The thing I hear the most about online dating is that some people are simply the worst, which is unfortunate because there aren't many consequences for those who behave badly. A new free iOs app called The Grade, aims to address the lack of online dating accountability by grading its users and expelling those with failing grades from the app and the dating pool.
Everyone who uses The Grade receives a mark ranging from "A+" to "F," which is determined by an algorithm that rates users' profile and popularity, responsiveness, and message quality and combines the three scores for a total grade. Marks for message quality take into account things like proper spelling and grammar and the use of offensive words and slang.
The creators of The Grade made a similar experimental app called Mutually and conducted surveys to inform The Grade's features. According to the people behind both apps, "Males are editing their bios and photos 129% and 121% more and females are editing their bios and photos 32% and 31% more." It appears that males still "like" females with the same frequency (43% of the time) despite them editing their bios more often. However, women are liking men 21% more often and responding to their messages 47% more.
Since The Grade launched November 10, it has expelled 5% of its roughly 7,000 users so they aren't bluffing about giving people the boot. Users are given tips for improving their profiles and receive a warning if they fall below a “C” grade. Still, a customer review of the app brings up an uncomfortable question this app raises about "deselecting people based on their 'quality'" and whether or not the grading of popularity is a new insidious way to shallowly sort people.
I asked a representative of The Grade more about how profile quality and popularity affects grading, and I learned that the algorithm incorporates how often a person is liked as well as the length of their bio. It's hard to say how fair even a sophisticated algorithm is and this might not be the perfect solution to the challenges of online dating, but a site with more obvious repercussions for inappropriate messages or unresponsive accounts has got to look attractive to the many, many people who have been burned on other sites.
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