[HN Gopher] Never pay for online dating (2010)
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Never pay for online dating (2010)
Author : skanderbm
Score : 303 points
Date : 2022-10-11 14:43 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (web.archive.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (web.archive.org)
| geraldwhen wrote:
| I paid for OkCupid to get advanced filters to find my wife,
| shortly after this article was written.
|
| I paid for a single month of premium back in the day. So this
| article is odd.
| aliqot wrote:
| n=1
| xiphias2 wrote:
| n > 0 (never)
| [deleted]
| bryan0 wrote:
| Yup I paid for online dating around when this article was
| written and it was one of the best decisions of my life!
| soylentcola wrote:
| I also used OkC and some others around that time period, and
| they struck me as both less expensive and a little less
| cynically "pay to win" (to use the gaming terminology). I
| recall it was more like paying $5-8 for a month's worth of
| better filters and being able to see who checked out your
| profile - something fairly useful since it may show you
| someone who's already at least somewhat interested and hadn't
| already come across your radar.
|
| When I did online dating again a year or so ago, it seemed
| both more expensive and more blatantly creepy (pay to "like"
| the most in-demand people! yech...)
|
| The one nice thing was realizing quickly that what they were
| charging for in 2021 wasn't something I wanted to pay for, so
| I could safely skip it. Even without paying a dime, I found
| Hinge to be a useful way to meet people and go on dates that
| were largely fun and a mostly decent experience. Currently
| involved with someone I met there a year ago and haven't used
| the apps since then.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| I am happy for you but I think if you met your wife in a car
| crash (I knew a person this happened to for real!) I don't
| think you would say a great way to meet people is car
| crashes. Also, maybe OKC was better than some.
|
| I think dating apps would be creepy, but to be fair I am a
| person who married before they were that popular. I have a
| college age son who is in a committed relationship with
| someone he met through friends so I believe IRL meeting is
| still possible. The important thing is to build strong
| relationships so do what works for you.
| 300bps wrote:
| You have a great response to the headline!
|
| The article though gives details of what they see as the
| problem: forcing people to pay to allow communicating means
| that well over 90% of profiles on their systems are just filler
| and unable to communicate with you.
| geraldwhen wrote:
| And had those filler profiles not existed maybe I wouldn't
| have joined. But at least when I paid, specifically for
| OkCupid, the premium filters let me find real people.
| bombcar wrote:
| I like to read this that you were already married when you
| found your wife, and were trying to see what you needed to do
| to get OkCupid to recommend her.
| elzbardico wrote:
| Apps like Tinder and Happn kind of escaped this by being places
| more suited to hookups and One Night Stands than the place
| someone goes to find a long-term partner.
|
| By focusing on quick relationships too, both Tinder and Happn can
| be more liberal about message limits for free tier users, at the
| same time making sure that man derive value from a paid
| subscription.
| [deleted]
| phpthrowaway99 wrote:
| I once googled the screen name of a Plenty of Fish date I had
| setup. Exact match comes up on a 'weird' forum, with city and
| state matching in the info under the username.
|
| One fake account later (required to view attachments), I saw
| pictures of her dog doing her in... Uh... various ways.
|
| I stopped online dating for like 5 years after that.
| danjoredd wrote:
| That's a nightmare. She should be sent to prison for that, tbh.
|
| Not nearly as extreme, but last time I tried Online dating I
| messaged someone and found out she was only looking for someone
| to get her pregnant and be a father. Straight up, first thing,
| not interested in a first date unless I was interested in
| getting her pregnant.
|
| I'm Christian so sex outside of marriage is a huge no-no for me
| anyway, so unmatching was not a hard decision even though she
| was attractive.
| phpthrowaway99 wrote:
| Be VERY glad she was upfront about it. That is a decently
| common tactic for women over 25.
|
| My last relationship was practically begging to get her
| pregnant from the first 6 months. Eventually it didn't work
| out after 2 years.
|
| Next guy met her, and got her pregnant within 2-3 months.
| Married 3 months later. He's set to inherit an 800 acre ranch
| on the coast of California very soon. He has no idea who he
| just married. The girl was a nightmare. I'm 38 and have
| serially dated for 20+ years, and I've never met a girl so
| mean and cold and unpleasant. I'm not sure if he's seen that
| side yet, and he's about to be a dad next month.
| svnt wrote:
| I think the unstated issue is that there are predominantly hook-
| up apps that people also use to find life partners because good
| alternatives don't exist.
|
| With the assimilation of the ecosystem into Match some sort of
| alignment was inevitable, and a hook-up service is a 'good' SaaS
| service by classic metrics, while a matchmaking service does not
| fit the model well (at least yet).
| salzig wrote:
| This reminded me about a fun talk done by Amy Webb - how she
| played with dating.
|
| Just posted it for everyone to - enjoy
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dt3LAaq8XKY - discuss
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33164287
| jjulius wrote:
| >As a founder of OkCupid I'm of course motivated to point out our
| competitors' flaws. So take what I have to say today with a grain
| of salt.
|
| I really appreciate this kind of self-awareness, and find it
| incredibly lacking from a lot of things that founders, CEOs, et.
| al. post, whether it's on a blog, an HN comment or on Twitter.
| evouga wrote:
| I used to be play Magic the Gathering with Christian back in
| NYC. He was a smart, down-to-earth guy. I didn't realize he was
| an OkCupid cofounder until several months after meeting him.
|
| He got canceled a few years ago for saying off-color things at
| an academic conference... hope he's doing OK these days.
| haskellandchill wrote:
| Actually with Seeking paying works out to filter low income men.
| You can pay $100-300 a month and the quality and responsiveness
| of women there is superior to any other platform right now.
| [deleted]
| robcohen wrote:
| If you take the view that users should be paid for viewing ads
| via microtransactions (like through a browser like Brave), then
| isn't it reasonable to expect the same rewards for users using
| dating apps? Wouldn't it make sense to pay the user instead of
| the service for their time and attention?
|
| It seems to me that microtransactions and dating apps are a
| perfect match, and I wonder why no one has done this yet? Is it
| because it's too closely associated with ideas of prostitution?
| It's only a stone's throw from the concept of OnlyFans, but
| instead you pay for attention instead of exhibitionism. Why
| should Tinder/OkCupid get paid for "boosts" when you're really
| just buying the attention from your target demographic? Seems
| like crypto would fit nicely into this sector.
| codethief wrote:
| Interesting idea but already now people swipe purely out of
| boredom or, even worse, get addicted to swiping - what would
| that look like if they also got paid for swiping?
| robcohen wrote:
| Yes, this is an issue that needs to be addressed. On some
| level, people do get paid for seeing ads in the sense that
| the real content they want is being subsidized, so on some
| level, even if someone is "bullshit" swiping, they are still
| giving their time and attention so there is some benefit for
| the person be swiped in the aggregate.
|
| That said, I imagine the actual thing that would need to be
| paid for is someone's time, so posting a kind of smart
| contract crypto bond that someone gets for showing up in
| person to a coffee date or something like that. Yes it would
| still be abused, but there would be a equalibrium reached
| between price and time sacrificed. Maybe you make it so that
| you can only go on a certain number of coffee dates per week
| or something like that.
| pranit10 wrote:
| oof maybe they should have taken their own advice
| Dawnyhf5 wrote:
| metalliqaz wrote:
| so this begs the question... in 2022, are there any apps/sites
| actually worth using?
| par wrote:
| Amazing how, even 12 years later, this is even more true than it
| was back then.
| fifticon wrote:
| This is partly explained by match.com buying and removing
| competitors, to keep active dating sites in this pattern.
| aliqot wrote:
| OkCupid used to have great engineering blogs often with an
| embedded and nuanced social commentary regarding the haves vs
| have-nots when it comes to the dating world. I believe at one
| point they divided users, or rather let them self-classify as
| A-team and B-team. Some would never even pass each other in the
| hallway based on this score and designation.
| troupe wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand what you are saying about A/B or how
| hallways fit into online dating.
| k__ wrote:
| My girlfriend once got a message on OKCupid, that she was
| categorized into the group of especially popular people.
|
| I contacted the staff, but never found out what this meant in
| the end.
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| Was this a poly/open relationship? I've heard women in
| those arrangements are perceived as easy. Doesn't really
| make sense when you consider the fact they already have
| someone and aren't in any rush.
| harvey9 wrote:
| I take it to mean people so different in socio economic
| status that they would never be in the same building in real
| life.
| aliqot wrote:
| it was data that indicated to them that there were two
| groups, an attractive group and the remainder.
| tsumnia wrote:
| Their articles were really interesting too; its sad Match took
| all of them down. One of the ones I distinctly remember was
| about the right profile pictures. Its been years, but I clearly
| remember for men it was something along the lines of "full
| body, outdoor picture, while shirtless looking away from the
| camera"
| carabiner wrote:
| Bumble will tell you which of your photos caused the most
| right swipes. In my case it was EXACTLY that: photo of me
| from behind shirtless while rock climbing, muscles on
| display.
| jrgoff wrote:
| Photofeeler did a post about trying replicate some of this
| and apparently some of okcupid's results were probably pretty
| questionable: https://blog.photofeeler.com/okcupid-is-wrong-
| about-smiling-...
| leeroyjenkins11 wrote:
| I would say a study done in 2020 is obviously going to have
| different results than 2010. You have 10 years of
| difference and changes in how people interact online. You
| also have different apps that fill certain niches.
| Shirtless may work on some platforms and not others.
| Selection by women may have changed because there are so
| many options, there may be finer selection criteria they
| use now that wasn't as common in that era.
| tsumnia wrote:
| Nice! I hadn't read this counter argument. I would say I
| still think their articles gave an interesting look into
| how humans behaved online, however skewed it may be.
| Clickbait is well known now and I do recall they were one
| of the first to talk about the "MySpace angle" photos not
| being considered good (again, potentially skewed for
| views).
| coupdejarnac wrote:
| If someone reproduced what OKCupid was before the Match
| acquisition, that would disrupt the dating app market. Dating
| apps as a whole have been a race to the bottom thanks to Match.
| btbuildem wrote:
| I think onboarding users is the biggest problems. How does one
| approach that?
| coupdejarnac wrote:
| If I could have come up with a cheap solution, I would have
| done it already.
|
| It would probably be worth it to pay Kim Kardashian her $250k
| featured post fee to get a bunch of women to join. Something
| along those lines.
| teeray wrote:
| You, as a user of a dating app, are forever in a Nash Equilibrium
| with the dating app. When you find the love of your life, you
| delete the app forever. Therefore, everything the app does to
| help you find that person works directly against their own goals
| (user growth, "engagement". subscriptions).
| afarrell wrote:
| I've long had an idea for an app that helped you be a better
| boyfriend/husband by helping you plan dates and find good ideas
| for dates in your city like museums, great restaurants,
| concerts, etc.
| cupofpython wrote:
| only if they are the only dating app around. if not, then
| having a reputation for actually matching people well will
| bring more people to the app and generate more revenue than you
| would ever get from a small amount of desperate customers.
|
| Of course, matching people well is hard - so any model that
| isnt good at that will be better off trying to game their
| customers and brute force their marketing. (for example, if
| their entire model is based on superficial values like how well
| they can take a photo of themselves - it may not be good at
| actually matching people)
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > Of course, matching people well is hard
|
| I thought OKCupid did a great job. The second person I had a
| conversation with ended up becoming my wife.
|
| I really liked how OKCupid had a seemingly never-ending set
| of personality questions. You could answer none of them, or
| you could answer 100 of them, and the more you answered, the
| more confidence it had in its matching. You would even flag
| the importance of each question, so you can tell it if
| something is an absolute deal-breaker (like your desire to
| have kids or stay child-free), or if something is a mild
| preference, like hair color.
|
| > (for example, if their entire model is based on superficial
| values like how well they can take a photo of themselves - it
| may not be good at actually matching people)
|
| IMO, Tinder ruined online dating. AFAIK, it makes zero
| attempt at actually _matching_ people based on any metrics
| other than location and age.
|
| Actually, I take that back. Tinder didn't ruin online dating,
| shitty men that send unsolicited dick pics or go ape-shit
| when they get rejected did.
| hackermailman wrote:
| The questions were easily manipulated, so I would find
| someone I liked, changed all my answers so we would be
| either 96% match or lowest as possible because I would
| always get interest from them when they discovered who
| viewed them with the lowest score, usually they would send
| a message 'hey we are supposed to be enemies' which led to
| dates.
|
| They were community made questions so often very vague and
| not very reliable, another attempt would work if someone
| remade that feature with user voting maybe on best
| questions
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| This seems like it would be counterproductive.
|
| If you had a low-percentage match, then I wouldn't think
| it would lead to a successful relationship. Gaming the
| percentage doesn't seem like it would have a good overall
| outcome.
| Tangurena2 wrote:
| I found with OKCupid, that the women I scored the highest
| matches with (like 97 or above) had forgotten to check the
| "I don't want to see, nor be seen by, straights" checkbox.
| Two of my _ex_ es came out as gay and another 2 probably
| should have.
|
| > _shitty men that send unsolicited dick pics or go ape-
| shit when they get rejected did._
|
| I'm afraid that's so true.
| lukevp wrote:
| Early OKCupid was amazing, their matching algorithm was
| spot on. I had a similar experience, and matched with my
| wife there after only a handful of other dates. The
| craziest part- she had made a profile, and we'd matched,
| but she wasn't ready to date at the time and deleted her
| profile. A couple months later she remade it and we matched
| again! Neither of us realized we were the same people until
| after we had started dating and talked about previous
| messages we'd sent out. So their matching was definitely
| legitimate. We were a 92% match on OKCupid. It's 11 years
| later and we're still happy as 2 clams! OKCupid was the
| most meaningful website in my entire life, because it
| helped me find my lifelong partner, and I never paid them a
| cent.
| thehappypm wrote:
| McDonalds works against its interests by making its customers
| less hungry too.
| golergka wrote:
| > When you find the love of your life, you delete the app
| forever.
|
| That's true only for users who have this goal.
| yellow_lead wrote:
| Not if you're poly or something (just saying)
| wzdd wrote:
| > works directly against their own goals (user growth,
| "engagement". subscriptions).
|
| ... success stories, marriages per day due to the app (as per
| Match.com's advertising material in the article), word of mouth
| advertisement for the app to your friends...? Again, from the
| article, even in 2011 match.com was proudly reporting that its
| active user base changed out every six months. So the "dating
| apps don't want you to find someone perfect" narrative strikes
| me as a little simplistic.
|
| On the other hand, plenty of people use dating apps like Bumble
| and Tinder to find hook-ups, not the love of their life. These
| people will keep coming back to the app as a _result_ of being
| frequently successful.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > So the "dating apps don't want you to find someone perfect"
| narrative strikes me as a little simplistic.
|
| Read the article again; their explanation is that after 6
| months, people either butt out, or pair-off and butt out.
| luckylion wrote:
| > So the "dating apps don't want you to find someone perfect"
| narrative strikes me as a little simplistic.
|
| Tobacco companies are spending serious money to stop kids
| from smoking, because they really care about their health.
| rglullis wrote:
| Tinder and OkCupid are not in the "I want to find a partner for
| life" demographic, they are in the "we give you a constant
| stream of hookup connections" business.
| consp wrote:
| Surprisingly I thought the same though there is more than one
| person I know who is married to his Tinder date. Somehow it
| works out apperantly (this is still anecdotal).
| rglullis wrote:
| Don't tell anyone, I also met my wife on Tinder. But we are
| the exception, not the rule.
| rdtwo wrote:
| Isn't it the same company now
| rglullis wrote:
| You know how the big car companies have different brands
| (VW and Porsche, Ford and Jaguar, Toyota and Lexus), each
| for a specific market segment?
|
| Same thing.
| travisporter wrote:
| Isn't hinge addressing this
| ratww wrote:
| Is it?
|
| To a complete outsider it feels as if Hinge is just becoming
| the new Tinder. Anecdotal of course (mostly from women
| friends), but partly supported by the growth of Hinge lately.
|
| People looking for relationships don't want to be matched
| with people only looking for hookups, and people looking for
| hookups don't want to part of a club that accepts them. Apps
| have the incentive to make money so they don't really do
| anything.
| soared wrote:
| From my friend circle hinge is completely different than
| tinder/etc and built for the purpose of finding long term
| matches. Most of my friends, along with myself, found their
| SO on hinge.
| [deleted]
| chrisseaton wrote:
| How are they doing it? Is it a poly app?
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Nah, that's Open.
| changoplatanero wrote:
| can you explain more?
| lake_vincent wrote:
| Their motto is that their app is "meant to be deleted."
| They don't want to you stay on it, but they DO want you to
| tell all your single friends about it.
|
| Hinge's free tier is absolutely excellent and I have gotten
| multiple dates, as well as a girlfriend, without paying a
| cent.
|
| What's the catch, you may ask? As with most dating apps,
| let's just say that if you don't have a "highly
| competitive" profile, you will struggle if you don't pay
| for high-volume swiping.
| Bakary wrote:
| AFAIK from past discussions on here, the Hinge model is
| to make it harder with people with a low Elo on the app,
| and to provide them with more fine-grained options to pay
| to boost their chances ("roses" etc.)
|
| If you have a higher than average Elo, it will seem like
| having a free lunch. But that's because it's fueled by
| someone else's desperation at being caught in low Elo
| feedback loop early.
|
| You then have high Elos who cycle through the app quickly
| and don't pay, and the rest who cycle more slowly and are
| more likely to pay during their time there.
| globular-toast wrote:
| How do they make it harder for people with low Elo?
| Surely it being harder for low Elos is the natural way of
| things? They are just cashing in on the fact that low
| Elos (which are disproportionately male, of course) will
| get desperate and more likely to try the "premium"
| options.
| ratww wrote:
| One of the main criticisms I see is that low-Elo people
| _also_ get show mainly high-Elo people. So there 's much
| less chance for two low-Elo people matching with each
| other, the algorithm works against it.
|
| Since you have a limited number of "likes" per day, you
| have to actively "say no" to people that's attractive to
| you.
| Bakary wrote:
| Attractive people will have options, so the app has to
| show them other attractive people to retain them. That's
| why there is a containment system where if your Elo drops
| low enough you get shown other low-Elo accounts. You also
| need attractive people to retain the low-Elo accounts
| (Elo being a relative measure to the userbase, by
| definition) so you can seed them with attractive people
| once in a while but generally keep them confronted to
| low-Elos. Ideally, you want to create an impression of
| potential at first, which will get the user to spend in
| the face of loss aversion as the Elo bucketing sets in.
|
| That said, this is not the only thing happening, and the
| platform apparently also does the opposite, or does
| batches (exclusively low-Elo followed by exclusively
| high-Elo for a while). At the end of the day, it's an ML
| blackbox.
| lake_vincent wrote:
| Yeah, that sounds about right. I am actually single again
| (ha...), so the quality of the match is not gonna be as
| deep as a compatability based algo like OKC - Hinge
| profiles are relatively shallow, and hard to get right.
| It's much better for getting laid, not finding the love
| of your life.
|
| I don't plan on returning to any apps, because the whole
| experience feels dehumanizing, and I'm looking for
| something enduring now.
| ratww wrote:
| Isn't that exactly how Tinder also works, or at least
| used to work? I remember Tinder being heavily criticised
| for using Elo ranking.
| Bakary wrote:
| We'd have to know the algorithm but it's all about the
| details of how that Elo is implemented, which traits are
| selected for in which apps, the monetization options etc.
| soylentcola wrote:
| I assume "Elo" is their hotness credit score system? I
| doubt I had a high one - kinda nerdy looking mid 40's
| dude, not particularly tall or athletic-looking, not
| particularly wealthy, no constant stream of matches, etc.
|
| I found the people in the "rose list" to just look like
| Instagram profiles with fairly vanilla profiles and
| standard TV/socmed good looks, whereas I usually fit
| better with other nerdy weirdos of average/decent looks.
| It's oversimplification, but that's about as good as I
| can get as a generalization.
|
| I still spent some weekends taking care of things at home
| and plenty of others with dates over the course of
| several months. I met a few lovely people who I'd totally
| say hi and chat with if I ran into them out and about
| today. I went out a few times with one or two that
| eventually fizzled. And I went out with one that I
| wouldn't have met otherwise (lives 45min away) and am
| still involved with a year later.
|
| I never paid for it (Hinge) and just treated it as a way
| to "surface" potentially interesting people to say hi to,
| chat with, and potentially date. For all the flaws, it's
| a more effective way to do this than counting solely on
| meeting people in your physical sphere.
| actionablefiber wrote:
| > Their motto is that their app is "meant to be deleted."
|
| I have seen this on NYC subway adverts, but is there
| anything substantially different about their app or
| business model that backs up their motto?
| lake_vincent wrote:
| I mean, in a way yes. For example, super easy to delete
| your account. No dark patterns or hoops to jump through.
| Also, the profiles themselves are pretty minimal - they
| are like ads, and are practically disposable as such.
| Once I got what I came for, I just threw it out.
| actionablefiber wrote:
| > Also, the profiles themselves are pretty minimal - they
| are like ads, and are practically disposable as such.
|
| That sounds pretty counterproductive to me? I feel like
| many people on Tinder already volunteer way too little
| information about themselves in their bios. I guess maybe
| that's OK if you're just swiping based on the person's
| pics but that seems like a bad strat for finding a
| partner.
| lake_vincent wrote:
| It's definitely a bad strat for finding love, but not bad
| for finding company lol.
| fastball wrote:
| Seeing as how Hinge is also owned by the Match Group...
| probably not.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| I wonder if there is an alternative business model which would
| put users and the business on the same side.
|
| Could you put a lien against someone's marriage, such that in
| order to marry someone you meet on HappyDating.com you had to
| pay the outstanding debt?
|
| Anything less extreme?
| tromp wrote:
| A subscription that converts to free membership after n
| years.
| actionablefiber wrote:
| At that point why not just sell lifetime memberships by
| default?
| wolpoli wrote:
| But then that's not a stable SaaS business.
| actionablefiber wrote:
| There's a pretty reliable flow of new people aging into
| the dating world or entering it for the first time.
|
| In any event, "pay a regular subscription for X years and
| free thereafter" is just a lifetime subscription paid in
| installments, not a fundamentally different business
| model.
| tromp wrote:
| It seems different. You may no longer need the service
| after a few mnonths. Or decide you don't like the
| service, and look for another one. In either case, you
| pay far less than what you'd pay for lifetime service.
| alvarezbjm-hn wrote:
| Upfront price
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| Honestly, I think this is a great idea. It would probably
| cost next to nothing but would work well as a marketing
| ploy.
| drewcoo wrote:
| Additional "relationship management" services? Anniversary
| reminders/suggestions to counseling to help on any possible
| angle of being a couple. Probably also access to lawyers
| (possibly paired with more dating).
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| For short-term incentives, you could have some kind of scheme
| where you monetize dates. Eg when you match someone the app
| proposes you a list of partner bars, restaurants, parks, etc.
|
| In theory, this could create a perverse incentive for the app
| to set you up for matches that last just long enough for a
| few dates, but not long enough that you get off the app. In
| practice, I don't think matching algorithms are precise
| enough that the app could act on that incentive.
|
| The bigger problem is that most users would completely ignore
| the monetized dates.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| Good idea! I'm not entirely sure it helps though. You still
| need to keep people on the dating treadmill to make money,
| not get them off and onto the remainder of their shared
| life experience as quickly as possible.
|
| Unless you interject before people get a chance to talk to
| each other. You might even be able to spin this as a safety
| feature, you matched with this person - Click here to join
| our dating even next Tuesday that they are going to...
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| > You still need to keep people on the dating treadmill
| to make money,
|
| If that's truly the attitude of apps (albeit a disgusting
| one), they could simply take the view that there's always
| a "new crop" of money being born each day and will be
| ready for their churn in 18 or so yrs.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > I wonder if there is an alternative business model which
| would put users and the business on the same side.
|
| Hookup apps. Apps for non-monogamous people. You're looking
| for repeat customers.
|
| The only other way is paying when the couple gets into
| something long-term, but the fee would probably be higher
| than people want.
| actionablefiber wrote:
| Definitely hookups, but also not just hookups; I've found
| gay Tinder to be a really great way to meet people in my
| area from all walks of life and parts of town who have
| overlapping interests with me.
|
| I definitely agree that if your service depends on a
| subscription model and is explicitly aimed at people whose
| goal begins and ends with finding a life partner and
| deleting their account, then there is really no easy way to
| reconcile this.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| Heterosexual non-monogamy is difficult for those people who
| aren't, let's say, conventionally attractive.
|
| The people I knew who could pull it off didn't really need
| an app!
| alfnor wrote:
| But apps increase their options, which puts the rest of
| us at a disadvantage.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| > When you find the love of your life, you delete the app
| forever. Therefore, everything the app does to help you find
| that person works directly against their own goals (user
| growth, "engagement". subscriptions).
|
| I'm not sure this is a fair modeling of how an app must work --
| think of other industries that have extremely long sales cycles
| like, say, a realtor. Realtors are incentivized to match you to
| a home in such a manner that you might recommend them to others
| (and leave positive reviews), perhaps even use them again on
| the buy/sell side later on if their career is long.
|
| Mind you Realtor is closest to professional match maker, but
| there's no reason an app couldnt take a middle ground between
| tinder and a highly involved match making service.
| badwolf wrote:
| This is why I had high expectations and hopes for Facebook
| Dating. They "have all the data" - and benefit from you being
| on the site, whether you get married and stop using dating, or
| not.
|
| Unfortunately, they made a pretty shitty 'dating' system and
| left it to rot.
| skizm wrote:
| When you find the love of your life you move from user to free
| marketing. People constantly talk about how they met, early
| dates, etc. New users always enter the dating market, either by
| just younger people getting older or breakups, divorce, erc. So
| it seems like it wouldn't be in the best long term interest to
| keep users in the dopamine loop.
| teeray wrote:
| Sounds good in theory, but consider two dating apps: one with
| hockey stick user growth and high retention, and another with
| stagnant growth but high user churn. Which one would get the
| VC dollars? The story you tell would present itself in
| metrics as the latter app (high churn).
| btbuildem wrote:
| This here is the crux of the problem: approaching
| everything with the "would someone think of the VCs"
| mindset.
|
| Can we for once build something good and useful, and leave
| the greedy gamblers out of it?
| alfnor wrote:
| No, we cannot, because this is capitalism.
| bradlys wrote:
| Relatedly: Has there been any new dating apps that haven't been
| acquired by Match and are trending upwards? I feel like just as
| Hinge was getting popular and people were talking of its success
| - it fell off _hard_ due to acquisition by Match in the following
| couple years.
|
| It seems like you have to always go to a newer app to find
| success before Match ruins it.
| seydor wrote:
| Why don't we have dating AI? well, it would be unprofitable, but
| maybe ..
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| ... unless you live in a place in which your dating prospects are
| few or non-existent, in which case you pay for the "travel mode"
| feature.
| lopis wrote:
| Or just use a GPS mocking app on your phone.
| jefftk wrote:
| OkCupid was bought by Match Group (who run almost all online
| dating sites, including Match, eHarmony, and Tinder) in 2011 and
| took down this post not long after.
|
| EDIT: the purchase was Feb 2011 [1] and the post was removed
| sometime between Jan 2011 [2] and Mar 2011 [3]. The rest of the
| blog was still up at the time [4].
|
| [1] https://www.npr.org/2011/02/03/133456140/The-Last-Word-In-
| Bu...
|
| [2]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20110113034228/http://blog.okcup...
| up
|
| [3]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20110301161329/http://blog.okcup...
| down
|
| [4]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20110301161329/http://blog.okcup...
| different post up
| bartimus wrote:
| So there's still a void for a dating service to be filled?
| btbuildem wrote:
| From an end-user perspective? Desperately so.
|
| I think the biggest obstacle to solving the Dating App
| problem is the onboarding.
| conductr wrote:
| I've been married since before Tinder so never used it. But
| I think the "Dating App problem" is something of a head
| scratcher. The reason the apps all have problems is because
| Dating is the problem. It's hard. Always has been. Finding
| a lifelong partner, very hard.
|
| I might be wrong but these types of conversations about how
| bad the apps are make me think y'all are expecting some
| sort of technological easy button. It will never exist.
| These companies are probably making it worse because of
| their profit motive but there's definitely a reason nobody
| has "solved" dating.
| aspaviento wrote:
| The problem is not dating, the problem is visibility. If
| you have tons of dates with tons of people you'll end up
| with someone who aligns with you (also will help you to
| learn what you really like) but these apps, as funny as
| it sounds, make you invisible by oversaturation. The
| amount of people is so huge that you spend less than a
| few seconds to decide if you want to match or not with
| someone and you never know about this person ever again.
| conductr wrote:
| I struggle to see how this is different than the real
| world of strangers. If you go out anywhere you are around
| people. Some you find attractive some that may find you
| attractive. Yet, you probably never even speak to each
| other so visibility isn't really the problem.
|
| The fact it's a dating app, just means you have some
| expectations. You expect you may get a date. But you may
| not. You expect those other people are real profiles.
| They may not be. You expect those people that you do
| match with actual intend to have a conversation/go on a
| date. They may not have that intention.
|
| If I've learned anything from the younger-than-me
| generations, they like having Likes. It's attention. It's
| meaningless by most measures but gives them some
| endorphins or something. I'll probably never get it fully
| but I can completely see how people would have a Tinder
| profile for no reason other than to get a confidence
| boost when they got a Like/Match. I realize that's a
| broad stoke but I continue to observe it over and over.
| aspaviento wrote:
| The difference is precisely what you mentioned, people
| there expect to have dates and find a partner. There
| could be other people trying to get something else (heck
| there are even scammers) but it's not your expectation to
| start a convo expecting to get somewhere, it's the goal
| of the app. This doesn't happen in real life, in fact, if
| you try the same approach, you'll be seen as creepy
| depending on the context. Dating apps should skip this
| initial uncertainty and technically make it easier to get
| to the point.
| conductr wrote:
| I guess dating for me always just was an activity without
| expectation. Or perhaps better said, without surprise.
| Meaning anything could happen. I might have fallen in
| love with someone on the night we met, the universe
| seemed aligned, we already got in some small talk face to
| face, maybe even got physical then - only to find out the
| next day they gave me the phone number for Pizza Hut and
| I'd never see or hear from them again. I couldn't even
| Google them or DM them, it didn't exist. Everyone was a
| ghost by default.
|
| The apps to me seem exactly like what you all are saying.
| If I were young I'd probably turn to the same tactics I
| employed before the apps; meeting people in the real
| world. Probably easier said than done, but that's always
| been true.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| Volume and effort.
|
| Likes and such are distracting as they are attract the
| wrong people (attention seekers) or give off the wrong
| impression (false flags). The former is very prominent
| against men, the latter is very prominent against women.
|
| Volume exasperates both this problem and the problem of
| choice. There are so many choices for so little effort,
| people are drowning in it and not investing enough to
| feel attached to their choices. Where before you had to
| invest more time into an individual person and your other
| options where far more limited, now you have far more
| choice for less effort when you're on the winning side of
| the market.
|
| Some poster posted a few sources one time on a similar
| topic regarding the importance of investment and how
| people will generally stick together when invested. It's
| the initial investment which is missing. The fact
| ghosting as a concept didn't just come into existence,
| but is so omnipresent among both sexes, speaks for
| itself.
| thoroughit wrote:
| I believe this is correct. The vast majority of my modern
| "swipe era" dating experiences fall into either 1) Woman
| makes up excuse to bail within ~2 hours of planned date
| 2) Woman ghosts/un-matches just as conversation begins to
| gain momentum 3) Woman tells me she is "overwhelmed" by
| the attention she's getting from the app and is going to
| delete it, leaving behind her cell number. The
| effort/attention ratio for women on dating apps is
| literally unnatural. This ratio is tempered in the real
| world because it takes _balls_ to approach a woman.
| adamc wrote:
| exacerbates
| jnwatson wrote:
| Indeed. I met my girlfriend on a relatively novel dating site
| called The League.
|
| It was recently purchased by Match.
| xtracto wrote:
| Im tempted to make a service where you "deposit" some fee to
| subscribe, I then return part of the deposit to you on a
| monthly basis UNTIL you find a match on the site. If/once you
| find a match, I keep the rest.
|
| That should align goals for both the company and the partner
| seeker.
|
| EDIT: I'll be getting interest from the remainder your
| payment every month, as part of my profit scheme.
| btbuildem wrote:
| I like the alignment of incentives here, but "match" would
| have to be defined better. If it's a literal match (mutual
| like) it would effectively be a per-pay-like and wouldn't
| work. Maybe something along the lines of "matched, chatted,
| met, stopped using the app for X period of time"?
| xtracto wrote:
| Yep, I've thought something like that:
|
| For every month that you use the app to a certain degree
| (number of viewed profiles, page loads or whatnot) I will
| give you back 1/nth (1/12th) of your deposit. If you
| don't use it enough, then I'll "keep" that month's budget
| as a subscription payment. The idea is that once you
| match with someone, you will stop using the app, and the
| rest of the money will slowly go to me.
|
| I am convinced it could be a good model, of course as
| with everything, there are several things to be solved
| before making it a sound business.
| derefr wrote:
| That's basically how many old human-labor matchmaking
| services work, insofar as the matchmaker gets a lump-sum
| payment at the beginning, and then spends an unbounded
| amount of labor doing the matchmaking until it works out.
| The matchmaker is incentivized to make a good match as
| efficiently as possible, as their profit-margin decreases
| linearly with the amount of time they spend on each "case."
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| That just sounds like the optimal solution is to do zero
| match-making labor.
| labster wrote:
| If it was a one-time game, sure. If your game relies on
| future business, word-of-mouth advertising, and not being
| arrested for fraud, it's a bad choice.
| Volundr wrote:
| Eh maybe from an efficiency perspective on profit vs
| labor, of I can get one person to pay me $100 to
| matchmake for them, then do nothing, I've got an infinite
| return on my effort, but if I want to make a living doing
| this I need to have some success stories to keep the
| $100s coming, so some effort is needed.
| [deleted]
| carabiner wrote:
| Match has turned all of its apps into tinder. That is,
| gambling-like "one more swipe" photo centric dating apps, where
| the artificial restriction of choice keeps every person
| starved. Tinder is casual hookups, okcupid is leftist tinder
| for relationships, Hinge is politically moderate tinder for
| traditionalists, and so on. Each is a different marketing
| segment, but the same basic idea that gets men to pay to meet
| women.
| opportune wrote:
| I would not say Hinge artificially restricts choice. You are
| limited in how many "likes" you can send each day, but it's a
| different model where each like is actually a
| notification/puts you in someone's "inbox", so letting
| everybody like too much would make it too spammy to work.
|
| That model is also quite good because you don't need to pay
| for women to notice you. Those 10 people you like will notice
| you anyway, unlike other apps where you could like 1000
| profiles and barely be seen by any of them.
|
| I personally have found Hinge very effective compared to
| other apps without paying a cent. My like -> match -> date
| conversion rate was literally two orders of magnitude better
| than any other app.
| bjustin wrote:
| I also found Hinge to have a much higher hit rate of
| conversations-per-profile-seen, and dates, than the other
| apps.
| ravenstine wrote:
| > okcupid is leftist tinder for relationships
|
| LOL
|
| Some people are going to take this the wrong way, but I've
| never read a more true statement.
|
| I'm a pretty liberal person (folks think I'm conservative
| because I think communism stinks), but my experience with
| OkCupid many years ago was that most of its users were self-
| proclaimed cultural Marxists or feminists with a bone to
| pick. My digital head was decapitated several times by women
| there just for introducing myself to them. I'd even been
| lectured a handful of times about how I was "misogynist" for
| the age range I specified on my profile included women 5
| years younger than I was, which wasn't even low enough to
| include women of college age.
|
| The day I saw an advertisement for OkCupid that actually used
| the initialism "DTF" was when I knew for sure I would never
| be returning to them ever again. It would surprise me if they
| still had any meaningful userbase since it was pretty much
| dead in the LA area the last time I used it.
|
| > but the same basic idea that gets men to pay to meet women.
|
| In which case men should just go to Seeking Arrangement.
| vintermann wrote:
| Sounds like the same trend we se in other social media, which
| is that as soon as there's something new which against the
| odds has broken through, everyone rushes to copy it - the
| reason both YouTube and Facebook are pushing shorts so
| aggressively now.
| revolutukr wrote:
| houstonn wrote:
| More Orwellian still, they edited articles that contained data
| inconvenient to the politically correct narrative and elite
| ideology.
|
| Edit: Here's an example.
|
| "I'm bisexual." REALITY: 80% of self-identified bisexuals are
| only interested in one gender.
|
| People who describe themselves as bisexual overwhelmingly
| message either one sex or the other, not both as you might
| expect.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20170307114207/https://theblog.o...
|
| They presented the reality based on data, it's not subjective,
| it's revealed preferences. Match.com removed that section and
| updated the article with "This post has was originally
| published in 2010 and has since been updated to reflect
| OkCupid's current values."
| CodeSgt wrote:
| Where was this?
| sam0x17 wrote:
| > People who describe themselves as bisexual overwhelmingly
| message either one sex or the other, not both as you might
| expect.
|
| I don't think you can draw the conclusions from this people
| seem to be. Think about it. If you are genuinely attracted to
| both genders, then you can choose. If you're pursuing a goal
| (like a relationship) you're going to have some ideal you're
| going after, so you're probably going to pick a gender to
| look for for any particular period of time. I think it would
| be actually very uncommon to actively seek both at the same
| time, especially since there are cultural/societal
| considerations tied up with this. If you genuinely like both
| deciding to pursue a particular gender doesn't invalidate the
| fact that you could just as genuinely pursue the other.
| Society dictates that pursing one or the other are of varying
| difficulty, but this has nothing to do with the legitimacy of
| how you feel about the other. Bi-sexual people I've known
| follow this pattern -- they'll pursue one gender for 6 months
| to the year, and then re-bound with the other, then maybe
| stick with that one for a while, rinse and repeat. Since most
| people only use dating services for a short while, this would
| probably look as described above in aggregate.
| wavefunction wrote:
| Any examples? Their blog post on the dating economy being
| skewed away from black women seemed to match with economic
| and social realities.
| bragh wrote:
| They do have memory-holed some very inconvenient blog
| posts, such as this
| https://techcrunch.com/2009/11/18/okcupid-inbox-attractive/
| (probably exists somewhere on archive.org)
| flutas wrote:
| > (probably exists somewhere on archive.org)
|
| Yep!
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20091121080804/http://blog.ok
| cup...
|
| God I love archive.org
| dorfsmay wrote:
| Me too. Please remember they are funded and can exist
| only through donations:
|
| https://archive.org/donate/
| anon23anon wrote:
| I was a regular reader of their blog. It was great. They
| had a bunch of data on how we data and they weren't
| afraid to let the data speak. This resulted in some ppl
| getting upset b/c they had to hear something that didn't
| fit their worldview.
| throwaway289943 wrote:
| afavour wrote:
| They've memory-holed (i.e. deleted) their entire old
| blog, no? It's disappointing but I think it's a stretch
| to describe that as Orwellian (as the OP did). At some
| point they just discarded all their old content, it's not
| that much of a conspiracy.
| floor2 wrote:
| The motivation is what matters for the folks calling it
| Orwellian.
|
| If someone is deleting their posts because the facts
| don't align to the worldview of a religion, a political
| party, a corporation or some other powerful group, many
| people will be more concerned about that than if the
| posts had been deleted for more routine, functional
| business reasons.
| WalterSear wrote:
| Old content - that it still being discussed and would
| still be generating pageviews.
| afavour wrote:
| Entirely possible they don't care for the page views.
| Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending it, I think it's a
| shame that interesting content like that gets pulled down
| but it's usually for boring corporate reasons (don't want
| to maintain the blog any more, they don't benefit from
| the pageviews) than conspiratorial Orwellian reasons.
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| I don't think it's a orwellian conspiracy, they make
| money running a dating website and took down some old
| blogs that suggested online dating is really pretty
| rigged not in your favor for guys (their paying
| customers). You don't need some men in the shadows to
| explain why they took that down
| afavour wrote:
| Not sure why you're being downvoted for asking this,
| editing blog posts ought to be very easily traceable using
| archive.org.
| aeturnum wrote:
| > _" I'm bisexual." REALITY: 80% of self-identified bisexuals
| are only interested in one gender._
|
| > _People who describe themselves as bisexual overwhelmingly
| message either one sex or the other, not both as you might
| expect._
|
| Yes, I remember this. It was sad to see such basic logic
| errors from OKC. It seems a little like saying that
| heterosexuality is a myth because all "heterosexual" people
| prefer some bodies over others. Bisexual means you are
| attracted to both masculine and feminine people. It does not
| imply a 50 / 50 split, or that you want to date everyone
| equally. The Match.com Orwellian activity aside - that
| critique was always very odd.
| [deleted]
| silverwasthere wrote:
| I use straight dominated apps for straight dating and gay
| dominated apps for gay dating so my usage would basically
| agree with their majority statistic.
|
| It's how I use the tools not who I am, though.
| Retric wrote:
| Bi isn't an all or nothing thing. Men are well known to enter
| same sex relationships when in restricted environments long
| term such as sailing ships or prison, but not everyone is
| that flexible.
|
| Women do the same with a lesser known example being elderly
| women swapping because of the shrinking dating pool.
|
| So, self identifying as bi shouldn't be taken as having zero
| gender preferences nor should we assume peoples preferences
| are static through time. People may be in a committed
| relationship and seek partners of the a different gender etc.
| watwut wrote:
| That implication is not logical. It is unreasonable to expect
| bisexuals to seek 50/50 gender split.
|
| First, even if the actual attraction is same for both
| genders, it would be reasonable to expect bisexuals to seek
| opposite gender partners way more. Pretty much anyone who
| wants bio children need opposite sex partner. Pretty much
| anyone who don't want to deal with stigma around gayness too
| kuch will prefer opposite gender partner.
|
| Second, bisexuality does not mean the attraction is same. It
| it fairly normal for bisexual to be attacted toany people
| from one gender and few from the other. It is also fairly
| normal foe them to have periods where they go for one gender
| only (either as conscious decision or not).
| bundze wrote:
| There are multiple reasons why someone would prefer to date
| only one gender while actually bisexual. I know a person who
| is bisexual and only dates the opposite gender because they
| don't want to deal with backlash from their conservative
| family and because they prefer to start a traditional family
| one day. I do feel like that may be a popular issue so I
| wouldn't expect that a bisexual person would message both
| genders equally, like this article absurdly claims.
| [deleted]
| RajT88 wrote:
| I don't see how the bisexual statistic is politically
| incorrect.
|
| It makes sense, considering the self-professed "bisexuals"
| I've known, which are well known as well in liberal-leaning
| circles:
|
| 1. Young women who pretend to be Bi to get more attention
| from Men
|
| 2. People who pretend to be Bi to avoid having to completely
| come out of the closet
|
| There's actually a saying in the gay community for the
| latter, "Bi now, gay later!"
| auveair wrote:
| > There's actually a saying in the gay community for the
| latter, "Bi now, gay later!"
|
| I think by gay community you meant asshole gay people, I've
| been waiting for a very long while now to turn gay (I'm a
| bisexual dude).
|
| > I don't see how the bisexual statistic is politically
| incorrect.
|
| Not politically incorrect, just deeply ignorant.
| Scarblac wrote:
| I know some bi people who seem to switch their main
| preference every few years. That could also look like this.
|
| And as for the second, that may not be a conscious
| decision, right? People discover more about their own
| orientation over time.
| claudiawerner wrote:
| I feel like that sort of expression encourages biphobia;
| even if 'genuine' (whatever that means) bi people are rare,
| an expression like "Bi now, gay later" perfectly plays into
| long lasting tropes such as bisexuality being "just a
| phase", something which bisexuals such as myself have spent
| a long time trying to overcome.
|
| To add on that, studies like the ones mentioned only reveal
| so much; there are a few good reasons why one might only
| search for one gender or the other online and in a
| particular place.
| pabl8k wrote:
| OK this just feels like this topic is an excuse for you to
| trot out tired tropes about bi people while scare-quoting
| the word to delegitimize the orientation.
|
| What you're doing is called bi erasure. It happens from
| straight and gay people. Bi doesn't necessarily mean
| attraction or experience is exactly equally split. For some
| people it is, for some people it isn't. Some people may
| change how they self describe. None of that means people
| aren't legitimately bi.
| RajT88 wrote:
| I am not trying to de-legitimize anything. Nothing I said
| changes (or can change) your truth.
|
| My post was based on what I've been told by both Gay and
| Bi people (the latter, several Bi people I knew
| complained about the first item with the young women). So
| if Straight and Gay people can participate in Bi Erasure,
| so too can Bi people I suppose.
| marpstar wrote:
| I think it's better labeled "heteroflexible", or engaging
| in physical contact/sex with a same-sex person (for the
| dopamine), but have no "romantic" attraction to same-sex
| people.
| throwagay wrote:
| When I was young (teens to early 20s) I self identified as
| gay. And I can remember not being very convinced by the
| existence of genuinely bi people.
|
| Then I fell in love with a woman, still happily
| monogamously married to after many years.
|
| These days I would self identify as human. But I guess you
| could call me bi: I still find attractive men attractive.
|
| I'm not sure what I would seek these days if I were single.
| hezralig wrote:
| There are plenty of bisexual people I know that have open
| arrangements who are in relationships with a partner of one
| sex and are only permitted by that partner to date people
| of another sex by that partner (because fear of
| competition/jealousy reasons).
|
| Some people only want romantic relationships with a partner
| of one sex while hookups with another. Some people have bi-
| cycles. Some people are attracted to a person of their own
| gender 80% of the time and another 20% of the time.
|
| Many bi people aren't out or completely honesty with their
| dating history because they have to put up with the
| insecurities and stereotypes trotted out by the chronically
| ignorant from both straight and gay communities. The lack
| of support and understanding is one of the reasons why
| rates of depression and anxiety are higher for bisexual
| people. Imagine being questioned about your preferences and
| asked to make a choice by a group of people that were held
| to a similar level of cultural-interrogation by
| heterosexuals. Bisexuals are a minority of a minority,
| however, I am glad the attitude of thinking bisexuality is
| secretly indecisiveness is dying off.
| [deleted]
| gsk22 wrote:
| Ugh, can we please stop with these damaging stereotypes
| about bi people?
|
| There are plenty of acceptable ways to be bisexual, and
| while some people might fit the boxes you described, there
| are lots who don't.
|
| These antiquated views are a large part of why, as a
| bisexual man, I mostly keep that to myself. Coming out is a
| big deal with a significant amount of associated emotional
| stress, doubly so when others try to rationalize how you're
| not a "real" bisexual ("you've only dated women, how can
| you be bi!?" or "oh you just like fooling around with
| dudes, you're not really bi" etc).
| auveair wrote:
| The bisexual thing was pretty stupid and pretty revealing how
| much this blog post was bullshit, there was a bunch of reason
| why you would pick one gender as a bisexual, especially if
| online dating was just to meet more of the gender you wanted.
|
| But a bi dude, in 2010 you simply wouldn't get match with
| women if you write bi and plenty of gay dude would turn you
| down as well, so you just wouldn't bother and write gay or
| straight eventually.
|
| Edit: removed today
| ChickeNES wrote:
| I clearly remember seeing women's profiles on both okc and
| Tinder that outright stated that they were not interested
| in bi men, but it's become rarer and rarer as time passes
| jrnichols wrote:
| Depends on where you are. I'm still finding a lot of
| blatant hatred and bigotry from women against bisexual
| guys.
|
| the gay guys have been fine. but over the years, the most
| hateful, vile comments have come from women.
|
| I dont't think that it's becoming more rare, but the
| hateful ones are quieter about it. as son as you bring it
| up in a private conversation, they unleash on you and
| block you.
| skyyler wrote:
| >But a bi dude, in 2010 (and still today) you simply
| wouldn't get match with women if you write bi
|
| This is simply not true.
|
| Maybe I'm just hot enough to overcome the queer disgust? I
| don't feel like I'm that hot.
| yamazakiwi wrote:
| Depends on where you live and what age your dating pool
| is.
| auveair wrote:
| > This is simply not true.
|
| I removed the point about today since I haven't been
| dating in a few years, but I stand by the 2010 comment,
| you could find a few female stars being openly bisexual
| for example but it was incredibly rare for male stars,
| which is indicative of how hot it was perceived at the
| time.
| skyyler wrote:
| My lived experience just completely disagrees with what
| you are saying. Perhaps it's an age difference thing. The
| gay men have had more of a problem with me than the
| straight ladies.
|
| I gravitate towards bi/pan people anyways due to my
| androgynous features.
| vintermann wrote:
| No personal experiences here, but I observe that k-pop
| stars are more popular than ever and that yaoi is a
| thing. I believe you.
| auveair wrote:
| I don't know how old you are, but anyway it seems you are
| starting with a pretty good crowd, if you're not ugly,
| androgynous (sought after) and dating in an understanding
| pool, which is your own orientation. I see where you are
| coming from but it doesn't seem like it warranted the
| blanket dismissal you started with.
|
| For what it's worth I found a blog post referring to that
| phenomenon from a few years ago which talks about a poll
| conducted in Glamour Magazine: https://web.archive.org/we
| b/20160320094402/https://www.pride...
| skyyler wrote:
| I guess I didn't realize how good I have it. Discussions
| about dating sites have always been confusing to me.
|
| It's simple, you make a profile, talk to people, people
| talk to you... Why is that so hard?
| sneak wrote:
| Most (75%+) men on most dating sites only complete the
| first two items on your "simple" list.
| rngname22 wrote:
| "Results indicated that heterosexual women rated bisexual
| men as less sexually and romantically attractive, less
| desirable to date and have sex with, and less masculine
| compared to straight men. No such differences were found
| for heterosexual and gay men's ratings of female and male
| profiles, respectively. These results support previous
| research findings that indicate more negative attitudes
| toward dating bisexual men than bisexual women." https://
| www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15299716.2018.15...
|
| "63% of women, however, say they wouldn't date a man who
| has had sex with another man"
| https://www.glamour.com/story/glamour-sexuality-survey
|
| If you do some casual searches you can find qualitative
| and quantitative data supporting the idea that
| unfortunately for bisexual men, male-attracted women are
| not into them and you're incentivized to hide or downplay
| it if you want to appeal to the broadest group (though
| I'd argue you may as well focus on those that can accept
| male bisexuality if you're successful enough at dating).
| sangnoir wrote:
| > "I'm bisexual." REALITY: 80% of self-identified bisexuals
| are only interested in one gender
|
| This isn't the slam dunk it appears to be. A dietary
| equivalent would be "X% of self-professed omnivores avoid
| vegetarian dishes". They are open to the idea, but still have
| preferences. Just because one is open to the superset,
| doesn't mean they assign each subset equal weight.
| hezralig wrote:
| Or,
|
| I eat $x at home, I am looking for $y on this service.
|
| There are plenty of bisexual people I know that have open
| arrangements who are in relationships with a partner of one
| sex and are only permitted by that partner to date people
| of another sex by that partner (because fear of
| competition/jealousy reasons).
|
| Some people only want romantic relationships with a partner
| of one sex while hookups with another. Some people have bi-
| cycles. Some people are attracted to a person of their own
| gender 80% of the time and another 20% of the time.
| webmobdev wrote:
| That does sound a more sensible interpretation to me. I
| know many in India (where vegetarian diets are prevalent)
| who eat meat occasionally when they suddenly crave for it,
| but are mostly inclined towards a veg diet. And they think
| of cannot eat non-veg foods for all three meals or even
| continuously every day for even a week unlike some others
| who can't do without meat in a meal. Perhaps bisexuality is
| also a spectrum rather than a 50-50 thing?
| rafaelero wrote:
| Cool data. Isn't there something more up to date?
| Arkhaine_kupo wrote:
| Whats inconvinient to the pollitically correct narrative is
| people with 0 scientific literacy making bold claims about
| society based on surveys on extremely sampled social studies.
|
| Doing a study on how "dateable" black women are based on a
| specific dating app in 2010 is like making claims on
| everyones eating habits based on a survey on a Burger king
| drive through. It will probably not be a very good survey.
|
| They also took down the whole blog, people only remember the
| weird survey because it was an incel talking point seconds
| after it came out, specially in black pill groups arguing
| that giving up was the only alternative because OkCupid had
| "proved" that love was impossible for some and hypergamy or
| some other nonsense.
| afpx wrote:
| Would it be ok if they warned that it's just for
| entertainment?
|
| I enjoy reading these types of articles, and in my next
| project, I was planning to do something similar.
| Arkhaine_kupo wrote:
| > Would it be ok if they warned that it's just for
| entertainment?
|
| I mean they were always ok, but the problem is presenting
| some silly fun data analysis as "science".
|
| If you counted how many people have red hats in your way
| to work and publish it as a blog it can be fun. If
| suddenly far right groups start making posts about how
| your red hat stats correlate with immigration and theft
| statistics then your post is not the problem, but there
| is a problem.
|
| same with the OkCupid blog. I have 0 issue with their
| work (albeit they could show their work cause a lot
| looked incredibly amateurish), but the talking points
| that came from it are still being repeatedly wrongly 10
| years later and did real damage.
| kikokikokiko wrote:
| "presenting some silly fun data analysis as "science""
|
| Their silly data analysis had a sample that was probably
| orders of magnitude larger than any cohort an university
| paper could dream of getting their hands on, but yeah, it
| was just a silly fun data analysis.
| Arkhaine_kupo wrote:
| > Their silly data analysis had a sample that was
| probably orders of magnitude larger than any cohort an
| university paper could dream of getting their hands on
|
| and yet their sample was incredibly biased despite it
| being large. A big set of data still churns out bad
| results.
|
| Most of their blog posts did not show the data, how they
| normalised it, percentage of each group. They just run
| regression on it and anything with p<00.5 that seemed fun
| was published. Which was fun, but its not good science,
| its hardly science at all.
|
| There is a reason why blog posts and published results
| have different standards (and also why most
| sociological/psychological results are impossible to
| reproduce having one of the largest reproduction crisis
| of any science)
| kikokikokiko wrote:
| So, after sampling the interactions of 1.51 million
| people, and analysing the amount of messages an average
| tall woman receives compared to an average short woman,
| the conclusion that "taller women, on average, are less
| attractive to the average male than short women" is
| invalid?
|
| Please, tell me how this is absurd, when it's basically
| what you see in real life. Or that men that make more
| money are more attractive to women, on average? This
| delusion of denying facts when it does not conform to
| your own sense of what is "fair" is just childish.
| pksebben wrote:
| _because they 're all people who signed up for okcupid,
| who were actively using okcupid to date at the time_.
|
| the amount of pressure this puts on the sampling is hard
| to understate. not only are you looking at a highly
| truncated set of interpersonal dynamics (what you can
| tell about someone based on a dating profile is far less
| than what you can tell by meeting real people in meat
| space), you're specifically selecting for _people who
| have been as of yet unsuccessful IRL_. you 're also
| selecting for _people who wish to take a fairly serious
| shortcut around personal interaction_.
|
| given these factors, it would be both crazy and stupid to
| believe you can generalize about human nature anything
| you get from a dating app.
|
| as for "what you see in real life", might I suggest that
| you, yourself, are also constrained to a perspective that
| doesn't necessarily match other people's perspectives,
| and that maybe, just maybe, you are also seeing a biased
| sample of the world which is both the result and cause of
| difficulties with interpersonal interactions?
| mecha_ghidorah wrote:
| > the conclusion that "taller women, on average, are less
| attractive to the average male than short women" is
| invalid
|
| I'd say it's premature given that a lot of women don't
| want to date men shorter than them, so I can see men
| messaging them less just because they'd assume they were
| wasting their time.
| Arkhaine_kupo wrote:
| > Analysing the amount of messages an average tall woman
| receives compared to an average short woman, the
| conclusion that "taller women, on average, are less
| attractive to the average male than short women" is
| invalid?
|
| It isn't invalid, but its also not science. If you have
| 1000 short girls and 3 girls over 6'4 well you got an
| issue of normalising values. Where variance of results
| are more affected near the edge cases than the median.
|
| The problem is not the results, its that on a vaccum they
| are contextless, and that is what makes the silly fun
| data anlysis.
|
| > Or that men that make more money are more attractive to
| women, on average?
|
| Yeah because if they wanted to date someone broke they
| could find them outside. Online dating is a fraction of
| their total dating behaviour, therefore conclusions are
| not conclusive.
|
| If you want actual studies about it, women prefer a
| stable job over wealth. Aka a dude with 100k normal
| salary has a better chance than an unemplyed dude with 1
| million dollars. This is something that cannot be found
| through OkCupid cause networth isn't even a question or
| filter on their analysis.
|
| > This delusion of denying facts
|
| I am not denying facts, i have just done science past
| running a database through matlab.
| jules wrote:
| > They just run regression on it and anything with p<00.5
| that seemed fun was published.
|
| How do you think science operates in actual practice?
| OkCupid at least has a sample large enough that you can
| commit all sorts of statistical sins and still produce
| halfway decent conclusions, unlike your run-off-the-mill
| n=10 study.
| bongoman37 wrote:
| lelanthran wrote:
| > nd yet their sample was incredibly biased despite it
| being large.
|
| I gotta ask, in case what way is the sample of a few
| millions of people who want to date 'incredibly' biased?
|
| Slightly biased I might buy, but how on earth can you
| make the leap that people looking for dates via a
| matchmaking site is not at least slightly representable
| of people looking for dates?
| Arkhaine_kupo wrote:
| Online dating already mostly skews towards collage age.
| Secondly apps like OkCupid with long forms will self
| select the users who are not willing to disclose that
| information, don't wanna spend the time, or won't engage
| seriously with the form.
|
| So you will have mostly a group of 20 year olds, who are
| willing to answer a lot of questions. It doesn't matter
| how big the pot is, thats not a random sample of society.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > So you will have mostly a group of 20 year olds, who
| are willing to answer a lot of questions. It doesn't
| matter how big the pot is, thats not a random sample of
| society.
|
| Is that all? That doesn't make it "incredibly" biased.
|
| I mean, looking at your example of "black women being the
| least desirable on OkCupid", it's easy enough to check if
| it applies only to 20 year olds who are willing to answer
| lots of questions or if that correlation actually exists
| outside of that group[1].
|
| _Your_ way, of simply dismissing it instead of regarding
| it as a data point that can be further investigated is
| the opposite of science.
|
| [1] OkCupid certainly had the data, and on one of the
| blogs I recall seeing their distribution of ages, and _it
| was not dominated by the 20-30 age group_ , even if they
| were a majority. It would have been easy for OkCupid to
| redo that desirability analysis for particular age
| groups.
| pmyteh wrote:
| The sample size is, honestly, mostly irrelevant for these
| 'headline' type analyses. A good sample of a few hundred
| will get you a strong estimate, while a biased sample of
| a few million will get you a bad one.
|
| The classic illustration is the _Literary Digest_ poll of
| the 1936 Presidential Election. They got over two million
| respondents and confidently predicted a heavy Roosevelt
| loss. George Gallup got a comparatively tiny _but well
| sampled_ set of respondents and correctly estimated the
| Roosevelt victory. The magazine 's problem was partly
| sampling bias (their readers were richer than the average
| American, amongst other things) and partly non-response
| bias (they got a return rate of ~25%, which is pretty
| good, but probably disproportionately from the most
| politically engaged of their readership, who hated
| Roosevelt).
|
| I don't know how bad the sample is here for extrapolating
| to 'all those seeking dates', but the size is a
| distraction - the sampling is all.
|
| (This isn't necessarily true if you're making individual
| profiles, searching for rare phenomena, or something else
| which is more in the 'big data' than 'social statistics'
| space, and which genuinely needs that much training data.
| It's also not true if you're studying _the site members
| themselves_ , for whom the site members are a perfect
| (non-) sample. The latter is true for the in-house data
| science team themselves, but we shouldn't just assume
| their experience will extend to the rest of the world).
| newZWhoDis wrote:
| Why was OP flagged and mass reported?
|
| You had a sensible reply but now most can't even see the
| discussion. Dang really needs to get this place back on
| track
| freedomben wrote:
| It's back now, so I think it shows the system working.
| Controversial posts like this one used to just die and
| disappear forever but now with "vouch" option some things
| deserving come back to life. Not perfect obviously, but
| on the right track IMHO.
| newZWhoDis wrote:
| When do you get vouch capability?
| Arkhaine_kupo wrote:
| I would assume because it skirts quite close to some of
| the comment guideline rules
|
| for example:
|
| >Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies, generic
| tangents, and internet tropes.
|
| I assume the use of orwellian, and the attempt at
| bringing in political correctness probably raised some
| flags.
|
| I had a sensible reply but tbh I have discussed those
| blog posts multiple times in this site, so it gets to a
| point where 10 years in they are still being wrongly
| discussed you just wanna report and move on with your
| day.
| yibg wrote:
| I don't think anyone ever claimed this represented the
| overall population. It's clearly the data set for OkCupid
| users, which may be a decent proxy for online dating users.
| Unless there is any reason to doubt the accuracy of the
| data presented, I don't see the problem. Black women on
| OkCupid are not as desirable as white women. We may not
| like the results, but doesn't make it invalid.
|
| To use your analogy, if 95% of people going through burger
| king drive through prefers Coke vs Pepsi, that's relevant
| data for that purpose.
| watwut wrote:
| I have seen people making that claim repeatedly on HN.
| lmm wrote:
| If the problem was that the results were inaccurate, there
| would be no need to suppress what the post originally said.
| Incomplete data is a fixable problem. No, the blog was a
| gaffe in the Kinsley sense: they accidentally said the
| truth.
| houstonn wrote:
| Hypergamy is nonsense? I think you're confusing an opinion
| or desired reality with data and observed reality.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypergamy
| Arkhaine_kupo wrote:
| Why link a page and not read it?
|
| In the "Mating preferences" blurb they discuss hypergamy
| as being reduced as gender equality reduces and even
| worse links to a study called "The end of hypergamy"
| where they discuss men stop dating down once women
| achieve educational parity.
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5421994/
|
| So yeah, if you come from a poor, unequal country women
| wanna marry and old rich university educated man. If you
| don't, they dont. So hypergamy is not natural or
| unavoidable its a sad reality of some societes.
|
| Most people on dating apps swipe right on people with
| higher rating than them, the talking point about women
| being hypergamous and only liking the top profiles is not
| reproducible outside of dating apps, because it isn't
| real. Its a reflection of their userbase. If there are
| 1000 men sending 100 messages a day to 10 women, they all
| get rated highly, so they mostly see highly rated men
| profiles. And having attention from mediocre candidates
| outside of the app, they mostly interact with the most
| attractive counterparts online. This doubly skews the
| candidate pool women would interact with online in 2010,
| thus the findings are not proof of hypergamy, but okcupid
| being a sampled and incomplete group of people.
| throwaway289943 wrote:
| kikokikokiko wrote:
| Yeah, everybody knows that what guarantees a successful
| marriage is a man that earns half of his wife. Just close
| your eyes and think of allllll the couples, from friends
| to family, where this dynamic worked so amazingly well.
|
| Males find females, that are healthy and young,
| attractive - since they are the most likely candidates to
| have healthy offspring.
|
| Females find males, that are capable of getting enough
| resources to sustain the offspring, attractive. And in
| the case of males, there is no age barrier per se that
| impedes reproduction, so it's expected to see couples of
| younger females and older males.
|
| It's true for humans, it's true for chimps, it's true for
| dogs. Reality does not change just because you want it
| to. And it doesn't matter if we're talking about India in
| the 19th century or California in 2022. Women, ON
| AVERAGE, will find a rich guy more attractive than a bum,
| and men, ON AVERAGE, would find a 21 year old waitress
| hotter than a 55 year old Hollywood starlet.
|
| It is what it is.
| captainthrow wrote:
| mpweiher wrote:
| 1. Maybe the parent did read the page?
|
| "In a 2016 paper that explored the income difference
| between couples in 1980 and 2012, researcher Yue Qian
| noted that the tendency for women to marry men with
| higher incomes than themselves _still persists in the
| modern era_. "
|
| Emphasis mine.
|
| 2. Reduced [?] eliminated
|
| And of course, it says that " _some_ research supports
| that theory, " of that reduction. (again, emphasis mine).
| When you take a theory that has some support and then
| extrapolate from that theory to an end-state and claim
| that end state as certainty, you are leaving the realm of
| evidence and drifting off into pure fantasy.
|
| > women being hypergamous and only liking the top
| profiles is not reproducible outside of dating apps,
| because it isn't real.
|
| Actually it is real, as all the evidence shows. Including
| genetic evidence, which has concluded that historically,
| only around half of males reproduce, whereas almost all
| women do (apparently 40% vs. 80%).
| kikokikokiko wrote:
| Far from your Burger King straw men, there's even a very
| famous study, out of the UK if I'm not mistaken, that
| confirmed the thesis of black women being the least
| attractive group across the whole spectrum of major ethnic
| groups. I mean, there must be one group, out of all, that
| would score lower than the others ain't there? Reality
| doesn't have to be politically correct at the end of the
| day.
| compiler-guy wrote:
| Strangely, There doesn't have to be just one with a lower
| score than the others.
|
| One of the weirdest things about being human is that our
| preferences are neither rational nor consistent. The
| classic example in behavioural economics is with ice-
| cream flavors. If I prefer chocolate to strawberry and
| strawberry to vanilla, it doesn't follow that I prefer
| chocolate to vanilla. The preferences aren't transitive,
| and there doesn't exist a total preferences order.
| Brusco_RF wrote:
| Thats a very interesting point that I've never
| considered. Where can I read more about that? Is there a
| study you can link me to?
| narrator wrote:
| [deleted]
| Arkhaine_kupo wrote:
| Source or it wont be discussed.
|
| But aside from that, and the inherent assumption that
| beauty standards are universal and biological which is a
| pretty big assumption.
|
| A slight societal preference does not lead to the
| conclusions people drew from the article.
|
| To give an example, taller men have a higher chance of
| being promoted. Fortune 500 CEOs are disproportionately
| tall compared to the general population. As a society we
| still promote meritocracy, and working hard. Not telling
| people who are 5'4 to just give up and be unemployed
| cause they will never be the CEO of Ford Motor company.
| lmm wrote:
| > To give an example, taller men have a higher chance of
| being promoted. Fortune 500 CEOs are disproportionately
| tall compared to the general population. As a society we
| still promote meritocracy, and working hard. Not telling
| people who are 5'4 to just give up and be unemployed
| cause they will never be the CEO of Ford Motor company.
|
| Now you're moving the goalposts, which shows you knew
| your original claim was wrong. "It didn't happen, and if
| it did they deserved it" indeed.
| mpweiher wrote:
| They're not surveys, and that's _exactly_ the point.
| Surveys reveal how people claim to behave, which may nor
| not be how they actually think they behave, which may or
| may not be how they actually behave.
|
| If they were surveys, your criticism would be valid.
|
| Instead, this was about how people actually behave, so
| neither fooling themselves nor others.
| matsemann wrote:
| What if you're bi, but for a long term partner through
| match.com you're mostly interested in the opposite sex,
| vs your behavior other places for more casual hookups?
|
| What if you're bi, but not that open about it so you
| mostly take the chance on the opposite sex on a public
| dating platform?
|
| There must be so many other factors like these that at
| least should invalidate any broad claim by a company only
| seeing a small part of people's behavior and sexuality.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > What if you're bi, but for a long term partner through
| match.com you're mostly interested in the opposite sex,
| vs your behavior other places for more casual hookups?
|
| Then why on earth would you put down "bi" in the profile?
| vintermann wrote:
| Well, people at Okcupid. Back then. We don't know how
| well it generalizes.
| pksebben wrote:
| whether it's a survey or not is a straw man, and you know
| it. it's bad faith to argue along these lines given that
| the primary criticism leveled was regarding sampling.
|
| if you want to back up your point, speak to that. how
| does this show anything about the ~99% of people who have
| never used okcupid? on what grounds do you believe
| okcupid to be a representative sample?
| npc12345 wrote:
| concordDance wrote:
| Do we have reasons to think the non representativeness
| would have been relevant to these conclusions?
| mpweiher wrote:
| > whether it's a survey or not is a straw man
|
| No it's not. The post I replied to mentions "survey" four
| times, once per sentence. It mentions "sample" once.
|
| > on what grounds do you believe okcupid to be a
| representative sample?
|
| On what grounds do you believe okcupid to _not_ be a
| sufficiently representative sample?
|
| UPDATE: it was 4 times, not 3, so once per sentence.
| busterarm wrote:
| "incel" and "black pill" terminology didn't even exist in
| 2010.
| Arkhaine_kupo wrote:
| incel was coined in 1997. also the ideology was common
| well before it hit the mainstream, it just didnt have an
| official name. any guy in the forums in the early 2k can
| tell you this people were already there.
| pksebben wrote:
| can confirm. 4chan was full of the stuff way before it
| became remotely politicized.
| noasaservice wrote:
| It wasn't by those names, sure.
|
| But the "Forever alone" meme definitely was.
| https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/forever-alone
|
| And the citation date: 2010.
|
| Or better yet,
| https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cultures/involuntary-
| celibacy... cites that:
|
| "On August 12th, 2005, the American television network
| G4TV released a satirical commercial for the online role-
| playing game World of Warcraft in which a woman
| introduces the game to her boyfriend in order to prevent
| him from pressuring her to have sex."
| claudiawerner wrote:
| The 'Forever alone' meme was originally a jab at oneself
| for having few partners; it didn't imply anything about
| one's mindset or opinion on others, nor an opinion on
| society as a whole. It was also used mostly in an ironic
| sense. I'm saying that the meme has nothing to do with
| the 'incel' movement, unless you want to throw in every
| online expression of loneliness as incel stuff.
|
| Some namesakes remain, for example Reddit's
| r/ForeverAloneDating where people who haven't had much
| experience (if any) can make posts to solicit potential
| e-dates. Although the balance is skewed toward men, there
| are a good number of women posting there too, and it has
| nothing to do with incel/blackpill crap.
| pksebben wrote:
| iirc the term incel was actually coined as part of a
| support group for folks that struggled to date; I have a
| vague memory of an interview with the lady who's credited
| with it's Genesis, and how she was shocked at where it
| ended up.
| tomxor wrote:
| > the post was removed sometime between Jan 2011 [2] and Mar
| 2011 [3]. The rest of the blog was still up at the time [4].
|
| Internet Archive is great for cases of self censorship like
| this. I assume that as part of the acquisition the author was
| compelled to take it down.
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| Can't wait to see all our old private messages get leaked by
| some hack of the parent organization now too. Or for it all to
| just get sold to advertisers
| nemo1618 wrote:
| I wish! After I met my (now-)wife on OkCupid, we deactivated
| our accounts so that we'd stop getting notifications. A few
| months later we wanted to revisit our first messages to each
| other -- only to find that OkC had already deleted them. I
| was pretty shocked at how eager they were to discard a few KB
| of potentially priceless ASCII. :(
| crazygringo wrote:
| I can't speak specifically to this case, but it's certainly
| not about saving KB, it's usually specifically to prevent
| people from messaging the same person multiple times a year
| for many months/years.
|
| IIRC, OkC also removed the ability to bookmark profiles,
| presumably for the same reason -- everything moving to a
| more "ephermeral" experience to prevent anybody getting
| "obsessed" with certain accounts because of how creepy that
| gets. Since spam, stalking, and abusive messages are by far
| the #1 problem with any online dating service. (Yes
| blocking works, but it's even better when people don't have
| to block in the first place. If you have to block too much,
| you quit the app.)
| btgeekboy wrote:
| I'm engaged now, and met my fiancee on a dating site. At
| the time, it made sense that I deleted my account, since we
| were exclusive, but now those first messages exist only as
| a memory. I'd love to have those again, but I'm happy that
| data is gone.
| Marsymars wrote:
| I had the foresight to screenshot the convo between my
| soon-to-be-fiancee before deleting my account. :)
| ephbit wrote:
| Just because the enduser doesn't see the data anymore,
| doesn't mean the company doesn't have/use them anymore.
| pathartl wrote:
| Luckily I was able to dump the SQLite db that Tinder used
| in the past when I met my SO
| LiquidInsect wrote:
| That probably makes sense, but I'm sad to find that out.
| I've been thinking of logging back in to see if I could
| read the first few messages between myself and my recently-
| deceased fiancee. But those were years ago and I'm sure
| they're gone.
| jmainguy wrote:
| Sorry buddy
| inglor_cz wrote:
| On the other hand, deleting potentially compromising stuff
| once it is no longer needed is really good for former
| clients' privacy. In case of a hack, no one will be able to
| dig in decades of old erotic penmanship and blackmail
| people.
| sneak wrote:
| Match lets third parties access the extremely
| personal/private matching question answers from OKCupid.
|
| Presumably this means advertisers.
|
| I used OKC for years until the founders sold it (and my
| private data) to this shady company, then I was forced to
| delete.
|
| Acquisitions are worse than breaches for end user privacy.
| GitHub sold your whole travel history (via client IP
| geolocation) to Microsoft.
| Justsignedup wrote:
| Spoke to the OKC co-founder when he was working out of a co-
| working location making fun side project, he said that even
| they thought this was a bit too pretentious and very
| correlation vs causality issues.
| zasdffaa wrote:
| I read that as "carnality issues".
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Never Pay for Online Dating (2010)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26945413 - April 2021 (116
| comments) Related:
|
| _Never Pay for Online Dating (2010)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25055501 - Nov 2020 (265
| comments)
|
| _Why You Should Never Pay for Online Dating [cached]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15260785 - Sept 2017 (1
| comment)
|
| _Cached OkCupid Article: Why You Should Never Pay For Online
| Dating_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2170998 - Feb 2011
| (80 comments)
|
| _Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1842557 - Oct 2010 (32
| comments)
|
| _Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1277626 - April 2010 (9
| comments)
| idealmedtech wrote:
| The problem really happens when you do algorithmic price setting,
| which incentivizes you as the developer to get people addicted to
| the experience of swiping, regardless of whether or not the
| swiping has the desired outcome for the end user. A user base
| with just the right levels of dopamine from interactions and
| loneliness will probably end up buying one of the weekly
| promotional deals.
|
| That's why when you first start on any dating service, you're
| (typically) inundated with activity, so that you can always chase
| that high, and when you can't get it, you try to pay for it.
|
| Online dating is a tough problem to solve, tougher still when
| profit incentives misalign with user success incentives! I'm not
| even sure what an equitable _but also successful_ dating service
| would look like, because there 's this fundamental mismatch in
| values.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > That's why when you first start on any dating service, you're
| (typically) inundated with activity, so that you can always
| chase that high, and when you can't get it, you try to pay for
| it.
|
| It's striking how the business model is indistinguishable from
| how cocaine dealers were described to us as kids in the 80s.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Only two industries call their customers "users" (-:
| gnicholas wrote:
| I'm so tired of this line. The reason they're called
| "users" in tech is because unlike in many industries, they
| don't pay anything for access to the platform/app. If they
| all paid, they'd be called "customers".
|
| Implying that tech companies and drug dealers are birds of
| a feather based on this is silly. If you want to say tech
| companies make addictive products, say that. But don't
| pretend that calling people "users" is evidence in
| furtherance of this argument.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > But don't pretend that calling people "users" is
| evidence in furtherance of this argument.
|
| I didn't. It's a joke. See: (-:
| londons_explore wrote:
| The problem is worse than that... The app/site developers
| interests are directly opposing the users interests.
|
| The user (perhaps) wants to find a lifelong partner, and never
| use dating apps again.
|
| The site developer wants users to never find a lifelong
| partner, and to spend months/years returning to the app to find
| new candidates.
|
| In my experience, the developer usually wins - some users on
| dating sites have been there a decade or more, and active much
| of that time.
| crazygringo wrote:
| This isn't really the case though.
|
| If an app isn't getting you decent dates every so often,
| you'll move to an app that does. And it's pretty clear within
| a couple of months if an app is working for you or not.
|
| And then once you're in a relationship, the app has zero
| control over whether it succeeds or not!
|
| So no, dating apps aren't working against your romantic
| interests, simply because a) there's too much competition and
| b) they're not even smart enough to identify your true love
| and then hide him/her from you.
|
| They are trying to make a buck off of you though. Which they
| should, since they're a business.
|
| But so no, the developer doesn't "usually" win. I have lots
| of friends who got married from an online date. The people
| you know who are still on the apps after a decade -- well
| it's not like they've settled down with anyone they met in
| real life either. It's probably not the apps' fault.
| btbuildem wrote:
| Most of the apps are owned by Match.com, and they've slowly
| migrated to the same mechanism, the only difference is the
| demographics they cater to.
| karpierz wrote:
| This model ignores a key incentive: dating apps that don't
| successfully match won't be used.
|
| So at best, the developer is incentivized to have the user
| find someone to date in the short term and have the
| relationship fail in a manner that doesn't reflect poorly on
| the dating site. And it's not really feasible for the dating
| site distinguish between "will successfully date for a few
| months" and "will successfully date for a lifetime".
|
| You could apply the same logic to any long term purchase.
| Dealerships only sell lemons because they want you to come
| back and buy more cars. Recruiters only match you with
| companies that you'll definitely want to leave because they
| want to match you again. Realtors only show you houses you'll
| hate because then you'll want to move again.
| londons_explore wrote:
| > it's not really feasible for the dating site distinguish
| between "will successfully date for a few months" and "will
| successfully date for a lifetime".
|
| I think it _is_ feasible for a dating site to figure that
| out, given enough data.
|
| And I think the 'few months' figure is probably too high -
| they want to match people who will go on a few dates or a
| one night stand, then return to the app.
|
| It's a pretty damn strong signal when a user matches with
| someone, exchanges phone numbers, then deactivates their
| account. The ML algorithms will be trained to do everything
| possible to avoid that outcome.
| karpierz wrote:
| > I think it is feasible for a dating site to figure that
| out, given enough data.
|
| I've worked on the developer-side of this; I assure you,
| it's not. It's hard enough to predict if people will
| exchange messages with any reasonable precision + recall.
|
| > It's a pretty damn strong signal when a user matches
| with someone, exchanges phone numbers, then deactivates
| their account. The ML algorithms will be trained to do
| everything possible to avoid that outcome.
|
| Yeah, any dating site that does this is doomed to
| irrelevance.
|
| If it were as easy to make a successful dating site by
| just optimizing for that signal, you should really do it.
| Match will acquire you for millions - billions, and the
| core code is relatively simple. You could get it running
| in under a week. Get some VC funding, do a gradual roll
| out onto a few colleges, you'll be a multi-millionaire by
| Spring.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| > dating apps that don't successfully match won't be used.
|
| This isn't entirely true. A portion of the user base uses
| it almost entirely for entertainment and validation. I'd
| suspect it's a sizeable portion at that.
| tkk23 wrote:
| Have you considered the network effect? Users can't switch
| if there is no competitor with possible matches.
| londons_explore wrote:
| There is also a network effect for data. A dating site
| with few users doesn't collect much data, so can't train
| an ML algorithm to do a good job of showing you
| interesting matches.
| voakbasda wrote:
| Sounds a lot like a casino. The house always wins, at the
| expense of their customers.
| mwint wrote:
| Maybe it's worse than a casino - relatively few people walk
| into a casino _expecting_ to win life changing money and
| never come back.
|
| Many people use dating apps expecting to find a lifelong
| partner and never come back.
| dheera wrote:
| Honestly, I wouldn't mind paying $10K for finding someone who
| actually becomes my life partner, let's say due upon 2 years of
| stable marriage. In such a system, user incentives would be
| fully aligned with the business. However -- this would be hard
| to enforce.
| gnicholas wrote:
| My brother posted on FB offering several thousand dollars for
| anyone who referred him a wife. No dice though. He met his
| wife a couple years later via one of the apps.
| IX-103 wrote:
| I was thinking the money could be held in escrow. You could
| only get your money back if you end up marrying someone you
| didn't meet on the service.
| dheera wrote:
| Not sure I like that idea. What if I never marry because I
| don't meet someone {compatible, available, interested}?
|
| Maybe if I can delete my account from the platform at any
| time (even without marrying anyone) and get my money back
| I'd be OK with it. Ideally, the money in escrow should also
| earn interest or have the option to invest it in some
| generic index fund.
| MonkeyMalarky wrote:
| If you liked this article I recommend the book Dataclysm by the
| same author.
| khalilravanna wrote:
| Counter-point: always pay for online dating (as a guy).
| (Everything that follows is anecdotal.) I used Tinder off and on
| for years. When I was active I'd swipe for 10-30 mns a day and I
| think I estimated I could get through 100 right-swipes ("Yes, I
| want to match") per day. Even with that I would only end up with
| 1 or 2 matches a week. Which predictably when you include the
| chances of them being a bot, of them not responding, or not being
| serious about going out on dates meant I was basically going on
| at most 1 date a month with Tinder.
|
| At this point, I had refused to pay for a subscription because it
| felt cringe/sad as a reasonably attractive guy who doesn't have
| _terrible_ luck dating in real life. At some point I got over my
| dumb ego and paid for the highest tier subscription--cause, hey,
| why not? I kid you not the number of matches I got went up 10x. I
| would swipe on someone and match within 30 mns vs 1 week 1 month
| later. I had multiple dates a week, more dates than I'd ever had
| in my life. And eventually met my current girlfriend.
|
| My point: the game is _clearly_ rigged. Nothing about me changed.
| My behavior using the app, my physical appearance, my bio were
| all the same. As soon as I gave them my money Tinder flipped a
| switch and my profile which was likely barely being placed in
| front of women was now pushed front and center.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| My fair warning / PSA is[1] never pay for "roses" (super likes,
| other premium ways of indicating you like them "more"). They
| don't work. And the worst of it as an antipattern they
| essentially work against you (because the app lets the recipient
| know they received a rose).
|
| Here's why -- On average, matches are essentially trying to
| maximize the ELO score they match with, someone with a maximized
| score across many variables like social aptitude, wealth, future
| prospects, looks, (and many other attributes). Now, obviously
| people have their own weighing function for each aspect but some
| of them are simply universally valued -- for example healthy is
| near-universally preferred to someone who is critically ill. So
| What do you indicate to a match that you most likely _needed_ to
| use a rose to attempt to match with them ? You reveal that the
| app generated Elo score is actually too low to be presented them
| in normal swipes. (Especially in hinge which has a weekly
| rotation of people you cannot swipe/match with except if you
| rose, perhaps in other apps but I'm less well versed in their
| mechanics).
|
| [1]: at least as a man, idk if a woman would ever send a rose to
| a man, and if they'd work even if they did. Women will get a
| match >50% of the time w/o a rose, so why pay?
| user_named wrote:
| You absolutely should pay for dating apps. They barely work
| otherwise.
| Double_a_92 wrote:
| Do they work any better after you pay though?
| OgAstorga wrote:
| You're probably better off without them.
| russianGuy83829 wrote:
| (2010)
| joelfried wrote:
| Over 60% of the way past the filter on /r/AskHistorians . . .
| Agreed we should be a touch more timely!
| captainthrow wrote:
| [deleted]
| chatterhead wrote:
| OkCupid was awesome.
|
| Can someone please make another one? We need a site dedicated to
| Test Taking! OkCupid wasn't just about dating; it was about the
| tests you could create and take. It was awesome.
|
| The dating was also based on tests and archetypes OkCupid created
| and they were pretty good. We need something pure like that from
| the early 2000s.
| codethief wrote:
| Could you elaborate on what OkCupid was like in the early
| 2000s? I've only known it for a few years.
| coupdejarnac wrote:
| In my experience, Okcupid's match percentage was a very good
| estimate for how good of a match you were with someone. So
| there was that.
|
| Plus, the whole OKCupid experience wasn't a game of deception
| to trick you into buying subscriptions or IAP.
| chatterhead wrote:
| You started off by taking these matching profile tests that
| grouped you into an archetype based on your responses. The
| archetype test was also optional it wasn't required to use
| the site. (Not sure if it was based on orientation but it was
| certainly gender based.)
|
| There were a series of archetypes that were your ideal
| matches and you could search by peoples archetypes if they
| shared it. (I believe you could keep it private, too.. I
| can't totally remember.)
|
| Otherwise, the entire site was geared towards creating tests
| and taking tests. Their test creation system was awesome. I
| had several tests on tv shows and entertainment. You could
| get really detailed with the response types and question
| structures.
|
| OkCupid themselves, as outlined in this thread, shared their
| data freely and collected it without a bunch of invasive
| coding. People were literally creating data collection tests
| and we took them for fun. That's how you collect data!
|
| The entire site had a much more mellow approach to dating
| then the alternatives at the time, yet it was still geared
| towards matches not just sex.
| codethief wrote:
| Thanks for the insights!
| bschne wrote:
| Aside: I'm in my late twenties and have used various of the
| currently popular dating apps on/off over the last few years.
| Whenever I see one of the old OKC blogposts around the internet,
| it's kind of striking how different the pictures look from what
| you'd see on the apps today. It's possible/not unlikely I'm
| overinterpreting based on the different style/fashion alone here,
| but it just all seems a lot less posed & staged, and like there's
| much more variance than with the pictures you see today, and even
| the extremely attractive examples seem much more natural.
| jugg1es wrote:
| If you are saying that the profile photos on dating sites seem
| a lot less staged, than you are right. Good quality cameras on
| cell phones were not nearly as ubiquitous in 2010 as they are
| now. I think it was better back then because you could get a
| good sense of the person's personality from their photos than
| you can now.
| soylentcola wrote:
| Also, it wasn't a given that you were only/primarily using it
| via a mobile app. I remember frequently browsing OkC and
| chatting with people on my computer during lunch. It was a
| lot more focused on saying things before they turned into
| another swipe/mobile-centric platform.
| bschne wrote:
| I just recently saw a documentary excerpt where two women
| were browsing and discussing profiles on a dating site in
| the early aughts -- there sure seemed to be more info and
| more engagement with a given profile. Whether that actually
| led to better outcomes, I don't know, but the difference is
| pretty big.
| AyyWS wrote:
| Article from 2010. Instagram was created on October 6, 2010. I
| bet it's related.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Probably because online dating/apps are mainstream now. OkCupid
| was most certainly _not_ mainstream. Online dating still had a
| social stigma even in 2010 and OkCupid was the one that geeks
| used. It was generally full of unattractive people. Some people
| now intentionally take and curate pictures for their online
| profile and even some of the most attractive people use it.
| UI_at_80x24 wrote:
| To add my own personal experience (and to echo the headline),
|
| I met my wife while using PlentyOfFish. We have been married for
| 12+ years. I would never pay for a dating app/site.
|
| If you can't find somebody on the free sites, join a forum where
| you might find somebody with similar interests/hobbies/skills. Be
| a kind, polite person and once you have developed a friendship,
| then see if it can expand into more.
|
| Most of these other apps are more geared to hook-ups, (hump-and-
| dump); and not towards long-term relationships anyway.
| bearjaws wrote:
| They also had an amazing blog post about how dating profiles came
| down to ~85% how attractive you are (both men and women).
|
| Most people look at 3-4 images and pass, this probably was the
| inspiration for Tinder.
|
| One example of this was personality score, which they ended up
| removing. "In short, according to our users, "looks" and
| "personality" were the same thing". In this example it was just a
| profile picture with no text...
|
| Whole bunch of interesting knowledge from this:
|
| https://archive.ph/QNCbf#selection-513.0-513.79
| Bakary wrote:
| A profile picture with no text implies confidence and knowing
| how attractive you are (other than being a bot of course)
| ThalesX wrote:
| This is funny, I recently created a new Tinder profile and
| for lack of inspiration I didn't fill anything in except some
| pictures. I'm getting a lot more swipes than when I nerded up
| my profile. Unfortunately, I'm looking for interesting
| conversation which 80% of pic-based 'swipes' don't really
| provide.
| ryeights wrote:
| >After we got rid of the two scales, and replaced it with
| just one, we ran a direct experiment to confirm our hunch --
| that people just look at the picture. We took a small sample
| of users and half the time we showed them, we hid their
| profile text. That generated two independent sets of scores
| for each profile, one score for "the picture and the text
| together" and one for "the picture alone." Here's how they
| compare. Again, each dot is a user. Essentially, the text is
| less than 10% of what people think of you.
|
| Further down the page.
| bitwize wrote:
| The inspiration for Tinder was Grindr, an app for gay men.
|
| Gotta hand it to gay men, they're pretty honest about what
| they're looking for.
| dsfyu404ed wrote:
| Honest to who, others or themselves?
|
| I think most dishonesty in dating is just lack of self
| awareness.
| yamazakiwi wrote:
| I find the bad attitude of "Must be: 6 foot, 6 pack, 6
| figures" very minimal on Grindr. I'm guessing because if
| that's what you actually want you can find it easily, and
| after being rejected enough you're more likely to adjust your
| bad attitude.
|
| Most gays I know don't use grindr anymore however.
| tinyhouse wrote:
| Nice article but not sure I follow the argument here. The problem
| of messaging into the void can be solved by changing the settings
| to only show you paid members. If they don't give the option then
| don't use them. Paying members are more serious so it makes sense
| to not spend your time on non-paying members. BTW, at least on
| Tinder I know that everyone can message back regardless if they
| are paid members. Maybe in 2010 things were different and the
| article made more sense then.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Here's an interesting probable side effect of the spread of
| dating apps:
|
| > "According to Rhode Island's Department of Health, the numbers
| for STDs rose drastically between 2013 and 2014. Syphilis cases
| increased by 79 percent, newly identified HIV infections
| increased by 33 percent, gonorrhea cases increased by 30 percent
| -- and it's mostly young adults (along with African-Americans and
| Hispanics) who are becoming infected at these higher rates."
|
| https://www.techtimes.com/articles/55888/20150527/tinder-dat...
|
| Now if we look at the majority shareholder ownership of say,
| Gilead Sciences (a major provider of STD pharmaceuticals) and
| Match Group (owner of Tinder) on Yahoo Finance, the overlap is
| fairly large. (This of course is true for most corporations in
| the USA, so it's perhaps not as much of a plot as it might seem).
|
| But still... it makes one wonder about investment capitalism.
| It's always finding a way to create value and improve people's
| lives. A nice square deal. Make money promoting risky sexual
| behavior when they come in the front door, make more money
| treating the resulting STDs when they leave via the back door.
| Rather similar to pushing the soft drinks and junk food on the
| kids, and then reaping profits from the high hospital bills a few
| decades later. Gifts that keep on giving, right?
| EmilyHughes wrote:
| I don't get it. Why does no government anywhere run a non-profit
| dating site from tax-payer money when this is becoming the most
| popular way people are meeting?
|
| All the options people have are using toxic apps which entire
| business model is to undermine the self-esteem of young men and
| scamming them out of their money. And then people wonder where
| the mental health problems and mass shootings come from.
|
| I really don't understand how this stuff is still not regulated
| anywhere, it's a dangerous scam.
| 4gotunameagain wrote:
| Have you seen the state of governments ?
|
| They are so incompetent that famine/frost/nuclear apocalypse
| are serious possibilities..
| [deleted]
| twoWhlsGud wrote:
| If you think they look bad, you should check out some of
| their constituents.
|
| Seriously though, this seems like an area where anti-trust
| and transparency regulation (service X has a Y rating for
| producing matches that meet standard Q) could play a useful
| role.
| [deleted]
| tiborsaas wrote:
| Sharing your desires, sexual preference and all intimate
| conversions with the government doesn't seem like a good idea.
|
| You could say they can tap into that currently, and that's
| probably true, but deliberately broadcasting it to them would
| probably be out of question for many people.
|
| Also, consider what government run IT projects look like. Now
| mix that with a dating app, perfect recipe for a disaster.
| EmilyHughes wrote:
| You would always be able to switch to whatever service you
| like for further messaging, a non-profit the wouldn't care
| about keeping you on their app. Why would you have intimate
| conversations on a dating site anyway.
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| The Singapore government does some matchmaking:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Development_Network
|
| From what I heard it's mostly speed-dating stuff.
|
| EDIT: Aand I got ninja'ed. Twice.
| exhilaration wrote:
| I kind of love this idea, take the skills of 18F
| https://18f.gsa.gov/ and put them into making the ultimate
| dating site! An awesome application of data science. Let's take
| it further -- Government-funded matchmakers! They can hire all
| the Korean and Indian aunties that are already doing this for
| free.
| flyingfences wrote:
| What an unfortunate name, though... 18/F/USA totes legit
| brightball wrote:
| Why would this need to be government run?
| rdtwo wrote:
| Because monopolies
| ratww wrote:
| Businesses want to make money, and dating apps can make heaps
| of money by retaining users and making it pricier for them to
| find a relationships.
|
| Users that want relationships want to find someone ASAP and
| delete the app.
|
| Those two goals are completely incompatible.
| Double_a_92 wrote:
| Everything else so far seems to absolutely suck.
| svnt wrote:
| It could also be built using the Signal model.
| BrainVirus wrote:
| _> Why does no government anywhere run a non-profit dating site
| from tax-payer money when this is becoming the most popular way
| people are meeting?_
|
| Sounds like a great idea. I nominate NSA as the host
| organization. You wouldn't even need to bother creating a
| profile, they will just use all the surveillance data to find
| you the best matches.
|
| https://crossdysfunctional.tumblr.com/post/109024982557/fund...
| ABraidotti wrote:
| Ha. The NSA or Amazon. Just log in through Amazon SSO and it
| matches your purchase history against a variety of
| candidates. Medical purchases excluded for a fee.
| EmilyHughes wrote:
| If you have more trust in a shady private company than your
| own government it's time to move to another country.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| It's very toxic to casually claim that something causes mass
| shootings without evidence.
| ftf7r4y4 wrote:
| Yoofie wrote:
| > Why does no government anywhere run a non-profit dating site
| from tax-payer money
|
| Because its outside the scope & role of the government?
|
| > I really don't understand how this stuff is still not
| regulated anywhere
|
| This is a common theme I see in alot of discussions about
| everything. Do not confuse regulation with enforcement. Any
| regulation that is not enforced is useless, or it is used
| selectively (a.k.a "corruption"). Adding more rules wont solve
| anything.
|
| And plus, we have the rules. Match group, who basically own the
| entire western world online dating market, should have not been
| allowed to buy all their competitors in the first place. This
| is a failure of the regulating bodies to do anything and now
| the users end up paying the price.
| feoren wrote:
| > Do not confuse regulation with enforcement. Any regulation
| that is not enforced is useless, or it is used selectively
| (a.k.a "corruption"). Adding more rules wont solve anything.
|
| This is such a weird take when you think about it. It's like
| saying "people can just run traffic lights; therefore, adding
| more traffic lights cannot prevent accidents." Okay, well,
| preventing people from running traffic lights is just a
| separate issue that should also be solved if it's a problem.
| The answer isn't to stop putting up traffic lights! And it
| doesn't follow that some people not following the rules means
| rules are worthless. Besides, different governments (and
| different agencies within governments) have vastly different
| levels of "teeth". I know it's easy to get jaded seeing all
| the regulatory capture in the U.S., but that's not the entire
| world. Even in the U.S. some regulations are rigorously
| enforced, e.g. FAA regulations.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| It actually seems much more aligned with scope & role of the
| government than of any commercial entity.
| alfnor wrote:
| No, a country is nothing without its people.
| Double_a_92 wrote:
| Future demographics are probably a pretty serious longterm
| issue..
| ghusto wrote:
| > Because its outside the scope & role of the government?
|
| That doesn't align with the fact that there are government
| funded programmes for things like mental well being, sexual
| health and education, and even music appreciation.
|
| The government is concerned with whatever the heck we say it
| is. It's _our_ government.
|
| P.S. No, I don't live in America ;)
| googlryas wrote:
| > Because its outside the scope & role of the government
|
| Is it? Governments care very much about what their
| demographics will be in the future. Governments get involved
| in trying to modify birth rate. Hooking people up seems like
| an interesting idea, especially if the government thinks
| they're going to deal with massively bad demographic shift in
| the midterm future.
| mantas wrote:
| Different governments have widely different scopes & roles.
| It's up to society to decide what government shall do.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| > Why does no government anywhere run a non-profit dating site
| from tax-payer money when this is becoming the most popular way
| people are meeting?
|
| _Popular_ does not mean _effective_. Online dating is the most
| toxic way of dating invented, so why would the governments
| contribute?
| 3dprintscanner wrote:
| Interestingly the Chinese government does something similar:
|
| https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2017/06/27/China-lau...
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/comrade-me...
| tzs wrote:
| > I don't get it. Why does no government anywhere run a non-
| profit dating site from tax-payer money when this is becoming
| the most popular way people are meeting?
|
| California kind of accidentally did so a few years. They
| thought they were simply running a public sex offender
| registry, but it occurred to some sex offenders it was also a
| state run directory of people that would be less likely to be
| put off by their own record and might even have at least one
| important shared interest to bond over.
|
| The state was not pleased with this.
| codeduck wrote:
| this is both awful and hilarious
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| > undermine the self-esteem of young men and scamming them out
| of their money
|
| Your first mistake was thinking that culture actually cares
| about this.
| onetimeusename wrote:
| I don't know about the mass shootings being linked to dating
| apps but I thought about this too.
|
| I think the fundamental problem is that more men always sign up
| on these apps than women. That would be true of a government
| app also. It seems like this ruins the experience for both men
| and women alike. I am speculating here because we don't really
| know much about how these apps work since no one releases their
| user data. But women I have talked to complain about married
| men, copy-pasted pickup lines, and men treating women like
| prostitutes. With my own experience men complain about fake
| accounts, having to do all the effort and getting nothing for
| it, and for both, meeting people, going on dates, and then
| after you've become attracted to each other you find out how
| deeply damaged and incompatible the other person is because
| they hid all their baggage.
|
| A lot of this just seems like it's exacerbated by the use of an
| app. I think the apps drive decent people away. This is all
| speculation.
|
| I somewhat think the whole proposition of online dating was
| doomed to fail. I don't know if a non profit/government office
| could fix this leaving aside how politics could affect it.
| didactylost wrote:
| At some level, a dating network needs to make recommendations.
|
| In Plato's _Republic_ , he proposed his vision for a utopian
| city-state. Essentially, citizens would be ranked into castes:
| bronze/iron for laborers and artisans, silver for soldiers,
| gold for leaders. When people came of age in this utopia, they
| would be paired off through what they would be told is a random
| lottery.
|
| In reality, however, the city's leaders would decide on the
| couplings ahead of time, pairing like with like. Plato called
| this the "noble lie", and it neatly demonstrates what any
| government-run dating system would probably develop into: a
| systemic eugenics program.
| EmilyHughes wrote:
| You people take it to far. I am not talking about some
| dystopian government that forces marriages to create some
| kind of super-citizen.
|
| I just want the incentive of making profit removed and
| provide a decent service that does what it promises. If that
| service can only be provided at a loss (which seems to be the
| case) then let the state do it. Nobody would force anyone to
| use it.
| didactylost wrote:
| Sure, but it's a slippery slope, and there are other ways
| to reduce the profit motive, like grant/donation-based non-
| profits or public benefit corporations.
|
| Well-intentioned government mandates have a nasty habit of
| being used coercively when authoritarian-minded
| administrations get their turn at the helm.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Oh wow. This is the first time we've heard about Plato's
| political thought experiment, didacticos.
| antiterra wrote:
| I'm all for a lot of state-sponsored things, but a government
| run dating site sounds like one of the most dystopian ideas I
| can imagine.
|
| Blaming online dating sites for mental health problems and mass
| shooting is a new one. I don't discount the feeling of despair
| that can occur on dating sites for men. However, the experience
| of a being woman on a dating app is absolutely harrowing, even
| if you have incredibly low standards and/or are incredibly
| desirable.
| LambdaComplex wrote:
| Current dating apps are designed to make money for their
| creators. A dating app made by the government could be made
| with completely different incentives in mind.
|
| To put it differently, I'm reading your argument as
| equivalent to saying that the existence of the USPS (which
| will deliver to remote rural areas, despite the fact that
| doing so isn't profitable) is more dystopian than the
| existence of UPS and FedEx (which will not).
| ryandrake wrote:
| It's always weird to read how government-run XYZ is somehow
| "dystopian" when we currently already have
| MassiveUnaccountableCorporation-run XYZ. I'd rather not have
| either of them run things, but if I had a choice, I'd much
| rather it be an institution that at least in theory answers
| to voters, than a meagcorporation that answers only to a set
| of rich shareholders. Talk about dystopian!
| langitbiru wrote:
| Singapore gov does that (to some extent):
|
| https://www.msf.gov.sg/policies/Marriages/Pages/Finding-a-Pa...
| INTPenis wrote:
| Well how about we start a non-profit dating app? I was just
| wondering how much it could cost to run the backend with todays
| cloud services. With what Tinder is charging for boosts and
| subscriptions I feel like they're raking it in. But I've never
| developed and deployed a fully cloud based app, just used a
| bunch of their services off and on.
| alfnor wrote:
| https://github.com/Alovoa/alovoa
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| I've actually detailed an idea like this a year ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27474424
| svnt wrote:
| It's not non-profit afaik but doesn't plenty of fish [0]
| essentially provide this service?
|
| The problem is the population has already been divided and
| Match exists using predatory practices. You could maybe
| dethrone it using regulations or an organic campaign.
|
| 0 [ https://www.pof.com ]
| slyfocks wrote:
| I've wondered about this for years. Given the obviously
| misaligned incentives between a for-profit dating app and its
| users, dating seems like a perfect area for a non-profit to
| operate.
| watwut wrote:
| ISIS kinda did that, minus app. But the whole process was
| absurdly abusive and exploitative.
| 535188B17C93743 wrote:
| Seems like a waste of tax-payer money to me. Why can't people
| just... meet others offline like they did 10+ years ago.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Bowling alone, pfft... why can't they bowl with somebody?
| acuozzo wrote:
| > Why can't people just... meet others offline like they did
| 10+ years ago.
|
| Because dating apps have distorted courting even if we elect
| to ignore them.
|
| They alter expectations and make the proverbial sea seem much
| more filled with fish than it truly is.
|
| And even if this distortion has no impact on us, we can't
| control whether or not it has had impact on our prospective
| date(s).
|
| Why would your date willfully overlook a glaring fault of
| yours, for instance, if they have 999 likes in their pocket
| from seemingly-flawless suitors?
|
| Hell, even if your date doesn't use dating apps either, then
| they likely know what's available from friends, relatives,
| etc.
| ratww wrote:
| Well, if the government wants to help people meeting offline,
| it's gonna cost a helluva lot more than a website... to the
| point it doesn't sound like a waste anymore. I don't see
| society going back to offline dating by itself.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| People can meet each other offline like they did 10+ years
| ago. They (or some large proportion) might prefer to meet
| online though, as the evidence seems to indicate.
| danielvf wrote:
| The government of Singapore has been active in this area since
| the 80's. Not only having run a dating site, but also
| subsidizing singles cruises, hosting mixer events, and grants
| to college programs to get people together.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Development_Network
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Some places do. Not gov. level, and probably not in the US, but
| your hunch has been followed-up in some european and asian
| towns where they'll organize matching pools of local singles.
| It's beneficial to everyone: the town keeps their working age
| tax payers, willing to build a family there, and the people get
| to find partners with high chance they share many values
| alredy.
| boringg wrote:
| Does anyone know if this applies to Child Care matching sites as
| well?
| cblum wrote:
| Paying for online dating was the reason I met my wife.
|
| I had been using several dating apps and had paid subscriptions
| to all of them. I was getting burned out by the experience and
| decided to let my subscriptions expire and take a break from
| dating, so I wasn't actively checking the apps anymore.
|
| A paid feature of one of the apps I was paying for (Coffee Meets
| Bagel, for the curious) was that it notified me whenever someone
| liked my profile. One day I got one of those notifications,
| checked her profile and arranged a first date.
|
| And now here we are, happily married :)
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| I honestly view online dating as a low-yield random effort. My
| last gf was on Match. I've been on dates from the other sites,
| though Hinge seems to trend too young.
|
| The cost isn't prohibitive to me so I just go with it.
|
| The one thing that should be clear to everyone is that no matter
| what, the most important aspect of dating is to be as
| geographically close to your perceived dating pool as possible.
|
| So figure out the two or three basic requirements you have
| (politics, culture) and try to live where those things are
| common. No amount of effort online or not is going to improve
| your chances of meeting viable partners if you live too far away.
| I think you really need to be within 15 minutes or less. As a
| man, I firmly believe this is a top filter for women when looking
| at profiles.
| codethief wrote:
| The fact that incentives of online dating platforms and their
| users are not aligned is anything but new. But it makes me
| wonder: Maybe a not-for-profit organization would be a better
| model to run an online dating platform?
| dennis_jeeves1 wrote:
| Remaining single is actually a realistic and wise option for many
| men out there.
| nohankyou wrote:
| Don't pay, network! Livejournal was free for me (early 2000s,
| what do I know about it today), and via friends of friends
| feature I met my wife. Of course those relations came from people
| I met on IRC...
| aabbcc1241 wrote:
| One way to make it align is to run dating platform voluntarily
| instead of for profit. This way you really want your effort to be
| helpful to the community.
| k__ wrote:
| I think, OKCupid did rather well. They question approach was a
| bit broad, but if you just answered around 100 very niche
| questions, you'd get good matches.
|
| But to be honest, I did online dating for almost 20 years and got
| like 10 dates from it, 2 of which turned into a relationship.
|
| Some of my friends did much better, though. You know, the tall,
| buff guys with beards, etc. Had at least one date a month. So,
| even with the "show personally via questions" kind of stuff,
| looks are still king in online dating.
|
| I did much better with offline dating. Talking to a interesting
| person is more exciting than just reading about it, I guess.
|
| So, if you wanna go the online route, hit the gym and eat well.
|
| If you're prepared to meet people offline and date at parties,
| meetups, etc. Then you can get away with a less helathy
| lifestyle, haha.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| So the main complaint here seems to be that eHarmony and
| Match.com only let subscribers talk to other subscribers? Is that
| still true? If so, that does indeed sound like a pretty terrible
| way of doing things. If I'm a paying customer I should be able to
| initiate a conversation with anyone who's willing. I don't want
| my prospective date to have to pay money just to talk to me!
|
| In terms of the larger point about the overall incentive
| structure of dating sites, it seems to me there are a few
| possible solutions:
|
| 1. Sites should only allow "lifetime" subscriptions, eliminating
| the perverse incentive to keep people from having successful
| relationships.
|
| 2. Some sort of system for paying per successful match. Something
| like "I'll pay you $1k if I meet my wife through your service."
| That seems way harder to enforce, but would align the incentive
| structures almost perfectly if it could be achieved.
| magic_hamster wrote:
| This was brutal. What a teardown.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| There's a good TikTok addressing why it's impossible to escape
| paying for online dating. Basically, it comes down to the reward
| cycle. When you first sign up, you get a bunch of matches and
| success. Then it tapers off, giving you the option to pay for the
| initial success, which it happily gives you. Repeat.
|
| That's the core reason these apps print money.
| sbf501 wrote:
| This may have been true 12 years ago, but years later OkCupid
| added "last active", which was a search criteria to weed out old
| profiles. At least, was there in 2015 when I met my current
| partner.
|
| The gist of the article seems to be combining two different
| things: why you should pay for online dating, and false
| advertising. I don't think the OP joins those arguments very
| well. Plus, again, this was 12 years ago. I think today OKC might
| be guilty of the same thing they are pointing fingers at back
| then.
| bradlys wrote:
| OKC was bought by Match - they were no longer the same company
| after being acquired as they were before. All these articles
| were written _before_ they were acquired.
| [deleted]
| sbf501 wrote:
| Ah, good point. Didn't know that. The second paragraph still
| holds tho: mixing two arguments.
| romankolpak wrote:
| Related personal anecdote:
|
| I am experimenting with Tinder subscription at the moment, and it
| feels incredibly exploitative. When you make a profile, matches
| are frequent and you can tell that you show up for people.
| However it gradually falls down with time, and the only
| predictable and obvious way to get back up is to pay for Boosts
| and/or Priority Likes.
|
| Right now my 6-month old profile gets ZERO likes outside of the
| time it's Boosted ($3 a pop or something). I get plenty once I'm
| boosted, so the profile attractiveness doesn't seem to be a
| factor.
|
| It feels like the app's algorithms are rigged to gradually push
| you towards paid subscription options. There must be a huge
| invisible market of Tinder whales given how exploitative it is,
| gambling addiction, loneliness, and desperation for dates are
| correlated traits and I would absolutely bet on Tinder exploiting
| this heavily.
| somedude895 wrote:
| Back when I was on Tinder I'd delete my profile and make a new
| one once every three months or so, seemed to do the trick.
| opportune wrote:
| I am pretty sure they also boost you when you start using the
| app again after a period of inactivity, but not sure if the
| implementation/magnitude is different from the new-user bonus
| no_time wrote:
| I'm very suprised they are not using face tracking and/or
| device fingerprinting to thwart this.
| flutas wrote:
| It's all speculation, but they _seem_ to track a large
| amount of data to try and check for "new profiles" that are
| old users starting a new account, supposedly for 3 months
| after you delete your account. These are the ones I've seen
| commonly talked about.
|
| - Phone Number
|
| - IP
|
| - Device IDs
|
| - Email
|
| - Photo hashes
|
| - Photo exif
|
| - Facial recognition
|
| - Linked Facebook, Instagram, Spotify accounts
| welshwelsh wrote:
| Honestly, I am ok with this system. Paying a couple dollars for
| a matchmaking service isn't a big deal. If you go to bars
| instead you will pay way more. An introduction to a potential
| partner is worth at least $50 in my opinion, if anything Tinder
| is too cheap.
|
| There are too many guys on tinder and most of them are not
| serious, mindlessly swiping as a way of wasting time. If you
| filter out the free users and only match guys who pay for boost
| with girls, it's a much better ratio for those guys and a
| better experience for the women since guys who buy boost are
| more invested and more likely to follow through.
| louissan wrote:
| Well I'd rather go to a bar/pub anyway. Social, human beings,
| brawling to order a beer at the zinc, contact and all that?
| Not to mention you at least get the tipsiness/(more: drunk)
| if/when all else fails... 8>
| throwaway289943 wrote:
| Same here, I can look at, meet, and chat with 5-10 girls in
| one evening in a bar, and get a pretty good impression of
| them. Takes months to do the same on a dating app, with
| heaps of added toxic behaviour/people that you don't get in
| a bar. Gave it up a long time ago..
| nerdponx wrote:
| Maybe I'm just socially inept, but I have never once
| managed to meet someone at a bar that wasn't already part
| of some bigger group that I was with.
|
| Edit: that's actually untrue, there are exactly 2
| instances where it happened in my life. They were in the
| kinds of bars that I would usually avoid (too many drunk
| people shouting over loud music), in areas far from where
| I lived, that had pretty strong "going out" cultures.
|
| Edit 2: now that I think about it, I'm not exactly
| dashing handsome. I've historically done a lot better in
| "house party" type of settings, but again that's with
| people who are already friends of friends.
| briga wrote:
| Have you _tried_ to meet someone at a bar that wasn't a
| part of your group?
| throwaway289943 wrote:
| It's dishonest though, it should be clear that you get
| downgraded over time as well, and not just marketed as a
| "boost".
| blfr wrote:
| I've made a similar comment before[1] but this is exactly
| right. The price-to-benefit ratio for Tinder is incredible.
| You can literally fill your calendar with dates for months on
| a budget that would last a couple of decent drinks.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30485955
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Only if you've hit the genetic jackpot.
| notch656a wrote:
| I've always wondered if online dating selects HARD
| (relatively to in-person invites) for looks. I don't look
| very pretty but when I was on the (IRL) dating scene I
| could get probably half the women I talked to out on a
| date if I really tried. Being fairly ugly I tried tender
| and OkCupid for a year or two and was lucky to have
| someone accept once every few months and I had a 100% no-
| show rate where the counterparty backed out. Online
| dating seriously hurt my self esteem until a few months
| after I stopped.
|
| I gave up the apps and married someone meeting them the
| old fashioned way.
| valarauko wrote:
| > I've always wondered if online dating selects HARD
| (relatively to in-person invites) for looks.
|
| I think it does, since it's the primary determinant of
| selection. I also find that in-person personality can be
| more attractive, unlike profiles where you have fewer
| dimensions to go on. Likewise, I do think certain types
| of people do better online and some do better offline.
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| I'm not the prettiest dude in the world, but I'm not
| really particularly ugly.. I look like a brown Matt Damon
| IRL.
|
| I had absolutely zero luck with online dating back when I
| tried it around 2008. I think I just got downranked into
| oblivion by not gaming the system, since those dating
| sites use a ranking algorithm internally to gauge how
| attractive you are. If you click the "like" button on any
| woman you'd be willing to go on a coffee date with, it
| assumes you're a loser and hides you away.
|
| Fortunately, you can network your way into a relationship
| the same way you can get a job.. just put out the word
| among friends, family, family friends, etc that you're
| looking for a girlfriend. Chances are you're within a
| couple of hops of hundreds or thousands of people. This
| isn't good for finding hookups or for incel jerks, but if
| you're ready to settle down it's the best method IMO.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| For men it selects hard for height. Looks are secondary
| if you pass the magic threshold.
| alfnor wrote:
| False. Women see your face before your height on dating
| apps, but vice versa IRL.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| IMO if the business model is to pay for impressions, I wish
| they'd be up front and just state and charge price per mille
| (or hundred or whatever). Instead you get an ambiguous
| "boost" with no accountability/metrics about what even
| happened? They could literally show you to no one and say
| "Oops, guess your profile sucks!"
|
| The match rate thing is also kind of a lark because you don't
| care about matches. You care about matches with people you
| want to match with... in fact that kinda understates the
| ultimate goal -- you care about matches with someone who
| would be good for you (and you for them)... everything else
| is just vanity.
| jrnichols wrote:
| unfortunately Tinder has become a lot less useful, and a
| rising number of OnlyFans creators are using it as a vehicle
| for advertising. They'll match with a guy, chat like normal,
| and then start dropping hints about their "spicy site."
|
| it's really kind of depressing, honestly. Guys on dating
| sites are viewed as transactions. Tinder isn't alone with
| this - they're on _multiple_ sites doing the same thing.
| hahamrfunnyguy wrote:
| I don't mind paying something, but their goal of selling
| boosts, super-likes, etc runs counter to the goal of the
| customer which is to meet a compatible person IRL and then
| (presumably) stop using the site.
|
| My experience with boosts is that they were counter-
| productive. While the boosts yield likes, but a lot of them
| would be profiles I'd already left-swiped on, should have
| been excluded by my filters, or just low-effort profiles. The
| same profiles would keep showing up in my feed too after I
| had swiped.
|
| As for your second point, I think women do exactly the same
| thing. There's just more guys on the site so women are just
| getting a higher ratio low-effort likes. I'd say a good 50%
| of the profiles don't have anything written in them except a
| series of emojis or statements like "I don't know what to
| write here." or other really low effort content. Even the
| gold profiles sending messages would initiate a conversation
| with the dreaded "Hi." These interactions were always a
| complete waste of time, I just stopped responding to them
| after a while.
| michaelchisari wrote:
| I agree, but a honest model has a flat subscription fee
| instead of promising matches for free and upselling through
| nudging and manipulation.
|
| I haven't online dated in a long time, but if I ever do
| again, I'll go with a service that has a transparent pricing
| model with no free plan.
| btbuildem wrote:
| It IS exploitative, by design. If you don't have the paid
| service, they'll never show the people who liked you in your
| normal stack. But once you pay, they've identified you as
| willing to pay, so the incentives are at extreme odds (any time
| you get a match, it's a risk for Tinder that you won't pay
| again)
| onetimeusename wrote:
| ya. I pay about $100 per month over a few apps and if you read
| the sales pages it's clear they deliberately disable useful
| features if you don't pay so you are paying to have an
| "enhanced experience". That alone should suggest they don't
| really have a value proposition for your life. Maybe that's
| because they don't want to be sued by promising to sell
| relationship success. But they keep user statistics secret and
| I suspect that is because the statistics would tell the truth
| about what they sell. I have had a bad experience but I don't
| think HN is the the place to talk about it.
| cryptonector wrote:
| I wonder if for younger people now the best way to meet dates
| is off-line. Well, I suspect it's always been so, but the
| question is whether the culture for young people will be
| decidedly on the off-line side.
| Cloudef wrote:
| mikepurvis wrote:
| If you've already graduated university, aren't part of a
| religious community, and don't want to do the bar/club scene,
| what does that leave? Friends of friends, or family
| introductions? Activity groups like sports/dance? Your
| workplace, or the gym? Neighbours?
|
| Most of these are extremely hit and miss, and a lot of people
| have no interest in being hit on while trying to do their job
| or work out.
|
| Dating sites/apps absolutely fill a need-- you can argue that
| that need only exists because of systemic issues in how
| modern society works, but it's possible to tackle that in
| parallel to adopting a non-judgmental attitude toward those
| using the best tools available within the system we do
| currently have.
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| I'm pretty much in that position and still don't use the
| apps. It's like saying there's nothing to eat and settling
| for grass. For average males they'll provide a fleeting
| moment of hope only to utterly destroy self confidence
| after a few weeks. Better off not using them at all.
| Cloudef wrote:
| Dating apps do not work because you are not actually
| present. You have the attention of hundreds of people at
| the same time, so unless you decide to meet up right away,
| the other party immediately loses interest. Most of the
| people are just looking for sex or something less serious,
| and the apps heavily paywall males. They are cancer.
|
| Meeting through friends is probably the safest, as that at
| least gives you some safety that you arent meeting up with
| someone completely nuts.
|
| Personally I met my date through a bar though.
| blfr wrote:
| > unless you decide to meet up right away, the other
| party immediately loses interest
|
| Well, yeah. You should meet up right away. What else you
| gonna do? Flirt over text for weeks?
| Cloudef wrote:
| Actually get to known each other before we go over for a
| drink or lunch, instead of hurrying it up just to have an
| awkward time?
| blfr wrote:
| You can get to know each other in person. Why would it be
| any more awkward than over text.
| Cloudef wrote:
| I don't know about you, but I don't usually meet up with
| someone just together that I don't know at all. It would
| be nice to talk at least for a while. It's different when
| you meet someone already in a social situation.
| hahamrfunnyguy wrote:
| This is how it's supposed to be done, after all the other
| person wants to meet you too. Typically, I make a
| suggestion of somewhere to meet during the first text
| conversation. Never had anyone decline the offer.
|
| Most of my first dates have been enjoyable, even if I
| didn't see the person again. It's just pleasant casual
| conversation with a stranger.
|
| I've only ever had one really bad first date, but now the
| story is quite entertaining. I had her meet me at a
| concert I was attending with friends. She spent the
| evening alternately hitting on my friends and crying in
| the corner. To be fair, I didn't have high expectations
| for that date anyway which is why I tried to fold it into
| something I was already doing.
| imiric wrote:
| > Dating apps do not work
|
| > unless you decide to meet up right away, the other
| party immediately loses interest.
|
| I think you're contradicting yourself, and making an
| objective statement from your subjective experience.
|
| Dating apps are best used to setup actual physical dates.
| They're the digital equivalent of making eye contact at a
| bar or party, and giving a stranger your contact
| information. All the while eliminating the uncertainty of
| whether the other person is even interested, based on
| initial physical appearance and whatever they decided to
| share in their profile.
|
| > Meeting through friends is probably the safest
|
| Sure, but that's always been the case. It's always been
| risky going on a date with a stranger, or a blind date.
| Dating apps make the blind date a bit safer, while
| substantially opening up the possible dating pool to
| beyond just via friends.
|
| Are they predatory, full of dark patterns and exploit
| lonely men? Absolutely. But I'd still argue they're
| better than meeting a random person at the bar, evidenced
| by many people who do find suitable short or even long-
| term partners on them.
| Cloudef wrote:
| Yes, I agree I have bit of biased view here. I do find it
| very unnatural to go to blind date with person I barely
| know. Compared to something lets say bar, it's less
| unnatural because you both just happened to be there,
| maybe you both came with some other friends and just
| happened to start talking to each other. To be honest,
| I've had better experiences meeting people through non
| dating online communities than from dating apps, because
| you already have kind of an idea how the person you are
| meeting is like.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| > non dating online communities
|
| How does the geographical aspect work? Are you mobile
| enough that you don't mind meeting a person that's a
| flight away? Or is it primarily online communities that
| are already geo-bound, like discords/reddits for
| particular cities?
| Cloudef wrote:
| In my case, there were both cases. Meeting people far
| away, but also locally. Sometimes we would gather
| somewhere as a group.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| > Most of the people are just looking for sex or
| something less serious...
|
| Not in my limited experience browsing the 30-40 range in
| my area. There are a handful of profiles where it's
| clearly an ENM couple looking for playmates, but almost
| all the rest have the exhausted-sounding language of
| "serious only please", "no hookups/nsa", "please don't be
| a weirdo/cheater", "please have your shit together", etc.
|
| > ... and the apps heavily paywall males. They are
| cancer.
|
| Yes, absolutely. The current state of affairs sucks for
| everyone. But I'm not sure if meeting people at a bar is
| necessarily any guarantee of finding someone who isn't
| "completely nuts".
| ketzo wrote:
| I mean -- I've had multiple medium-to-long term,
| fulfilling relationships that started on dating apps.
| They do work sometimes.
|
| Yeah, it's a shitty environment, and it's very much a
| numbers game (especially for hetero guys), but again --
| you're coming from an extremely judgmental place.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| The number of men with the attitude that the problem
| couldn't possibly be the way they use the apps is
| astounding.
|
| A female friend of mine took some very expensive online
| dating class run by a former data scientist from one of
| these apps and she started her own side business fixing
| mens profiles. I was very skeptical at first but I have
| several friends who've used her. Each of them went from
| basically no success at all to getting dates every week.
|
| The good news is while there's probably nothing you can
| do to make it a truly enjoyable experience, online dating
| can work quite well largely because the competition is so
| poor. Ever watch a female friend swipe? It's amazing how
| bad most men are at this.
| edude03 wrote:
| Was it Logan Ury? If so I think that's part of a much
| more complicated and nuanced discussion on self worth,
| self reflection, knowing what you want etc more than
| anything specific to "apps"
| mattmaroon wrote:
| I think the teacher of the class was female but I'm not
| certain! Honestly I've seen some of the profile
| transformations she's done and they're good. They got
| great results. And there's nothing magical about them,
| just some good insights.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I can't claim to be any kind of expert, but there are a
| number of TikTok accounts that get into this kind of
| thing, like Eric Explains. One of the biggest principles
| is that many women come to an environment like a dating
| app with a lot of preconceived notions about the men
| they're going to find there-- that they're all going to
| be sleazes, pathetic, desperate, bland, immature, out of
| shape, whatever.
|
| So your #1 goal with a profile is to use the pictures to
| tell a story that challenges these preconceptions. For
| example:
|
| - Overall, favour photos that other people took of you
| over selfies (communication: I have good people in my
| life and am not looking for a support system)
|
| - A picture of you being domestic, like cuddling your
| pet, cooking, or even cleaning (communication: I have my
| shit together, can take care of myself, and am not
| looking for a substitute mom)
|
| - A picture of you doing something active that you love
| (communication: I already have interesting passions and
| will have worthwhile things to talk about)
|
| - A picture of you giving a presentation (communication:
| I'm a leader, people listen to me when I speak)
|
| - A picture of you in a suit at an event (communication:
| I clean up nice, I get invited to fancy parties)
|
| - A picture of you in an exotic location (communication:
| I travel and have varied experiences)
|
| But the main thing is that the pictures tell a story far
| more than the words do, so _use the pictures_. Don 't
| make the words a bland list of assertions about your
| personality, instead use that space to tell a joke or
| give a conversation prompt.
|
| And then there's a few sort of obvious turn-offs to
| avoid, like the shirtless bathroom selfie, the fish pic,
| the pic with your ex, the joke that you're willing to lie
| about how you met. All of that just makes you blend in
| with the crowd rather than stand out.
| throwaway289943 wrote:
| Another big reason why dating apps suck, is that people
| don't go on dates. People meet their partners in groups
| of friends of friends, at parties. Before dating apps,
| nobody would ask a stranger out for a date, and nobody
| wants to do that now either, so the apps is enabling
| something that people don't actually want.
|
| It should be focused on getting together groups of
| friends of friends for parties instead.
| Cloudef wrote:
| Even if you do, it usually feels very unnatural as you
| don't really know each other yet. I agree that meeting in
| a group works better.
| slater wrote:
| Personals ads in newspapers have been a thing since
| forever
| kashunstva wrote:
| > meet people in real life like you are meant to be.
|
| Meant by whom - you? The form of this argument could be
| extended in any number of equally ludicrous directions where
| things were previously one way and now they are another, e.g.
| "Forget airplanes, walk like you are meant to."
| skyyler wrote:
| I kind of agree with you, but expand "real life" to include
| "group chats local to your geographic location and/or hobby
| and/or interests"
|
| Furries have been doing it like this for years and it works
| very well. I met my wife in a chatroom dedicated to making
| fun of people that misinterpret Hegel.
| Carrok wrote:
| > meet people in real life like you are meant to be
|
| Keep this gatekeeping nonsense to yourself. I met my wife of
| many years on a dating app. We probably never would have met
| by chance.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Realizing there is survivorship bias might help people
| appreciate the complexities this topic.
| Cloudef wrote:
| Good for you. Doesnt change the fact they are shady and
| made to mainly exploit people's weakness for money.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| > exploit people's weakness for money
|
| Weakness?
| Cloudef wrote:
| Loneliness
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| I feel like that's just being human, not a weakness. Thy
| are exploiting humanities desire to form relationships.
| kzrdude wrote:
| I'm sure you have some vulnerability in your humanity
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| For sure, the spirit is willing but the flesh is spongy
| and bruised. But in this case our ability and desire to
| form attachments is also a strength, I find it funny to
| be called a weakness.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| How is wanting to meet a partner "weakness"?
| Cloudef wrote:
| Loneliness can make people do dumb things, like waste
| money on scammy dating apps that artificially block you
| out unless you fetch the money.
| skyyler wrote:
| Calling loneliness a "weakness" says a lot more about you
| than dating apps.
| LtWorf wrote:
| 2-3 years ago you could use a GPS faker, stay somewhere random
| a week and then return and you'd have many matches again.
|
| I experimented a lot with it because I used to work at a
| different online dating company (where I was also doing scummy
| things).
| hahamrfunnyguy wrote:
| I am sure that is the case, their goal is to keep you swiping
| as much as possible and buying their upgrades. I had a Gold
| membership for about a year or so. Boosts didn't work for me, I
| found that the boots only yielded a lot of low-quality likes
| (ie: profiles, that my filters should have rejected). I also
| continuously had profiles showing up that didn't meet my filter
| criteria and that I'd already swiped left on just days before.
|
| I ended up emailing support and making the case that the site
| wasn't working as advertised or even as support said it was
| supposed to be working. I ended up getting a full refund.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Agreed. It also seems extremely gross that you're initially
| pushed to buy Tinder Gold, but then only afterward realise
| there are still features locked behind Tinder Platinum, and
| _even after that_ you 'll probably spend still more buying
| packs of boosts and super-likes.
|
| I know they're far from the only game in town, but this really
| feels like the behaviour of a monopoly entity that knows it can
| do basically whatever.
| nerdponx wrote:
| If I were an unethical data scientist working at Tinder, I
| would actually reserve the best matches until later in the
| period, after the initial flurry of "visibility" subsides a
| bit. That way you are less likely to immediately find a good
| date or two in the first few matches, helping to ensure that
| you will not just unsubscribe next month, while providing you
| with enough tantalizing options that you think it makes sense
| to keep going. "Great matches started coming up, I had better
| renew so I don't lose out!"
|
| It's like a slot machine that actively adjusts the odds as
| you play, in order to keep you hooked as long as possible.
|
| I'm pretty solidly mediocre when it comes to "algorithm
| design" tasks like this one, so I thought of it you can bet
| for sure that someone at Tinder did too.
| [deleted]
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