I am more than a little discomfited by what the author seems to want here:
- “Reduce competition” by making online dating exclusive to those who can afford $100+/mo
- Obtain potential match’s sexual history prior to conversation to use as a proxy for promiscuity
- See all social media of potential matches
- Ratings hit for people who decide not to meet with you after chatting
- Interface for quantifying the multiple human beings you are talking to as “leads”, CRM style
- Automated reverse image search / face recognition for social media
- Random bonus: ability to filter Instagram messages by male/female??
Leaving aside the basic disrespect for the people on the other end of the chat here, who actually thinks women would participate on a platform where they are being cyberstalked by, and pressured into meeting with, desperate men who are tracking them in a spreadsheet?
> “Reduce competition” by making online dating exclusive to those who can afford $100+/mo
Suppose you wouldn't need to pay more than $100 if you'd find your match and leave platform. Serious goal = serious price. Marriage will cost much more anyway. Marriage with a wrong person will cost 10x again.
One can buy flowers, pay a cute kid to surprise a lady with them and point at you for a 100 bucks irl, and there's still enough for a drink or two. Hell, 100 bucks is enough for 1 more & refined attempt.
> Suppose you wouldn't need to pay more than $100 if you'd find your match and leave platform. Serious goal = serious price.
Go read the site and tell me again you still believe they have the “serious goal” of finding you a partner. The first thing I saw on the homepage was “experience hypergamy”. Then a bunch of entries on luxury, spending money, and how everyone on their website is somehow beautiful, successful, and intelligent. All the while using the same two actors for everything. In one of the fake exchanges, one of them (presumably the man, judging from the rest of the copy) invites the other to the Maldives, who immediately agrees.
They’re selling bargain bin fantasies. It’s drivel for men and women who think of themselves as the protagonists of 50 Shades type books.
I had the same thought but a split second later I remembered why I'm sitting on the couch with a screen in front of my eyes on a freaking Sunday morning.
There's probably something around two dozen better options where I could "speed date" (talk to/flirt with) a bunch of people who will share some space & time on a sunny Sunday morning.
And since I know people with money, I know that "being able to afford xyz" doesn't mean shit. Even fuck you money doesn't. Sure, some "chicks" roll with it, but I never heard or read words from one of those chicks (traveling, Dubai, family, friends of friends in theater) that resonated with me or made me think: "potentially a good enough Mom."
But then again, a 100 bucks isn't that much for a working, single dude.
The need to know so much about a person before a date is just another sign of subliminal depression, mania and obsession.
Maybe they should start putting dating profiles into captchas or something.
Is this a human? Do you like her looks? Do you like her last tweet? No? Based on our data points, you should. Access denied. Let's try again.
I recommend that "busy"-no-time-people find some way to prime their brain for exploration of humans and characters.
Instead of methodological fault finding you simply make it methodological traits-that-I-like finding.
Women absolutely would participate on a platform that is free to use and has a high enough barrier to entry that they can select out all the scrubs and they can freely get what they're after without all the mess. Have you seen online dating today? It's a dumpster for both men and women. Men get a better shot at what they want for a higher fee, women get access to men they'd actually want to meet with.
- men who can't afford that are already scratching the bottom of the barrel on dating sites and feeling like total losers because they have no prospects they're happy with
- most people would show you a picture of their butthole as long as they knew it would be kept confidential if that meant they'd have a better shot at finding what they're after
- information source aggregation, analogous to meeting people in more places than the singles bar
- wasting peoples time is an undesirable trait
- youre using an app to find sex and/or love, the interface changes nothing about this
- the last two are the same as number 2, just analytics for the algorithm.
When you're designing an algorithmic solution to mate pairing, you have to treat it like a meat market and gamify it for best results. And the current incumbents are absolutely doing that, it's just that their interests do not align with their users.
There are four times more men than women on the apps. The moment a women sorts by almost any criteria, 80% of the men will be filtered out purely because of that.
Online dating is just manifest of what happens in real life.
The top 20% most attractive men get 80% of the likes. Men of average attractiveness is out of luck on dating apps and they should not use dating apps.
Average men will swipe right on below average women (and above) - because it's easy and free to shoot your shot.
Therefore, even below average women will get seemingly unlimited likes.
These below average women will then pick and choose likes from the top 20%. These women will also wonder why they can't get these top 20% guys to commit to them or ask them out on a date. It's because these men have many options. These above average men will often only want something casual with below average women.
This is why women will say there are no "good" men on dating apps despite having thousands of likes. Eventually, these women will "settle" for someone less than what they hoped. In reality, these women are just settling for men of equal attractiveness to themselves.
>Imagine a CRM-like interface overlayed on Hinge, Tinder, and Bumble
This is "ideal" but in reality, women have no trouble getting likes on dating apps. Therefore, they won't put much effort into a dating app that creates too much friction. If you make your dating app use a CRM-like interface, you'll have a sausage fest. Hell, most women barely fill out their Hinge, Tinder, Bumble profiles. They do the absolute minimum and they still get thousands of likes. My female friend once experimented by putting up a picture of a shoe as her only dating profile. She still received many likes - some of them paid Super Likes.
> Online dating is just manifest of what happens in real life.
Absolutely not. If you're looking for a partner in real life, you're working with a small, finite "dating pool" and you calibrate your expectations reasonably. In your office, there might be twenty women you like, five of them may be interested in you. Both sides go through a straightforward process to make up their minds, and that's it. Stuff like the 80% / 20% theory ultimately doesn't matter, because in that small cohort with no gender imbalances, almost every person naturally finds a mate - just not always their first pick.
In contrast, in online dating, you don't have an estimate of the dating pool, and it appears essentially infinite. This encourages two behaviors. First, you're spending very little time on individual profiles, often just swiping left or right in a matter of seconds - so individual decisions are made with much less fidelity. Second, it makes it really hard for both sides to calibrate expectations and to stop looking when they find a match that's good enough. If your date seems to like model trains a bit too much or needs to lose 20 pounds, there is a temptation to keep looking instead of trying to work with that.
In the end, if you go through thousands of profiles, then (a) the results probably won't be any better than with a smaller pool (see: the secretary problem); (b) you will be a lot more miserable for much longer; and (c) the purported "80% / 20%" split actually starts to matter a lot.
If you go to the grocery store or any place with many people you could do the same thing as online.
What is interesting is the sociology of how guys will swipe right basically everyone online and basically no one in person even though the rejection % is going to be astronomically higher online. Rejection online even tends to be more rude. Getting rejected in person is almost always very polite.
What is even more interesting is how there hasn't been an overall adjustment in behavior when swiping right in person is so much more valuable because of the lack of people doing it.
Here's what will happen between men and women of different attractiveness levels (based on my experience and observations):
1. Man (same level of attractiveness) + woman (same level of attractiveness) = potential relationship
2. Man (higher) + woman (lower) = casual sex, situationships
3. Man (lower) + woman (higher) = friendzone, man does stuff for woman without sex
Of course there are outliers. But these are the most likely outcomes.
In physics, there is a concept of the lowest energy state. For example, a ball at the top of the hill wants to release all the energy and rest at the bottom of the hill.
The lowest energy state for a women is #3. The lowest energy state for a man is #2. In other words, a man naturally wants a ton of casual sex, if he can. A woman naturally wants a lot of attention, protection, resources, if she can.
A very attractive man will get a lot of #2. A very attractive woman will get a lot of #3.
On dating apps (and in real life), woman want either #1 or #3 in outcome. Men want either #1 or #2 in outcome.
Eventually, most will settle into #1 after learning where their personal attractiveness level is.
> My female friend once experimented by putting up a picture of a shoe as her only dating profile. She still received many likes - some of them paid Super Likes.
Well, obviously. Every guy wants a woman who's got some depth to her sole.
> Online dating is just manifest of what happens in real life.
Really, no. The paradox of choice is one of the biggest problems with online dating, one of the reasons why it never worked for me, and one of the reasons why it never worked for many people I know. It works for some, that's fine, and it's probably useful in semi-rural areas where meeting people is hard.
> The top 20% most attractive men get 80% of the likes
It's specifically this notion of "top 20%" that is flawed. While online dating is about searching for the "best match", real life is about committing to a person who you seem to get along with, embracing the unknown, and working on it together to make each other the best match for each other. If that work goes well, you end up being the best match for each other, and you don't regret not having swiped 500 more times in search of better.
I am not sure you're disagreeing with grandparent, it seems to me the what they're talking about is about getting that first date, while you're talking about establishing a relation past that.
> The top 20% most attractive men get 80% of the likes.
I have seen few experiments and it's even more unbalanced, in the order of top 2/3% getting 97% of the likes.
I don't think there is much to fix about online dating anyway personally, there are many different platforms with different focuses and it has worked for lots of people.
This is not the whole story. Even though everyone (both male and female) can identify the most attractive top 5% of the other sex, there is sufficient randomness in the preferences that matches are possible and sufficient (more work for males certainly). This absolutely makes sense biologically/evolutionary because everyone needs to find a mate somehow.
> This absolutely makes sense biologically/evolutionary because everyone needs to find a mate somehow.
Also because predicting the most favored traits one or two generations down the line is difficult. Biologically you want as much genetic diversity as possible to ensure at least some have the right traits to survive the next cataclysmic event.
As a contrived example, if every man only went for women with big breasts that would be a real issue of a couple generations later swimming speed became important for survival
> My female friend once experimented by putting up a picture of a shoe as her only dating profile.
this test probably wasn't valid due to the prevalence of foot fetishists. It might be hard to find an object that no one fetishists but one could pick something that isn't related to a common fetish.
Lots of men seem to be in denial about what makes those 20% of men more attractive. It's mostly that they put in some amount of effort. Most women are only giving likes to men who write interesting things in their profiles and have put effort into grooming themselves and presenting themselves well in their photographs - ie men who seem likely to reciprocate when a woman invests effort into a relationship.
Since likes are virtually limitless, it allows the possibility to deceive. Most women on these apps have experienced matching with someone and then realizing he hasn't even read her profile. Many men don't even seem ashamed of deceiving women like this. Women don't want to be used or cheated on, and so many men are signaling that they will do so by starting off with lying to multiple women that they are interested. So of course women know that most likes are actually lies, and so women are very carefully looking for signs that a man isn't playing the field. The men who succeed are those who have profiles that manage to convince women that they will only express interest when it is honest and genuine.
> Lots of men seem to be in denial about what makes those 20% of men more attractive. It's mostly that they put in some amount of effort. Most women are only giving likes to men who write interesting things in their profiles and have put effort into grooming themselves and presenting themselves well in their photographs - ie men who seem likely to reciprocate when a woman invests effort into a relationship.
It is almost impossible to fake your personality. The moment you meet person IRL it will become obvious that the fake Mr. Interesting life was created just to get chicks online. Those 20% are interesting, because they’re genuinely interesting IRL, not because “they’ve put effort into their online persona”.
> It's mostly that they put in some amount of effort.
I don't understand why so many people think that those who struggle to date must be not putting effort. Do you really think that in real life effort equals success?
> The top 20% most attractive men get 80% of the likes
I don't like how that (decade?-)old OkCupid's blog post's conclusions keeps being thrown out over and over like it is fact and had reliable methodology that makes those findings generalizable. (Assuming that I am right in identifying that statement's provenance.)
I don't think anyone should base their dating strategy, or what it means to date and be in the dating market for them over that conclusion, and should actually come to their own conclusions based on their own experience, even if it might be as dismal as that finding.
I think this clearly shows the shortcomings of modern scientific method: everyone knows X is true, but admitting this would have serious implications to how we've organized the society, so... we just don't.
>Online dating is just manifest of what happens in real life
idk. What you are describing here is a pretty specific dynamic created by a specific environment.
I mean.. some things will carry into other contexts but the "game theory" only plays out in an efficient, legible, high velocity context.
When I was in college, most casual hookups started drunkenly at dance bars. Looks played, for sure. But... The guys that shagged for medals were generally the most outgoing guys... the ones that made the most moves.
I might have tried hitting on a random girl once or twice per year. My housemate tried 10 times per week... or more.
Being a man in 2024 is a rather pathetic experience honestly. You constantly feel like a beggar in the dating market. How can you build self-esteem with that? No wonder so many men simply check out.
There is no "dating market".
Homo sapiens is a monogamous and patriarchal species.
We have the technology to ignore this fact now, but any such attempt is fundamentally working against human biology.
20% of the men are not dating 80% of the women. If you honestly believe this nonsense, you need to stop watching Manosphere videos on the internet and go find a local community in real life.
You cannot "fix it". You either do well or don't on such a platform. It's like being a terrible dancer, and going to a dance party expecting to pick up girls. You won't make a good impression because you don't "vibe" in that environment.
If you try to level the playing field, women have no reason to comply. They will find another dating app, to use.
> Seeking is one of the only sites to do this right. They claim a ratio of 4 women per 1 man, and they get this by charging men $109/month.
Great. Now you pay a $1200/year to be taken for a ride by gold diggers.
----------------
Online dating is a laughably bad proposition, unless you have just the right characteristics to do well on there: being tall and handsome, and having pictures that show off your privileged life, and all that of course in comparison to your peers.
As hard as it is to initiate conversation offline, especially with the norms of today, it's still much easier for me to, compared to getting a match and then somehow managing to convert that into a date.
EDIT:
I'd like to add this analogy. Online dating is like job searching by spamming your resume on LinkedIn. I don't even have a LinkedIn...
> You cannot "fix it". You either do well or don't on such a platform.
Give me a reasonable person, and I will make sure they'll do much better. I've done it for myself. You need to have a hacker mindset when it comes to online dating. Almost no one does. I've done it for my friends as well.
I can believe that if you craft the profile to the point where it's basically a bunch of lies, you can do well. I don't see the point of going through that much effort, however. Because, (and this is maybe because I'm long term minded), your lies will all unravel when you actually meet the person and start a relationship with them.
Even then. I still think you would do sub optimally compared to real life. Why would I ever line myself up against a bunch of other men and let women choose the best? That only works well for you if you're naturally popular...
I've had reasonable success with dating apps, meeting both my girlfriend and my previous one through Bumble. I'm likely part of the so-called "lucky 20%" of men with most matches. While this may sound like I'm bragging (I am), I've also seen the other side of Bumble when my female friends allowed me a peek, and it's eye-opening. The majority of men are simply terrible at marketing themselves.
Most men fundamentally misunderstand women's incentives. They present what they think women will find attractive, but from a male perspective, which often misses the mark entirely. I could elaborate for hours on the issues I see in these profiles. Now, whenever I hear a guy claim "dating apps suck, they're a scam," I don't entirely disagree — dating apps are indeed flawed — but I'm immediately curious to see his actual profile.
There's a significant missed opportunity in these apps: they could teach and guide men to build their best profiles, select and eliminate pictures, and suggest concrete improvements. It might sound extreme, but even basic A/B testing can dramatically increase your number of matches, the majority of men will just create their profile in 2 minutes, never touch it again, and wonder why they don't have dozens of girls throwing themselves at yet another guy taking a selfie in his bathroom.
> They present what they think women will find attractive, but from a male perspective, which often misses the mark entirely.
Are you going to share any advice or particulars? I see posts like yours and they are a dime a dozen, but could be summed up by "your profile is bad", but they never offer any concrete advice on improvement.
What are women looking for in these profiles that they can immediately use within less than 1 minute to determine whether it's a good match or not?
Try to look at your profile dispassionately. Would you be interested in meeting this person? Does it look like they’re a generally pleasant person to be around? Do they have hobbies? The questions you ask are really determined by what you’re ultimately looking for or find attractive, so my questions might not match yours.
> The majority of men are simply terrible at marketing themselves.
Yes and no. It's stupid hard for a guy to know what women are really thinking. I may have success and believe that I have what women want, but still could be very mistaken. I'm regularly surprised at what I see guys get away with once I believe I have it figured out. I'm always having to update my info.
This might be a bit messed up, but I sat with a friend who was talking to men on a dating app. She went through a high volume of guys, and we must have done this for over an hour. So many seemed to be almost illiterate with text or mind-numbingly boring. Many were jerks. Many had such focus on the rational element (talking about marriage, what they are looking for in a relationship) that they seemed to forget there's a human on the other end. Of at least a couple dozen guys, the two my friend ended up enjoying talking to (but still had other issues which turned into a dead-end) were those who came off as being the most normal of the group. Like, they won out by simply having a normal conversation as normal people. That sill gives me limited understanding of what my friend finds attractive, but it was eye-opening.
I don't think dating apps are going to get much better than they are. To me, trying to make a dating app that solves the problems this article and others talk about is a "cursed problem".
I heard an interview from a dating app founder a while ago where she had a quote that I'll try to paraphrase: "We're creating an (app|business) where only dissatisfied customers remain and satisfied customers never return."
Obviously dating apps exist and are successful and not everyone who's using a dating app is looking for a long term relationship, but the sentiment remains.
It could work tied to some other service although it’s not clear to me what that would be at the moment. Newspapers used to run personal ads, and Craigslist even ran them for free. It wouldn’t surprise me if they actually benefitted from people matching, because you’d be predisposed to buy or at least respond to classified ads for other purposes in the future.
Facebook tried and I think still has a dating feature. I’ve only ever encountered one person who was using it, and his match appeared to me and the guy’s friends to be a scammer who was likely to hit him up for money. If they had launched it before they were so widely distrusted and lost the young audience, it might have worked, and they obviously don’t need it to be profitable on its own, just to give you another incentive to visit Facebook and see ads.
Yelp, Foursquare, or last.fm probably could have offered an opt-in dating feature a decade ago and done well (by the metrics of the day). Letterboxd or a Goodreads-style service could try it, but it seems more risky: I could see people no longer using the service for its original purpose once they matched, because it would feel like updating your dating profile while in a relationship.
If you were running a dating app in a more traditional society the obvious solution would be to charge a substantial fee at the wedding if both newly weds were members of the app say in the past 5 years.
How you would achieve a similar pricing structure in our society I have no idea.
>Online Dating. Is anyone having a good experience with this?
>Third, make the app look like a CRM.
>Now you are on to the qualify leads step. If you aren’t agreeing on a time to meet in the first ten messages, this is a dead lead.
What an incredibly ironic piece. Somehow I don't think any technical solution proposed here is going to improve online dating for people who think like this.
I'm of average attractiveness, at best, and had no issue finding genuine matches that led to relationships, the last of which became my wife and love of my life.
Never was there any analytics or numbers game required. I would go so far as to say that if you're matching with so many people without success that you need a spreadsheet, then the problem is internal and no technical solution will help you (which is also how I feel about the author of the linked deranged rant).
> Charge men money per month. Only men. Every club promoter understands this. You don’t want your club to be a sausage fest, similarly, you don’t want your dating app to be a sausage fest.
Isn't this already just the norm in a lot of apps? When your first point seems to be a thing tat this level that people already ambiently know about I'm going to have a hard time imagining that you have done a lot of research into the space.
----
Four points points from reading it:
- Coffee Meets Bagel does one of the best things IMO: only showing a limited number of profiles a day. Forces people into a bit more of a "speed dating" mindset rather than an "endless scrolling" mindset. Good for serious people.
- Pairs, a Japanese app, does have a pretty "CRM" vibe, with a lot of filters and a whole list view. Kinda neat, and again a thing with some serious people
- Somebody on twitter said it best: online dating in its current form is so much worse than mixers because in it the most popular people can talk to way more people. At least at a mixer popular people pair off and then other people talk to other people[0]
- And of course, just like meeting people at parties, online dating is its own vibe. It's not _as_ limiting as mixer/club vibes in some sense if you can find the right app with the right kind of people matching your mindset, but it's easy to forget that a loooooot of people are still meeting outside of that space, despite what online people say.
[0] Can no longer find the original tweet, but it was @Ugarles, included the fun bit about how he met his wife at a party, and much later on in the relationship they realized they had matched online and she had decided against it.
Readit News
- “Reduce competition” by making online dating exclusive to those who can afford $100+/mo
- Obtain potential match’s sexual history prior to conversation to use as a proxy for promiscuity
- See all social media of potential matches
- Ratings hit for people who decide not to meet with you after chatting
- Interface for quantifying the multiple human beings you are talking to as “leads”, CRM style
- Automated reverse image search / face recognition for social media
- Random bonus: ability to filter Instagram messages by male/female??
Leaving aside the basic disrespect for the people on the other end of the chat here, who actually thinks women would participate on a platform where they are being cyberstalked by, and pressured into meeting with, desperate men who are tracking them in a spreadsheet?
Suppose you wouldn't need to pay more than $100 if you'd find your match and leave platform. Serious goal = serious price. Marriage will cost much more anyway. Marriage with a wrong person will cost 10x again.
Go read the site and tell me again you still believe they have the “serious goal” of finding you a partner. The first thing I saw on the homepage was “experience hypergamy”. Then a bunch of entries on luxury, spending money, and how everyone on their website is somehow beautiful, successful, and intelligent. All the while using the same two actors for everything. In one of the fake exchanges, one of them (presumably the man, judging from the rest of the copy) invites the other to the Maldives, who immediately agrees.
They’re selling bargain bin fantasies. It’s drivel for men and women who think of themselves as the protagonists of 50 Shades type books.
There's probably something around two dozen better options where I could "speed date" (talk to/flirt with) a bunch of people who will share some space & time on a sunny Sunday morning.
And since I know people with money, I know that "being able to afford xyz" doesn't mean shit. Even fuck you money doesn't. Sure, some "chicks" roll with it, but I never heard or read words from one of those chicks (traveling, Dubai, family, friends of friends in theater) that resonated with me or made me think: "potentially a good enough Mom."
But then again, a 100 bucks isn't that much for a working, single dude.
The need to know so much about a person before a date is just another sign of subliminal depression, mania and obsession.
Maybe they should start putting dating profiles into captchas or something.
Is this a human? Do you like her looks? Do you like her last tweet? No? Based on our data points, you should. Access denied. Let's try again.
I recommend that "busy"-no-time-people find some way to prime their brain for exploration of humans and characters.
Instead of methodological fault finding you simply make it methodological traits-that-I-like finding.
How does it work? How does _she_ work?
That's an interesting pivot.
With this mindset, how do you distinguish settling from a reasonable compromise?
It's not about "rich people must be good" but rather "most poor people are bad"
- men who can't afford that are already scratching the bottom of the barrel on dating sites and feeling like total losers because they have no prospects they're happy with
- most people would show you a picture of their butthole as long as they knew it would be kept confidential if that meant they'd have a better shot at finding what they're after
- information source aggregation, analogous to meeting people in more places than the singles bar
- wasting peoples time is an undesirable trait
- youre using an app to find sex and/or love, the interface changes nothing about this
- the last two are the same as number 2, just analytics for the algorithm.
When you're designing an algorithmic solution to mate pairing, you have to treat it like a meat market and gamify it for best results. And the current incumbents are absolutely doing that, it's just that their interests do not align with their users.
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The top 20% most attractive men get 80% of the likes. Men of average attractiveness is out of luck on dating apps and they should not use dating apps.
Average men will swipe right on below average women (and above) - because it's easy and free to shoot your shot.
Therefore, even below average women will get seemingly unlimited likes.
These below average women will then pick and choose likes from the top 20%. These women will also wonder why they can't get these top 20% guys to commit to them or ask them out on a date. It's because these men have many options. These above average men will often only want something casual with below average women.
This is why women will say there are no "good" men on dating apps despite having thousands of likes. Eventually, these women will "settle" for someone less than what they hoped. In reality, these women are just settling for men of equal attractiveness to themselves.
>Imagine a CRM-like interface overlayed on Hinge, Tinder, and Bumble
This is "ideal" but in reality, women have no trouble getting likes on dating apps. Therefore, they won't put much effort into a dating app that creates too much friction. If you make your dating app use a CRM-like interface, you'll have a sausage fest. Hell, most women barely fill out their Hinge, Tinder, Bumble profiles. They do the absolute minimum and they still get thousands of likes. My female friend once experimented by putting up a picture of a shoe as her only dating profile. She still received many likes - some of them paid Super Likes.
Absolutely not. If you're looking for a partner in real life, you're working with a small, finite "dating pool" and you calibrate your expectations reasonably. In your office, there might be twenty women you like, five of them may be interested in you. Both sides go through a straightforward process to make up their minds, and that's it. Stuff like the 80% / 20% theory ultimately doesn't matter, because in that small cohort with no gender imbalances, almost every person naturally finds a mate - just not always their first pick.
In contrast, in online dating, you don't have an estimate of the dating pool, and it appears essentially infinite. This encourages two behaviors. First, you're spending very little time on individual profiles, often just swiping left or right in a matter of seconds - so individual decisions are made with much less fidelity. Second, it makes it really hard for both sides to calibrate expectations and to stop looking when they find a match that's good enough. If your date seems to like model trains a bit too much or needs to lose 20 pounds, there is a temptation to keep looking instead of trying to work with that.
In the end, if you go through thousands of profiles, then (a) the results probably won't be any better than with a smaller pool (see: the secretary problem); (b) you will be a lot more miserable for much longer; and (c) the purported "80% / 20%" split actually starts to matter a lot.
Look at Mr. Popularity here.
If you go to the grocery store or any place with many people you could do the same thing as online.
What is interesting is the sociology of how guys will swipe right basically everyone online and basically no one in person even though the rejection % is going to be astronomically higher online. Rejection online even tends to be more rude. Getting rejected in person is almost always very polite.
What is even more interesting is how there hasn't been an overall adjustment in behavior when swiping right in person is so much more valuable because of the lack of people doing it.
Whereas on dating apps people will be speaking to many others and so it's much harder to find a long-term relationship.
I think a better solution would be letting people freely talk to eachother by communities / interests. But that is harder to monetise.
And you still have the fundamental issue that there are far more men than women.
I did find that it was a bit better in several aspects.
Here's what will happen between men and women of different attractiveness levels (based on my experience and observations):
1. Man (same level of attractiveness) + woman (same level of attractiveness) = potential relationship
2. Man (higher) + woman (lower) = casual sex, situationships
3. Man (lower) + woman (higher) = friendzone, man does stuff for woman without sex
Of course there are outliers. But these are the most likely outcomes.
In physics, there is a concept of the lowest energy state. For example, a ball at the top of the hill wants to release all the energy and rest at the bottom of the hill.
The lowest energy state for a women is #3. The lowest energy state for a man is #2. In other words, a man naturally wants a ton of casual sex, if he can. A woman naturally wants a lot of attention, protection, resources, if she can.
A very attractive man will get a lot of #2. A very attractive woman will get a lot of #3.
On dating apps (and in real life), woman want either #1 or #3 in outcome. Men want either #1 or #2 in outcome.
Eventually, most will settle into #1 after learning where their personal attractiveness level is.
Well, obviously. Every guy wants a woman who's got some depth to her sole.
Really, no. The paradox of choice is one of the biggest problems with online dating, one of the reasons why it never worked for me, and one of the reasons why it never worked for many people I know. It works for some, that's fine, and it's probably useful in semi-rural areas where meeting people is hard.
> The top 20% most attractive men get 80% of the likes
It's specifically this notion of "top 20%" that is flawed. While online dating is about searching for the "best match", real life is about committing to a person who you seem to get along with, embracing the unknown, and working on it together to make each other the best match for each other. If that work goes well, you end up being the best match for each other, and you don't regret not having swiped 500 more times in search of better.
I am not sure you're disagreeing with grandparent, it seems to me the what they're talking about is about getting that first date, while you're talking about establishing a relation past that.
I have seen few experiments and it's even more unbalanced, in the order of top 2/3% getting 97% of the likes.
I don't think there is much to fix about online dating anyway personally, there are many different platforms with different focuses and it has worked for lots of people.
Also because predicting the most favored traits one or two generations down the line is difficult. Biologically you want as much genetic diversity as possible to ensure at least some have the right traits to survive the next cataclysmic event.
As a contrived example, if every man only went for women with big breasts that would be a real issue of a couple generations later swimming speed became important for survival
I don’t see this as evolutionary necessity.
Theoretically alpha male could father all the children.
Online dating makes sense, logically. Absolutely nothing against it - I met my wife on FB of all places.
But in my dating days, I'd met more than one person who was using an app and ghosted a date because I asked them to do something, in person.
If you're tired of getting swiped the wrong way, just do it the old fashioned way.
this test probably wasn't valid due to the prevalence of foot fetishists. It might be hard to find an object that no one fetishists but one could pick something that isn't related to a common fetish.
Since likes are virtually limitless, it allows the possibility to deceive. Most women on these apps have experienced matching with someone and then realizing he hasn't even read her profile. Many men don't even seem ashamed of deceiving women like this. Women don't want to be used or cheated on, and so many men are signaling that they will do so by starting off with lying to multiple women that they are interested. So of course women know that most likes are actually lies, and so women are very carefully looking for signs that a man isn't playing the field. The men who succeed are those who have profiles that manage to convince women that they will only express interest when it is honest and genuine.
It is almost impossible to fake your personality. The moment you meet person IRL it will become obvious that the fake Mr. Interesting life was created just to get chicks online. Those 20% are interesting, because they’re genuinely interesting IRL, not because “they’ve put effort into their online persona”.
I don't understand why so many people think that those who struggle to date must be not putting effort. Do you really think that in real life effort equals success?
I don't like how that (decade?-)old OkCupid's blog post's conclusions keeps being thrown out over and over like it is fact and had reliable methodology that makes those findings generalizable. (Assuming that I am right in identifying that statement's provenance.)
I don't think anyone should base their dating strategy, or what it means to date and be in the dating market for them over that conclusion, and should actually come to their own conclusions based on their own experience, even if it might be as dismal as that finding.
idk. What you are describing here is a pretty specific dynamic created by a specific environment.
I mean.. some things will carry into other contexts but the "game theory" only plays out in an efficient, legible, high velocity context.
When I was in college, most casual hookups started drunkenly at dance bars. Looks played, for sure. But... The guys that shagged for medals were generally the most outgoing guys... the ones that made the most moves.
I might have tried hitting on a random girl once or twice per year. My housemate tried 10 times per week... or more.
If you try to level the playing field, women have no reason to comply. They will find another dating app, to use.
> Seeking is one of the only sites to do this right. They claim a ratio of 4 women per 1 man, and they get this by charging men $109/month.
Great. Now you pay a $1200/year to be taken for a ride by gold diggers.
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Online dating is a laughably bad proposition, unless you have just the right characteristics to do well on there: being tall and handsome, and having pictures that show off your privileged life, and all that of course in comparison to your peers.
As hard as it is to initiate conversation offline, especially with the norms of today, it's still much easier for me to, compared to getting a match and then somehow managing to convert that into a date.
EDIT: I'd like to add this analogy. Online dating is like job searching by spamming your resume on LinkedIn. I don't even have a LinkedIn...
Give me a reasonable person, and I will make sure they'll do much better. I've done it for myself. You need to have a hacker mindset when it comes to online dating. Almost no one does. I've done it for my friends as well.
Even then. I still think you would do sub optimally compared to real life. Why would I ever line myself up against a bunch of other men and let women choose the best? That only works well for you if you're naturally popular...
Right on. This dude gets it. You should hold workshops on that and a series of TED talks.
Most men fundamentally misunderstand women's incentives. They present what they think women will find attractive, but from a male perspective, which often misses the mark entirely. I could elaborate for hours on the issues I see in these profiles. Now, whenever I hear a guy claim "dating apps suck, they're a scam," I don't entirely disagree — dating apps are indeed flawed — but I'm immediately curious to see his actual profile.
There's a significant missed opportunity in these apps: they could teach and guide men to build their best profiles, select and eliminate pictures, and suggest concrete improvements. It might sound extreme, but even basic A/B testing can dramatically increase your number of matches, the majority of men will just create their profile in 2 minutes, never touch it again, and wonder why they don't have dozens of girls throwing themselves at yet another guy taking a selfie in his bathroom.
Are you going to share any advice or particulars? I see posts like yours and they are a dime a dozen, but could be summed up by "your profile is bad", but they never offer any concrete advice on improvement.
What are women looking for in these profiles that they can immediately use within less than 1 minute to determine whether it's a good match or not?
Yes and no. It's stupid hard for a guy to know what women are really thinking. I may have success and believe that I have what women want, but still could be very mistaken. I'm regularly surprised at what I see guys get away with once I believe I have it figured out. I'm always having to update my info.
This might be a bit messed up, but I sat with a friend who was talking to men on a dating app. She went through a high volume of guys, and we must have done this for over an hour. So many seemed to be almost illiterate with text or mind-numbingly boring. Many were jerks. Many had such focus on the rational element (talking about marriage, what they are looking for in a relationship) that they seemed to forget there's a human on the other end. Of at least a couple dozen guys, the two my friend ended up enjoying talking to (but still had other issues which turned into a dead-end) were those who came off as being the most normal of the group. Like, they won out by simply having a normal conversation as normal people. That sill gives me limited understanding of what my friend finds attractive, but it was eye-opening.
I heard an interview from a dating app founder a while ago where she had a quote that I'll try to paraphrase: "We're creating an (app|business) where only dissatisfied customers remain and satisfied customers never return."
Obviously dating apps exist and are successful and not everyone who's using a dating app is looking for a long term relationship, but the sentiment remains.
Facebook tried and I think still has a dating feature. I’ve only ever encountered one person who was using it, and his match appeared to me and the guy’s friends to be a scammer who was likely to hit him up for money. If they had launched it before they were so widely distrusted and lost the young audience, it might have worked, and they obviously don’t need it to be profitable on its own, just to give you another incentive to visit Facebook and see ads.
Yelp, Foursquare, or last.fm probably could have offered an opt-in dating feature a decade ago and done well (by the metrics of the day). Letterboxd or a Goodreads-style service could try it, but it seems more risky: I could see people no longer using the service for its original purpose once they matched, because it would feel like updating your dating profile while in a relationship.
How you would achieve a similar pricing structure in our society I have no idea.
>Third, make the app look like a CRM.
>Now you are on to the qualify leads step. If you aren’t agreeing on a time to meet in the first ten messages, this is a dead lead.
What an incredibly ironic piece. Somehow I don't think any technical solution proposed here is going to improve online dating for people who think like this.
As a man in particular it's a numbers game and a huge time sink. Making it a CRM is just layering tools on top to make the process more efficient.
I've heard even women do this, some have a spreadsheet with criteria they will validate during the first date.
I'm of average attractiveness, at best, and had no issue finding genuine matches that led to relationships, the last of which became my wife and love of my life.
Never was there any analytics or numbers game required. I would go so far as to say that if you're matching with so many people without success that you need a spreadsheet, then the problem is internal and no technical solution will help you (which is also how I feel about the author of the linked deranged rant).
Filter through:
* 50% bots running cryptocurrency scams = 50% remaining
* 50% OnlyFans / Instagram models seeking likes/subs = 25% remaining
* 50% inactive accounts = 12.5% remaining
* 20% looking for sugardaddies / prostitutes = 10% remaining
* 10% Men categorised incorrectly and blank accounts = 9% remaining
* 75% won't respond (busy with other people, etc.) = 3% remaining
* 60% other issues - smoking, already have children, complicated situations, etc. - 1% remaining
So after you spend days to go through about 100 accounts, you finally get to speak to a real person and be one of the 8 guys she's speaking to.
Isn't this already just the norm in a lot of apps? When your first point seems to be a thing tat this level that people already ambiently know about I'm going to have a hard time imagining that you have done a lot of research into the space.
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Four points points from reading it:
- Coffee Meets Bagel does one of the best things IMO: only showing a limited number of profiles a day. Forces people into a bit more of a "speed dating" mindset rather than an "endless scrolling" mindset. Good for serious people.
- Pairs, a Japanese app, does have a pretty "CRM" vibe, with a lot of filters and a whole list view. Kinda neat, and again a thing with some serious people
- Somebody on twitter said it best: online dating in its current form is so much worse than mixers because in it the most popular people can talk to way more people. At least at a mixer popular people pair off and then other people talk to other people[0]
- And of course, just like meeting people at parties, online dating is its own vibe. It's not _as_ limiting as mixer/club vibes in some sense if you can find the right app with the right kind of people matching your mindset, but it's easy to forget that a loooooot of people are still meeting outside of that space, despite what online people say.
[0] Can no longer find the original tweet, but it was @Ugarles, included the fun bit about how he met his wife at a party, and much later on in the relationship they realized they had matched online and she had decided against it.