for context an NPS score is basically the answer to a single question about how likely you are to recommend a service or product to someone else, it’s used in marketing to gauge the success of said product or service.

So let my start by saying, this is admittedly a very dark thought and is going to expose some of my pathological thinking, but hear me out:

I’m a very insecure woman, so I completely understand the women who post selfies on subreddits like /r/truerateme and want to know what their “score” is. This is admittedly a very toxic practice that elevates the opinions of toxic men’s opinions, because of the insecurity, we refuse to accept positive feedback and that leads to thinking the negative feedback is somehow more objective or true.

Anyway, in the world of Tinder where people are actually out there getting accepted or rejected, I can’t help but wonder why society hasn’t implemented some kind of NPS score for humans. Credit reporting companies do this with a credit score, I guess - but I was thinking more about how attractive someone is, or how valuable they are on a “dating market”.

Tinder could easily expand a profile to include metrics, like Airbnb or Uber does with ratings. It seems like an inevitable progression of the way our society views and treats relationships and dating as transactional and marketized. (And in a sense this is what happened with the Tea app, though that was more like a safety tool for women, it still created a context in which men in particular were rated based on how previous dates went.)

Maybe Materialists is just stuck in my brain, but I am genuinely surprised the feature doesn’t already exist (or does it and I don’t know - I’ve never been on a dating app).

Another way this idea is human-NPS-score idea is super toxic is that it assumes attraction or tastes are objective - that someone is only attractive or valuable in some objective sense that anyone can see or that there is social consensus about.

Instead the reality is that how attractive someone is varies incredibly on an individual basis, but even between cultures (and over time).

Still, maybe I’m just broken, but I think I would pay money to know what my human NPS score is.

(Probably it would be worsened by this post, tbh. I shouldn’t have written this. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.)