L'amour sous algorithm

This french book title can be translated as “Love dictated by algorithms”. It talks about a real woman reporter who, after a bad breakup, started using Tinder, and one thing leading to the other, ended investigating what was behind Tinder’s algorithms.

Overall, I was disappointed as I didn’t learn much about the algorithms, probably not the fault of the reporter as a lot is hidden by Tinder company. To summarize, every Tinder user has an ELO score. When Alice sees Bob on the app, the swipe is akin to a game where being swiped right (“I like you”) is equivalent to a “win”. The win is more or less important depending on the ELO of Alice and Bob, like a Chess game.

Plus Tinder also uses a lot of info, like hobbies / age / education, to make the pairing. It kind of makes sense in my opinion. But some heuristics can be problematic as “young women are shown mostly older richer guys”.

The author, being a woman, mostly focused on her experience, and thus on how some women were wrongly disadvantaged. She barely talked about the men experience, except citing for a paragraph some friend of her. Weirdly, she also admitted being “cruel” to guys on the app (her words), but just choose to blame the app and not re-considering her own behavior.

I didn’t really the book, as it was mostly about her complaining about her life. On the other hand, it was also the most interesting part of the book: her point of view as a woman. Which makes me realize that I mostly read books written about men, so it was refreshing in some ways, and I shall read more women writers this year I think.

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