There's nothing quite as pathetic as swiping right on every profile you come across on Tinder. It's little more than the dating equivalent of throwing a giant bowl of questionably delicious spaghetti against a shit-covered wall. However, the lonely techies of Hacker News have optimized the catch-all process of seeing which poor souls come to them. And they're sharing their secrets.

In a post titled "Hacking Tinder for Fun and Profit," former Microsoft developer Yuri de Souza details how he reverse engineered Tinder to mass-like every girl on the network. The reason for doing so? Sitting there manually expressing your approval for everything that walks took far too much time:

I played around with Tinder one lazy Sunday afternoon and recalled my friend telling me how he would spend hours swiping right on Tinder just to accumulate as may matches as possible. This had me thinking, why can't I reverse engineer Tinder and automate the swipes? After all, I'm pretty darn good at taking things apart!

After de Souza's hacking, he was able to furnish a simple script that can be run "as many times as you like in a loop" while you, the internet neckbeard, "watch the matches pour in."

However, when de Souza unleashed his hack on Hacker News, he was not greeted as a liberator of loneliness. Instead, commenters began one-upping him, showing off their Tinder match hacks.

One engineer, Venkatesh Nandakumar, showed off his "Automating Tinder" hack, which he describes as a way to take back the "upper hand" women have on the service:

As far as social dynamics of Tinder goes, girls have an upper hand initially and the liberty to be choosy — to swipe left if you will. But once the match it done, it's upto the guy to initiate the conversation. Given the generally low hit-ratio for males and even more so for South Asian males ;), the best strategy for guys is to swipe-right-all. And when there is a match, decide if they want to initiate the conversation.

Then there's tinderbot, which one hacker uses to skip right past the pesky dating process and tell users to straight-up download his app:

tinderbot is a node module which allows you to develop 'bots' which interact on the Tinder dating app [...] which periodically 'likes' all matches nearby and tells them to play Castle Clash.

And there's loltinder:

I created this because I got tired of swiping — it's easier to sort out later who you like. My initial experiment exhausted me from 9 dates in a row.

I really just love meeting up with girls and reading bibles together. It's so peaceful and sweet. Sex? Ew.

And so on.

The Hacker News crowd is already seeing the possibilities beyond simply throwing a stick of dynamite in the pond of singles. Hacker "cheepin" suggests script kiddies can start using these tools to like-spam across different regions with various photos, as a way to determine which selfie gets the most likes:

You can combine with an Android emulator (to spoof GPS location), and a fake facebook to be literally anybody, anywhere, and see who likes you. While it's certainly not the intended use of the app, A/B testing your appearance to different regions is not out of the question.

Liking everyone certainly isn't the intended use of the app, either. But that doesn't matter if you're coding to erase womankind's supposed upper-hand. As one user noted, "This is the most useful dating advice I have ever seen on Hacker News."

To contact the author of this post, please email kevin@valleywag.com.

Screenshot: Tinder