Over the past year+, many male Hinge users here have reported an unfortunate bug where they only see Hinge’s lowest-rated users in their Discover section.
Here are a few examples from the Hinge subreddit. I’ve also seen other examples in Game Facebook and Telegram groups:
Does anyone still keep on getting Obese or transgender people?
Hinge only showing me very obese people
Hinge Only showing me unattractive people
Because of the sensitive nature of this topic, these users will frequently been told that they are conceited/rude/unattractive/mean, et cetera, and/or that they need to work on their profiles and take better photos and so on.
I’m here to tell you that this is all untrue, and that there is indeed a bug with Hinge that has been going on for years. I haven’t seen anyone post about this bug publicly, so I figured I’d start one as a centralized place where we can all discuss commonalities and solutions.
It first happened to me in 2018, and has persisted despite multiple resets. I first pointed it out on the Hinge subreddit in May 2019 (and of course was promptly shellacked by offended users, instead of people acknowledging there might be an issue with Hinge).
About a month ago, recreated a Hinge profile again after a year and a half. New email address, new phone, maybe only the number was the same — same behavior, except this time, it’s all unattractive profiles, not broken up by the odd superattractive profile like before.
Luckily, there’s a way to get around this:
Workaround
What we know about how to fix this so far is to set your age and distance settings to very constrained, and then swipe through all the unattractive profiles quickly in that setting, whereupon you’ll finally be shown profiles that are attractive.
For example, set your age range to 26-27 and distance to 1 mile. The least attractive profiles will still be shown first, but you can swipe through them faster and use up your daily likes on the attractive ones quicker.
Many guys have reported that the bug has subsided after they started matching with girls they liked using the workaround method. Personally, I haven’t noticed this after a couple months of swiping and liking, despite matching with a number of attractive women, but it’s possible it takes a while.
Will Hinge fix the bug?
I first let Hinge know about this bug in 2018 through their Zendesk support form. I did not receive a response. I encourage anyone reading this post to send them an email and link them to the post. They can’t ignore us for long.
Pancake Mouse 
Wow! I’ve avoided this app for so long for this very reason.. just tried this fix and it’s a game changer! Literally worked instantly! Thanks a million!
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Hey mate, this definitely happens.
I think it’s a shadow ban, I fixed it by change my number after multiple resets.
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It’s not a shadowban, it seems to happen to a certain percentage of men at random, some of whom have never been shadowbanned or banned.
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I have been experiencing this problem for over a year. I recently moved to Manhattan and for some reason thought the change of scenery would resolve the issue. Still, I set my range to a mile and only shown unattractive. In such a big city, do you think it’s a good idea to delete my profile and try again with a different phone number? Thanks
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You can try, yeah. But honestly I don’t mind it, once you swipe through the ugly girls you get a nice narrow range you can like from.
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This is unbelievable. After 24 hours on hinge I hit a wall where the quality dropped from acceptable to heinous. Like I’m not exaggerating when I say that at least 20% of the faces hurt my brain to look at. I got on here to find people I could be with, not look at for 1 second and be biologically repulsed by. It’s uncanny. It’s like the app is trolling me. Crooked faces bad skin and round bodies. Like wtf, that’s not close to representative of the human biomass. Fuck their lame algo.
Your fix worked instantly.
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