When Tinder co-founder Jonathan Badeen conceived of swiping right to like—and swiping left to pass on—potential matches, he created a gesture that upset the personality tests and matching algorithms that had defined an earlier era of online dating. Like sorting a deck of cards, it gamified interactions and encouraged gut reactions in a way that felt intuitive—and, when it resulted in a match, rewarding.

Swiping right and left has been adopted in apps far beyond online dating. Users can now swipe to buy clothes, make friends, learn languages, trade stocks, review messages, or even decide what pictures to delete. It’s become so pervasive that Gen Z now says “swipe right” and “swipe left” as linguistic code for “like” and “dislike”—revealing the staying power of a gesture that rewards rapid decision-making and distills myriad factors down to a binary question.