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].
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.
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.
Match rates where true for me as well in comparison to other apps. However, what I found interesting is that I’d routinely run out of matches on my last month of being “premium”. As soon as the paid gig was up, all of a sudden, profiles of potential matches in my area that I had never seen prior are numerous. BUT.. to like or match, I have to resubscribe… hmm…
Another obvious manipulation by Hinge (and the other apps) is I’m almost 100% positive they artificially limit who they show you by stacking the deck with a bunch of profiles of women they know haven’t logged into the service in awhile. Basically priming the pump with “possibility” to keep you engaged; diluting the active profiles and spreading any likely match possibilities out over time.
It’s things like these two realizations that made me decide these apps are not in existence to help you find a match. They’re incentive is the same as Facebook, engagement. You matching means you no longer using the app and that’s bad for business.
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.
Your experience may have location bias? I.e. where did you use OKC?
I used it in Europe (2010--2011, mostly Germany and Italy) and Asia (2011-2013, Hong Kong) and Europe again (2014--now mostly Berlin & Hamburg) and my experiences were/are very different.
People are from the full political spectrum. Very right people are the outlier though, admittedly.
In Berlin there is a leftist bias but this is pretty newish (wasn't like this at all, when I started using OKC again in Europe in 2014).
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.
"The term "Cultural Marxism" refers to a far-right antisemitic conspiracy theory which claims that Western Marxism is the basis of continuing academic and intellectual efforts to subvert Western culture" [0]
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.
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
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. :(
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.)
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.
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 fiancée. But those were years ago and I'm sure they're gone.
I’m engaged now, and met my fiancée 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.
What I used to love about OkCupid was how it would nudge you into writing a profile to tell who you are and what you care about. My profile had grown and it was a nice little place to present myself to the world and to talk to various women sometimes not even for dating but for the sake of an interesting conversation. Compare that with Tinder that won't even let you write more than small quantity of letters, come this is just text! There used to be an interesting thing where you would see who visited your profile and vice versa. Sadly the OkCupid website has been crippled into being unusable and the app is just a worse tinder now. Profiles are short, and mostly uninteresting.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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"?
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.
And if someone finds a match but doesn't inform the site you lose out, no? I expect a lot of people to be dishonest if it means getting a bunch of money back.
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.
Honestly, the worst part about dating apps is that it's basically become the only way a lot of women want to meet men. And I'm not speaking from a disgruntled male perspective, I'm speaking from a friend of a lot of women who've essentially stated exactly that.
It's funny because most of my LTIR friends have met their significant others through more traditional means and the perpetually single are stuck on gamified apps.
The apps can definitely work so it's not all for naught but I think the privacy and low risk (emotionally) nature of them leads to an over reliance by a lot of people.
I highly doubt most women would reject a male asking for a date IRL but not in Tinder or whatever. I think the preference for online dating is simply convenience, taking the path of least resistance.
IMO taking this path of least resistance is a bad idea, especially much so for males who make up the vast majority of dating app users. Meeting people and asking them out takes some courage and makes you stand out from the crowd. That’s the main reason why it can work so well, in online dating you’re just one face among others.
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.
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.
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.
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 circumstance and balls to approach a woman.
ghosting occurs because despite that people complain about it, they would resent even more being told that they don't make the cut. ghosting is a little disappointment each day, and it fades as the days accumulate.
and if you still don't like it, just accept that the other person does like it, and it's a kindness you could extend to them.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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
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.
"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...
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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?
> 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.
"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.
> 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)
> 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.
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.
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?
> 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.
> 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.
> 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?
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Economists assume a utility curve in the same way that physicists assume spherical cows. They are a useful abstraction which help explain many things, but don't reflect reality completely.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
"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%).
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.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> “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.
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.
Many people, including myself, don't find the whole "cycles"/percentage thing attractive, though. Especially for a longer term relationship, why would you want to date someone who loved you for who you were only part of the time? Especially seeing as its something you can't change about yourself.
In reality I've generally found that many "bi" guys are just waiting for a "real" relationship with a chick, while doing guys on the side. Hell, even outside of relationships, most bi guys I've met would pick a chick over a guy 9 times out of 10. Some of that is due to the fact it's a lot rarer/harder for them to hook up with a chick vs a dude (latter being more open and free with sex).
If someone is bi, has a romantic/sexual preference for both and experiences periods where they really do prefer one or the other then a traditional relationship is probably not going to work best for them; something poly or very open seems like the batter option, where their partner is aware and agrees to it.
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?
>"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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Yeah, I'm gay & bi guys in the gay community complain that they're not as accepted, which to some degree is definitely true. But the number of "bi" guys who want to bang guys on the side while looking for a "real" relationship with a woman is staggering. I try to avoid them at all costs; I'm not a fleshlight/something to discard.
I feel like the gay community needs to treat bi guys better but at the same time bi guys need to take a look at themselves and consider if they're romantically bi, or just sexually bi because they just want to fulfil their sexual needs (which is much easier with guys obviously).
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).
Besides, what did they actually look at? According to a friend, it's a lot easier to get a male date, even if you're more interested in women. How would that affect the 80% figure?
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.
I loved them when I trusted them to keep backups of things that were taken down like this, but the fact that they quickly removed KiwiFarms from their archive has dented my confidence a lot.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
There's certainly no doubt in my mind that they save your "top" match, based on your swipe history and whether or not they've already matched you, to show up right after you use your last free swipe. Wait 12h and hope they show up again? Maybe, or maybe I'll spend the $2 to get that super like. Very scummy.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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>
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..
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.
I know that works to make friends, when you drunkenly, randomly start to talk to other people, or jump into conversations.
But how does it work for meeting the opposite sex ? Being drunk for these kinds of things usually isn't good
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.
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)
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.
I've only ever used ok cupid back in the day, not tinder, but - why do likes matter? Can't you still use the search function to find people you're interested, and begin interacting my messaging them?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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”
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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".
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.
>>>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.
Huh? Before dating apps, you would do things like go to the mall, and look for cute girls in the food court to start a conversation with. We were absolutely approaching strangers to ask out. Did you not date in the late 90s (or even earlier)?
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.
> 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.”
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
I am living in Singapore and never heard of anything like that. Would you mind giving some links besides another (purely declarative) initiative of ministry of youth?
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
It's like saying, "Some people keep running this traffic light but we don't have any traffic cops. What if we lowered the speed limit so they wouldn't be going so fast when they run it?"
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.
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).
>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.
I once was a part of making a Facebook clone for the US military so service men and women wouldn't be on Facebook giving away secrets.
It was garbage and nobody used it but nobody cared because we weren't being paid to get people to use it.
The functions of the USPS and a dating site differ substantially. If we were talking about an email or file transfer service then we could at least compare the paradigm.
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!
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.
If you leave it up to private companies, you'd still get an eugenics program, one that selects for creating the perfect little consumer.
In a future where dating apps (and technology in general) becomes the only way to meet potential mates, only those who successfully "engage" with the apps/tech in a way that the company approves of will be allowed to reproduce.
Those that either refuse to engage on principles, or don't "engage" with it the "right" way (let's say by not falling for dark patterns, etc) and end up banned are effectively prevented from reproducing.
Both options can end up dystopian, but I'll take a government-run scheme any day. Not only are governments at least theoretically accountable to their citizens, but they are also as slow as molasses and terrible at tech, so they'd fare much worse at eugenics than a private company.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nice effort but I'm thinking more of a cloud-native app. Simply because if it's to be non-profit, it should be as cheap as possible. And RDS with MariaDB does not fit. Alovoa seems more aimed at self-hosting.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We’re not still confusing bypassing encryption by compromising device security with “[undermining] effective cryptosystems” like those articles when everyone was leaving WhatsApp?
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).
> 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.
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.
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...
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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)
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.
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.
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
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.
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 exes 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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"
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'd be worried that the change in people's attention spans means that a OKC clone (which as I understand relied on lots of personality questions) wouldn't work today as most people just wouldn't actually complete it. A promotional post by an "influencer" would probably make those people self-select too.
I think there is a lot of fatigue from the type of low effort, low value interactions that Tinder et al facilitate. I have no marketing data available, but I would guess there is demand for an app that at least makes an effort to create higher value connections.
The social media influencer idea solves the problem of onboarding a lot of people fast, particularly women. I disagree that the audience self selects to have low attention span- I doubt that matters if there is sufficient demand for a non-Tinder dating app experience.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Bought a Bumble Premium with a one time payment of ~120 EUR. In three months got only one match which led to a date. But what a date! We are in love now and I am quitting all dating apps I have used before.
My match was ONLY possible due to a Premium subscription. These 120 EUR were the best spent money of my live.
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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
A funny anecdote: back in the day there was an app called Flamite that used the now defunct tinder api and you could use it to automate matchmaking. what i did is to yes everyone and then i waited a week. i had 200 matches. I then checked all profiles and removed 120 that i didn't like. i wrote to the remaining 80. i had good chats with 20 of them, met 3 of them and now I'm happily married to one.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Met my wife on OKCupid, we have kids now and have been happily married. I thank God for OKC and it's impact on my life.
eHarmony told me I was unmatchable and match.c was worthless- I agree with this article reply rate was nil. OKC reply rate was awesome and people were much more chill to just IM for a bit and have real exchanges. I met my wife in under two months on the OKC platform.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
app idea: if anyone watches Indian Matchmaking, the matchmaker gets "paid' during the wedding (or through other gifts and influence). so there is a huge incentive to marry (if that was the only end goal to dating). also you don't really get many choices (maybe only 3 over a few months) so there is a lot of hopefulness, openess, compromises (and expectations, that makes for the drama in the show. )
if traditional matchmaking has worked, why not just apply new tools to what humanity has been doing?
Who wants to build a better dating website? Free and open source without any bots run by donations. Dating website is a human right. People are lonely and this dating websites are taking advantage of the situation.
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?
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...
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.
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."
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?
The biggest problem with current dating apps is that they limit swipes behind a paywall.
Sure, you can pay to get the opportunity to swipe on more profiles, but you can't pay to give everyone else the opportunity to swipe on yours. That means paying for more swipes doesn't really get you more matches.
Dating is a numbers game, and Tinder/etc. are rigged not to play.
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