Page 8 of Swiped
“So, Nat, can you get us some hotter girls on BeTwo?”
A roar of male laughter filled the room as the asker smirked at Nat. The producer frantically grasped for the questioner’s mic just as he added, “I’ll take my answer off the air.” He raised his arms above his head in triumph and sat down to some scattered applause.
No thoughts came to Nat as she registered the producer mouthing her the words,I’M SO SORRY! She sputtered into her mic, only vaguely aware that she was making sounds at all. “Um . . . uh . . . I . . .”
“No way, nope!” Tracy boomed into Nat’s silence. “Nat, do not even dignify that with a response.” She winked at Nat before turning her full, gorgeous fury toward the audience member. “And you, never speak into a microphone again.”
A few hoots and some more applause rose as Nat shrank in her seat. She shot a glance at her fellow panelists. Christine gave her a double thumbs-up and a grin. Rami was shaking his head, staring at the table, and drumming his pen against a notepad. Nat felt puddles forming in her armpits as she reached for her lukewarm BuzzFill-branded water bottle.
“OK, can we get another question?” asked Tracy. “A real one this time?”
From the back of the auditorium, a tiny figure with a chest full of lanyards and badges rose. “Yeah, this one is also for BeTwo,” he said.
“Careful,” Tracy warned.
“No, no, it’s serious!” the asker insisted. “So, my question is, what’s the data on how to get the most girls to respond? Like you must know the most successful opening lines, or the stuff that gets the most right swipes in profiles?”
Tracy turned her glittering eyes to Nat. It seemed like this question was going to be allowed. Nat swallowed and raised her mic. “Well, running correlations on our backend data wouldn’t necessarily give us any insight into causation for something so personal,” she said, feeling her words echo into silence. “So, I don’t have a magic formula. But I like to think—”
“OK specific scenario!” the asker interrupted. Nat could see his small figure in the back row, waving his hands to cut her off as he continued his thought. “What’s better: having a little kid in your pics or having an unusual animal, like a hedgehog or a pot-bellied pig? Because I have access to all of those options, but I just want to maximize my impression, you know?”
Nat felt Christine perk up as the question, impossibly, continued.
“And if I go hedgehog or pig,” he said, “would girls just think I’m some weirdo whose apartment smells like wet Cheerios? Because it doesn’t. Thanks.”
He sat as Christine raised her mic. “Some women enjoy the smell of wood chips.”
“Yes, well, this is actually an interesting question phrased in an unusual way,” chirped Tracy, righting the ship once again. She flashed a dental brochure smile at Nat. “Nat, do you have data on what makes the most quote-unquote successful profile?”
Nat forced her eyes not to roll, and picked up her last thought, a line she’d actually rehearsed with the twins days before. “Well, I like to think that all a profile needs to be successful on our app is to exist.” She paused for a warm reaction, but none came. In fact, she thought she heard a scoff from Rami’s end of the stage. She sat up straighter and turned to meet his gaze. She couldn’t ignore the amused glow dancing in his eyes or the heat it sparked in her chest. “The BeTwo algorithm is so unique because it takes into account more personality factors than any other dating app, meaning that themore information you provide, the more accurate your matches will be. We like to let the users set how much they share.”
Rami shook his head and drummed his pen.
“Sure,” said Tracy with her Queen Bee poise. “But back to my question about the data. Do you take any steps to ensure that your app doesn’t just replicate toxic, patriarchal standards from IRL dating?”
This time, Nat felt her nerves ease up a bit. Now this was her wheelhouse — talking about data,herdata, and all the times she had painstakingly combed through it to ensure that her code sorted it in a way that was organic and true to the user pool. Unlike a lot of app creators, she thought of the vast set of data in the user pool as a kind of personal challenge-slash-conversation between herself and every person on her app. She let users input as many disparate variables as they wanted, and it was her job, and her joy, to figure out how to stretch her algorithm to respond to each one of them. She smiled in Rami’s direction as she said, “Actually, I — we have one of the most diverse user pools exactly because we let people set a huge number of details about themselves from scratch, from preferred pronouns to polyamory and even asexual search filters.” She sat up straighter still, visually flashing back to the hundreds of hours she and the twins had spent making sure the app could handle so much variety. “So, the hope is that each BeTwo user can look for what aligns with them so specifically that the search reflects them as an individual more than any kind of social norm.”
Tracy gave an approving “Hmm!” but it barely covered another scoff from Rami’s direction. He was now frowning and glaring at Nat like she had personally kicked him in the shins. She narrowed her eyes at him.
“Wow,” said Tracy. She pursed her glossy lips. “So it sounds like you’re saying that BeTwo actually endeavors to break bad social cycles in the dating world?”
This time, the whole auditorium heard Rami’s scoff. And what he said next.
“Breakbad cycles?” he spat into the mic. “More like spawn them like locusts!”
Tracy grinned. There was blood in the water, all right. “One of our other panelists would like to weigh in?”
Rami looked a little startled at his own outburst as he ran a hand through his curls and nodded. “Yeah, yeah, I would.” His brow furrowed in the way Nat had found so charming before they’d learned each other’s names and personalities. “I mean, being ghosted used to just mean some glowing dude in a Civil War uniform was watching you sleep. And that’s still preferable to what it means now, right?”
He got some laughs at this line, but Nat just shook her head.Ghosting. She couldn’t believe that was his best shot. “Look,” she replied, “we didn’t invent ghosting or tell people to start doing it.” Adrenaline swirled in her body. Maybe she could be a shark, too. “And if it keeps happening to you, well, maybe that’s not about the app, you know?” She went for the kill with a little stage-y smile and shrug. The audience hooted as Rami fixed his stare on his hands.
“Sorry, just a joke,” Nat continued, tossing her hair and gesturing for the crowd. She wasn’t sorry. “But BeTwo is really only serving a very simple need. It’s labeled as a dating app, which is true, but it’s not a full-service love experience. We’re not here to be relationship counselors — it’s just about making introductions to get people on a date and letting them take it from there.”
Nat smiled, proud of her answer as Tracy pressed a pink-manicured finger to her earpiece and frowned. “Let’s move on,” she said. “How about one more question, and please, not about BeTwo?”
Most of the hands went down as Tracy craned her neck to scan the audience. “I think I see someone over by the doors? Maybe?”
“Actually, I have a question,” said Rami.Of course he did.
