Abiedo

Glenda, my best friend, finally cracked and did suggest Tinder. So, I have crunched a few numbers for you and here is why we shouldn’t use Tinder and any dating site for that matter.

Back when MTN introduced the WOW bonus my little brother, Sydney – the other comic in the family, Shirbet – the CD in ABCD, was on Cell C and had MTN girlfriends. Every time I recharge, he would call them using my phone. Soon enough however, he realised that his girlfriends weren’t that interesting – needless to say he had to spend 200 free minutes before midnight.

He then decided to start prank calling people but that too, became boring because you can only prank a number so many times before the game gets boring for both of you and so he soon ran out of things to talk about with all his MTN contacts. Then, believe you me he escalated it even further… to dialling random MTN numbers. This was fun, mainly because of the anonymity.

How does this story relate to Tinder? Well, trying very hard not to bore you with the numbers – Tinder generates close to 2 billion swipes a day from over 50 million monthly users – only about 24 million of those result in matches, matches which mostly do not result in conversations, conversations that mostly do not result in dates, dates which mostly do not result in what either party wants.

All of those matches are concentrated on hot men and women because Tinder’s algorithm broadcasts liked profiles more so, that means the average Tinder user gets little to no matches at all and doesn’t stand a chance to get those likes – with guys averaging a success rate of 7%(a disappointingly depressing peak of 5 matches a week of using up all available swipes which doesn’t do much for you because the girls a guy matches with will have tons of matches to choose from, most of which would be more adept than you).

This is mainly because Tinder women are very selective, perceiving 80% of men to be unattractive and they are very stingy with swiping right while the average guys tries to increase his chances by playing the match game – zonke bonke! This means what the numbers show is really just an exaggeration of reality because few people are generating lots of likes whilst the Tom, Dick and Harry’s are getting none.

Worse, all these are likes are based entirely only looks alone and maybe a bio here and there but what this means is that the pool is reduced significantly as people limit themselves to never finding out about the person’s other positive traits – do or die baba!

Moreover Tinder is never an accurate representation of any quality – be it looks, wittiness or whatever that tickles your fancy. Increasingly, the data is showing that people prefer to get a “feel” of the person themselves. Tinder will never give you this.

On the other hand, the average person meets about two to four new people every day. That means on a scale of 1-10, you have a definite chance of meeting at least an eight according to your preference EVERY WEEK!

Every week of your life you are guaranteed at least one face to face conversation with your “soul mate” That is still an extremely conservative estimate considering that you could still choose this soul mate from the tens of thousands of people you already know. But hey, not all of us can walk to strangers so… back to my brother.

Here is the catch or the twist rather; in no time, some of the random numbers started getting saved as the strangers proved interesting and interested. I kid you not, he met dozens of women through this method – and these were just MTN users only. So I checked the numbers, there are more cell phone users in South Africa than there are Tinder matches in the world.

You literally stand a better chance of meeting your soulmate from just dialling random numbers and striking a conversation than you do on Tinder. Let that sink in. 346892342348, just like that – I just banged my keyboard and that could be my soulmate. Of course, it seems much easier to swipe than to approach or call people but the numbers don’t suggest Tinder is better. In fact the numbers show that Tinder is far much more time consuming and frustrating for both parties.

Rather you could just continue living your life doing whatever it is that you do and ultimately you will bump into the “one” – not once every week, a different “one” each week. My advice is to smile more and greet more, spin your chair and strike up a chat with that colleague on the cubicle behind you, don’t use your phone or earphones in the bus or the taxi, talk to new people every chance you get – believe me, queues aren’t that bad when you are conversing. We can fool ourselves all we want – technology is still a long way from replacing a true human connection.