If you’ve been swiping right and left indiscriminately on multiple dating apps in the hopes of finding ‘the one,’ STOP! Apparently, dating apps are a huge waste of time and energy, and they seldom help you land a significant other, says a new study.
*sob*sniffle*
Researchers Taha Yasseri and Jennie Zhang of the Oxford Internet Institute concluded in their research that most of the dating app swipes are ignored for the most part, and that many of the carefully-crafted messages go unanswered.
Image source: Giphy
How did they arrive at this conclusion? By studying 19 million messages between 400,000 users on a dating app, whose name hasn’t been revealed because of a signed non-disclosure agreement. Among these 19 million messages, sadly, 49 percent of them are single, unanswered messages, and of the 51 percent that were answered, only a measly 19 percent exchanged phone numbers on the app. That’s just sad, isn’t it?
Suggested read: 12 common misconceptions about online dating that are far from true
Talking about these stats, Yasseri said in an interview,
“This is probably sad to some people, but reassuring to others who think there is something wrong with them because nobody is responding to their messages. It’s not you, it’s just a general trend. For some reason, people do not take these sorts of conversations too seriously.”
Another interesting conclusion of the study was that men apparently swipe right indiscriminately, and then sift through the matches, and only message those they deem ‘worthy.’ So it’s only natural that the number of unanswered messages go up, right?
Image source: ComedyCentral
Further, Yasseri said,
“We interviewed some users and realized that men usually swipe right way more often than females, and they pay way less attention to profiles. Female users are quite picky, and when they swipe right, they are more likely to mean it.”
So now you know why your carefully crafted message didn’t get a reply on whatever dating app you’re currently killing time on. However, all said and done, there are two things for you to look forward to: one, you could hold onto hope that you’re one among the small percentage of people who do exchange phone numbers on the dating app, or two, ditch all dating apps and start dating people in real life. That should do the trick, eh?
Why do you think your messages aren’t getting any replies? Sound off in the comments below.
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