Well, it was a wild ride but it all ended up being a success 🥂🎉 I'm proud to announce that I was most likely, the most liked person on Tinder for April the 1st 2024, being swiped on 2,608 times and receiving 1,289 likes!
I did it! 🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉
What Do The Stats Say?
Firstly, the amount of people who actually got the April Fools update was 16,000 which was okay but not quite as high as I'd have liked as the update didn't reach most of my daily users in time. The majority of my users are not active daily and I had a little bit of trouble getting the update out in time. Tracked via Google Analytics, my profile was swiped 2,608 on times, with just over half of those people, 1,319 finding the workaround that I put in place to not like me, as I thought it would be best to give everyone theoption of passing but I didn't expect so many people to use it. This was done by clicking the left arrow on the keyboard. The "This person is too hot to dislike today, please try again with someone else" popup came up 5145 times as people tried to dislike me!
The popup that came up when someone tried to dislike me.
Most importantly, I received 1,289 likes on the day. A lot less than I was aiming for but I'm still happy with the result!
I had expected quite a few people to uninstall the extension, but only72 people who were pranked uninstalled it.
Here is the age distribution of the people who liked me on the 1st of April.
Here is the gender split of the people who liked me on the 1st of April. This pie chart does not include unknown genders.
How the day went
From the 31st of March, I started getting likes in, as the update was to start running the prank from the 1st of April, local time for each user. Throughout the 31st, I only got a few hundred likes but I could see everything was working and in place. When I woke up on the 1st of April, I couldn't check my likes and I had to re-verify with a selfie as I'd been soft-banned due to people reporting my profile. This happened 3 separate times over the course of this prank and I expected my profile to not be showing whilst I was banned, but it I'm pretty sure it still did for some, although I'm not sure how much that affected the numbers. Fortunately through the day I was still able to see the likes coming in so I knew it was working for some people at least, even whilst I was soft-banned.
On the 2nd of April past 12pm, it was all over and I was able to see the final numbers on Tinder.
Conclusion
Not everything went to plan but I'm very happy with the results. I know what I should have done differently and I'm excited to start planning early for next April so I can get ahead of the game.
- James 03/04/2024
LighterFuel April Fools 2024 Press Release (pre-april fools prank)
Hi, I'm James Arnott, soon to be the most liked man on Tinder for April the 1st, 2024.
Now I couldn't fault you for thinking that I'm going to get my likes through my dashing looks, or perhaps my charming personality, but I'm sure to your surprise, it's neither! I've put my software engineering skills to use and given my chrome extension for Tinder a little update. (\s)
This press release has been written prior to April Fools, so I'll do another one with all the statistics after the event.
Background
Back in 2021, I created a chrome extension called "LighterFuel for Tinder" which is an accelerant for dating apps, allowing my users to help identify spam profiles through reverse image searching, and extra information like when the account was created. It's since grown to around 10,000 daily users and many more weekly and monthly, tracked via google analytics. All donations through LighterFuel go to medical aid in Ukraine.
The Master Plan
For this year, I have decided to run an April fools prank on all my users, showing them my profile and instead of disabling a like or a right swipe, which happens when users run out of likes, I have engineered a mechanism to disable rejections or left swipes with a popup saying "This person is too hot to dislike today, please try again with someone else".
I was inspired by the dating app "Singularity" which only has one person to swipe on, but I thought I could add my own spin to it. Tinder already has the mechanism to disable likes, but not dislikes, so I thought I'd give that a spin and see how it goes.
What numbers am I aiming for?
There doesn't seem to be an exact science to measure the "most liked person" on tinder, but one guy managed to get 14,600 likes over 2 years, so if everything goes to plan, I'll at least beat his 6 month average of 3650 in one day!
I also have a personal mission to beat Jazz Egger who was featured in the article, "This Londoner says she is the most popular person on Tinder" so my goal is to have this Londoner (me) to be the most popular person on tinder (for a day). She claimed to have 5,400 matches in a year, which I'd love to beat in a day.
Given the amount of users that will see my profile and have to like it, for the 1st of April 2024, I am confident I will be the most liked person on tinder for that day. I'm going to track my likes via Google Analytics alongside running a script to count the amount of likes I have before April fools and the amount of likes before and after.
This april fools prank is a one-off and is not designed or intended to help me find a date, but I couldn't resist the opportunity to have a little fun.
- James 28/03/2024
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are you doing this?
Why not? This is a silly idea that I thought would be fun to try out!
How many likes do you expect to get?
I have no real idea, I'm expecting at least 3000, but it could easily go over 10,000.
Do you expect people to uninstall the extension?
I'm sure some people will, but I'm hoping that people will see the funny side of it.
Are you going to do this again?
I don't plan to! This is a one off gag.
Are you doing this for a date?
No, I'm doing this for a laugh.
Why is it your profile and not someone else's?
I did initially ask a british youtube prankster to see if they'd like to choose the profile, but they politely declined. Then my test account which was colin the caterpillar themed, got shadow-banned so I had to use my own account.
Are you just aiming to get likes from women?
Nope! I'm not discriminating, in my eyes, a like is a like.
How many people actually use LighterFuel?
I track how many active users I have via Google Analytics. This has proven to me to be the most reliable so it's the best way of measuring how many people use it. My analytics still vary from day to day, but I consistently have around 10,000 daily and around 110,000 monthly active users. I would like to note that not all these users will get the update in time for April Fools, but I'm hoping that the majority will.
What could make this prank go wrong?
From a technical point of view, it could easily just not work as planned due to unforeseen changes to the Tinder platform or I could get banned again which would hide my profile. If my users really don't want to like me, there are instructions on how to disable the prank in the extension popup.
