While I tend to agree with the results, this study is highly unethical, probably statistically useless and incredibly biased, and the use of ‘females’ vs ‘men’ (as opposed to men/women or male/female) is ... rough, at best.
The article uses men/women *and* male/female in their respective appropiate contexts
I won't go into how you think of the ethicality of the "study" which is little more than a cursory glance at avaliable data bringing some insightful results
It's only gotten worse on Tinder and such since 2015 as the dating platforms have pivoted more into instagram-like experiences. You can't just write 100 words and throw up a crappy cell phone photo and call it a day, you have to have a presence with video, stories, etc. and keep it up to date for their algorithms to keep you in rotation and getting possible likes.
Ultimately your success depends on your local area. The east coast generally has more women competing for men vs. the west coast is the opposite, see: http://jonathansoma.com/singles/ Someone who struggles to even get a single like or handful of dates in SF would be rolling in likes and attention in NYC.
Anecdotally , this seems similar to what I observe in the job market (most employers fighting for the top 20% of candidates). Average is out in all aspects of life.
> Guys, unless you are really hot you are probably better off not wasting your time on Tinder
I have zero experience with Tinder, but a friend of mine has recently been on a Tinder binge (rebound after a bad divorce) and he was getting lucky left and right. He's looks are somewhere around average (definitely not "hot") and he has shitty profile photos to boot. So, the reality must be more complex than the quote above.
That's the way they'll get you. Tinder is like a deck of cards, and you want to be at the top so more people see you. When you create a profile you will be near the top for a few days, then depeing on how popular you are you get sent further back in the deck. The only way to get on the top again of the deck is to pay money. It's the "First hit is free" business model.
I think the key is also to not get too emotionally invested in it and to not always believe what other people have to say about it. Just create the stupid profile (on Tinder or any similar app), put it online and do the swiping. Sometimes you're on a winning spree, things work better than expected and sometimes it's like the desert of nothingness for weeks or months. Using it during lockdown with freezing temperatures with snow is definitely another hurdle.
He's been doing that for over a year now. His main advantage I think is that he's in a big city with 112 women for every 100 men, and the split is even more in his favor in the educated/ambitious cohort he belongs to. Also, he's near the top in terms of perceived income (super-nice car, nice apartment, willing to spend a lot on the dates), but that only helps once you're on a date.
Out of curiosity... how is he with women? That is, does he seem like the nice, respectful, intelligent, interested type? Or is he just a lucky jerk?
I ask because it's my experience that it's not that hard to get lucky on Tinder, especially in a city (where there are lots of people nearby). You just need to be willing to treat women like human beings so that they don't feel unsafe with you.
In particular you don't need to be exceptionally gorgeous. Women have told me over and over just how badly most men behave online and then on dates. Simply being able to hold an intelligent conversation, and not starting with "DTF?", puts you in the top 10%.
But I don't have a lot of data points. So I'd be curious if your friend refutes my theory.
women care less about looks than men from my own experience. being hot sure helps but a hot guy that is just being a prick won't be as lucky as an average looking person that has empathy, good manners, humor, is able to listen and shows integrity and confidence.
> the reality must be more complex than the quote above.
I'm quite sure of the complexity and even what I wrote above won't always lead to a great outcome with the "wrong" person.
N=27, no mention of geographic diversity, self reported "data" via "interviews" (ie dm-ing while pretending to be a normal user), no actual visibility into who the women were liking.
This is a pseudo-science article commonly quoted on incel sites. The "data" is based on claimed interviews with a small group of women.
When you look at studies that used real messaging patterns on a dating website, you can see that people tend to message other people of similar "desirability".
Bingo. The funny thing about it is that I'm not a scientist or data analyst or statistician or academic, I'm only well-read, and that alone is enough for a sixth sense to identify the writing here as a shallow imitation of a meaningful scientific investigation. Do you ever get that hunch that what you're reading is bullshit, even though you can't point at a specific reason?
> Do you ever get that hunch that what you're reading is bullshit, even though you can't point at a specific reason?
That just sounds like you had an opinion going in. Which happens. This study isn't alone. It happens to confirm other studies saying the same thing. Also, why wouldn't women like the most attractive men if that worked out just fine?
I think it's shown that of all women and of all men, there's a lot more desirable women than men. Meaning, the pool of desirable women is vastly larger than desirable men.
What website is that data from? I see they go to great lengths to hide it and that's very important. If it's a website focused on marriage it'll be very different from Tinder.
The headline of this post agrees with the real data from reports published by OKCupid years ago, back when they were a cool company.
Why is so much of the Internet taken up by mediocre person X complaining that technology Y or cultural practice Z isn't making their lives less mediocre?
I'm old enough to have passed the dating stage of life by the time Tinder came out, so have never used it, but it seems to be doing what it is intended to do. There is a huge difference between the actual finding here that Tinder is mostly useful if you're in the top 20% of most attractive men versus the title that you shouldn't bother if you're not "super hot." A lot more people are in the top 20% than can reasonably be classified as "super hot." Tinder is free to use, and if you never get a single date out of it, at worst you wasted some number of hours looking at pictures of women that you would have otherwise spent doing what? Looking at pictures of women is something I spend a lot of time doing even when I'm not hoping to date any of them.
There isn't any way to express this without being a dick about it, unfortunately, but if people don't find you attractive, there is no technology that can make life easier for you. Tinder isn't making your life suck. The fact that women don't like you is making your life suck.
However, assuming your lack of attractiveness is purely physical, then obviously some method of presenting to other people that entirely relies on them evaluating pictures of you is not likely to work. So do something else. There is no shortcut to presenting your truer, fuller self to people. Online dating platforms initially tried this. eHarmony, the original incarnation of match.com, and of course the initial implementation of OkCupid that relied on extremely detailed personality profiling and a proprietary matching algorithm that was supposed to be all the rage from Harvard math PhDs. They tried digging into very deep evaluations of what makes people compatible and to specifically show those people to each other. To some extent, it worked, but it doesn't scale and it only worked when few people were using it. As soon as you're in a competition with everyone, no one is willing to make detailed assessments of each and every prospect that takes too long when you want to get around to at least looking at all prospects. It's the classic problem of choice paralysis.
I'm sure whoever wrote this is no different. On what basis are you swiping right on women? Either it's because you find them hot, too, or you're just swiping right on everyone in an attempt to game the system, which is forcing the opposite sex to be more selective than they might otherwise be just to not be overwhelmed by more messages than they can possibly ever read.
If it's not working for you, do something else. I don't know what that something else is, but at some point, this incel argument that dating is impossible for some men doesn't seem to be born out by reality. Go to any random WalMart or trailer park and you're going to see the fattest, grossest, most worthless, unemployed, drug addicted, wife-beating men on the planet nonetheless finding people somehow willing to marry and breed with them. Shitty people have had no problem getting laid for as long as humans have existed. Richard Ramirez, who raped children, murdered probably at least 30 people, never showered, and had all of his teeth rotting out, still had women throwing themselves at him. If it's not happening for you, you're either psyching yourself out, not really trying, or setting your sights way too high and you need to recalibrate and be more honest with yourself about the kind of person you should even be trying to attract.
Its pretty much what one would expect. There is a common 4chan "wisdom" that 90% of women want the 10% of men (the "chads") and are rather willing to share that top 10% than settle for anyone of the bottom 90% of men. This seems to support that sentiment with slightly less dramatic numbers but i am also sure the author was biased by these incel communities it would be super interesting to have real scientists do a study on anonymised tinder-internal data. On the other hand i find little evidence for the outcome in general to be false. The only escape route i know of is to focus on more favorable sub communities that a) value monogamy for male and female members and b) have a major second value-system that reduces pool size and reduces community fluidity significantly. Random examples are small local communities like villages, religions, vegan groups. Whenever i observed a really attractive female with a very average partner and had a chance to find out the reason, the answer was never that the partner was rich, but always that they came from a distinct cultural background (religion, rare language or dialect, special geographic region) and valued the shared background higher than other factors.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 77.3 ms ] threadI won't go into how you think of the ethicality of the "study" which is little more than a cursory glance at avaliable data bringing some insightful results
Ultimately your success depends on your local area. The east coast generally has more women competing for men vs. the west coast is the opposite, see: http://jonathansoma.com/singles/ Someone who struggles to even get a single like or handful of dates in SF would be rolling in likes and attention in NYC.
Maybe this is why so many people are unhappy .
I have zero experience with Tinder, but a friend of mine has recently been on a Tinder binge (rebound after a bad divorce) and he was getting lucky left and right. He's looks are somewhere around average (definitely not "hot") and he has shitty profile photos to boot. So, the reality must be more complex than the quote above.
I ask because it's my experience that it's not that hard to get lucky on Tinder, especially in a city (where there are lots of people nearby). You just need to be willing to treat women like human beings so that they don't feel unsafe with you.
In particular you don't need to be exceptionally gorgeous. Women have told me over and over just how badly most men behave online and then on dates. Simply being able to hold an intelligent conversation, and not starting with "DTF?", puts you in the top 10%.
But I don't have a lot of data points. So I'd be curious if your friend refutes my theory.
> the reality must be more complex than the quote above.
I'm quite sure of the complexity and even what I wrote above won't always lead to a great outcome with the "wrong" person.
This entire article is just confirmation bias...
When you look at studies that used real messaging patterns on a dating website, you can see that people tend to message other people of similar "desirability".
See for example figure 3 in https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/8/eaap9815 : "Both women and men tend to contact others who are ranked somewhat—but not excessively—higher than themselves."
That just sounds like you had an opinion going in. Which happens. This study isn't alone. It happens to confirm other studies saying the same thing. Also, why wouldn't women like the most attractive men if that worked out just fine?
https://senseoffairness.blog/2020/02/14/the-unfairness-of-on...
So, gut feelings don't always match the facts! :)
I think it's shown that of all women and of all men, there's a lot more desirable women than men. Meaning, the pool of desirable women is vastly larger than desirable men.
The headline of this post agrees with the real data from reports published by OKCupid years ago, back when they were a cool company.
I'm old enough to have passed the dating stage of life by the time Tinder came out, so have never used it, but it seems to be doing what it is intended to do. There is a huge difference between the actual finding here that Tinder is mostly useful if you're in the top 20% of most attractive men versus the title that you shouldn't bother if you're not "super hot." A lot more people are in the top 20% than can reasonably be classified as "super hot." Tinder is free to use, and if you never get a single date out of it, at worst you wasted some number of hours looking at pictures of women that you would have otherwise spent doing what? Looking at pictures of women is something I spend a lot of time doing even when I'm not hoping to date any of them.
There isn't any way to express this without being a dick about it, unfortunately, but if people don't find you attractive, there is no technology that can make life easier for you. Tinder isn't making your life suck. The fact that women don't like you is making your life suck.
However, assuming your lack of attractiveness is purely physical, then obviously some method of presenting to other people that entirely relies on them evaluating pictures of you is not likely to work. So do something else. There is no shortcut to presenting your truer, fuller self to people. Online dating platforms initially tried this. eHarmony, the original incarnation of match.com, and of course the initial implementation of OkCupid that relied on extremely detailed personality profiling and a proprietary matching algorithm that was supposed to be all the rage from Harvard math PhDs. They tried digging into very deep evaluations of what makes people compatible and to specifically show those people to each other. To some extent, it worked, but it doesn't scale and it only worked when few people were using it. As soon as you're in a competition with everyone, no one is willing to make detailed assessments of each and every prospect that takes too long when you want to get around to at least looking at all prospects. It's the classic problem of choice paralysis.
I'm sure whoever wrote this is no different. On what basis are you swiping right on women? Either it's because you find them hot, too, or you're just swiping right on everyone in an attempt to game the system, which is forcing the opposite sex to be more selective than they might otherwise be just to not be overwhelmed by more messages than they can possibly ever read.
If it's not working for you, do something else. I don't know what that something else is, but at some point, this incel argument that dating is impossible for some men doesn't seem to be born out by reality. Go to any random WalMart or trailer park and you're going to see the fattest, grossest, most worthless, unemployed, drug addicted, wife-beating men on the planet nonetheless finding people somehow willing to marry and breed with them. Shitty people have had no problem getting laid for as long as humans have existed. Richard Ramirez, who raped children, murdered probably at least 30 people, never showered, and had all of his teeth rotting out, still had women throwing themselves at him. If it's not happening for you, you're either psyching yourself out, not really trying, or setting your sights way too high and you need to recalibrate and be more honest with yourself about the kind of person you should even be trying to attract.
There is none attractiveness behind screens...
only clever ppl get that...
The similar "desirability" is just a boat :D
humanity is awful :)