OKCupid is smart about that too, based on how attractive you are you'll see -- and be visible to -- people in a similar "league" to you. You're not going to be seeing beautiful women who could model if you're an unattractive male. This is pretty good for people who are unattractive, because they can focus on people they're more likely to have success with.

https://www.quora.com/Is-being-one-of-the-most-attractive-pe...

It's the latter (using things like click through rates). I'm not sure if any one blog sums up their methods, but they write about this topic a lot. In one post I read, they specifically mention that having a high quality camera correlates with their attractiveness ratings and so do different types of poses. So "attractiveness" might be better thought of as popularity, not beauty (though, that's the approximation).

okcupid is now very similar to tinder in that users can rate each other on a 0-1 scale. (It used to be 1-5).

The rating algorithm is probably a lot like pagerank. Ratings by users that are rated highly matter more.

The potential signals are:

* swipes yes or no

* messages received

* length of conversations

* number of unmatches/blocks received