From what I can tell, the dating apps are really really good for "good" looking men, and very bad for average to bad looking men.
lucky for me I suppose I got married before dating apps became a thing..
lucky for me I suppose I got married before dating apps became a thing..
It says that women rate most men as less attractive than average, yes. But then women are quite willing to message men who are rated as less attractive than average.
Meanwhile, the men rank attractiveness on a shockingly mathematical-looking curve. However, at the same time, men overwhelmingly refuse to message any but the most attractive of women.
Thus, if you're an average-looking man, your odds of getting messages are actually greater than they are for an average-looking woman.
Untrue. If you're an average-looking man your share of female-to-male messages is greater than an average-looking woman's share of male-to-female messages. The woman is still getting a far larger number of messages.
No, they don't, or at least it isn't shown in that data. Those graphs refer to the proportions of messages for each gender, not raw numbers. Each male user sends 3.5 times as many "first contact" messages as each female user, according to their 2016 data.
average-looking women are disadvantaged because men appear to be far more selective than women are:
Absolutely agree. But they're disadvantaged against other women, not against men, if you're measuring by, as you specified, "the odds of getting messages". An average man will receive fewer messages than an average woman.
The point is, while average-looking men are disadvantaged by the sheer number of men on these apps, average-looking women are disadvantaged because men appear to be far more selective than women are:
"2/3 of male messages go to the top 1/3 of women. When it comes down to actually choosing targets, men choose the modelesque. Someone like roomtodance above gets nearly 5 times as many messages as a typical woman and 28 times as many messages as a woman at the low end of our curve. Site-wide, two-thirds of male messages go to the best-looking third of women. So basically, guys are fighting each other 2-for-1 for the absolute best-rated females, while plenty of potentially charming, even cute, girls go unwritten."
It's unclear what you mean by more selective. If you're an average woman, you get more inbound interest than an average man. The tricky statistical massaging you're doing amounts to "well men are even more open-minded when it comes to more attractive woman." But that doesn't make sense: if a man has sent you a message, does it suddenly become half a message if he then messages someone else? You're penalizing men on open-mindedness for messaging more women.
That said, the blog post is weirdly presented and its graphs a bit misleading because of the skewed distributions. What would be most useful is comparing the median number of messages received by men and the median number of messages received by women (or best of all calculating the Gini indices of the respective distributions), instead of bothering to use the star ratings at all.
ETA:
> Divide the all raw numbers by 3.5, the rates will stay the same.
You're misunderstanding the data. It's not that men collectively send 3.5/4.5 of the messages; it's that each individual man sends 3.5 times as many messages as an individual woman. I.e. it already corrects for there being more men on the app. If men comprise 2/3 of users on dating apps, that means that 87.5% of all first messages are sent by men.
Any research/analysis on the topic pales compared to reality.
Here's what happens in real world ("Tinder Experiment: 18 Yr Old Woman Tries Being A Man!!!"): https://youtu.be/DZTIbHIsIYw?t=615. It's a larger view compared to the number of messages, but the principle still applies.
There's really aa difference between what men and women expect, and also between what they say and what they do. I'm pretty honest when I talk with someone, something serious and compromises are not on my horizon, a lot of women discard me when I say that, and I'm ok with it, but sometimes I continue talking with them, and they told me how many man lie saying that they want something just to get on the their bed sheets and they disappear after that. Overall, I found some great people and nice aquitances, but the time I had spent is not despreciable.