Reddit Gobsmacked By Man Who Posted Graph Showing He Swiped Right On 14,000 Women And Got 14 Matches In Four Years Of Online Dating

One would think the graph charting the applicants to Aella's Very Adult Birthday Party would have easily run away with the title of "Saddest Sankey Diagram of 2024," but one Redditor may have topped it yesterday with a diagram charting his experience with online dating in New York City for the past four to five years — and his chart doesn't even feature the phrase "came in a fluffer."

It seems this Redditor didn't come in much of anything, really. According to a graph he posted to /r/dataisbeautiful yesterday, the Redditor "swiped right," or shot his proverbial shot for a match, on nearly 14,000 women between Tinder and Bumble over the last five years.

Of his right swipes, he made 14 matches, struck up conversations with six of them, and made friends with two of them. At the time of writing, the graph has been removed from /r/dataisbeautiful for unknown reasons, but screenshots exist elsewhere online as it continues to be spread around.

The Redditor's proverbial batting average of 1-for-1,000 on dating apps struck many as gobsmackingly poor, and some users were determined to get to the bottom of his issue.

In the comments, the Redditor said he was 5'3" and voiced that he believed his short stature had turned him off from 999/1,000 women in New York City. However, the issue might not be his height, but his methodology.

One key issue identified by commenters was that the unlucky Redditor admitted to swiping right on literally every live woman in New York. His Sankey Diagram shows he only swiped left on 500 accounts out of roughly 14,400. In a comment, he explained that he figured he could "numbers game" his way into some matches and only rejected fake profiles or women who were located internationally.

Tinder will punish users who only right-swipe, as well as users who swipe right without looking at a profile. If a person excessively swipes right, Tinder will assume they're a bot or not legitimately looking to date and thus suppress them in other users' lineup of potential matches. Some investigations into the app suggest Tinder could "shadowban" users who excessively swipe right, meaning that while the user could still technically use the app, his profile would not be shown to others.

This seems a more likely explanation of why the Redditor has had such a struggle with dating apps. While his profile hasn't been posted online, he has expressed it has been checked by others and regularly updated, which is generally a good thing for a Tinder user to do, according to some investigations into how Tinder's algorithm works.

However, it seems their buckshot approach to dating apps led to their struggle, which led to a very pathetic-looking chart that likely doesn't tell the whole story.