The methodology shows the position of power that companies collecting data inevitably leverage:
Tinder doesn't supply any statistics or analytics about member usage so I had to collect this data myself. The most important data I needed was the percent of men that these females tended to “like”. I collected this data by interviewing females who had “liked” a fake Tinder profile I set up. I asked them each several questions about their Tinder usage while they thought they were talking to an attractive male who was interested in them. Lying in this way is ethically questionable at best (and highly entertaining), but, unfortunately I had no other way to get the required data.
Put yourself in situations where the people you’re attracted to have to spend a fair amount of time talking with you. Initial snap judgements can be overcome after a few hours of interaction. You probably won’t be able to date a celebrity this way (although if you live in LA and work in the film industry, I will adjust my probabilities) — but you can absolutely meet and date attractive people that way.
(Why’d you edit out your question? I thought it was interesting!)
Thanks, I briefly considered consulting the HN hive mind for alternatives that were not "wasting [...] time" but chose to avoid going off the rails as coming anywhere near "dating tips" often has here in the past. Didn't mean to leave you hanging like that... I guess I need to spend a bit more time before clicking 'add comment' on rising stories.
My personal recommendation sounds like a specific subset of yours -- meet people by volunteering, expecting to learn from rejection as the initiator. In-person interaction can overcome the specific shortfall that is the primary topic of this discussion - getting/giving(!) a chance orthogonally to attractiveness. The volunteering bit provides a framework for shared direction and is beneficial well beyond meeting strangers (don't volunteer solely to start relationships!). This comment covered some caveats: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16041801
I wonder if the results hold when you're a man looking for other men? I've heard anecdotes from queer friends that online dating apps give them tons of potential dates and hook-ups. I've personally had more success with women that I've met in person, but when I've looked for men on Tinder I've been much more likely to get a match than with women.
Probably true...I'm gay and have ~2500 matches on Tinder while being pretty discerning (I swipe right maybe 10% of the time). Also agree that if you are just looking for a "hookup" being gay makes it many times easier to do that.
Being gay these days pretty great, for many reasons. Almost all of my perceived downsides I felt growing up w.r.t social stigma/discrimination have been mostly eliminated in my day-to-day.
> I wonder if the results hold when you're a man looking for other men?
I had a gay roommate who was very active on Grindr. He was reasonably attractive. Essentially, he could meet another man within an hour if he wanted too.
If you are a guy with a less then average looking face and a hot body on Grindr for example you will get tons of messages to filter through. Just post pics of your body with your face somehow concealed. You will then get tons of messages each time you open the app where you can connect with the hottest prospects.
It's interesting as once those hot to attractive guys connect and chat with you a human connection is made and hooking up, becoming friends or becoming occasional sex buddies is highly likely.
Of course you need to show your face, so just send your best pics of yourself. I would say Im about average looking, but can take some above average looking pics.
On tinder you can find out with a simple change in your settings. Out of curiosity I found out that men are not nearly as picky as women in terms of the initial match. Nobody hounded me on chat though.
Anecdotally, I don’t think this is true. I was married just before Tinder became a thing, but I have several friends in their mid-to-late twenties who did and still do use it. I know three people who used it to meet their future wives, all of whom are maybe slightly above average attractiveness, and one friend who is frankly very far below average, but has slept with dozens of women (I believe over 50 at this point) by using it. I’m not suggesting any of that is good, bad, whatever, but there are at least four counterexamples all of whom I’d say were happy with the results of using it.
>It was determined that the bottom 80% of men (in terms of attractiveness) are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men. The Gini coefficient for the Tinder economy based on “like” percentages was calculated to be 0.58. This means that the Tinder economy has more inequality than 95.1% of all the world’s national economies.
95%?
So there's still a chance! Men are not going to give up that easily.
No citation needed.
Also his sample size of 27 and self-reporting makes this not very rigorous(?).
I noticed that tinder-attractiveness is very relative. I have virtually no chance to find a date on Tinder in France whereas it's reasonably easy in NYC. And in some places in Asia I'm hugely popular. Overall, regular dating sites always work better than Tinder. I think it's because Tinder is more for casual encounters and a woman can afford to be picky if that's what she's looking for. The supply of men looking for casual encounters is far superior than the demand.
> I have virtually no chance to find a date on Tinder in France whereas it's reasonably easy in NYC
This has most likely has nothing to do with Tinder itself but with being from a different country. Especially the French accent is very appealing to American women and being tall (which, as a Westerner, you probably are) is a big plus in Asia. You could walk into any bar and meet women.
I'm gonna assume you're a heterosexual male. NYC is one of the worst market for heterosexual women, because 1. they outnumber guys by a significant amount 2. NYC is very gay friendly, so homosexual males are overrepresented.
I have personally observed this difference even in meatspace.
In general the word "females" makes me think of Ferengi and redpillers in a very off-putting way, but maybe it's normal in the academic econ literature.
And this language policing reminds me of antifa extremism in an also off putting way - but why mention if if not to speculate on a potentially insulting label?
Maybe - could just be an oversight; he definitely uses the neutral "males" and "females" in most of the article.
But the whole men/females usage seems to get a lot of representation among men who have novel theories about interaction of the sexes in general and how women should be required by law to have sex with them specifically.
Not really, calling women females is a strong signal that a the speaker sees them as part of their outgroup. And because it's not openly stigmatized yet people will say it casually -- you couldn't ask for a better bright line that says "don't date me".
Huh, good to know that the term female can be interpreted in a negative light. In my mind, it is fairly neutral, same as male vs. man. I normally use it when I mean to include both younger girls and adult women.
I always attributed the use of "female" and "male" in non-scientific speech to the polic-i-fication of general society. Use of these words in daily speech used to be rare until the TV show cops came about. "BOLOT for white male ages 20-25 with blue jeans and a white T-shirt". Also smacked to me of greater police contact in a captive population where mannerisms of the higher status police being copied by those subjugated.
Totally my opinion and could be completely off-base, but seems to ring true to me.
It's noticeable because it's a surface feature (it's the color of the bikeshed), but it's consistent with the article's whole attitude: this is a man studying females on behalf of men (explicitly; see intro paragraph). In that context, I find the word choice unsurprising.
This is just empirically false, I'm wondering where they made the error. Are they excluding the way that the algorithm matches people? So that if you're in the bottom X% men you're eventually only shown to corresponding bottom X% girls, so that it doesn't feel like you have the low success rate that you would do vs the general population.
That's true, but I'm sure there's also an ordering algorithm that optimizes for engagement (i.e. it'll show you people with high scoring profiles first if you haven't been on the app in a while)
One of the problems with Tinder is its nebulous ethos. Is it a dating app or is it a hookup app? It seems to pretend that it's both without committing to either one, which muddies the water and I don't think that works terribly well.
Tinder is brilliant in that it focuses entirely on vanity, ego, and lust, far more so than any of its predecessors. Thus, it has taken a large portion of the dating market away from sites like OKCupid, which had virtually nobody on it in the LA area when I last used it nearly a year ago. Once upon a time, I was an overweight nerd with no money, yet I somehow got dates through OKC. Those days are long gone.
The only alternative I can recommend is real life. Nothing beats it, and it's the only way you can know you aren't wasting your time. Go to meetups and actually talk to people and figure out how to improve when you screw up. Being able to get to know people, even if they don't end up being dates, is pretty awesome. It means actually having to grow as a person, but I would bet on a higher success rate than with any dating app/website.
All dating apps I know of are a joke. Bumble is hilarious because it actually makes an existing problem worse and sells that as a solution; women don't want hundreds of messages from random penises, and they're very unlikely to initiate a conversation.(i don't blame them) Match, Chemistry, PoF, and all those old-school sites are borderline scams that charge a fortune. Match will send you daily emails telling you how many likes(is it "winks"? i can't remember now.) you're getting, but none of that seems to manifest on the site itself. It's the ol' bait and switch.
I always had much better luck with online dating. At least on those sites you are reasonably certain they are available and wanting to date and/or hook up with people.
I went to a ton of meetups and group events in real life over the course of three years (and to a lesser extent for years before that), met a lot of women through that, but very few of them were either not in a relationship or emotionally available at the time (either too focused on their career, in an 'it's complicated' situation, going through crap with family, not very financially stable, waiting for their unicorn and would accept nothing less, etc). Many of these women I never saw with anyone or spoke about being with anyone over the course of many years in successive meetups.
To be fair, I was in a similar situation through a good chunk of my 20s when I was either working my butt off for startups or completely broke, so I understand.
But online dating was much less frustrating for me.
I've had similar experiences with group events. It's true that a lot of the women you meet are not available or looking for a relationship, which can be pretty frustrating when you meet someone you really like. So I definitely get you there.
Online dating does separate the wheat from the chaff in that sense, but I still find it more frustrating because there's far more competition I have to deal with and 99% of the time there's no return. When I'm in public with someone I find attractive, there's a high likelihood I can at least strike a conversation with them. Even if nothing comes of it, I gain experience. With online dating, I just get experience updating my profile and sending messages with almost no payoff.
It definitely works for some people. My best friend met his fiance on OKCupid years ago, and I've gotten multiple dates through it in the past, so I know that it can work. Whether the online dating sphere still functions properly is a different question, considering my online dating success decreased while my situation in life drastically improved, which makes no sense to me.
I'll add that I'm not particularly bothered by any of this. As you were in your 20s, I am at a stage where the benefits of dating don't outweigh the benefits of focusing on my craft until I can reach a certain threshold.
My girlfriend I've been with for the past two and a half years I met through OKCupid as well. Honestly OKCupid is the only site I've ever had any luck with for online dating, the rest have been pretty much useless.
> I went to a ton of meetups and group events in real life over the course of three years (and to a lesser extent for years before that), met a lot of women through that, but very few of them were either not in a relationship or emotionally available at the time
Don't go to events and activities looking for love. Go to events and activities looking for interesting people to get to know and be friends with - and let them be a filter of "Hey, I know someone you should meet" when they know you're single. Similarly, if you have friends who've never met but who are single and have similar interests, don't be afraid to introduce them to each other.
It wasn't specifically looking for love, I was mainly trying to get out of my shell and meet more people. I made a ton of friends from it, more than I can keep up with, and some of my closest friends today came from that period of time, so it was still very valuable. But I was also hoping it would help my dating prospects and it didn't seem to help much with that.
Do some of the people you've met that way know you're single and looking? There may even be 1-2 people that strike you as "this person knows everyone" or even "I think X hangs out with the kind of people I'd like to meet."
I'm not actually single and looking anymore. I've been dating my current girlfriend for the past two and a half years, who I met on OKCupid. Also I was sorta kinda that 'person who knows everyone', or at least as much as anyone was. I went to a lot of meetups across many different groups that interested me. I ended up being the organizer for one of them.
OkCupid, Match.com, Chemistry.com, PlentyOfFish, and Tinder are all owned by the same company. They like to hide that fact and pretend they're all separate entities to end users, but it's true. Some of them were once separate, then purchased later, but Tinder was part of them from the very beginning. So they're not really "losing" users, just shuffling them around from site to site.
Yikes, I knew that OKC, Match, and Chemistry were owned by the same company, but I had no idea they'd become such a monopoly. Thanks for enlightening us!
You can pretty much chart the downfall of OkCupid as a result of selling out to Match. When it was a sort of overgrown hobby project run by a couple of data geeks, it was fun. (Hell, even if you weren't necessarily interested in, or comfortable with the idea of, "online dating", the extensive quizzes were a great signup engine.)
When the founders sold to Match, and presumably also got less involved in the day-to-day, suddenly I stopped hearing anything good about it anymore. I can't personally vouch for it, being out of the market at the time, but it went from being a pretty reliable recommendation that I'd often hear friends talking about, to quickly developing a reputation for having a high creep factor, lots of low-effort and fake profiles, etc.
As with many businesses, I think the demand for growth uber alles killed it. If they had been content being a niche service, they would have survived and served that niche well. But too few businesses (especially startups that get sold) are allowed to do that; their management requires they either shoot the moon or burn up trying.
In particular, I think there is a solid niche for an OKC-like dating site that actively rejects "mobile first" low-word-count design in favor of the desktop (check your messages when you get home, no "swiping" from the shitter, etc.), emphasizes profiles with lots of information and underlying data to construct matches on something other than photos, and basically serves a very literate demographic. Basically OKC circa 2004. Though today, a modern version would also need tools to aggressively block users that are abusive or just plain "creepy", because there's an Eternal September aspect to the Internet today that didn't really exist back then, that you'd need to combat -- spam-type adaptive filters would probably do the job ('is this spam' is a pretty vague question for a machine, so is 'is this creepy', but you could teach the filters over time given a good dataset and feedback mechanism).
As almost average looking guy living in Baltimore I found Match.com to be the best dating app and worth the money. I at least had one date a month with average looking women. POF was 2nd while Eharmony was the worst.
Though in 2010 to about 2014 Christian Mingle was the best as there weren't many guys on it and I dated a dozen average to attractive looking women in a few months. Not many use it like before as they didnt jump to mobile quick enough.
I got married to someone I met on match, been married for 10 years. My coz is in a long term relationship with someone he met on tinder. Your mileage may vary...
"The only alternative I can recommend is real life. Nothing beats it.."
The problem I have with meeting people from "real life" is that they're mostly random people that I usually have little to nothing in common with.
At least on some dating sites I can list my interests, and the people who reply can self-select to have some or even many of these things in common with me.
There are almost certainly hacker meetups or groups in your area that you can attend. My computer science teacher is currently hooking up with someone he met that way ;)
Being a member of my local lug, this is the very last place most males will find anything other than a lot of other nerdy males. Which is cool, but it's a horrible way to hook up. Your odds get really bad.
And as someone else pointed out, it's a great way to drive off women. The last thing a woman wants it to be gawked at by 16 men because they're looking for that nerdy girl. So they stop coming and you end up with the original situation, where it's 16 nerdy guys
Behavior like this is why there’s rampant sexual harassment in places that should ostensibly be about something other than hooking up. I would recommend going to hacker meet ups to hack, and going elsewhere like a bar or club to look for a hookup.
Bars or Clubs are for people who like drinking and dancing. It's very unlikely that you will randomly find someone there who shares meaningful interests.
Is this a discussion about finding people to date, or to hang out with? If it’s just about expanding your social network then you’re right, bars are bad unless your shared interests are drinking and dancing. But it seemed as if this thread was suggesting using social situations that aren’t about dating to find people to date.
It doesn't have to be exclusively one or the other.
It's like you are blaming people for having "impure intentions".
Lots of things are like that.
People who go to a local food event go there to eat food but also they know they are going to meet some people that they may like, at least for some people that's a part of the motivation too.
There's a definitive stigma to attending events just to hook up with people. Our local Reddit NYC meetup group actively keeps an eye for people who appear to be doing this, because they keep showing up.
And the problem isn't that they're looking for someone to date; the problem is that they're not at all invested in the group - and if you go to any group with only the intention of picking up a date, that's the vibe you'll throw off as well, and you'll be unwelcome there.
> The problem I have with meeting people from "real life" is that they're mostly random people that I usually have little to nothing in common with.
"Real life" doesn't have to work that way. Do you enjoy cycling? Board games? Chess? Knitting? Great -- go out and do those things with other people! Unlike with an online dating checklist, those people probably won't be faking those interests, so you'll actually have something in common.
Mutual activities is a single factor in dating someone. Do they like sex? Do they want children? Do they want a house with a picket fence, or do they want to live nomadically? Do their political interests align with yours? Are they messy, or are they neat freaks? Etc ad nauseam
Question-based dating sites match people on these criteria. That’s impossible to do with someone you meet at a bar.
I haven't been in the online dating game for awhile, but I found the list of checkboxes more useful in theory than in practice. Even when people didn't lie or mislead in their profiles, which they often did, I got a better idea of compatibility from a short in-person meeting than a lengthy written description.
And bars are a terrible place to meet people, unless you want to meet people who enjoy hanging out in bars. Mutual activities often correlate with similar personality traits, and are enjoyable ways to spend time together.
> The problem I have with meeting people from "real life" is that they're mostly random people that I usually have little to nothing in common with.
What meeting people in real life means is basically just getting on with your life and doing things that interest you. Like comics? Go to a comic shop. Fascinated by chainmail bikinis? Start spending time at Renaissance Faires - or learn to make them and build a community around yourself. Enjoy mountain biking? Go biking, then go grab coffee or drinks with some other people doing the same. Don't focus on doing these activities to meet potential romantic partners - do them to have fun because you enjoy them and meet other people who enjoy the same things. Don't expect those people to be possible partners, expect them to be friends or acquaintances and to be people through whom you may meet a possible romantic interest.
To quote Ben Carson, "I don't have facts to back this up," but I feel pretty sure that a huge percentage of relationships come from either having some common activity (e.g. "high school," "college," "coworker") or from knowing someone in common (e.g. "friend's brother/sister/other friend").
The one thing I can pretty much guarantee for you is that sitting at home and hoping for a date with an interesting delivery person (or service person if something goes out) is not going to be a successful approach - and if you're that delivery or service person instead, remember that asking out someone whose home or office you've just gone to would be just as creepy as being hit on by the people you've been sent to.
"Don't focus on doing these activities to meet potential romantic partners - do them to have fun because you enjoy them and meet other people who enjoy the same things."
I can't disagree with this enough.
If you want a job, are you going to continue going to the activities you've always been going to and hoping to meet someone that gives you work?
If you want an apartment to live in, are you going to go to the same activities you've been going to and hope that someone there is a landlord?
Maybe you would. But most people would check a jobs site or a rental site. Why would romantic relationships be any different?
> most people would check a jobs site or a rental site. Why would romantic relationships be any different?
That is absolutely a viable approach, and it's one that works for a lot of people. In fact, the two of us have just described "searching for jobs" vs "networking for jobs."
My point though was not so much to do those things to find a partner, but to get out and do things. Part of what you're looking for is not just relationships but (possibly) higher-quality relationships found through people who will vouch for those they're introducing.
For different people "Our matching algorithms say you're an 80% match with this person" vs "Hey, I know someone you should meet" will have different levels of credibility and acceptance.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-35535424 has some stats, and in particular the 'how couples met their romantic partners' graphs. Even back in 2009, for heterosexual couples "through friends" was 30% and falling, with "at a bar/restaurant" and "online" taking up most of the rest and other options including college/coworkers all in steep decline. So I dunno that the stats are entirely behind you, especially if you consider likely changes since 2009. (Maybe there are more recent figures out there.)
I think this has become increasingly infeasible over the past decade due to the rise of social media and internet usage.
People have become very picky with very short attention spans (scroll through feeds, swipe left/right, filter people on dating apps based on very specific attributes, etc).
Also to a large degree "locality" benefits (and limitations) have faded. 10-20 years ago people didn't have access to such a seemingly infinite pool of people. It was more limited to the people around them (people likely to visit the same pubs and coffee shops and events and so on).
I don't think young people today have the patience to "invest" in getting to know random people like that anymore.
Instead of spending days and weeks with someone only to find out that they don't match well together, they go through 300 profiles and talk to 5 of "the best" ones out of that pool.
And often times there's lots of information packed in social media that they can pick up quickly (politics, job, education, culture, etc). It would take much longer to pick up that stuff in organic real world interactions because people don't quiz each other like that.
The one key problem is that if your preferred partner is themselves a homebody with mostly-asocial interests, you’re unlikely to meet them by going out, because they aren’t going out. Meeting people in real life implicitly filters for extroverts (and introverts with a lot of willpower to burn being temporarily social.)
> One of the problems with Tinder is its nebulous ethos. Is it a dating app or is it a hookup app?
That's a feature, not a bug. For many/most people, there's not a strict binary division. Dates can turn into hookup and hookups can turn into real relationships. I know multiple friends in long-term relationships which started as Tinder hookups.
This. I've been dating someone I met through tinder for two years now. It's started out as friends with benefits and evolved into a relationship where we are planning our future together.
Data point of 1: probably 70% of the people I match with on bumble initiate a conversation. I think I'm slightly above average in terms of attractiveness
> One of the problems with Tinder is its nebulous ethos.
It's not a really a problem though because people can indicate for themselves in their profiles, either explicitly or implicitly, what type of relationship they are looking for; it can be different things for different people.
> Tinder is brilliant in that it focuses entirely on vanity, ego, and lust, far more so than any of its predecessors.
But I think that misses the main appeal of Tinder, which is that once you match with someone you basically have an invitation to start a conversation with them, and hence are less likely to be wasting your time (or someone else's). IIRC, on other sites, you can simply message any random user and thus are much more likely to spend time messaging someone who has absolutely no interest in you.
> It's not a really a problem though because people can indicate for themselves in their profiles, either explicitly or implicitly, what type of relationship they are looking for; it can be different things for different people.
In my anecdotal experience (which means feel free take with a handful of salt), it never really worked out that way. I've gone on dates via Tinder where a profile explicitly stated "no hookups" or something to that effect that did, indeed, turn into hookups.
Also, and this is the more obvious thing, I think, is that a dating platform designed to not require you to actually read a profile before deciding if you're interested isn't going to be the ideal place for stating "preferences". Hence, my anecdotal experience.
i would advise against meetup.com for most people depending on your city. It's filled with 45+ year year olds. Among the younger meetups, its going to 9 guys - 1 girl ratio. The guys are typically all out-of-shape and awkward nerdy types and the the one girl will be similar to them too.
> One of the problems with Tinder is its nebulous ethos.
That's a "feature".
It makes it mainstream enough for people to be there without being embarrassed or ashamed.
Then people can turn it into more of a dating thing or a hookup thing as they prefer.
Few people would want to publicly create a profile on "just-here-strictly-for-hookups.com".
That's also why a huge percentage of profiles, especially female ones, insist so strongly that they are not there for hookups. It's a facade and a bit of virtue signalling ("I'm not a slut like those other girls!").
I'm not much of a believer in real life. While I don't know about most people, I never joined hobbies to find a date until I realized I had to get serious about finding someone. Until that point, I just did whatever was most fun. If I was in a badminton league, it was purely because I wanted to play badminton.
So, when I started picking hobbies and going to events based on gender ratio first and fun second, it felt kinda awkward. I figured most people were like what I used to be. If they were in a badminton league, it was probably because they wanted to play badminton, not to get hit on by some guy.
On a dating website, everyone is at least in the same ballpark of expectations. It's straightforward. And, ultimately, it worked. I got engaged after 4 years with a great girl I met on OKC.
I don't think it's this simple. There are actually many women on Tinder.
The reality is women are creeped out by many men on dating sites and apps. If you don't believe me, go talk to some women and ask them about their experiences. Or go read the /r/creepypms subreddit, which isn't just concerned with online dating but shows you what women have to deal with online.
This pushes them towards only interacting with the most attractive and witty men who create a sense of safety. Whether that sense of safety is false is up for debate, but I do think this is what drives a large amount of inequality in online dating. Men are generally not scared of or creeped out by women they interact with online, so their standards online are closer to their standards in real-life.
No idea if it's true, but a commonly heard thing is that most women are on Tinder not with the intention of ever meeting someone via it, instead they (consciously or subconsciously( use it as an ego boost.
I also know two women who do exactly that. No man I know is on Tinder etc. for boosting his ego. The odds are incredibly stacked against men, even if the male/female ratio is even.
I feel like the methodology has a lot of flaws that makes the error bars so large as to make the actual numbers in this study useless:
1. Small sample size
2. Inactive profiles
3. These apps actually adjust the profiles you see based on your attractiveness level. I know they at least categorize attractiveness because I've had this experience when Bumble seemingly had a bug where I would suddenly get a ton of profiles that were clearly super-attractive people, then get a bunch of profiles that were clearly the exact opposite (no profile images, dark or random pictures, and :ahem: not so conventionally attractive people).
However, the general point stands: The majority of women will like a minority of men on these apps. As such, as a man, if you want to make this work for you, the basic strategy is to get as highly attractive pictures of you as possible (professional if you can) and pictures of you doing various interesting activities (as opposed to just vanity shots). Then, keep swiping right and follow up on all matches. But don't make this your only source of meeting women, as others suggested, spend a lot of time in places where you can meet women in real life.
I find it interesting how many people on this site accept the natural gender imbalances between men and women when it comes to dating, yet don't believe these differences extend beyond relationships into things like career choice or leadership seeking tendencies. Why do you think this is?
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I just warn you to remember the downfall of "People you may know" ... if there's somebody that I have 500 mutual friends with, theres a good chance I know them and am not a friend for a reason.
Its more about actual intimacy because harder to find a connection using Tinder because communication is first about building up intimacy whereas people you may know tend to have more of an earlier connection.
Any guy who complains about their attractiveness being the limiting factor is relying too much on that. I've got a friend who is a handsome guy but is not "hot" and he's basically a hobbit, but he's gone on half a dozen or more dates trough Tinder and has no problem matching and talking to women because he's a funny and considerate and talented guy and it is obvious.
If you're having trouble with matches, maybe you aren't very interesting, or you don't signal it in the right way. Quit complaining and get to work.
It doesn't specify that "attractiveness" is limited only to physical appearance. It defines attractiveness based solely on what portion of women swipe right, so by that definition your friend would probably qualify as above average attractiveness.
This seems to go against the popular notion that men tend to value visual signals of attractiveness, whereas women tend to value non-visual signals of attractiveness.
It's been a long time since I took Psych 101. Does anyone know, has this idea ever been discredited, from a statistical standpoint?
I guess the discrepancy could also be caused by selection effects, i.e. what kind of people use Tinder, and/or what frame of mind are they in when they use it.
The sheer conventional-ness of that idea makes me doubt it (but I don’t know of any data one way or the other), but the article doesn’t strongly contradict or support the idea that women tend to be interested in “non-physical” attributes. There are visual signals of wealth/socio-economic status that you can send with a picture as well. All you need to posit is that there is some kind of attractiveness signaling you can do with a photo, and then the next step (not taken here) is to figure out what that is.
"Researchers at Griffith University in Queensland examined what factors most influenced female attraction to males and found that physical strength reigned supreme.
"After surveying 150 women, they concluded that they could almost predict how attractive a man was based on three things: how physically strong he looks, how tall he is and how lean he is..."
Does Tinder catalyze any real life hookups at all? At best it's an awkward chat. Over here it's simply fake profiles (I'm a man, looking for a woman). Various creeps, scammers, "researchers" fishing for god knows what. The profiles are insolent - one profile photo no description, photo of a computer screen, "I'm lost, new in the city, show me around" descriptions. It's quite obvious that there is no woman behind the profile. The few "real" profiles are oftentimes connected with Instagram profile - coverage of the person's gym/professional activities, the profile is basically part of person's online brand/presence and in this case the real life hookup is not the goal either.
In my experience it definitely leads to dates, hookups and relationships. While there will be the occasional fake profile or someone who tries to boost their instagram account, it‘s rather rare in my area and easy to distinguish from users with actual dating intentions, regardless of how serious they are.
I've met plenty of couples who met on tinder, so it does for sure. If you're having a bunch of awkward chats, I dunno, look up some example chats on reddit and see if that's different than what you're doing or if you just perceive all chats as awkward.
I have an idea for a new twist on a dating site that I don't have the time/energy to write... if anyone is interested in working on this PM me and we can discuss. Bonus if you live in Denver/Boulder area.
So people can’t be bothered to pm me yet I should toss out a side project idea I can just as easily crank out in my own should I decide too? And I’m downvotes because I prefer to keep this private? Fucking unreal.
Yes. What does the fact you could do it on your own matter? You can't be bothered to even describe your idea. Why should anyone care to pm You? You never said you wanted to keep it private, you explicitly said your couldn't be bothered to describe it...
By making the opportunity purposefully vague, only those who are extremely open to the opportunity (or desperate) would send a PM. Not sure if it ever works, but the internet is a big place.
“the bottom 80% of men (in terms of attractiveness) are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men.”
Female sexual selection is a powerful force that creates the male dominance hierarchy.
>Tinder doesn't supply any statistics or analytics about member usage so I had to collect this data myself. The most important data I needed was the percent of men that these females tended to “like”. I collected this data by interviewing females who had “liked” a fake Tinder profile I set up. I asked them each several questions about their Tinder usage while they thought they were talking to an attractive male who was interested in them. Lying in this way is ethically questionable at best (and highly entertaining), but, unfortunately I had no other way to get the required data.
Unreliable conclusions derived from unreliable "data" that was obtained unethically (and probably illegally; did the pictured guys knew their picture was being used?).
131 comments
[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 193 ms ] threadTinder doesn't supply any statistics or analytics about member usage so I had to collect this data myself. The most important data I needed was the percent of men that these females tended to “like”. I collected this data by interviewing females who had “liked” a fake Tinder profile I set up. I asked them each several questions about their Tinder usage while they thought they were talking to an attractive male who was interested in them. Lying in this way is ethically questionable at best (and highly entertaining), but, unfortunately I had no other way to get the required data.
Netflix's recently released (Dec 29) Black Mirror season 4 episode 4 "[explored] Tinder and Siri-like technologies": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hang_the_DJ_(Black_Mirror)
(Why’d you edit out your question? I thought it was interesting!)
My personal recommendation sounds like a specific subset of yours -- meet people by volunteering, expecting to learn from rejection as the initiator. In-person interaction can overcome the specific shortfall that is the primary topic of this discussion - getting/giving(!) a chance orthogonally to attractiveness. The volunteering bit provides a framework for shared direction and is beneficial well beyond meeting strangers (don't volunteer solely to start relationships!). This comment covered some caveats: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16041801
Being gay these days pretty great, for many reasons. Almost all of my perceived downsides I felt growing up w.r.t social stigma/discrimination have been mostly eliminated in my day-to-day.
I had a gay roommate who was very active on Grindr. He was reasonably attractive. Essentially, he could meet another man within an hour if he wanted too.
It's interesting as once those hot to attractive guys connect and chat with you a human connection is made and hooking up, becoming friends or becoming occasional sex buddies is highly likely.
Of course you need to show your face, so just send your best pics of yourself. I would say Im about average looking, but can take some above average looking pics.
95%?
So there's still a chance! Men are not going to give up that easily.
No citation needed.
Also his sample size of 27 and self-reporting makes this not very rigorous(?).
This has most likely has nothing to do with Tinder itself but with being from a different country. Especially the French accent is very appealing to American women and being tall (which, as a Westerner, you probably are) is a big plus in Asia. You could walk into any bar and meet women.
Surprisingly, I met an American woman, who was here to study for 2 months. She landed 4 days before we met.
She was way, way out of my league, both in attractiveness and social class. My English helped a lot. I also met several South American women too.
I'm gonna assume you're a heterosexual male. NYC is one of the worst market for heterosexual women, because 1. they outnumber guys by a significant amount 2. NYC is very gay friendly, so homosexual males are overrepresented.
I have personally observed this difference even in meatspace.
But the whole men/females usage seems to get a lot of representation among men who have novel theories about interaction of the sexes in general and how women should be required by law to have sex with them specifically.
Totally my opinion and could be completely off-base, but seems to ring true to me.
Tinder is brilliant in that it focuses entirely on vanity, ego, and lust, far more so than any of its predecessors. Thus, it has taken a large portion of the dating market away from sites like OKCupid, which had virtually nobody on it in the LA area when I last used it nearly a year ago. Once upon a time, I was an overweight nerd with no money, yet I somehow got dates through OKC. Those days are long gone.
The only alternative I can recommend is real life. Nothing beats it, and it's the only way you can know you aren't wasting your time. Go to meetups and actually talk to people and figure out how to improve when you screw up. Being able to get to know people, even if they don't end up being dates, is pretty awesome. It means actually having to grow as a person, but I would bet on a higher success rate than with any dating app/website.
All dating apps I know of are a joke. Bumble is hilarious because it actually makes an existing problem worse and sells that as a solution; women don't want hundreds of messages from random penises, and they're very unlikely to initiate a conversation.(i don't blame them) Match, Chemistry, PoF, and all those old-school sites are borderline scams that charge a fortune. Match will send you daily emails telling you how many likes(is it "winks"? i can't remember now.) you're getting, but none of that seems to manifest on the site itself. It's the ol' bait and switch.
I'm using dating apps for over 10 years now. Dated 3 women via them.
In "real life" I found 12 in that time.
But I still do it, every few years I get some nice surprises :)
I went to a ton of meetups and group events in real life over the course of three years (and to a lesser extent for years before that), met a lot of women through that, but very few of them were either not in a relationship or emotionally available at the time (either too focused on their career, in an 'it's complicated' situation, going through crap with family, not very financially stable, waiting for their unicorn and would accept nothing less, etc). Many of these women I never saw with anyone or spoke about being with anyone over the course of many years in successive meetups.
To be fair, I was in a similar situation through a good chunk of my 20s when I was either working my butt off for startups or completely broke, so I understand.
But online dating was much less frustrating for me.
Online dating does separate the wheat from the chaff in that sense, but I still find it more frustrating because there's far more competition I have to deal with and 99% of the time there's no return. When I'm in public with someone I find attractive, there's a high likelihood I can at least strike a conversation with them. Even if nothing comes of it, I gain experience. With online dating, I just get experience updating my profile and sending messages with almost no payoff.
It definitely works for some people. My best friend met his fiance on OKCupid years ago, and I've gotten multiple dates through it in the past, so I know that it can work. Whether the online dating sphere still functions properly is a different question, considering my online dating success decreased while my situation in life drastically improved, which makes no sense to me.
I'll add that I'm not particularly bothered by any of this. As you were in your 20s, I am at a stage where the benefits of dating don't outweigh the benefits of focusing on my craft until I can reach a certain threshold.
Don't go to events and activities looking for love. Go to events and activities looking for interesting people to get to know and be friends with - and let them be a filter of "Hey, I know someone you should meet" when they know you're single. Similarly, if you have friends who've never met but who are single and have similar interests, don't be afraid to introduce them to each other.
http://iac.com/brand/match-group
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Match_Group
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9884518
When the founders sold to Match, and presumably also got less involved in the day-to-day, suddenly I stopped hearing anything good about it anymore. I can't personally vouch for it, being out of the market at the time, but it went from being a pretty reliable recommendation that I'd often hear friends talking about, to quickly developing a reputation for having a high creep factor, lots of low-effort and fake profiles, etc.
As with many businesses, I think the demand for growth uber alles killed it. If they had been content being a niche service, they would have survived and served that niche well. But too few businesses (especially startups that get sold) are allowed to do that; their management requires they either shoot the moon or burn up trying.
In particular, I think there is a solid niche for an OKC-like dating site that actively rejects "mobile first" low-word-count design in favor of the desktop (check your messages when you get home, no "swiping" from the shitter, etc.), emphasizes profiles with lots of information and underlying data to construct matches on something other than photos, and basically serves a very literate demographic. Basically OKC circa 2004. Though today, a modern version would also need tools to aggressively block users that are abusive or just plain "creepy", because there's an Eternal September aspect to the Internet today that didn't really exist back then, that you'd need to combat -- spam-type adaptive filters would probably do the job ('is this spam' is a pretty vague question for a machine, so is 'is this creepy', but you could teach the filters over time given a good dataset and feedback mechanism).
Though in 2010 to about 2014 Christian Mingle was the best as there weren't many guys on it and I dated a dozen average to attractive looking women in a few months. Not many use it like before as they didnt jump to mobile quick enough.
The problem I have with meeting people from "real life" is that they're mostly random people that I usually have little to nothing in common with.
At least on some dating sites I can list my interests, and the people who reply can self-select to have some or even many of these things in common with me.
And as someone else pointed out, it's a great way to drive off women. The last thing a woman wants it to be gawked at by 16 men because they're looking for that nerdy girl. So they stop coming and you end up with the original situation, where it's 16 nerdy guys
It's like you are blaming people for having "impure intentions".
Lots of things are like that.
People who go to a local food event go there to eat food but also they know they are going to meet some people that they may like, at least for some people that's a part of the motivation too.
And the problem isn't that they're looking for someone to date; the problem is that they're not at all invested in the group - and if you go to any group with only the intention of picking up a date, that's the vibe you'll throw off as well, and you'll be unwelcome there.
"Real life" doesn't have to work that way. Do you enjoy cycling? Board games? Chess? Knitting? Great -- go out and do those things with other people! Unlike with an online dating checklist, those people probably won't be faking those interests, so you'll actually have something in common.
Question-based dating sites match people on these criteria. That’s impossible to do with someone you meet at a bar.
And bars are a terrible place to meet people, unless you want to meet people who enjoy hanging out in bars. Mutual activities often correlate with similar personality traits, and are enjoyable ways to spend time together.
What meeting people in real life means is basically just getting on with your life and doing things that interest you. Like comics? Go to a comic shop. Fascinated by chainmail bikinis? Start spending time at Renaissance Faires - or learn to make them and build a community around yourself. Enjoy mountain biking? Go biking, then go grab coffee or drinks with some other people doing the same. Don't focus on doing these activities to meet potential romantic partners - do them to have fun because you enjoy them and meet other people who enjoy the same things. Don't expect those people to be possible partners, expect them to be friends or acquaintances and to be people through whom you may meet a possible romantic interest.
To quote Ben Carson, "I don't have facts to back this up," but I feel pretty sure that a huge percentage of relationships come from either having some common activity (e.g. "high school," "college," "coworker") or from knowing someone in common (e.g. "friend's brother/sister/other friend").
The one thing I can pretty much guarantee for you is that sitting at home and hoping for a date with an interesting delivery person (or service person if something goes out) is not going to be a successful approach - and if you're that delivery or service person instead, remember that asking out someone whose home or office you've just gone to would be just as creepy as being hit on by the people you've been sent to.
I can't disagree with this enough.
If you want a job, are you going to continue going to the activities you've always been going to and hoping to meet someone that gives you work?
If you want an apartment to live in, are you going to go to the same activities you've been going to and hope that someone there is a landlord?
Maybe you would. But most people would check a jobs site or a rental site. Why would romantic relationships be any different?
That is absolutely a viable approach, and it's one that works for a lot of people. In fact, the two of us have just described "searching for jobs" vs "networking for jobs."
My point though was not so much to do those things to find a partner, but to get out and do things. Part of what you're looking for is not just relationships but (possibly) higher-quality relationships found through people who will vouch for those they're introducing.
For different people "Our matching algorithms say you're an 80% match with this person" vs "Hey, I know someone you should meet" will have different levels of credibility and acceptance.
People have become very picky with very short attention spans (scroll through feeds, swipe left/right, filter people on dating apps based on very specific attributes, etc).
Also to a large degree "locality" benefits (and limitations) have faded. 10-20 years ago people didn't have access to such a seemingly infinite pool of people. It was more limited to the people around them (people likely to visit the same pubs and coffee shops and events and so on).
I don't think young people today have the patience to "invest" in getting to know random people like that anymore.
Instead of spending days and weeks with someone only to find out that they don't match well together, they go through 300 profiles and talk to 5 of "the best" ones out of that pool.
And often times there's lots of information packed in social media that they can pick up quickly (politics, job, education, culture, etc). It would take much longer to pick up that stuff in organic real world interactions because people don't quiz each other like that.
I thought it was a Facebook data mining app.
That's a feature, not a bug. For many/most people, there's not a strict binary division. Dates can turn into hookup and hookups can turn into real relationships. I know multiple friends in long-term relationships which started as Tinder hookups.
It's not a really a problem though because people can indicate for themselves in their profiles, either explicitly or implicitly, what type of relationship they are looking for; it can be different things for different people.
> Tinder is brilliant in that it focuses entirely on vanity, ego, and lust, far more so than any of its predecessors.
But I think that misses the main appeal of Tinder, which is that once you match with someone you basically have an invitation to start a conversation with them, and hence are less likely to be wasting your time (or someone else's). IIRC, on other sites, you can simply message any random user and thus are much more likely to spend time messaging someone who has absolutely no interest in you.
In my anecdotal experience (which means feel free take with a handful of salt), it never really worked out that way. I've gone on dates via Tinder where a profile explicitly stated "no hookups" or something to that effect that did, indeed, turn into hookups.
Also, and this is the more obvious thing, I think, is that a dating platform designed to not require you to actually read a profile before deciding if you're interested isn't going to be the ideal place for stating "preferences". Hence, my anecdotal experience.
So, it is indicated
That's a "feature".
It makes it mainstream enough for people to be there without being embarrassed or ashamed.
Then people can turn it into more of a dating thing or a hookup thing as they prefer.
Few people would want to publicly create a profile on "just-here-strictly-for-hookups.com".
That's also why a huge percentage of profiles, especially female ones, insist so strongly that they are not there for hookups. It's a facade and a bit of virtue signalling ("I'm not a slut like those other girls!").
So, when I started picking hobbies and going to events based on gender ratio first and fun second, it felt kinda awkward. I figured most people were like what I used to be. If they were in a badminton league, it was probably because they wanted to play badminton, not to get hit on by some guy.
On a dating website, everyone is at least in the same ballpark of expectations. It's straightforward. And, ultimately, it worked. I got engaged after 4 years with a great girl I met on OKC.
I know very few women on tinder, but most of my single guy friends are on it.
The reality is women are creeped out by many men on dating sites and apps. If you don't believe me, go talk to some women and ask them about their experiences. Or go read the /r/creepypms subreddit, which isn't just concerned with online dating but shows you what women have to deal with online.
This pushes them towards only interacting with the most attractive and witty men who create a sense of safety. Whether that sense of safety is false is up for debate, but I do think this is what drives a large amount of inequality in online dating. Men are generally not scared of or creeped out by women they interact with online, so their standards online are closer to their standards in real-life.
1. Small sample size
2. Inactive profiles
3. These apps actually adjust the profiles you see based on your attractiveness level. I know they at least categorize attractiveness because I've had this experience when Bumble seemingly had a bug where I would suddenly get a ton of profiles that were clearly super-attractive people, then get a bunch of profiles that were clearly the exact opposite (no profile images, dark or random pictures, and :ahem: not so conventionally attractive people).
However, the general point stands: The majority of women will like a minority of men on these apps. As such, as a man, if you want to make this work for you, the basic strategy is to get as highly attractive pictures of you as possible (professional if you can) and pictures of you doing various interesting activities (as opposed to just vanity shots). Then, keep swiping right and follow up on all matches. But don't make this your only source of meeting women, as others suggested, spend a lot of time in places where you can meet women in real life.
What evidence can you provide that would lead someone to believe this?
Please do check it out if you're interested and provide feedback. Anything is appreciated!
Heres the appstore link: appsto.re/ca/SfGTib.i
Its more about actual intimacy because harder to find a connection using Tinder because communication is first about building up intimacy whereas people you may know tend to have more of an earlier connection.
If you're having trouble with matches, maybe you aren't very interesting, or you don't signal it in the right way. Quit complaining and get to work.
It's been a long time since I took Psych 101. Does anyone know, has this idea ever been discredited, from a statistical standpoint?
I guess the discrepancy could also be caused by selection effects, i.e. what kind of people use Tinder, and/or what frame of mind are they in when they use it.
"After surveying 150 women, they concluded that they could almost predict how attractive a man was based on three things: how physically strong he looks, how tall he is and how lean he is..."
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/love-sex/women-stron...
http://www.businessinsider.com/why-nigerian-scam-emails-are-...
By making the opportunity purposefully vague, only those who are extremely open to the opportunity (or desperate) would send a PM. Not sure if it ever works, but the internet is a big place.
Female sexual selection is a powerful force that creates the male dominance hierarchy.
Hell, for a claim that suspect and borderline hostile, multiple, peer-reviewed and reproducible citations, plural, needed.
It is definitely not a dating app where you'll easily find someone to marry, but like anything else.
Unreliable conclusions derived from unreliable "data" that was obtained unethically (and probably illegally; did the pictured guys knew their picture was being used?).
We're back at "my guess is as good as any other".