A New Dating App Gives You A Letter Grade For Poor Online Behavior
The Grade
When you were in school, a bad grade may have inspired fear and a lecture from your parents.
A new dating app launched by Snap Interactive this week awards letter grades based on a completely different set of criteria.
The Grade seeks to weed out badly behaved online daters with an algorithm that grades users based on popularity, responsiveness, and message quality.
"Never before have users been held accountable for their behavior on a dating app," Snap Interactive CEO Cliff Lerner said in a press release. "Our goal was to create a community of high-quality perspective matches without having to sort through the hundreds of the inappropriate and hostile singles that are so pervasive on existing dating apps."
The popularity grade is based on how often a person's profile is liked by other daters. The response rate grade is based on how often a user responds to messages and how often they receive responses. The algorithm also checks the content of messages for spelling mistakes, slang, and inappropriate words to come up with the message quality grade.
Your cumulative grade is displayed prominently so that anyone who visits your profile can see it. Users whose grades are too low are then kicked out of the app.
The Grade is available for free on iOS as of yesterday.
The team has already been able to learn some interesting things about online daters in New York City, using data pulled from 1,000 beta users over the past month.
They found that of all men in New York City, Manhattan residents have the highest overall grades, with an average grade of A-. Brooklyn females have the highest average grades, with an overall grade of A, thanks in part to their 73% message response rate.
Manhattan females, on the other hand, have an A+ profile popularity grade and get liked 50% of the time.
With an average message length of 33.5 characters, men in Brooklyn write the longest messages and have an A- for message quality.
Queens men, however, write the most inappropriate messages, with 1% of their messages containing a bad word. They only get liked 5.6% of the time and have a D overall grade.