I CTO'd a fairly successful dating site for 4 years. I think a lot of the critiques of dating sites/apps miss the mark. The "they only stay in business by keep you single" sort of comments.
Instead, i think dating sites' issues are more fundamental. Thought experiment: write a dating profile for yourself in the 3rd person. Then have you 5 closest friends and family members each write one on your behalf. Now have everyone vote on which of the 11 profiles is the most "you". Do you believe yours comes in first? How about top 5?
When we fill out profiles, we naturally try to highlight some parts of ourselves and hide others. Your friends and family see you as you present. Only you see yourself as you intent.
The result of this all is that our dating profiles are a limited, and often misleading, approximation of ourselves. Any matchmaking app is thus matching my "Online Dating Approximation" with your "Online Dating Approximation". The hope is that if our approximations match, we can extrapolate us matching? Weak connection in my experience.
I think this is why Tinder and Bumble have had so much success with their frankly superficial model. At least the online vs reality is closer than more in-depth matching schemes. But we still hear tales of cat/hat-fishing, so maybe they suffer the same issues.
None of the dating apps ive seen have really keyed into the "monkey brain" side of love. The subtle things that make us truly love a person. To be seen if any get there, but there is just no substitute for getting to know someone in person vs flipping through people online.
> None of the dating apps ive seen have really keyed into the "monkey brain" side of love.
Back in the day, okcupid did this for me. I'm quirky, and expect the same in dates. It wasn't just a biography, you could see their answers to all sorts of random crap. This gave a fuller picture of a person. Of course, I had already learned that falling in love online was a bright red flag, so my expectation was somewhat less than finding that monkey brain chemistry: I was looking for people who I could tolerate (and vice verse!) long enough to figure that part out.
After my first marriage ended, apps had all turned into tindr, and it seems that quirky folks end up in the generic loser pile, while the top 1-10% are doing bloodsport. Fortunate for me, I'm on the empathetic side of quirky and connecting with people in person is easy enough if I put myself out there. But there's the rub: solo tindr binges make me feel miserable, going out and living makes me feel alive -- and that's what people are attracted to.
Yes, the observation from someone in the industry is that the top 10-20% are "date bacon" and have no trouble meeting people, and everyone else is a loser.
+1 for OkCupid. I met a lot of the most important persons there who even stayed friends. It is one of the sad examples of MBAs destroying an app they don't understand saying the "UX ix too tedious".
Plenty of fish was the only good one. It sucked and did no matching at all. That meant there was an expectation that you basically exchange 2 messages and then meet in person. All the rest is bs: people are not the same in person as online, so the main job of a dating app is to get people in chairs in person asap
The story is about how Tinder and Bumble are in decline. The superficial model isn’t working anymore.
I think the issues are much more fundamental than you suggest. They’re societal and they’re subcultural within the apps. For one, people are much pickier now than they’ve ever been. On the other hand, the dating apps have this filtration problem: those who successfully form a relationship quit the app, possibly for life.
Unfortunately, it’s not random when people form successful relationships. Some people are just much better at it than others. This is where the filtration problem arises: over time, the concentration of people who aren’t good at forming relationships increases, as these are the folks who stay in the apps the longest. This makes it harder and harder to find a relationship through the apps, and frustration ensues.
The filtration problem isn't app specific, that's life. For example, looking for partners at 40 is very difficult, and the population of singles has been very filtered.
With respect to the apps, you have to realize the filtering problem comes to a steady state, where new "dateables" in equals "datables" out. This isn't necessarily a problem
I've heard tinder users say they are picky because swiping yes on too many reduces your visibility (or something like that). That seems like a bad incentive to make people take chances on each other.
do we actually have any evidence this is true? people have complained about dating since we were neanderthals; articles like this have written themselves for the past decade
There is a fundamental misunderstanding here. What the profile says is not just a list of bullet points of facts. How it says what it says is in my opinion a more reliable signal than the facts contained in it.
Anyone can say that they are funny, and loves to travel. Can they write it funny? The kind of funny wich meshes with your funny? Are they insightfull? Empathic? Judgemental? Confident? Do they have lots of insecurities? These scream of the page from between the words even if, and perhaps especially so if the person is unaware of them.
But of course that only works if they wrote the words themselves. Otherwise i might as well ask them for the phone number of that relative of them who wrote their profile.
> Thought experiment: write a dating profile for yourself in the 3rd person. Then have you 5 closest friends and family members each write one on your behalf.
This works for what you like as well, your close friends or family will likely write down a better list of what you like than you would do. We aren't honest about what we like since we want to say "I like to exercise" or "I like to cook" instead of less noble things that would describe you better. This makes it really hard to match people who would like each other since they aren't honest about what they would like in a partner.
Anyway, the main problem is that you have to sell yourself online. It isn't natural to sell ourselves, we learn who people are by seeing what they do not by listening to them talk about themselves.
> The result of this all is that our dating profiles are a limited, and often misleading, approximation of ourselves.
I once asked my therapist what she thought of an idea where therapists did double-duty as matchmakers, serving as a kind of gatekeeper, where they only set you up with someone once they saw you really did the work and moved past whatever was holding you back in your relationships, thus protecting the market from "lemons". She said it wouldn't work and didn't go into the details; over time, I came to appreciate that getting better at relationships meant diving in, imperfect as I am, and getting better through experience. So such a gatekeeper would have a moral hazard/catch-22, not being able to set people up on dates would prevent them from progressing.
Who you really are is someone who is always a work in progress. No dating profile could ever capture that - and it's unreasonable to expect one to ever succeed at doing so. And if someone isn't changing and growing - they should work on that before blaming their dating profile.
> So such a gatekeeper would have a moral hazard/catch-22, not being able to set people up on dates would prevent them from progressing.
Clearly this. Many people think that therapy is just like going to a doctor that will fix you in a moment with the right pill (well, or in a few sessions). But really it's like having a personal trainer. They can guide you but you need to sweat it yourself if you want improvements.
>over time, I came to appreciate that getting better at relationships meant diving in, imperfect as I am, and getting better through experience.
And for me, I only got angrier at the artificial experience and more or less gave up, focusing on a career where I feel I do have impact.
I don't know, I guess everyone will process the ordeal differently. I never liked the idea of stuff like Twitter or Facebook to begin with, so I wasn't surprised that a social media website dedicated to the messiest part of courtship would drive me over the edge.
> When we fill out profiles, we naturally try to highlight some parts of ourselves and hide others.
Sure, but this is not unique to dating sites. When meeting anyone on a first date IRL we present the best version of ourselves. It takes time for people to get to know each other, and whether they first meet online or in a bar is not much different. Meeting IRL obviously has more signals than seeing a digital profile, but a digital profile is somewhere in between a glance and a wink at a bar, and having an in-person conversation with someone.
The really insidious aspect of dating sites is how exploitative they can be, and "they only stay in business by keeping you single" is fairly accurate. On Tinder, you never truly know whether you're not getting likes because of your profile, or because their algorithm has decided to effectively shadowban you. Your only option would be to buy boost packs and super-likes to even get a chance to be seen.
There's a large market opportunity for a dating site that is actually transparent and not exploitative.
Huh? You were the CTO of a dating app, you start a line with “more fundamental…” What was the ratio of active women to active men? That seems to be most important.
Like dating apps are something like 5-95 active women to active men. If my dating app were 50-50, dude, I could make my app like the WeChat shake to match, and it will perform better than profiles or swiping or whatever big philosophical ideas you have.
On our app we were about 60% women to 40% men. Nonbinary made up a small enough % to round to zero. DAU/MAU were roughly the same, though you might see seasonal swings toward one or another.
I think it's a conglomeration of issues _including_ unaligned incentives of the companies vs their users. The fact that they're nearly all self curated profiles is a symptom of the former.
The core "Apps" don't want the real you with all your idiocracies and flaws, that won't sell the most subscriptions. They want the heavily curated "you", which inevitably becomes a bait and switch for someone else when the idealized you is replaced by IRL you.
With the newer generations fully online for their lifespans, it may be an interesting (and dystopian) exercise to use a specially trained LLM with hooks into social platforms, long form writing, etc to "summarize" ones "life corpus" instead of relying entirely on self reporting and curated images.
Can't help but interpret this take as a little disingenuous. Most dating apps seem to follow the trajectory of "new app launched" -> "new app grows and gets popular" -> "new app bought out by match.com" -> "new app turns to shit"
I'd like to see one that doesn't employ all the dark patterns, but where instead the incentives of the org are aligned with the incentives of the users. If you manage to onboard enough users to get traction, establish yourself as the go-to place for dating, and tell every single little greedy MBA and investurd to pound sand - you may well have solve this problem once and for all and stay king of the castle.
Agreed. GP's comment ignores the reality that dating apps are aggressively monopolized by a single company, and that many of their acquisitions have resulted in demonstrable drops in quality.
It's not that nobody has figured out dating apps yet, it is that selling lonely men expensive add-ons is far too profitable.
The problem is that getting to that point requires quite a bit of capital. The hard part isn’t building the app, it’s buying users, largely through advertising, and then filtering the assholes through moderation staffing. Both of that costs a lot of money, up front. To date, nobody has come up with a way to monetize dating apps in a way that doesn’t negate the benefits of the app.
Personally I’d love to see someone figure out a way to do an activitypub based dating app, where people can build small community instances funded directly by the users.
There's also the fact people only have a somewhat accurate idea of what they'll actually like in a partner. Maybe you only think you'll like someone who's always direct, or who wants to be submissive in bed, or is financially responsible.
> I think a lot of the critiques of dating sites/apps miss the mark. The "they only stay in business by keep you single" sort of comments.
Yeah? I think your comment, as someone that got paid by this market, completely miss the mark. People aren't tired of dating apps because they don't know how to use it, this is just a patronizing comment of someone that made money out of it, probably pushing features that made you guys stay in the business because you kept single people in the app.
> None of the dating apps ive seen have really keyed into the "monkey brain" side of love.
Now you should review the comments and your opinion then you might get so some conclusion related to why none of those apps works long-term for the user, including the one you were responsible for.
I imagine random but surprisingly shared tidbits like your favorite spongebob character being Plankton. Or remembering your most embarassing MySpace post. Or your favorite toy growing up being one of those super balls that you bounced into oblivion one day, never to be seen again (hey, it said "super" after all).
Those buzzfeed-esque tiny details you probably wouldn't think about unless prompted. But it can say a lot about you and where/how you grew up.
I have a theory that contemporary life causes many people great despair, relating both to dating/relationships and career, because our culture is not very supportive or accepting of personal growth.
So, if you get off to a good start in your dating life and career from your late teens and early 20s, you get plenty of approval and validation and compounding success as you progress through life, and acceptance that you deserve the success you're having ("they were always a high achiever, ever since school days").
Whereas if you're not in the top tier of "chosen" people and experience a few painful rejections and setbacks, you're made to feel that's just what you deserve and what you're stuck with, and there's not much you can do to improve your lot. I suspect this has become more of an entrenched belief since the discovery of evolution/DNA, and the generally accepted belief that most of our life outcomes are predetermined by our inheritance.
I think the dating apps (and employment recruitment platforms/techniques) intensify this further, by filtering based on a few simple characteristics, some of which really are genetically predetermined (height) and others that are downstream consequences of having had a blessed start in life (income/education level/job seniority/state of health).
Society generally, including/especially the dating/employment spheres, don't seem to offer much support for people who really sincerely trying to undertake a journey of personal improvement (outside of mainstream accepted practices like conventional fitness training and education). You're just expected to be "good to go". Someone who may have been dealt a rough hand in life but is trying very hard to improve themselves, including their social skills, their emotions, their health/fitness, their career prospects - all of which will lead them to becoming better romantic partners over time - can find themselves getting little support and encouragement along the way, and indeed can get a lot of discouragement from some quarters (including friends and family members).
I think a lot about how the world would be better if more people were encouraged and empowered to go on long-term journeys of deep personal growth, and what kinds of social platforms, including dating and employment platforms, could emerge out of that and bring much more opportunity and satisfaction to people who currently feel the despair of being left behind.
Humans are the same as we were for millennia, the problem is that we seem to be having a bit of a self-denial crisis nowadays. We just can’t accept our flaws anymore, apparently, so we build these fake meaningless narratives that “everyone is special” and “all bodies are beautiful” etc. The truth is that dating is brutal; it works very well for a few people, but for the majority of average people it is a hard competition to which nobody actually know the rules. It’s completely asymmetric gender-wise and failing on it is basically failing on being.
So you find yourself in this situation where everyone is so nice and polite, so sophisticated and accepting, so inclusive, but for some reason nobody gives a single ** about having a romantic relationship with you. How’s that possible? Well it’s possible because it’s all fake. Deep inside, in our intimacy and our inner circles, we’re the same as we were a thousand years ago. The apps simply make it obvious and pull it to the surface.
Ugly people with lumpy bodies have been successfully reproducing for millennia. Many of them even had/have shit personalities to top it off. Dating sucks because in modern times we are coddled and are terrified of failure, many of us spend way too much time behind computer screens and on social media so our people skills have atrophied, and we also spend relatively little time around other people in fun and recreational environments so the opportunities are just missing in a massive way.
The apps completely change how we perceive ourselves and our potential sexual partners. I can't believe I have to say this, but the biggest things that have changed with regards to dating in the past 10 years vs the past 1,000 are social patterns and technology.
>It’s completely asymmetric gender-wise and failing on it is basically failing on being.
This kind of attitude is so harmful. If your life's purpose is 100% dependent on some idealized stranger granting you validation you are in for a bad time. Sex is great, biological imperatives are powerful, but you wont find animals falling into existential dread and despair because they haven't gotten laid yet (or recently). That is a particularly human trait, and it comes from obsessive and self-defeating beliefs about the world rather than reality itself. You might feel like this belief is out of your hands, but it very much is not. Your beliefs are one of the few things in this world that are entirely up to you to change and improve upon (or not).
I think it's a bit of both. Humans are the same, but the tech and environment and especially quality of life isn't anymore. what was good enough in the 50's to attract a mate in a local town isn't good enough for the entire state or even country. I'm sure if Tinder existed in the 50's there'd be similar-ish issues.
At the same time, part of this is because there's been a lot of change in how and where we interact. There isn't really a "poker night" in a lot of modern 30's life with neighbors you chat with every day. young adults can't afford (in time nor money) to get out to a night life more than a few times a month, and even those night life places feel more like people come with established groups. Modern society doesn't pay enough and gets more and more expensive. It's no surprise it can feel soul crushing.
The only part I disagree with is the historical perspective. When was this time that people believed in personal growth? For most of history the nobels were nobels, peasants were peasants and that was that. If anything, the sense of having dynamic control of one's destiny throughout one's lifespan is a recent invention. (Well at least in the west)
Absolutely with you. The great dissonance is between people's expectations and their reality, not the past and the present. Life for someone born poor even a century ago was brutal and oppressive in a way most of us have difficulty understanding.
Yeah this is a good point. I guess genetic determinism is just the contemporary scientific justification for a mentality that’s existed in some for a long time or indeed forever. (I’d be interested to know if other human cultures were more and accepting and supportive of personal growth.)
Agreed, I think this is all downstream from recent macroeconomic forces in the west/America. Namely the "land of opportunity" in the post WW2 era has disappeared and the class structure has largely calcified and will carry over multiple generations. The anxiety people feel about not being one of the "top tier and chosen" is because that's the only avenue for social mobility left.
Or maybe it was always mostly BS and the information age where the message is less controlled/manipulated by a few elite owned sources is making that obvious.
I think you hit the nail on the head in a lot of aspects but I don't fully agree. Our society does endorse and actively support the virtues of personal growth. The issue is, as you pointed out, it only values the growth of those "chosen" to reach a high-percentile level at the end of their journey. There's nothing more abhorrent to our societal myths of a just road for everyone to take than someone who worked years to reach some level of success in a field they want to excel in but only hit a point barely above mediocrity.
> There's nothing more abhorrent to our societal myths of a just road for everyone to take than someone who worked years to reach some level of success in a field they want to excel in but only hit a point barely above mediocrity.
I think it depends on how we define mediocrity. Is it mediocre to spend as much time it requires to get a PhD becoming a good pastry chef or carpenter? In the west very likely yes, unless you're an "entrepreneur".
Yeah I hear you, and no doubt Horatio Algers (and simplistic interpretations/retellings of his story arcs) have done plenty of harm in this respect.
I think we can do much better than “if you work hard and believe in your dreams you’ll make it”. There are many techniques people can learn than can amplify the impacts of their efforts and make them much better companions. They’re just not widely known/accepted as yet.
There are numerous studies confirming the effect you're speaking of, altough I'm not sure if dating apps have an influence on that.
It was shown that certain national ice hockey teams were comprised mainly of players who were born at the beginning of the year. It is theorized that this is because the date that cuts one class for another is at the beginning of the year. If you're born in January, and you start playing hockey at 5, you're gonna be significantly older than a child that's born in december. As a result, you'll be recognized and helped more by your coach, which improves your chances of becoming better, and drags into adulthood, up until you're in the national team. The same applies for academic and professional careers and I'm sure dating as sell.
> Whereas if you're not in the top tier of "chosen" people and experience a few painful rejections and setbacks, you're made to feel that's just what you deserve and what you're stuck with, and there's not much you can do to improve your lot.
You aren't "made to feel anything", it's a two way street. You have someone who says something negative, and you have the choice to listen to it or disregard it. That's a choice
> I think a lot about how the world would be better if more people were encouraged and empowered to go on long-term journeys of deep personal growth
I think if you're motivated enough to do this, you're already motivated enough to go out and get the career success or love life or whatever you're after. Frankly doing that is probably simpler and more straightforward than "self discovery" or whatever. There's a Carlin bit for this https://youtube.com/watch?v=4s3bJYHQXYg
> You have someone who says something negative, and you have the choice to listen to it or disregard it. That's a choice
This is just not true about human psychology. Like it is not true at all.
People are affected by what is said about them. And those few unaffected generally tend to have much bigger issues in relationships, because their lack of caring usually makes them into very uncomfortable to be around.
> You have someone who says something negative, and you have the choice to listen to it or disregard it. That's a choice
That's like saying "You have someone punching you in the face, and you have the choice to be hurt by it or not. Being hurt by being punched in the face is a choice."
You don't choose to be hurt and you don't choose the consequences of being hurt.
I love Carlin and it’s a good gag with some truth in it.
But it assumes we’re all hardwired to be a certain way, which is the very assumption I’m arguing needs to change.
It’s true most self-help is ineffective, and it’s because you can’t change much in your life just by consciously making an effort to change, or just “trying harder”. There is a lot you can change by undoing subconscious self-sabotage patterns and undertaking “letting go” practices, over a long enough period of time. This kind of stuff is fringe now but is growing in popularity because people are finding it far more effective than mainstream self-help and therapy (I sure have).
To everyone here, this is how a confident person with a healthy dose of self-esteem feels and behaves like (with a pinch of salt as this depiction is a bit idealistic).
To @mvncleaninst, not everyone has the same emotional strength and tools to cope with these sort of situations, and trust me, I am not apologizing for mediocrity and lack of courage, I absolutely loathe when people try to excuse what's under their control with made-up stories, disorders and whatnot.
Depression is a real thing, some people have gone through real shit. An example, many people grow up in completely dysfunctional households, you have no idea how that can absolutely destroy someone's perception of it's own value. Same thing with poverty, a lot of people had dealt with both of these things and most likely many more. The wounds inflicted by these circumstances stay with people their whole lives, one cannot just "shrug off these things and carry on" as they have become imbued with them.
Life can break absolutely anybody; if you don't believe this is true, congrats. you've had it easy, so far.
From (George) Carlin's wikipedia entry:
"Because of my abuse of drugs, I neglected my business affairs and had large arrears with the IRS, and that took me eighteen to twenty years to dig out of."
It seems that your motivation expert actually does much worse than the average person on things that require planning and self-control. Colour me surprised. Is this part of his comedy act?
> You aren't "made to feel anything", it's a two way street. You have someone who says something negative, and you have the choice to listen to it or disregard it. That's a choice
Right, this is why we can choose not to feel the pain of being punched in the face.
In your analysis, it seems like the growing person should be recognized by the chosen class and be given a shot at relationships. Why though? If you don’t belong to the chosen class, find a partner that isn’t in the chosen class as well and grow together.
Maybe I am mistaken, but this has a subtext of "I want to be recognized, but I don’t want to deal with disadvantaged people myself".
Well, it’s not true of me, because I was lucky enough to find someone with whom to share a journey of growth (we got together in 2011, just before the dating apps took hold), and it’s worked out well for us.
But I see what life is like for friends who are trying to find serious relationships/life partnerships via the apps, and how much it’s all geared towards being/seeming “the best” and finding “the right person”, and how brutal it is for their self esteem and life outlook (a good friend is at the age where she’s probably missed the chance to have children, having tried to find the right guy via the apps for many years).
I often wonder how it could be better for her and other friends if there were apps/communities more geared towards finding people to grow with rather than finding someone who ticks the boxes now.
In some ways it may be even more difficult to find a partner to grow with than one who has already grown and will give you a chance, because there’s more questions involved. Do they have the same capacity for growth? Are they as tenacious? Will they keep up their efforts after receiving the gratification of acceptance? Etc, etc.
In the "good old days" dating was simpler, but also much, much worse for the average woman. People dated within their town almost exclusively. The best bachelors would be gone pretty quickly. That put a ton of pressure on the remaining women to quickly settle for an average guy in order not to be stuck with a terrible partner (an angry drunk or other kind of lowlife). Not marrying wasn't an option, and divorce wasn't an option. They had to choose, and their dating pool was small and constantly shrinking. Many women got stuck in unhappy marriages, but that was life.
I agree with you that many guys today struggle with dating because they haven't done the necessary work to be good partners, but the problem isn't that "contemporary life doesn't encourage self-improvement". The "problem", if you even want to call it that, is that women prefer being single over a bad relationship with a crummy guy. For the first time in history, women have the economic independence to walk away from a bad deal, and guys have up their game as a consequence.
This sentiment is all over & is very demoralizing to guys who got an education, have a decent job, go to the gym and still get rejected by women who seem to be their peers. I'm not a fan of incel ideology, but there is something to the 'she'll have her fun with bad boys then settle down with you in her 30s when she's looking for someone with a stable income' sentiment that goes around. 20s dating is hugely depressing for men and it shows with all the stats of young men 'dropping out' of life. I got lucky and met someone sweet a couple years ago, but it was extremely rocky for a long time, and it still is for most of my friends.
But men just have to 'step it up'. Six feet, six figures, bare minimum right?
"I am eighteen years old, have a good set of teeth, and believe in Andy Johnson, the Star-Spangled Banner, and the 4th of July. I have taken up a State lot, cleared up eighteen acres last year, and seeded ten of it down.
My buckwheat looks first rate, and the oats and potatoes are bully. I have got nine sheep, a two year old bull, and two heifers, besides a house and a barn.
I want to get married. I want to buy bread and butter, hoop skirts, and waterfalls for some person of the female persuasion during life. That’s what’s the matter with me. But I don’t know how to do it."
Some people argue with the ‘no true woman’ fallacy, or don’t trust them to know how to self reflect properly, but clearly something is dying in society.
> For the first time in history, women have the economic independence to walk away from a bad deal, and guys have up their game as a consequence.
I see variations of this statement all the time. This weird, almost gleeful misandry masquerading as a historical perspective. It needs to stop. It has poisoned all our interactions and it is hurting people.
That is a very short term view. It’s essentially ‘Uber driving for relationships’.
Those same women will then complain bitterly when they get older or become a single mom, and no one pays attention to them anymore and have to start actually doing the work.
Like an Uber driver whose car has been worn to a nub with zero equity in anything, still living paycheck to paycheck, and no new skills. But 10 years down the tubes, and they never had to work for ‘the man’, and saw a lot of cool stuff.
The social construct of marriage tries to even this out - that ‘crummy’ man stays around and provides in many ways (social, financial, physical) even after she’s no longer hot and ‘marketable’. And who will help support and protect her while she has kids. The things that make them ‘crummy’ is exactly what is needed to support all that.
It’s the social/relationship equivalent of a retirement fund/pension. It’s not exciting up front.
Pay in now, (and keep him around) so you’re not eating dogfood in 20 years and have kids who can help you too. Instead of being terribly lonely, mentally ill, and then dying alone and getting eaten by your cats.
Which society has also been nuking social safety net wise, much to everyone’s likely long term regret frankly.
It’s folks losing the plot society wide. It’s how we end up with a lot of very sad stories later.
> I agree with you that many guys today struggle with dating because they haven't done the necessary work to be good partners, but the problem isn't that "contemporary life doesn't encourage self-improvement". The "problem", if you even want to call it that, is that women prefer being single over a bad relationship with a crummy guy. For the first time in history, women have the economic independence to walk away from a bad deal, and guys have up their game as a consequence.
---
What if there actually are plenty of men who have 'stepped their game up' and are perfectly qualified peers to women and would make suitable partners, but the women just have wildly unrealistic expectations?
Or the women just aren't that interested in men in general?
Could those be factors, rather than men just being so beneath women?
The interesting fact is that mostmost men are "below average" "bad" partners according to how women perceive men (I don't remember the exact numbers but it is something ridiculous like only 5% of men are worth considerations).
I don't think things have changed much. Your explanation pretty much blames men which has been in vogue. The dating apps just expanded the size of the "town". Women still look for the top tier guys. I don't believe they are choosing to be single but convincing themselves they can do better when in reality they can't. Dating apps feed the illusion of choice that mr. right is easily obtainable.
Those women also had far less competition. The men the next town over they now have access to come with a town full of women who are now able to access the men of the town the woman is in. Each time her dating pool increases, the competition increases too.
There's no free lunch, just tyranny of too many choices, endless analysis paralyses and FOMO.
I don't disagree with your point, but still: there was plenty of pressure on the men, too, and "many men got stuck in unhappy marriages, but that was life".
Also, early pressure to marry "the best bachelor" often meant "the guy on the football team", "the guy that peaked in high school" (you just didn't know it yet).
Often they were the ones who became the angry alcoholics.
I don't see many men, old or young, doing much to improve their standing as a bachelor, given what is in their control. I've had to do a lot of listening and learning to be a man women would be interested in. Modern male culture in the US typically does NOT do that.
At the same time, I think you're right that women have more power over their life decisions more than ever. This is great and I want that for the women of earth.
> The best bachelors would be gone pretty quickly. That put a ton of pressure on the remaining women to quickly settle for an average guy in order not to be stuck with a terrible partner
So average women with average men, I don't see the issue. The problem is now a lot of women aims very high, even out of their league, when they don't have much to put on the table.
I don't think is that simple, the happiness levels of women have not increased in recent years according to many studies, its more likely a complex issue and that aspect you mention may be a minor variable; I believe is more likely than us (our brains to be exact) have had not time to adapt to the new times where you have to watch hundreds of people with "better" partners than us just by scrolling through your feeds, and that is quite chaotic but soon enough we will adapt a bit better.
> In the "good old days" dating was simpler, but also much, much worse for the average woman. People dated within their town almost exclusively. The best bachelors would be gone pretty quickly.
Honestly, the ability to tell “the best bachelor” without experience together of the type that used to be frowned on before marriage was always weak; what has changed is that the social and economic compulsion/incentive (on both sides) to marry has become a lot weaker and the volume of exposure much greater, and norms limiting the kind of experience that reveals fundamental incompatibility before marriage have weakened.
Women don't prefer being single. Women want a relationship - but with a hot tall confident rich guy their friends will be envious of who makes them feel butterflies ("chemistry").
That's the definition of the ideal boyfriend for most younger women.
So the hot tall confident rich guys play the field, because they can. Worse, some of the hottest and most confident guys are narcissists - because narcissists and sociopaths are very good at seducing people with love bombing and future faking.
Inexperienced women get their hearts broken and decide that all men are jerks - partly because at this stage the kind funny not-so-hot guys don't register as realistic prospects on their dating radar.
There are subcultures within this, and there's certainly a niche of women who find clever, funny, and kind men more attractive than rich and tall etc men. But it's relatively small compared to most of the population.
At the same time there's a strongly gender-polarised and adversarial (actually hate-filled) culture in the US where wannabe manly men who hate everything woke etc are in a permanent war with feminists who are convinced that all masculinity is toxic.
It's not so much that "guys have to up their game" but that the entire culture is emotionally dysfunctional, and dating is stuck in a kind of permanent adolescence where healthy give-and-take relationships aren't modelled at all.
Can you think of one movie or TV show which models a realistically happy working adult marriage which isn't either sentimental and idealised, or doesn't end in drama, tragedy, and betrayal?
You are confounding social and professional outcomes. Social to me is much more genetic (looks, personality, etc.) than professional. Yes, IQ matters some for professional success. Grit, aka "The Grind" is probably the number one indicator of success. I'm not saying everyone can grind to wealthy, but almost everyone can grind to middle class. And the grind applies to all types of jobs -- professional or not, high income or not, corporate or start-up.
Also, you wrote your post (I assume) from the perspective of a man. Even the most unattractive women on dating apps get far more attention than the most attractive men. This has been shown time and time again. Also, most men are invisible to women, but the reverse is not true. (Do not read this post as disparaging towards women.)
What is really happening is that visual-only dating apps are refining the purest biological imperatives: women only seek the best physical mates (top 20%), where as men pursue whatever they can. As a result, most men get zero attention on dating apps. The craziest irony to me: I grew up before the Internet and dating apps became a thing. RARELY did I hear women talk about finding an attractive mate. They wanted to find someone compatible and supportive with good long term intentions. These visual-only dating apps have weirdly inverted the world as most women chase the very best men... who treat them terribly, but are very good looking and have a lot of practice seducing women. Rinse and repeat; almost everyone on dating apps except for the very top are much less satisfied than life before dating apps.
The first paragraph put into words what i've always been intuitively convinced of, but it seems difficult to make people understand it who haven't had to live through it.
>Someone who may have been dealt a rough hand in life but is trying very hard to improve themselves, including their social skills, their emotions, their health/fitness, their career prospects - all of which will lead them to becoming better romantic partners over time - can find themselves getting little support and encouragement along the way, and indeed can get a lot of discouragement from some quarters (including friends and family members).
In dating apps, the first approximation is that women rate men based on attributes that follow the power law (such as social status), whereas men rate women based on attributes that follow the normal distribution (such as looks, age etc.). The same dynamics applies to many animals when they choose their mates.
It directly follows that on these platforms, the attractiveness of men is much less evenly distributed than the attractiveness of women, but there is "rich get richer" or Matthew effect which skews the popularity of most men.
This point is almost never mentioned in such analysis. But that is the basis of the different experience average men and average women have on current dating market.
I don't know, from what I've heard, women rate mostly based on red flags (is there anything I don't like), whereas men rate based on green flags (is there anything I like). Which of course makes it hard for men to create a good profile, whereas women get swamped with messages and have a lot of "dont's" in their profiles. But it doesn't mean women are neccessarily "pickier". They are just as "interested" or "on the search" as men, but are often more cautious because of bad experiences.
Evo-psych explanations break down when you look at actual couples, I think. I recall a study where people ranked each other with 1-9, and they found that the stated preference was similar to what you describe, with women prefering the higher ranked men, and vice-versa but with the men having wider spread preferences. But when they looked at actual couples it was far more random with "9"s paired with "5"s and so on. (I can't find a link but maybe someone else finds it?) In reality, common interests and similar social milieus are probably the most important factors.
I am not talking about self-reported preferences but the statistical analysis of the observable experiences men and women have on dating apps. I find the former to not be consistent with the latter, and I find the latter more trustworthy.
I have learned a lot about this in the zoo with my daughter. Adults become extremely uncomfortable when the children find the human-like behavior of apes funny. Adults just want to go away. To me it seems that our animal nature is too much for most people to psychologically accept.
That is why I completely avoid that evo-psych discussion in general and here in particular. Dating app popularity can be easily observed and we don't need to go into that discussion at all.
>But when they looked at actual couples it was far more random with "9"s paired with "5"s and so on.
are these general couples or couples that met online? There is definitely a whole different dynamic to meeting someone physically and how that body language and actual time to converse changes their perception (not swipe and try to woo them with a text message).
You're not even getting 5 seconds on a dating app if you don't have the right looks or right pitch. I always had an idea for one of those trashy Blind Date reality shows with a premise of "would you swipe right on your SO/Spouse?". because we're never getting organic data for that.
I hear this claim alot on social media but is there any solid research backing this up?
I want to propose a different hypothesis - men and women lie differently. Men are more likely to say they got no matches on a dating site and complain whereas women are more likely to keep quiet of they get few to no matches and exaggerate the number they do get.
Maybe men are more likely to blame the site or algorithm whereas women are more likely to blame themselves.
Maybe ratios of unsuccessful attempts are roughly evenly distributed and the difference can be explained solely by the fact that men must ask and make the first move in most cultures whereas women don't have to.
OKCupid had a blog (I believe it was called “OKData”, which had a few posts that agreed with the parent post. I believe that the blog was removed after an acquisition, but the content was published as a book, which is still available.
Annectotal, but the women I know, if anything, try to tone down the number of matches they get, and dates they go on, whereas for the men it's the other way around. You hear of every single match from a male friend.
Not solid research but I set up an account with a single scrappy black/white picture of a photo of a woman from the 1940s. Her profile drew an order of magnitude more attention than what I normally get.
>men and women lie differently. Men are more likely to say they got no matches on a dating site and complain whereas women are more likely to keep quiet of they get few to no matches and exaggerate the number they do get.
There's no Tinder-specific data, but it's been very well reported that the rate of matches between men and women on older dating sites was drastic, at least 1:2. So I don't think it's really a "lie" when men say they get no dates. I'm sure with the Tinder age that gap has only widened.
You also need to keep in mind that people complain in different places. You're likely not going to find a woman complaining about lack of matches on Hacker News, for example.
>Maybe ratios of unsuccessful attempts are roughly evenly distributed and the difference can be explained solely by the fact that men must ask and make the first move in most cultures whereas women don't have to.
It's possible, but I hear this is even a problem on sites where the woman is expected to make the first move. There's just some element of pickiness men lack compared to women. Be it due to quantity of choice or the bar to meet or whatnot.
I have never heard the power law/normal distribution claim on social media and almost never anywhere else either. Do you have some links?
I don't know about solid research. The last time I was looking up research about this was around 15 years ago, when I was actually planning to publish a paper about the finding above.
I had some data about a series of speed-dating events. Men gave double the amount of +'s (if both give a +, then it is a match) as compared to women, and the distributions were what I claim above.
Then there was the OkCupid article and some other research articles on dating sites (no apps at that time) and speed-dating events. I don't remember any research mentioning the different distributions although it was obvious from the graphs on the research papers that all of these followed the same distributions.
I think one of the reasons why there is so little research is that there is some taboo around this subject. For example the OkCupid article mentioned was pulled off. I don't know what the taboo is. Perhaps these results hint too much about differences between sexes or our evoluationary past?
This is easy to test. Create 6 dating profiles: Looks: (1) below average, (2) average, and (3) above above. Then, man vs woman. Now watch what happens. There are lots of YouTube videos of people who have done it. It is stunning how much more attention goes to the most attractive men. Average and below attractive men will get almost zero attention. If you go deeper, and continue past the like to a conversation, it becomes more striking.
>> In dating apps, the first approximation is that women rate men based on attributes that follow the power law (such as social status)
Based on my observations and conversations with girlfriends who use dating apps, women rate men based on height first, and everything else (including social status) second.
I am five foot four and my former dating life from the time I was 22-36 wasn’t anything to write home about (with one failed marriage in between).
I got friend zoned more than I wish to admit. I started dating my now wife at 36 and I’m now 49.
I wasn’t unattractive - I was in peak physical shape by any metric as a part time fitness instructor, runner, muscular, 10% body fat. I was outgoing, decently successful financially etc.
But I am short.
It got better after my divorce At 32. Maturity - maybe? The nature of competition changed - probably? I was single, no kids, intelligent, still in above average shape. But I would have still failed miserably on dating apps I think. I met my now wife at work and the women I dated before then were mostly through teaching classes at gyms.
They were more willing to let their guard down with me as an instructor than just some random dude trying to hit on them at the gym
I'm 5'8" on a good day, and my dating app experience is pretty meh. But in real life, my height never seems to matter. Literally last night I was approached by a woman over 6'.
It's wild how people's real-world preferences can be completely different than their more superficial online ones (I'm not excluding myself from this, or is this aimed at any gender/group in general).
I did not go too deep into what I mean by social status. I actually do not think women rate men on attributes like education/job title/car/wealth that are typically associated with social status, but more with dominance, and height is one proxy attribute for dominance -- lack of above-average height is a good indicator that men is likely not very dominant.
I wonder if this also relates to the choice of people in "visible" positions such as politicians and business executives. The men are selected for tallness first, and the women for competency.
The entire premise of that analysis is broken by a simple truth - that while rarely discussed in "polite society", it turns out that women enjoy sex too.
It is easier to talk about this in the context of dating apps. This phenomenon appears to touch some taboos, and I think that explains why these discussions never get anywhere. You can always find narratives that support what you want to believe, because social behavior is so complex. When we concentrate on the statistical analysis of differences of experiences men and women have in dating apps, it is easier to keep the talk about the actual phenomenon.
Such pressure does exist. And it's even stronger in, say, Christian communities, but I don't think it makes finding a partner a breeze in them (although they do tend to get married sooner?)
I'm so happy that I dated pre-dating app era, between 2005-2010. There were dating apps but not that mainstream. I walked up to my wife and her friend with some BS reason at a club, kept on the conversation and boom 10+ years together.
I'm average looking, she has a beautiful face and has been dancing since the age of 4. I'd have 0 chance with these kind of girls on dating apps. Absolutely 0.
Another good thing, that time social media have not yet screwed up people's self esteem and that helped a lot -> she has not overrated herself, I have not underrated myself.
We've been dating in person for a couple of billion years, we are hard-wired for that as body language tells a lot more in a fraction of a second than any made up profile text and over edited photos.
You can still meet people today outside of dating apps. A good friend of mine met his gf at a surf hostel. I met my gf on a boat in the Maldives. I think most people would objectively say she is out of my league if they saw us in a photo together.
I think the hardest part about meeting someone is being in a situation to meet them. If your life is something like: sleep -> eat -> work -> repeat, it's very hard to meet someone.
Traveling really only makes sense if one of you wants to move or want to have a long distance relationship. Both of these are rare attributes for meeting people while traveling.
Most of the women I meet while traveling are also not single. They’re with their partners whereas many men will travel solo. Traveling solo isn’t a thing most women will do at all. Many men will.
At the same time I was using online dating site. It helped to accelerate the search and filter candidates. I could save time rejecting illiterate and/or less clever girls. Think about Google maps and real estate search - you don’t want a house on the highway.
I wouldn’t use that today. Full of fake profiles to lure paying customers and to keep them as long as they can. Free subscription is not existing anymore.
It's completely different for introverts like me. I can figure out multivariate calculus or how a git merge works, but I do not have the faintest idea how to start a conversation with someone. Especially if it's two or more people already talking. The only avenues that worked for me are work and apps.
Have we been dating in person for a couple of billion years?
Setting aside that people have not been around for billions of years, if you go back in history without the tech and the mobility we have today "dating" is a complete different thing. You didn't have such a large pool of potential partners, where you were born played a huge role and you also didn't have as much freedom to do your own thing as you did today.
You better watch out though I would actually be more worried with that type of relationship because your wife will now realize she has unlimited options and start to second guess. So many divorces happen now from things as simple as a facebook message leading to an affair.
That fear of missing out could hit hard and lots of people get blindsided by it.
* There's no endless swiping. Users can only see a handleful of matches, each profile stays visible until users say yes/no on each profile, and the profiles are only topped up twice a day.
* All chatting is in-person, which is much more human than trying to text online. If users match, they can't chat. They both put down a deposit (about double the cost of a drink in a bar), pick a day & time they're avaliable, and Breeze automatically makes a reservation at a local bar (the first drink is free), or a park for a walk.
* Since dates require a deposit, and there's only so many days in the week(!), and users can't make new matches without first planning current matches, users don't get overwhelmed with connections - the existing contacts are prioritised.
* They're not owned by Match.com - which for me is a big plus! More disruption of their monopoly is a good thing.
Looks interesting indeed. Seems to only be available in NL though, as the company seems to be Dutch and they don't say anything about where they are available. Make sense if they do the whole "make a reservation for me" thing.
> They're not owned by Match.com
Let me know in 5-10 years. I'd bet a substantial amount of money that eventually match.com will acquire them as well. Seems to be what ends up with all these dating services.
> Breeze is active in 15 cities: Alkmaar, Amsterdam, Breda, Delft, The Hague, Eindhoven, Groningen, Leiden, Maastricht, Nijmegen, Rotterdam, Tilburg, Utrecht, Wageningen, Zwolle. Beforehand you can choose where you want to date by going to the ‘Date preferences’ menu.
Seems helpful if you are looking for a committed relationship.
Many of us are not. Where can we go?
This is the question that really needs answering; else we will have no option but to continue to flood the same spaces that commitment-seekers use. The relative signal to noise ratio is hurting all of us.
This is only something that would work for the Dutch. That's the whole point of "going Dutch". The fact that women have to pay anything at all would make this a non-starter in the US market.
> As Illich saw it, the rise of universalizing social technologies — that is, institutions managed by strangers — transgressed the traditional bounds of diverse vernacular communities and harnessed human endeavor to a trajectory of limitless growth, creating a “radical monopoly” over the ways and means of living that blunted any alternative to industrializing the desires of consumer society. In the process, persons and communities alike were deprived of the practical knowledge to shape tools according to their own defined needs and choices. Robbed of such competence, they became servants to the logic of those institutions instead of the other way around.
> His greatest insight was that when conviviality is swapped for productivity, monopolizing institutions that chart a singular path at mass scale become counterproductive to their original intent beyond a certain threshold.
> In his book “Energy and Equity” Illich illustrated this point in terms all could easily understand. As anyone who has driven on a freeway would agree, individual mobility turns into collective congestion when everyone has a car.
Darren Brown once had an interesting experiment, where he created a psychological profile and shared it with a broad room of people. Everyone agreed that it was a perfect approximation of their personality. ie. People don't really have a sense of who they are. (The few that do, are exceptional and don't need dating sites). Profiles are probably not the right artifact to use to determine a match.
Social cues will always be more valuable than personality, or kindness. For men, that is status and wealth and physical attractiveness. For women, it is beauty and age. Regardless if you like that or not, it may be what is missing in these utilities.
Further, I like how the Japanese make group dates. 3 boys and 3 girls go out on a date. Gokkon. Maybe this is something the West should consider. Safer, far more interesting, and allows people to broadly consider each other.
> In 1948, in what has been described as a "classic experiment",[10] psychologist Forer gave a psychology test – his so-called "Diagnostic Interest Blank" – to 39 of his psychology students, who were told that they would each receive a brief personality vignette based on their test results. One week later Forer gave each student a purportedly individualized vignette and asked each of them to rate it on how well it applied. In reality, each student received the same vignette, ... On average, the students rated its accuracy as 4.30 on a scale of 0 (very poor) to 5 (excellent). Only after the ratings were turned in, it was revealed that all students had received an identical vignette assembled by Forer from a newsstand astrology book.
Most people on dating apps have never had a long term relationship (say 5 years or more of cohabitation) and have never got to the stage where they're completely accepting of and comfortable with their partner.
Nobody writes on tinder that they're looking for a partner who will laugh every time they toot while watching TV.
We're all shopping for beautiful, successful people who don't fart.
I don't like dating apps (and I'm happy that I'm in a relationship and don't need to use them).
I think it's because I can't flirt on cue. A dating app is a very clear social situation (like a singles night, or speed dating, ...) where both sides know what they are looking for (be it a relationship, sex, romance...). But you can't "fall with the door into the house" as they say here. You have to navigate certain rituals of dating, you have to impress but but be natural, show interest but not too much, etc..
Contrast with how it worked before dating apps, you met people from your extended social circle. You had some non-romantic interaction first. There is a certain amount of ambiguity in the beginning. You can flirt and express interest without being on a formal date, and then ask them out. It can also be stressful and anxiety-inducing of course, but IMO much less than on the bazaar that is a dating app.
I think dating would work much better as a side-function of a regular social network app, than as a dedicated app (and I know quite some friends who met over the internet but not via dating apps). But alas, there is no business model there...
I think Facebook dating does this, but frankly I don't really like the idea of letting my whole family know I'm looking to date by throwing myself on Facebook
I don't mean the "dating relationship" stage, but much earlier, the first impression. It's quite intimidating if one of the few things somebody knows about you is that you are looking for a relationship/romance with them.
Readit News
I CTO'd a fairly successful dating site for 4 years. I think a lot of the critiques of dating sites/apps miss the mark. The "they only stay in business by keep you single" sort of comments.
Instead, i think dating sites' issues are more fundamental. Thought experiment: write a dating profile for yourself in the 3rd person. Then have you 5 closest friends and family members each write one on your behalf. Now have everyone vote on which of the 11 profiles is the most "you". Do you believe yours comes in first? How about top 5?
When we fill out profiles, we naturally try to highlight some parts of ourselves and hide others. Your friends and family see you as you present. Only you see yourself as you intent.
The result of this all is that our dating profiles are a limited, and often misleading, approximation of ourselves. Any matchmaking app is thus matching my "Online Dating Approximation" with your "Online Dating Approximation". The hope is that if our approximations match, we can extrapolate us matching? Weak connection in my experience.
I think this is why Tinder and Bumble have had so much success with their frankly superficial model. At least the online vs reality is closer than more in-depth matching schemes. But we still hear tales of cat/hat-fishing, so maybe they suffer the same issues.
None of the dating apps ive seen have really keyed into the "monkey brain" side of love. The subtle things that make us truly love a person. To be seen if any get there, but there is just no substitute for getting to know someone in person vs flipping through people online.
Back in the day, okcupid did this for me. I'm quirky, and expect the same in dates. It wasn't just a biography, you could see their answers to all sorts of random crap. This gave a fuller picture of a person. Of course, I had already learned that falling in love online was a bright red flag, so my expectation was somewhat less than finding that monkey brain chemistry: I was looking for people who I could tolerate (and vice verse!) long enough to figure that part out.
After my first marriage ended, apps had all turned into tindr, and it seems that quirky folks end up in the generic loser pile, while the top 1-10% are doing bloodsport. Fortunate for me, I'm on the empathetic side of quirky and connecting with people in person is easy enough if I put myself out there. But there's the rub: solo tindr binges make me feel miserable, going out and living makes me feel alive -- and that's what people are attracted to.
Yes, the observation from someone in the industry is that the top 10-20% are "date bacon" and have no trouble meeting people, and everyone else is a loser.
Then there's the spam problem.
Since then I've only been meeting people in real life. I agree that using tindr felt miserable and probably still does.
I think the issues are much more fundamental than you suggest. They’re societal and they’re subcultural within the apps. For one, people are much pickier now than they’ve ever been. On the other hand, the dating apps have this filtration problem: those who successfully form a relationship quit the app, possibly for life.
Unfortunately, it’s not random when people form successful relationships. Some people are just much better at it than others. This is where the filtration problem arises: over time, the concentration of people who aren’t good at forming relationships increases, as these are the folks who stay in the apps the longest. This makes it harder and harder to find a relationship through the apps, and frustration ensues.
With respect to the apps, you have to realize the filtering problem comes to a steady state, where new "dateables" in equals "datables" out. This isn't necessarily a problem
do we actually have any evidence this is true? people have complained about dating since we were neanderthals; articles like this have written themselves for the past decade
There is a fundamental misunderstanding here. What the profile says is not just a list of bullet points of facts. How it says what it says is in my opinion a more reliable signal than the facts contained in it.
Anyone can say that they are funny, and loves to travel. Can they write it funny? The kind of funny wich meshes with your funny? Are they insightfull? Empathic? Judgemental? Confident? Do they have lots of insecurities? These scream of the page from between the words even if, and perhaps especially so if the person is unaware of them.
But of course that only works if they wrote the words themselves. Otherwise i might as well ask them for the phone number of that relative of them who wrote their profile.
This works for what you like as well, your close friends or family will likely write down a better list of what you like than you would do. We aren't honest about what we like since we want to say "I like to exercise" or "I like to cook" instead of less noble things that would describe you better. This makes it really hard to match people who would like each other since they aren't honest about what they would like in a partner.
Anyway, the main problem is that you have to sell yourself online. It isn't natural to sell ourselves, we learn who people are by seeing what they do not by listening to them talk about themselves.
I once asked my therapist what she thought of an idea where therapists did double-duty as matchmakers, serving as a kind of gatekeeper, where they only set you up with someone once they saw you really did the work and moved past whatever was holding you back in your relationships, thus protecting the market from "lemons". She said it wouldn't work and didn't go into the details; over time, I came to appreciate that getting better at relationships meant diving in, imperfect as I am, and getting better through experience. So such a gatekeeper would have a moral hazard/catch-22, not being able to set people up on dates would prevent them from progressing.
Who you really are is someone who is always a work in progress. No dating profile could ever capture that - and it's unreasonable to expect one to ever succeed at doing so. And if someone isn't changing and growing - they should work on that before blaming their dating profile.
Clearly this. Many people think that therapy is just like going to a doctor that will fix you in a moment with the right pill (well, or in a few sessions). But really it's like having a personal trainer. They can guide you but you need to sweat it yourself if you want improvements.
And for me, I only got angrier at the artificial experience and more or less gave up, focusing on a career where I feel I do have impact.
I don't know, I guess everyone will process the ordeal differently. I never liked the idea of stuff like Twitter or Facebook to begin with, so I wasn't surprised that a social media website dedicated to the messiest part of courtship would drive me over the edge.
Sure, but this is not unique to dating sites. When meeting anyone on a first date IRL we present the best version of ourselves. It takes time for people to get to know each other, and whether they first meet online or in a bar is not much different. Meeting IRL obviously has more signals than seeing a digital profile, but a digital profile is somewhere in between a glance and a wink at a bar, and having an in-person conversation with someone.
The really insidious aspect of dating sites is how exploitative they can be, and "they only stay in business by keeping you single" is fairly accurate. On Tinder, you never truly know whether you're not getting likes because of your profile, or because their algorithm has decided to effectively shadowban you. Your only option would be to buy boost packs and super-likes to even get a chance to be seen.
There's a large market opportunity for a dating site that is actually transparent and not exploitative.
actually kinda shocked China or Korea haven't made this a state thing in order to help boost marriages and childbirths
Like dating apps are something like 5-95 active women to active men. If my dating app were 50-50, dude, I could make my app like the WeChat shake to match, and it will perform better than profiles or swiping or whatever big philosophical ideas you have.
The core "Apps" don't want the real you with all your idiocracies and flaws, that won't sell the most subscriptions. They want the heavily curated "you", which inevitably becomes a bait and switch for someone else when the idealized you is replaced by IRL you.
With the newer generations fully online for their lifespans, it may be an interesting (and dystopian) exercise to use a specially trained LLM with hooks into social platforms, long form writing, etc to "summarize" ones "life corpus" instead of relying entirely on self reporting and curated images.
PS I'm half joking half not.
I'd like to see one that doesn't employ all the dark patterns, but where instead the incentives of the org are aligned with the incentives of the users. If you manage to onboard enough users to get traction, establish yourself as the go-to place for dating, and tell every single little greedy MBA and investurd to pound sand - you may well have solve this problem once and for all and stay king of the castle.
It's not that nobody has figured out dating apps yet, it is that selling lonely men expensive add-ons is far too profitable.
Personally I’d love to see someone figure out a way to do an activitypub based dating app, where people can build small community instances funded directly by the users.
Yeah? I think your comment, as someone that got paid by this market, completely miss the mark. People aren't tired of dating apps because they don't know how to use it, this is just a patronizing comment of someone that made money out of it, probably pushing features that made you guys stay in the business because you kept single people in the app.
> None of the dating apps ive seen have really keyed into the "monkey brain" side of love.
Now you should review the comments and your opinion then you might get so some conclusion related to why none of those apps works long-term for the user, including the one you were responsible for.
What kind of things should I imagine here?
Those buzzfeed-esque tiny details you probably wouldn't think about unless prompted. But it can say a lot about you and where/how you grew up.
So, if you get off to a good start in your dating life and career from your late teens and early 20s, you get plenty of approval and validation and compounding success as you progress through life, and acceptance that you deserve the success you're having ("they were always a high achiever, ever since school days").
Whereas if you're not in the top tier of "chosen" people and experience a few painful rejections and setbacks, you're made to feel that's just what you deserve and what you're stuck with, and there's not much you can do to improve your lot. I suspect this has become more of an entrenched belief since the discovery of evolution/DNA, and the generally accepted belief that most of our life outcomes are predetermined by our inheritance.
I think the dating apps (and employment recruitment platforms/techniques) intensify this further, by filtering based on a few simple characteristics, some of which really are genetically predetermined (height) and others that are downstream consequences of having had a blessed start in life (income/education level/job seniority/state of health).
Society generally, including/especially the dating/employment spheres, don't seem to offer much support for people who really sincerely trying to undertake a journey of personal improvement (outside of mainstream accepted practices like conventional fitness training and education). You're just expected to be "good to go". Someone who may have been dealt a rough hand in life but is trying very hard to improve themselves, including their social skills, their emotions, their health/fitness, their career prospects - all of which will lead them to becoming better romantic partners over time - can find themselves getting little support and encouragement along the way, and indeed can get a lot of discouragement from some quarters (including friends and family members).
I think a lot about how the world would be better if more people were encouraged and empowered to go on long-term journeys of deep personal growth, and what kinds of social platforms, including dating and employment platforms, could emerge out of that and bring much more opportunity and satisfaction to people who currently feel the despair of being left behind.
So you find yourself in this situation where everyone is so nice and polite, so sophisticated and accepting, so inclusive, but for some reason nobody gives a single ** about having a romantic relationship with you. How’s that possible? Well it’s possible because it’s all fake. Deep inside, in our intimacy and our inner circles, we’re the same as we were a thousand years ago. The apps simply make it obvious and pull it to the surface.
The apps completely change how we perceive ourselves and our potential sexual partners. I can't believe I have to say this, but the biggest things that have changed with regards to dating in the past 10 years vs the past 1,000 are social patterns and technology.
>It’s completely asymmetric gender-wise and failing on it is basically failing on being.
This kind of attitude is so harmful. If your life's purpose is 100% dependent on some idealized stranger granting you validation you are in for a bad time. Sex is great, biological imperatives are powerful, but you wont find animals falling into existential dread and despair because they haven't gotten laid yet (or recently). That is a particularly human trait, and it comes from obsessive and self-defeating beliefs about the world rather than reality itself. You might feel like this belief is out of your hands, but it very much is not. Your beliefs are one of the few things in this world that are entirely up to you to change and improve upon (or not).
At the same time, part of this is because there's been a lot of change in how and where we interact. There isn't really a "poker night" in a lot of modern 30's life with neighbors you chat with every day. young adults can't afford (in time nor money) to get out to a night life more than a few times a month, and even those night life places feel more like people come with established groups. Modern society doesn't pay enough and gets more and more expensive. It's no surprise it can feel soul crushing.
Or maybe it was always mostly BS and the information age where the message is less controlled/manipulated by a few elite owned sources is making that obvious.
I think it depends on how we define mediocrity. Is it mediocre to spend as much time it requires to get a PhD becoming a good pastry chef or carpenter? In the west very likely yes, unless you're an "entrepreneur".
I think we can do much better than “if you work hard and believe in your dreams you’ll make it”. There are many techniques people can learn than can amplify the impacts of their efforts and make them much better companions. They’re just not widely known/accepted as yet.
It was shown that certain national ice hockey teams were comprised mainly of players who were born at the beginning of the year. It is theorized that this is because the date that cuts one class for another is at the beginning of the year. If you're born in January, and you start playing hockey at 5, you're gonna be significantly older than a child that's born in december. As a result, you'll be recognized and helped more by your coach, which improves your chances of becoming better, and drags into adulthood, up until you're in the national team. The same applies for academic and professional careers and I'm sure dating as sell.
You aren't "made to feel anything", it's a two way street. You have someone who says something negative, and you have the choice to listen to it or disregard it. That's a choice
> I think a lot about how the world would be better if more people were encouraged and empowered to go on long-term journeys of deep personal growth
I think if you're motivated enough to do this, you're already motivated enough to go out and get the career success or love life or whatever you're after. Frankly doing that is probably simpler and more straightforward than "self discovery" or whatever. There's a Carlin bit for this https://youtube.com/watch?v=4s3bJYHQXYg
This is just not true about human psychology. Like it is not true at all.
People are affected by what is said about them. And those few unaffected generally tend to have much bigger issues in relationships, because their lack of caring usually makes them into very uncomfortable to be around.
That's like saying "You have someone punching you in the face, and you have the choice to be hurt by it or not. Being hurt by being punched in the face is a choice."
You don't choose to be hurt and you don't choose the consequences of being hurt.
But it assumes we’re all hardwired to be a certain way, which is the very assumption I’m arguing needs to change.
It’s true most self-help is ineffective, and it’s because you can’t change much in your life just by consciously making an effort to change, or just “trying harder”. There is a lot you can change by undoing subconscious self-sabotage patterns and undertaking “letting go” practices, over a long enough period of time. This kind of stuff is fringe now but is growing in popularity because people are finding it far more effective than mainstream self-help and therapy (I sure have).
To @mvncleaninst, not everyone has the same emotional strength and tools to cope with these sort of situations, and trust me, I am not apologizing for mediocrity and lack of courage, I absolutely loathe when people try to excuse what's under their control with made-up stories, disorders and whatnot.
Depression is a real thing, some people have gone through real shit. An example, many people grow up in completely dysfunctional households, you have no idea how that can absolutely destroy someone's perception of it's own value. Same thing with poverty, a lot of people had dealt with both of these things and most likely many more. The wounds inflicted by these circumstances stay with people their whole lives, one cannot just "shrug off these things and carry on" as they have become imbued with them.
Life can break absolutely anybody; if you don't believe this is true, congrats. you've had it easy, so far.
From (George) Carlin's wikipedia entry:
"Because of my abuse of drugs, I neglected my business affairs and had large arrears with the IRS, and that took me eighteen to twenty years to dig out of."
It seems that your motivation expert actually does much worse than the average person on things that require planning and self-control. Colour me surprised. Is this part of his comedy act?
Right, this is why we can choose not to feel the pain of being punched in the face.
No.
Maybe I am mistaken, but this has a subtext of "I want to be recognized, but I don’t want to deal with disadvantaged people myself".
But I see what life is like for friends who are trying to find serious relationships/life partnerships via the apps, and how much it’s all geared towards being/seeming “the best” and finding “the right person”, and how brutal it is for their self esteem and life outlook (a good friend is at the age where she’s probably missed the chance to have children, having tried to find the right guy via the apps for many years).
I often wonder how it could be better for her and other friends if there were apps/communities more geared towards finding people to grow with rather than finding someone who ticks the boxes now.
I agree with you that many guys today struggle with dating because they haven't done the necessary work to be good partners, but the problem isn't that "contemporary life doesn't encourage self-improvement". The "problem", if you even want to call it that, is that women prefer being single over a bad relationship with a crummy guy. For the first time in history, women have the economic independence to walk away from a bad deal, and guys have up their game as a consequence.
This sentiment is all over & is very demoralizing to guys who got an education, have a decent job, go to the gym and still get rejected by women who seem to be their peers. I'm not a fan of incel ideology, but there is something to the 'she'll have her fun with bad boys then settle down with you in her 30s when she's looking for someone with a stable income' sentiment that goes around. 20s dating is hugely depressing for men and it shows with all the stats of young men 'dropping out' of life. I got lucky and met someone sweet a couple years ago, but it was extremely rocky for a long time, and it still is for most of my friends.
But men just have to 'step it up'. Six feet, six figures, bare minimum right?
"I am eighteen years old, have a good set of teeth, and believe in Andy Johnson, the Star-Spangled Banner, and the 4th of July. I have taken up a State lot, cleared up eighteen acres last year, and seeded ten of it down.
My buckwheat looks first rate, and the oats and potatoes are bully. I have got nine sheep, a two year old bull, and two heifers, besides a house and a barn.
I want to get married. I want to buy bread and butter, hoop skirts, and waterfalls for some person of the female persuasion during life. That’s what’s the matter with me. But I don’t know how to do it."
https://dustyoldthing.com/ad-looking-for-wife-in-1865/
https://docs.iza.org/dp4200.pdf
Some people argue with the ‘no true woman’ fallacy, or don’t trust them to know how to self reflect properly, but clearly something is dying in society.
I see variations of this statement all the time. This weird, almost gleeful misandry masquerading as a historical perspective. It needs to stop. It has poisoned all our interactions and it is hurting people.
Those same women will then complain bitterly when they get older or become a single mom, and no one pays attention to them anymore and have to start actually doing the work.
Like an Uber driver whose car has been worn to a nub with zero equity in anything, still living paycheck to paycheck, and no new skills. But 10 years down the tubes, and they never had to work for ‘the man’, and saw a lot of cool stuff.
The social construct of marriage tries to even this out - that ‘crummy’ man stays around and provides in many ways (social, financial, physical) even after she’s no longer hot and ‘marketable’. And who will help support and protect her while she has kids. The things that make them ‘crummy’ is exactly what is needed to support all that.
It’s the social/relationship equivalent of a retirement fund/pension. It’s not exciting up front.
Pay in now, (and keep him around) so you’re not eating dogfood in 20 years and have kids who can help you too. Instead of being terribly lonely, mentally ill, and then dying alone and getting eaten by your cats.
Which society has also been nuking social safety net wise, much to everyone’s likely long term regret frankly.
It’s folks losing the plot society wide. It’s how we end up with a lot of very sad stories later.
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What if there actually are plenty of men who have 'stepped their game up' and are perfectly qualified peers to women and would make suitable partners, but the women just have wildly unrealistic expectations?
Or the women just aren't that interested in men in general?
Could those be factors, rather than men just being so beneath women?
There's no free lunch, just tyranny of too many choices, endless analysis paralyses and FOMO.
Also, early pressure to marry "the best bachelor" often meant "the guy on the football team", "the guy that peaked in high school" (you just didn't know it yet).
Often they were the ones who became the angry alcoholics.
I don't see many men, old or young, doing much to improve their standing as a bachelor, given what is in their control. I've had to do a lot of listening and learning to be a man women would be interested in. Modern male culture in the US typically does NOT do that.
At the same time, I think you're right that women have more power over their life decisions more than ever. This is great and I want that for the women of earth.
So average women with average men, I don't see the issue. The problem is now a lot of women aims very high, even out of their league, when they don't have much to put on the table.
These are average women too.
Honestly, the ability to tell “the best bachelor” without experience together of the type that used to be frowned on before marriage was always weak; what has changed is that the social and economic compulsion/incentive (on both sides) to marry has become a lot weaker and the volume of exposure much greater, and norms limiting the kind of experience that reveals fundamental incompatibility before marriage have weakened.
That's the definition of the ideal boyfriend for most younger women.
So the hot tall confident rich guys play the field, because they can. Worse, some of the hottest and most confident guys are narcissists - because narcissists and sociopaths are very good at seducing people with love bombing and future faking.
Inexperienced women get their hearts broken and decide that all men are jerks - partly because at this stage the kind funny not-so-hot guys don't register as realistic prospects on their dating radar.
There are subcultures within this, and there's certainly a niche of women who find clever, funny, and kind men more attractive than rich and tall etc men. But it's relatively small compared to most of the population.
At the same time there's a strongly gender-polarised and adversarial (actually hate-filled) culture in the US where wannabe manly men who hate everything woke etc are in a permanent war with feminists who are convinced that all masculinity is toxic.
It's not so much that "guys have to up their game" but that the entire culture is emotionally dysfunctional, and dating is stuck in a kind of permanent adolescence where healthy give-and-take relationships aren't modelled at all.
Can you think of one movie or TV show which models a realistically happy working adult marriage which isn't either sentimental and idealised, or doesn't end in drama, tragedy, and betrayal?
Also, you wrote your post (I assume) from the perspective of a man. Even the most unattractive women on dating apps get far more attention than the most attractive men. This has been shown time and time again. Also, most men are invisible to women, but the reverse is not true. (Do not read this post as disparaging towards women.)
What is really happening is that visual-only dating apps are refining the purest biological imperatives: women only seek the best physical mates (top 20%), where as men pursue whatever they can. As a result, most men get zero attention on dating apps. The craziest irony to me: I grew up before the Internet and dating apps became a thing. RARELY did I hear women talk about finding an attractive mate. They wanted to find someone compatible and supportive with good long term intentions. These visual-only dating apps have weirdly inverted the world as most women chase the very best men... who treat them terribly, but are very good looking and have a lot of practice seducing women. Rinse and repeat; almost everyone on dating apps except for the very top are much less satisfied than life before dating apps.
What makes you think so?
what you describing is human nature, the reality of it that people won't tell you directly.
i don't think it's just something modern, most people have always been superficial, judgemental, tribal and so on.
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It directly follows that on these platforms, the attractiveness of men is much less evenly distributed than the attractiveness of women, but there is "rich get richer" or Matthew effect which skews the popularity of most men.
This point is almost never mentioned in such analysis. But that is the basis of the different experience average men and average women have on current dating market.
Evo-psych explanations break down when you look at actual couples, I think. I recall a study where people ranked each other with 1-9, and they found that the stated preference was similar to what you describe, with women prefering the higher ranked men, and vice-versa but with the men having wider spread preferences. But when they looked at actual couples it was far more random with "9"s paired with "5"s and so on. (I can't find a link but maybe someone else finds it?) In reality, common interests and similar social milieus are probably the most important factors.
I have learned a lot about this in the zoo with my daughter. Adults become extremely uncomfortable when the children find the human-like behavior of apes funny. Adults just want to go away. To me it seems that our animal nature is too much for most people to psychologically accept.
That is why I completely avoid that evo-psych discussion in general and here in particular. Dating app popularity can be easily observed and we don't need to go into that discussion at all.
are these general couples or couples that met online? There is definitely a whole different dynamic to meeting someone physically and how that body language and actual time to converse changes their perception (not swipe and try to woo them with a text message).
You're not even getting 5 seconds on a dating app if you don't have the right looks or right pitch. I always had an idea for one of those trashy Blind Date reality shows with a premise of "would you swipe right on your SO/Spouse?". because we're never getting organic data for that.
I want to propose a different hypothesis - men and women lie differently. Men are more likely to say they got no matches on a dating site and complain whereas women are more likely to keep quiet of they get few to no matches and exaggerate the number they do get.
Maybe men are more likely to blame the site or algorithm whereas women are more likely to blame themselves.
Maybe ratios of unsuccessful attempts are roughly evenly distributed and the difference can be explained solely by the fact that men must ask and make the first move in most cultures whereas women don't have to.
There's no Tinder-specific data, but it's been very well reported that the rate of matches between men and women on older dating sites was drastic, at least 1:2. So I don't think it's really a "lie" when men say they get no dates. I'm sure with the Tinder age that gap has only widened.
You also need to keep in mind that people complain in different places. You're likely not going to find a woman complaining about lack of matches on Hacker News, for example.
>Maybe ratios of unsuccessful attempts are roughly evenly distributed and the difference can be explained solely by the fact that men must ask and make the first move in most cultures whereas women don't have to.
It's possible, but I hear this is even a problem on sites where the woman is expected to make the first move. There's just some element of pickiness men lack compared to women. Be it due to quantity of choice or the bar to meet or whatnot.
I don't know about solid research. The last time I was looking up research about this was around 15 years ago, when I was actually planning to publish a paper about the finding above.
I had some data about a series of speed-dating events. Men gave double the amount of +'s (if both give a +, then it is a match) as compared to women, and the distributions were what I claim above.
Then there was the OkCupid article and some other research articles on dating sites (no apps at that time) and speed-dating events. I don't remember any research mentioning the different distributions although it was obvious from the graphs on the research papers that all of these followed the same distributions.
I think one of the reasons why there is so little research is that there is some taboo around this subject. For example the OkCupid article mentioned was pulled off. I don't know what the taboo is. Perhaps these results hint too much about differences between sexes or our evoluationary past?
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Based on my observations and conversations with girlfriends who use dating apps, women rate men based on height first, and everything else (including social status) second.
I got friend zoned more than I wish to admit. I started dating my now wife at 36 and I’m now 49.
I wasn’t unattractive - I was in peak physical shape by any metric as a part time fitness instructor, runner, muscular, 10% body fat. I was outgoing, decently successful financially etc.
But I am short.
It got better after my divorce At 32. Maturity - maybe? The nature of competition changed - probably? I was single, no kids, intelligent, still in above average shape. But I would have still failed miserably on dating apps I think. I met my now wife at work and the women I dated before then were mostly through teaching classes at gyms.
They were more willing to let their guard down with me as an instructor than just some random dude trying to hit on them at the gym
It's wild how people's real-world preferences can be completely different than their more superficial online ones (I'm not excluding myself from this, or is this aimed at any gender/group in general).
I'm average looking, she has a beautiful face and has been dancing since the age of 4. I'd have 0 chance with these kind of girls on dating apps. Absolutely 0.
Another good thing, that time social media have not yet screwed up people's self esteem and that helped a lot -> she has not overrated herself, I have not underrated myself.
We've been dating in person for a couple of billion years, we are hard-wired for that as body language tells a lot more in a fraction of a second than any made up profile text and over edited photos.
"do married people watch gen z dating and feel like they caught the last chopper out of Nam"
I think the hardest part about meeting someone is being in a situation to meet them. If your life is something like: sleep -> eat -> work -> repeat, it's very hard to meet someone.
Traveling makes it much easier on my opinion.
Most of the women I meet while traveling are also not single. They’re with their partners whereas many men will travel solo. Traveling solo isn’t a thing most women will do at all. Many men will.
At the same time I was using online dating site. It helped to accelerate the search and filter candidates. I could save time rejecting illiterate and/or less clever girls. Think about Google maps and real estate search - you don’t want a house on the highway.
I wouldn’t use that today. Full of fake profiles to lure paying customers and to keep them as long as they can. Free subscription is not existing anymore.
Setting aside that people have not been around for billions of years, if you go back in history without the tech and the mobility we have today "dating" is a complete different thing. You didn't have such a large pool of potential partners, where you were born played a huge role and you also didn't have as much freedom to do your own thing as you did today.
That fear of missing out could hit hard and lots of people get blindsided by it.
* There's no endless swiping. Users can only see a handleful of matches, each profile stays visible until users say yes/no on each profile, and the profiles are only topped up twice a day.
* All chatting is in-person, which is much more human than trying to text online. If users match, they can't chat. They both put down a deposit (about double the cost of a drink in a bar), pick a day & time they're avaliable, and Breeze automatically makes a reservation at a local bar (the first drink is free), or a park for a walk.
* Since dates require a deposit, and there's only so many days in the week(!), and users can't make new matches without first planning current matches, users don't get overwhelmed with connections - the existing contacts are prioritised.
* They're not owned by Match.com - which for me is a big plus! More disruption of their monopoly is a good thing.
> They're not owned by Match.com
Let me know in 5-10 years. I'd bet a substantial amount of money that eventually match.com will acquire them as well. Seems to be what ends up with all these dating services.
> Breeze is active in 15 cities: Alkmaar, Amsterdam, Breda, Delft, The Hague, Eindhoven, Groningen, Leiden, Maastricht, Nijmegen, Rotterdam, Tilburg, Utrecht, Wageningen, Zwolle. Beforehand you can choose where you want to date by going to the ‘Date preferences’ menu.
Many of us are not. Where can we go?
This is the question that really needs answering; else we will have no option but to continue to flood the same spaces that commitment-seekers use. The relative signal to noise ratio is hurting all of us.
> As Illich saw it, the rise of universalizing social technologies — that is, institutions managed by strangers — transgressed the traditional bounds of diverse vernacular communities and harnessed human endeavor to a trajectory of limitless growth, creating a “radical monopoly” over the ways and means of living that blunted any alternative to industrializing the desires of consumer society. In the process, persons and communities alike were deprived of the practical knowledge to shape tools according to their own defined needs and choices. Robbed of such competence, they became servants to the logic of those institutions instead of the other way around.
> His greatest insight was that when conviviality is swapped for productivity, monopolizing institutions that chart a singular path at mass scale become counterproductive to their original intent beyond a certain threshold.
> In his book “Energy and Equity” Illich illustrated this point in terms all could easily understand. As anyone who has driven on a freeway would agree, individual mobility turns into collective congestion when everyone has a car.
From https://www.noemamag.com/a-forgotten-prophet-whose-time-has-...
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Social cues will always be more valuable than personality, or kindness. For men, that is status and wealth and physical attractiveness. For women, it is beauty and age. Regardless if you like that or not, it may be what is missing in these utilities.
Further, I like how the Japanese make group dates. 3 boys and 3 girls go out on a date. Gokkon. Maybe this is something the West should consider. Safer, far more interesting, and allows people to broadly consider each other.
> In 1948, in what has been described as a "classic experiment",[10] psychologist Forer gave a psychology test – his so-called "Diagnostic Interest Blank" – to 39 of his psychology students, who were told that they would each receive a brief personality vignette based on their test results. One week later Forer gave each student a purportedly individualized vignette and asked each of them to rate it on how well it applied. In reality, each student received the same vignette, ... On average, the students rated its accuracy as 4.30 on a scale of 0 (very poor) to 5 (excellent). Only after the ratings were turned in, it was revealed that all students had received an identical vignette assembled by Forer from a newsstand astrology book.
Nobody writes on tinder that they're looking for a partner who will laugh every time they toot while watching TV.
We're all shopping for beautiful, successful people who don't fart.
I think it's because I can't flirt on cue. A dating app is a very clear social situation (like a singles night, or speed dating, ...) where both sides know what they are looking for (be it a relationship, sex, romance...). But you can't "fall with the door into the house" as they say here. You have to navigate certain rituals of dating, you have to impress but but be natural, show interest but not too much, etc..
Contrast with how it worked before dating apps, you met people from your extended social circle. You had some non-romantic interaction first. There is a certain amount of ambiguity in the beginning. You can flirt and express interest without being on a formal date, and then ask them out. It can also be stressful and anxiety-inducing of course, but IMO much less than on the bazaar that is a dating app.
I think dating would work much better as a side-function of a regular social network app, than as a dedicated app (and I know quite some friends who met over the internet but not via dating apps). But alas, there is no business model there...