The online dating industry reports that about 20% of users are "date bacon", and get all the good responses. Everybody else is wasting their time.

In a big city a good looking woman will accumulate 5 or maybe 10 thousand right swipes within a few weeks. How is she ever to get to your profile without you doing something to bump yourself to the top of the queue? There's physically no time in the day for her to even swipe that far.

But shouldn’t there also be thousands women on the site? Are you saying there’s 1 woman with 10000 matches, and 9999 women with 0 matches? Or that there are 10000 women, with 10000 matches each?

Wouldn’t it make sense for the dating site to optimize it so that the women with the least matches get to the top of the queue, so you have a better chance of a mutual match?

All women habe thousands of matches. But there are many more guys than women. So if a woman would have in average a thousand likes in a week a guy would have 100 (1:10 population). But while women have many more likes they can be much more selective, so these 100 guys with likes will be the most attractive ones.

Showing people with less likes would make it more fair, that is right. But the effect will be that a woman will see more „less attractive“ guys and will stop using the app. And women are the users all dating apos have to keep because of the large gender inbalance on dating apps.

I suspect the website optimizes for giving you the most desirable matches first to give you hope that you can match with people like that. Thus it follows some sort of a power law, where the most desirable options get the most matches, and everybody else gets whatever they can get. Yes, there's talk of ELO score, but I haven't seen evidence of that much in practice.