How matching works

Plainly, and without pretending to be more scientific than it is.

1. You have to look before you swipe

Every profile opens a ten-second window before Like unlocks. The countdown on the card is only the visible half — the server refuses a Like that arrives inside the window, so it is a rule, not a suggestion, and it applies to any client.

This is the oldest idea in the product: swiping fast is how people make decisions they would not defend a minute later.

2. Your feed is ordered by four things, in this order

1. Boost	An active paid Boost is seen first. It is the one thing money buys in the feed, and it is labelled on the card so you always know.
2. Compatibility	The score below.
3. Trust	The Rate Score their past dates gave them.
4. Recency	Newer profiles break ties, so a new person is not invisible.

3. What the compatibility score is made of

Personality	How closely your nine self-rated traits sit next to theirs. Only traits you have both rated count, so filling in more cannot hurt you.
Interests	Shared interests as a proportion of your combined list — so listing fifty things does not beat listing three.
Trust	Their Rate Score, held back until they have a few reviews. A new profile counts as neutral, never as bad.
Mutual interest	Whether their own stated preferences would accept you — and whether they have already liked you.

Anything we cannot know scores neutral and says so in the explanation. We never fill a gap with a guess and then present it as a number.

4. The weights are a setting, not a discovery

How much each of those four counts is an owner setting (DATING_MATCH_WEIGHTS), not something measured from outcomes. The defaults are personality 35%, interests 25%, trust 25%, mutual interest 15%. Every score you see tells you which weights produced it.

If that ever changes to something learned from real data, this page will say so, and it will say what the data was.

5. Following through counts

If someone routinely matches and then goes silent — no message, no review, no polite decline — their score is reduced. If you go quiet about as often as they do, the reduction is dropped: you are matched like with like rather than both being buried.

6. Your deal-breakers remove people, they do not merely demote them

Age range, region, a minimum Rate Score, Verified-only, and interests you rule in or out are filters. If you set one, those profiles do not appear at all.

Everyone under 18 is excluded from every feed, always. That is a legal line, not a preference, and it cannot be turned off.

7. The experimental part

If the learner is switched on for this deployment, your private post-date feedback nudges your own weights a little — toward whatever actually mattered on the dates that went well. It is deliberately limited:

one piece of feedback moves a weight by at most a few percent;
no weight may ever drift more than a set fraction from the default;
every adjustment comes with a sentence saying what moved and why;
you can reset to the defaults from your profile at any time.

It only ever changes the order of your feed. It never changes anybody's Rate Score, and it is never shown to anyone else.

8. What we never do

We do not use your precise location. A profile holds a city or region, nothing finer.
We do not sell any of this. Ratings, messages, feedback and preferences are private.
We do not show you profiles that are not real people. Demo profiles used for testing are marked SYNTHETIC- and never enter a real feed.