No, it stems from the imbalance in demographics. If a man and woman both swipe right on 100 people, she'll get a lot more matches than he will.

The only thing she can do differently is swipe right less, and then you're going to have guys complaining that they hardly ever get a match. They'll only be swiping on 9's and 10's. If your personality is doing all the heavy lifting, this would make dating sites unusable.

OP posted a comment shortly after the post. He sent out a total of 300 likes and got 40 responses.

Apparently this site only lets you send 8 likes per day.

The numbers game is when the guy puts out hundreds of low effort attempts per week. Limiting how many likes people can use is the opposite of that.

It's certainly better than starting with "hi there".

And opening with a question seems like a good start, I would try some without that and see if your response rate drops significantly.

I think it especially helps if the question is something about them, people love talking about themselves.

That would have more to do with the matches. Which was 40 out of 300.

Response rate is more likely tied to how well he started the conversation.

Being attractive helps, but people place too much importance on that, and not enough on things like not being boring.