Tinder confirmed it has been calculating your ‘desirability’

Would you want to know how desirable Tinder thinks you are?

Turns out that women in your Tinder feed make their way onto your phone’s screen based on something more than geography. Tinder recently confirmed that they have an algorithm that shows you potential matches based on ‘desirability.’ But the app doesn’t tell users how the algorithm rates them.

Here’s a little bit of an explanation as to how the rankings work, according to an interview The Verge conducted with one of Tinder’s founders:

Tinder’s CEO, Sean Rad, tells Fast Company that there’s at least some level of complexity to the scoring system. “It’s not just how many people swipe right on you,” he says. “It’s very complicated. It took us two and a half months just to build the algorithm because a lot of factors go into it.”

A Tinder data analyst describes a bit of its inner workings, suggesting that a person’s desirability rating goes up more when someone with a high rating gives them an approving swipe than when someone with a low rating does. The analyst compares it to the ranking system used in Warcraft. “Whenever you play somebody with a really high score, you end up gaining more points than if you played someone with a lower score,” he says.

Sounds a little like Google’s algorithm that determines page rank. It also sounds like Tinder is actually pretty similar to another dating app called The Grade, which, unlike Tinder, allows users to see what their ratings are.

Reaction on social media was mostly ambivalent:

The day someone finds a way for Tinder users to get their internal ranking is a sign of the apocalypse

— Eric Rees (@EricRees) January 11, 2016

why are ppl shocked about tinder's algorithm rating users for desirability? we internally rate/rank ourselves via like metrics all the time

— alexis anais (@holyurl) January 13, 2016

what I gotta do to get my rank up @tinder pls

— Poe Damelo (@CarlitosCafe_) January 11, 2016

With so many dating apps making changes to become more and more like one another, maybe Tinder will one day publicize users’ ratings that the algorithm churns out.