What Happens After You Both Swipe Right: A Statistical Description of Mobile Dating Communications

Résumé : Mobile dating applications (MDAs) have skyrocketed in popularity in the last few years, with popular MDA Tinder alone matching 26 million pairs of users per day. In addition to becoming an influential part of modern dating culture, MDAs facilitate a unique form of mediated communication: dyadic mobile text messages between pairs of users who are not already acquainted. Furthermore, mobile dating has paved the way for analysis of these digital interactions via massive sets of data generated by the instant matching and messaging functions of its many platforms at an unprecedented scale. This paper looks at one of these sets of data: metadata of approximately two million conversations, containing 19 million messages, exchanged between 400,000 heterosexual users on an MDA. Through computational analysis methods, this study offers the very first large scale quantitative depiction of mobile dating as a whole. We report on differences in how heterosexual male and female users communicate with each other on MDAs, differences in behaviors of dyads of varying degrees of social separation, and factors leading to "success"-operationalized by the exchange of phone numbers between a match. For instance, we report that men initiate 79% of conversations--and while about half of the initial messages are responded to, conversations initiated by men are more likely to be reciprocated. We also report that the length of conversations, the waiting times, and the length of messages have fat-tailed distributions. That said, the majority of reciprocated conversations lead to a phone number exchange within the first 20 messages.