Even though it would get terrible press and PR, a "no surprises" dating site where height and weight and photo are verified would go a long way to solving some of these problems. This way people can swim in their lanes, without wasting other people's time.
Wouldn’t help, the same numbers breakdown would occur, people would still be unhappy as a consequence, it would just be more up front. Well, it’s the world people want, hope they like it.
The phrase "swim in their lanes" riles me in this context. While a photo and some basic personal data would help, dating is not an activity where social cooperation between competing parties is needed to ensure a better outcome. And there's no pool attendant either. It's not up to you to decide who gets to date whom.
> dating is not an activity where social cooperation between competing parties is needed to ensure a better outcome
I'm not sure if I agree. From the perspective of the dating site you'd be right, the longer people are unable to find the kind of relationship that they want, the better it is for their business. However, from the point of view of the people looking for dates, if people are shown little to no profiles where it's highly unlikely that a relationship will happen, and shown mostly profiles where matches are likely, regardless of their stated preferences, and thus response rates and relationship likelihood rises, that seems like it can be a better outcome to me.
It's not about that, it's about the phrasing "swim in your lane". That means imposing social rules, and belittling people who behave differently. Taken in extremis, it can be interpreted as: ugly should only date ugly.
No, you're misinterpreting it, maybe even projecting your own insecurities. Nobody said you have to date fit / thin people - just that people shouldn't lie / pretend about it. You have a fetish on fatties? Set the weight filter up high. This is clearly superior to the current model, where it's easy for people to lie about weight/age/height/income/...
The real criticism of this model is completely different, and much deeper. People don't actually know what they want and who would make them happy, and they often conform / default to social conventions in their public preferences - e.g. maybe you want to filter out 10+ older men because you don't want to go on dates with "creepy" dudes, or you want to filter out fat women because you don't want your friends to judge you - even though in reality, you might actually be happier with those matches, or, more likely, those attributes are often orthogonal to your actual happiness.
One of the rather bleak theories that has come out of the Red Pill / men's rights movements is that women develop this sense of entitlement because:
1. Attractive / high value men are happy to sleep with less attractive women they wouldn't consider as 'relationship material'.
2. Women are generally more sexually liberated so there's an increasing chance they will have had several of these encounters, and therefore believe they are entitled to men of the same level (also known as becoming an 'alpha widow').
Like most of these theories it's pretty depressing to contemplate, but I'm yet to see a convincing refutation of it.
The most depressing outcome of it is that a man will eventually marry a woman who ranks him at the bottom 50% of the people she had a romantic relationship with.
I can not tell who is going to be the most miserable in such relationship. My guess is the woman, who will not be able to understand how "she settled like that, since she could do so much better". In the best case scenario, the man will be oblivious of the fact, so probably he will be unaffected.
Absolutely, it's a horrible thing to contemplate. As a single man who is not very successful with women, I'm equally afraid of this outcome as I am of being alone forever. Perhaps even more.
I would love to find a way of coming to terms with this that doesn't involve adopting the full red pill attitude of "never get married, all women are like that" etc
On the positive side, this probably means that the average man will marry a woman in the top50% of the romantic relationships he has had in the past. So you can focus on that thought. :)
Of course, this is possible because the average man will have far fewer relationships than the average woman. So in the end the numbers for this imaginary couple will look like:
For the man: He will marry then number 2 mate out of a total of 5.
For the woman: She will marry the number 10 mate out of a total of 15.
Obviously the numbers are totally made up, but you get the point.
So be positive! When you will settle, your mate will probably exceed your expectations.
It’s interesting that girls start at the top and get rejected down to their compromise level. Men start at the bottom and rise up to catch the falling girls. I am not sure either is better off or worse. Also you can look at other things... rank people on ability to cook, sing, solve puzzles, money, humor, cleanliness, optimism, generosity. Also even if you are hung up on number of or looks of mates, you can lower your standards, pay for it...
Best is to find your own self esteem. Whoever gets your company and attention is lucky, because you chose to give it to them and no one else...
It’s just you in the Boltzmann brain... no one else means anything. Also the universe is big, really big. And the block universe is here all at once. You can’t really change anything... we don’t know anything. What were we talking about again ?
"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." (but the whole post is illuminating [1]) Also, this 8 month old thread [2] is full of excellent context.
It doesn’t really answer the question of whether Tinder works, it just pushes some numbers around and compares it to an economy, and says that if you think of Tinder as an economy, then the economy would be very unequal.
The problem is that the comparison totally falls apart. You are not competing to get the most likes on Tinder, you are just trying to meet someone to form a relationship or make out or whatever. If you’re really interested in comparing Tinder against other avenues for achieving this goal (or whatever goal you have), then you should be looking at something like WAR—wins against replacement. How likely are you to have a positive outcome using Tinder versus using some other site, or trying to meet people in person.
If you want to find a place where it’s easy to find someone cute who wants to make out, then the only real answer is to be a gay man (do whatever you need to make that possible), clean yourself up, and move to the city.
If you’re interested in a heterosexual relationship, you are simply going to have to deal with the fact that men and women in our culture have, on average, differing preferences when it comes to relationships. If you have typical preferences for a single man in our culture, then they don’t match typical preferences for a single woman in our culture, and if you find a relationship, it will involve some bridging of the gap between your different desires. Tinder doesn’t change that, and neither do any of the other sites.
I would say that it involves unlearning the bad lessons that Hollywood, TV, and advertisements teach you about love.
Being happy in a relationship is not about somehow managing to trick someone into being with you, nor is it about somehow lifting yourself up to the standards of masculinity / femininity you see in media.
I think I can vouch that women don't factor appearance in as much, at least once they get past 25 years or so. When I was younger I was nearly invisible to women. I ended a LTR of 7 years at 30 and the tables had turned significantly. I'm a similar build to when I was 22, I'm at best average attractiveness, now I'm bald too and yet online dating is like shooting fish in a barrel. I could line up more dates then I actually have free time to go on. I literally spend less than 3 weeks on any dating app as I'll tend to meet someone in that time who I have some sort of casual relationship with for a period of time and I tend to be monogamous even in casual relationships.
I'm 42 and probably in the best shape of my life. But that's mostly because I spent the first forty years absolutely shunning any form of physical exercise.
I heard an interesting theory that you're more likely to go on dates with avoidant personality types. The secure ones are not bouncing in and out of relationships.
Probably sort of like hiring - everyone always complains most candidates are bad can't even do fizzbuzz, etc- presumably because the good candidates are happily employed.
Because it compiles a lot of scientific research and experiments to prove your original point that most males are unattractive and that looks are the main attribute women care about.
The populations are different, though, right? One could hypothesize that the set of all men in relationships past some age have median attractiveness higher than those who are single. The first set would contribute only to measuring total average. The second set would contribute to total average and also average on dating site.
It's also why the median job-seeker in a field is less skilled than the median person in the field of interest: the median person has been evaluated by at least one employer to be sufficiently skilled.
Sadly, OkCupid resembles the pay sites it describes in this blog post much more now than it resembles the 2010 version of it. The posts on reddit.com/r/okcupid paint a pretty bleak picture of it today.
I love how the first sentence is "Today I'd like to show why the practice of paying for dates on sites like Match.com and eHarmony is fundamentally broken, and broken in ways that most people don't realize." and OKcupid belongs to match.com today.
Ah, yes. I remember. Ten years ago we worried about trivial things like how honest the dating sites were. In 2020 this story wouldn't raise an eyebrow.
I guess the question is, would those people have otherwise gotten married to somebody (is it a coincidence they met through online dating, or was it the cause of finding someone)
I think this is important too. There's two kinds of people in the online dating realm. The people who could have gotten dates/married without online dating, but just happen to have used the medium to expand their circle. And the people who would have had difficulty offline, and that difficulty may or may not extend to the online realm too.
Everyone I know who've found love online seem to be in the first category. Those that find dating difficult offline don't seem to have significantly better luck online either.
I find that last statement a little confusing; I have horrendous luck offline and have significantly better luck online. I have never been able to "ask someone out" conventionally in person without making a fool of myself. It's a lot easier for me to take lots of rejection (the price everyone pays for being single and looking) when I'm sitting on the toilet on my phone in the morning than when I'm face to face with the person I'm interested in. Much faster turnover between individual rejections as well. All of the most positive relationships in my life, not just in romance or sex, have been off online dating/hookup sites/apps. Edit: and I never once paid for them
Some of my friends definitely had difficulty dating offline. Nice and shy, might not know what to say in a first date, can seem a bit boring at first, and also just doesn't have a big social circle to meet other people.
I feel online dating gave them a chance to meet some other people, pre-meet prior to first date, and than go on a first date, which they'd otherwise wouldn't have been able too. Either from never meeting the person in the first place, never asking to go out on a date, or messing up that date.
That's all my personal analysis though, like I have no data here appart from a few people I know and my interpretation.
> is it a coincidence they met through online dating, or was it the cause of finding someone
Do you mean like... Given enough time they'd have married someone offline as well?
I think some of them that are more socially active offline probably, but some I could see easily going a long time without. There's a lot of people who have really small social circles without any new face coming into it ever. And they don't have the motivation or personality to go and seek it out in real life, but do if it's behind a screen at home in their pijamas.
While back there was a stigma a bit around online dating too, which I think has gone away now.
One of the quirks about online dating products is that unlike almost every other product, success is correlated with how quickly your users delete their accounts.
Users sticking around for a long time means you failed horribly at your mission.
I'm really not sure how one would create a good revenue model for something like this. Many apps try a subscription-based approach and all I can say is that for someone who is earnestly looking for a partner, an annual subscription is the last thing they want.
Yeah, I think connecting with the offline world might be the ticket. Also, possibly offline social events for singles, curated to groups of people that are likely compatible? The only thing is events are hard to scale, so you'd want to possibly recruit some your users to host them for you. A lot of single people love hosting events to impress and get to know other singles.
Aligning the incentives of users and business could be accomplished with a pay-per-connection model. Users would browse and attempt to connect freely, but would only see a paywall when a mutual connection is made.
Someone must have attempted this before; I’m curious what obstacles they ran into. My guess would be that this model is radically less profitable than the standard “casino” model where you effectively string users along with the evergreen promise of “maybe this time.”
The problem with this is that while people are more than willing to pay high sums for actually giving them a partner worthy of a stable relationship leading to marriage, people don't want to pay to hedge on mutual app connections that may or may not evolve into a relationship.
The reality also is that once you know someone's name and if there truly is mutual chat interest you can just connect with them on other social media, and it's extremely hard for any dating service to avoid that.
That's interesting, and that seems extremely logical. I imagine it would be really hard for an app to enforce this, compared to the societies that traditional match makers operate in where if you didn't pay them for a match they found you, you might end up publicly shamed.
Does anyone else end up feeling bitter by using these online dating apps? How do you deal with constant rejections, ghosting, not matching with anyone that you like etc.
Yeah, most men who use them feel this way. I met a guy one time who claimed he had been active on tinder for a year and hadn’t gotten one match. Granted he wasn’t much of a looker but that’s just rough.
Expectation mismatch is real. Unless you pay so you can see what “lowering your standards” could bring (by looking at people who liked you even though you didn’t like them), you can go ages without ever matching, or matching with dead profiles who will never answer.
I assume they're at best knowingly designed to be like that. Ignoring that the whole premise probably isn't that healthy, there's a reason why people just do it for an ego trip (predominantly women)
It is like anything else. It is just a tool. I think getting rejected in person would be a lot more depressing than just being ignored online.
When I was a user, I met a lot of people outside of my town and social circle. I dated a few here and there for quite a while. It isn't magic but it can be a controlled way to meet other people.
Humans aren’t very good at believing the lies they tell themselves when they’re in conflict of their true emotions, whims, or desires.
We’re also evolutionarily optimized to recalculate and reconsider almost constantly, so even if that works for you at the start, as soon as you have just one conversation that goes on a week, you’ll forget that little lie and pine for what you got a taste of. Or most people would, anyway.
No reason to feel bitter. It's just a broken system to milk as much money as they can from you. Stop using them and maybe also remove your Facebook account. Online dating is a waste of time.
I gave up online dating 10 years ago. A few months ago I tried again after a relationship ended. I'd quit again within a week. Honestly it was even worse than I remembered.
IMO dating sites are geared towards below average-looking people who have no shame about being overtly picky. Most desirable single men and women are not online dating. My only brush with online dating was installing Tinder many years ago. The first girl it showed me wasn't very attractive, but I wasn't going to judge her ("swipe"), you know? Uninstalled it, felt like when you wander into one of those grimy "meet-market" bars. If you already turn down advances from average-looking people IRL, why would you create an account to do that online? I think attractive women feel the same, there are already enough real-world opportunities. None of the girls I've dated have even considered online dating.
Definitely not true and likely has never been true. Many of the most attractive women I know are active on online dating. People join online dating for various reasons. One is to expand your dating pool. If you've burned through a lot of your social network (or you don't want to poison it) then online dating is a great way to expand your horizon.
From what I gather, it really only amplifies what you experience in real life already. If a significant amount of people show interest in you from a very early stage - you will have no problems with online dating. If you require any kind of barrier to get interest, I wouldn't bother unless you have the incredible ability to not evaluate your self-worth from the app regardless of what happens.
Yes.
A while ago when I was single I tried using online dating apps for a while but ultimately I met someone in real life and it's going well. Previous relationships were also people I met in real life. Don't get discouraged if online dating doesn't work for you either. It didn't work for me. I know it's hard during COVID, but work on yourself in the meantime, and COVID will be over sooner or later.
Online dating just never worked for me, for the same reasons you describe. I think part of it is a combination of paradox of choice and part of it is people just not having faith in technology finding them something human. I went on dates where the other person sooner or later doubted the possibility of marrying someone they met online, and it usually degenerated from there into either friendship or nothing.
There's also the weird social expectation on many apps that males should message first, which results in females getting spammed, which then further results in females not messaging first, and the cycle perpetuates.
As a technology lover I really want online dating to work in bringing more compatible people together and increase overall societal happiness by increasing the average quality of marriage, but time and time again it seems to me that the best way to bring compatible people together is with offline events. Compatible people tend to want to go to similar places and do similar things, and any successful online dating app really should exploit that fact.
In fact, the most successful organizations I have seen at bringing together singles into stable marriages were not even explicitly about dating. I've seen far more stable couples form at mixed-gender sports teams, hiking groups, volunteer organizations, conference organizing teams, and other professional organizations where participants largely cared about the same causes.
I met my wife on a dating app. I had met several women through dating apps and was pretty burnt out on all the dates and messaging. People are pretty fake via msg and you can figure it out quickly in person. After awhile I decided I'd just go back to the normal way of meeting people and it would be more sincere. I figured I'd meet someone when out with my friends or co workers, at a wedding, whatever.
I was about to delete my OK Cupid account and she msg'd first, sending me something kind of clever and we met up for a beer. Before the date I decided it would be my last dating app date. Friday is our 2nd anniversary.
I find it emotionally a lot easier to be evaluated and rejected for romance by a stranger over the course of a few days, than to have a friendship that grows for months/years but ultimately stops short of romantic territory. The latter is usually what happens with people I meet organically.
The people you met organically did evaluate and reject you for romance over the course of a few days, you just didn't notice. Now that you know what to look for you'll see it. Feynman's method[1] has always worked exceptionally well for me. If the person is into me they like it, and if they're not they say so and time to move on.
Someone may be into you but have different norms and values. It’s an incredibly uncompromising and disrespectful approach (not from the PC or objectification perspective but from the perspective that you’ll “open negotiations” on your terms rather than signaling a willingness to compromise).
I’m married now, but I had a realization a while ago that all the women I’ve dated or hooked up with were because I made it extremely clear what I was interested in, and not accepting being put in a friend-zone.
It’s not quite as bold as Feynman’s approach, but clear intentions and not trying to hedge a situation or avoiding being shot down was the key to success for me.
On multiple occasions I met a girl and just said out loud to my friends or hers that I am going to date her/go home with her and in the case of my wife I told some of her friends that I was going to marry that girl. My wife and I took another 5 years after that to get the timing right, but when either of us were single we’d start chatting again.
But Feynman method is for how you get paid-for sex. And women he was trying to get sex with were in fact interested primary in food he can pay for them. They were in it to find someone who will pay dinner for them, they were not in it for dating or hookup or fun. I kind of feel like that just straight paying prostitute is literally equivalent, but kind of more honest thing (more honest from both sides).
> women he was trying to get sex with were in fact interested primary in food he can pay for them
Also, it was 1946 - when women saw men as a necessary meal ticket. It's waaay less likely to work today, particularly for people living comfortably above the poverty line.
Not really bitter per say, but the whole idea seems foreign to me. Don't know how to explain it well, but I don't feel my persona is very fit for the way online dating works. It all feels very artificial. On the other hand, though I just don't meet people organically.
When I stopped looking for dates and started looking for friends, it worked and felt at lot better.
I met and became friends with one of my still best friends by contacting them on a dating site and having zero expectations of ever meeting them, just because I thought they'd be cool to hang out with online (and they were).
My partner of the last 10 years was a friend of theirs. Never would have met my partner if not for the dating site, and never would have met them on a dating site.
The same way men deal with it every day of their lives dating in the real-world? It sucks. We power through it, pick ourselves up, and keep fighting. Some of my buddies have triple-digit notch counts....and they still get rejected (although it's rare enough that it becomes a subject of conversation). It's just a part of The Game for men. Lesbian Norah Vincent spent a year living as a man and practically had a mental breakdown (timestamp is where they discuss cold-approach dating and rejection): https://youtu.be/Ip7kP_dd6LU?t=563
A lot of it boils down to mental framing. In other words, think of yourself as providing an opportunity for someone to participate in something great. If they don't take advantage of that opportunity, that's their loss not yours. One of the best quotes is from Patrice O'Neal: "You MUST believe in your own righteousness."
> Lesbian Norah Vincent spent a year living as a man and practically had a mental breakdown (timestamp is where they discuss cold-approach dating and rejection):
To be clear, she had a mental breakdown when at a therapy session with a bunch of men who were talking about chopping up their wives. The context in your post frames it as if it had been because of her lack of success in dating, but that's not what it was. (Also, she talks about how she actually had dating success to the point that straight women she was dating would agree to sleep with her even after finding out that she has female parts. I wish I was that hot.)
In multiple interviews she explains that the building anxiety from the whole experiment led to her breakdown. The group session might have been particularly traumatic but it's not an isolated incident where her mental state went from 100 to 0, so the GP isn't inaccurate to state that living as a man for a year gave her a nervous breakdown, to be clear.
The alternative makes less sense to me - who loses count of the amount of partners they had? It's one number to remember, I'd posit that the majority of people, whether deliberately or not, do keep track of that.
Calling them "stone-cold losers" for remembering a number doesn't make any sense to me.
In person dating is hard, online dating is harder.
Dealing with anonymous people who get no penalty for being assholes is hard.
Relationships are hard, even with people you have a lot in common.
The last part -- matching with people you like is where I see a real need for a specialist that I'm an unaware to exist -- there could be soooo much at play there.
The demographics of that group, what that group REALLY wants in a partner, honest feedback for yourself, what to improve in yourself etc etc.
We just matched a friend of mine from New England with a friend of my wife from Mexico. He is a great guy but he had already given up on dating. And it was actually the girl who asked if we knew someone. But most people will not ask their friends.
My wife and I are wondering how the Indian Matchmaker business model work. How do you align the incentives so you can help people and get some extra income?
You ever ask a date why they swiped on your profile? It's a good question for 10-15 minutes in to the first conversation. It's always revealing - about you, about how you're perceived, and about how the other person perceives you and what matters to them.
Also - bug your desired-sex friends and family. Show them your profile. Focus-group it. This has been massively helpful for me.
At the end of the day: change stuff and see what happens.
The social penalties that constrain people in your circle from being jerks also constrain you from expressing potentially unwanted interest, though. People will stop introducing you to their friends if you’re constantly asking them out. I feel a lot more confident expressing what I want to strangers. Have you not found the same?
Depends on the dating app, but my only real problem is that I find doing nothing at home more entertaining than first dates, and second dates bring fear of commitment.
Actually getting dates? That's easy enough. Being white, attractive enough, 6' tall, between 150 and 180lbs, no kids, and make a tech salary seems to tick off a lot of boxes for girls.
The height is by far the most important factor. Surprised me but as a 5'5" guy, shedding excess weight, new wardrobe, good job, approached women IRL and online, none of it mattered compared to height. Goes down exponentially proportionate to how many SDs from the mean you are...
I have had relationships and am engaged to a beautiful woman now so I found a way to work around it but it is near impossible. My short male friends are either single or have made considerable compromises.
It's a factor that is weirdly denied in society too. Nobody wants to hear that an immutable characteristic plays such a role on the male side...
I think it's due to society still fundamentally adjusting to female parity of power and the reduced value of marriage. Until recently, single women suffered huge economic insecurity; they had a massive incentive to compromise on their attractiveness standards.
This said, you can still somewhat compensate for height with status and other looks. Tom Cruise is 172cm but I don't think he ever struggled for dates.
Perhaps but women biologically have a very strong preference for height as it was during most of humanity's evolution a great analogue for ability to protect and provide.
We men of course have our own biological preferences perhaps equally irrelevant in the modern era, so this isn't a blame thing just an oft denied fact.
Oh and as to Tom Cruise - it is a hilarious kind of example I have heard so many times. The fact that people have to reference those who are monumentally successful in the top .000001% kind of proves the point.
It’s just because everybody knows him. You could pick any random successful guy who is not tall and you’d probably find the same. Attractiveness is made of many factors and height is just one of them.
I get bored with this kind of argument because it always ignores magnitude and nuance.
Yes there other factors but height tends to be a prerequisite before they apply. Odds goes exponentially down based on how far from the mean you are. 5'9" vs. 5'5" is a world of difference.
'Success' is also not Boolean. I know very successful short guys who have had zero success with women.
Talking in blasé terms 'oh it is just one of many factors' is like saying possessing functioning legs is just one of many factors a footballer requires. Or having enough petrol is one of many factors in a car functioning properly. It's true but kind of missing the point.
The really interesting point is why people are so in denial about this fact that is so blatantly obvious.
I suspect it is a mix of those without this issue wanting to think their success was all attributable to their own skills, people not liking the idea that something uncontrollable could screw you so bad, women feeling it is an attack (it isn't at all), those who are shorter but not significantly below the mean having success (though reduced) and thinking it must apply to those shorter than them, etc.
Another interesting thing I have noticed is that short men is one of the few remaining immutable characteristics society allows people to mock openly. "What is she doing with that little squirt" is something I heard from a friend recently without a hint of self-awareness.
I can only talk for my experience - I’m 5’8” and over 40, and I don’t think height has ever made much of a difference in my relationships (or rather lack thereof), whereas my general appearance and dullness definitely did at various points. I still reckon that if I were ripped and/or better looking and/or rich and/or wittier, it would make a world of difference, whereas an extra few inches alone would not. I know taller guys with much less “pull” than me, and shorter ones who kill it year after year. But I guess I don’t know anyone smaller than 5’6”.
On the mocking, I agree but hopefully that’s slowly going away. It’s one of those things, like casual racism and casual sexism, that will take a while to fully disappear from everyday conversations. Some animal instincts are just what they are.
the difference between 5'8" and 5'5" is massive. And again it's nuanced, it's a prerequisite and MASSIVE but there are other factors once a woman's past that.
Most of the examples of guys who do well at very short height are either - some MASSIVE compensation in some other way (hugely confident, etc.) with a MASSIVE failure rate, or they are actually in a dating pool with a lower male height.
Obviously exceptions happen (I'm engaged for one!) but the impact it has is massive and I didn't know until my mid 20's, nobody wanted to admit it or talk about it and it would have saved me a lot of pain to know.
> Perhaps but women biologically have a very strong preference for height
I find that quite hard to believe. Otherwise, the range of heights would be much narrower, and humans would probably be much taller (we're barely taller than gorillas), with much less variation between cultures. I'd say either it's unlikely that there was that much genetic pressure on height, or that most of evolution height wasn't genetic (but limiting factor was something else, e.g. food - so only well-fed people could grow as tall as their genetic potential).
It's actually well accepted in biological research, plenty of evidence for it, surveys of women, OK cupid had a blog about it (before they wiped all that).
Also all of literature would suggest otherwise. Look at any documentary talking about a man who is considered attractive and see what word they use first. "Tall, dark and handsome" - notice the order. The list goes on and once you start looking for it you'll be surprised. Look at romance - novels - see how many of the men are short.
You could also speak to some women and ask them about it. If you ask enough you'll get at least some honest responses (not disparaging women, equally men may often be deceptive on this kind of question).
I'm also not sure I understand your argument - both men + women contribute to height, male height is only part of the equation (my dad is normal height my mum is very short and I am short for example). Also nutrition has been HUGE in stunting growth, societies with better nutrition have a very big increase in height (which also suggests sexual selection plays a role I'd say).
Height is also in a pretty narrow range anyway, +-2SD.
Finally I'd say that if you were significantly shorter than average and male + had tried your hand with dating you'd have a very raw and immediate series of data points that would be pretty compelling.
This isn't really a controversial point, in the same way men have a preference for a certain hip/waist ratio in women ("why don't all women then have that hip/waist ratio" you might ask following your existing argument...!)
It's much exaggerated in online dating. I'm short too, but IRL the height is less of a problem, women taller than me routinely approach me in clubs. In online dating, they just filter by height using "AND" operator, and that's it.
It is a matter of magnitude though. How short are you? I am 2SD below the mean and trust me that rules you out very much IRL too.
But I agree that women are obviously filtering on that.
As an anecdote - one site I was on took a while to publish my height and I started having conversations with women. As soon as it showed one dropped contact and the other said she felt 'no chemistry' after we had basically said hello to each other :)
I had a miraculous growth spurt around 18 and went from 5'6 to about 5'10, putting me happily within the average range.
What barnacled is saying is absolutely true, and unless you've spent time as a single man of below average height, you really just won't understand.
The difference in attention and respect that a few inches make is pretty astounding. I'd imagine it's pretty similar to the stories I hear of people shedding hundreds of pounds and being treated as a completely different person. Once again, unless you've been on both sides of the equation, it's unlikely you'll be able to grasp how much physical traits like height and weight affect how people treat you.
I got majorly downvoted for saying it, it's one of those things people don't like to accept, it's amazing the excuses I've heard and how angry people have got with me for saying it.
As you say, unless you've experienced it for yourself it's hard (but not impossible) to get quite how extreme it is.
I've heard plenty enough from women talking directly about it, from basically all fiction ('tall, dark, handsome' in that order, no romance novel has a short guy, etc.), the fact that height rockets up when nutrition improves - sexual selection likely to be a big factor on that too.
It's nuanced and it's all relative to the average height of the dating population you're in but a few inches can be the difference between some attention and absolutely none.
I've never felt as disposable and low-value in my entire life as when I tried online dating for a year or two. Ended up ditching the entire thing and only went for real-life interactions instead. Happily had much more success there, in spite of being a big-time introvert.
Rate my online dating app idea: There are no profile pictures.
However, you do upload pictures of yourself and are asked to rate pictures of others - possibly not in your geographic area. The AI gets a feel for what your preferences are and matches you.
Granted - its all a bit superficial that its really just about how you look - but this seems to be the underlying issue with tinder: the benefits accrue to the top percentile "best looking" people. Everyone else gets (unfairly) left in the dust.
I'm not a psychologist, but I'm pretty sure attraction is in the top 2 "need-to-haves" of a relationship. While yes, it's shallow, it's only shallow because we evolved to have this bias in the most primitive parts of our brains, which means it's important to a successful existence.
Attraction is not just about appearances though. I don't know if you have ever experienced it, but I can assure you from personal experience it is completely possible to not find someone attractive at first meeting but become attracted to them as you get to know them.
That is true; it's also possible to find someone attractive in person but not in a picture, and to draw a contrast, possible to find them attractive at first but then upon meeting them, realize their personality renders them unattractive. I'm not sure what's actionable about any of these facts, though, because the visual part still seems to be the most important to people.
While true, I feel this is more conducive in unforced, organic encounters. i.e. if you and the other person meet and interact in some other group or activity that has nothing to do with dating.
In an online dating situation, you have extremely little to determine what the other person is like, so appearances (photo) becomes significantly more weighted. You look at the photo, find him/her unattractive, and move on.
Whereas in a more organic situation, you may find the person unattractive at first meet, but as you interact with them, decide otherwise.
Yeah, see this is one of the ways in which I find online dating now even worse than it was in the oughties. People didn't even bother trying to inject some kind of personality into their profile, so even if I matched them I had nothing to say to them. There is no online dating anymore really, there is only online hookup. That's fine if that's what you're into, but goddamn is this shit shallow.
I think it is time we admit that there are some problems that just can't be solved with a website.
The issue is that personality can be faked, or even just show friction between “personality via delayed text media” and “personality in immediate conversation”. So the apps try to tone it down and just leave that side to the date experience.
I worked for $large_dating_site years ago at their peak. We spent countless days weeks and months in meetings, spitballing all kinds of ideas, building prototypes, and coming up with "innovative" ideas for new dating app products. In the end it turns out the only thing users really want is a picture, a name, and a paragraph. Everything beyond that is in the realm of direct human interaction. Any kind of artificial friction you create between people that is any more complex than that just ends up being annoying and driving away casual users.
The problem with dating apps is not a technological one. It all comes down to who's using them. Wherever the women go, the men will follow. This is why Bumble has been so successful. Catering to women is the only way to have a successful dating app. At any given time, there's a curve of adoption for dating apps, and they all go through the same lifecycle. Cool/new/hip/cheap/free with a 50/50 young male/female ratio and no bots -> established/revenue generating/mature users with fewer women than men -> bot ridden scam with no real women. At any given time there are three major apps that fill these roles. Right now it's Hinge -> Bumble -> Tinder.
My wife says I am almost supernaturally attuned to what I term the "sausage-party coefficient". In any public space, I can give a very accurate ratio of the number of men and women, and it's remarkable how as soon as there are sufficient women, all these dudes just appear and all the women leave, like gazelles in the presence of hungry lions. In any bar (when they open again), sit down with your double scotch and count that ratio every few minutes. It's like a law of nature.
It sounds like one could try to solve that mismatch by aggressively tracking usage and queueing up registrations, so that the ratio of actually-active users is always close to 50-50. It means leaving money on the table though.
I'm not sure that "(unfairly)" is quite how I'd put it, but that's neither here nor there.
The main problem I see with this idea is if I knew that's how the app worked, I could upload a picture of someone from the "best looking" subset of my gender, probably get quite a few matches, and no user of the app would be able to call me out on my BS, because "oh, the AI must have been really terrible at understanding my preferences..." rather than "this user just uploaded a model's photo"
It might be more soul-crushing though to be matched, exchange a couple of messages, agree to meet, then have the photo reveal, then "oh sorry, something came up"? (Like today's dating apps, but with an extra step or two and more investment at the time of rejection.)
Right now, you just get invisibly and unknowingly filtered out by those who don't find you attractive. That gives a certain amount of esteem preservation to the activity at least.
Do you remember Dating Ring [1], a startup from gimlet media? That was actually the first time I paid for a dating site. They interviewed me in person and hand picked matches. They actually gave me a few good matches and I ended up dating somebody from their match. I wish they were still around.
While I completely agree with their comments about these sites having a vested interest in showing you non-paying users, I have an issue with his conclusion.
> From the ad, we can see that just 86,140 of those subscribers get married, a mere 6.2% of the people who paid the company to find them a mate.
I know a lot of people who would easily drop $120 for a 6.2% chance of finding a partner in a year. These odds are not horrible.
Why not hire a salesman to do the online dating for you until they have managed to get a date offline?
I think most people absolutely suck at being original or appealing in texting. Going through tinder or any dating app makes you see the worst of humanity. Scams, lot of them. Catfishers. Kids pulling prank and laughing at desperate middle-aged men. Exaggerations, too high expectations. It makes you compare with others. It makes you desperate. Just avoid it.
Better to be honest about having a representative / mediator than catfishing or pretending to be someone you're not to try and "win" the game, especially if you suck at it.
I mean, people don't really know themselves or what they look for, generally speaking.
Having a majordome to manage your phone and online presence is quite fancy, I’d date, assuming of course the pictures and information given are genuine.
If they start paying for the service at age 18, then most users would be married before they turn 35. That's comparable with, for example, the average age of first marriage for men in Denmark and Spain.
> No, it isn't. At those odds, your expected wait to marry is over 16 years, which defeats the purpose.
Most people who are motivated to get married explore more than one option at the same time. So you do this plus some combination of other things likely to get you socializing with members of the other gender: start doing the weekly ski/ bike trips; going to pubs; going to yoga; join the square dancing club, etc etc. (Clearly my recent experience socializing with the opposite gender is pretty badly out of date).
Again, nothing legal/ ethical and guaranteed so the only way to increase the odds is to increase your exposure to your audience. If your goal is marriage, $120 and 6% on eHarmony is price and time competitive. Though likely not as fun as going on weekly ski or bike trips.
120$ is pretty cheap when the traditional alternative is to go to a bar - had friends doing that a couple times per week, 120$ is basically spent in a month or less
The difference is that going to a bar can be quite nice by itself: you go with friends, drink, have fun. Using a dating app/website on the other hand...
Look its a brutal truth, but looks matter and paying for a subscription isn't going to make your chances of meeting someone higher. No matter what dating app comes out, it will always be about the top 20% of men getting matches while the rest get almost nothing.
Then you go on to say, but wait online dating isn't real life? Or is it? An increasing amount of people are meeting through online dating these days. I'd say it very accurately represents real life, granted personalities may not always be attractive and result in a breakup there is a looks threshold that needs to be met before anything meaningful emerges.
You're not wrong. But I might put that as, "Looks matter to most people, because they haven't yet discovered that looks don't matter, and in fact conventional attractiveness can be a noxious poison.".
I met my current (and last) wife on OKCupid. Only messaged two or three women, she the last. We've been married now for four years and get along like two peas in a pod. Luck, I guess. (I certainly had it coming.)
Sometimes paying seems like a good idea. More exposure on Badoo was lucrative. Same with little features on Tinder and OkCupid at certain points during their development.
Most dating sites are a bad deal for males, mainly due to the gender skew. There are at least 2x as many males. The top 20-25% is then enough to gobble up all viable women (top 50%). 1 out of 2 are at least not unattractive, 1 out of 3 are outright attractive, and 1 out of 5 are hot. That is, not even out of attractive males and the women are already gone.
I think you'll find that women of all attractiveness levels are put off by men who outright reject half of all women as "unviable", based solely on their appearance.
And that's just one dimension. If you have 2 or 3 other axes where you cut off anybody below the median (intelligence, income, politics, interest, etc.) you're quickly finding yourself looking only at a few percent of the population.
And if you have no other metrics other than attractiveness, you'll find that few women wish to date you.
WTF? Half the pool was considered viable based on swipe percentages. You seem unable to properly comprehend even basics communicated.
Further, the most superficial experience highest success. That is, they are most likely to lie.
A high percentage of viable matches is uncommon. 1/2 minimally mutually satisfying match * 1/2 at least not unattractive * 1/2 reciprocating attractiveness = 1 out of 8 random pairings find each other minimally mutually satisfying and at least not unattractive (by their own measure of what that is; whether aesthetics, social status, money, etc).
If you are a male, online dating will be full of scams and very costly. Men don't always get the better end of things in life, especially in today's screwed up world.
I worked for a dating site a long time ago. The business model seems simple at first glance but the incentives of the customer and business are almost 100% in opposition:
We created a dating app that tries to address this.
We leverage an entrance fee to reduce that conflict of interest. Once someone pays the entrance fee, we have little incentive to keep them single and looking. We actually want them to go on dates and make a margin on the dates we book.
If you make a margin on dates you book then isn't your optimal strategy to get people on dates that won't turn into relationships? That way they keep booking dates?
The sign up fee makes sense. The per-date margin seems to be diametrically opposed.
Still, it is an incentive to create dating opportunities. And what kind of date would not result in a relationship, but make you want to go on another date? It would need to be good and bad at the same time. Maybe a good date with the wrong person.. It sounds really hard to exploit this.
The upshot of this however is that, if you are being honest in your profile, these things are things that you want to do anyway.
If you still take the effort to talk to the person before going on a booked trip, it should be an experience you will enjoy.
Of course, things can go wrong. But part of any relationship is taking that risk.
I don't think this is a silver bullet, no, but I think it is a pretty good framework for people who are in a good place to find in a healthy relationship. I.e. comfortable and honest with themselves and looking for a partner to enrich their lives rather than just seeking 'a relationship' (i.e. trying to fill some other void in themselves).
It incentivizes the website to match you with people you are not actually compatible with, so that you keep going on dates to find someone you actually like. (Maybe not repeatedly, since you might stop using the website, but at least the first few times)
I worked for dating sites way back too. We hired backpackers in english speaking countries to message people from fake accounts to get them to sign up and pay.
Back years ago, I had tried eHarmony. When this article first came out, I had read it and started tracking my own numbers. It pretty much matched what the article is saying perfectly.
It was a long time ago and I certainly don't have the data anymore. IIRC, there used to be a tell on the site where careful inspection of the user's profile page would tell you whether or not they had a full, paid profile (it was something like the background color of one of the fields being slightly different).
Once I discounted the unpaid profiles from my numbers, it was actually a pretty high percentage of people that would respond, go through the several layers of canned intro questionaires, a few back-and-forth messages, and finally agreeing to a date.
The end result was something like 25% of the people with whom I matched whom also had paying profiles would end up in a date. But if you were just tracking "percentage of 'matches' that lead to dates", it was something like 0.1%.
Basically, it boiled down to eHarmony's system giving out less than 1 paying profile per day out of the 5 or 7 or 10 or whatever they gave you. You had to be diligent, working it every day, to get that number above 1 per week. Filter that down to 25%, it was about a date a month.
It was exhausting. I had better luck talking to random people at social events. I met a few people through Craigslist by gamifying my posts, stuff like "to prove you're not a bot, you have to decrypt this ROT13 message and copy it in your email to me" [0]. I actually dated a woman for a little while whom I met when she came to my door looking for donations for some charity.
But really, getting out of bars and going out to specific social events, getting into a group of people with whom I became friends, and letting them introduce me to women, was the ultimate key to finding my wife of 6 years.
[0] Aaaah, Craigslist personals ads. It's all fun and games, until you meet the crazy one who tries to get you into a fight at a biker bar.
I miss OKCupid's blog. A couple of critiques though:
1. Objectives. The article might be correct if your objective is marriage. If your objective is to schedule as much low-effort sex as possible, or even just juggling multiple long-term relationships, especially if you operate over a wide geographic area......expanding your search online is invaluable. Treat paid sites as just another tool in your harem management toolbox.
2. Stale profiles. This is why I really liked the $COUNTRYNAME_Cupid websites. They take more effort to put a profile together, AND they have a "last logged in" feature, so when you do a profile search "No smokers, no kids, etc..." you don't have to worry about messaging people who haven't touched the site in 9 months, and it's easy to ignore blank profiles. Also, typically women with free accounts will "poke" you or view your profile, and that webpage listing those women is where you start your screening.
I think it is irresistible for a dating app to not milk on human vulnerability and emotions.
Look at Tinder, the paid plans started out with features like changing location, unlimited likes, more superlikes etc. All of these seem fair as they don't necessarily disadvantage you if you are not paying, your rank in recommended profiles more or less remains the same.
I recently saw that Tinder introduced one more tier now where even your likes are boosted if you are in the paid plan. This would make the app kind of useless for anyone who is not paying and is not hot enough to be ranked at top.
Sidenote: I wonder why OkCupid deleted their old posts. I loved posts like these and others like Race and reply rate. If it was because of not wanting to offend someone, it is even worse that we are pushing things like these under the rug.
Do you actually have evidence of that? It seems at least equally likely that ownership changed and new management felt that keeping people in the dark about how dating sites work is better for business.
Not disagreeing, but I think calling it political correctness is actually granting those folks too much credit. It was people who were unqualified to process or understand the company’s findings chiming in with pop interpretations, just because they wanted to feel a part of what was supposed to be an intelligent conversation backed by data.
I'm pretty sure it's an open secret that paid Tinder is definitely helping out their users in various obvious (e.g. see who swiped you) and non-obvious ways (e.g. more favorable matching algorithms).
Not sure if it's a bad thing either, as the common saying goes: if you're not paying then you're the product and non-paying Tinder users are there to prop up paying ones. The only down-side I'd argue is mentally hurting ignorant people with self-image but I think Tinder is doing good amount of effort explaining this.
If we assume this statement to be true, that still leaves the huge problem of figuring out whether the reason for something being removed/silenced is due to its controversial nature, or any of a number of other possible explanations.
>use the blood of children to make immortality drugs
has actually been the topic of notable research. Though the studies I've read were with regard to growth factors and proteins in youth blood plasma. Democrat links I leave on the cutting room floor. Vanna White is the only potential candidate I have currently for an immortal.
Ambrosia was the big name startup around the time iirc.
The rest is mostly hogwash, I agree, but if you actually do a bit of digging, a tall tale sometimes has a nugget of truth. There is also a level of translation and realism required.
>In fact, illuminati exist and are alien lizard people
becomes much less insane if you filter it through the understanding information propagates with less resistance through lower reliability channels and extract the oh so much more likely meaning:
>There exists a small kernel of individuals with influence spanning far beyond what any normal person would experience or recognize, and their mentality or approach to dealing with things is so different as to be hard to understand from a casual observer's or outsider to their number's point of view.
1 and 4 my pedantism and integrity will in no way allow any reasonable entertaining of however.
I do not need your funding at this time, and do hope it isn't taken personally if occasion should find I do in the future, or we end up in the same startup. I just wished to point out that sometimes what sounds absolutely batshit insane is merely missing explicit context.
You pay for the scarest resource: attractive people.
What is attractive has been evaluated and optimized over time by Tinder.
Tinder is not your only option. Good old dating still works magic even more now since everybody seems to date via app. The tides have changed.
What Tinder in my point of view evolved, is more a chat platform, than a dating platform. Good looks and speed is everything. I find it way easier to date offline than online even though I am on the attractive tier. No answer for 4 hours? Off you go. Does not happen offline + WhatsApp.
One of my acquaintances has remarked that he pays for a Tinder account for the same reason that he bought an expensive looking swiss watch: It grants him access to a pool of unsophisticated and, hence, easily impressed women. While I did dislike the bluntness, I don't necessarily disagree:
When YouTube and Facebook optimized for engagement, that meant boosting conspiracy theories and click-bait content.
Now that Tinder has optimized their engagement for a while, I'd expect that the supply side of the platform is dominated by mentally unstable young girls who crave validation so bad that they'll interact with pretty much anyone that the app connects them with. Alternatively, a pool of nymphomaniac women (or prostitutes pretending to be regular users) would probably be a great marketing asset for Tinder, because it gets guys to brag about their success, thereby boosting word of mouth. So it is indeed in Tinder's best interest to optimize for less intellectual and easily addicted members.
Plus back when I was single, I was usually busy doing stuff with friends or classmates and only barely managed to keep my Facebook halfway up to date. So based on my personal experience, I would feel very suspicious of anyone who spends a lot of time on dating apps. Either they are lonely, or they're super desperate. Both of that are hints that in the real world, not that many people want to spend time with them ...
EDIT: It looks like my guess wasn't that far off.
"Being a SBDA user was significantly associated with having psychological distress and depression"
Not sure about the mentally unstable young girls but can confirm that Tinder in my part of the world has a lot of... scantily-clad people shilling their Instagram accounts. Whether they are prostitutes I don't know, but I doubt that they are looking for a relationship.
I've added a link. Research says that people who heavily use Tinder tend to have psychological distress, depression and anxiety. It's just not clear yet if that means:
Some of them are literal sex workers. I saw a profile where a Chinese lady plead “I offer full-body massages with all services. Please don’t think bad of me, this is my job”.
Journalists and users interpreted their research to be the company’s marketing direction and part of how they created their users’ experience, rather than data revealing mass user behavior. Blame the messenger, reaction. Also, revealing parts of the sauce is perhaps more advantageous to competitors than may have been anticipated. They just don’t benefit much as a company when the reactions to published research becomes yet another thing for PR to manage.
I still don't know of any happy long-term couples in my social network who met through OLD.
The closest is a friend who is poly, meets all of her partners online, and then has a heavily one-sided poly relationship, since it's much, much harder for the guy to get any side-action.
This last guy has made it to two years, which is a record. Online dating is perfect for finding guys like that.
The biggest problem with OLD is that nearly everyone actively using it has problems. Problems that need to be addressed with time, effort, therapy, psychiatric counseling, and/or medication. Also potentially surgery, if a pitbull mauled your face as a child or something.
Don't feel bad if you aren't finding what you want on OLD, because you don't actually want to date the people who don't want to date you. And they're completely justified in not wanting to date you. You shouldn't want to date yourself either. You're both using dating apps, after all. That means there's lots of room for self-improvement, for everyone involved. Just being on the app is a red flag.
If I had to succinctly describe the vast majority of people who aren't using OLD for hookups (without digging into underlying causes), who spend extended periods of time unhappily single, searching in vain for a partner on dating apps:
Meeting people in the real world like we have done for millennia is highly underrated. I don't understand the obsession with dating apps. It's a horrible way to meet people. Young people's inability to approach potential partners the old school way has been a boon for those who actually have the balls to do so. I face so little competition these days, it's become real easy to stand out from the pack and get everything I want, more often than not.
In a non-creepy way. Probably not on the street, but sure anywhere out where people might be social and open to striking up a conversation (bar, restaurant, park, class, whatever). Don't make it an "approach," just strike up a conversation and if you hit it off, connect so you can develop something.
Maybe this is a generational thing, but outside of clubbing there is basically no situation I'm regularly in where it would not be weird for me to randomly strike up a conversation with a stranger.
If I'm shopping I'll smile and say "thanks" for any little consideration (moving aside, putting a "between shoppers bar" on the conveyor, holding a door, etc.), and when waiting for something I'll say something "chit chatty" to the person next to me, male or female, old or young. Sometimes it will be met with a conversation, mostly a polite reply but no chat, others will be shocked that a stranger spoke to them.
Anything can be used as a conversational gambit. I think "how about dem Yankees?" comes from an old film.
The point is that it doesn't cost anything to be rebuffed. Being open, approachable, and friendly is worth learning.
Not being creepy, slimy, or a Lounge Lizard helps. Just speak to people.
Fellow Brit! I'm 28 and in Japan.
Point taken, though being gay it is harder to find which people are within my dating pool - and the risk when rejected is much higher if the guys gonna deck me in the face.
I'm only playing devils advocate anyway, I met the guy I'm "dating" right now at a friends birthday party, so I can't knock the classic method.
The gay community is famously promiscuous (it’s not just hearsay, there are clear stats). I have several gay friends and none of them has ever struggled finding either occasional or stable relationships. They definitely never felt forced to strike a conversation with random people off the streets just to find a partner. If anything, they always joked that us “heteros” are illogically self-restricting when looking for sex and relationships.
Clubs are probably one of the worst place to meet people. No way to really converse and the best you can hope for is to meet someone drunk who wants to fuck. Not ideal for actually meeting people.
Most people are actually quite friendly and open to chatting. Talk to the people around you at bars, restaurants, parks. Offer to help people. Conversations happen naturally, just be open and confident. If you struggle with that, maybe some more structured group activities help break the ice (e.g. attend a class, sport, volunteer somewhere, etc.)
It depends. I think one reason you see many people using dating apps is that there is due to the bad gender ratio in their group. More people travel for work now and if all the places someone visit or work or study has bad gender ratio(story of many here), it is much harder to find partner. Many of us are not made for bar flirting with a random person.
It sounds like you have a very different goal. Some of us want a long term relationship. The fact that you've become good at meeting lots of people and starting relationships with them is proof you are not even remotely achieving the same goal.
My goal. Meet one great person, be with them for a very long time. Ideally for life but lets say 10 years. At 10yrs I'd have 6 to 7 relationships my entire life. If you tell me, "it's easy. I have a few new relationships a month" you haven't achieved the same goal.
I too can achieve the different goal of sleeping with lots of people but I choose not to because that's not my goal.
The OP could very easily have the same goal, except he is focusing on putting more leads at the top of the funnel.
More leads / dates = more chances for long term relationships.
If OP dates 100 women to find 1 long term relationship, is it more likely OP will find a better 'match', than you, who may date 1-3 women before converting them into a long term relationship.
Shouldn't more opportunities = more selective = better long term fit?
I don't really have a goal. Relationships with interesting people of whatever form are worth having regardless of the outcome. I've been in serious committed relationships, and single and having flings or just physical fun.
Being open minded, meeting a lot of people, and seeing what happens is the best way to meet a long term partner in my opinnion.
Every time I'm single, I'm out there meeting new people for everything from one night stands to flings to casual relationships and on occasion you realize that the person you're seeing that started just casually is the one you want to be with seriously. It's what has happened to me a couple times and again recently.
Hey Greggman3, I had a similar goal. My 2 golden nuggets are:
- Find out if you can diagnose with the Big 5 whether you'd be more of a fit with someone (or in my case: the HEXACO model -- a derivative of the Big 5). In my case: I need someone who scores quite high to extremely high on openness. My whole strategy on finding an amazing girlfriend always revolves around this. So far, I'm 4 years in :)
- Read up on assorted mating theory (check the wiki, just a few paragraphs)
When you have the right approach, finding an amazing partner is actually really easy, albeit there's work to do.
For more inspiration see also [1]. What I took away from this talk is not that she went all techy on it, but that she made a very clear strategy on how to find her life partner. It's the best example I could find of that it's quite easy (but hard work), when you have an approach that works for you.
Finding an approach that works for you is the toughest part.
I bet Bumble is more successful as a social network for women than as a dating app. I’ve not had a single chat on it and I don’t expect to ever get one. But hey, you can swipe right on Sharon Stone and a bunch of hot instagrammers! A man would probably get more value out of an hour on a random onlyfans than a year on Bumble.
It’s not rocket science to get a response on there. Ditch selfies. Show your best self. Smile. You’ll get a match...
Bumble is definitely more popular among my female friends. There are a lot of “fake” profiles too, profiles created with the intention of getting you to follow their Instagram, but there are real profiles out there with real people on the other side. Bumble is one of the many dating apps I tried after my divorce and it’s the one I have the most success with. I’m not a model so Tinder doesn’t work. I’m not interested in diving into another marriage so eharmony and hinge don’t work. I tried the league but I’d rather eat dog shit than listen to a 1%’er cry about money problems.
Woman just want dogs. Men just want a woman. Men, get a dog.
> Woman just want dogs. Men just want a woman. Men, get a dog.
Even if you're a cat person? Doesn't make sense. There must be women who like cats, too. I at least found one. Not within a dating app though. Unless you consider World of Warcraft a dating app, that is.
Possibly, but I wasn't specifically looking, and she was actually already in a relationship when we met (we started out as friends), and wasn't specifically looking either.
it was a bad attempt at sarcasm. I love cats personally. WoW has had it's share of relationships for sure. I loved the older MMO days when you're guild/clan felt like extended family.
My statement was an (I guess poorly worded) attempt to show how ridiculous courtship is, yet we all do it.
I didn't mention the dynamics of my relationship with my ex so not sure what you're comparing to. Down voted because of sarcasm/bias against dogs. Or because I find elitism unattractive.
As a man who isn't especially fond of radical feminism or silencing men, Bumble has been the best experience I've ever had on a dating app.
The "women message first" rule takes a lot of pressure away from my shoulders.
By applying a few common sense rules (eg only swiping rights on profiles that have a minimum of text), I've been able to have conversations that were mostly with women who were actually interested in talking to someone.
I've still had some bad experiences (eg woman who already had a boyfriend and only mentioned it after a month, then dropped out), and there's still a sense of "you're a man so you're the one who has to keep the conversation going no matter what", but overall the interesting-conversation-to-effort ratio of the app has been way higher than I expected it to be.
The conversations pick up faster, there's way less ghosting, I actually get the sense that the woman I'm talking to actually read my profile, etc. I really wouldn't call it humiliating.
(I've heard from others that their experience was more in line with the usual apps though)
I didn’t have many friends and none were going out regularly. I went on my own. Made some friends (basically women I wasn’t attracted to) which made it marginally less awkward but still spent many hours alone on dancefloors.
I get the practically of
online dating, but not why people would expect it to be easier than going out, breaking a sweat, talking to (and getting snubbed by) women. If anything in nightclubs the element of physical attraction (which isn’t just looks but pheromones and spit and whatever else) is immediately available, whereas in online dating you have to painstakingly evoke an atmosphere.
But sure, not everyone enjoys dancing to DJs. But it’s hard either way.
Nightclubs are expensive, man! Tinder looks dirt-cheap in comparison, lol.
But yeah, I have to say I’ve been tempted to try “the old-fashioned way”. I just fear the conditioning we get from Hollywood - anybody alone in any social setting must “obviously” be a serial killer or weirdo.
Interesting considering OkCupid has recently come out with an even more expensive tier for their app. The best features are now twice as expensive as their “normal” paid plan. Meanwhile they’ve redesigned the app in a way that seems less useful to me. Users always hate app redesigns so maybe it’s just something I need to get used to, but they’ve eliminated the ability to do a custom fine grained search and see a bucket of results.
Anyway I was a paying customer until I noticed they came out with even more expensive plans. I don’t want to be nickled and dimed so I’m back on free.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 267 ms ] threadAnother one: "women rate an incredible 80% of guys as worse-looking than medium" - https://archive.is/ZJymw
I'm not sure if I agree. From the perspective of the dating site you'd be right, the longer people are unable to find the kind of relationship that they want, the better it is for their business. However, from the point of view of the people looking for dates, if people are shown little to no profiles where it's highly unlikely that a relationship will happen, and shown mostly profiles where matches are likely, regardless of their stated preferences, and thus response rates and relationship likelihood rises, that seems like it can be a better outcome to me.
The real criticism of this model is completely different, and much deeper. People don't actually know what they want and who would make them happy, and they often conform / default to social conventions in their public preferences - e.g. maybe you want to filter out 10+ older men because you don't want to go on dates with "creepy" dudes, or you want to filter out fat women because you don't want your friends to judge you - even though in reality, you might actually be happier with those matches, or, more likely, those attributes are often orthogonal to your actual happiness.
1. Attractive / high value men are happy to sleep with less attractive women they wouldn't consider as 'relationship material'.
2. Women are generally more sexually liberated so there's an increasing chance they will have had several of these encounters, and therefore believe they are entitled to men of the same level (also known as becoming an 'alpha widow').
Like most of these theories it's pretty depressing to contemplate, but I'm yet to see a convincing refutation of it.
I can not tell who is going to be the most miserable in such relationship. My guess is the woman, who will not be able to understand how "she settled like that, since she could do so much better". In the best case scenario, the man will be oblivious of the fact, so probably he will be unaffected.
I would love to find a way of coming to terms with this that doesn't involve adopting the full red pill attitude of "never get married, all women are like that" etc
Of course, this is possible because the average man will have far fewer relationships than the average woman. So in the end the numbers for this imaginary couple will look like:
For the man: He will marry then number 2 mate out of a total of 5.
For the woman: She will marry the number 10 mate out of a total of 15.
Obviously the numbers are totally made up, but you get the point.
So be positive! When you will settle, your mate will probably exceed your expectations.
Disclaimer: I am also a man.
Best is to find your own self esteem. Whoever gets your company and attention is lucky, because you chose to give it to them and no one else...
It’s just you in the Boltzmann brain... no one else means anything. Also the universe is big, really big. And the block universe is here all at once. You can’t really change anything... we don’t know anything. What were we talking about again ?
[1] https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-g... (Tinder Experiments II: Guys, unless you are really hot you are probably better off not wasting your time on Tinder — a quantitative socio-economic study)
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22406583 (RFC: Let's Disrupt Dating Apps)
The problem is that the comparison totally falls apart. You are not competing to get the most likes on Tinder, you are just trying to meet someone to form a relationship or make out or whatever. If you’re really interested in comparing Tinder against other avenues for achieving this goal (or whatever goal you have), then you should be looking at something like WAR—wins against replacement. How likely are you to have a positive outcome using Tinder versus using some other site, or trying to meet people in person.
If you want to find a place where it’s easy to find someone cute who wants to make out, then the only real answer is to be a gay man (do whatever you need to make that possible), clean yourself up, and move to the city.
If you’re interested in a heterosexual relationship, you are simply going to have to deal with the fact that men and women in our culture have, on average, differing preferences when it comes to relationships. If you have typical preferences for a single man in our culture, then they don’t match typical preferences for a single woman in our culture, and if you find a relationship, it will involve some bridging of the gap between your different desires. Tinder doesn’t change that, and neither do any of the other sites.
Being happy in a relationship is not about somehow managing to trick someone into being with you, nor is it about somehow lifting yourself up to the standards of masculinity / femininity you see in media.
—Olaf, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVCCYAYr-24
I’m not a therapist or relationship counselor. I really only have my opinions and personal experiences to share.
Women rate 80% of online images of men on a dating site as worse-looking than their personal definition of medium.
I think it's important to keep in mind that:
* There are disparities between gender for how much appearance factors into attractiveness.
* The fact that a person is on an online dating site itself sends an attractiveness signal.
This is an unattainable level of health and fitness for most Americans. Bet you’re way more attractive than you think you are.
I'm 42 and probably in the best shape of my life. But that's mostly because I spent the first forty years absolutely shunning any form of physical exercise.
Presumably the hot dudes aren't the people on online dating sites. (Not to be objectifying, but dating is a bit of a lemons market i imagine)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
It's also why the median job-seeker in a field is less skilled than the median person in the field of interest: the median person has been evaluated by at least one employer to be sufficiently skilled.
Which, of course, why this blog post was deleted.
In 2010 it was weird to date on the internet. In 2020 everybody and their mother is on tinder.
So maybe the average is bleak, but if it has a good P90 or P95 success rate, it might still be worth the try.
Everyone I know who've found love online seem to be in the first category. Those that find dating difficult offline don't seem to have significantly better luck online either.
I feel online dating gave them a chance to meet some other people, pre-meet prior to first date, and than go on a first date, which they'd otherwise wouldn't have been able too. Either from never meeting the person in the first place, never asking to go out on a date, or messing up that date.
That's all my personal analysis though, like I have no data here appart from a few people I know and my interpretation.
Do you mean like... Given enough time they'd have married someone offline as well?
I think some of them that are more socially active offline probably, but some I could see easily going a long time without. There's a lot of people who have really small social circles without any new face coming into it ever. And they don't have the motivation or personality to go and seek it out in real life, but do if it's behind a screen at home in their pijamas.
While back there was a stigma a bit around online dating too, which I think has gone away now.
Users sticking around for a long time means you failed horribly at your mission.
I'm really not sure how one would create a good revenue model for something like this. Many apps try a subscription-based approach and all I can say is that for someone who is earnestly looking for a partner, an annual subscription is the last thing they want.
Marriage is correlated with a lot of measures of societal health---perhaps government grants?
http://sdn.sg/
Someone must have attempted this before; I’m curious what obstacles they ran into. My guess would be that this model is radically less profitable than the standard “casino” model where you effectively string users along with the evergreen promise of “maybe this time.”
The reality also is that once you know someone's name and if there truly is mutual chat interest you can just connect with them on other social media, and it's extremely hard for any dating service to avoid that.
Even if people get many matches in the first place, the rate of any meaningful interactions is low.
When I was a user, I met a lot of people outside of my town and social circle. I dated a few here and there for quite a while. It isn't magic but it can be a controlled way to meet other people.
We’re also evolutionarily optimized to recalculate and reconsider almost constantly, so even if that works for you at the start, as soon as you have just one conversation that goes on a week, you’ll forget that little lie and pine for what you got a taste of. Or most people would, anyway.
Doctor: "Then stop doing that."
I gave up online dating 10 years ago. A few months ago I tried again after a relationship ended. I'd quit again within a week. Honestly it was even worse than I remembered.
Patient: decides to ignore the advice and seeks medical advice on the internet
Is this still true? When was the last time you tried Tinder/Bumble/OKC? There are tons of attractive people there.
Definitely not true and likely has never been true. Many of the most attractive women I know are active on online dating. People join online dating for various reasons. One is to expand your dating pool. If you've burned through a lot of your social network (or you don't want to poison it) then online dating is a great way to expand your horizon.
From what I gather, it really only amplifies what you experience in real life already. If a significant amount of people show interest in you from a very early stage - you will have no problems with online dating. If you require any kind of barrier to get interest, I wouldn't bother unless you have the incredible ability to not evaluate your self-worth from the app regardless of what happens.
Therefore it's in their best interest to give you illusion of success in bite size chunks.
These services only amplifies the already attractive people who don't need matches anyway.
Online dating just never worked for me, for the same reasons you describe. I think part of it is a combination of paradox of choice and part of it is people just not having faith in technology finding them something human. I went on dates where the other person sooner or later doubted the possibility of marrying someone they met online, and it usually degenerated from there into either friendship or nothing.
There's also the weird social expectation on many apps that males should message first, which results in females getting spammed, which then further results in females not messaging first, and the cycle perpetuates.
As a technology lover I really want online dating to work in bringing more compatible people together and increase overall societal happiness by increasing the average quality of marriage, but time and time again it seems to me that the best way to bring compatible people together is with offline events. Compatible people tend to want to go to similar places and do similar things, and any successful online dating app really should exploit that fact.
In fact, the most successful organizations I have seen at bringing together singles into stable marriages were not even explicitly about dating. I've seen far more stable couples form at mixed-gender sports teams, hiking groups, volunteer organizations, conference organizing teams, and other professional organizations where participants largely cared about the same causes.
I was about to delete my OK Cupid account and she msg'd first, sending me something kind of clever and we met up for a beer. Before the date I decided it would be my last dating app date. Friday is our 2nd anniversary.
It's a pretty great reflection actually...looking back and seeing how many last attempts actually worked out.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surely_You%27re_Joking,_Mr._Fe...
It’s not quite as bold as Feynman’s approach, but clear intentions and not trying to hedge a situation or avoiding being shot down was the key to success for me.
On multiple occasions I met a girl and just said out loud to my friends or hers that I am going to date her/go home with her and in the case of my wife I told some of her friends that I was going to marry that girl. My wife and I took another 5 years after that to get the timing right, but when either of us were single we’d start chatting again.
Also, it was 1946 - when women saw men as a necessary meal ticket. It's waaay less likely to work today, particularly for people living comfortably above the poverty line.
So I got bored, and posted haiku to entertain myself. I realized that it was actually more fun than dating :)
Then I got a long rant by a crazed creative woman, she actually was perfect so I said whatever, let's meet and see what happens!
Today is our 3rd wedding anniversary :)
I met and became friends with one of my still best friends by contacting them on a dating site and having zero expectations of ever meeting them, just because I thought they'd be cool to hang out with online (and they were).
My partner of the last 10 years was a friend of theirs. Never would have met my partner if not for the dating site, and never would have met them on a dating site.
A lot of it boils down to mental framing. In other words, think of yourself as providing an opportunity for someone to participate in something great. If they don't take advantage of that opportunity, that's their loss not yours. One of the best quotes is from Patrice O'Neal: "You MUST believe in your own righteousness."
To be clear, she had a mental breakdown when at a therapy session with a bunch of men who were talking about chopping up their wives. The context in your post frames it as if it had been because of her lack of success in dating, but that's not what it was. (Also, she talks about how she actually had dating success to the point that straight women she was dating would agree to sleep with her even after finding out that she has female parts. I wish I was that hot.)
Calling them "stone-cold losers" for remembering a number doesn't make any sense to me.
The last part -- matching with people you like is where I see a real need for a specialist that I'm an unaware to exist -- there could be soooo much at play there. The demographics of that group, what that group REALLY wants in a partner, honest feedback for yourself, what to improve in yourself etc etc.
My wife and I are wondering how the Indian Matchmaker business model work. How do you align the incentives so you can help people and get some extra income?
Also - bug your desired-sex friends and family. Show them your profile. Focus-group it. This has been massively helpful for me.
At the end of the day: change stuff and see what happens.
Actually getting dates? That's easy enough. Being white, attractive enough, 6' tall, between 150 and 180lbs, no kids, and make a tech salary seems to tick off a lot of boxes for girls.
I have had relationships and am engaged to a beautiful woman now so I found a way to work around it but it is near impossible. My short male friends are either single or have made considerable compromises.
It's a factor that is weirdly denied in society too. Nobody wants to hear that an immutable characteristic plays such a role on the male side...
This said, you can still somewhat compensate for height with status and other looks. Tom Cruise is 172cm but I don't think he ever struggled for dates.
We men of course have our own biological preferences perhaps equally irrelevant in the modern era, so this isn't a blame thing just an oft denied fact.
Oh and as to Tom Cruise - it is a hilarious kind of example I have heard so many times. The fact that people have to reference those who are monumentally successful in the top .000001% kind of proves the point.
Yes there other factors but height tends to be a prerequisite before they apply. Odds goes exponentially down based on how far from the mean you are. 5'9" vs. 5'5" is a world of difference.
'Success' is also not Boolean. I know very successful short guys who have had zero success with women.
Talking in blasé terms 'oh it is just one of many factors' is like saying possessing functioning legs is just one of many factors a footballer requires. Or having enough petrol is one of many factors in a car functioning properly. It's true but kind of missing the point.
The really interesting point is why people are so in denial about this fact that is so blatantly obvious.
I suspect it is a mix of those without this issue wanting to think their success was all attributable to their own skills, people not liking the idea that something uncontrollable could screw you so bad, women feeling it is an attack (it isn't at all), those who are shorter but not significantly below the mean having success (though reduced) and thinking it must apply to those shorter than them, etc.
Another interesting thing I have noticed is that short men is one of the few remaining immutable characteristics society allows people to mock openly. "What is she doing with that little squirt" is something I heard from a friend recently without a hint of self-awareness.
On the mocking, I agree but hopefully that’s slowly going away. It’s one of those things, like casual racism and casual sexism, that will take a while to fully disappear from everyday conversations. Some animal instincts are just what they are.
Most of the examples of guys who do well at very short height are either - some MASSIVE compensation in some other way (hugely confident, etc.) with a MASSIVE failure rate, or they are actually in a dating pool with a lower male height.
Obviously exceptions happen (I'm engaged for one!) but the impact it has is massive and I didn't know until my mid 20's, nobody wanted to admit it or talk about it and it would have saved me a lot of pain to know.
I find that quite hard to believe. Otherwise, the range of heights would be much narrower, and humans would probably be much taller (we're barely taller than gorillas), with much less variation between cultures. I'd say either it's unlikely that there was that much genetic pressure on height, or that most of evolution height wasn't genetic (but limiting factor was something else, e.g. food - so only well-fed people could grow as tall as their genetic potential).
Also all of literature would suggest otherwise. Look at any documentary talking about a man who is considered attractive and see what word they use first. "Tall, dark and handsome" - notice the order. The list goes on and once you start looking for it you'll be surprised. Look at romance - novels - see how many of the men are short.
You could also speak to some women and ask them about it. If you ask enough you'll get at least some honest responses (not disparaging women, equally men may often be deceptive on this kind of question).
I'm also not sure I understand your argument - both men + women contribute to height, male height is only part of the equation (my dad is normal height my mum is very short and I am short for example). Also nutrition has been HUGE in stunting growth, societies with better nutrition have a very big increase in height (which also suggests sexual selection plays a role I'd say).
Height is also in a pretty narrow range anyway, +-2SD.
Finally I'd say that if you were significantly shorter than average and male + had tried your hand with dating you'd have a very raw and immediate series of data points that would be pretty compelling.
This isn't really a controversial point, in the same way men have a preference for a certain hip/waist ratio in women ("why don't all women then have that hip/waist ratio" you might ask following your existing argument...!)
But I agree that women are obviously filtering on that.
As an anecdote - one site I was on took a while to publish my height and I started having conversations with women. As soon as it showed one dropped contact and the other said she felt 'no chemistry' after we had basically said hello to each other :)
What barnacled is saying is absolutely true, and unless you've spent time as a single man of below average height, you really just won't understand.
The difference in attention and respect that a few inches make is pretty astounding. I'd imagine it's pretty similar to the stories I hear of people shedding hundreds of pounds and being treated as a completely different person. Once again, unless you've been on both sides of the equation, it's unlikely you'll be able to grasp how much physical traits like height and weight affect how people treat you.
As you say, unless you've experienced it for yourself it's hard (but not impossible) to get quite how extreme it is.
I've heard plenty enough from women talking directly about it, from basically all fiction ('tall, dark, handsome' in that order, no romance novel has a short guy, etc.), the fact that height rockets up when nutrition improves - sexual selection likely to be a big factor on that too.
It's nuanced and it's all relative to the average height of the dating population you're in but a few inches can be the difference between some attention and absolutely none.
If in 'real life' you could communicate with that many people outside of your social circles, it'd be the same.
However, you do upload pictures of yourself and are asked to rate pictures of others - possibly not in your geographic area. The AI gets a feel for what your preferences are and matches you.
Granted - its all a bit superficial that its really just about how you look - but this seems to be the underlying issue with tinder: the benefits accrue to the top percentile "best looking" people. Everyone else gets (unfairly) left in the dust.
Thats as far as I got... thoughts?
In an online dating situation, you have extremely little to determine what the other person is like, so appearances (photo) becomes significantly more weighted. You look at the photo, find him/her unattractive, and move on.
Whereas in a more organic situation, you may find the person unattractive at first meet, but as you interact with them, decide otherwise.
I think it is time we admit that there are some problems that just can't be solved with a website.
I worked for $large_dating_site years ago at their peak. We spent countless days weeks and months in meetings, spitballing all kinds of ideas, building prototypes, and coming up with "innovative" ideas for new dating app products. In the end it turns out the only thing users really want is a picture, a name, and a paragraph. Everything beyond that is in the realm of direct human interaction. Any kind of artificial friction you create between people that is any more complex than that just ends up being annoying and driving away casual users.
The problem with dating apps is not a technological one. It all comes down to who's using them. Wherever the women go, the men will follow. This is why Bumble has been so successful. Catering to women is the only way to have a successful dating app. At any given time, there's a curve of adoption for dating apps, and they all go through the same lifecycle. Cool/new/hip/cheap/free with a 50/50 young male/female ratio and no bots -> established/revenue generating/mature users with fewer women than men -> bot ridden scam with no real women. At any given time there are three major apps that fill these roles. Right now it's Hinge -> Bumble -> Tinder.
The main problem I see with this idea is if I knew that's how the app worked, I could upload a picture of someone from the "best looking" subset of my gender, probably get quite a few matches, and no user of the app would be able to call me out on my BS, because "oh, the AI must have been really terrible at understanding my preferences..." rather than "this user just uploaded a model's photo"
Right now, you just get invisibly and unknowingly filtered out by those who don't find you attractive. That gives a certain amount of esteem preservation to the activity at least.
[1] https://www.datingring.com/
The person you dated or the app?
> From the ad, we can see that just 86,140 of those subscribers get married, a mere 6.2% of the people who paid the company to find them a mate.
I know a lot of people who would easily drop $120 for a 6.2% chance of finding a partner in a year. These odds are not horrible.
But are the people who would drop $120 to find a partner the same people who belong to that 6.2%?
I think most people absolutely suck at being original or appealing in texting. Going through tinder or any dating app makes you see the worst of humanity. Scams, lot of them. Catfishers. Kids pulling prank and laughing at desperate middle-aged men. Exaggerations, too high expectations. It makes you compare with others. It makes you desperate. Just avoid it.
I mean, people don't really know themselves or what they look for, generally speaking.
Anyway, matchmakers are not a new concept.
My wife would get upset if I did that.
> I think most people absolutely suck at being original in texting or appealing.
Yup
Those are in fact horrible odds. I would prefer to pay $2,000 for a 100% chance. Or $20,000.
The only way you can get 100% chance is if you go the route of a mail-order bride. Not sure if that's even legal anymore.
For legitimate options that include only legal means with consenting adults... 6.2% is pretty good.
No, it isn't. At those odds, your expected wait to marry is over 16 years, which defeats the purpose.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_age_at_fi...
Most people who are motivated to get married explore more than one option at the same time. So you do this plus some combination of other things likely to get you socializing with members of the other gender: start doing the weekly ski/ bike trips; going to pubs; going to yoga; join the square dancing club, etc etc. (Clearly my recent experience socializing with the opposite gender is pretty badly out of date).
Again, nothing legal/ ethical and guaranteed so the only way to increase the odds is to increase your exposure to your audience. If your goal is marriage, $120 and 6% on eHarmony is price and time competitive. Though likely not as fun as going on weekly ski or bike trips.
Then you go on to say, but wait online dating isn't real life? Or is it? An increasing amount of people are meeting through online dating these days. I'd say it very accurately represents real life, granted personalities may not always be attractive and result in a breakup there is a looks threshold that needs to be met before anything meaningful emerges.
I met my current (and last) wife on OKCupid. Only messaged two or three women, she the last. We've been married now for four years and get along like two peas in a pod. Luck, I guess. (I certainly had it coming.)
[1] "Alle 11 Minuten verliebt sich ein Single über Parship"
2014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2170998
Discussed at the time:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1842557
and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1277626
Most dating sites are a bad deal for males, mainly due to the gender skew. There are at least 2x as many males. The top 20-25% is then enough to gobble up all viable women (top 50%). 1 out of 2 are at least not unattractive, 1 out of 3 are outright attractive, and 1 out of 5 are hot. That is, not even out of attractive males and the women are already gone.
And that's just one dimension. If you have 2 or 3 other axes where you cut off anybody below the median (intelligence, income, politics, interest, etc.) you're quickly finding yourself looking only at a few percent of the population.
And if you have no other metrics other than attractiveness, you'll find that few women wish to date you.
Further, the most superficial experience highest success. That is, they are most likely to lie.
A high percentage of viable matches is uncommon. 1/2 minimally mutually satisfying match * 1/2 at least not unattractive * 1/2 reciprocating attractiveness = 1 out of 8 random pairings find each other minimally mutually satisfying and at least not unattractive (by their own measure of what that is; whether aesthetics, social status, money, etc).
Truth.
https://caseysoftware.com/blog/working-for-a-dating-website
We leverage an entrance fee to reduce that conflict of interest. Once someone pays the entrance fee, we have little incentive to keep them single and looking. We actually want them to go on dates and make a margin on the dates we book.
https://stories.fairytrail.app/reinventing-the-online-dating...
The sign up fee makes sense. The per-date margin seems to be diametrically opposed.
The upshot of this however is that, if you are being honest in your profile, these things are things that you want to do anyway.
If you still take the effort to talk to the person before going on a booked trip, it should be an experience you will enjoy.
Of course, things can go wrong. But part of any relationship is taking that risk.
I don't think this is a silver bullet, no, but I think it is a pretty good framework for people who are in a good place to find in a healthy relationship. I.e. comfortable and honest with themselves and looking for a partner to enrich their lives rather than just seeking 'a relationship' (i.e. trying to fill some other void in themselves).
It was a long time ago and I certainly don't have the data anymore. IIRC, there used to be a tell on the site where careful inspection of the user's profile page would tell you whether or not they had a full, paid profile (it was something like the background color of one of the fields being slightly different).
Once I discounted the unpaid profiles from my numbers, it was actually a pretty high percentage of people that would respond, go through the several layers of canned intro questionaires, a few back-and-forth messages, and finally agreeing to a date.
The end result was something like 25% of the people with whom I matched whom also had paying profiles would end up in a date. But if you were just tracking "percentage of 'matches' that lead to dates", it was something like 0.1%.
Basically, it boiled down to eHarmony's system giving out less than 1 paying profile per day out of the 5 or 7 or 10 or whatever they gave you. You had to be diligent, working it every day, to get that number above 1 per week. Filter that down to 25%, it was about a date a month.
It was exhausting. I had better luck talking to random people at social events. I met a few people through Craigslist by gamifying my posts, stuff like "to prove you're not a bot, you have to decrypt this ROT13 message and copy it in your email to me" [0]. I actually dated a woman for a little while whom I met when she came to my door looking for donations for some charity.
But really, getting out of bars and going out to specific social events, getting into a group of people with whom I became friends, and letting them introduce me to women, was the ultimate key to finding my wife of 6 years.
[0] Aaaah, Craigslist personals ads. It's all fun and games, until you meet the crazy one who tries to get you into a fight at a biker bar.
1. Objectives. The article might be correct if your objective is marriage. If your objective is to schedule as much low-effort sex as possible, or even just juggling multiple long-term relationships, especially if you operate over a wide geographic area......expanding your search online is invaluable. Treat paid sites as just another tool in your harem management toolbox.
2. Stale profiles. This is why I really liked the $COUNTRYNAME_Cupid websites. They take more effort to put a profile together, AND they have a "last logged in" feature, so when you do a profile search "No smokers, no kids, etc..." you don't have to worry about messaging people who haven't touched the site in 9 months, and it's easy to ignore blank profiles. Also, typically women with free accounts will "poke" you or view your profile, and that webpage listing those women is where you start your screening.
For anyone who might want to re-read them, gwern archived the old OKCupid blog here: https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/okcupid/
Look at Tinder, the paid plans started out with features like changing location, unlimited likes, more superlikes etc. All of these seem fair as they don't necessarily disadvantage you if you are not paying, your rank in recommended profiles more or less remains the same.
I recently saw that Tinder introduced one more tier now where even your likes are boosted if you are in the paid plan. This would make the app kind of useless for anyone who is not paying and is not hot enough to be ranked at top.
Sidenote: I wonder why OkCupid deleted their old posts. I loved posts like these and others like Race and reply rate. If it was because of not wanting to offend someone, it is even worse that we are pushing things like these under the rug.
Popular theory is their acquisition by the same company that owns every other dating site on the planet had something to do with it.
Political correctness. Hopefully there are copies around the web, those posts were very very interesting.
Not sure if it's a bad thing either, as the common saying goes: if you're not paying then you're the product and non-paying Tinder users are there to prop up paying ones. The only down-side I'd argue is mentally hurting ignorant people with self-image but I think Tinder is doing good amount of effort explaining this.
Reasons include but are not limited to:
Inciting of violence
Threats of death
General stupitidy of idea
Legitimate criticism of authoritarian powers that be
General rudeness
1. the holocaust was a hoax
2. democrats are run by a secret cabal of satanists that use the blood of children to make immortality drugs
3. illuminati exist and are alien lizard people
4. Donald trump is smart and did a great job with the coronavirus
>use the blood of children to make immortality drugs
has actually been the topic of notable research. Though the studies I've read were with regard to growth factors and proteins in youth blood plasma. Democrat links I leave on the cutting room floor. Vanna White is the only potential candidate I have currently for an immortal.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/05/science/young-blood-may-h...
Ambrosia was the big name startup around the time iirc.
The rest is mostly hogwash, I agree, but if you actually do a bit of digging, a tall tale sometimes has a nugget of truth. There is also a level of translation and realism required.
>In fact, illuminati exist and are alien lizard people
becomes much less insane if you filter it through the understanding information propagates with less resistance through lower reliability channels and extract the oh so much more likely meaning:
>There exists a small kernel of individuals with influence spanning far beyond what any normal person would experience or recognize, and their mentality or approach to dealing with things is so different as to be hard to understand from a casual observer's or outsider to their number's point of view.
1 and 4 my pedantism and integrity will in no way allow any reasonable entertaining of however.
I do not need your funding at this time, and do hope it isn't taken personally if occasion should find I do in the future, or we end up in the same startup. I just wished to point out that sometimes what sounds absolutely batshit insane is merely missing explicit context.
The old posts were critical of Match.com, who OkCupid were acquired by.
You pay for the scarest resource: attractive people.
What is attractive has been evaluated and optimized over time by Tinder.
Tinder is not your only option. Good old dating still works magic even more now since everybody seems to date via app. The tides have changed.
What Tinder in my point of view evolved, is more a chat platform, than a dating platform. Good looks and speed is everything. I find it way easier to date offline than online even though I am on the attractive tier. No answer for 4 hours? Off you go. Does not happen offline + WhatsApp.
When YouTube and Facebook optimized for engagement, that meant boosting conspiracy theories and click-bait content.
Now that Tinder has optimized their engagement for a while, I'd expect that the supply side of the platform is dominated by mentally unstable young girls who crave validation so bad that they'll interact with pretty much anyone that the app connects them with. Alternatively, a pool of nymphomaniac women (or prostitutes pretending to be regular users) would probably be a great marketing asset for Tinder, because it gets guys to brag about their success, thereby boosting word of mouth. So it is indeed in Tinder's best interest to optimize for less intellectual and easily addicted members.
Plus back when I was single, I was usually busy doing stuff with friends or classmates and only barely managed to keep my Facebook halfway up to date. So based on my personal experience, I would feel very suspicious of anyone who spends a lot of time on dating apps. Either they are lonely, or they're super desperate. Both of that are hints that in the real world, not that many people want to spend time with them ...
EDIT: It looks like my guess wasn't that far off.
"Being a SBDA user was significantly associated with having psychological distress and depression"
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7055053/
Plus this:
https://phicklephilly.com/2019/08/22/meet-the-tinder-prostit...
http://valleywag.gawker.com/tinder-is-full-of-robot-prostitu...
https://shanisilver.medium.com/tinder-is-a-modern-day-whoreh...
a) People with psychological issues like Tinder.
or
b) Using Tinder causes psychological issues.
The closest is a friend who is poly, meets all of her partners online, and then has a heavily one-sided poly relationship, since it's much, much harder for the guy to get any side-action.
This last guy has made it to two years, which is a record. Online dating is perfect for finding guys like that.
The biggest problem with OLD is that nearly everyone actively using it has problems. Problems that need to be addressed with time, effort, therapy, psychiatric counseling, and/or medication. Also potentially surgery, if a pitbull mauled your face as a child or something.
Don't feel bad if you aren't finding what you want on OLD, because you don't actually want to date the people who don't want to date you. And they're completely justified in not wanting to date you. You shouldn't want to date yourself either. You're both using dating apps, after all. That means there's lots of room for self-improvement, for everyone involved. Just being on the app is a red flag.
If I had to succinctly describe the vast majority of people who aren't using OLD for hookups (without digging into underlying causes), who spend extended periods of time unhappily single, searching in vain for a partner on dating apps:
men: too shy
women: too picky
If I'm shopping I'll smile and say "thanks" for any little consideration (moving aside, putting a "between shoppers bar" on the conveyor, holding a door, etc.), and when waiting for something I'll say something "chit chatty" to the person next to me, male or female, old or young. Sometimes it will be met with a conversation, mostly a polite reply but no chat, others will be shocked that a stranger spoke to them.
Anything can be used as a conversational gambit. I think "how about dem Yankees?" comes from an old film.
The point is that it doesn't cost anything to be rebuffed. Being open, approachable, and friendly is worth learning.
Not being creepy, slimy, or a Lounge Lizard helps. Just speak to people.
The gay community is famously promiscuous (it’s not just hearsay, there are clear stats). I have several gay friends and none of them has ever struggled finding either occasional or stable relationships. They definitely never felt forced to strike a conversation with random people off the streets just to find a partner. If anything, they always joked that us “heteros” are illogically self-restricting when looking for sex and relationships.
Most people are actually quite friendly and open to chatting. Talk to the people around you at bars, restaurants, parks. Offer to help people. Conversations happen naturally, just be open and confident. If you struggle with that, maybe some more structured group activities help break the ice (e.g. attend a class, sport, volunteer somewhere, etc.)
My goal. Meet one great person, be with them for a very long time. Ideally for life but lets say 10 years. At 10yrs I'd have 6 to 7 relationships my entire life. If you tell me, "it's easy. I have a few new relationships a month" you haven't achieved the same goal.
I too can achieve the different goal of sleeping with lots of people but I choose not to because that's not my goal.
More leads / dates = more chances for long term relationships.
If OP dates 100 women to find 1 long term relationship, is it more likely OP will find a better 'match', than you, who may date 1-3 women before converting them into a long term relationship.
Shouldn't more opportunities = more selective = better long term fit?
Being open minded, meeting a lot of people, and seeing what happens is the best way to meet a long term partner in my opinnion.
Every time I'm single, I'm out there meeting new people for everything from one night stands to flings to casual relationships and on occasion you realize that the person you're seeing that started just casually is the one you want to be with seriously. It's what has happened to me a couple times and again recently.
- Find out if you can diagnose with the Big 5 whether you'd be more of a fit with someone (or in my case: the HEXACO model -- a derivative of the Big 5). In my case: I need someone who scores quite high to extremely high on openness. My whole strategy on finding an amazing girlfriend always revolves around this. So far, I'm 4 years in :)
- Read up on assorted mating theory (check the wiki, just a few paragraphs)
When you have the right approach, finding an amazing partner is actually really easy, albeit there's work to do.
For more inspiration see also [1]. What I took away from this talk is not that she went all techy on it, but that she made a very clear strategy on how to find her life partner. It's the best example I could find of that it's quite easy (but hard work), when you have an approach that works for you.
Finding an approach that works for you is the toughest part.
[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/amy_webb_how_i_hacked_online_datin...
Bumble is definitely more popular among my female friends. There are a lot of “fake” profiles too, profiles created with the intention of getting you to follow their Instagram, but there are real profiles out there with real people on the other side. Bumble is one of the many dating apps I tried after my divorce and it’s the one I have the most success with. I’m not a model so Tinder doesn’t work. I’m not interested in diving into another marriage so eharmony and hinge don’t work. I tried the league but I’d rather eat dog shit than listen to a 1%’er cry about money problems.
Woman just want dogs. Men just want a woman. Men, get a dog.
Even if you're a cat person? Doesn't make sense. There must be women who like cats, too. I at least found one. Not within a dating app though. Unless you consider World of Warcraft a dating app, that is.
My statement was an (I guess poorly worded) attempt to show how ridiculous courtship is, yet we all do it.
Revoking the message right to every male user is not the answer.
The "women message first" rule takes a lot of pressure away from my shoulders.
By applying a few common sense rules (eg only swiping rights on profiles that have a minimum of text), I've been able to have conversations that were mostly with women who were actually interested in talking to someone.
I've still had some bad experiences (eg woman who already had a boyfriend and only mentioned it after a month, then dropped out), and there's still a sense of "you're a man so you're the one who has to keep the conversation going no matter what", but overall the interesting-conversation-to-effort ratio of the app has been way higher than I expected it to be.
The conversations pick up faster, there's way less ghosting, I actually get the sense that the woman I'm talking to actually read my profile, etc. I really wouldn't call it humiliating.
(I've heard from others that their experience was more in line with the usual apps though)
I didn’t have many friends and none were going out regularly. I went on my own. Made some friends (basically women I wasn’t attracted to) which made it marginally less awkward but still spent many hours alone on dancefloors.
I get the practically of online dating, but not why people would expect it to be easier than going out, breaking a sweat, talking to (and getting snubbed by) women. If anything in nightclubs the element of physical attraction (which isn’t just looks but pheromones and spit and whatever else) is immediately available, whereas in online dating you have to painstakingly evoke an atmosphere.
But sure, not everyone enjoys dancing to DJs. But it’s hard either way.
But yeah, I have to say I’ve been tempted to try “the old-fashioned way”. I just fear the conditioning we get from Hollywood - anybody alone in any social setting must “obviously” be a serial killer or weirdo.
Anyway I was a paying customer until I noticed they came out with even more expensive plans. I don’t want to be nickled and dimed so I’m back on free.