People is complicated and we contradict ourselves all the time. But I think that sometimes dating apps might be deceiving. I mean, you have the illusion of transparency, but in fact there is an algorythm that decides who can see you and who you can see. So your actual choices are limited by that.
There is still some use to them, but in a way you need to "game" it. As if you were optimizing a character build for D&D (Did you played or did I imagine that?). Anyway, you can min-max the profile and play with the different features.
Codders use labbels and key words to build their algorythms, so choosing well might improve how many times you appear in searches (I use this at linkedin and works well). Most people swipe based on pictures, but nothing prevents you from "adding" clues or information on those pictures. The most common example is a picture with a pet. But the right T-shirt might show things like humors sense of tastes.
I don't think that women swipe only on "Mr handsome", but many times we do swipe on "generalizations". I mean, we "project" our beliefs on others. Consider this, I swiped left on people who had certain books as favourites because after years being a nerd I had associated certain personality traits on the people who had that book as favourite and those traits were incompatible with me. Might have been wrong? maybe, I would never know. Do you think that they thought I swiped left based on a book? I doubt it. They probably thought it was about looks or income. Incidently, I also swiped right based on books, comics, TV shows and music selection. Sometimes didn't worked anyway, but I did have a conversation starter.
Ultimately, we don't really know why someone swipes left because they won't tell us. And we can only know why they swipe right if they choose to tell us. But that is not important, what we do know is that people is looking and that if we make it easier for them to see who we are, we increase the chances that someone who might like us doesn't pass us because they "don't know" or make wrong assumptions.
