Page 19 of Swiped
Nat sighed and regarded the glass and metal rectangle glowing in her hand.
Et tu? she wanted to ask. She opened her app.
There was a crop of new messages and a bouncing heart in the menu bar, which meant that she had secret admirers to unlock, a feature that was available instantly behind a paywall or for free every twenty-four hours.
But Nat knew her own algorithm, and so she knew that she had to swipe on as many profiles as possible in that crucial first forty-eight hours of creating an account in order to keep from getting buried in the daily crop of new users, and also feed the algorithm enough data to get the most matches.
She started swiping right on profiles, barely even taking in the pictures, let alone their names and pithy twenty-word bios, before the screen filled with a green YES heart and flipped to the next man in the queue. Why not? The more the merrier.
She’d initially based BeTwo on a system called collaborative filtering, which was basically the same system that streaming services used to suggest what movies or music someone might like based on what they’ve already watched or listened to.
If Bob liked smooth jazz, it showed Bob songs that other people who also like smooth jazz had listened to, thus making Bob feel satisfied and deeply understood by the magic of lifeless code.
Most dating apps lifted that model and stopped there. They sorted users based on broad categories like race, gender, job/income, educational level, age, and once someone matched with enough people of a certain type, it showed them that subset of profiles pretty much exclusively.
Of course, Nat had decided to honor the revolutionary insight that people usually liked more than one type of music, and so her version of collaborative filtering ended up being a lot more nuanced.
Years-of-her-life-level nuanced, but it meant that BeTwo’s match suggestions were based on more factors than any other app that she knew of.
The teens kept blasting their jams. Nat kept blindly swiping right.
Something that had always bothered Nat was the fact that most dating apps’ collaborative filtering didn’t just group users based on the demographic categories, it also ranked them based on the majority preferences for each category — or in other words, it ranked users by popularity.
Each and every user was given a score based on how likely they were to get right swipes compared to every other user on the app.
So, when a user inputted their age, it was compared to data on how many “yes” swipes a user of a similar age had received from their potential matches.
That meant that if the user pool skewed young, which they naturally tended to do, users over thirty-five were automatically ranked lower in the dating pool — even before taking other factors like ageism into account.
Nat had felt that an algorithm reflecting that Bob likes smooth jazz, and so probably isn’t into heavy metal, was one thing.
An algorithm reflecting that Bob likes twenty-five-year-olds and not thirty-five-year-olds, never mind the fact that Bob himself is forty-three years old, and then punishing those thirty-five-year-olds because of Bob’s preferences, was entirely different.
She’d labored to create a novel algorithmic approach because, as she’d learned through her many betas, most algorithms didn’t surface their low-ranking users nearly as often for matches, because most dating apps had a vested interest in making users feel that their match pool was brimming with the hottest singles around.
In fact, many apps didn’t show low-rank users to higher-rank users at all.
They just disappeared into the dregs of the user pool, and matched only with users that the system had deemed on-or-below their level of swipe-ability.
In other words, it was a likeability contest where not coming in first place would essentially banish you to Siberia.
Nat had thought that approach was not only a moral outrage, but it was also lazy.
It didn’t take a genius to see how this could do more than just perpetuate the worst biases of society — it would literally codify those biases with every single swipe.
It was part of what she’d been trying to say when Tracy had brought up breaking toxic social tendencies in the panel discussion.
That was exactly why her algorithm was so special.
It was why it was worth protecting. It was why she had to beat Rami.
The teens with the speaker were now standing in the aisle.
One of them lay down a flattened cardboard box.
A young man in baggy jeans and an all-black San Francisco Giants cap started breakdancing.
The kissing teens stopped kissing, and clapped and whooped at the kid’s moves.
The song bopped with lyrics about feeling yourself and owning the moment — no haters!
Nat shrank down in her seat, all the better to hide her hater tendencies, and kept swiping. At least someone out there was having a good night.
* * *
Nat pushed open the red pleather swing doors to her favorite bar, and felt the atmosphere greet her like a sigh of relief.
Bathed in moody red light, the place was intimate and dive-y, with jazz standards on the jukebox and no-nonsense bartenders who served up stiff, classic cocktails in front of a hand-painted mural of forest creatures cavorting with elegant, robed figures.
It was a little slice of the city that time and the tourists had never touched. It was perfect.
It didn’t look like Sara was there yet, so she pulled herself onto a stool by the door.
She set her phone on the tarnished brass bar top and kept swiping.
As if by magic, a gin martini appeared in front of her with a wink from the server.
She took a sip and let it course through her body, unraveling her nerves like unzipping a zipper.
“No way, this place is off-limits for dates.”
She turned to the voice at her shoulder. It was Rami, standing like a sentry with a bourbon in his hand, and glowering at her.
“It’s definitely off-limits,” she snapped. “And I’ve definitely been coming here longer than you have, so, sorry.”
Rami eased up his glare by an iota. “So, you’re not here for a date?”
Nat sipped her martini. “Never. This place is sacred.”
Rami’s entire body softened with relief as he said, “Tell me about it. Did you know they’ll kick you out if you order a cosmo?”
Nat tossed her hair. “Was that embarrassing for you?” she asked.
“You’re hilarious,” said Rami, flatly. He gestured to her phone. “You should put that on your profile!”
Nat blushed and stashed her phone as Rami pulled himself onto the seat she’d been saving for Sara. He let out a theatrical sigh and looked at her sadly. “One night of the BeTwo hellscape and you’re already hitting the sauce.” He sipped his bourbon with a smirk. “Sounds about right.”
“How do you know that this isn’t a celebratory drink?”
“Because you’re drinking it alone.”
Nat shrugged. She looked into his amused brown eyes with what she hoped was utter confidence. “The date was great, actually. He was really nice.”
Rami frowned. “It’ll wear off on the second date.”
“Oh good, another cynical insight!”
“It’s not cynical if it’s true.”
At that line, a smile twisted on Nat’s face. She couldn’t help it.
Rami’s left eyebrow perked up, and his eyes narrowed with interest. “Trust me, there’s a weird thing that happens when you meet up with someone you’ve been talking to online. First online dates are notoriously unreliable.”
Nerves suddenly crept into Nat’s stomach. “You know we’re not supposed to be in contact, right?” she said.
Rami waved his hand in defiance and continued. “First of all, you have the huge relief that your date is not, in fact, criminally insane, which is a low bar that makes you overlook a lot of other perfectly valid red flags.”
Nat rolled her eyes at him. “Should I be writing this down?”
“Then there’s the fact that you’ve already formed this whole idea of them in your head from their messages. You think, ‘Oh, she’s a nurse. She must be kind!’ or ‘She wrote ‘lol’ to my Hobbit reference and went to a good school, she must be smart—’”
Nat almost choked on her martini. “Please don’t tell me you’re a sapiosexual.”
Rami grimaced. “God, no. That’s just code for ‘asshole.’”
“Right?” she cried, raising a hand in righteous validation. “Who says that?”
Rami lifted his nose in the air and took on a pompous tone as if reciting from a profile. “Hello, I want you to know that I think I’m smart in the most entitled way possible.”
Nat scoffed in appreciation. They both took sips of their cocktails.
He ran a hand through his curls and faced her. “Basically, the whole premise is flawed. In your head, you’ll always be dating the person you first imagined when you read their profile.”
“So? What’s the difference?”
“Just wait until you get to a second date with a promising guy. You walk in to meet him, all excited. You totally feel like you know him.” He sighed and smiled, and his dimples winked at her in his olive cheeks.
“Then before the first round of drinks even comes, surprise! You can’t stand each other!
” His smile dropped. “You’re horribly mismatched. ”
Nat frowned. “‘Mismatched’ seems like a strong word. No algorithm is going to be perfect.”
Rami leaned in toward her. He still smelled like sandalwood and, weirdly, also gummy bears.
“Oh, but you were feeling so good about him that you agreed to a full-on dinner, and now you have to suffer through the next two hours making conversation about whatever it was you did have in common, like some 80s teen movie.” His face scrunched up in a mock grin. “Isn’t that quirky?”
Nat shook her head as her algorithm swirled in her mind. “Liking the same movies is a factor of compatibility.”