Discover is fifteen people a day now
Discover used to be endless. Swipe, swipe, swipe, and there was always another card, which is exactly how you end up having looked at two hundred people and remembered none of them. It’s now a fixed batch each day. Fifteen profiles, ranked once in the morning, frozen until midnight. When you finish them, that’s the day.
What changed
Fifteen a day, frozen
Your batch is dealt once and does not reshuffle. Refresh all you like — the same people, in the same order, until midnight.
You can see why somebody is there
Each profile carries short chips: same jurisdiction, same faith level, two shared languages, liked you.
The counter is honest
It shows where you are in today’s fifteen, and a slot is spent whether you like someone or pass on them.
Why put a limit on it at all
Because an infinite feed is a slot machine and we did not want to build one. The endless version optimises for the next card, and the next card is always cheaper to look at than the current one is to read. People swipe faster, read less, and message worse — and on an app this size, burning through the community in a fortnight is a real risk rather than a theoretical one.
Fifteen is enough that a session feels worthwhile and small enough that reading a profile properly is the rational thing to do. If you like somebody, you have not just passed up a hundred alternatives; you have used one of fifteen.
It also makes the app finishable, which sounds trivial and is not. “Done for today” is a much healthier ending than “I got bored”.
What the ranking actually looks at
Hard filters first: your stated preferences, their stated preferences, distance, age. Nobody gets into your batch who has ruled you out or whom you have ruled out — with one deliberate exception, explained below.
Then a ranking over what is left. Somebody who has already liked you goes near the front, because a mutual match sitting unnoticed in position forty is the single most wasteful thing a dating app can do. After that: shared jurisdiction and parish tradition, similar answers on faith and intentions, shared languages, overlapping interests, proximity, recent activity and profile completeness.
There’s also a fatigue term. If the same person has appeared in several of your batches and you have neither liked nor passed, they slide down. The first sighting is never penalised, though — an early version docked people the moment you reloaded the page, which meant the profile you were halfway through reading sank while you read it.
- Liked you already: near the front, always.
- Same jurisdiction, similar faith practice, same stated intentions.
- Shared languages and interests, weighted by how unusual the overlap is.
- Distance inside your radius, and how recently they were active.
The one deliberate exception
Some profiles in the directory are seeded rather than active members. Those are ordered strictly behind real members everywhere in the ranking, so a live person always comes first.
They are also exempt from the mutual-preference filter, for a boring reason: their preferences are defaults nobody chose, and applying a default age ceiling would have emptied the feed for anybody past it. Filtering on a preference that was never actually stated is worse than not filtering at all.
Why it stopped changing every time you refreshed
The first version of this shuffled on every page load. Members told us, in exactly these words, that refreshing showed a new person every time — which is maddening when you are halfway through reading somebody.
The batch is now dealt on the server and stored, along with the reason chips and the distance, at the moment it is dealt. Reloading re-reads that record instead of re-ranking. The only thing resolved fresh is whether the person has liked you since, because that can change during the day and you should see it.
One thing that looks like a bug and is not: after you like or pass somebody, the counter can appear to restart. Everyone you have decided on is filtered out server-side, so the batch you come back to legitimately begins at the first person you have not seen.
The bug this uncovered
While testing the limit we found something genuinely bad. The Pass and Like buttons were rendered inside the animated card, so when an exit animation stalled, the button could still be holding a reference to the previous profile while the counter moved on. Five taps, one person, five slots gone.
Fixed: both actions now read the live profile rather than whatever was captured when the card mounted, passes are de-duplicated, and a like that names a photo the current profile does not own is refused outright. Five taps now decide five different people, which is what it always looked like it was doing.
Since this was published
The free batch is no longer fifteen. It is three profiles a day. Everything else described above is unchanged: the batch is still dealt once, still frozen until midnight Eastern, still ranked the same way, and a slot is still spent on a decision rather than on a like.
Three is a much smaller number and we would rather say so plainly than let this post quietly go out of date. The reasoning in “Why put a limit on it at all” is the reasoning that took it down: if the point of a batch is that reading a profile properly is the rational thing to do, then the batch should be small enough that you actually do it. A subscription lifts the cap.
Try it