore. While that was great for her, I was still out an OkCupid profile. Realizing online dating probably wasn’t for me, I gave up. At least until the next year.

I restarted my OkCupid in 2014. I received slightly more messages this time around because I flat out didn’t care what anyone thought of me, which lead to an apparent uptick in the quality of the messages I sent out. Still no dates, though.

Morose and crestfallen, I considered Tinder. Even someone as (willingly) disconnected from popular culture as myself had heard of the popular swiping app. I avoided it because I felt it was sordid and awful. How could an app centered around objectifying women based on their looks do anything other than make me a misogynist-or at least misogynistic enough to feel gross about myself?

I became increasingly desperate as my 2014 OkCupid adventures turned out just like my 2013 OkCupid adventures: Unanswered texts and an empty inbox. One night I signed up on Tinder and started swiping, guiltily sorting human beings into “desirable” and “undesirable.” I matched with five women in the first month. None of them responded to my messages.

I tried to hack Tinder and it was a disaster

Not long after this, I saw a Medium post by Blake Jamieson explaining exactly how to garner over 800 matches.

I called in a favor and had a friend photoshop a few pictures of me to emulate Jamieson’s example. I also wrote up a nice little bio I’d use once I reinstalled the app. Another thing I did was check out r/Tinder for any advice. The pick up artists (PUAs) there recommended making a new Facebook, one separate from your real one, for your Tinder account. They also suggested liking tons of pages to see if you and your matches had similar interests. I spent about 20 minutes liking stuff with my new fake Facebook page before signing up for Tinder with my newly photoshopped “Match of the Day” images.

Encouraging at first. While I didn’t come close to the 800 plus Jamieson promised, I increased the my amount of matches by about 400 percent (so I got around 20 matches as opposed to five). The advice about liking lots of stuff helped a lot. One girl I matched with liked Slate. She answered my first message, which confirmed whether she actually read Slate. When I asked if she noticed a marked decline in Slate’s quality she didn’t answer.