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Comment by imtringued | Hacker News Reader

I'm starting to think that those "20% of the men get 80% of the women" statistics are actually a property of dating apps rather than the real world.

When you think about the food industry it is convenient as hell but it is also bad for you over the long term. Dating apps are just like that. If you are lucky and you find someone good for you. If you stick around too long you are discovering the terrible business model the hard way.

A lot of industries have been building their business model around creating artificial needs. Mobile games and dating apps are the most extreme. Pay to win games are intentionally designed to be terrible to get you to pay up. Dating apps make their money off the misery of unsuccessful men.

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Dating apps are horrid. Reducing someone to a snippet of text and some photos. Then ofc it’s a competitive game so we’ll assign an internal ELo and punished you for not paying to win.

Unfortunately almost all my friends continue to use them. For some reasons it’s odd to find people irl within a few years of my own age, outside the online world. Meet plenty of people irl but the demographics are always very skewed offline.

Yes, I'm also convinced that dating apps aren't a good way to match-make. I've had some experience of them, and there are clear problems for both men and women on it. Men struggle to get matches, women struggle to get good quality matches. The environment is artificial. A few words on your profile, a few photos that probably don't represent you in real-life, and then an artificial 'date' where it's hard for people to be natural. I met my wife in person at work. Not saying that is great either, but I find my attraction to someone is based far more on who they are in real-life than the 2D representation that a photo or some text messages can represent.

wasn't there some research where women only rated top 20% men as attractive while men had a wider range.

If that's actually true then dating apps are just magnifying whats already there and aren't the cause of the phenomenon.

Pretty sure that research was done by one of the said dating app companies. OKCupid?

ah maybe. good point.

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