In March, we learned that Tinder had been secretly running an exclusive invite-only service called Tinder Select for around six months.
Initial reports suggested the platform was for celebrities and other popular Tinder users, after invites to the service were leaked to the press.
And now Business Insider has gained an inside look at the dating product, after one of its New York-based journalists was invited to the secretive platform.
Nathan McAlone’s experience gives the impression of a service that is still in its testing stage, and one that is slightly different from what initial reports suggested.
First, he says it functions in a very similar way to normal Tinder – there is currently no separate feed of “high-quality singles” to swipe through.
Instead, when you toggle the blue Select button on, and the app’s colour scheme changes slightly, your normal feed gets populated with other users of Tinder Select.
When swiping through, you can identify these fellow Tinder Select members because their photo has a blue border, and their profile is branded with a blue “Select” badge.
The journalist said, however, that these profiles were very rare in New York, and he was unable to find one to screenshot and blur for the purposes of the story.
Of those he had previously come across, most “worked in tech or in PR”, McAlone said.
The most interesting insight the story revealed about Tinder Select was to do with its algorithm.
According to the Business Insider journalist, after toggling the Select service on, he started getting inundated with matches, far more than he was used to.
His theory is that Tinder Select pushes your profile to the front of the feeds of the people you have liked, as well as front-loading your feed with people who have already liked you.
In addition to this, he and other Tinder Select users also noticed a strong uptick in the number of Super Likes they received.
From what he describes, Tinder seems to have created an algorithm shift that can meaningfully improve your success on the app – a constant built-in profile boosting service.
This is obviously something that could be extremely valuable to the dating app, with clear revenue-generating potential, no matter what its exact plans for Tinder Select are.
Read the article here.