we show height. we won't let you filter it.

Height is, by some distance, the most argued-about number on the internet’s dating discourse. Whole threads, whole podcast episodes, whole categories of screenshot get built around it every few months. We’re not wading into that argument, and this isn’t a piece about what anyone should or shouldn’t want. It’s about a much narrower design question: what should a piece of software be allowed to do with that number, once you’ve told it.

Every dating app shows height somewhere. Only some let you filter by it — and the ones that do have quietly turned a physical trait into a search parameter, which sounds like a small UI decision and is actually a philosophical one, usually made by accident, by someone who needed a field for the settings page and reached for the easiest number on the form.

To be fair to the apps that built the filter: the request makes sense on its face. People want fewer matches that go nowhere, and a filter is the cheapest possible way to promise that — cheaper than actually improving how people get introduced, certainly cheaper than asking anyone to write a sentence about why they’re interested. It’s a reasonable request, answered with the wrong tool.

What a filter actually does

A disclosed trait and a filterable one behave completely differently at scale. Disclosure means: here is a true thing about me, read it, decide what you make of it — the same way you would meeting someone at a friend’s dinner table. A filter means: this population gets sorted before anyone reads anything at all. One is a fact placed in front of a person. The other is an algorithm making the introduction decision on that person’s behalf, at a scale no dinner table ever operated at.

And once a system starts optimizing exposure around one number, it starts quietly producing the exact behaviour everyone complains about afterwards: pile-ups right at the “acceptable” line, dead zones just past it, and self-reported numbers on both sides drifting further from reality every year, because everyone’s now gaming a gate instead of just describing themselves. None of that is a personal failing. It’s what any sorting system does to any sortable field — which is the actual argument for having as few sortable fields as decently possible.

None of this is speculative — it’s the most-cited complaint about height on the apps that filter by it: profiles clustering suspiciously at round, favourable numbers, and a running joke about how a listed height and an in-person one rarely match. That’s not coincidence or a lot of bad luck. It’s what reliably happens once a number decides who gets seen at all.

The fields we didn’t build

Same logic killed the salary field and the caste field before either got anywhere near a spec document. Not because money or background don’t matter to people — they clearly do, to plenty of perfectly reasonable people — but because a dropdown for either turns a private, human, case-by-case judgment into a public, structural sorting mechanism. Some truths belong on a profile, for someone to read with actual context attached. None of them belong in a filter UI, where they’re read by nobody and applied to everybody.

So: height goes on every Iraada profile, honestly, because honesty about yourself is the deal here — it’s one of the seven decisions in how the app works. There is no filter, no range slider, no search parameter. Not because we think it shouldn’t matter to you, but because we don’t think a piece of software should be the one deciding, on your behalf and at population scale, that it does.

We did consider softer versions — a filter that only widens a range, never narrows it, or one visible to the profile owner but not actually enforced. Every version we tried still ended up teaching people to optimize a number instead of writing a better prompt. So we stopped trying to make the filter safe and left it out entirely.

This costs us something, and we knew that going in. There’s a real number of people who’d prefer the filter and will go find an app that has one — that’s a fair trade, made on purpose, not an oversight we’re explaining away. What’s left, we’d argue, is a slightly more honest room: you’ll find out the way you would in person, from a person, at the point where it can actually be a conversation instead of a gate.