The fact that one company repeatedly bought out its competition and now owns, according the the article, 45 dating apps probably has a lot to do with why they suck. Instead of competing by trying to be better, just buy out the rivals, gut them, and make everything worse. As long as the dominant player has lots of capital to buy any upstarts and the regulatory environment lets them do it, it can be an easier way to make money than actually being good would be.
As well as regulating them, Western governments might want to actually fund high-quality, not-for-profit dating systems of some kind. Improved health for citizens, lessened extremism, not to mention possibly boosted population growth could result.
I've thought for a while now that it is a matter of national interest that your population couples up and has children. It's immensely important for the success of a nation and it's odd that the majority of how people meet now is through data apps and that there is no oversight over these at all. They have every incentive to match you with someone you are more likely to have a short term relationship than match you with someone that will result in a successful long term relationship. This has terrible long-term outcomes for a population at a large enough scale. With all of the talk of how algorithms can affect our society through news and social media, I've been somewhat surprised that dating app algorithms have not had much attention.
It is socially corrosive. However, "family values" have traditionally
been framed as a conservative value in the USA/UK/AUS at least.
So, how do we move "love and human relationships" back into a
progressive position in a time when entrenched power profits from
lonliness and division?
Well, in the USA, for the past at least 50 years, "family values" means "fundamentalist Christian" rather than supporting families/childrearing/parenting/etc. This is why "family values" politicians are usually against family leave, prenatal programs, early childhood programs, or well any social programs designed to support poor families
Progressivism in the west has decided to take the track of individualism rather than collectivism, and this is the result. If people are lonely, it’s not “power and profits” causing that. It’s the decline of what used to be the strongest forces bonding people and communities together: religion and kinship. And progressivism has helped achieve that decline, by making social liberalism a core part of the platform—and indeed the most important part.
When you tell people that they’re unique individuals and self actualization is the highest virtue, there’s little room for family.
Thanks, great link and concept. Think I heard Peterson remark on this
Bolshevik dehumanisation of relations before, but this is a memorable
handle on it.
edit: also, while we're talking of glasses, that whole
conservative-progressive axis is through the looking glass now. A lot
of what looks "progressive" now is simply restorative to common sense.
US conservatives have nothing to do with maintaining or returning to historic norms. From massive government subsidies and radical tax policies to wild spending sprees they’ve completely abandoned past stances only keeping the name. Similarly modern democratic politicians have no real connection to the glass of water theory and similar stances.
Voters on each side are extremely diverse to the point there’s little universal on either side. As should be obvious from the two party system.
Both parties in the US are fairly authoritarian. They've dine an excellent job at riling up the public into picking sides while the parties themselves sure seem to be one and the same.
Sure they get into public debates and throw political mud at each other, but at the end of the day they agree on direction and end up only debating details.
For example, both parties want to shut down the southern border and only debate how to do it. Both parties want larger government with more regulations, they just occasionally debate which regulations to add. Both want to spend like there's no tomorrow, debating only who to give the newly printed money/debt to. They both agree that banks and many large corps are too big to fail. They both continue to pull more power to the federal level, only pulling state-level stunts when its a political show. They both lean heavily on executive power when in charge, wielding more and more power from the Oval Office and circumventing congress.
The list goes on, but from where I sit we aren't offered the choice between a more liberal or conservative party, we're offered to pick one of two sides in a fight that is largely chummed with political hot topics that keep us all arguing with each other while the politicians largely do whatever they want.
You didn't, no. Though you were replying to a comment specifically about US conservatives and that is generally considered to be the Republican party.
I should have clarified though, and wasn't even meaning it as a comment directly or argumentatively at you so much as a comment on our current political system.
Conservative doesn't necessarily == old. I'm a woman who loves other women, we've been around forever, but conservatives want to make it difficult for us to have relationships.
Conservative means old-fashioned, not old. More specifically, it means returning to some halcyon (usually mythical) "good old days" when things weren't "degenerate".
Sure, homosexuals have been around forever, but societal acceptance of homosexual relationships is relatively new. Conservatives (in the US) want to turn the clock back on that, and make those relationships socially unacceptable or even illegal.
Of course, conservatives have certain ideas of when exactly the "good old days" were. Homosexuality was very accepted (even encouraged) in ancient Greece, for example, but Christian US conservatives obviously don't want to go back to those days.
> Sure, homosexuals have been around forever, but societal acceptance of homosexual relationships is relatively new
> Homosexuality was very accepted (even encouraged) in ancient Greece, for example
"Homosexuality" in ancient Greece was different in so many ways from the modern concept, one has to question whether it is appropriate to apply that modern label to it. Doing so tends to promote misunderstanding, by erasing rather than highlighting how very different ancient Greek attitudes were from all contemporary Western ones, whether progressive or conservative.
(1) was it homosexuality or bisexuality? It is questionable whether the distinction between the two even makes sense in an ancient Greek context
(2) it was socially acceptable for a grown man to have relations with a teenage boy, but a grown man having such a relationship with his social equal (another free adult male) was (generally speaking) viewed much more negatively; by contrast, in the contemporary West, the former is increasingly viewed as taboo, the latter as increasingly acceptable, which is moving in the complete opposite direction to the ancient Greek attitude
(3) the term "homosexuality" encompasses both male-male and female-female relationships, but ancient Greeks didn't treat them as equivalent: in many city-states, the former was much more socially acceptable than the latter (Sparta was a noticeable exception, possibly due to its more egalitarian gender relations). Many cite Aristophanes' speech in Plato's Symposium as one of the few ancient forerunners of the modern homosexual-vs-heterosexual distinction, yet it treats female-female and male-male relations as two separate categories, rather than merging them into a single category of "homosexual"
(4) contemporary Western ideas tend to emphasise heterosexual and homosexual relations as interchangeable and equivalent; ancient Greek views did not. Many ancient Greek men had both a wife and an adolescent male lover, but we have no evidence any of them ever thought of marrying the latter. They wouldn't view the two as coequal members of a common category, as much contemporary Western thought does
(5) the idea of sexual orientations ("homosexual", "heterosexual", etc) as categories of persons was largely unknown in the pre-modern world. As I mentioned, Aristophanes' speech in the Symposium is sometimes viewed as a precursor of that modern idea, but (a) the Symposium is arguably not representative of the mainstream of ancient Greek thought on this topic, (b) given it is a speech by a comedian in a text rich with irony, it is unclear how seriously Plato actually wanted us to take it (c) in the details it doesn't agree with modern concepts either (missing any concept of bisexuality, and treating male-male and female-female relations as two separate categories on the same level as male-female ones)
> or why you're putting scare-quotes around it
To emphasise its status as a word (and the specific concept/cultural construct that word represents), which emerged in the context of a particular culture and historical period, and hence whose applicability to very different cultures in very different historical periods is open to question
> Anything involving sexual relations between men is anathema to Christian conservatives.
I don't see how the views of contemporary Christian conservatives has any inherent relevance to the question of how applicable the word "homosexuality" is to ancient Greece
>I don't see how the views of contemporary Christian conservatives has any inherent relevance to the question of how applicable the word "homosexuality" is to ancient Greece
The entire context of this question is about what "conservative" means, and we're talking about modern American conservatives. It's entirely relevant; you're the one going on a weird tangent about ancient Greece when I merely brought it up to illustrate that mores change over the centuries and between cultures.
The definition of conservative isn't nearly as black and white, especially in the US.
What is conservative, in the sense of wanting things not change, is a constant moving bar and requires more context. Conservative, in the sense of going back to something in the past, requires context of how far you want to go back.
> Of course, conservatives have certain ideas of when exactly the "good old days" were. Homosexuality was very accepted (even encouraged) in ancient Greece, for example, but Christian US conservatives obviously don't want to go back to those days.
This is a perfect example of the latter. Anyone in the US that considers removing protections for sexual identity must first pick a time in the past where the laws and norms fit their preferences. That can be called conservative, but is it really?
For the former, my generation's big push was to finally make gay marriage legal. It was progressive for sure, and classically liberal in the sense that we were trying to further protect individual rights and freedom to choose. Once it passed, though, does it become conservative? Personally I prefer the definition of conservative that is more present focused, preferring to leave things as they are today unless we have a very good reason to change it. In that sense, protecting gay marriage and similar protections on the books today would be very conservative and trying to remove them would fall into some other bucket that likely doesn't have a name (reductivist? destructionist?).
> It was progressive for sure, and classically liberal in the sense that we were trying to further protect individual rights and freedom to choose. Once it passed, though, does it become conservative?
Radical gay liberationists argued (and still argue) that same-sex marriage was always conservative rather than truly progressive, since it is trying to co-opt and tame gay radicalism into sustaining traditional social institutions such as marriage, rather than what they argue would be the truly progressive approach, which would be to dismantle those institutions entirely.
Words like "conservative" and "progressive" have no inherent meaning, absent a background political ideology to read them against. Once you pick your political ideology, that ideology then gives those words meaning for you – but to someone else, who has chosen a different ideology, they can have radically different meanings. If we can't agree on what is the objectively correct ideology, then there we won't be able to agree on any meaning of those terms as objectively correct.
> Radical gay liberationists argued (and still argue) that same-sex marriage was always conservative rather than truly progressive, since it is trying to co-opt and tame gay radicalism into sustaining traditional social institutions such as marriage, rather than what they argue would be the truly progressive approach, which would be to dismantle those institutions entirely.
And I would argue that is an unnecessarily extreme stance. The concept of marriage can't be dismantled, at best we could remove any state concept of it and get rid of any legal protections, tax benefits, etc. I don't personally see the value in that over making sure everyone has access regardless of who they wish to marry, though regardless marriage as a concept would never be abolished as it exists both in state and religious contexts.
> Words like "conservative" and "progressive" have no inherent meaning, absent a background political ideology to read them against. Once you pick your political ideology, that ideology then gives those words meaning for you – but to someone else, who has chosen a different ideology, they can have radically different meanings. If we can't agree on what is the objectively correct ideology, then there we won't be able to agree on any meaning of those terms as objectively correct.
This is a really strange view on language in my opinion. We absolutely could define what the terms conservative and progressive mean, and the definitions could be absolute rather than relative. In my experience people do seem to have different understandings of the terms today, but that can easily be a failure to agree of definitions rather than a given side effect of the terms themselves being relative to one's starting point.
> The concept of marriage can't be dismantled, at best we could remove any state concept of it and get rid of any legal protections, tax benefits, etc
In Australia, unmarried couples (what we call de facto relationships) have essentially the same legal rights and benefits as legally married couples. In fact, Australia extended de facto status to same-sex couples before it legalised same-sex marriage, rendering the latter move an essentially symbolic measure, at least as far as Australian domestic law goes. There's no reason why other countries (including the US) couldn't do the same thing, except maybe "conservatism"?
And once unmarried relationships are made legally equivalent to married ones, you don't need to retain government recognition of marriage. One could just repeal marriage laws, and abolish marriage as a secular legal concept. If individuals want to get married as a cultural or religious tradition, that's a private matter in which the government doesn't need to get involved. If a couple are separating and can't agree on issues such as property and children, and hence need the courts to decide those issues, the courts don't need to know or care whether the couple are "married" or not.
I think most gay liberationists would be happy with an outcome in which marriage disappears from the law, and starts to fade from mainstream culture. Yes, there will probably always be minorities of religious conservatives/etc who retain it, but there's a saying "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good"
> This is a really strange view on language in my opinion. We absolutely could define what the terms conservative and progressive mean, and the definitions could be absolute rather than relative
You can define words to mean whatever you want. The problem is, different people define words differently, and if definitions disagree, what makes one person's definitions objectively superior to another's?
No doubt one can come up with completely unreasonable definitions – if someone was to define either "conservative" or "progressive" as "the belief that the moon is made of green cheese", that's obviously not a definition worthy of anyone's time. But, if radical progressives start arguing "'mainstream' progressivism is really conservatism", that doesn't seem to me to be an inherently unreasonable position, in the way that the 'green cheese' definition is. It is a reasonable definition if their views are right; and its value if their views are wrong may depend on how exactly one thinks their views are wrong.
I generally agree with what you're saying here. I'm all for less regulation and smaller governments, that would include removing the legal definition and any legal accounting for the concept of marriage. I think you would still need to get rid of any benefits unmarried couples would be offered though, otherwise you really left all the government programs in place and did nothing but abolish a single term from the laws.
> You can define words to mean whatever you want. The problem is, different people define words differently, and if definitions disagree, what makes one person's definitions objectively superior to another's?
As far as I see it words are entirely arbitrary, there is no objectively superior definition. The only important factor is that definitions are shared. If everyone makes up their own definitions for a shared set of words we'll never understand each other.
I think we get into problems when people begin refining terms like "progressive" or "conservative" when people start adjusting their understanding to allow themselves to fit into one bucket or the other. I.e. people don't learn the shared definition of each term and decide if they fit into either bucket, the find themselves wanting to fit into one bucket or the other and redefine terms to reshape their reality. Tribalism at its finest, basically. The idea of not fitting into either category is a bit scary or stress-inducing, people want to fit in and it is easier to change definitions rather than to change their opinions or beliefs.
I imagine whatever the matching algorithm, somebody will object to it. For example, if one political orientation is generally considered less attractive by women, the platform will have to decide if they want to artificially boost those people or not. I think either decision will upset somebody.
There’s a pretty strong correlation between gender and political affiliation, if we match between similar politics, some people might be hard to match.
That's what everyone says but they're just Maginot lining it. There's a new frontier: gametogenesis, embryo sequencing, and paid surrogacy if not artificial gestation. When that frontier opens the storyline changes.
It's still very difficult to raise a baby on your own and even with two people. It will still feel like someone's career is harder to manage with a child, and so I don't think these things are really going to make much difference for the average person that will likely not be able to afford these things anyway.
A committed married couple having children at a healthy age, feeding them well, and keeping them safe are going to still perform extraordinarily well against what you've laid out, and will likely also have higher happiness levels.
There should be an auction system for women to accept bids from the government to have kids. Might not get the type of parents society wants though.
Or remove old age benefits, and make it so you might only get them directly from your kids if the kids are willing to support you. That would put long term consequences more into view and link costs and benefits.
> There should be an auction system for women to accept bids from the government to have kids. Might not get the type of parents society wants though.
I always thought this was closer to fair.
If (expected cost of child) >> (expected benefits for having child), are we really surprised that a lot of people decide not to?
If you want to look at the results when that changes to == or <, look at lower income families, where the US incentives are higher (additional low income-qualified programs + absolute tax breaks are more valuable) and child costs lower (greater use of public education and facilities).
But... given the nature of a free market, I expect adjusting the benefits for higher-income people would be cost-prohibitive.
In countries with solidary pension systems you can surely bind retirement benefits to number of children.
The issue being, they try to avoid paying more than the bare minimum anyway and if you pay less, that means dead old homeless people on the street. Would be a great advertisement to having children, thoug.
In my coutry, most people under 45 (who could actually bear children) doubt they will see any retirement ever. Of course that affects their desire for procreation as well.
That sounds very, very expensive. Assuming that the single parents that would most need the help here similarly can't afford the taxes to fund these programs, who is paying for and subsidizing it?
If its a massive shift towards corporate taxes, I could probably get behind that.
Most people in the past and in the current day have none of that and still have children. The most well-developed and stable countries will most of what you laid out have some of the lowest birth rates.
Ending wasteful spending of our tax dollars on gov contractors and letting them slide with huge overcharges, partly due to use-it-or-lose it budgeting, would help in a big way. Ending this shit budgeting practice would also be big.
Nevermind how much of our tax money goes towards the MIC. Rather see our money go towards these programs to help one another, over bombs to tear people apart.
Optimizing spending and cutting waste only gets so far, and its only a short term fix. At the end of the day the system needs to include a sustainable model for one of the population to be subsidized by everyone else, in this case that segment is single parents.
With many western countries also seeing a large growth in the retired population, that leaves a segment of the population heavily subsidizing the elderly and single parents, along with all other government programs and similar groups that need help (like the poor, students, those too sick to work, etc)
> one of the population to be subsidized by everyone else
When you frame it that way, you're setting it up to fail, asking "everyone else" to pay tax dollars to support "one". How about instead: one of the population (namely ultra-wealthy people and businesses) subsidizing everyone else. Now, it's the larger "everyone else" who is benefitting, at the expense of a small group who should hold less democratic power due to its size.
I'm not saying you're doing this but phrases like the one quoted above are sometimes used to divide the "everyone else" group against each other, in order to erode support for programs that ultimately benefit them.
I totally get that framing can make a difference, unfortunately in politics it often seems to be the largest factor. If the system is that fragile, though, it does make me question if its the right answer. People that can should be willing to help subsidize those in need because they see it as the right thing to do, not because they're convinced by a story that may be more spin or even a hit of gas lighting "for the greater good."
That said, with regards to dividing "everyone else" with such phrases, I wish politicians hadn't done so well leveraging phrases that best explain a program as divisive language. It is one part of the population subsidizing others, and there shouldn't be anything wrong with that. Politicians get involved, though and such phrases become weapons to keep "everyone else" divided and unaware how similar we all are. If you want to stay in power, just keep your people fighting themselves so they never look up.
Where exactly are all the workers going to come from to support this one? There's already a labor shortage, and presumably you want to make sure child-care workers are highly vetted. On top of this, with an aging population, there's a greater need for care workers for seniors, and here there's a lot of problems with these workers abusing the seniors.
>- walkable safe environments, transportation, and regulations that allow children to move around on their own
This would be great, but most Americans don't want this. They sure as hell aren't voting for it, and achieving it would require basically bulldozing most American cities. Americans have built themselves, ever since the end of WWII, a country and infrastructure that's entirely incompatible with the lifestyle you advocate here. I live in Tokyo now, and it's exactly what you're advocating here, but I simply can't imagine America somehow becoming like this in my lifetime. (It's one of the main reasons I came here.)
Anyway, as other posters have noted, other countries have much of what you want here, and their fertility rates are quite poor, worse than the US in fact.
If you really want to get people to have more children, you need to force society back to the "good old days", where women have far fewer rights, divorce is highly stigmatized, being non-religious or non-Christian is highly stigmatized, contraception is generally non-available, women basically can't have jobs except for schoolteachers (and only until they're married) or maids and need to just find a husband and become a SAHM, etc. Just look at the societies with high fertility, but contemporary and historically: they're absolutely horrible for women's rights. High fertility and large families have always been accomplished on the backs of oppressed women (and I'm not sure it was all that great for most men either).
Um, I don't think this answers my question. Online courses aren't a substitute for early-childhood daycare. You have to have actual people present in-person to do these jobs, and people willing to do these jobs for the wages offered are in short supply, or are people you really don't want watching your kids. This also extends, as you seem to say, to other jobs with high contact with young children, like elementary school teachers. There's a shortage of them too.
I suppose increasing salaries a lot might help, but we seem to be talking about government workers here, so that seems unlikely to happen.
I'm curious, would you support funding to help anyone willing to homeschooled their child as an alternative solution here?
I often hear similar arguments for the need to help parents offload certain portions of childcare so they can go to work, I don't know that I've ever really heard any meaningful push to help parents offload work so they can raise their children full-time.
No, why? Why should someone be paid to stay at home with their kids?
Homeschooling has no quality control whatsoever--parents can just teach whatever the hell they want, which usually involves a lot of religious BS and skipping over all the science stuff. On top of that, they only teach their own kids. One of the reasons kids go to school is because one teacher can handle a class of 15-30 kids. If we all paid for one parent to stay at home with 1 or 2 kids, how the hell is society going to pay for that? It doesn't make any sense at all.
Raising children full-time is a luxury. It has to be paid for by one family member (usually the husband) working enough to pay for the entire family expenses, or keeping this term short enough that savings can be used until the kid is old enough that the parent can go back to work. There simply isn't enough money to tax people, then pay a portion of that back to those same people so they can stay at home.
I ask because, to me, the idea that we should be heavily subsidizing the removal of parents from a child's life while considering parents being more involved a luxury feels very backwards.
You seem to have a base assumption that most people are bad parents and kids would be better off being raised by professionals. You also seem to have an assumption that both you and the state have the right to decide what is best for someone else's child. Maybe those are commonly held assumptions, but I definitely disagree with them and would be concerned that both could lead to a society that looks eerily similar to the Soviet Union.
Respectfully, I think the line of questioning is a bit off.
There are two components of this problem: (1) allocation & (2) efficiency
Substituting others (or parents) for child care services is a reallocation. E.g. 1 hour of parent time instead of 1 hour of day care worker time.
Efficiency is instead looking at the "How many person-hours does it take to support 1 child in this way?" metric.
Blending them together muddies the solution, because both need to be improved.
We need to make sure that the most valuable allocation is being used. Whether that's parents receiving subsidized child care, so they can do more valuable work. Or whether it's making stay-at-home parenting financially tenable. Or offering both options!
But it's also using technology to push the scaling factor. I.e. it'd be great if every child received a 1 teacher:3 children ratio, but that would bankrupt every public school system in the country. So we've settled on our current ratio. But could we improve upon that...? (IMHO, tech to replace people for early childhood is dubious, but for late-primary there begin to be some options that aren't currently widely deployed)
And if we improved the scaling factor, we'd decrease costs (personal or government), which would open up reinvestment of those savings in incentive programs.
Homeschooling can be pooled similarly to public schooling though. Historically it has been commonplace for a local community on the scale of a neighborhood to have their own schoolhouse run by parents in the community. This definitely falls outside of the modern public schooling model but handles the concern of an extremely low student to teacher ratio.
Is it fair to say you'd be on board with this kind of setup, where its effectively home schooling pooled to free up more parents to enter the workforce?
Indeed. But can you supplement a teacher with a focused MOOC, such that children receive a better education at a cheaper overall cost?
I'm less convinced that's impossible. E.g. better general classroom teacher + MOOC for math focus.
I know Khan videos were better-taught than some of my primary math courses...
Having specialized teachers, all being expected to generate their own lesson plans (based on local standards/templates, if existent), on very similar material, all across the country... doesn't seem like an efficient use of their skills.
There are more fundamental questions here of whether we want population growth. There seems to be a de-facto equilibrium springing up where wealthy countries quietly drop below replacement rate fertility and then migration from poorer regions happens.
It isn't immediately clear why this is a bad thing either. It seems intuitively fair, sustainable for the forseeable future, nobody is being forced to do anything against their will. Might be a good outcome. We can't all have growing populations; given the failures of manufacturing and energy policy in the west that would just lead to war and not having enough stuff to maintain a good lifestyle. We're already having trouble treading water when it comes to lifestyles, the last thing we need is more people.
It causes lots of problems because many of our systems have been set up in times of growth and won't function without it. Take for example "pay-as-you-go" pension systems in much of Europe. Here, you don't fund your own retirement, but the current working population funds the retirement of the current retirement population. This works great when you have population growth, because you can have e.g. five working people fund one person's retirement. If the ratio moves closer to 1:1 or worse, this becomes a lot more challenging.
Of course, population growth cannot continue forever, so we will have to figure this out anyway. Still, for any individual country, the smart move seems to be to stave it off for as long as possible, observe how other countries deal with it, and then implement the solutions that have actually worked for others yourself.
> Take for example "pay-as-you-go" pension systems in much of Europe.
Money by itself is worthless if you can't exchange it for actually useful goods and services. So non-"pay-as-you-go" pensions cannot circumvent demography, either – if too many retirees with their accumulated capital would be chasing too little working-age people providing goods and services, you'd just get inflation and all your accumulated capital became worth less.
> Western governments might want to actually fund [s] high-quality,
not-for-profit dating systems of some kind. Improved health for
citizens, lessened extremism, not to mention possibly boosted
population growth could result.
That's too sane! Human relationships are anathema to the profit, so
what you suggest would be a disaster for capitalism and the meat
grinder. Consumerism is driven by isolation, FOMO and insecurity. And
without a supply of disocontented single young men, how will we feed
the war machine?
Slightly less cynically, one of the big factors we've found in recent
research for episode 2 of "Love Isn't" [0] relates to the lack of
public spaces. In the UK we've decimated parks to build shopping
centres and more housing, and most of the pubs have closed. We spoke
to several wealthy and intelligent UK citizens in their 30s or 40s who
say they are very frustrated because dating apps are rubbish, but
where do you meet people IRL now?
I think colleges would be well-advised to create dating systems that encourage healthy relationships (keyword: healthy) between students. Students who marry someone they met at university are much more likely to become enthusiastic alumni. And hookup culture is a disaster for everyone.
All they need to do is work towards maintaining a healthy ration between man and women in their alumni. Something around 51% male and 49% women usually causes people to form more serious relationships. When the ratio is too skewed in the man's favor, they women feel pressured to participate in the hookup culture to secure a mate (source: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24693022-date-onomics).
With the current trend of more women graduating from university, this will probably get worse. Working towards getting more men into universities will end up benefiting women because it will probably create a healthier dating culture.
Colleges are already too deep in stuff they can't handle with student relationships gone wrong (date rape, etc.). Pushing their names / reputations / liabilities further out there by creating student dating apps would be idiotic.
Without a financial stability and solved housing, this will be a hard one... hard to have a kid, if you have 4 roommates in your 30s. Let's not forget all the devaluing of trades and other non-college professions (where you start work at ~18, and start having kids at 20) in favour of colleges (in case of USA, with loans), slow rising careers and even if you manage to get a big enough house/apartment to put a kid in, you're 30+ by then, and having multiple kids is a lot harder.
That's not the best way to do it IMO, subsidies for dating apps that facilitate successful, long-term relationships would be a far better idea.
Have a law that lets citizens specify on which app they met their partner when getting married, and have the government pay a small (to the tune of $10) monthly subsidy to the makers of that app for as long as that marriage lasts. $10 per month per couple is not a lot of money for a government in the grand scheme of things, and the benefits to population growth and plain human happiness are incalculable.
As opposed to for-profit, ad-driven, surveillance capitalism companies with a demonstrated interest in short term profits and hoovering all the data they can?
Yeah.
I'd be willing to take that risk.
Don't get me wrong. I don't think the government is a good group to do this. I just think they're a less-bad group than the usual parties.
This might be heresy to say around these parts but arranged marriages
in Asian countries are typically successful and happy. Note there is a
world of difference between arranged and "forced" marriages.
Yes, there are downsides to what is seen in the "secular west" as an
illiberal over-involvement of families. 'Honour killings' and other
regressive horrors can occur. But they're not the norm. Plus side is
that healthy, supportive involvement from both sides of a family is
super valuable.
But why stop at the family? Throughout most of human history the
community, the village, respected friends etc, have held a really
important place in matchmaking. Just read some Jane Austen :)
We like the illusion of total independence and choice. In 2024 we can
have that. And thank goodness we've gotten past those old suffocating
social norms that kept people in traps of class and normative gender
roles.
But the model of isolated autonomous Bayesian-utility-maximising
actors rationally selecting each other ... is a crock. We just don't
do that. As soon as we get a serious date, what is the first thing we
do... introduce them to our friends for approval!
So sure, there are any number of groups from which we could take
healthier advice than from a for-profit company that feeds on
loneliness and isolation, including maybe a benevolent government that
funds services which ultimately result in better mental health and
social stability.
> This might be heresy to say around these parts but arranged marriages in Asian countries are typically successful and happy.
Estimated rates of domestic violence are pretty high in those countries. That is the thing, if you make divorce socially costly, people will stay together whether happy or not.
I am neither British, nor a shill, but the team behind gov.uk is pretty amazing. They have an excellent blog that explains about their design and tech processes.
Easy - OP's imagining the government forces you to date people - instead of offering a loss-leading alternative to a monopoly.
If you start with the presumption that the government can do nothing but be a dystopia - it's easy to imagine ways anything can end up being a dystopia.
I haven't looked but I suspect that people in happy loving relationships are less likely to be extremists/terrorists than unhappy people without close ties or people in their lives to check in on their mental well-being.
I haven't looked either, but I think the correlation runs the other way: people likely to be extremists/terrorists have trouble forming happy, loving relationships.
I guess the fact that we disagree reaffirms the parent's point that we should look to studies/research instead of assuming.
What people need are 3rd spaces where they can touch grass together. Online dating is a failed social experiment. Most women won't touch it as-is. Once men start using AI generated imagery en masse, hopefully women will catch onto it and end it for good.
Read: they need to legalize prostitution. There are curious in-between sites like Cuddlecomfort.com (for just platonic cuddling and anyone who's reported for sex work is banned), but it needs to be out in the open and regulated.
Yeah, to NPR's credit they do touch on this, but I think this is yet another facet of American life and business where the answer is the same, and simple.
There is a monopoly in this sector of the economy and the monopolist's profit incentives are opposed to human life. In particular this monopoly stands to make the most money by lying and claiming to facilitate the creation of relationships, while in actuality not delivering that promise so that you stay subscribed.
Match is just doing what economic incentives compel it to, but they are incentivized to prevent people from developing secure long-term relationships and starting families, which is pretty sinister.
It's all right there and clear as day, simple economics, and Match is probably breaking the law at this point as it erodes our belief in love itself.
I honestly think there are many such situations today, and they should be identified so that those who have qualms can avoid those sorts of industries and businesses in the same way people avoid allergens, addictions, and other harmful substances and activities.
People need to look beyond responsibilities to a company’s shareholders and look at responsibilities towards the shareholders of their communities and societies: their fellow human beings.
By standard Economic theory, that is not a stable strategy, since it incentivises starting new dating apps. It only has to be moderately successful to ensure a profitable exit. Over time, Match would run out of money.
Given that Economists overwhelmingly get these things right more than our intuitions, I'm really curious what explanations they have.
It might, but there are lots of sticky things in human behaviour. A person fully aware of the situation in your statement, and only looking for money may do so, but the vast majority of people (off HN) likely do not have the skills (tech/business), do not care about the skills, might not want to start a company or simply are happy enough with their life to not want to rock the boat too much.
Here's a mathematical question: if you could flip a coin, with a 50% chance of getting a billion dollars, and a 50% chance of never having more than $1000 in your bank, would you flip the coin?
The "mathematically correct" answer would be to take the bet, but the rational decision any well-settled person would take is very likely not to flip.
Not a revenue of $1000, but always being $1000 away from being in debt.
...yeah I get "what if I spent $900 on a purchase and got the money back the next day" is a valid criticism, but I mean, just above poverty.
By the way the P(expected) = (1 billion * 0.5) + ((almost) zero * 0.5) = a very respectable 500 million, which even at $1000 a day would take 500,000 days or over a thousand years.
> Not a revenue of $1000, but always being $1000 away from being in debt.
On the contrary, the bet posed was "Here's a mathematical question: if you could flip a coin, with a 50% chance of getting a billion dollars, and a 50% chance of never having more than $1000 in your bank, would you flip the coin?"
It's a cash cap, not a risk statement.
So by the terms, you do just need to set up a way to ensure a cash flow to you while you continue to build up more illiquid safety net and ensure fewer and fewer things cost you money even if you don't own them.
Even if you want to reframe as always being $1000 away from being in debt, that's easy, there are financial arrangements that can let you structure extraordinary assurance that $1000 would never dip below zero, even if you accept it as a narrow lane between the cap and bankruptcy.
I would expect the average SWE on HN to be worth more than a $1000. (Of course there are exceptions, I'm not an SWE myself but I'm only talking about the average person for simplicity.)
> Given that Economists overwhelmingly get these things right more than our intuitions, I'm really curious what explanations they have.
Why doesn't it?
If someone is willing to sell you something for $1M - and you can make it user hostile and extract $10M from it - why not keep making that $1M purchase of new dating apps?
As long as Match buys the apps for less than what they can extract from them - it's sustainable.
Dating apps have very peculiar dynamics (e.g. you need to somehow get women on the app and men will follow automatically). Also women may be conservative and they might not want to join the latest dating app that ranks 50th on the App Store. So it’s not like anyone can create an app and be successful enough to be worth acquiring. Very few will reach that threshold and then the monopolist can buy those few ones.
So standard economics don’t apply. Also, the statement “ Economists overwhelmingly get these things right more than our intuitions” needs a citation.
> Given that Economists overwhelmingly get these things right more than our intuitions, I'm really curious what explanations they have.
Not an economist but starting a new dating app is very hard because those suffer network effects. It's not like most apps which can work on their own.
That's why there's no stress going on at Match group to keep the monopoly running, those new apps don't come up often and cannot come up often due to the nature of the business.
That's also why most of them suck so much even before being bought by the monopoly. To overcome this strong network effect stacked against them, they have to push a lot of marketing levers, some of them unethical and others are very costly.
I feel like there's a genius adversarial strategy to be had here. It seems to me the dominant player is overvaluing the possibility of being displaced and is misallocating capital to acquire competition of dubious merits. I can leverage this by making a passable clone of their product in the hopes of being bought out for much more than I'm worth.
Subpar matching is a consequence of 80%+ being rejected by default. You either exclude them from your platform or string them along to monetize them. You're not going to find a technical solution to reduce bias in human behavior.
Anecdotally, some of those apps used to be a lot better at matching people up. It's totally possible to match way more than 20% - but why bother, if you can just string them along?
idk is Bumble a lot better? I don't think it is and now they've added ads that have a timer to skip. The fundamentals of this market makes me think dating apps are destined to be trash.
In a free market, if such a company's products are crappy, as you propose, then that means there's an opportunity for anyone that wants to make profit to provide an app that isn't crappy; they'd get rewarded for it.
The question shouldn't be "how do we stop this company", it should be, "why aren't people providing competing, non-crappy, apps?". Let's fix the root issue rather than proposing regulation to regulate a problem that shouldn't exist.
There's been a lot of discussion about this. My favorite argument there is that there's a big difference between what makes a dating app profitable, and what makes it good at finding people long term relationships. Not unlike how Amazon is far better off showing you ads in a search than giving you the best matching item that you probably want.
The features that make an app crappier are what makes it sticky and lucrative. Making an app better at matching people is expensive, but doesn't give you revenue. The owners heading in that direction will get offers from the crappier, more profitable app maker that are hard to refuse.
With the existing hegemony of Match, a new company doesn't actually need to worry about becoming profitable; if they can be good enough at matchmaking that they start to catch on, then they can rely on a buyout from Match. Much like how a decade ago, "getting bought by Google" was the business plan of a lot of companies, many of which did get acquired by google.
This probably works once. I'm sure Match's buyout terms will include a non-compete agreement, so you can't keep repeating this trick until they run out of buyout money.
There is a market failure though. Big apps bought enough competition to reach a critical mass where startups can't overcome the network effect.
Side advice: never use the words "free market" in an argument, you get dismissed immediately because people are instantly compelled to think of reasons that it isn't a free market.
This ignores a whole swath of complex social dynamics. Plenty of businesses exist that are horrible, but extremely difficult to dethrone. Ticketmaster is probably one of the less controversial examples.
Former dating app founder here - lots of thoughts on the space - feel free to AMA
High level though, there's a lot of human behavior which makes dating frustrating with or without apps.
At it's core, even in the best case, dating has A LOT of rejection. Dating apps introduce more opportunity for incremental validation (you got liked!) but also incremental rejection (you got ghosted!) and the sheer number of interactions that lead to nothing is much higher and more quantifiable than IRL (you've all seen the r/tinder sankey diagrams)
Two "solutions" I believe would generally benefit dating
1. Apps are more transparent and equitable with how they expose profiles to other users. Don't bias toward highly liked people to increase perceived "quality" and shadow-hide show profiles that aren't liked often (and then ask them to pay lol). Show people more randomly, to better represent the true cross section of people on the app.
2. Daters set some type of routine that works for them - say "I'll try to go on ~1 date per month". Being intentional about this helps minimize the feeling that each date is so fatalistic / it's the end of the world if the person who seemed awesome when messaging is actually a jerk. It'd be nice if an app facilitated this type of routine and figured out a feedback mechanism to reward users who were generally pleasant / respectful on their dates.
> Apps are more transparent and equitable with how they expose profiles to other users. Don't bias toward highly liked people to increase perceived "quality" and shadow-hide show profiles that aren't liked often (and then ask them to pay lol). Show people more randomly, to better represent the true cross section of people on the app.
This won't work; if you do this, you'll expose that the average online dating user is... well, average.
There's a bit of kayfabe going on; users want to think the other users of online dating are 8+/10, sexy, flirty, fun, and desirable singles. Unfortunately, 69% of Americans are overweight and 36% are obese. If profiles users see weren't heavily weighted toward highly-rated ones, the perception of online dating would immediately change from "online dating is fine, a bunch of attractive people are using this" to "online dating is only for the ugly and desperate"; the article points out that this is the way Gen Z perceives online dating already.
Dating apps really struggle to keep the most desirable, because those are the ones least likely to need it. Yet they're also the most important for a dating app to have. As fewer desirable people use it, the less perceived legitimacy it has, which results in fewer people using it, particularly the desirable ones. I suspect dating apps are experiencing this death spiral now.
I see your point here - and I do agree, from experience, people sometimes express a desire for a bit of reality distortion in dating (we often heard that they want the experience to feel more like 'fate' or 'chance' than overly engineered).
That said, I don't fully agree with the idea that there's a uniform concept of x/10 scale for daters and that they uniformly will balk at those below that uniform rating and therefore the only way forward is boosting those based on their global like %. And some data backs this up.
The oft-cited OkCupid Dataclysm book talks about variance (e.g. lots of people like / lots of people dislike), explaining variance is meaningfully more important to messaging and engagement than raw like %.
Additionally, on the point of weight / body type, we found that a little under half of daters (and > 50% of women interested in men) do not report body type to be a significant factor in their decision making. So it is a meaningful factor, but for about 1/2 of daters it isn't.
The point I'm trying to drive here is, while there is for sure data and intuition that points to what you're describing, there are others that point to other ways that people perceive the quality and likelihood of finding a partner on an app that may work as well, if not better, while not relying on a need to as heavily hack perception.
> Body type is a significant factor for way more than 50%. People lie on surveys because they feel guilty for being superficial.
I think you are extrapolating your own view. You have no way of knowing what they feel and even for an educated guess you do not know which country/social class/occupation those users tend to be from in the app being discussed.
Revealed preferences are a thing, no matter the social class. What people self-report to want and what they actually want is rarely the same, especially in fields with high social pressure.
Of course but you can't just claim that because you feel like X then everyone feels like X even if they say Y. You gotta have something to back it up. Especially if you represent a minority of users in many categories...
First, I think you're making some big assumption by implying that GP's statement is him projecting his own beliefs/attitudes, rather than being generally cynical.
Second, I think "people are superficial and attracted to people who fit conventional beauty standards" is a fair null hypothesis. That's what conventional beauty standards mean. I don't think it's a stretch to assume that people's stated preferences there are biased towards making themselves look less superficial.
> "people are superficial and attracted to people who fit conventional beauty standards" is a fair null hypothesis
Most likely is that you are extrapolating from your experience. Average here is male middle class from US or EU. A real average person lives in an Asian country on 50 USD/month trying to make it in life.
The gene wants to carry on and in this world survivability is not up to the looks unless you are already middle class in a stable rich country. Perhaps you are not being cynical enough if you think the looks is what's important for >50% of users.
>Additionally, on the point of weight / body type, we found that a little under half of daters (and > 50% of women interested in men) do not report body type to be a significant factor in their decision making. So it is a meaningful factor, but for about 1/2 of daters it isn't.
According to the previous poster, 69% of Americans are overweight (36% obese). Assuming the dating app users are representative of Americans, then well over half of those daters are, themselves, overweight. So of course many of them won't report body type to be a significant factor! They're already overweight, and their expectations in a partner are probably realistic. What's disturbing is that only about 1/2 of daters said it wasn't a meaningful factor: this means that almost 20% of daters are both overweight AND (assumedly) expect to date fit people.
That's true. The sad reality about dating is that, for 99% percent of people, the partner that would be ideal for their tastes is "out of their league" so to speak. Humans have dealt with this reality of dating acting somewhat like a marketplace via mores of commitment, dating within social classes, condemnation of promiscuity, etc., but the human nature is still there. 10's want 10's, but 5's don't want other 5's, they also want 10's.
The strategy most dating apps use has been to keep people in a perpetual cycle of heightened seeming possibility. You see the young, cool, attractive people, and perhaps one out of 100 times you'll strike out, and the unlimited options keep you feeling that such an opportunity could happen infinitely. For average hetero dudes, this obsession will drive purchasing premium, paying for swipes and super likes, etc.
I know it's controversial but I do believe that robotic/AI partners is the "ideal world" solution to this. You get someone who fulfills all your physical needs so you don't have to play the roulette in real life, or string along someone in your league because you believe you could get someone out of it. I'm sure in the future we'll see them similar to how we see sex toys today.
Strange analysis. Considering that what people want from dating apps is sex and partners, and that both are easier to obtain from people of matching attractiveness. As a former dating app user, the possibility is something I never cared about: I cared about a date, there is a marketplace and- while I will try to find someone acceptable- certainly I'm not wasting my time chasing people out of my league. That produces just waste of time and money, rejection and frustration.
I would rather say something different: dating apps have zero interest in making you find a partner- this means for them simply losing a customer. They would rather keep you in a cycle with some intermittent reward but preferably without losing you.
Finally there is an huge difference between different classes of users: at the very minimum by gender, attractiveness and purpose. Casual sex is a totally different use case than looking for a partner; high attractiveness allows using the app intermittently for immediate reward, while average people need to put much more effort and entirely different mode of use. But despite all this complexity, apps have converged to a single hyper-simplistic model that optimizes maybe intake of new 20 year old users but works much worse than it could for most people.
> Considering that what people want from dating apps is sex and partners, and that both are easier to obtain from people of matching attractiveness.
But people don't have an accurate perception of matching attractiveness. The average person is a 5 who thinks they're an 8. And they've been looking at celebrities rather than average people, so if you match them with a 5 then they'll think that's a 3.
And yet the overwhelming majority of people of average attractiveness have mated and formed couples and married since forever. So that's possible. If an app is not able to match them, must be a failure of the app, not of nature.
Ages ago, people had very, very limited dating options: generally only the suitable partners in their village. They didn't have porn to distract them, and they weren't allowed to just stay single because of social pressure and (for women) economic need. It was rare that anyone stayed single, and they were generally considered weird or "unmarriageable".
So basically, people took what they could get, even if it meant someone they didn't care about or worse, someone who was downright abusive.
The higher rate of singledom these days isn't necessarily a bad thing. Centuries ago, these people would have gotten married, had terrible marriages, and produced kids (remember, no contraception back then) that were neglected and abused and grew up to be awful people.
You're defining attractiveness like boomers handing out grades where in real life that's not how the 10 scale is used, it follows video game review rules where 7 is middling.
And this is right to happen with humans same as video games. It's not centered at average it's centered where 5 is "not quite unattractive." And because the typical human is attractive the average sits at around 7.
Your dating standards are high if weight automatically makes someone a sub-5 in your eyes. I’m not saying that’s morally wrong—you like what you like. But recognize that it’s a high standard and will make dating more difficult.
I mean look you're attracted to what you're attracted to but this is such a sad comment. You're not like doing anything wrong but reading this it's not so surprising that 2/3 of women have disordered eating.
What if I stopped showering and women found me unattractive for it? And I started blaming them, saying it’s their fault I can’t bring myself to shower?
You're ignoring the magnitude. To make this a fair comparison it would have to be something like
"Women find men's musk so repulsive that men who struggle with controlling it due to their hormones, diet, or lifestyle are showering with so much chemical exfoliant to keep it under control that it's destroying their skin."
And in that world I think you have a case that women have to get over it.
You can be like "just lose weight" up to the point where it drives a super-majority of women have an unhealthy relationship with food and starve themselves to do it. It looks like the new weight loss drugs might finally just fix the problem in a way that satisfies everyone. I have an ED and I will be so happy if I live to see generation of women who don't ruin their mental health to chase the thinness expected of us -- but it still sucks that the solution is drugging women to lose weight and not growing to find "heavier" (i.e. women with a BMI higher than 20) women attractive.
It would not be a good thing for people to find indicators of poor health to be neutral or attractive. It would just perpetuate eating disorders generationally.
Astonishing mental gymnastics to think that others have to "grow" to find unhealthy, overweight women attractive rather than they themselves needing to improve themselves if they want to be found attractive. Prime example of externalizing blame.
Men and women alike have been achieving acceptable weight for thousands of years. You don't need drugs to be thin, those are a recent invention. Do you think I don't have to watch what I eat too? If I gave into all my cravings I'd also be fat and find myself gross. Others do not need to adapt to your failures.
Right we prefer our women unhealthy and underweight. Look at this point I don't know what else to tell you. There's clearly an experience gap we can't cross if you're equating disordered eating with watching what you eat. I wish you could see from a woman's perspective how horribly women treat their bodies to be thin -- it's not healthy.
By your own measure I'm incredibly successful. I'm not stupid and know how much better skinny women are treated in all aspects of life. I am of a socially acceptable weight for a woman in 2024 which means I get lightheaded if I don't eat for a few hours or stand up too fast, I'm always cold, I'm always tired, I can never eat to full, and sitting on hard chairs for too long hurts. So when I say grow I mean finding women at actually healthy weights attractive. There have been times in human history where it's happened.
Don't want to add fuel to this debate, but what you say sounds a bit strange to me. I am of thin build- slightly underweight- and never felt this gave me any problem. Granted, it's just how my body works so it's possible that if I had to make an effort to keep this weight this would come with some slight issues. On the other hand it's also not normal for a lot of people to be overweight, this has clearly to do with culture and food rather than innate needs. So it's strange that your body would give you negative symptoms for just keeping a natural weight.
So I think the dynamic here is that it's really common to consider women who are of a healthy natural weight to be overweight. I'm not out here defending women who are 5'7" and 200 lbs as healthy but what happens is that that 5'7" woman will be viewed overweight at 150, chubby at 140, and "normal" at 130. And may god help you if you're close to 160. Which is fine for folks who's natural resting weight is 130 but for everyone else it sucks, you end up fighting your body 24/7 to keep it that way and having to ignore/suppress your bodies natural signals.
It's no one person or group's fault that this happens but it's where we're at. I'm technically not underweight by the numbers but my body violently disagrees with that, I've learned to accept it. One of the most common experiences for women in late 20's early 30's is to ease off the constant dieting, gain 10-20 lbs because that's where their body always wanted them, and suddenly feel great -- more energy, less brain fog, regular periods, and suddenly it's not work to maintain it.
Yes, these numbers make the discussion a bit more concrete. But 5'7'' and 150 is definitely in the healthy weight range- girls can strive to be thinner than that but it's to fit some arbitrary idea of beauty rather than to, as you say, "be treated better in each aspect of life" (yes of course, attractive people in general are treated better- but it should be a negligible effect for the ranges we're talking about). In other words, I assumed that the user you were talking to was talking about much higher BMI indexes than these. Personally, as a male, I don't find the 5'7''/ 150 unattractive at all- though it also depends on how fit someone is.
The idea that real world couples necessary match attractiveness is kind of incels invention. And then they get angry whenever they see a couple with one person super attractive and other .. normal.
I find the whole argument, especially with the grades, silly. But it is true that usually partners match each other by attractiveness- also keeping in mind that attractiveness is not exclusively physical and means different things for different people. Attractiveness is not a scalar, it's a vector.
> I would rather say something different: dating apps have zero interest in making you find a partner- this means for them simply losing a customer. They would rather keep you in a cycle with some intermittent reward but preferably without losing you.
It sounds like you're agreeing with me. The apps benefit from people staying in the app, not partnered up stably. If the app only showed people they'd have the best longer-term prospects with, then it would likely show people in their attractiveness range as a rule.
> There's a bit of kayfabe going on; users want to think the other users of online dating are 8+/10, sexy, flirty, fun, and desirable singles.
I'd go a bit further than that, people are explicitly looking for that different reality when opening the app.
That's one of the reasons of getting the app to them, getting better matches than in the reality.
I don't think it's a solvable problem, online dating is just full of paradox, the paradox highlighted in the article is real but this is another one on top of that.
> "online dating is only for the ugly and desperate"; the article points out that this is the way Gen Z perceives online dating already.
The article notes that Gen Z usage of dating apps is down, but it's not clear to me it's because they think it's low status. (Polo is unpopular, but it's high status.) Do you have more info on why Gen Z isn't using dating apps? It being low status is certainly possible, but lower over all interest in romance is too; Gen Z is famously having less sex.
I followed the "failing to woo Generation Z" link, and just got this PDF, which didn't help much: https://www.generationlab.org/_files/ugd/b2ee84_c2430c8256ff... (College students are using dating apps less than post-college 20-somethings, but I think that's always been true.)
I think it's pretty simple - Gen Z are young and have better opportunity to date IRL. They are surrounded by many peers, have more free time and friend circles are still strong.
As people grow older, they have more obligations, they sometimes move away from where they were raised thus breaking away from friends, they generally hang out in less homogenous age bracket.
I believe the claim is that Gen Z uses dating apps less when controlling for age than their predecessors. (I don't have the data to tell whether that's true.)
When people say Gen Z are they talking about Gen Z in America or Gen Z on Earth? I notice many qualities ascribed to Gen Z seem to be completely alien to Gen Z where I live which makes me suspect that these qualities are simply random variation and correlation hunting, and not inherent to that cohort’s formative experiences (smartphones, covid, etc).
The solution to dating app problems is actual human contact and throwing dating apps away.
There is too much to get wrong with text only. Say the wrong thing online and you're done. Say the wrong thing in person and you can judge by facial expressions that you did and get a chance to correct a misunderstanding. You also get a chance to actually see what the other person subliminally likes and dislikes. All in real time.
Sure, you can text "I like that" but how would you know what you were getting into?
I’ve dated for years without apps trying to meet people organically, and then also years through dating apps, and I’ve had way more opportunities for human contact with dating apps. I mean the whole point of dating apps is to meet in person once you feel the person might be a good match
The benefit of dating apps IMO is that everyone on there is explicitly there to find a partner for some reason. In real life it’s a bit of a guessing game, which is fine, but the simple math is that love is easier to find where all the people looking for love are hanging out.
+1 - one of the biggest things we found actually, is externalizing the potentially uncomfortable elements of dating generally helps people be more authentic and focus on getting to know each other. A few examples:
- As you said, dating apps, everyone is there to date, so you don't have to feel awkward about approaching someone not knowing if they're not single or interested in you or even if they are in the mood for conversing with a stranger
- Hinge did a good job forcing Q&A. Before that people often thought it was uncool / signaled trying too hard to add a bio so people often had less info to go on.
- On our app - we helped facilitate where people went on their first date (generally tried to pick more affordable / neutral options) - this took the pressure off of worrying if the person picking made a bad / too crowded choice - blame it on us!
Not saying dating apps can remove everything uncomfortable about dating, but they can definitely help!
My experience is that the major limiting factor in finding partners is whether people "click" with me, not whether people are single.
In other words I'm better off going to an event with my kind of people and looking for the 5% that are eligible singles, than going to an event with singles and looking for the 0.5% that are my kind of people.
Obviously this would be different if you're a person who likes almost everyone and is attractive to almost everyone — a golden retriever, as it were. I offer no opinion on whether many such people exist.
The trouble there is that the attractive people on the dating apps often aren't looking for partner, instead it's often just for self-validation. And as discussed above, these are preferentially shown to many people.
Really? I find that it is way easier to meet people in person. In real life, girls approach me at the gym. On apps, I get maybe one like a week and it's usually not someone I'm interested in.
Just casually make eye contact with people and see who looks back. Smile at them. If they smile back, that's an invitation to talk to them - or sometimes they'll just walk up and talk to you.
Socially, we have to reduce “riskiness” of IRL approaching people with the intent to date.
Right now, it’s scary to want to approach someone only to risk getting roasted for being a creep, barking up the wrong tree, and the myriad other reasons why people you want don’t want you.
It has to be thing everyone does - somewhat like bar hopping on a weekend. You know you’re at the bar to find someone and so is everyone else.
>The solution to dating app problems is actual human contact and throwing dating apps away.
You aren't wrong, but you dramatically expand your dating options by using these apps. Just relying on your social circles is no different than remaining in the Middle Ages, just relying on a possible partner to show up at church or in the market. These apps spread your geographic and social opportunities, after that it's up to the human contact you describe.
>The solution to dating app problems is actual human contact and throwing dating apps away.
This is backwards. Dating apps were a solution to the problem of opportunities of meeting potential mates drying up. Dating apps wouldn't be popular if "actual human contact" was a viable strategy.
I mean apps can facilitate actual human contact though, common advice I see is to transition from text to a low stakes in person meet up as soon as possible.
Thank you for showing up, it would be great to hear more of your input. #1 is so, so key. Dating apps made me feel terrible about myself and invisible (“why am I getting no likes?” — for context I’m a guy).
It wasn’t until I realised I had no idea who my profile was actually being shown to that it all started to make sense and I realised that’s the lever that apps can pull to make money.
Fundamentally though I think your comment about human behaviour is spot-on and at the end of the day my belief is that dating is something you just can’t short-cut with technology. Parabox of choice and low investment are garbage-in, garbage-out so to speak. You can’t ‘Uber Eats magic food box’ dating.
"something you just can’t short-cut with technology" - totally agree - it can be a helpful part of the process provided the service is in service of the customer's goals, which often isn't the case.
That said, there are definitely things products can do to improve the experience for users - this paper is a bit old, but was eye opening to our team when thinking about designing our product https://people.duke.edu/~dandan/webfiles/PapersUpside/People...
> and the sheer number of interactions that lead to nothing is much higher and more quantifiable than IRL
I've done tons of online dating and used to bartend so I'm around single IRL people all the time. I absolutely have far, far more "successful interactions" in OLD, unless you're also referring to chatting, which is pointless to even discuss. I'm referring to actually meeting the person and whether that turns out success in whatever way someone considers that.
If I go out to a bar and hang out, and potentially start talking to some new woman for hours knowing absolutely nothing about her - I have no idea if she's attracted to me, nor single, etc. I've probably spent thousands of hours casually talking to someone I may find interesting only to find out before they leave that they're either not interested or not single or not hetero, whatever.
I'm not one to ever care about rejection but the fact that people take it personally in OLD and call it "ghosting" when someone you've matched with and don't connect with through chatting and move forward to meet and etc is absolutely pathetic.
That isn't ghosting. GHOSTING is when someone who actually is involved with you in a RELATIONSHIP beyond a 1 steak dinner tinder date disappears from your life without any recognition that they're leaving. Someone you ACTUALLY have ties to.
I've had it happen before. I've also had thousands of OLD rejections (uwu oh no), and there is absolutely no comparison between some dweeb getting rejected after 2 dates and crying about it and having someone you've been with for years disappear.
My partner in 2020 disappeared when she stopped taking her medication. It was absolutely traumatizing that this person I spent 2 years with just disappeared without a word one day. I know she's alive and in my city but in 4 years I've never heard a word. No drunk texts, nothin. And I'm not going to track her down or seem stalkerish if she clearly lost interest in having me in her life.
And you know what one of the most frustrating parts of that 2020 when I was stuck at home hiding from covid and my partner just disappeared? When I'd look up support from other people online about being ghosted/dear-johned and 99% of the posts on reddit/etc where about ONLINE DATING GHOSTERS. God. Some of those people were absolutely pathetic.
It's ABSOLUTELY ridiculous to expect someone you've hung out with a few times via OLD to NOT disappear without telling you why. Christ I've done it a billion times. You don't feel a connection, you move on, both people USUALLY understand and are mature about it and don't cry and almost all of the time it's mutual because if I'm not feeling a vibe I'm probably not going to seem interested, and vice versa.
I don't think I've ever had a woman cause any stress when we've ended things and moved on.
> I have no idea if she's attracted to me, nor single, etc. I've probably spent thousands of hours casually talking to someone I may find interesting only to find out before they leave that they're either not interested or not single or not hetero, whatever.
This sounds very off. It's extremely common for people to overshare when drinking. If you can't figure things out in that environment I'm not sure how much lower the barrier to entry can be.
This sounds like dating app propaganda or I just live somewhere with much friendlier people.
Well, I didn't say "I can't figure out how to pick someone up at a bar or IRL," I said- in less words, my ratio of successfully picking someone up via OLD is higher than my IRL pickups. You have no idea if that's 20 or 300, I can easily say 80-90% of mine, and I think ALL of my last 5-10 serious partners all came from OLD. People IRL, especially frequenting the dive bars I worked at, were't very much out there to get married.
I can open up tinder right now and go grab coffee with a match. I can also go to a coffee shop or bar or game alone and sit there for hours speaking to nobody because literally nobody in that shop is remotely interested in me Vs OLD where I know the person at least at some degree finds me attractive and we HAVE to interact with one another. I also absolutely would not sleep with bar patrons no matter how many passed me a number behind bar, that meme is kind of offensive to bartenders who take pride in their work and value their regulars/customers.
I'm admittedly biased because I definitely cannot pick up anyone online, but do well in person.
Online dating is working with limited information. Some people just look better than others when squinted at. I guess the low-res digital version of me is too unappealing.
> I have no idea if she's attracted to me, nor single, etc. I've probably spent thousands of hours casually talking to someone I may find interesting only to find out before they leave that they're either not interested or not single or not hetero, whatever.
Most of those _were_ interested, but decided you weren't a match.
What about throwing out the whole swipe-app paradigm with the matches and algo-stack and going back to okcupid style profiles that you can browse? Anyone can message anyone. It was the best dating site by far.
tl;dr tons of spam / offensive messages. I actually think that with advances in NLP and content moderation since then, you could re-introduce a paradigm like this with potentially less spam.
Ok, that explains requiring a match before messaging. But the swiping and algo-determined stack? That seems purely intended to make it more like a gambling app.
That was a more effective and pleasant experience. Sending a well-crafted message drawing on someone's profile usually worked for me, and I completely ignored the "matches" gimmick. Been off the market for many years now.
Why do you think apps don't do (1), if it would benefit dating? Because people would just choose to use different apps because of the perceived quality issue you mentioned?
To what extent do you think the core issues are driven by the different goals of men/women, and the dynamics they create?
Great qs - As for why apps don't show profiles more randomly - I think because the space is so competitive, perceived quality is so important and frankly its "easy" for apps to leverage who they show to who and when in order to make users most likely to keep swiping and/or upgrade. I do think apps generally want you to find a partner, but are generally okay with making the experience valuable to them (even if that means gamifying and playing with who gets to see who and when) along the way.
I'd say (assuming by the way you phrased the question you're referring to men who are generally interested in women, women who are generally interested in men) there are certain factors and preferences that trend across genders which do influence dating behavior and outcomes for these populations. Based on survey data we collected a few years ago - some are shared across genders (e.g. political views) others are not (e.g. height). But I wouldn't say there were glaring different "goals" by gender, so much as some difference in how important certain factor were.
I'm curious to your thoughts: what do you think about a nonprofit dating app?
Do you think they may shift the balance of your quote from above?
> I do think apps generally want you to find a partner, but are generally okay with making the experience valuable to them (even if that means gamifying and playing with who gets to see who and when) along the way.
I could see it for sure - it'd at least be worth experimenting with. Beyond the functionality itself, I'd be most curious about how the idea that its a non-profit influences perception of the app and the people using the app. Profit or non-profit, it'd be nice to see apps talk more openly about how they approach matching - I think Coffee Meets Bagel did this a while back.
Thanks for the responses. In terms of goals, I was thinking more of the relationship goals. Many men are happy using apps to play the field (I've talked with friends who simultaneously 'dated' half a dozen or more women), whereas most of the women I know used apps to find longer-term relationships.
This can result in a small fraction of men going on a large number of dates (expecting that they don't need to commit) and a large fraction of women not thrilled that the desirable guys don't want to get serious. Are there ways around issues like this? Or is this more of an urban myth than a reality?
There are statistics studies both endorsing and invalidating this concept.
Some OkCupid / Tinder data suggest that "likes" are not evenly distributed, which has been extrapolated out to mean that dating is unbalanced. On the same token, unmarried rates are pretty equal across genders in the US suggesting that from an outcomes perspective people are achieving their relationship goals (at least in terms of marriage there are other goals).
In our app, which was much more heavily skewed toward actual dates than likes, I would not characterize the pattern of people who went on dates heavily skewed toward a small portion of men - so it may be real from a liking perspective (I can't claim to refute data directly from the dating apps) but may be more of a myth when it comes to actual dating.
Not the OP but I think they don’t because it’s more profitable and makes a more addictive experience for the user.
Think about it - an app can directly influence the amount of matches you get. Show your profile to everyone at the beginning, a fair number of matches. Not paid yet? Show their profile to fewer people, then when you think the user is about to leave, ramp up the visibility for just enough matches to keep them hooked.
User just paid for the Gold tier? Increase their profile visibility… Not too much though, you want to create that dry spell so you can repeat the cycle and get them onto the Gold Plus tier.
For-profit dating apps are essentially gambling apps.
>...and figured out a feedback mechanism to reward users who were generally pleasant / respectful on their dates.
This sounds like a social scoring system, which is bound to be fraught with issues.
It's also possible/plausible that trying to increase the instances of this proposed reward (e.g.: per date) is bound to end-up being an objective - in and of itself; not to mention that the reward instances would potentially occur far more frequently for people who are generally considered "attractive".
I have very little info. I like snowboards, standup, dogs, no description. I've put software engineer as a job. A couple years ago, I've A/B tested a few photos and with regular photo in a t-shirt I've only got a 2-4 likes per week. With a very similar photo to this one https://e0.pxfuel.com/wallpapers/29/831/desktop-wallpaper-io...
I've got about 60 likes per week. I've thought that's a lot, but my ex told me she's got almost 2000 in a first week.
If your "best foot forward" is a snapshot in a T-shirt, that is understandably going to draw less interest than a professional model shot by a professional photographer with professional hair, makeup, lighting, and expensive clothes.
I've got clothes that probably aren't much cheaper than that, and while I do look my best in them in random photos, it's nothing compared to the response I get when I'm seen wearing them in person. I'm not a model (I don't have the looks), but a man in a good suit is going to provide enough pause to make most women at least consider him. Then it's up to you to be charming.
I should probably add that the picture was average quality - my mate made it using old Samsung. Second one was in a plain black t-shirt, but much better lighting and camera.
I have enough signal to claim that a profesional picture in a suit can boost your matches by 2 orders of magnitude. All my ex-girlfriends said it excites them I'm confided and ambitious - I'm not - but the suit conveys that messages. It's fascinating.
Pics like that really are a “best foot forward” approach. Mediocre photo, casual dress, nothing remarkable about setting? Not going to get a lot of attention. Wearing a wetsuit on the beach with a surfboard or SCUBA gear will also get a lot more attention. Or t-shirt, but while you’re sitting in the pilot’s seat of a private plane (preferably while in the air).
Hospital medical people are pretty wild. Especially with all of the visiting nurses in some places… those folks are usually young, making too much money, and hitting anything that moves.
I recently wondered if AI could reasonably help with the awkwardness of such interactions. Could AIs do the awkward "is this a match" chatting anonymously and asynchronously? At least enough to conclude that a) If matched, these two people will likely reach their first date?
I am married so outside the target customer base, but do you think there is a market opportunity for a dating app with some sort of built in coaching service? Based on complaints I hear it seems like a lot of younger people are so awkward and lacking in social skills that they literally don't know how to act and move the dating process forward. Maybe they need at LLM (or human coach for a premium fee) to prompt them on how to chat without seeming boring/crude/creepy/narcissistic, ask someone to meet in person, and then follow up after a date. Of course some people are just shitty and beyond help, but others just need a nudge in the right direction.
LLMs won't help them any more than "normal" dating/socializing advice did and does - which is not much. In the end, you just gotta socialize, and practise that. Advice is just merely a small nudge, has to be very personalized, and is full of the tiniest subtleties depending on the situation. LLMs would just repeat the generic advice out there which is 95% total crap.
I'd like to bring back an article, more analytical on this paratox (the title, Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating, speaks a lot), from the old and now dead OkCupid blog.
Funnily, this post was deleted just after the acquisition from the Match Group in 2011.
OkCupid really went to pot after the acquisition. You can't even browse/search any more. It's all Tinder-style matching. Is that what people really want?
Online dating has gotten progressively worse over the past ~10 years. Even Craigslist personals is gone... Where can one meet a weirdo nowadays?
Met my partner in cl personals before it got shut down. Couldn't ask to be with a better person and we only saw each other's pics after writing back and forth for a bit.
Curious if text based dating sites exist any more or even text at first and photos only being shared after writing a while
Oh man my comment on how Match group is a gambling app company is up there. I've been online dating for 20 years with pretty decent experiences as a short, ugly man, but now indeed the app/online dating situation is the worst ever. Some of this is probably due to me being older though.
With all due respect here - "20 years of successful online dating" sounds like an oxymoron! Unless you're choosing to date and to not enter into a long term relationship?
With all due respect, this seems like a Rorschach test? He didn't say "20 years continuously dating online"? People can date online a bit, get into a relationship for a quite a while, relationship ends, go back to online dating, etc.
This is semantics, but I think the parent's point is: if the relationship ended, was it "successful"? You obviously have different answers (and that's fine!)
Actually this brings up an interesting point: the article implicitly assumes that the winning condition, the optimal outcome, is a long term relationship. But is it? Certainly many rich guys don’t act like that (stay w one person for 50+ years). This is important, because if we don’t have a consensus on what the best outcome is, that would explain why we’re not getting one. There may not be a single optimal outcome for that userbase.
We don't need consensus since consensus is impossible with a large population. You just need a vast majority and the vast majority agree on the winning condition.
That's a big "if" imho. Especially, since there are more than enough instances of unhappy marriages in previous generations. Often people stayed in abusive relationships because divorce was heavily frowned upon.
Thanks. a great article. Over 10 years old and still spicy.
Bookmarked for further research.
Oddly, OKCupid came out in our interviews as "one of the better" types
of business and produced the most long term matches. Has anyone got
some other data sources on quality and satisfaction in dating apps,
with some large sample sizes?
A couple years ago, post pandemic, I tried these apps for the first time in my life (mid forties), and I had the what is apparently the typical hetero male experience of no matches.
It wasn't bad dates or ghosting or catfishing all that stuff you read about. Just no dates, no chats even. Gave up after a few months and deleted them, I doubt I'll ever go back on there.
Its perhaps controversial, but I definitely didn't "lead with my wallet" on my profile. And maybe for an average guy that is the only viable strategy, but of course that is selecting for a particular type of relationship.
The way these apps work, you pretty much have to pay as a guy. It's like a club where women get in free. The algorithms will derank you very fast unless you're a 10/10 male, and you will basically get no matches from then on. Most guys who are successful on dating apps are paying for it.
That hasn't been my experience at all, and I definitely don't think I'm a 10/10. I've had absolutely no trouble getting dates. (This does not mean that all the dates were great, or led anywhere BTW; the vast majority were nice enough people but there was no interest on one side or the other.)
When I see posts like this, I really wonder if men like you just don't know how to write a decent profile intro/bio and post some good photos. I think there are definitely certain things that make a dating profile more attractive, and many people aren't good at it. You might want to ask some female friends to evaluate your profile.
Ask your female friends to show you their tinder or hinge apps.
Take a look at what most men's profiles look like.
It is shocking, funny, and a little bit sad. At least it was for me. Maybe it's because I live in a big city? Idk.
Tons of mirror selfies, car selfies, low quality photos, weird forced smiles (no offense - smiles can be improved), red flag prompts, etc.
That's most profiles.. the next percentile is average looking guys with no "edge" to make them standout. Super cliche. Why should she swipe right in this guy? Yeah, he might be nice and safe. But he's exactly the same as the other 1000 guys that have this profile.
>Tons of mirror selfies, car selfies, low quality photos, weird forced smiles (no offense - smiles can be improved), red flag prompts, etc.
No lie as a man I honestly feel like I see the same
95% of women's profiles don't even have a bio, just a link to their IG or Snapchat and the profile pics are all very similar (you ever see a woman take a pic in front of graffiti/neon wings?)
I've seen men's profiles and I know they tend worse, but in my experience it's not by much
Maybe because a lot of men will swipe on a woman's profile if her first pic is a gym or bikini or nightclub pic regardless of whether she puts a bio or anything personal into it? It's why I use Hinge/Bumble over Tinder anyway, but even then getting interesting personal info from a profile is difficult
>But he's exactly the same as the other 1000 guys that have this profile.
Tbh this is how I feel alright, I'm just 1 of 1000 guys in the DMs, why bother putting in more effort for the same result
damn im jaded with dating apps D: to be 100% clear tho i'm not saying men or women have it worse or men or women are bad/evil/etc. no misogyny or misandry here
It's certainly possible to get dates without paying. But the difference between paying and not paying is pretty huge on apps like Bumble and Hinge (for men at least). For me, it was a difference between a few matches a week and multiple matches a day.
Profile wise you are right, this is part of what makes a guy "10/10" or not (which might not match 10/10 in real life). For me, I am a divorced dad in my 40s with kids. That causes a lot of women to swipe left and there isn't much I can do about it, unless I lie.
I think in general on dating apps, women are way choosier, men are less choosier, and this leads to a feedback cycle. Women have too much choice so they swipe left more, and men feel they have little choice so they swipe right more.
If you pay the app, it artifically boosts your match rate constantly so you still get shown to lots of women regardless of swipe rate. This gives most guys a much better chance of finding the right woman for them.
Contradicting myself though, the woman I'm dating now matched me OkCupid (where I was experimenting with a long form profile), and I didn't pay anything for that - but it was kind of luck I think.
Bottom line is it comes down to a number game with OLD. The more people who see your profile across apps, the more chances you have. Paying is a cheat code in that respect and improves odds.
>For me, I am a divorced dad in my 40s with kids. That causes a lot of women to swipe left and there isn't much I can do about it, unless I lie.
You can change your profile to leave this critical info out. This will probably net you far more dates. However, they'll probably be one-and-done dates because most women will be annoyed that you hid this info from them until meeting, so I don't recommend it (besides the concept that honesty is the best policy).
But I don't think this is something you should blame on dating apps at all. Your situation is what it is. If someone doesn't want to date a person with kids, that's their preference and that just makes them an unsuitable partner for you.
However, it might be possible to get a few more matches by having a great profile/photos, so that some women on the edge might be swayed to swipe right despite the kids.
>Bottom line is it comes down to a number game with OLD.
I absolutely agree. The more dates you go on, the more time you spend on it all, the more likely you'll find someone who wants a relationship with you (and you with them). Sitting around and posting on HN about how no one wants to date you is not a recipe for dating success, but that seems to be the approach many men here have.
> hen I see posts like this, I really wonder if men like you just don't know how to write a decent profile intro/bio and post some good photos. I think there are definitely certain things that make a dating profile more attractive, and many people aren't good at it.
But that itself is a filter, no? Not everyone have interesting lives to fill a good bio nor attractive enough to have some attractive photos.
No, I disagree. Just ask anyone in advertising: how you present something makes a huge difference in perception.
Sure, not everyone can look like Brad Pitt in his prime, but your profile will look radically different with different photos. Having photos shot by a talented photographer, for instance, will get you better results than a couple of bathroom selfies. The same person can look much more attractive at certain camera angles, or with certain lighting. The composition of those photos will lead to very different results: what is in the photos? Are they shirtless selfies, are they showing you at the golf course, are they with your family (or ex), are they showing you on a hike, etc. Depending on what kind of person you want to attract, the photos you want to show will be very different. If you want an outdoorsy woman, don't post a bunch of photos of yourself in a bar, for instance.
Same goes for the bio. You don't have to have an extremely interesting life, but you can write something that's somewhat interesting to read, and shows that you're not lazy. A bio with nothing at all, or worse "just ask!", screams that you're lazy and aren't willing to put any effort into your profile or your search for a match. A thoughtful bio just telling about things you like and what kind of person you're looking for, even if bland, is far better unless you're looking for a very shallow or stupid person (the kind who thinks "just ask" is a good bio).
My advice for photos: get some good photos of yourself doing stuff you like to do, which you would like to find a companion for. If you want someone who goes out drinking with you a lot, then post photos of yourself at bars that you like. If you like to hang out at the gym all the time, post photos of yourself there. If you like fishing, post pictures of yourself on a boat with a dead fish. If you like hiking, post pictures of yourself doing that. The woman will subconsciously think about if she can see herself in that photo with you. If your photos don't show yourself doing anything, it'll look like you have no interests at all.
Doesn't that have a slight problem for someone genuinely has no interests whatsoever?
For me there are no hobbies, no interests, no experiences, no stories, no partner, and no friends. But I have reason to continue this way, and it grants me a token of solace for the trouble.
But what of those as hollow as myself without such incentive? It would seem a painful position to be, existing as a shell of a person but without reason to embrace the isolation. What for them then?
But if it isn't, I'd say that if you have nothing to offer a partner, why should you expect anyone to be interested in you as a partner? It's up to you to make yourself a better, more rounded and interesting person to be around.
Also, it's hard to imagine anyone has NO interests at all, nor any life experiences, or anything at all really. I mean, you're on HN, so obviously there's some kind of interest in something tech-related, right?
Having no life experiences is true, but there's a little bit of cheating involved, unfortunately. The only memory of childhood I have is a vague impression of a toddler's toy, an egg shaped chicken with a blue bottom that had a bell in it. Everything else? What my room looked like? What route I used to go to school? What my teachers were like? It's all gone now.
My adolescence has mostly gone the same way; I remember dropping a ball from a stairwell for physics class. I know I was in high school but couldn't tell you much more then that. My college days, I that I was in class. But I don't remember anyone's names or faces or events or what tests I took. Only thing I know for sure is that no graduation ceremony occurred. I picked up my diploma from the admin office and then never looked back.
My first real concrete memories are somewhere in between a suicide attempt after graduation, and getting a job. And there's where I've been since for the last 12 or 13 years now. That's more or less the entirety of my life. Almost 40 years of life all of it can be laid out in 3 paragraphs.
Being on HN I think is more because I frankly don't have anything else better to do. Work has slowed down and it's either scroll reddit and HN or... honestly I'm not sure what else. Sleep perhaps?
I have never had a problem getting dates either but if you don't realize you are in the top 20% and having a different experience than most guys, then you are just stupid.
My experience is 10 years old now (I met my wife on OKC then), but at the time I was getting plenty of mutual matches and actually had enough women contacting me that I never initiated contact. I wouldn’t say I’m a 10/10, but definitely on the luckier side where it comes to traits attractive to women. I was also in my mid- to late-20s at the time, which I still feel like is the peak dating app age range.
No woman is looking for an average guy on dating apps. Would you look for an average car at an average price on a car sales website, if they were all within your ability to get?
Committed relationships found by judging other people's personality and looks are completely unnatural for human beings, and a result of conditioning by society.
The natural state is living immersed in a place where other beings are and spontaneously interacting with them without a developed ego/personality filtering the interaction, as the closest relatives to human (chimpanzees and bonobos) do.
This makes the socially-conditioned relationship model very unstable, since such a relationship will only work if, as long as and to the extent that the conditioned beliefs happen to match the other person and their beliefs.
Since the conditioned beliefs are fundamentally false (because they are of the form "you will be happy if X" but happiness is actually the absence of any such belief) they are unstable and they will mutate once their falsehood is partially realized, and this process, along with viral cultural propagation, also creates many different conditioned mindsets that make matching and intimacy very challenging.
So the problems with dating apps are just a very specific effect of what is the fundamental nature of human beings and reality.
The tech is superficially premised on the idea that humans will behave the same in captivity. Necessity and familiarity are critical variables in the right environment for pair bonding that can't be replicated through technology that exists to undermine those two things. Technology solves the necessity of people to depend on one another or invest their time in interpersonal experiences; it's easier than ever to shut the world out and not worry about survival. It also allows people to be distant while creating the illusion of connectedness, and people are going to be much less likely to invest in new relationships in that case. Take those things away and all you have is the primitive instinct to act on, which is what today's dating apps are specifically tuned to. If you want more than that, it's almost too bad, because opportunities for the sexes to engage in meaningful shared experiences are few and far between today. You're lucky if you see the same person more than once at a coffee shop. Go to a night club today, and chances are it will be predominantly full of people who for some reason aren't actually interested in having fun or giving anyone a chance outside of their clique. Workplaces are not only far more remote-oriented today but are less hospitable to relationships among coworkers than ever. Meetups are basically a joke now, and let's not even get into the bar.
Younger generations are correct in getting out of the dating app game, even if perhaps it will take a while for people to actually return to meatspace for dating, by and large.
It's said that it's better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all, but Alfred Lord Tennyson never used a dating app.
I think a better way to rephrase this is "judging 10s/100s of people in a few minutes, at days on end."
Judging people for looks isn't new, but being picky is easier if there are 1000 options easily available. In pre-internet times there was a much harder limit on how many people you could choose from.
Btw tangentially related is the secretary problem - trying to select how many people to reject before selecting the statistically best choice (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem).
>Committed relationships found by judging other people's personality and looks are completely unnatural for human beings, and a result of conditioning by society.
Humans developed culture and language. It is in our genes, how our brains evolved. Whatever we are doing right now is our natural state. Society, likewise, consists of other humans, and whatever conditioning they exert is also part of human nature, specifically of humans in large groups. Whatever social conditioning you are thinking of was not brought upon us by aliens.
"Committed relationships found by judging other people's personality and looks are completely unnatural for human beings, and a result of conditioning by society."
Evolutionary psychiatrists would not agree. They would argue there's practical reasons that we would evolve to judge others. For example a woman judges a man to guess if he'll have a wandering eye or lack of loyalty and abandon their kids. A man judges a woman to guess if she'll have a wandering eye and trick him into raising another man's children (Since in a natural environment men have no way to know they are the father.)
Only if you assume a useless definition of natural. By your definition, everything would be natural, right? Can you give an example for something thats not natural?
Better yet, do some experiments outside of just gender. Make an account for a dog. Or be a guy who's a total douchebag.
You may not like what you find.
EDIT: Seems people here don't like what I have to say or think I'm kidding.
I haven't done the dog experiment myself, though I've seen it done a few times by others. It's quite the realization when a dog gets more attention than you do as a human on a dating app. Yeah, it's different, but it may not feel that way if all you want is for just one person to not dismiss you that day.
However, I have done the experiment of pretending to be a stereotypical douchebag on dating apps, and that was especially enlightening. By douchebag, I mean that type of guy who shows his abs in mirror shots, wears a baseball cap sideways, and sends dick pics (I didn't actually do that part, but I'm illustrating a character here). Turns out that if all you want to do is get laid by attractive young women, then this is the guy you want to be. Many women in my locality are looking specifically for a good time with him. Just show pics of you in front of a white pickup truck, type in all lowercase, say you've spent time in jail, and that all you care about is sex.
My craziest online dating story is from 2007 with PlentyOfFish. Was hours from going to the girls house to torrent and chill. Googled her username from POF back when usernames sometimes meant something. Got a hit on a weird forum. Threads with pictures. Had to make a fake email to make account to see attachments. Confirmed, normal looking girl from Alameda CA letting her dog do her. I swear on my parents life. I stayed off online dating for several years until the tinder craze in 2014.
Your dog comments gives me a spark of PTSD.
Yikes! That's worse than my experience. She wanted me to pretend physically abuse her, and not in a BDSM with a safe word sort of way. I just don't want any element of that kind of dynamic in my life or to accidentally unleash some negative part of my psyche that's dormant.
Likewise to you, I quit dating for a while after that experiment.
"Reproductive baseline value of females is obvious." This has some serious sexism/incel vibes.
Visual appearance can be very deceptive. There are plenty of very 'conventionally' attractive people who have less obvious health disorders ranging from infertility to women with high likelyhood of death during birth to mental disorders that would cause problems for raising a child.
Reproduction is sexist. Women bear, and contribute, the lions share of the fetal cost.
Not all healthy appearing prime age females can reproduce, obviously. Healthy, young adult, well nourished appearance is still a good indicator towards 9 months of reproductive value.
It's at best an indicator that the woman isn't about to die and could maybe push out a child. Nothing more. That's really not super helpful and I doubt that it's anything remotely close to what most people are thinking about when they swipe and try to get a date with somebody.
I think people date and romance because largely it feels good, and it instinctively feels good because it satisfies certain necessities of life. Some of which necessitate pairing with the opposite sex. I don't expect the masses to be able to explain their instincts,or for their thoughts to explain them.
> That's really not super helpful
But it's more helpful than most of the other social media fast alternatives of someone you don't know well. You won't be getting their medical records. On a thirty second first glance yay/nay a few healthy photos looking good doing aerobic activities is as close as you're going to get to evidence of sexual fitness for fetal survival without asking intrusive and creepy sounding medical questions.
The fetus can potentially emerge as long as the man sticks around and survived for a few minutes. Not so for the female. The baseline minimal investment is sexist. Perhaps nature should be flagged too.
Dating apps are a world of abundance, a buffet of sausages for women. For men they are a pit of hell, unless you're either (1) in the top 10% (2) have low standards.
Here are some Tinder stats [1]
- a man of average attractiveness is “liked” by approximately 0.87% (1 in 115) of women on Tinder.
- the bottom 80% of men (in terms of attractiveness) are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men.
Anecdotally I have never had anything remotely resembling "success" on a dating app. I almost never get matches, my messages almost never get replies, and even when I get to the point of scheduling a date, they virtually always drop off. And then even when they agree to a date, they often cancel on the day of, and on multiple occasions even block me.
In real life meeting women in person, I've ever had any issues with dating.
It annoys me that people speak of "dating apps" collectively without addressing the enormous discrepancy between the male and female experience on them. It's analogous to speaking about the pros and cons of something like monarchy without considering that your experience of monarchy is going to drastically depend on whether you're the king or his subjects.
I don't really see a solution either. Men need to get off the apps and meet women in person, because otherwise they're fighting for the bottom of the barrel (I don't say this to put anyone down - the point is that you're going to have access to way better quality as a man if you meet people in real life).
Dating apps by and far are quite useless. If you ever want to know how insidious they are, just download one, finish your profile, and swipe for 10 minutes a week.
Since you are not an "active user" they will give you the most attractive people to swipe on. Every couple of days they will give you a "limited time" discount on gold or platinum or whatever. The push notifications are my favorite part, "you could be missing out on the love of your life!!!".
Not to mention the interactions with the UI are littered with casino like visuals. The whole purpose of the app is to get you addicted and spending time and money on it.
It's much easier to naturally meet people in real life through work/school. If you can't there, go hang out at coffee shops or bookstores or something and just hang. Strike up conversation with people, just live. You'll get rejected and some people will be rude but it's all real. You could also always pick up hobbies and meet people there. Just be social, don't spend time and money on these machines of misery.
I'm always so confused by the advice to go to bookstores to meet people. What kind of bookstores do you guys go to where the customers talk with each other?
Being able to start a friendly conversation under circumstances where an average male might fail is a prime sign of date-ability. While humans are very complicated, the general animal rule that males must impress females still exists at some level in some form.
That's a recipe for women to feel creeped out. Even at Meetups women get bugged by men who for lack of a better term lack awareness and communication skills.
And by this I do imply men talking to women, because despite claims to the contrary, it's the accepted norm (and there are always exceptions). That's my experience, it may be different in same sex communities.
There's no great place for people to meet anymore.
Countless surveys have shown that women do want to be approached. And don't forget about the "Brad Pitt vs Stalker" duality that exists for women and dating: They either view you as handsome who can do no wrong (including approaching them at Meetups), or some kind of creep. There is little in-between. Also, women view about 80% of men as unattractive. It is not a normal distribution, as men rate women's attractiveness. The open secret is that you need to approach lots of women on a regular basis in all sorts of different settings. Eventually, you will find luck.
Basically this, the bookstore was a stand in for any type of place that you may frequent and see others frequent.
People react differently to being approached, just like anyone would. If they are just into you it works. If not some are polite and see it as a compliment and just say no. Others will be offended and scoff. Either way no one gets hurt and you just move on.
Eventually you just get lucky with someone who is interested in you back. This is kinda how it was for most of history, so I find it odd people are so against it now. We are social creatures! go out and meet people, if they happen to be mean oh well, that reflects entirely on them.
> Also, women view about 80% of men as unattractive. It is not a normal distribution, as men rate women's attractiveness.
No source for a claim like this, on a forum where it's the norm for even the most mundane things? Please link one, would be interested in having a look at the study.
> At least on OKCupid, women rate 80% of men as below-average attractiveness, while men rate women at right about 50% as below-average and 50% as above-average
is very different from
> Women view about 80% of men as unattractive. It is not a normal distribution, as men rate women's attractiveness.
Pretty confounding to take that sort of a logical leap in a thread that's about the dark patterns, gamification and the highly modified context into which dating apps transform dating inside them.
I investigate these complaints for a living. Please don't date anybody you work with. We'll both be happier for it.
The fun always starts after a breakup and the other party doesn't want to see you at work anymore. There is usually no penalty for falsely reporting anyone to HR for harassment "in good faith," and there are likely anti-retaliation policies protecting malicious claimants from punishment for "misrepresentation" of any situation. Your side of the story will be recorded for the sake of appearance, and ignored. The system is completely broken.
If you're sure they're your soul mate, changing departments is not enough, leave now, on your own terms. You do not want a common HR department acting as a mediator for your domestic disputes. You're asking to be made unemployed and homeless.
Happened to me. Utter, utter nightmare. As she seemed to winning she got overconfident and started making claims that were easy to objectively disprove. She was thrown out. She broke down and confessed, after it was too late. Not a work situation though. I don't know why she did it, we weren't on bad terms or anything, I guess she just felt like it. Just a total psycho. It really turned my life upside down for awhile. I wanted to quit anyway, to get away from the whole thing.
Sorry to hear it buddy. Not the first time I've seen that.
I'd say it gets better but it is genuinely traumatic to be attacked out of nowhere for no apparent reason. There's literally nothing you can do to avoid random acts of violence. Even becoming a hermit isn't a solution; now you're that creepy guy who lives in a van by the river who gets blamed for diddling all the kids.
Nomadic life is safer, as long as you don't draw attention and move along before anybody learns how to exploit you.
I hope you find peace and have since landed on your feet.
> I don't know why she did it, we weren't on bad terms or anything, I guess she just felt like it. Just a total psycho
Also not the first time I've seen (or experienced) that either.
I'm seeing more instances of this sort of behavior exhibited by the borderline personality disorder crowd without consequence in popular media. Awkwafina does it in one of her shows, Pete Davison does it in "King of Staten Island," both in relation to getting rid of potential step-parents in publicly-humiliating manners. It's happened to me too in this context. It's really disturbing behavior to see promoted, and now I see it being leveraged at work too as a means of eliminating undesirable colleagues.
Acts of social terrorism, we grant the euphemism "cancellation." There's really nothing you can do but live in fear of it, because there are no rules and our institutions have no integrity.
You wouldn’t get a chance to quit either one, probably.
The job might fire the accuser - they might have an incentive to investigate.
At the gym you might get arrested and then banned, with no one interested in doing followup to figure out the actual truth - just have you released after it was clear it was fake. The gym wouldn't want anything to do with you either way afterwards.
I don't disagree with any of that. I'm just saying the repercussions for whatever things like that happen, they will be lower at the gym compared to the workplace.
Being arrested in public often has much more far reaching negative consequences than the accuser being fired, and you not being arrested.
Assuming work is going to actually investigate before acting of course. They do at least have some incentive on that front - if they need you more than the hassle it creates.
The current society propaganda is society doesn’t need men, so if it’s a woman doing the accusing, don’t expect society to want to investigate. Unless you’re in an area which is ‘anti’ that and the cops think they can manage it. They’re very unlikely to actually pursue charges of false accusations though, that opens a giant can of worms almost everywhere.
It takes a really compelling and provably nasty situation for someone to be willing to risk the backlash from a pretty woman crying and wailing - who you know is more than willing to make false allegations.
Women’s ‘power’ is their beauty - aka the drive others have to make them want them. As to if it’s manipulation or influence depends on the degree of intended mutual benefit in it.
Men’s ‘power’ is their physical violence (which can allow them control over resources), aka their ability to physically force someone or something to ‘comply’. As to if it’s warlord style or ‘community policing’ depends on the degree of intended mutual benefit in it.
Women are more used to the how and why behind false allegations and have the social tools to deal with it better, where most men are going to be powerless except in specific circumstances (Cops, and gay men, maybe - depending on the venue).
There is a reason society has been shitting on cops lately, btw. It hasn’t escaped their notice, I assure you.
Look at how much of the population supported amber heard during the trial if you don’t believe me.
Usually they’d just ignore it after it was obvious what was going on, and threaten the false accuser with a criminal charge - but not actually charge her.
HR is used to more ‘active’ management than the gym. If they’re under a lot of public pressure though, they might want to burn you even worse to appease the folks squeezing them.
Depends on the leadership incentives, and how much ‘force’ the other party wants to apply.
Of course. It works at every level, all the way down to family. Other advice here suggests joining groups to meet people, but anytime you two are under the same reporting umbrella, you're vulnerable to malicious claims when they want to be rid of you.
It's a sad state of affairs; I don't have a solution. Private citizens have no business running tribal justice systems. They used to call this form of abuse triangulation (but that term has a wildly different meaning with this crowd).
They're never together at the time of the complaint, but I don't see it mattering-- if a dude is sending dick pics to anyone while on the clock then it's an issue.
So these investigations usually focus on verifying whether he sent them at the time she said he did. Timestamps get forged or omitted in phone screenshots and personal phones are beyond our forensic purview. It's all hearsay. If I can't discredit the evidence, it stands, and the accused is usually terminated. Welcome to Kangaroo Court.
I ate some shit recently when a guy was accused of emailing dick pics to his ex from his work email. I believed her story (men are pigs, right?) until a colleague looked deeper at the email headers; she saw that the ex was the one sending the pictures to him. The social media narratives we're told and the shit I've seen in the last decade could not be more opposite. Men do some seriously gross shit at work for real, just not anything surfaced by the reporting process. That pipeline has just been a torrent of bullshit.
For what it's worth it's not always a romance thing. Bad complaints are always filed by women, but their targets are evenly split across men and women. False claims ensnare bosses and colleagues just the same as icky exes.
I think the mindset should be that whoever you initially meet, or hang out with, won't be a match but may potentially introduce you to a person with whom you could match. So all coworkers then are excluded from the dating pool, but are potential matchmakers.
If you don't date at work you still make friends at work and grow your social circle. Leverage that to meet new people through work people.
It can be risky dating at work but some find the trade off worth it. I suppose it depends on how comfortable you are at your job too. I've definitely seen relationships blossom in my workplace more than once. When you spend so much time with people it's only natural.
You are talking specifically about the male experience.
As 'female' it doesn't matter how often I use the app, if my profile attracts enough males I get matches and ice breakers all day long. If I accidentally open the app after 2 months it just gets more.
I don't need to match or look out. I get nice and stupid messages in mailbox and can choose from them.
If I go to match 80% (made up but realistic number) of the profiles shown already matched with me.
The apps don't want me to buy anything, they nag me for my time.
I could go on. By design I will only see the most successful or 'aggresive' profiles and nothing else.
This is very true, I've never used a dating app as the opposite sex so I'm not sure what their experience is like. This definitely sounds about right though.
Makes sense that attention is what they want from you, and how the experience compares to that of an average dude on it.
I suppose I'm forgetting other experiences too, I guess I follow the two "rules" of dating apps because as a dude I get a decent amount of matches. Still I don't like the dating apps, maybe I just yearn for something more real I'm not sure.
Until dating apps explicitly measure success in terms of matches made and users deleting the app at all levels of their business, the quality of their products will suffer
If a product team is incentivized to bring in revenue over creating long term relationships, then it will always make decisions that sacrifice the latter for the former
Investors need to understand and accept that these business measure success in that way or find a different stock
Otherwise the apps will have a slow trickle of users leaving after a slew of mediocre first dates or little to no high quality matches
I've kind of wondered how you would structure something to have incentives line up.
Sign a contract saying you pay nothing for as long as you are actively swiping/matching/communicating, but if you stop for 1-2 months you have to pay? Rather feels bad... but maybe the 'lucky' users would be more willing to pay since they found someone? As it currently is & the article describes, current dating app revenue feels super scummy from top to bottom.
Maybe even a discount/refund if you come back to the app after a month or two off :D
It's only a paradox until you realize that dating apps would shoot themselves in the foot with such a user-hostile model, trashing their brand. Hanlon's Razor directs us to the simpler explanation, which is that 90% of people on dating markets stay on dating markets; for which there are many, many highly personalized reasons. No dating app can fix its users' mindsets.
There are three rules on dating apps, and they haven't changed in the last couple of decades: be attractive, don't be unattractive, and inject humor. The fourth rule is to remember that if you want to be treated like a customer then make sure you pay for the product rather than being the product; the fifth rule is to have patience over things outside of your control.
I found my wife on Hinge in a suburban-bordering-rural part of the country (so not a lot of people on the apps in absolute terms) right before its acquisition and actually had better success broadly speaking on Bumble. The trick was, unfortunately, to pay for it. Have super likes or whatever they're called. Pay for the membership to see people who like me without having to swipe. Pay to boost my profile so more people see it and potentially like it. The worst part (for me), actually spend time curating photos and writing thoughtful answers to things - the former being much more important than the latter. Even with all of this I'd hit nights where I had seemingly swiped one way or the other on every eligible bachelorette within 100 miles. Maybe I had.
Unfortunately I don't have any reproducible or generalizable advice from meeting my wife. She was my only match on Hinge, neither of us paid for it, and we moved to phone conversation and dates within 48 hours.
I really like this take, and I think it becomes extremely self-evident once you think about it for a bit, and talk with people who use dating apps IRL.
"Dating apps are incentivized to keep people going on mediocre first dates" is such a tired take that would require such incredible sophistication and secrecy to pull off, "we can't make the matches too shitty, but we also can't make them too good, damn it Jim that match was too high quality! now they'll stop paying!" its comic book villain stuff that cannot possibly explain why all of these apps suck.
"For which there are many highly personalized reasons" -> Look, yes people are responsible for their own mindsets. But in the words of a recent tweet (I wish I could cite but I can't find it) concerning learning comprehension tanking in K-12 students: Its Phones! Its just phones. Its obviously phones! You hear this crap like "well, its a highly complicated situation with many variables and possible explanations" Nope! Its literally just phones!
Dating is hard, weird, and scary. Its one of the most vulnerable things humans do. We're putting kids on a dopamine treadmill from childhood, and we're surprised that, at best, we've got cohorts of individuals growing up who love the matching but stop when it gets any more difficult than a swipe?
> that would require such incredible sophistication and secrecy to pull off
No, there's no need for a strawman Snidely Whiplash, it can be done through regular management practices with plausible deniability.
1. Collect metrics around recurring revenue and "engagement". (With the software, not engagements between couples.)
2. Use those metrics to choose what changes in the software and who gets promoted.
Low quality matches is the default state, they don't have to deliberately engineer it. They can just let it happen, or not care when it happens as the result of some other change.
> "we can't make the matches too shitty, but we also can't make them too good, damn it Jim that match was too high quality! now they'll stop paying!" its comic book villain stuff that cannot possibly explain why all of these apps suck.
No, they celebrate Jim—all the more if he is ordinary. It's like extreme couponing. The employees are genuinely cheering all the way to the bank when they see someone stack coupons to take home $20,000 of goods for only $300. Jim is the jackpot winner who invites all his unlucky friends.
I completely agree. I'm always amused by the idea that dating apps have this secret, sophisticated algorithm that gives you dates that are nice but leave you wanting more. Human relationships are hard and I doubt that the best experts in the field could come up with something like that, and it's certainly impossible for an algorithm without any information about the person. I always feel that these complaints come from the frustration of not being able to find the perfect partner, from people who don't even come close to the standard they want in a partner.
In my experience, online dating is a pretty well functioning marketplace. People have a limited amount of time to date, so they'll take the best one they can get. Of course, online dating narrows down the ranking process to superficial information, but I don't think there's a technical solution to that. As a man I've seen both sides of the coin. When I started out with online dating I didn't have good pictures, no good bio, no good writing skills and didn't pay. I went months without a good match and even longer without a date. Then I decided to clean up my profile, highlight my strengths as a potential partner, learned to carry a fun conversation and started paying for the product and suddenly had to reject women, simply because I had too many options for any given night.
Dating apps are just a more extreme form of real dating. Dating always has been a competition, people will choose the best partner they can get. The advantage of the real world is that people often don't have many choices, but the disadvantage of the real world is also that people don't have many choices. Apps get rid of that disadvantage, but also of that advantage.
I don't doubt that many users are approaching dating apps suboptimally but I don't think its fair to completely throw out the idea that these companies are knowingly trading quality of service for profitability.
Network effects are such a huge piece of the puzzle that can draw people to a service despite it being a bad experience (see FB marketplace), and app companies have gotten extremely good at finding the optimal amount of user hostility (see the vast majority of mobile games).
Beyond that, Match can afford to be user hostile because they have proven able to consistently buy basically everyone in town. Who cares if Tinder gets a bad rap, there's a very good chance users go to another Match Group service and they can buy practically any non-Match service that springs up.
> It's only a paradox until you realize that dating apps would shoot themselves in the foot with such a user-hostile model, trashing their brand.
This is sarcasm right? What dating app has a stellar reputation? Which one hasn't been outright caught or isn't widely suspected of using fake profiles to string users along? Or hasn't failed to prevent obvious scammers/rapists? Or hasn't leaked/sold their customer's data?
The idea that dating apps have a precious reputation that they must carefully maintain or no one would use their services is beyond ridiculous
An actually good date is worth potentially hundreds of dollars. I’m surprised there isn’t an app which meets this need. Yes there is “The League” but even that is just a more exclusive Tinder. No, make a matchmaker app for high paying customers that uses human curation. $500 for 3 dates.
This kind of thing has actually existed for a long time. They predated dating sites and had even worked off paper as far as I understand.
The problem is they cost a lot more, and still had basically zero guarantee of any success. IIRC they were so expensive most single people would have trouble affording them.
I met my wife on eHarmony back when it was relatively new. I had tried one of the non-computerized matching services at some point and it was like 4x what Match or eHarmony cost and it was a pretty poor service.
I probably tried Match in 2000 for the first time? Had a lot of bad first dates on various sites between 2000-2005. Like 50+ people I never went on a second date with?
Back then tech wasn't cool. You could hit it off with someone and then they'd literally get up and leave when they found out your job.
I also tried speed dating, that was popular for a while. It was like a meetup where you talked to different people for 10 minutes each and then at the end checked off on a paper if you were interested in someone you met and if you matched with someone the organizer sent you each other's contact info.
I ended up trying all this cause when I finished college I moved to a new place. I basically knew no one. And at my first job I was like 23 and there was not a single other person under 30 in the division, it was even hard to find people to hang out with as friends. Working as an engineer was very different for me then.
Any activity that is small enough that they need more people, but still large enough.
Be careful, males and females are in general attracted to different activities. (I don't know why). If you are a guy trying to meet girls (or vice versa) your first choice is probably bad. If you don't see someone who could be a match right away you are in the wrong activity. (this is before you meet them to learn if they are married or have have compatible personality)
You want to look for some kind of social hobby that naturally attracts a wide range of people, both men and women, is in person, and makes you happy regardless of whether you're actually meeting people.
Certain sports qualify. Volunteer groups can qualify. Some hobbies work.
For sports today the rock climbing community is very inclusive and the sport naturally causes people to get to know each other since you can't climb with ropes in most places without pairing up with someone. The whole gym culture of rock climbing didn't really exist yet when I was in my early 20s.
Married with 3 kids here. If was single today I'd be at the local rock gyms 24/7. I took my kids climbing a few weeks ago and I couldn't believe how many women were in that place. Roughly a 50/50 male/female ratio, and everyone is super fit. Yoga pants - chefs kiss. Easy to strike up conversations too when looking for help with a problem...
eHarmony, where I met my spouse, used to be like this in the 2000s. $249 for 3 months of access, they chose the dates for you (after filling out an extensive, 1-hour questionnaire) and you could NOT search. It was a digital version of a very old school, professional matchmaker. I remember getting an average of 1 match per week (no date guaranteed from a match, it just afforded you the possibility of communication, both sides had to agree to it after reviewing the traditional writeup and pics).
After dedicating an hour to completing eHarmony's extensive questionnaire, I was unexpectedly informed that there were no matches available for me, resulting in my inability to join their service. While initially disheartening, I appreciate eHarmony's honesty and their decision not to charge me the $249 membership fee given the lack of potential matches. This transparency is commendable, although the experience ultimately led me to discontinue my pursuit of online dating altogether.
I'm sorry to hear that; of course it would've been be disheartening! If you're interested in sharing, I'm curious if you speculated at the time why that might have been the case (e.g. where you live, unique interests, etc.), and how you went about things after that experience.
My ethnic background, despite not imposing significant restrictions on my preferences, may have influenced the outcome. Additionally, my friend pointed out that my atheistic/agnostic stance could have further narrowed my potential pool of matches, possibly eliminating up to half of the available candidates.
Back in those days, eHarmony was almost exclusively for Christians, since it was founded by a devout Christian guy. It's a little less so these days, but it still has that reputation and the users there are much more likely to be religious than other dating apps I think. I tried it for a little while about 5 years ago and found it to be a waste of time and quit.
The question here is, does a matchmaker actually have better results in terms of matching then a dating app or other methods? Historically they only really seem to work when the culture around them supports their use and people assume they're going to marry someone they don't know well rather then date for a few years.
There was such a service in Chicago in the 90s. I think it might have been more than $500 though (and that would have been in 1990 dollars). I don’t remember if I saw the ads in the Chicago Tribune or the alt-weekly Chicago Reader.
I’m not sure, though, that even though the good date being worth potentially hundreds of dollars would lead to most people being willing to spend those hundreds of dollars. When I was a young man, there was a lot of stigma about having met people through personals (the pre-app version of dating apps) or the early years of internet dating. I think probably the '00s was the peak period for social acceptability and quality of matches.
Back in my single days a woman approached me on OkCupid saying she was a matchmaker and I was a good candidate for her client. I rejected the client but consented in being in their database and once in a while they would ask if I was interested in going on a date with one of their customers (I guess this was either a service where only women paid, or I at the very least wasn't a customer they were working for but connected with me when it made sense for them.)
What I quickly realized is that it's still not a great model. The match maker promised the women at least X dates per month, and the benefit was that setting them up with me let them check off that box (I am professional, good looking, not crazy, etc.) but I ended up declining to meet these women, or after a first date. The reason is that as paying customers of the match maker, they were also a bit too far into the "oh shit it's almost too late territory" and wasn't what I was looking for.
I guess the point I am making is that the high paid matchmaker can screen-out the obvious shit for you, but the flip side is you're now "someone who needs a match maker" and that's limiting too.
Coincidentally, I met my wife pretty randomly on a swipe. Had an OK date with her, but decided she was a good woman so I called her back. After our second date I decided to give it a real go, and deleted the apps. Two kids now.
Don’t write off the power of making a more exclusive Tinder. I wrote about it in a separate comment [1] but the nature of a dating app will be strongly determined by the barriers to entry in front of it. Just turns out that the barrier to entry that The League introduces is not one that may select for the type of people you are interested in.
I tend to agree it is worth a lot. So maybe we need people like recruiters who mask the identities but provide a bit of detail to do the matchmaking. I think of friends and acquaintances to be a good (or at least better than most) mediator of matchmaking, because they know people who might fit well with you. This would be an extension of that.
The article doesn't mention this at all but there seems to be an abundance of "content creators" on dating sites targeting men. They will chat with you for a day or so and then try to sell you their "product."
It's anecdotal but this happened to me several times. You also hit a bunch of profiles that are clearly promoting similar services.
I'm sure it's not great for women either, but dating apps in modern times are pretty awful for men.
I never understood sites like onlyfans... i mean, I understand the sites and creators, but I don't understand men who pay for that.
On one hand, you have normal porn... with some google-fu (well... bing-fu) and disregard for copyrights, you can find anything you want for free, but you have to jerk off by yourself.
On the other side, you have prostitution, where you pay, and you get actual sex (bj, hj, pegging, whatever you're into and pay for).
And then you have onlyfans... you pay... and then you have to do the deed yourself? why?!
Prostitutes are people. With their own preferences and standards. Is it truly that unbelievable to you that there's people that don't even meet hooker's standards for a client? Or that people believe that they don't meet even that standard?
Then there's those that live in countries where prostitution is illegal. How does someone that's socially awkward and has no network to speak of, look for and hire someone working in a profession that's outside the law?
On the other hand there's a degree of protection for both sides when the only insights to the other is just a small block of text that flashes on a screen. It's hard to be a disappointment when you're just a box that's garnered 15 seconds of paid for attention.
Yeah, it's a mystery. You don't even have to disregard copyrights if you don't want to: pornhub.com and others are all free, though you have to pay for access to certain videos. But there's so much stuff on there for free, so why bother?
For a straight male, you’ll see a surprisingly large number of fake profiles. Anecdotally, women seem to report this too. (Reddit has MANY such posts!) So identity verification is a real problem.
As an iPhone user, I’d seriously consider using a dating app that ONLY allowed you to “Sign in with Apple”, in the belief that it’s the “best” way to ensure a real human is behind the sign-in, more-so than email/pwd, or even Facebook or Google sign-ins.
btw, I'm just throwing out that "Sign in with Apple" is "best" only to challenge "Sign in with Facebook" or "Sign in with Google" folks to explain why not.
At the very least, it's nice to have Apple whip up a random email address for you every time a site asks for one.
Wait, so this is a thing in the real world? I thought it was just people on Twitter being dumb. Like, prospective dates are judging you on your brand of phone?
Maybe I'm just too old now (mid-30's) but I don't even know what kind of phone most of my friends and acquaintances have.
I personally haven't dealt with it, but I personally know people who have. They tend to skew younger, and it's a big deal in middle/high schools. Kids will actually bully other kids just because they have an Android.
It's pathetic that Apple marketing has worked so well at convincing people that they're the luxury product.
It's usually half joking but people remark on it more often than not.
Part of it is because they're not used to communicating with people outside of the Apple walled garden, so there's some extra hurdles for video calls, sharing photos, things like that.
The problem with dating apps is that most people on there are looking for validation and dopamine hits, not actual dates.
The value of the dating app for most people is the dopamine hit they receive upon getting a new connection and the expectation that when they open it again they might see someone new and interesting. Once they’ve gotten the validation of the match there is very little reason to move forward with an actual date.
I imagine that's way more true for women than men. And that's not exclusive to dating apps. Nightclubs for example are filled with scantily clad women looking for nothing more than validation, while most men in there are looking for action.
6 years ago you could actually match with real local people that you even met before, now you just get matched with Asian crypto scammers and Thai women.
They scammed me out of 60€. Don't waste your money or mental health on this.
I had a wake up call with Craigslist. 15 years ago I found every apartment or sublet or room for rent through Craigslist, no problem, never had an issue.
After moving back to the states last year after a decade abroad, I tried Craigslist to find an apartment and literally every single one was a scam. Times change.
My theory of dating apps is that the hurdles in front of them will largely define your experience with them. For instance Tinder in China is behind the Great Firewall and requires you knowing it exists despite it not being marketed whatsoever there, both of which create a strong selective effect on who is on the app, making it a very different experience than Tinder elsewhere despite the app itself being the same (hint: I had a great experience with it, largely well-educated global-minded people with an anti-authoritarian bent and high motivation to take dates seriously, at least when I was using it many years ago).
In trying to make a dating app “easy” you create a new selective effect for who it will appeal to, which may be (but usually is not) positive.
The "enshitification" of dating apps is long overdue, in fact I'd say it's one of the easiest to predict.
"Enshitification" almost follows a formula: take any app that does not have a direct path to revenue, add investor cash, watch the enshitification as the apps founders try to please investors. Dating apps here have an additional issue which is you are guaranteed to have users "fall off", either a user finds someone and drops off or the user get frustrated and drops off, one of these outcomes is basically guaranteed for a dating app.
And this is just my opinion but I feel like unlike other apps, users are more resistant to paying for dating apps because it makes you look like a looser and dating is is inherently viewed as something that should be "free" (at least the meeting aspect)
I guess my question is what did investors really expect?
I never had a problem getting matches on dating apps, but it’s hard to not let that go to your head. Often times I feel like I’m just swiping through a catalog looking for a quick fix.
For real relationships, having a strong network of friends who can introduce you to new people organically is key. Without that, you have nothing and basically must rely on dating apps. If you go out and do stuff just because you want to meet people and not actually do the activity, it is real easy to pick up on and puts people off.
> Basically, a new app starts up, and hopeless romantics looking for real love begin flocking to it. But so do sleazy types who lie on their dating profiles.
That pretty much sums up every social media site. Hasn't seemed to happen here, but I'm sure it's because of damn good moderation. A quick shufti through New, shows a lot of spammers and hypers, pushing their wares, just like they do, in LinkedIn, and StackOverflow.
Dating apps for most people seem like a complete waste of time and actually detrimental to your life. There are exceptions, of course, like people much too busy.
As a male, it seems guaranteed (probably due to supply vs demand disparity?) that you will only have matches that are significantly less attractive than you. I think most people will consider me average in looks. I don't think I've ever matched with a girl that was average on online dating in the 5 years I tried it. I also got professional photo help and put a lot of effort into it etc. As another commenter mentioned, more than half the women I met up with also had an STI.
There has been some research done on the attraction thing, and it has been shown that if women don't know you, they are exceedingly likely to rate men as mostly ugly. If they do know you, however, their ratings are more of a bell curve. So if you want the most attractive possible match (for you), and have the best chance at someone you have the most chemistry with, I think you have to just meet a lot of women in person and get to know them first. It is unfortunate because people are seemingly less social nowadays? So it is kind of a problem that makes itself worse.
> As a male, it seems guaranteed (probably due to supply vs demand disparity?) that you will only have matches that are significantly less attractive than you.
This seems to wildly vary across apps, but that's not generally been my experience. I've also found that folks can have a very different conception of attractiveness than their prospective partners.
I’ve found that it’s not just the photos but the writing and content on profiles.
It was surprising to me how many people had really poorly written profiles or just photos.
I’m guessing I’m a 4-5 but have matched with really attractive, and more importantly, very smart, successful, and interesting people. At first I was surprised but women tell me that many people on dating apps put in little effort or just can’t do basic things like carry a conversation beyond “hey” and “your [sic] beautiful.”
I find that the apps are useful for meeting lots of people in person and testing out chemistry. I’m not sure a better way to meet people IRL.
I’m in my 40s and only have my own experience so YMMV.
I’m curious how you knew half the women you met had an STI. Are you asking this?
OkCupid used to have a bunch of blog posts with numbers about how much a difference a good profile and good pictures make, but I think they took them down when Match bought them out. I haven't been on any dating sites in a few years but the amount of people with garbage profiles and bad pictures (lighting / posture being the biggest and easiest issues to fix) is crazy high.
OkCupid used to be the best because they actually tried to match you up on common interests and relevant dating questions. Last I heard that had been ripped out and it was just another tinder clone emphasizing photos and swiping. Should be a crime to ruin an app that useful.
The questions thing made it possible to see answers to dealbreakers before ever sending a message.
I met my current wife on OkCupid back in 2010. It was great. My big deal breakers were that I wanted a non-smoker that didn't want kids. OkCupid matched us at like 98%, and having now been together for 14 years, I'd say that match was pretty spot on.
last time I was on it, the questions had been de-emphasized and it seemed more like a tinder clone. hopefully a better version of it comes along someday, it's a valid idea (matches based on quizzes)
That’s extremely disappointing. The questions were both entertaining in and of themselves and also extremely helpful as a filtering and sorting mechanism. I don’t know why they’d want to de-emphasize or eliminate the best part of OKC. That’s what OKC used to be about!
I had a traumatic experience with it (ironic by context) not on online dating so yeah I have asked all women ever since. It is definitely tricky and requires tactfulness to talk about this early on.
Your points are all valid, but is it really a waste of time and detrimental? If your ultimate goal is to meet someone long term, what is a better use of your time? Even if your chances are slim, and several dates in a row fail, you just need one to succeed.
Your reply is not particularly astute nor is it charitable.
(1) Perhaps I have also dated not through online dating, where it completely aligns with what I'm saying?
(2) Caring that someone is sexually appealing to you... a red flag?
(3) Yes I would agree that shallowness is unattractive, as anyone would. However, bringing up a point specifically relevant to online dating apps and implying that it may be specifically relevant to online dating apps does not necessarily mean that is my entire mentality. If I met up with multiple women knowing I said what I said, perhaps it would not be such a logical leap to assume maybe that attractiveness does not matter to me as much as you seem to think it does?
> And that creates a problem for the sellers of used cars that are actually good. These sellers are like, "What the heck?! I KNOW my car isn't a lemon! It's worth way more than what you're willing to pay!" And so they refuse to sell their used car and exit the market. The result is a market where lemons become more prevalent.
Lots of truth to this. These days, dating apps seem to be exclusively for the desperate, horny, and desperately horny; as the article says, the younger generation doesn't even use them.
Even if you're just a "normal" person not in that top ~20% of attractiveness/desirability, and have no chance of matching with those top 20%, that top 20% still needs to use your app. Otherwise, everyone else using it starts thinking that the app is made for the undesirable. Nobody wants to think of themselves as undesirable! And everyone wants to swipe right on a 10/10 girl or guy and hope they somehow get lucky.
When the only attractive people left on your platform are OnlyFans advertisement bots, your dating app is pretty much fucked, no matter how many genuine 6/10 romance-seekers you have.
We are being way too generous to dating app companies here. They invented their own problems, and applied those problems to our social lives in order to turn a profit.
Dating apps aren't optimized for connection. They are optimized for engagement. The most engaging dating behavior is rejection.
The only utility that a dating app can provide its users is to maximize the number of interactions.
Tinder explicitly limits the number of interactions (swipes) a user can perform each day. It also limits the diversity of the group that each user interacts with. By doing this, Tinder has explicitly removed all of its utility! The only thing it has left is its walled garden; so it's no surprise how anticompetitive Match has become.
Not everything needs a “tech” solution. The issue is that we need more third spaces, not that we need better dating apps. People know how to pair up if they naturally see each other often in real life.
> "one-in-ten partnered adults ... met their current significant other through a dating site or app."
This seems unlikely, though I suppose there's a long tail of people who met before apps were available (computer dating goes back to the 1970s at least, but I don't believe it was that common). These days I'd think the ratio would be closer to a half. I even notice it's common in the NYT wedding announcements.
It’s strange that the dating spps company are sitting on a gold mine of user data and has done little on it. Aside from the usual way of monetizing by ads, they may sell courses on how to improve attractiveness and improve profile. Their data is more reliable than most people’s experiences or hunches, but they seldom share with the world these knowledge. I sorely needed them when I was a user of dating apps.
Originally responding to a flagged comment that stated you were weak for not talking to people in person:
You’re not wrong, but the in-person dating pool is small and the stakes are high. I am very recently divorced, dating single for the first time in nearly 25 years after finding my wife stole $300K from the family and had been carrying on an affair for 18 months while I thought our finances and love were at an all time high.
Dating apps at 45 are a literal fucking cesspool. Like any online community, there are norms and nuances which are incredibly difficult to come up to speed on and, frankly, are miserable to navigate.
That said, finding those who are open to in-person dating interactions is almost impossible these days. We’re missing The Third Place and folks have been trained to use apps to date and thus are unlikely to engage in person.
That said, I was super fortunate to find a beautiful single woman in my apartment building who was not only receptive but has been a really great friend and person to “date” in the traditional sense as I knew it 25 years ago.
But, I was incredibly fortunate and I’m not sure it’ll work long term; putting me right back into the dating apps potentially. Where not wanting to parent additional kids (my own or someone else’s), eventual marriage, or even something super serious or super casual is attractive to me. I am not in a place where sex after 1 to 3 dates is something I desire. Nor am I interested in having super deep emotional conversations or thoughts about some sort of future together before I meet someone.
That said, to poo poo dating apps is a Luddite view of the world. They do work and people are using them. We have regressed as a social society in the last 25 years and these apps offer a wide dating pool for people to explore without The Third Place or the uncomfortable experience of navigating these waters in person and potentially the offensive and negative experiences in-person interactions can create.
Best of luck to everyone out there. I hope you find what you’re looking for and the pains and anxiety that come from either method.
People use them out of desperation/necessity, not because they work at actually helping you find a partner or whatever it is you're looking. They work at keeping you hooked on the platform, hoping in vain you'll eventually find someone if you stick there long enough.
To quote someone else: There's this old man playing a crooked game every day and loosing his money so a youngster approaches him saying "don't you know this game is crooked old man, why are you still playing it?", to which the old man replies "I know it's crooked, but it's the only game in town".
The crooked game is the dating apps. For many people, it's the only option of dating and meeting new people outside their social circles, which is why they're used even if most people hate them, not because they're good.
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The crooked game is the dating apps. For many people, it's the only option of dating and meeting new people outside their social circles, which is why they're used even if most people hate them, not because they're good.
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> Dating apps at 45 are a literal fucking cesspool.
Funny I’m in almost the same situation and have found dating apps really helpful. I’ve been using them for a few months and it’s like a firehose of dates. It’s surprising because they get a bad rap, but I think I could go on a date every night if I wanted to.
I haven’t found a new partner and am just a few months in but have met nice people and relationships.
As an introvert I like being able to better filter and identify people who are potentially compatible.
I’m a man in a 10M metro area looking for long term relationships just using Hinge and avoiding hook up culture. So it’s hard to compare, but so different from 25 years ago when I was last dating.
> Funny I’m in almost the same situation and have found dating apps really helpful. I’ve been using them for a few months and it’s like a firehose of dates. It’s surprising because they get a bad rap, but I think I could go on a date every night if I wanted to.
To state the obvious, you must be in the top 20% of attractiveness, and probably over 6 feet / 183 cm. Literally, you are a statistical outlier. Multiple studies and experiments have shown that 80% of the women are seeking attention from the 20% most attractive men. Notice that I didn't say anything about "great personality".
Same for me, in my 40s, living in London. Started on the dating apps last October, and had so many dating opportunities I had to slow down. And now I've found an amazing woman. As a life long awkward geek, I wish it had been this easy in my 20s.
I think the 10M metro area helps your case, many folks don't have such a wide dating pool to pull from on the apps. Also, it depends on the culture of the area that you reside within. Here, in Minneapolis, folks are tight lipped, tight knit, and keep everything close to the chest, but they continue to hold some of those dating app nuances in high regard.
I'm really happy that, for you, it works. I also had a steady stream of dates, but they were folks I was not compatible with in any stretch of the imagination and the stress and anxiety that comes with juggling many different conversations, relationships, dates, etc, just isn't something I want to deal with. I want to spend my time investing in a small group of humans, not investing 1/100th of my available emotional and mental bandwidth on a variety of them, only to find myself moving on to the next one--time and time again.
TL;DR: 100 first dates, sometimes multiple times in a week is just exhausting for me and I prefer a world where I can be me, without the stresses associated with playing some game I don't understand.
> folks I was not compatible with in any stretch of the imagination
This is really within my control, right? I found being very specific about my interests and requirements. If I’m going on dates with people I have poor compatibility then I need a better profile. And need to ask more questions beforehand.
What was interesting to me is that there are lots of friendly people who will say “yes” to a date. So I put specific questions like instead of “must have sense of humor” add “must relevantly quote Monty python within the first three days messaging” and then filter based on it.
> after finding my wife stole $300K from the family and had been carrying on an affair for 18 months while I thought our finances and love were at an all time high
Yikes. Were there, in retrospect, signs that you missed?
Everything. Absolutely everything. When you work hard to always assume the best of the love of your life, it's almost impossible not to miss each and every sign because you dismiss them with prejudice.
I had no access to any financial account, ever. Once I gained access, after the fact, there were nearly $16K in cash advances against a credit card I didn’t even know I had.
Purchased all new dresses.
Purchased workout equipment (rarely, if ever used).
Purchased sex toys and sex-related clothing I never saw used.
5 new credit cards in her name.
Pieces of paper with divorce related info I assumed were for a friend of her’s, certainly not for us.
Would leave for 4+ hours a day, many times a week, to go shopping but never came back with anything.
Would leave our vacation home once a week to do laundry and get mail when she could have done it at a laundromat or had the mail held.
I'm sorry to hear that. Wouldn't some of that be considered a crime/fraud, meaning legal recourse may be an option? Of course a lawyer would know better.
(Not that it might be easy to recover the money, but the judge could have wages garnished.)
The burden is on me to prove she used it to prepare for divorce or used it on her affair. It’ll cost at least $100K and probably more to do so and it may not matter.
If she was using your money, would that not be some kind of "unauthorized spending" that you could "report" to your bank? I'm not just talking about preparing for divorce but even other expensive purchases. But I can imagine that it's probably near impossible if you're married with a joint bank account...
I would still suggest speaking with a lawyer about this if you haven't already, but nonetheless I wish you the best. Perhaps consider the money the "cost" of getting rid of person who needed to go anyway.
You're not wrong, but I believe there are things people can do to find better "fishing holes" if they think outside the box.
I grew up in Los Angeles and have never actually felt at home here. Should it be any surprise that my experience dating here has been poor? I'm certainly not a hottie, but I am pretty sure I'm not ugly, either. Given all the examples of male attractiveness I've seen, I think I'm a low 7 on the decile scale. Most women out here seem to only consider 5 - 7s "settle material", but most women aren't above a 7 either, so physical attractiveness doesn't universally explain struggles with dating, not that it isn't a big part of it.
My hypothesis is that people underrate the difference in dating culture across cities and countries. I've been to enough cities and a few countries to realize that, actually, people aren't the same everywhere; cities all have different cultures with varying attitudes and levels of connection to reality. LA is fundamentally built on adults playing pretend for a living, so if you're a more analytically minded person, this is a poor place to be fishing for dates. A city built upon a different industry or values education may be a better place to find people you're compatible with.
What I think most people don't think about is how the male-to-female ratio in a city may have an impact on the dating experience. I recently did an experiment where I used Census data to examine which cities had more males than females and which ones had the opposite, narrowing the field down to just single people (never married, divorced, or widowed) between 25 and 34, and the results were quite interesting. While it's not super common for cities ever have superficially extreme imbalances, most major cities have significantly more single men in this cohort than single women.
For instance, in Los Angeles, my query over the ACS5 data from the last Census shows that Los Angeles has a male-to-female ratio of 1.18; this means that there's 18% more men than women in that city. In a major city, that's a lot of active competition.
Recently, I've been considering spending time in Boston because I already like that city and think it may be a better fit for me in the long run. In contrast to Los Angeles, Boston has a male-to-female singles 25-34 ratio of 1. Although it would be nice from a man's perspective for there to be more women than men, I think there's reason to believe that, for some men, they may suffer less competition in a city like that.
If you are curious, reader, the only major cities in the United States that I found to have significantly more women than men are Rochester NY, Cincinnati OH, Richmond VA, and District Of Columbia (having the lowest ratio at 0.89). There's a handful of other cities with a ratio <1, but you have to really ask yourself whether you want to spend time in Palmdale CA to find dates.
I don't have the research on hand (I'll post it here if I find it), but I remember reading about how the sex ratio impacts the way that women approach dating; if they have an abundance of options, in the case of more males than females, women are likely to be more selective and use long-term dating strategy (possibly paralysis-by-analysis or playing the numbers game), whereas they are less selective and think in the shorter term when there are fewer men. This is likely true at least to some extent in the case of the reverse gender. I'm just speaking from my perspective as a guy and the knowledge I've gathered.
Don't be like me and spend too many years fishing in the wrong hole. Find one with fewer rods already in it. ba dum tssshhhh
It is not from a researcher but a journalist. He does cite research and uses real life examples.
He gave examples where when the ratio was in the men's favor, they would not commit to marriage as easily. In contrast when the number was in the women's favor you would notice things like an increase in credit card debit I believe.
I did similar census research back in my early 20's (more than 10 years ago at this point) and concluded that certain parts of D.C. are the best place to be if you're an 18-34 single man. Then I happened to meet someone randomly (now married) before I had a chance to put this plan into action.
I'd be fascinated if someone who couldn't get a date in LA moved to DC and blogged about the results.
> I'd be fascinated if someone who couldn't get a date in LA moved to DC and blogged about the results.
I moved from the bay area to Manhattan. It didn't improve my dating success at all. I've blogged about it a lot on private spaces to friends but it's not as happy go lucky as you might imagine.
I think the odds will improve in your favor if you live in small towns with better ratios but those basically don't exist in the USA. Once you live in a big enough city, it seems like most women's bar for physical attractiveness quickly rises above that of what your average man can hope to pass. That said, I would never move to a small town because the amount of single professional working class women is exceptionally few.
> It's possible that dating apps could try to find similar solutions. Think like a Carfax for daters! Or a rating system, which is Airbnb's solution to this kind of information problem.
I wonder if there could be some alternative model that aligns incentives. Maybe something like group-on where they give coupons on things to take your date to, then get kickbacks from that (more dates= more money for them)
Tbh, I'm surprised there aren't any federated dating sites. Not sure that will magically fix all the issues with current dating platforms, but removing the profit motive while making hosting sustainable seems like a win.
I am in discussion to start our own dating site/app with some people. Probably Non profit. But there are many arguments not to do this. If anyone interested who think he could bring value...
I always flirted with the idea of making a dating app that charges users a ridiculous amount like $10,000 a year, as a cynical form of manufacturing exclusivity.
Yes dating apps have a fundamental contradiction and enshitification is inevitable. But what struck me the most was how amateurish this article was. Citing tiktok users. Overusing phrases. Poor pacing. Its another example of the enshitification of journalism.
Well yeah, if the app works then they don't get any money anymore. And they've gotten crazy expensive too.
I find it quite frustrating because I've tried to use these apps to find people similar to myself, but it's just impossible. Now they're all going to a "slim" approach where you don't even get to have a profile, just witty quotes and pics, no likes/dislikes etc. They're clearly designed for the superficial class of people/not to find you a relationship.
It's irritating as a gay furry who's not a heyyy type gay that I get a wall of tanned abs that only want to endlessly talk about Ru Paul's drag race, travelling and well...that's it.
I mean damn I like travelling too, it's why I moved to Europe, but these apps would work a hell of a lot better if you can provide as much data about your interests, likes/dislikes etc as you can and have the machine match up with similar + slightly similar.
Bumble is especially bad, at least gay guys don't grt their stupid "women talk first" behaviour, but we do get their idiotic design of having no real profile, just pics + "funi quote" and that's it.
The market is so ready for someone to come in with something that actually works and refuses to sell out. Whoever does that would make a mint (as long as they have the willpower to stick to it/not be bought).
I have a somewhat unrealistic dream that someday dating apps will be viewed the same way as roads: Essential infrastructure that needs to be handled by the public. A government developed dating app whose only goal is to help people find healthy relationships. All my american friends balk at this. But as a swede, I dont think it is completely impossible.
The completely impossible dream would be that we as a society stopped using dating apps and just met away from the keyboard instead.
Given their precipitous fall in TFR, certain Japanese prefectures have actually started taking this approach, most notably Tokyo [1]. I don't think your dream is _all that_ unrealistic
> All my american friends balk at this. But as a swede, I dont think it is completely impossible.
(as an American, balking at this): The American government is too irresponsible and corrupt to ever handle something like this -- it would get abused so quickly, and thus, no regular person would trust it.
Having a single dating app/profile as a free public service is a good idea in theory, but the pre-requisite of having a "functioning, selfless, responsible government, invested only in the public good" is just not a thing we're gonna get here.
And yet the government mostly does what we ask of it. USPS gets mail to the most remote locations for the price of a stamp. State and the military both protect our interests overseas (for better or worse). Healthcare.gov works pretty well (after that rocky rollout).
It's far from perfect, but I don't feel like it's any more dysfunctional than any other western democracy.
having worked at, or consulted at, several F500 orgs... I believe it.
most could be politely described as "basket cases" or "cluster hugs" (hugs being the operative word). but they had so much inertia and so many assets that were effective on ground they couldn't be stopped.
anything outside of core business drivers were a mess, but they could still make in rain in their core competencies.
the level of corruption was also shocking. CTOs packing the PMO and Procurement teams to approve contracts, including 400k consulting fees to a company, only a few months old, and owned 100% by the CTOs wife. Sales Engineers offering "acquisition fees" for going with their SaaS offering. People fighting to get to be the gatekeepers for new RFPs so they could milk the baksheesh.
Right and if you wanted to make money by being immoral, you’d have a lot better odds of success, and probably both less chance of being caught and less penalty, if you did, in the private sector.
A senator gets paid a tiny percent of what a c-suite exec does and there are much fewer of them. I know all sorts of small business owners who make more money than POTUS (though I suppose much fewer if you count speaking fees after retirement) or anyone in Congress. Etc.
I mean there’s corruption and graft and stuff, and plenty of waste, but for its size, I think our government is wonderful. The more I learn about other ones the more positively I feel about ours.
And here’s a way I like to think about things when there are big topics that are confusing. I ask “if you were wrong, would you still think you were right?” I often ask friends if Bing were better than Google (which I’ve never met anyone who thinks it is) would they know it? They say yes but then I ask them the last time they tried switching, or even know someone who did, and they realize that even if Bing was 20% better than Google they would still think it isn’t.
I think it’s the same with government. If ours were better than every other one in the world we’d mostly still think it wasn’t by sheer inertia and the marketing done by politicians to convince us it isn’t.
Im sure it isn’t the best in the world, but I think all the better ones are smaller wealthier countries that just have a much easier job.
> And yet the government mostly does what we ask of it.
That's the problem, though. What we ask of a dating app is roughly "Give me access to partners that are 'out of my league'." It might work for some people sometimes, but it's not satisfiable in any meaningful way.
It's like asking the government to "Make me rich" – something we do ask of the government! It does what it can, giving some people the opportunity to become rich sometimes, but it's not meaningfully satisfiable either. And that is where the ideas of corruption and irresponsibility come into play. "He got rich. I didn't. The government must favor him!"
Few want a dating app for "healthy relationships". One only has to step outside in a reasonably populous area to find all kinds of healthy relationship opportunities staring them right in the face. But that's not what people, generally speaking, are looking for.
> What we ask of a dating app is roughly "Give me access to partners that are 'out of my league'."
I don't really believe this is what we ask of apps.
It is however what that the current apps promise us.
If I install one of those apps, I need to swipe a lot of people to see an average woman. If I were single, I would probably be ok with the first 50 that show up if they weren't bots or onlyfans bait.
Apps only get used if they deliver what people want. Apps promise that because that's what people want. (There are always exceptions)
> I need to swipe a lot of people to see an average woman.
Right. If you were after an average woman (and an average woman was after you, we'll say someone also average), there would be no value proposition in swiping endlessly to find each other. You could both just step outside. There are average people abound.
But the likelihood is that at least one of you, if not both, seek someone who is more than average. A connection isn't being made outside because either one or both parties is saying, implicitly or explicitly, "No thanks."
And fair enough. If you think you can have something that you perceive as being better, why wouldn't you try to go for it? (Exceptions notwithstanding)
But the app doesn't promise women or men. It promises potential contacts. And it delivers. That's why people pay premium, etc.
If you read again what I said, I never said I was looking specifically for an average woman. What I said is that it takes some time to show them.
This changes expectations drastically. It also changes possibility of meeting someone that's "at your league", unless you use the app constantly, apply some strategy (such as swiping "no" to a lot of pretty people), or simply pay.
> I never said I was looking specifically for an average woman.
Nothing suggested you were...?
> What I said is that it takes some time to show them.
To which I said that's on purpose, because that's not what people want to see. If they did, they'd just go outside. You don't need an app to find average people. The world is teaming with them. It's the quest for someone 'better' that draws people to these apps.
That’s just marketing by politicians trying to get elected. “Our government sucks, pick me and I’ll fix it” has been every politicians message since Reagan. It isn’t real.
For an organization that size, it functions incredibly well in most respects. Nobody would claim it to be perfect (and you’re probably right that nobody would trust it even if it were, because so many have accepted that marketing) but it could handle simple tasks like a dating app.
It maybe shouldn’t. But I don’t think corruption is or in this case would be a real issue.
It maybe shouldn’t. But I don’t think corruption is or in this case would be a real issue.
I'd be more concerned about aligned incentives. A (modern, democratic) government exists to help maximize the social welfare of the governed. Is there enough societal gain to be had by entrusting mate-matching to the government? And are those gains in sync with the goals of the individuals?
Fictional example: In a politically polarized society, there might be a benefit to matching extremists with either moderates or extremists from the other end of the political spectrum.
Another: In order to bring economic balance, the government might decide to match the wealthy with the working class.
Well, a lot of people are concerned about the low birth rate, and a good online dating app might be helpful. And a not-for-profit model might actually be the best way to accomplish that.
I am neither sure that the common claim of why online dating is broken is true, nor that a government-run app is a good idea. Im just sure the “our government is incompetent and corrupt” argument is drastically oversubscribed to.
You know what government is 100 times as corrupt and incompetent as ours? Cuba. And they make some of the finest cigars and rum in the world. Surely ours could come up with something better than Tinder.
I get the impression the birth rate is a function of cost, not opportunity.
Sample bias ahead: My friends are mostly married. Those that have zero or one child did so because of the cost (both in real dollars, opportunity cost, and general pain-in-the-ass of raising children in the US today), not the inability to find a suitable mate.
Well sure, it’s not a total solution by any means, but there are people (including myself) who want kids but never had them because they didn’t find the right person with which to do so.
One only needs to increase the birth rate by about 25% to get back to population growth, so good online dating could probably make a meaningful impact. I am sure things like free health care and child care would be much better but they’d also be much more expensive, a decent online dating app could easily be at least budget neutral.
Would a single government (for example USA) operating such service be better on average than a single megacorp (for example Match.com)? I think corporate overreach in the democracy is way bigger than government overreach. At least in such simple and inconsequential case.
The Government could also match people based on a political agenda. I don't know why they would do that, but the idea fascinates me. Any creative types want to spin this into a "Black Mirror" script?
Good point. So, if the "Team Edward" party wants to dilute the "Team Jacob" party, they could match "Team Jacob" with attractive "Team Edward" companions who will raise their kids "Team Edward."
I think it's less insane to trust the Swedish government to implement something like this responsibily than the US government. As a US citizen, absolutely no thank you to a government dating app, it's too ripe with temptation for them to be overreaching and irresponsible with the data they collect.
The government here maintains a job database, which is basically the same thing. In practice, people still go to the for-profit job sites. Unless other dating apps are outlawed, it's unlikely the government brings a value proposition to see users use it over the alternatives.
> whose only goal is to help people find healthy relationships.
Especially if this is what is designed around. I expect you will find that most people using dating apps aren't looking for healthy relationships – they could have found hundreds of those just walking down the street – but are trying to find something else.
Before we go this route I would like to see what real competition looks like. They should break up the Match group and force those dating apps to actually really compete for users. I would love to know if new apps would maintain these tactics if they remain outside the Match group.
There are other options to private capitalism than the government. Could be a non-profit/NGO/worker owned collective. Maybe these types on organizations could provide a better product/experience, as they aren’t orientated around maximizing the profit.
I've seriously considered starting a non-profit that runs a site that works like one of the pre- match.com acquisition dating sites. I suspect 99% of costs will be combating spam profiles, which really isn't how I want to spend my time though.
> I have a somewhat unrealistic dream that someday dating apps will be viewed the same way as roads: Essential infrastructure that needs to be handled by the public.
Honestly, if the government gets involved, I hope it just kills the whole category with fire and bans them all, so we can stop with this atomized, app-mediated bullshit. Match Group's shareholders will be very sad, and I will be happy to play them a tune on the world's smallest violin.
But capitalism doesn't optimize for good outcomes, it optimizes for the shittiest thing that can be monetized that people will just barely tolerate. It also will use the power of propaganda to drown out and destroy any non-market competitors, so we feel we have to use that shitty thing.
And there it is! I think I have never ever seen an article posted on HN without somebody in the comment advocating for a government takeover. Even for dating apps now! If you examine official policy of the Soviet Union, not even Lenin was _that_ communist.
Tomorrow's article on HN: "How to make my three year old eat his vegetables?"
In the comments: "The government should mandate that he eats his vegetables!"
Calm down there, friendo, nobody's saying the government should take over dating. What everyone here is talking about is an alternative to the current match.com-owned, for-profit state of affairs. A public option without a profit motive.
It doesn't hurt to have that alongside competition, for those who would want to use it. I personally would not use a service like that, but some governments could be sane enough to implement it as a service to the public.
1. I'd say about half my romantic partners have come from apps, and the other half from in person (meeting at parties, through friends, etc). TBH I'm not sure one has been consistently better than another. Sure meeting someone in person for five minutes tells you a lot about potential compatibility in ways that texting via app doesn't. However, how someone constructs their data profile tells you a lot about how they see themselves, which you might not get from meeting someone casually. Empirically, I wouldn't say the outcomes from one source have been consistently better.
2. I really don't think 'enshittification' is unique to dating apps. Look at the internet. Like, recipe sites now all tell you about how special this soup was to the author's grandma and how treasured her childhood memories are of it ... because you spend more time on the site and they can show you more ads. More search results are just low quality SEOd blogs and what not. Tons of software is moving to a service model, because they can get sweet MRR from you, and make more money in the long run. Food, social media, games, etc are all getting engineered to become more addicting. Like this is neo-liberalism.
> Call it the dating app paradox: dating apps are supposed to be matching lovebirds together, but once they do, the lovebirds fly away — and take their money with them.
I wonder if Feeld, Bloom, etc in the ethical non monogamy / polyamorous dating landscape will escape “enshittification” because their happiest users (who find good matches) stick around looking for more friends.
That was sort of my reaction to the article too, like the assumption that "your users want to pair up such as to stop using your app" is an obviously incorrect assumption in many cases.
It also occurred to me that there's also an obvious expansion, which is into couples relationship and sex coaching/therapy/tools. I did some data analysis work with an app company with a lot of parallels to dating apps, and they kind of went that way: they figured out the needs of their users after their initial app was "done" and then offered another app, or expanded app to cover their subsequent needs. They actually did this twice very successfully, by branching out after a major stage of user need, that was the focus of the existing app, had been reached.
These dating companies could easily turn into relationship coaching or therapy or relationship tool apps. There's plenty of possibilities.
I meet most of my partners in real life just out and about, and only used online apps for very specific kinky stuff (which has caused me to get banned from regular dating apps lol). I still lament the loss of craigslist, so I installed Feeld.
However, Feeld is fucking terrible. One of the worst apps I've ever used in my life.
The design is good in theory, you can swipe through profiles without having to make a decision, then go back and say yes or no to partners at your leisure. You can list pretty much whatever you want in your profile as long as you keep the public pictures PG13 to keep the app store gods happy. You can pay for more matches or to send pings (extra notifications that people can see without matching you), or pay a fee to see everyone who has ever matched with you. The business model is super straightforward, no deception there.
But it is honestly the buggiest app I have ever used in my life. I would get a message notification and I would have to restart the app each time to view a message. I thought maybe it was just my cheap-ish Android phone, but I confirmed with my friend who uses a more expensive iPhone that the same thing happens for him. He could barely get it to work as well. We are both tech professionals.
They also never seem to address key complaints in design. To keep it hacker news safe, let's say you are interested in spanking. You can list "spanking" in your interests area, but there is nothing to indicate if you want to spank someone else, be spanked, or both.
I think they are clearly coasting on the lack of competition in the space, and after a major update it got even worse.
I decided I would no longer use it because I don't want to meet people with such low quality standards for software, because what else might they have low standards for in life?
I bet if you made dating apps paid upfront at a lower price than premium subscriptions (e.g. $10/month rather than $20/month on other apps), you'd still get a ton of users as people are willing to pay for a way to find love, and you'd get your much desired revenue. And you wouldn't have to deal as much with enshittification. The only other problem to solve is the 90/10 rule - where 90% of the women are only interested in 10% of the men.
I worked at eHarmony in 2009 and we had a monitor in the office which showed user complaints. Apparently, the business people had A/B tested and determined that the additional revenue from ads outweighed the annoyance that users experienced (I actually asked directly about this). The other thing was the large number of people who were frustrated by the low density of users in their geographical region. Spending a lot of time with user data as a developer was kind of depressing as a significant part of their user base was divorced people who were recovering from alcoholism or drug addiction.
Dating apps already have this problem, but a subscription really incentivizes the app to never let you find the right person. Because if you do, they lose a subscriber.
Charging a subscription at all creates a perverse incentive to never give you a good match. As soon as you find a good match, you cancel your sub and stop paying.
I do talk to women in real life, and it does have advantages. But it's not often you find someone who is attractive and single. And there is also an whole skill to taking it from meeting, texting to an actual date.
My worst STI experience was with someone who was in a friend group that I became a part of. They were also quite attractive to me, so it felt like a complete homerun.
I mean, you know you are gonna get downvoted here which is why you clearly chose a throwaway.
Your main thrust that dating does require courage is true, but that courage could be as straight forward as asking someone you met on an online dating app: I'm scared of getting herpes, would you mind taking a test before we had sex/kissed?
I've done this many times. No herpes yet. Some people have said no. Their loss.
So -- hopefully you can read this comment and reflect on your jadedness. Courage yes. Jadedness, no.
1. I love it when people reply to these types of comments earnestly, in part because I think the rest of us well-adjusted people can have good conversations here.
2. I can't imagine the mindset of being with someone who wants to have sex with you and all you have to do is take a test, but not being willing to do that.
