  Mobile dating applications (MDAs) have skyrocketed in popularity in the last
few years, with popular MDA Tinder alone matching 26 million pairs of users per
day. In addition to becoming an influential part of modern dating culture, MDAs
facilitate a unique form of mediated communication: dyadic mobile text messages
between pairs of users who are not already acquainted. Furthermore, mobile
dating has paved the way for analysis of these digital interactions via massive
sets of data generated by the instant matching and messaging functions of its
many platforms at an unprecedented scale. This paper looks at one of these sets
of data: metadata of approximately two million conversations, containing 19
million messages, exchanged between 400,000 heterosexual users on an MDA.
Through computational analysis methods, this study offers the very first large
scale quantitative depiction of mobile dating as a whole. We report on
differences in how heterosexual male and female users communicate with each
other on MDAs, differences in behaviors of dyads of varying degrees of social
separation, and factors leading to "success"-operationalized by the exchange of
phone numbers between a match. For instance, we report that men initiate 79% of
conversations--and while about half of the initial messages are responded to,
conversations initiated by men are more likely to be reciprocated. We also
report that the length of conversations, the waiting times, and the length of
messages have fat-tailed distributions. That said, the majority of reciprocated
conversations lead to a phone number exchange within the first 20 messages.
