Man Unsuccessfully Swipes Right 200,000 Times On Tinder

Dating is a numbers game, right?

What if your odds were .00075%?

That’s what Sebastian Stadil’s were. The 31-year-old San Francisco software engineer who says he swiped right on 203,000 Tinder ladies, give or take. Spoiler alert: he’s still single.

Stadil signed up for Tinder hoping to meet his next leading lady after breaking up with a long-time girlfriend. But the average match rate for straight men on Tinder was lower than he could stomach: a reported .6%. Manual swiping would never do. So, being the ingenue that he is, he engineered a bot that could not only swipe right for him, but also exchange messages and set up coffee dates.

Here’s where he went wrong.

1) He underestimated how critical women are. On average, men have to engage 18x more than women on online dating sites to yield the same results. Swiping more doesn’t make them any less picky, it just dilutes the playing field.

2) He was impersonal. A bio, a great picture and saying something more than just a simple “Hi” or “Hello” (say, commenting on her bio or the setting of one of her photos) recieves a greater positive response. In other words, take some time and be genuine.

3) He should have assessed his desirability score. We get it — the truth can be hard to swallow. But a savvy dater uses all the information available to him.

4) He was a robot. We are living in an increasingly automated world, sure. But there are some things an algorithm can’t do for you (yet). Charming a potential partner is one of them.

All that said, Stadil doesn’t consider the effort a failure. “Of the 150 first dates, 52 became seconds; 17 became thirds.” But let’s not forget that 17 third dates landed him back at square one.

One last word of advice: if you’ve unsuccessfully tried to date 203,000 women, maybe don’t self-publish a story about it stating, “I’m a fat, bald, short guy whose only quality is that he isn’t an ax murderer.”

Yeesh. Good luck with that, fella.