Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

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"Dating" tends to be an asymmetrical market where you cannot be successful (as a service) unless you can get the heterosexual women to opt in (in sufficiently large numbers to make the thing make sense). Guys tend to be openly looking for hookups. Women who are amenable to hookups tend to have zero problem arranging that. So the people you need to appeal to are the women looking for a relationship, not a hookup, and who want assurances this will be wholesome and not another means for total strangers to sexually harass them with dick pics and the like.

Though I have read a few things that indicate that dating sites have helped increase the number of interracial marriages and made it much easier for gays to find a mate. If you are gay and not out to your family or whatever, you can go on a dating site and admit that you are gay there and it vastly simplifies navigating a complex situation like that. Some gays still pretend they are straight and their lover is just a roommate to help make life in the big city affordable or whatever.

This is why I love Bumble. Women have to reach out first, so its much less hassle (as a male) of messaging over and over and over again into a black hole with no response.

> So the people you need to appeal to are the women looking for a relationship, not a hookup, and who want assurances this will be wholesome and not another means for total strangers to

Not in the casual case. You simply say, "Only looking for hook ups, something casual, etc". No one's time is wasted. When my Bumble push notification comes in, I know it's someone who finds me attractive based on my honest photos and okay with something casual. It's the perfect filter for all involved.

Disclaimer: Still have a Facebook account, but rarely log in.

Dating is an imprecise word that covers both more casual relationships and the process more rightly called courtship. I am not familiar with any sites that list themselves as courtship sites. (Sites offering that service are typically listed as dating sites, though some dating sites explicitly cater to either/both.) Courtship is the process of sorting out who is a good match for a long term relationship and forming that bond and so forth.

Courtship typically requires one to also sort out how you fit into the larger social fabric of each other's lives. In contrast, hookups or casual flings typically are looking to cut you out of the fabric of their social lives. People generally don't want to introduce casual sexual relationships to important people in their lives, thus expressions like "The kind you don't take home to mother."

Facebook is a social network. Their value position naturally readily aligns with the idea of courtship and they are apparently going with that.

I don't use either dating sites or hookup sites. I'm not the target market. I'm just making observations based on reading up on how asymmetrical markets work and this is a standard thing that you run across. I have read that it is why you see "Ladies night" at bars. The guys are going to be there anyway. You need to find some means to entice the women to show up.

(Disclaimer: I also don't drink, so this is just stuff I have read about working with asymmetrical markets and developing a service when you have a chicken-and-egg problem.)

Agree entirely. If I had to do it all over again, I'd want a co-parenting website, to find a partner of sufficient character and grit to have kids with, but we'd both be free to date other people while raising our kids together. Who I want to have kids with, have a casual relationship with, or enjoy activities together with might not be the same person.

Social networks are part of the problem, but people not knowing what they want is also part of the problem. People are hard, and cannot be solved with engineering.

People are hard, and cannot be solved with engineering.

I just realized this was the force behind it the whole time, when I read the line about casual versus long-term relationships that made an eyebrow arch up, what you just said is what made me so skeptical.

Reading everyone else's thoughtful responses: of course Facebook doesn't want to adjudicate dating choices, Facebook employs engineers who need $stuff to work on. 'Dating' is another feature for a tech company that sells ads.

That sounds nice in theory, but why do you think your coparent would be interested in such an arrangement? Dating your spouse is far easier logisitically than dating anyone else, once you have kids eating up your time.

Because they too don’t want a monogamous relationship (ie polyamorous lifestyle). Life is too short to commit to only one person (my opinion, ymmv).

Shared Google calendars solve the logistics issue.

That's just cultural. In India, they are all courtship services, and present themselves and matrimony / marriage sites.

> When my Bumble push notification comes in, I know it's someone who finds me attractive based on my honest photos and okay with something casual. It's the perfect filter for all involved.

I've never used Bumble before but my understanding is that males in the top 20% of physical attractiveness get nearly all of the requests and that males in the bottom 80% get nearly none. Does that sound accurate?

I can't speak for other users, but I get at least one request per week. Make of that what you will (I'm a solid 6/10 on a good day). Putting yourself out there costs you nothing.

I think one of the things that really hampered me was believing that attractiveness is: 1. always universal/objective 2. one dimensional

I took myself out of dating for a long time because of that set of beliefs combined with stats like the one you've posted. The truth is that different people find different types of people attractive. There are a few people who are just attractive (ironically a good number of those people are rather lonely because their good looks are intimidating) but the vast majority of people are attractive to some and not to others. Also, even how you present yourself matters a lot. Making yourself appear attractive does require some effort but it's not something you're stuck with.

If you're into long term relationships, you really only need a handful of people to find your attractive. The odds are actually in your favor when your sample size is large enough, which on a dating app it usually is.

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