I mean 1) 'stable matching' is not how anyone would describe the experience of using IRL meetup apps
2) at best gale-shapley is being used for ranking, not for preference inference; IMO they removed the 'have you met' feature (guessing because users found it invasive and hated it), but would be interesting to use it for scheduling meeting slots, a resource problem more similar to med school matching. The idea of using math to meet a mate goes back at least to kepler https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/05/15/312537965/h...
3) gale-shapley is old science about how to rank given preferences, but the actual interesting question is how they're detecting preferences. What are the factors? Are some factors excluded? What can hinge (and their cousins at match.com and elsewhere) detect about a person from their profile + interactions? Are they using image analysis / NLP on profiles / chats?
(they're definitely not just using the user settings toggles for preferences; at minimum, they must have a global rank for showing popular profiles at the top of the stack. Also it makes sense this stuff is secret, it's a liability landmine)
I was wondering the same thing re: #3. Some of it is answered in the article but it reads like it was written by a pop-tech blogger and obviously very light on details. I'm not sure where the linked article gets its information, but it seems to suggest that Hinge might be doing some kind of image analysis, maybe:
> Your likes also play into it. The more you like certain types of people, the more Hinge learns about your preferences, as founder Justin McLeod told British Vogue: “It gets better and more accurate the more that you reveal your tastes.” It’s kind of like if you look at the past ten people you’ve dated or fancied, you’ll eventually start to see a pattern emerging, so you’ll have more success (in theory) if you start to seek these types of people out. I.e what’s the point in me going for short blondes when I know I’m only really attracted to tall brunettes? The answer is there is no point, and Hinge knows that.
And why wouldn't they be? It seems like an incredibly easy target for aligning visual preferences without having to ask.
Has Hinge avoided the dark patterns of the Match Group and/or Bumble (not sure if they were subsumed yet) in which men are shown "likes" only as bait to purchase a premium product and only rarely show up as potential matches? If so, what is their monetization strategy? It is fairly clear that a successful result in a dating app means at least one less user, polygamy and "ENM" notwithstanding. I believe that some apps have used success and subsequent loss of user as marketing to "prove it works" but I haven't seen that tactic lately. How does Hinge work?
Aside and FWIW I just starting using Bumble/Tinder after years of refusing, which came after years of a (disastrous) relationship developed via friend-of-a-friend-of-a-relative and I can't fathom how things work anymore since I don't encounter anybody of the gender I'm into in contexts where it's appropriate to initiate contact. I know the tropes and standard advice (hobbies, church, etc) but it ain't working anymore.
I can say that me personally found Hinge much more effective in finding someone than all the other apps. Among my friends is the one with highest success rate of long term relationships. I’ve gotten hookups or short lived stuff on Bumble, nothing I’d call luck off of tinder. We’ve all been trying to figure out what makes Hinge different and we think is that you get a lot of information when someone makes a comment on one of your posts (pictures, facts, whatever) that lets you select much faster than a simple empty match with no info.
> Has Hinge avoided the dark patterns of the Match Group and/or Bumble
The way likes function on Hinge makes it a bit harder to implement those dark patterns.
What they have done is pull out the most attractive users and put them in a 'Standouts' section. These users can only be liked by using a 'Rose'. Uses get one Rose every 48 hours (I think) and need to purchase more if they want to like more of the Standouts.
You get a separate stack where you can see the full profiles of the people who liked or messaged you, the only thing is that you have to react (match, message, or reject)to the top profile in the stack before you can see the next (which you might be able to skip with premium?)
I was talking to someone the other day who told me he was dating a woman he met on Match (I believe this was several years ago) and noticed her profile was still active after they had decided to be exclusive. He asked what was going on. She told him Match gave her a really good deal on a year membership, but only if her account remained active. Since it was still early in the relationship, she didn’t want to kill her membership if things didn’t work out. So when women aren’t responding, it’s likely they are in a relationship already and just leaving their account hanging out there to keep their deal. This gives guys the impression they have a lot more options on these sites than they actually do.
Can you imagine what it would have looked like if dating apps existed in the war ravaged nations of Eurasia post World War II? Ladies would have been fighting tooth and nail for a good man, because they were hard to find after the world went to war with itself.
> Ladies would have been fighting tooth and nail for a good man
They probably already were.
I have heard factoids that the emphasis on heavy makeup and dressing up among Eastern European women was as a result of the dearth of eligible young men post WW2.
Dating apps are so bad, the ratio of men:women matches would impress a red-pilled 4channer.
Most men get somewhere like 0-4 matches a week and most women get somewhere like 100-1000. That’s a 25x difference best-case scenario and often it’s over 100x. Which is kind of insane considering there are about 50/50 men to women ratio in real life.
People say “the 20% top men get 80% of matches” but it’s worse than that. The 20% top men may get something reasonable like 3-4 matches a day, but your average women is getting something crazy like 1 match every 15 minutes.
Because a lot of men like to swipe right on nearly everyone and buy passes which get them unlimited swipes. And most women get extremely choosy and swipe right on only the super handsome nearly-perfect men, but you can’t even blame them when they have literally 1,000 matches.
On top of that, the bios suck. Even on Hinge. You can’t base someone off of 6 pictures and 3 quotes. If you’re not judging them on plain attractiveness / photogenics, you’re judging them on one random quote or minor character trait you relate to.
Online dating sucks. You’re much better off trying to meet people in real-life situations, where there is a more reasonable ratio of men and women, you can learn more about people then their favorite vacation spots, and the people have a lot more time to learn more about you too.
Or, you can try meeting people online but not in a surface-level dating-oriented site. Plenty of people formed couples through discord or their favorite video games. Unfortunately my understanding is that most online places are still male-dominated, but hopefully that’s changing as we are becoming a more tech-oriented and women-inclusive society.
Dating does suck! Though I'm not sure that dating apps suck more than what they replaced - pubs and bars really. I'm old enough to have dated before apps were the default and it wasn't exactly a less superficial time.
I think you don't understand that you cannot escape the consequences of human mating behavior by making dating online to offline. 80% of women will prefer top 20% of men. You can go to bar and get some beer goggles for a while, but it will wear down eventually. In Western world, 30% of the couples end up in affairs and 50% marriages end up in divorce. Ask why.
I think it's obvious that people have preferences, and will seek partners that match those preferences better. But even if that's true, people have different preferences. People don't adhere to some universal rating system.
But this is natural because men like almost everyone while women like maybe a few men per day. It's not because their ratio is wildly out of balance, here in EU it is close to 50/50 and 60/40 in the U.S. In some countries like Peru, Tinder has considerably more women than men, and yet, men still get very few likes vs women there. It's not about numbers, it's about behaviour. It's never difficult for a woman to get laid vs man.
>It's never difficult for a woman to get laid vs man.
True and that's an evolutionary trait. Women evolved to find someone help them bring healthy offspring with good genes and help them care for their offspring while men evolved to spread their DNA as much as they can.
The goal is the same in the end, to have successfully spread their DNA, the strategies are different because the biology is different for each of the two sexes.
It's at the point where women don't benefit either though. Getting 1000x matches just leaves most women overwhelmed.
Plus a lot of those matches end up being low-quality even despite trying to be picky, because the apps are so surface level. Plenty of men manage to get great pics and quotes but turn out to be complete douches.
Note that this is inherent to the current dating app models. Everyone I have spoken to who uses dating apps, male or female, intuitively understands this. The best strategy for men is to spam matches and messages as much as possible and hope you grab someone's attention. The best strategy for women is to filter heavily and pick randomly from the ones who get through and hope they aren't a weirdo. But those strategies, while optimal for individuals, make the experience overall disappointing.
I wonder if there is a way (in the game theory sense) to craft a strategy that is both optimal for individuals and the community, and then design an app around that.
> The best strategy for men is to spam matches and messages as much as possible and hope you grab someone's attention.
That’s a naive idea that makes it worse for everybody, including yourself.
If you’re genuinely looking for attention from anyone that’ll give it to you, you probably want to do some self-reflection.
More likely, I hope, you actually do know something about yourself and your tastes and can recognize that you’ll only be a good fit with a tiny fraction of the people on there.
If you’re not seeing that tiny fraction on the app or not matching with them, you either need to be patient, figure out ways to improve your profile, or figure out a different way to meet people.
Spamming indiscriminately may get you the a few extra internet points, but it doesn’t get you any good matches that you wouldn’t have gotten from being a genuine human person on there.
And it’s just makes an already crappy environment even worse.
If you're in a public space and the most attractive person is surrounded by more desirable prospects and ignoring you, do you join the throng or potentially lower your expectations and talk to someone less crowded by competition?
I haven't experienced online dating and I'm sure it's grim, but I also know people who've perhaps had unrealistic expectations and stayed largely single into their forties.
I've said before, but I think the dating apps are mostly grim for people around 20-25. Anyone after that is more realistic about their prospects and what's worth looking for in a partner.
Yes there is, and it is quite related to the article.
But it is not practical - both men and women should rank their preferences and then an optimal matching can be found. In online dating, I would not expect people to have complete and transitive preferences.
>I wonder if there is a way (in the game theory sense) to craft a strategy that is both optimal for individuals and the community, and then design an app around that.
That wouldn't be possible unless both the individuals and the community is settling for less. And that is true for anything. In socialist or leftist countries, people are levelled off, most having and average outcome and no individual doing really great or really bad. In other countries, some have really great outcomes and others have really bad outcomes.
I get four matches a week on average. Converting those matches into dates is the hard part in my opinion. Even when I seem to be connecting and having a good conversation on text, it's always been so difficult to go beyond that.
I don't know, I must be doing something wrong I guess. I wonder what the match to date conversion rate is.
Speaking as someone now married to a woman he met on tinder.
I took the view that if I matched with someone and they replied to a message there was a pretty high chance they were interested in a date, so I would generally just ask on the second or third message. Something like
Hi, <basic small talk question based on something in the profile>.
Hopefully receive a reply with some kind of conversational hook.
<reply to the hook, ask a follow up question>.
Would you like to meet for a drink sometime this week, would central Gotham work for you? My number is 123556679
Pretty much everyone is on the site to go on real dates, so best to think of the messages as for organising them.
Your mileage may vary, but I'd say this led to a date 80% of the time (assuming the match and reply had already happened)
Someone should build an app where women have to create an “application” form, and men have to fill it out. If women are the choosy ones, let them be upfront with their choosiness and adjust the level of friction that men have to go through to contact them.
For an individual woman they might have the luxury of being able to do this but it doesn't really scale because (the subtext is) that the men who would need this (versus the body-carousel you get on tinder) have the issue that most of the women who could actually articulate an interesting questionaire aren't dating online IME.
Also women do already do this in a sense on tinder - "Don't swipe if you're under six foot, here are my red flags, guys with hayfever aren't real men" blah blah.
I also think the whole idea of a romantic checklist is very narrow minded. Inferring people's beliefs from their actions would be interesting but just letting people basically only pick and extremely specific type of person seems like a route to nothing good socially.
OkCupid effectively used to do this, multiple ways. Before it turned into a blatant photo gallery (to maximize revenue from straight men paying for advantage, I suspect).
One of the ways was that OkCupid let anyone add their own multi-choice (plus optional freeform) questions, to the database from which people would answer. You could rate what each answer meant to you, and you could (IIRC) make answering a particular question mandatory before messaging you. Good for litmus tests.
The problem with algorithmic dating is that people don't know what they want. I evidently don't, at any rate; I've mostly ended up with partners that initially seemed to be pretty unpromising material. They only began to appeal to me as I got to know them. I'd never have met them if I'd pre-filtered through an application form.
Sure, smoking/non-smoking; perhaps dietary preferences; education; location. But I, a veggie, used to cook for a carnivorous family, for example. If I were preparing an application form consisting only of dealbreakers, I doubt it would have more than a couple of questions.
>Someone should build an app where women have to create an “application” form, and men have to fill it out. If women are the choosy ones, let them be upfront with their choosiness and adjust the level of friction that men have to go through to contact them.
No need for a form. Women subconsciously select a partner for the ability to produce healthy and successful offspring and taking care of them and her.
Wouldn't that just exacerbate the existing issues? Women already have the choice of applicants despite being roughly half the global population. Wouldn't it make more sense to make it harder for women to find a match based on their very specific requirements shown only to those who are seeking those particular traits so as to reduce the glut of inconsiderate matches the women receive?
It would make sense to just not allow men to swipe first at all, it was an obvious improvement when they only let the women start conversations. I think the issue is it will lower engagement.
The problem is that this is discrimination, by definition. From my own personal experience, there are plenty of women who have immediately rejected me because I'm 5'11" and not 6'. I'm sure they would love to be able to filter men by height. There's also plenty of people who would like to filter by race. One of these things is socially acceptable but the other isn't. How should the dating apps decide what questions go on the application? They can't, anything more than filtering by gender and there will be some subset of their userbase that they completely alienate. And they need to show growth and profits for investors. Not to mention, you know, the moral implications?
(Note that even that doesn't work... I'm not interested in dating trans women or gay men but I see their profiles all the time, because they set their profiles as "women seeking men".)
> Most men get somewhere like 0-4 matches a week and most women get somewhere like 100-1000. That’s a 25x difference best-case scenario and often it’s over 100x. Which is kind of insane considering there are about 50/50 men to women ratio in real life.
How is this statistically possible? Women getting way more _likes_ is plausible if men swipe right much more than women do. But each _match_ involves a man and a woman getting a match.
Say there are 10 women and 30 men on the service, and each woman matches with 3 men. 30 matches total. Assuming equal distribution, the men have 1 match each.
You can also then have a more extreme distribution. 3 of those men could have 10 matches and the other 27 have zero. Median man has zero matches, 80th percentile ("top 20%") has zero matches.
I'm not sure of that extreme of a ratio, but many of my single women friends will use the app, match with people, and it turns out that loads of the guys are just really useless... so it's not clear whether the matches are actually worthwhile.
Imagine a guy with a very interesting profile, who swipes right all the time. People match with him cuz he has the nice profile. Turns out that he sticks around on the platform for a long time.
Suddenly this one person is responsible for loads of matches. So if you have these long-term users, they can generate disproportionate amount of matches with themselves, biasing the pool.
This could be even more accentuated by Tinder-style algos. Somebody's popular? Of course their profile will show up more often!
If you combine this with people on the other side matching pretty conservatively... then suddenly you can have a handful of men receiving the large majority of the focus.
Paraphrasing some tweet, at least at parties the most popular guy can only talk to so many people at once!
I think you're right about 100-1000 being a count for "likes" rather than "matches" (terminology would differ by platform). If a woman had 100 people with a mutual interest, ready to talk, they wouldn't keep swiping to get to 200.
(Not super relevant to your point but maybe to the whole page) I think many swiping apps mostly show people that are already interested, which seems reasonable as a prioritization method. So a "like" from a woman is converted into an instant "match". I've heard some women brag like "90% of guys I swipe on like me back", but there's some bias in there.
I've also known men who are perfectly likable, who took a more passive approach, and never received a single incoming "like" from a woman in months. It's inconceivable that in a city of millions, _nobody_ finds the man attractive, not even the bottom 1% of women. It's just that they're not showing the profile much, and it's unclear if they're even giving it a tiny amount of random exposure. Even if you swipe, it's probably not enough to get to the top of the pile of thousands of horny dudes. So one has to buy the exposure for an hour or so then, possibly for hundreds of dollars a month. It's a good scheme, and the platforms like the information asymmetry on how it all works too - many people are guessing about things in these threads, which platform employees know the simple answer to.
Important to distinguish between matches and likes here. Women get a lot of likes but not 1 match every 15 minutes. Out of the people who like them, the viable matches are far lower than 1 every 15 minutes. Maybe a couple every week are actually decent matches they would like back. I don't find the difference between likes men get and women get surprising at all, it's the same for face to face meetings. Most of the men striking out on dating apps also strike out with face to face meetings probably at a higher rate if they were actually approaching all the random women they "like" at a glance. It isn't the general ratio of men to women that determines the like to match rate here, it's the ratio of desperate and frankly not attractive men to discerning and attractive women.
For less confident people IRL, the ability to like with low cost is actually great. I have had dates with people I would probably never have approached in real life and online dating has been a confidence boost generally.
>"Most men get somewhere like 0-4 matches a week and most women get somewhere like 100-1000. That’s a 25x difference best-case scenario and often it’s over 100x. Which is kind of insane considering there are about 50/50 men to women ratio in real life."
I always suspected something similar. Is this documented anywhere though that I could look? My response to this was to simply get rid of that app and quit. Why would anyone continue putting in the hours a week for something that led to 0-4 matches a week? How is the platform not a total failure based on this? Doesn't everyone of the guys not in that top 20 percentile turn around and tell everyone it is garbage?
> How is the platform not a total failure based on this? Doesn't everyone of the guys not in that top 20 percentile turn around and tell everyone it is garbage?
Yeah it is total garbage. Even when you put in all the work to get matches and arrange dates (which takes a ton of work), it's still basically a blind date, so when you actually meet there's still only a small chance that you will actually match.
And you always get worse matches, as a man, through the apps compared to real life. You will pay a price for that convenience of swiping.
There's an increased risk for women when they let men bypass that filter of being sociable and brave enough to befriend people in real life social situations.
If a woman can already go to a bar and easily pick out a guy, and easily judge the men, why would they use a dating app? It only makes sense if they somehow would get better matches there, so the men will have to lower their standards as a result of that convenience.
I just see online dating, and classified ads in the paper before that, as a way for people who don't fit the social norm to meet. And that's fine. But I don't see any reason for everyone to start doing that, and people who are normally sociable will just have a worse experience.
> I always suspected something similar. Is this documented anywhere though that I could look?
The book Dataclysm and the OkCupid blog have a lot of analysis about things like this. Both are about a decade old now and were written by one of the guys who founded OkCupid, so it focuses on dating sites instead of apps, but I would assume the trends are the same (or even amplified).
It's been a while since I've read either, so I don't remember exact data, but it's true that women get way more men reaching out to them than the reverse.
A few matches a week seems... fine though, right? Unless one wants to go on a first date every day of the week, and really who has time for that? If anything, hundreds of low-quality matches (because men just say yes to everyone) seem worse than a few considered ones.
Dating after the online part also sucks, where you pretend to be so busy that you can only meet once a week and only on weekdays, and you can never answer a message in under 24 hours. Don't really see how two people can start to like each other when it's so standoffish.
Who has every hour of their weekend booked? Who doesn't have two minutes to look at their phone in a whole day? It's such bullshit, this game is so exhausting and just zaps out any positive energy you get during a date.
> You’re much better off trying to meet people in real-life situations, where there is a more reasonable ratio of men and women
I think is a thought-stopping cliche that sounds right but just isn't true. People went to apps because real life situations have failed them. The hobbies that attract the most young people tend to be the most gender skewed (gaming is a great example).
>Because a lot of men like to swipe right on nearly everyone and buy passes which get them unlimited swipes
I think you're wrong. I've read that the main apps have done some work in the past years to make the "swipe on everything" strategy non-optimal. However, the fact of the matter is that the main apps could have been lying to me and you could be right and I could be wrong. It's so very difficult to draw conclusions from these dating apps when they're effectively black boxes to us common folk.
There's definitely a great deal of money and interest that could be had from creating an open-source dating app such that no one would be in the dark on what's being served to whom.
How does Hinge correct for the ratio problem? If women can only like a finite number of profiles, doesn't this further restrict the supply of Women Likes?
I agree, but it is a surface level retort still in my opinion.
What I find more insidious is the way people on HN deal with such statistics.
The HN typical person is a relatively well-off suburban CS employee. The rhetoric on HN when markets are talked about, e.g. the labour market, often revolves around free markets being good -- because it favors this typical HN's user position. They have never experienced any precariousness.
Now, comparing dating apps to a market is very slimey, but the analogy work to the extent where the focus is the HN user's expectation and how prevalent the market discourse seems to be here: like the worker offers their labour force to a company, a pretendent offers their social time and skills on a dating app. Except that the HN's user is experiencing the precariousness in the latter -- an unacceptable thing, apparently.
Except one is not owed this attention, time or privilege. Thinking the imbalance is unfair is a mark of expected privilege as they have in other space. It's a bit bonkers.
Thinking of it -- dating -- as a market is a bad thing, morally, ethically, and psychologically, but it remains the underlying tone I see in this thread.
> e.g. the labour market, often revolves around free markets being good -- because it favors this typical HN's user position.
Care to explain? I'd imagine that something along the lines of unionization wouldn't hurt the salaries of tech workers.
> Thinking the imbalance is unfair is a mark of expected privilege as they have in other space
I find it interesting to refer to labor exchange value as a "privilege", as if it were something arbitrarily bestowed from some higher authority. Wage is the result of adversarial relationships between demand and supply and not one of some arbitrary authority doling out favors left and right with strings attached
Talking about something as a market doesn't mean it should be a market. I've known plenty of people - women too - who spoke with disdain of the "meat market", but still went to bars to meet strangers, put up online profiles etc., things they hated, because what can you do? People get lonely, and women are people too.
Which is why it's so arrogant to say participating is optional. You have to go where people are, unless you're OK with being lonely for a long time.
Can't we say that the labour market is a market, and is unfair to some people, and the dating market is a market, and is unfair to some people? I'd guess that would be the "typical" HN person take, and I don't see a problem with it. I also don't see a problem with wanting to increase your chances of success, in either arena.
> one is not owed this attention, time or privilege
I thought this[0] was a really good piece about this kind of framing
There is a network effect of the critical mass of people who assume and use apps as the best way to date these days, and many of the traditional ways to date have eroded.
Readit News
2) at best gale-shapley is being used for ranking, not for preference inference; IMO they removed the 'have you met' feature (guessing because users found it invasive and hated it), but would be interesting to use it for scheduling meeting slots, a resource problem more similar to med school matching. The idea of using math to meet a mate goes back at least to kepler https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/05/15/312537965/h...
3) gale-shapley is old science about how to rank given preferences, but the actual interesting question is how they're detecting preferences. What are the factors? Are some factors excluded? What can hinge (and their cousins at match.com and elsewhere) detect about a person from their profile + interactions? Are they using image analysis / NLP on profiles / chats?
(they're definitely not just using the user settings toggles for preferences; at minimum, they must have a global rank for showing popular profiles at the top of the stack. Also it makes sense this stuff is secret, it's a liability landmine)
> Your likes also play into it. The more you like certain types of people, the more Hinge learns about your preferences, as founder Justin McLeod told British Vogue: “It gets better and more accurate the more that you reveal your tastes.” It’s kind of like if you look at the past ten people you’ve dated or fancied, you’ll eventually start to see a pattern emerging, so you’ll have more success (in theory) if you start to seek these types of people out. I.e what’s the point in me going for short blondes when I know I’m only really attracted to tall brunettes? The answer is there is no point, and Hinge knows that.
And why wouldn't they be? It seems like an incredibly easy target for aligning visual preferences without having to ask.
Aside and FWIW I just starting using Bumble/Tinder after years of refusing, which came after years of a (disastrous) relationship developed via friend-of-a-friend-of-a-relative and I can't fathom how things work anymore since I don't encounter anybody of the gender I'm into in contexts where it's appropriate to initiate contact. I know the tropes and standard advice (hobbies, church, etc) but it ain't working anymore.
The way likes function on Hinge makes it a bit harder to implement those dark patterns.
What they have done is pull out the most attractive users and put them in a 'Standouts' section. These users can only be liked by using a 'Rose'. Uses get one Rose every 48 hours (I think) and need to purchase more if they want to like more of the Standouts.
You get a separate stack where you can see the full profiles of the people who liked or messaged you, the only thing is that you have to react (match, message, or reject)to the top profile in the stack before you can see the next (which you might be able to skip with premium?)
How?
Deleted Comment
They probably already were.
I have heard factoids that the emphasis on heavy makeup and dressing up among Eastern European women was as a result of the dearth of eligible young men post WW2.
Dead Comment
Most men get somewhere like 0-4 matches a week and most women get somewhere like 100-1000. That’s a 25x difference best-case scenario and often it’s over 100x. Which is kind of insane considering there are about 50/50 men to women ratio in real life.
People say “the 20% top men get 80% of matches” but it’s worse than that. The 20% top men may get something reasonable like 3-4 matches a day, but your average women is getting something crazy like 1 match every 15 minutes.
Because a lot of men like to swipe right on nearly everyone and buy passes which get them unlimited swipes. And most women get extremely choosy and swipe right on only the super handsome nearly-perfect men, but you can’t even blame them when they have literally 1,000 matches.
On top of that, the bios suck. Even on Hinge. You can’t base someone off of 6 pictures and 3 quotes. If you’re not judging them on plain attractiveness / photogenics, you’re judging them on one random quote or minor character trait you relate to.
Online dating sucks. You’re much better off trying to meet people in real-life situations, where there is a more reasonable ratio of men and women, you can learn more about people then their favorite vacation spots, and the people have a lot more time to learn more about you too.
Or, you can try meeting people online but not in a surface-level dating-oriented site. Plenty of people formed couples through discord or their favorite video games. Unfortunately my understanding is that most online places are still male-dominated, but hopefully that’s changing as we are becoming a more tech-oriented and women-inclusive society.
Bars do work way better due to 'beer goggles' (or cocktails/vodka). Usually there are other activities available, e.g. dancing/snacks
I think it's obvious that people have preferences, and will seek partners that match those preferences better. But even if that's true, people have different preferences. People don't adhere to some universal rating system.
Why?
True and that's an evolutionary trait. Women evolved to find someone help them bring healthy offspring with good genes and help them care for their offspring while men evolved to spread their DNA as much as they can.
The goal is the same in the end, to have successfully spread their DNA, the strategies are different because the biology is different for each of the two sexes.
Ie. If there were a bunch of single women in any marketplace, men would naturally flock there, like any social media platforms dms
The users for online dating are women, men are the commodity/supply
Plus a lot of those matches end up being low-quality even despite trying to be picky, because the apps are so surface level. Plenty of men manage to get great pics and quotes but turn out to be complete douches.
I wonder if there is a way (in the game theory sense) to craft a strategy that is both optimal for individuals and the community, and then design an app around that.
That’s a naive idea that makes it worse for everybody, including yourself.
If you’re genuinely looking for attention from anyone that’ll give it to you, you probably want to do some self-reflection.
More likely, I hope, you actually do know something about yourself and your tastes and can recognize that you’ll only be a good fit with a tiny fraction of the people on there.
If you’re not seeing that tiny fraction on the app or not matching with them, you either need to be patient, figure out ways to improve your profile, or figure out a different way to meet people.
Spamming indiscriminately may get you the a few extra internet points, but it doesn’t get you any good matches that you wouldn’t have gotten from being a genuine human person on there.
And it’s just makes an already crappy environment even worse.
Everyone I know (and I met my partner through that) has felt like it's a nicer system.
I haven't experienced online dating and I'm sure it's grim, but I also know people who've perhaps had unrealistic expectations and stayed largely single into their forties.
I've said before, but I think the dating apps are mostly grim for people around 20-25. Anyone after that is more realistic about their prospects and what's worth looking for in a partner.
But it is not practical - both men and women should rank their preferences and then an optimal matching can be found. In online dating, I would not expect people to have complete and transitive preferences.
That wouldn't be possible unless both the individuals and the community is settling for less. And that is true for anything. In socialist or leftist countries, people are levelled off, most having and average outcome and no individual doing really great or really bad. In other countries, some have really great outcomes and others have really bad outcomes.
I don't know, I must be doing something wrong I guess. I wonder what the match to date conversion rate is.
I took the view that if I matched with someone and they replied to a message there was a pretty high chance they were interested in a date, so I would generally just ask on the second or third message. Something like
Hi, <basic small talk question based on something in the profile>.
Hopefully receive a reply with some kind of conversational hook.
<reply to the hook, ask a follow up question>. Would you like to meet for a drink sometime this week, would central Gotham work for you? My number is 123556679
Pretty much everyone is on the site to go on real dates, so best to think of the messages as for organising them.
Your mileage may vary, but I'd say this led to a date 80% of the time (assuming the match and reply had already happened)
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Also women do already do this in a sense on tinder - "Don't swipe if you're under six foot, here are my red flags, guys with hayfever aren't real men" blah blah.
I also think the whole idea of a romantic checklist is very narrow minded. Inferring people's beliefs from their actions would be interesting but just letting people basically only pick and extremely specific type of person seems like a route to nothing good socially.
One of the ways was that OkCupid let anyone add their own multi-choice (plus optional freeform) questions, to the database from which people would answer. You could rate what each answer meant to you, and you could (IIRC) make answering a particular question mandatory before messaging you. Good for litmus tests.
Sure, smoking/non-smoking; perhaps dietary preferences; education; location. But I, a veggie, used to cook for a carnivorous family, for example. If I were preparing an application form consisting only of dealbreakers, I doubt it would have more than a couple of questions.
(Last time I tried it, every woman on Tinder in SV was a young extremely poor French au pair.)
No need for a form. Women subconsciously select a partner for the ability to produce healthy and successful offspring and taking care of them and her.
(Note that even that doesn't work... I'm not interested in dating trans women or gay men but I see their profiles all the time, because they set their profiles as "women seeking men".)
How is this statistically possible? Women getting way more _likes_ is plausible if men swipe right much more than women do. But each _match_ involves a man and a woman getting a match.
Say there are 10 women and 30 men on the service, and each woman matches with 3 men. 30 matches total. Assuming equal distribution, the men have 1 match each.
You can also then have a more extreme distribution. 3 of those men could have 10 matches and the other 27 have zero. Median man has zero matches, 80th percentile ("top 20%") has zero matches.
Imagine a guy with a very interesting profile, who swipes right all the time. People match with him cuz he has the nice profile. Turns out that he sticks around on the platform for a long time.
Suddenly this one person is responsible for loads of matches. So if you have these long-term users, they can generate disproportionate amount of matches with themselves, biasing the pool.
This could be even more accentuated by Tinder-style algos. Somebody's popular? Of course their profile will show up more often!
If you combine this with people on the other side matching pretty conservatively... then suddenly you can have a handful of men receiving the large majority of the focus.
Paraphrasing some tweet, at least at parties the most popular guy can only talk to so many people at once!
(Not super relevant to your point but maybe to the whole page) I think many swiping apps mostly show people that are already interested, which seems reasonable as a prioritization method. So a "like" from a woman is converted into an instant "match". I've heard some women brag like "90% of guys I swipe on like me back", but there's some bias in there.
I've also known men who are perfectly likable, who took a more passive approach, and never received a single incoming "like" from a woman in months. It's inconceivable that in a city of millions, _nobody_ finds the man attractive, not even the bottom 1% of women. It's just that they're not showing the profile much, and it's unclear if they're even giving it a tiny amount of random exposure. Even if you swipe, it's probably not enough to get to the top of the pile of thousands of horny dudes. So one has to buy the exposure for an hour or so then, possibly for hundreds of dollars a month. It's a good scheme, and the platforms like the information asymmetry on how it all works too - many people are guessing about things in these threads, which platform employees know the simple answer to.
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Online dating is a competition like anything else in life. I had some success at online dating and I am not the best looking guy, so it's possible.
I always suspected something similar. Is this documented anywhere though that I could look? My response to this was to simply get rid of that app and quit. Why would anyone continue putting in the hours a week for something that led to 0-4 matches a week? How is the platform not a total failure based on this? Doesn't everyone of the guys not in that top 20 percentile turn around and tell everyone it is garbage?
Yeah it is total garbage. Even when you put in all the work to get matches and arrange dates (which takes a ton of work), it's still basically a blind date, so when you actually meet there's still only a small chance that you will actually match.
And you always get worse matches, as a man, through the apps compared to real life. You will pay a price for that convenience of swiping.
There's an increased risk for women when they let men bypass that filter of being sociable and brave enough to befriend people in real life social situations.
If a woman can already go to a bar and easily pick out a guy, and easily judge the men, why would they use a dating app? It only makes sense if they somehow would get better matches there, so the men will have to lower their standards as a result of that convenience.
I just see online dating, and classified ads in the paper before that, as a way for people who don't fit the social norm to meet. And that's fine. But I don't see any reason for everyone to start doing that, and people who are normally sociable will just have a worse experience.
The book Dataclysm and the OkCupid blog have a lot of analysis about things like this. Both are about a decade old now and were written by one of the guys who founded OkCupid, so it focuses on dating sites instead of apps, but I would assume the trends are the same (or even amplified).
It's been a while since I've read either, so I don't remember exact data, but it's true that women get way more men reaching out to them than the reverse.
Here's a random OkCupid blog post that focuses on it a little bit: https://theblog.okcupid.com/a-womans-advantage-82d5074dde2d. I think the book has more detailed data though.
Because, in my experience, I can convert half of those matches in dates. And some of the dates I can convert in other things like relations or sex.
Who has every hour of their weekend booked? Who doesn't have two minutes to look at their phone in a whole day? It's such bullshit, this game is so exhausting and just zaps out any positive energy you get during a date.
I think is a thought-stopping cliche that sounds right but just isn't true. People went to apps because real life situations have failed them. The hobbies that attract the most young people tend to be the most gender skewed (gaming is a great example).
I think you're wrong. I've read that the main apps have done some work in the past years to make the "swipe on everything" strategy non-optimal. However, the fact of the matter is that the main apps could have been lying to me and you could be right and I could be wrong. It's so very difficult to draw conclusions from these dating apps when they're effectively black boxes to us common folk.
There's definitely a great deal of money and interest that could be had from creating an open-source dating app such that no one would be in the dark on what's being served to whom.
Hinge, for example, only shows you a limited set of people per day, and it filters those based on who it thinks you like who also would like you back.
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What I find more insidious is the way people on HN deal with such statistics.
The HN typical person is a relatively well-off suburban CS employee. The rhetoric on HN when markets are talked about, e.g. the labour market, often revolves around free markets being good -- because it favors this typical HN's user position. They have never experienced any precariousness.
Now, comparing dating apps to a market is very slimey, but the analogy work to the extent where the focus is the HN user's expectation and how prevalent the market discourse seems to be here: like the worker offers their labour force to a company, a pretendent offers their social time and skills on a dating app. Except that the HN's user is experiencing the precariousness in the latter -- an unacceptable thing, apparently.
Except one is not owed this attention, time or privilege. Thinking the imbalance is unfair is a mark of expected privilege as they have in other space. It's a bit bonkers.
Thinking of it -- dating -- as a market is a bad thing, morally, ethically, and psychologically, but it remains the underlying tone I see in this thread.
Care to explain? I'd imagine that something along the lines of unionization wouldn't hurt the salaries of tech workers.
> Thinking the imbalance is unfair is a mark of expected privilege as they have in other space
I find it interesting to refer to labor exchange value as a "privilege", as if it were something arbitrarily bestowed from some higher authority. Wage is the result of adversarial relationships between demand and supply and not one of some arbitrary authority doling out favors left and right with strings attached
Which is why it's so arrogant to say participating is optional. You have to go where people are, unless you're OK with being lonely for a long time.
> one is not owed this attention, time or privilege
I thought this[0] was a really good piece about this kind of framing
[0] https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n06/amia-srinivasan/does...
'Cause I ain't got a car
I can't get a car
'Cause I ain't got a job
I can't get a job
'Cause I ain't got a car
So I'm looking for a girl with a job and a car
Don't you know where you are
Which sucks because smartphones have net negative effects imo.
You're not forced in the same way you're not "technically" forced to get a job - the societal pressures are all 2nd order.
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