Never Pay for Online Dating (2010)
gwern.net
gwern.net
They're making a sh*t ton of money (highest grossing app 2019) off mostly men's desperation (~$1.4 billion in 2019 reportedly), but there's only so much paying for all these boosts and memberships can do when there's just so much more demand for women on there. Tinder is also reportedly as much as 75-85% male.
I hope young men aren't letting their lack of matches on the dating apps lower their self esteem/make them depressed and try approaching in real life (post-pandemic). I know for some the feeling of getting close to 0 matches while others get hundreds a day can be crushing to their mental health. But real life is much better, don't let a lack of online success (what's the point, she wouldn't swipe me online so why should I approach her?) stop you from approaching women in real life .
I'm sure that I have seen somewhere here before some hard statistics on where partners meet in Western countries – maybe someone still has a link. In spite of the existence of known meat markets, those meat markets are not the source of most of the population’s relationships. Instead, people come together through mundane things like friends of friends, people at work, people in the neighbourhood, classmates, etc.
If everyone spends a stupid amount of time with online dating then that's where a lot of the matches are gonna be even if it's not an efficient way to get that end result.
If couples are finding each other online more than they are elsewhere, then online matchmaking is outperforming offline channels.
Also note that when you go with a traditional "man is the provider" model, then being in an environment where men have demonstrated their provider ability is beneficial for both parties. For the women as the options are pre-filtered and for the men as there is less competition noise.
As for dating apps/online dating... if you look at user statistics you see a strong gender imbalance, so apparently men want to use them far more than women do. I've heard this situation expressed in terms of those apps being less appealing to women than they are to men. However, due to the imbalance, the premise of these apps is essentially broken for most male users.
I mostly go into and create circumstances where the same is true of the women, pre-filtered.
One thing I liked about being on my promoter acquaintances' VIP tables is that the women also at the table have been pre-filtered like 4 or 5 times before I ever see them.
1. State department ->
2. Host family (with heavy input choice by the husband) ->
3. Promoter ->
4. Doorman (who would definitely reject guys and gals alike, no matter what name they dropped) ->
5. me.
So yes in that environment, there is also even less competition noise amongst men, because we wouldn't ever fight over a woman given the quantity and only chuckle at our predictably similar preferences if a pattern emerged. But, the selective evolution at play is much more extreme than the general population or the rest of the club.
and yeah, that also allows us to inherit the social validation and assumptions about our ability to provide that many women would also look for, which would be convenient enough to never think about. In quantity, some people are just more forward and assertive than others, so with a lot of women now competing for attention instead of men, this has been a much more optimal use of energy for men. Occasionally relationships are nice too, this wasn't about that.
I don't think they really do that "to get a man", though
"Getting drunk with friends" is an in-person activity. The point isn't getting drunk, the point is to socialize with barriers of anxiety and inhibitions lowered.
There are plenty of people who want to ensure physical compatibility for a long term relationship as much as emotional one. Society deems one "shallow", but for many people sex is a crucial aspect of any relationship, and just because they are willing to sleep with someone liberally does not mean they are also not interested in something deeper.
I'm assuming it doesn't mean being capable of basic sexual activity, because that seems like a given for 90% of potential couples. I.e., not something you'd really need to "test".
And if it means "capable of giving each other a really enjoyable sexual experience", I wouldn't think that's something you can falsify in just 1-2 dates. Because there's a learning curve, and that takes (among other things) time and practice.
I would suspect that more than 10% of women complain about a male partner being unwilling to perform oral sex on them, or bad at it, even though this might be very important for them and the main way they can orgasm. Men, too, complain about women’s ability or receptiveness to things they need for satisfying sex.
You can't easily tell whether a car will get better or worse the more you drive it, but you can tell when a car is immediately fun to drive. Start with the car that's fun to drive and hope it gets better (with proper care and maintenance) not worse.
My broad point was that it's not universal. And for a lot of people "sexual chemistry" is something they want to evaluate from the very beginning. Even they will probably admit that it takes more than 1 or 2 attempts to validate.
As for the drinks, you can get a mineral water with lime if you need a drink in your hand.
The point of the cover charge for men is to: Increase the barrier to entry, keep the riff-raff out and maintain a certain level of male clientele. This improves male to female ratio, improves the likelihood of females attending because they have better environment (you should love ladies night- you are paying for the club/bar to set out the bait) and better options to pick from. The higher the cover the less likely you will get into a fight over talking to the wrong girl.
I used to hate cover charges but then I realized like most people I got it all backwards. It's only desperation if you pay the cover, buy the drinks, only to not take proper advantage of it.
Wow. This is the first time I've heard anyone express this concern.
It boggles my mind that anyone would care about being seen without a drink in their hand.
What consequences do you imagine will come from that?
If you are just walking around without a drink, then you're stalking/leering.
Of course it's much more nuanced than that - you can look like a lecherous creep stalking woman with a drink in your hand just as easily.
But that would be the premise: With a drink you don't need anything else to have a good time, you're already "doing something". Without, you're literally trying to fill a void.
Is this how you think of others, or do you imagine that's how they think of you?
For me, whether or not someone has a drink in their hand, if they're in a party or a club or a bar they're all doing basically the same thing: wandering, listening, looking to meet and talk to people.
I really don't get why holding a drink would change any of that.
Most of human interactions is a facade of some sort. Smalltalk, icebreakers, most of early dating, even most professional conversations.
I know introverts and folks on the spectrum find this intolerable. But it's the foundations of human society.
You can hate it, but hating it will only make you angry. Instead, treat it like a game. There are many games you can play in the world to deal with something painful or frustrating.
If you're stuck trying to fall asleep, you pretend you're counting sheep jumping a fence.
If you're stuck in traffic, you try to guess which lane might be moving faster and make micro optimizations to get their faster.
If you're stuck looking for a life partner in a social setting, the game is act like you don't need one, that your life is fully complete without them, and that you don't care about any one specific given social interaction. Of course, the best way to play that game is to actually live that authentic life. But we all fail at hiding our emotions and true intentions in one way or another. So we play games to camouflage it like holding a drink and acting like that's all that we need to be engaged and interested.
Having some other activity involved (having a drink or otherwise) lowers the stakes when interacting with new people.
I trick I learned long ago at house parties or BBQs is to drink one beer, then constantly re-fill it with water for the rest of the time. That way I have something to hold onto and a way to entertain myself where there is a lull in conversation or whatever.
I can't tell whether you're joking which in itself is hilarious to me.
Basically just like in multiplayer game matchmaking, you get matched with people of a similar rank and never even see the people of different ranks. So if you yourself are matching people of lower ranks (ie. less visually attractive people, you know what the consensus is whether that matches your preference or not), that means you yourself have a lower rank and are not even shown to people with higher ranks. You might see higher ranked people, might super like them (like everyone else), might form clever a message because you paid for that feature too, but they will never see your profile.
There are articles claiming the dating apps don't do this kind of ranked matchmaking anymore, but did you know they even used to? so yeah imagine believing them.
These apps are not good for your mental health, and your own behavior influences other people's ranks whether you wanted it to or not. Caveat emptor.
Just today I started in the often advised book by Christian Rudder from 2015, from OkCupid. And yes, this one-dimensional thinking seems to be prevalent amongs this kind of people.
I very much prefer a dating website where I don't get the idea that I am an experiment. I want to meet someone with similar views on a relationship, views based on giving, trust, you know, the simple things. People who want other things, like traveling, will probably find similar minded matches.
I don't think many people involved actually believe this or actively think this way.
That being said, the result does have some similarity to how the physical world operates in large gatherings like primary schools or military, where people of similar attractiveness and few differences in their supportive ability would congregate. People figure out where they are on the consensus-attractiveness scale and match with people in the same range. This doesn't match how the world outside of that works, and therefore almost all guys and unattractive women have the same result on dating apps. For dating apps they haven't figured out a better solution, and don't want to or need to as it is also a perfect frustration feedback loop for them.
Don’t believe that’s accurate for superlikes. Those tend to get put near the top of the pile.
But, if you are a much lower rank, and use a superlike on someone higher ranked, the likely result is a quick swipe left.
But with a regular swipe you won’t be seen at all.
So yes men swipe right on tons of women, but the percentage of women in that pool that those men would date and not just hook up with is much much smaller.
Obviously caveat that men truly at the bottom of the dating pool might behave differently.
Thanks for your comment and I fixed the typos in my earlier post.
English is indeed not my native language, but I should have noticed this spelling mistake, since I use English most every day.
In my first language (Dutch) there is a clear distinction between singular and plural (men: man - mannen, women: vrouw - vrouwen).
why?
Its hard to tell in the US, but it areas with strong sectarian separation, you see profiles that are just "weird" if not fake.
I.e. I'm in Israel. if I see a profile of someone who wrote their name in hebrew (and a jewishy name at that), but it says they went to Al Quds University it just doesn't make sense. Is it possible? sure, i guess, but it would seem more probable that someone just sicked a profile generator choosing random universities in the general area with pictures from the internet.
It's a shady business and I'm sure others have noticed it too (esp. on Bumble and Tinder).
Having a good business relationship with Penske takes quite a bit of pressure off when you're shopping for a used box truck if you catch my drift.
Try as I might, I honestly cannot catch your drift on this one.
Can you restate this with a non-car analogy?
I thought it was a Dan Jenkins quote.
Just the fun without any of the shackles. Keep more time available for your own hobbies and interests.
If I’d ever separate from my current girlfriend, I would probably stick with ‘pay for play’ and not bother looking for a new girlfriend.
I don’t know, if $10 get me a girlfriend in a week without leaving my couch that’s money well spent.
Regarding the evolution of Tinder, I also despise all the options they added while slowly making the default worse. It got to the point that I don’t use Tinder at all because it’s become nearly useless for me at the moment. Probably because I have better options elsewhere.
Women here get to choose, it’s hardly pimping.
If 20 years ago it was rare for romantic/sexual partners to meet online vs in person, the trend is now reversed. We are now in a fully democratized app dating landscape. It therefore stands to reason that the same people who were successful at converting meetings in person would be successful at converting online as the skills are essentially the same.
You can also buy more boosts, and these do up your presence.
The headline would still be accurate though if it read “never join a dating app which requires payment”.
I could see my like and in that paid month my likes almost doubled.
I didn't act on them, because I wasn't interested in the people who liked me. But I wouldn't see this as a OKC problem. Overall I had the impression, I got my moneys worth.
When I first started online dating five years ago, I put in a ton of effort in my replies/messages, except I rarely got any replies. That was pretty sobering.
I still put effort in my replies/messages, but I got used to just one or two sentences rather than an actual paragraph.
A good female friend of mine complains about how guys in online dating can barely hold a conversation. I have said to her, you have no idea how many messages your average or below-average (in terms of physical attractiveness) male has to send to get a date, let alone a response in the first place.
The reality is that there are a number of variables you really can't change, at least without surgery which I realize is done in places like South Korea.
You can't completely change your face structure, male pattern baldness, ethnicity, or height.
One thing you can control is how you respond to male-pattern baldness. At two extremes: comb-over vs. shave your head.
Maybe it's just wishful thinking, but I imagine women prefer one of those options over the other.
The global online dating culture / landscape / norms are currently COMPLETELY dictated by a private company from a single country.
That is absolutely insane.
What is the implication on mental health and stress if one gets banned from Match group apps for life?
Sure IRL is still there, but ABD is here to stay and is the one dictating the norms currently.
How do we solve this issue?
Coffee Meets Bagel is independent and venture funded, though I did not find it to be a great app.
Grinder is also not owned by Match Group, but obviously that's not for most people.
There's also Feeld, which is independently owned, but mostly for couples, threesomes, kinky stuff etc.
I'd say Bumble is probably the best app out there not owned by Match Group.
And since the country of origin was mentioned, I'd add that when I was in Latin American I used Happn (very cool location-based app, independently owned) and Badoo (not bad, owned by Bumble).
So overall, I would say we're not in the dystopian phase of dating quite yet!
EDIT: Updates to add more sites and mention international stuff.
I can understand someone getting banned for spamming other users with unsolicited explicit pictures, but what can get you unintentionally banned from the Match group apps for life? Has it actually happened?
Remember also, the aim of the website is to keep you on the website, not leave the website and start a relationship. If they have a big part of the market, you will just have to put up and shut up. They might have tricks to keep you there and add a bit of noise when you seem to be dating someone long-term, like sending more explicit desireful emails to distract you with greener grass.
FYI there is no recourse for these bans.
No, there are a combined 4 or 5 apps that cover almost 100% of the attention in this space, and all but one are owned by the same company.
https://www.ft.com/content/1f179d7c-0249-11ea-be59-e49b2a136...
More or less a duopoly.
welcome to the new age
They finally fixed it after the second time I reached out to their support. Never got an apology or anything.
https://web.archive.org/web/20110204185529/http://www.observ...
Of course, this was all before the great rise of mobile apps, subsequently the Tinder model would become the dominant one, where you pay for higher visibility, and you can debate the effectiveness but it's all pretty different from how things worked back then.
1. Are you shown to someone you like? Other than paid things like Boost your only lever may be how you swipe.
2. Did they like you back? Good photos and bio actually help here so you have some agency.
3. Are they interested enough to initiate within the time limit? No agency here purely on the basis of sex. "Hi."
The deafening silence of gate 3 removes any chance to move a match from indifferent to interested by being funny, skillful or otherwise interesting. And it dumps even more work on the already most overwhelmed party in dating apps: the woman.
On hetero Bumble, be handsome, be attractive, don't be unattractive.
1. Choosing entirely on one's own terms whether to say "hey" to someone you swiped right on
2. Sifting through literally hundreds of "hey"s from men
There's no question that it takes more effort to think of something better than "hey" to say than it does to read that message. And let's not forget that the matched people have both explicitly opted into a conversation.
I thought the entire point of Bumble was to spare women from gross messages and dick pics.
How is it different?
Not sure how it works for anything other than male-female matching though.
They have already indicated that they are interested in the man by swing "yes" on him.
Supposedly this makes it better, although I disagree. Many women adapt to that in the same way that men adapted to it in the OP, which is to say, they start sending out generic, shitty messages like, "Hi."
Charging monthly fees creates perverse incentives. It will be in their best interest to avoid giving you a good match while trying to make it look like they're trying.
A one-time fee will make a user feel ripped off if they never end up landing a date.
You could try a model where you pay them once you go on a date (Or some other metric of "success"), but users could easily lie.
I met my wife on OKCupid back in 2010, so I haven't had the pleasure/pain of using Tinder, but from what I know of it, it worries me. OKCupid was designed from the ground up to actually show you matches that you might be compatible with on a personality level, while Tinder is rather superficial, making appearance the most important. In other words, you're less likely to find a successful long-term relationship on Tinder.
As a side note, it's always seemed rather paradoxical that dating sites have far more men than women on them. I would think that the numbers would be more equal, since the population split among the sexes is pretty close to 50/50.
If a dating site is so good at finding matches for people that there are tons of success stories, it's free advertising. Look at me, just coming out and talking about meeting my wife on OKCupid.
I think eHarmony's biggest problem was that they're too expensive. The article estimated that 96.25% of the profiles were dead, meaning less than 4% of their users were paying. I imagine they could have turned that way up by charging $10/month instead of a ridiculous $60/month. Less profit per user, but make up for it in volume.
I can already hear a pitch deck being presented to VCs.
Links to past discussions, like the following, are just in case people find them interesting:
Never Pay for Online Dating (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25055501 - Nov 2020 (265 comments)
Never Pay for Online Dating (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21110199 - Sept 2019 (6 comments)
Why You Should Never Pay for Online Dating [cached] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15260785 - Sept 2017 (1 comment)
Cached OkCupid Article: Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2170998 - Feb 2011 (80 comments)
Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1842557 - Oct 2010 (32 comments)
Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1277626 - April 2010 (9 comments)
> It turns out you are 12.4 times more likely to get married this year if you don't subscribe to Match.com.
Is likely to be misleading: unsubscribing from match.com won't increase the chance you get married. Far likelier is that the sorts of people who would have had difficulty marrying in the first place are more likely to use dating apps.
[1] I still have this price in my iTunes subscriptions, but I know brand new accounts have to pay a lot more. That sucks.
In 2010, straight men were embarrassed to pay for premium memberships or features on online dating because doing so was admitting you were desperate.
Now in 2021, I am just starting to have female friends that are subscribing to hinge and having that same internal conversation about desperation and struggle with their ego that me and my straight male friends had with ourselves a decade ago in our early 20s when we spent our first $5-10 a month to get unlimited swipes.
People are realizing that spending money on trying to find love is worth it in a world where many spend so much on Christmas presents, restaurants, bars, vacations, etc.
I am just waiting for governments to realize failing birth rates are such an important factor in the economy that it behooves them to try to actual launch their own free services to try to improve matchmaking. Or to regulate these marketplaces more seriously to encourage these services to optimize more for lasting matches than optimizing for monetization and revenue.
I believe Japan is the first to try actually spending government funds specifically on dating apps, both funding dating app startups and building their own, although other countries have been funding different initiatives to encourage people to start families like tax schemes or other monetary rewards.
Machine learning has a lot to contribute, but at the same time it can be weaponized against us by private for-profits that want to return money to shareholders.
But its theoretically possible to try to find more quality matches with actual reciprocated interest with machine learning, and to find other ways to tweak the rules and systems of online dating to discourage people from matching people they aren't actually interested in dating and responding to those they have matched, to decrease the 'grass is greener / what if the next person on the app I swipe on is better than that person I went out with last friday night' phenomenon, and solve all the other cultural problems created by commoditization of dating prospects, etc.
I think Hinge was doing some interesting stuff with ML that was giving it a tangible feeling of surfacing better potential matches than other services, but with their acquisition by Match Group and move to put their better matches behind a paywall and encourages spending I assume that's changed (especially since the 'roses' update).
What frustrates me is that there seems to be very little way for users to actually provide feedback to these apps learning mechanisms. When the ML is right, it's great. But when the ML is wrong, it's absolutely awful.
For example, to report back 'the matches you have been providing were appealing to me because of A, B, and C, but were unappealing to me because of E, F, and G', where the particular feedback factors could be 'physical appearance', 'job', 'political beliefs', 'children or family goals', stop showing me people with terms like 'poly, ethically nonmonogamous', or alternatively start showing me more of those people, etc.
I have had friends here who get nothing but handsome but unemployed men showing up in their feeds which for them was a dealbreaker whereas I don't care much at all about my partner's job. And I myself have 'don't want kids' as a boolean flag in my hinge profile but because I once added 'don't want kids' as text in one of my bio prompts, I was getting tons of people who _do_ want kids in my feed. I think the ML algo just saw the text 'kids' in the text part of my bio and ignored the 'don't want kids' boolean part. Myself and my friends have noticed things like if we stopped swiping based on attractiveness and started only looking at job title and for a couple weeks swiped right on people with higher status jobs even if they weren't our type, we got shifted into what seemed like entirely different archetypes and categories of people being sent to us. Like suddenly instead of my female friends getting cute skater boys they were getting wall street traders that had never even been available or visible to them previously. Which raises the question of - is it possible for the dating app ML and our swiping to put us into local maximums (based on our last 1000 swipes) but global minimums?
It's like $15 a month depending on the tier. You're gonna spend that on any one date anyway. Might as well get to peruse your likes rather than swiping blindly.
> Myself and my friends have noticed things like if we stopped swiping based on attractiveness and started only looking at job title and for a couple weeks swiped right on people with higher status jobs even if they weren't our type, we got shifted into what seemed like entirely different archetypes of people being sent to us. Which raises the question of - is it possible for the dating app ML and our swiping to put us into local maximums but global minimums?
A lot of my experience is now making sense lol. Setting my song pick to SOPHIE'S "It's OK to Cry" really changed whom I was seeing.
IMHO, falling birth rates in the west are a good thing. The world population is in the process of levelling out, it can't just keep growing. There are more than enough people in this world to keep the economy thriving. Immigration can make up for any local reproductive deficit.
What can Machine Learning and algorithms do if people just have unrealistic standards from being exposed to so many 'options' online?