Guidelines

Practical pointers for getting good calls and staying matchable.

Rule 1 is “don't be a dick”, covered in the ethos. The rest is practical stuff: how to get good calls, how not to get downvoted, and what to do when the queue's quiet.

Actually talk. The fastest way to collect downvotes is sitting on a call in silence. If you don't feel like speaking right now, that's fine. Just don't queue up. The other person joined to have a conversation.
One person on the mic, no background music. The other person signed up for a one-to-one, not a surprise group chat with whoever else is in the room and not a call fighting through whatever you've got playing. It tanks the audio quality and most people will just skip.
Set your interests and write a short bio. Both land in your partner's chat the moment you connect. The matcher also uses both to pair you with people you'll actually click with.
Your bio isn't a dating profile. ‘Horny’ and ‘single’ tell the next person nothing about you and everything about why to skip. Write something they could actually start a conversation from.
Give it a minute. First impressions through a microphone are weird. A lot of the best calls start awkward and warm up after thirty seconds. Try not to skip on the first pause.
About the gender filter. It's earned, not automatic. New accounts have it locked, and it opens up once you've had a few good calls and picked up some positive ratings (which keeps the site from being used as a skip-until-I-find-a-woman machine). Once it's yours, set it once and the queue respects it. Skipping every match until you get the gender you want isn't a filter, it's just bad for everyone: the person you skipped gets cut after two seconds with no idea why, and the ratio doesn't magically shift because you wanted it to. Right now the queue skews male; if your preference is rare, widen the filter or come back at a different hour. If you've set a preference and still nothing's matching, the person you'd pair with is usually already on a call rather than missing from the site.
Rapid skipping gets slowed down. Bail out of call after call in the first few seconds and the site starts dragging your re-queue out, up to a few minutes of it. Skipping that fast almost always means someone's hunting for one particular kind of person and treating everyone else as a turnstile, and people can feel when they're being skipped that quickly. Have one proper conversation and it resets.
Use the rating buttons honestly. Thumbs up for a good chat, thumbs down for a bad one, block for someone you don't want to see again. The whole matching system runs on these; the more honestly people use them, the better the queue gets for everyone.
If you wouldn't say it to someone's face, don't say it through a mic. Anonymity isn't a costume for being a worse version of yourself.

Where You Sit on the Ladder

Every account carries a quiet reputation score that shifts depending on how your calls go. Positive ratings push you up; thumbs-down and blocks push you down. Skipping someone in the first couple of seconds counts as a poor call too. The ladder has a good number of rungs, from the bottom (which you really don't want to see) to the top (which takes sustained good conversation to reach). New accounts start in the middle.

Build enough of a reputation and a small star appears next to your name for everyone you talk to, rising as you climb. Slip below the starting point and it disappears: nobody sees how far you dropped, it just stops showing until you recover.

Your position feeds directly into the matching queue. The higher you go, the better and faster your matches get. The lower you sink, the quieter things get. Be someone people want to keep talking to and the site gets better for you.