Never pay for online dating (2010)
web.archive.org
web.archive.org
EDIT: the purchase was Feb 2011 [1] and the post was removed sometime between Jan 2011 [2] and Mar 2011 [3]. The rest of the blog was still up at the time [4].
[1] https://www.npr.org/2011/02/03/133456140/The-Last-Word-In-Bu...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20110113034228/http://blog.okcup... up
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20110301161329/http://blog.okcup... down
[4] https://web.archive.org/web/20110301161329/http://blog.okcup... different post up
Edit: Here's an example.
“I’m bisexual.” REALITY: 80% of self-identified bisexuals are only interested in one gender.
People who describe themselves as bisexual overwhelmingly message either one sex or the other, not both as you might expect.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170307114207/https://theblog.o...
They presented the reality based on data, it's not subjective, it's revealed preferences. Match.com removed that section and updated the article with "This post has was originally published in 2010 and has since been updated to reflect OkCupid’s current values."
Yep!
https://web.archive.org/web/20091121080804/http://blog.okcup...
God I love archive.org
If someone is deleting their posts because the facts don't align to the worldview of a religion, a political party, a corporation or some other powerful group, many people will be more concerned about that than if the posts had been deleted for more routine, functional business reasons.
Doing a study on how "dateable" black women are based on a specific dating app in 2010 is like making claims on everyones eating habits based on a survey on a Burger king drive through. It will probably not be a very good survey.
They also took down the whole blog, people only remember the weird survey because it was an incel talking point seconds after it came out, specially in black pill groups arguing that giving up was the only alternative because OkCupid had "proved" that love was impossible for some and hypergamy or some other nonsense.
I enjoy reading these types of articles, and in my next project, I was planning to do something similar.
I mean they were always ok, but the problem is presenting some silly fun data analysis as "science".
If you counted how many people have red hats in your way to work and publish it as a blog it can be fun. If suddenly far right groups start making posts about how your red hat stats correlate with immigration and theft statistics then your post is not the problem, but there is a problem.
same with the OkCupid blog. I have 0 issue with their work (albeit they could show their work cause a lot looked incredibly amateurish), but the talking points that came from it are still being repeatedly wrongly 10 years later and did real damage.
Their silly data analysis had a sample that was probably orders of magnitude larger than any cohort an university paper could dream of getting their hands on, but yeah, it was just a silly fun data analysis.
and yet their sample was incredibly biased despite it being large. A big set of data still churns out bad results.
Most of their blog posts did not show the data, how they normalised it, percentage of each group. They just run regression on it and anything with p<00.5 that seemed fun was published. Which was fun, but its not good science, its hardly science at all.
There is a reason why blog posts and published results have different standards (and also why most sociological/psychological results are impossible to reproduce having one of the largest reproduction crisis of any science)
Please, tell me how this is absurd, when it's basically what you see in real life. Or that men that make more money are more attractive to women, on average? This delusion of denying facts when it does not conform to your own sense of what is "fair" is just childish.
It isn't invalid, but its also not science. If you have 1000 short girls and 3 girls over 6'4 well you got an issue of normalising values. Where variance of results are more affected near the edge cases than the median.
The problem is not the results, its that on a vaccum they are contextless, and that is what makes the silly fun data anlysis.
> Or that men that make more money are more attractive to women, on average?
Yeah because if they wanted to date someone broke they could find them outside. Online dating is a fraction of their total dating behaviour, therefore conclusions are not conclusive.
If you want actual studies about it, women prefer a stable job over wealth. Aka a dude with 100k normal salary has a better chance than an unemplyed dude with 1 million dollars. This is something that cannot be found through OkCupid cause networth isn't even a question or filter on their analysis.
> This delusion of denying facts
I am not denying facts, i have just done science past running a database through matlab.
the amount of pressure this puts on the sampling is hard to understate. not only are you looking at a highly truncated set of interpersonal dynamics (what you can tell about someone based on a dating profile is far less than what you can tell by meeting real people in meat space), you're specifically selecting for people who have been as of yet unsuccessful IRL. you're also selecting for people who wish to take a fairly serious shortcut around personal interaction.
given these factors, it would be both crazy and stupid to believe you can generalize about human nature anything you get from a dating app.
as for "what you see in real life", might I suggest that you, yourself, are also constrained to a perspective that doesn't necessarily match other people's perspectives, and that maybe, just maybe, you are also seeing a biased sample of the world which is both the result and cause of difficulties with interpersonal interactions?
I'd say it's premature given that a lot of women don't want to date men shorter than them, so I can see men messaging them less just because they'd assume they were wasting their time.
How do you think science operates in actual practice? OkCupid at least has a sample large enough that you can commit all sorts of statistical sins and still produce halfway decent conclusions, unlike your run-off-the-mill n=10 study.
I gotta ask, in case what way is the sample of a few millions of people who want to date 'incredibly' biased?
Slightly biased I might buy, but how on earth can you make the leap that people looking for dates via a matchmaking site is not at least slightly representable of people looking for dates?
So you will have mostly a group of 20 year olds, who are willing to answer a lot of questions. It doesn't matter how big the pot is, thats not a random sample of society.
Is that all? That doesn't make it "incredibly" biased.
I mean, looking at your example of "black women being the least desirable on OkCupid", it's easy enough to check if it applies only to 20 year olds who are willing to answer lots of questions or if that correlation actually exists outside of that group[1].
Your way, of simply dismissing it instead of regarding it as a data point that can be further investigated is the opposite of science.
[1] OkCupid certainly had the data, and on one of the blogs I recall seeing their distribution of ages, and it was not dominated by the 20-30 age group, even if they were a majority. It would have been easy for OkCupid to redo that desirability analysis for particular age groups.
The classic illustration is the Literary Digest poll of the 1936 Presidential Election. They got over two million respondents and confidently predicted a heavy Roosevelt loss. George Gallup got a comparatively tiny but well sampled set of respondents and correctly estimated the Roosevelt victory. The magazine's problem was partly sampling bias (their readers were richer than the average American, amongst other things) and partly non-response bias (they got a return rate of ~25%, which is pretty good, but probably disproportionately from the most politically engaged of their readership, who hated Roosevelt).
I don't know how bad the sample is here for extrapolating to 'all those seeking dates', but the size is a distraction - the sampling is all.
(This isn't necessarily true if you're making individual profiles, searching for rare phenomena, or something else which is more in the 'big data' than 'social statistics' space, and which genuinely needs that much training data. It's also not true if you're studying the site members themselves, for whom the site members are a perfect (non-) sample. The latter is true for the in-house data science team themselves, but we shouldn't just assume their experience will extend to the rest of the world).
You had a sensible reply but now most can’t even see the discussion. Dang really needs to get this place back on track
for example:
>Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies, generic tangents, and internet tropes.
I assume the use of orwellian, and the attempt at bringing in political correctness probably raised some flags.
I had a sensible reply but tbh I have discussed those blog posts multiple times in this site, so it gets to a point where 10 years in they are still being wrongly discussed you just wanna report and move on with your day.
But aside from that, and the inherent assumption that beauty standards are universal and biological which is a pretty big assumption.
A slight societal preference does not lead to the conclusions people drew from the article.
To give an example, taller men have a higher chance of being promoted. Fortune 500 CEOs are disproportionately tall compared to the general population. As a society we still promote meritocracy, and working hard. Not telling people who are 5'4 to just give up and be unemployed cause they will never be the CEO of Ford Motor company.
Now you're moving the goalposts, which shows you knew your original claim was wrong. "It didn't happen, and if it did they deserved it" indeed.
One of the weirdest things about being human is that our preferences are neither rational nor consistent. The classic example in behavioural economics is with ice-cream flavors. If I prefer chocolate to strawberry and strawberry to vanilla, it doesn't follow that I prefer chocolate to vanilla. The preferences aren't transitive, and there doesn't exist a total preferences order.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/preferences/#Tra has an overview, note especially the paragraph about pair-wise comparisons.
https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/BehavioralEconomics.html
But the "Forever alone" meme definitely was. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/forever-alone
And the citation date: 2010.
Or better yet, https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cultures/involuntary-celibacy... cites that:
"On August 12th, 2005, the American television network G4TV released a satirical commercial for the online role-playing game World of Warcraft in which a woman introduces the game to her boyfriend in order to prevent him from pressuring her to have sex."
Some namesakes remain, for example Reddit's r/ForeverAloneDating where people who haven't had much experience (if any) can make posts to solicit potential e-dates. Although the balance is skewed toward men, there are a good number of women posting there too, and it has nothing to do with incel/blackpill crap.
In the "Mating preferences" blurb they discuss hypergamy as being reduced as gender equality reduces and even worse links to a study called "The end of hypergamy" where they discuss men stop dating down once women achieve educational parity.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5421994/
So yeah, if you come from a poor, unequal country women wanna marry and old rich university educated man. If you don't, they dont. So hypergamy is not natural or unavoidable its a sad reality of some societes.
Most people on dating apps swipe right on people with higher rating than them, the talking point about women being hypergamous and only liking the top profiles is not reproducible outside of dating apps, because it isn't real. Its a reflection of their userbase. If there are 1000 men sending 100 messages a day to 10 women, they all get rated highly, so they mostly see highly rated men profiles. And having attention from mediocre candidates outside of the app, they mostly interact with the most attractive counterparts online. This doubly skews the candidate pool women would interact with online in 2010, thus the findings are not proof of hypergamy, but okcupid being a sampled and incomplete group of people.
Males find females, that are healthy and young, attractive - since they are the most likely candidates to have healthy offspring.
Females find males, that are capable of getting enough resources to sustain the offspring, attractive. And in the case of males, there is no age barrier per se that impedes reproduction, so it's expected to see couples of younger females and older males.
It's true for humans, it's true for chimps, it's true for dogs. Reality does not change just because you want it to. And it doesn't matter if we're talking about India in the 19th century or California in 2022. Women, ON AVERAGE, will find a rich guy more attractive than a bum, and men, ON AVERAGE, would find a 21 year old waitress hotter than a 55 year old Hollywood starlet.
It is what it is.
"In a 2016 paper that explored the income difference between couples in 1980 and 2012, researcher Yue Qian noted that the tendency for women to marry men with higher incomes than themselves still persists in the modern era."
Emphasis mine.
2. Reduced ≠ eliminated
And of course, it says that "some research supports that theory," of that reduction. (again, emphasis mine). When you take a theory that has some support and then extrapolate from that theory to an end-state and claim that end state as certainty, you are leaving the realm of evidence and drifting off into pure fantasy.
> women being hypergamous and only liking the top profiles is not reproducible outside of dating apps, because it isn't real.
Actually it is real, as all the evidence shows. Including genetic evidence, which has concluded that historically, only around half of males reproduce, whereas almost all women do (apparently 40% vs. 80%).
If they were surveys, your criticism would be valid.
Instead, this was about how people actually behave, so neither fooling themselves nor others.
if you want to back up your point, speak to that. how does this show anything about the ~99% of people who have never used okcupid? on what grounds do you believe okcupid to be a representative sample?
No it's not. The post I replied to mentions "survey" four times, once per sentence. It mentions "sample" once.
> on what grounds do you believe okcupid to be a representative sample?
On what grounds do you believe okcupid to not be a sufficiently representative sample?
UPDATE: it was 4 times, not 3, so once per sentence.
What if you're bi, but not that open about it so you mostly take the chance on the opposite sex on a public dating platform?
There must be so many other factors like these that at least should invalidate any broad claim by a company only seeing a small part of people's behavior and sexuality.
Then why on earth would you put down "bi" in the profile?
What kind of a stupid question is this?
If you only want interest from a particular gender, why advertise that you want interest from all genders?
To use your analogy, if 95% of people going through burger king drive through prefers Coke vs Pepsi, that's relevant data for that purpose.
It makes sense, considering the self-professed "bisexuals" I've known, which are well known as well in liberal-leaning circles:
1. Young women who pretend to be Bi to get more attention from Men
2. People who pretend to be Bi to avoid having to completely come out of the closet
There's actually a saying in the gay community for the latter, "Bi now, gay later!"
I think by gay community you meant asshole gay people, I've been waiting for a very long while now to turn gay (I'm a bisexual dude).
> I don't see how the bisexual statistic is politically incorrect.
Not politically incorrect, just deeply ignorant.
And as for the second, that may not be a conscious decision, right? People discover more about their own orientation over time.
To add on that, studies like the ones mentioned only reveal so much; there are a few good reasons why one might only search for one gender or the other online and in a particular place.
What you're doing is called bi erasure. It happens from straight and gay people. Bi doesn't necessarily mean attraction or experience is exactly equally split. For some people it is, for some people it isn't. Some people may change how they self describe. None of that means people aren't legitimately bi.
My post was based on what I've been told by both Gay and Bi people (the latter, several Bi people I knew complained about the first item with the young women). So if Straight and Gay people can participate in Bi Erasure, so too can Bi people I suppose.
Some people only want romantic relationships with a partner of one sex while hookups with another. Some people have bi-cycles. Some people are attracted to a person of their own gender 80% of the time and another 20% of the time.
Many bi people aren't out or completely honesty with their dating history because they have to put up with the insecurities and stereotypes trotted out by the chronically ignorant from both straight and gay communities. The lack of support and understanding is one of the reasons why rates of depression and anxiety are higher for bisexual people. Imagine being questioned about your preferences and asked to make a choice by a group of people that were held to a similar level of cultural-interrogation by heterosexuals. Bisexuals are a minority of a minority, however, I am glad the attitude of thinking bisexuality is secretly indecisiveness is dying off.
There are plenty of acceptable ways to be bisexual, and while some people might fit the boxes you described, there are lots who don't.
These antiquated views are a large part of why, as a bisexual man, I mostly keep that to myself. Coming out is a big deal with a significant amount of associated emotional stress, doubly so when others try to rationalize how you're not a "real" bisexual ("you've only dated women, how can you be bi!?" or "oh you just like fooling around with dudes, you're not really bi" etc).
Then I fell in love with a woman, still happily monogamously married to after many years.
These days I would self identify as human. But I guess you could call me bi: I still find attractive men attractive.
I'm not sure what I would seek these days if I were single.
But a bi dude, in 2010 you simply wouldn't get match with women if you write bi and plenty of gay dude would turn you down as well, so you just wouldn't bother and write gay or straight eventually.
Edit: removed today
This is simply not true.
Maybe I'm just hot enough to overcome the queer disgust? I don't feel like I'm that hot.
I removed the point about today since I haven't been dating in a few years, but I stand by the 2010 comment, you could find a few female stars being openly bisexual for example but it was incredibly rare for male stars, which is indicative of how hot it was perceived at the time.
I gravitate towards bi/pan people anyways due to my androgynous features.
For what it's worth I found a blog post referring to that phenomenon from a few years ago which talks about a poll conducted in Glamour Magazine: https://web.archive.org/web/20160320094402/https://www.pride...
It's simple, you make a profile, talk to people, people talk to you... Why is that so hard?
"63% of women, however, say they wouldn't date a man who has had sex with another man" https://www.glamour.com/story/glamour-sexuality-survey
If you do some casual searches you can find qualitative and quantitative data supporting the idea that unfortunately for bisexual men, male-attracted women are not into them and you're incentivized to hide or downplay it if you want to appeal to the broadest group (though I'd argue you may as well focus on those that can accept male bisexuality if you're successful enough at dating).
the gay guys have been fine. but over the years, the most hateful, vile comments have come from women.
I dont't think that it's becoming more rare, but the hateful ones are quieter about it. as son as you bring it up in a private conversation, they unleash on you and block you.
This isn't the slam dunk it appears to be. A dietary equivalent would be "X% of self-professed omnivores avoid vegetarian dishes". They are open to the idea, but still have preferences. Just because one is open to the superset, doesn't mean they assign each subset equal weight.
I eat $x at home, I am looking for $y on this service.
There are plenty of bisexual people I know that have open arrangements who are in relationships with a partner of one sex and are only permitted by that partner to date people of another sex by that partner (because fear of competition/jealousy reasons).
Some people only want romantic relationships with a partner of one sex while hookups with another. Some people have bi-cycles. Some people are attracted to a person of their own gender 80% of the time and another 20% of the time.
In reality I've generally found that many "bi" guys are just waiting for a "real" relationship with a chick, while doing guys on the side. Hell, even outside of relationships, most bi guys I've met would pick a chick over a guy 9 times out of 10. Some of that is due to the fact it's a lot rarer/harder for them to hook up with a chick vs a dude (latter being more open and free with sex).
If someone is bi, has a romantic/sexual preference for both and experiences periods where they really do prefer one or the other then a traditional relationship is probably not going to work best for them; something poly or very open seems like the batter option, where their partner is aware and agrees to it.
>People who describe themselves as bisexual overwhelmingly message either one sex or the other, not both as you might expect.
Yes, I remember this. It was sad to see such basic logic errors from OKC. It seems a little like saying that heterosexuality is a myth because all "heterosexual" people prefer some bodies over others. Bisexual means you are attracted to both masculine and feminine people. It does not imply a 50 / 50 split, or that you want to date everyone equally. The Match.com Orwellian activity aside - that critique was always very odd.
I don't think you can draw the conclusions from this people seem to be. Think about it. If you are genuinely attracted to both genders, then you can choose. If you're pursuing a goal (like a relationship) you're going to have some ideal you're going after, so you're probably going to pick a gender to look for for any particular period of time. I think it would be actually very uncommon to actively seek both at the same time, especially since there are cultural/societal considerations tied up with this. If you genuinely like both deciding to pursue a particular gender doesn't invalidate the fact that you could just as genuinely pursue the other. Society dictates that pursing one or the other are of varying difficulty, but this has nothing to do with the legitimacy of how you feel about the other. Bi-sexual people I've known follow this pattern -- they'll pursue one gender for 6 months to the year, and then re-bound with the other, then maybe stick with that one for a while, rinse and repeat. Since most people only use dating services for a short while, this would probably look as described above in aggregate.
It's how I use the tools not who I am, though.
Women do the same with a lesser known example being elderly women swapping because of the shrinking dating pool.
So, self identifying as bi shouldn’t be taken as having zero gender preferences nor should we assume peoples preferences are static through time. People may be in a committed relationship and seek partners of the a different gender etc.
First, even if the actual attraction is same for both genders, it would be reasonable to expect bisexuals to seek opposite gender partners way more. Pretty much anyone who wants bio children need opposite sex partner. Pretty much anyone who don't want to deal with stigma around gayness too kuch will prefer opposite gender partner.
Second, bisexuality does not mean the attraction is same. It it fairly normal for bisexual to be attacted toany people from one gender and few from the other. It is also fairly normal foe them to have periods where they go for one gender only (either as conscious decision or not).
I feel like the gay community needs to treat bi guys better but at the same time bi guys need to take a look at themselves and consider if they're romantically bi, or just sexually bi because they just want to fulfil their sexual needs (which is much easier with guys obviously).
IIRC, OkC also removed the ability to bookmark profiles, presumably for the same reason -- everything moving to a more "ephermeral" experience to prevent anybody getting "obsessed" with certain accounts because of how creepy that gets. Since spam, stalking, and abusive messages are by far the #1 problem with any online dating service. (Yes blocking works, but it's even better when people don't have to block in the first place. If you have to block too much, you quit the app.)
Presumably this means advertisers.
I used OKC for years until the founders sold it (and my private data) to this shady company, then I was forced to delete.
Acquisitions are worse than breaches for end user privacy. GitHub sold your whole travel history (via client IP geolocation) to Microsoft.
That model is also quite good because you don’t need to pay for women to notice you. Those 10 people you like will notice you anyway, unlike other apps where you could like 1000 profiles and barely be seen by any of them.
I personally have found Hinge very effective compared to other apps without paying a cent. My like -> match -> date conversion rate was literally two orders of magnitude better than any other app.
Another obvious manipulation by Hinge (and the other apps) is I’m almost 100% positive they artificially limit who they show you by stacking the deck with a bunch of profiles of women they know haven’t logged into the service in awhile. Basically priming the pump with “possibility” to keep you engaged; diluting the active profiles and spreading any likely match possibilities out over time.
It’s things like these two realizations that made me decide these apps are not in existence to help you find a match. They’re incentive is the same as Facebook, engagement. You matching means you no longer using the app and that’s bad for business.
LOL
Some people are going to take this the wrong way, but I've never read a more true statement.
I'm a pretty liberal person (folks think I'm conservative because I think communism stinks), but my experience with OkCupid many years ago was that most of its users were self-proclaimed cultural Marxists or feminists with a bone to pick. My digital head was decapitated several times by women there just for introducing myself to them. I'd even been lectured a handful of times about how I was "misogynist" for the age range I specified on my profile included women 5 years younger than I was, which wasn't even low enough to include women of college age.
The day I saw an advertisement for OkCupid that actually used the initialism "DTF" was when I knew for sure I would never be returning to them ever again. It would surprise me if they still had any meaningful userbase since it was pretty much dead in the LA area the last time I used it.
> but the same basic idea that gets men to pay to meet women.
In which case men should just go to Seeking Arrangement.
(X) Doubt
"The term "Cultural Marxism" refers to a far-right antisemitic conspiracy theory which claims that Western Marxism is the basis of continuing academic and intellectual efforts to subvert Western culture" [0]
No one "self proclaims" that.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_th...
Your experience may have location bias? I.e. where did you use OKC?
I used it in Europe (2010--2011, mostly Germany and Italy) and Asia (2011-2013, Hong Kong) and Europe again (2014--now mostly Berlin & Hamburg) and my experiences were/are very different.
People are from the full political spectrum. Very right people are the outlier though, admittedly.
In Berlin there is a leftist bias but this is pretty newish (wasn't like this at all, when I started using OKC again in Europe in 2014).
Edit: spelling
Internet Archive is great for cases of self censorship like this. I assume that as part of the acquisition the author was compelled to take it down.
That should align goals for both the company and the partner seeker.
EDIT: I'll be getting interest from the remainder your payment every month, as part of my profit scheme.
For every month that you use the app to a certain degree (number of viewed profiles, page loads or whatnot) I will give you back 1/nth (1/12th) of your deposit. If you don't use it enough, then I'll "keep" that month's budget as a subscription payment. The idea is that once you match with someone, you will stop using the app, and the rest of the money will slowly go to me.
I am convinced it could be a good model, of course as with everything, there are several things to be solved before making it a sound business.
I think the biggest obstacle to solving the Dating App problem is the onboarding.
I might be wrong but these types of conversations about how bad the apps are make me think y’all are expecting some sort of technological easy button. It will never exist. These companies are probably making it worse because of their profit motive but there’s definitely a reason nobody has “solved” dating.
The fact it’s a dating app, just means you have some expectations. You expect you may get a date. But you may not. You expect those other people are real profiles. They may not be. You expect those people that you do match with actual intend to have a conversation/go on a date. They may not have that intention.
If I’ve learned anything from the younger-than-me generations, they like having Likes. It’s attention. It’s meaningless by most measures but gives them some endorphins or something. I’ll probably never get it fully but I can completely see how people would have a Tinder profile for no reason other than to get a confidence boost when they got a Like/Match. I realize that’s a broad stoke but I continue to observe it over and over.
Likes and such are distracting as they are attract the wrong people (attention seekers) or give off the wrong impression (false flags). The former is very prominent against men, the latter is very prominent against women.
Volume exasperates both this problem and the problem of choice. There are so many choices for so little effort, people are drowning in it and not investing enough to feel attached to their choices. Where before you had to invest more time into an individual person and your other options where far more limited, now you have far more choice for less effort when you're on the winning side of the market.
Some poster posted a few sources one time on a similar topic regarding the importance of investment and how people will generally stick together when invested. It's the initial investment which is missing. The fact ghosting as a concept didn't just come into existence, but is so omnipresent among both sexes, speaks for itself.
and if you still don't like it, just accept that the other person does like it, and it's a kindness you could extend to them.
The apps to me seem exactly like what you all are saying. If I were young I'd probably turn to the same tactics I employed before the apps; meeting people in the real world. Probably easier said than done, but that's always been true.
It's funny because most of my LTIR friends have met their significant others through more traditional means and the perpetually single are stuck on gamified apps.
The apps can definitely work so it's not all for naught but I think the privacy and low risk (emotionally) nature of them leads to an over reliance by a lot of people.
IMO taking this path of least resistance is a bad idea, especially much so for males who make up the vast majority of dating app users. Meeting people and asking them out takes some courage and makes you stand out from the crowd. That’s the main reason why it can work so well, in online dating you’re just one face among others.
It was recently purchased by Match.
I am experimenting with Tinder subscription at the moment, and it feels incredibly exploitative. When you make a profile, matches are frequent and you can tell that you show up for people. However it gradually falls down with time, and the only predictable and obvious way to get back up is to pay for Boosts and/or Priority Likes.
Right now my 6-month old profile gets ZERO likes outside of the time it's Boosted ($3 a pop or something). I get plenty once I'm boosted, so the profile attractiveness doesn't seem to be a factor.
It feels like the app's algorithms are rigged to gradually push you towards paid subscription options. There must be a huge invisible market of Tinder whales given how exploitative it is, gambling addiction, loneliness, and desperation for dates are correlated traits and I would absolutely bet on Tinder exploiting this heavily.
I know they're far from the only game in town, but this really feels like the behaviour of a monopoly entity that knows it can do basically whatever.
It's like a slot machine that actively adjusts the odds as you play, in order to keep you hooked as long as possible.
I'm pretty solidly mediocre when it comes to "algorithm design" tasks like this one, so I thought of it you can bet for sure that someone at Tinder did too.
- Phone Number
- IP
- Device IDs
- Photo hashes
- Photo exif
- Facial recognition
- Linked Facebook, Instagram, Spotify accounts
There are too many guys on tinder and most of them are not serious, mindlessly swiping as a way of wasting time. If you filter out the free users and only match guys who pay for boost with girls, it's a much better ratio for those guys and a better experience for the women since guys who buy boost are more invested and more likely to follow through.
Edit: that's actually untrue, there are exactly 2 instances where it happened in my life. They were in the kinds of bars that I would usually avoid (too many drunk people shouting over loud music), in areas far from where I lived, that had pretty strong "going out" cultures.
Edit 2: now that I think about it, I'm not exactly dashing handsome. I've historically done a lot better in "house party" type of settings, but again that's with people who are already friends of friends.
I gave up the apps and married someone meeting them the old fashioned way.
I think it does, since it's the primary determinant of selection. I also find that in-person personality can be more attractive, unlike profiles where you have fewer dimensions to go on. Likewise, I do think certain types of people do better online and some do better offline.
I had absolutely zero luck with online dating back when I tried it around 2008. I think I just got downranked into oblivion by not gaming the system, since those dating sites use a ranking algorithm internally to gauge how attractive you are. If you click the "like" button on any woman you'd be willing to go on a coffee date with, it assumes you're a loser and hides you away.
Fortunately, you can network your way into a relationship the same way you can get a job.. just put out the word among friends, family, family friends, etc that you're looking for a girlfriend. Chances are you're within a couple of hops of hundreds or thousands of people. This isn't good for finding hookups or for incel jerks, but if you're ready to settle down it's the best method IMO.
My experience with boosts is that they were counter-productive. While the boosts yield likes, but a lot of them would be profiles I'd already left-swiped on, should have been excluded by my filters, or just low-effort profiles. The same profiles would keep showing up in my feed too after I had swiped.
As for your second point, I think women do exactly the same thing. There's just more guys on the site so women are just getting a higher ratio low-effort likes. I'd say a good 50% of the profiles don't have anything written in them except a series of emojis or statements like "I don't know what to write here." or other really low effort content. Even the gold profiles sending messages would initiate a conversation with the dreaded "Hi." These interactions were always a complete waste of time, I just stopped responding to them after a while.
I haven't online dated in a long time, but if I ever do again, I'll go with a service that has a transparent pricing model with no free plan.
The match rate thing is also kind of a lark because you don't care about matches. You care about matches with people you want to match with... in fact that kinda understates the ultimate goal -- you care about matches with someone who would be good for you (and you for them)... everything else is just vanity.
it's really kind of depressing, honestly. Guys on dating sites are viewed as transactions. Tinder isn't alone with this - they're on multiple sites doing the same thing.
I ended up emailing support and making the case that the site wasn't working as advertised or even as support said it was supposed to be working. I ended up getting a full refund.
I experimented a lot with it because I used to work at a different online dating company (where I was also doing scummy things).
I'd be extremely surprised if it happened to be otherwise.
That's why when you first start on any dating service, you're (typically) inundated with activity, so that you can always chase that high, and when you can't get it, you try to pay for it.
Online dating is a tough problem to solve, tougher still when profit incentives misalign with user success incentives! I'm not even sure what an equitable but also successful dating service would look like, because there's this fundamental mismatch in values.
It's striking how the business model is indistinguishable from how cocaine dealers were described to us as kids in the 80s.
Implying that tech companies and drug dealers are birds of a feather based on this is silly. If you want to say tech companies make addictive products, say that. But don't pretend that calling people "users" is evidence in furtherance of this argument.
I didn't. It's a joke. See: (-:
The user (perhaps) wants to find a lifelong partner, and never use dating apps again.
The site developer wants users to never find a lifelong partner, and to spend months/years returning to the app to find new candidates.
In my experience, the developer usually wins - some users on dating sites have been there a decade or more, and active much of that time.
Many people use dating apps expecting to find a lifelong partner and never come back.
So at best, the developer is incentivized to have the user find someone to date in the short term and have the relationship fail in a manner that doesn't reflect poorly on the dating site. And it's not really feasible for the dating site distinguish between "will successfully date for a few months" and "will successfully date for a lifetime".
You could apply the same logic to any long term purchase. Dealerships only sell lemons because they want you to come back and buy more cars. Recruiters only match you with companies that you'll definitely want to leave because they want to match you again. Realtors only show you houses you'll hate because then you'll want to move again.
I think it is feasible for a dating site to figure that out, given enough data.
And I think the 'few months' figure is probably too high - they want to match people who will go on a few dates or a one night stand, then return to the app.
It's a pretty damn strong signal when a user matches with someone, exchanges phone numbers, then deactivates their account. The ML algorithms will be trained to do everything possible to avoid that outcome.
I've worked on the developer-side of this; I assure you, it's not. It's hard enough to predict if people will exchange messages with any reasonable precision + recall.
> It's a pretty damn strong signal when a user matches with someone, exchanges phone numbers, then deactivates their account. The ML algorithms will be trained to do everything possible to avoid that outcome.
Yeah, any dating site that does this is doomed to irrelevance.
If it were as easy to make a successful dating site by just optimizing for that signal, you should really do it. Match will acquire you for millions - billions, and the core code is relatively simple. You could get it running in under a week. Get some VC funding, do a gradual roll out onto a few colleges, you'll be a multi-millionaire by Spring.
This isn't entirely true. A portion of the user base uses it almost entirely for entertainment and validation. I'd suspect it's a sizeable portion at that.
If an app isn't getting you decent dates every so often, you'll move to an app that does. And it's pretty clear within a couple of months if an app is working for you or not.
And then once you're in a relationship, the app has zero control over whether it succeeds or not!
So no, dating apps aren't working against your romantic interests, simply because a) there's too much competition and b) they're not even smart enough to identify your true love and then hide him/her from you.
They are trying to make a buck off of you though. Which they should, since they're a business.
But so no, the developer doesn't "usually" win. I have lots of friends who got married from an online date. The people you know who are still on the apps after a decade -- well it's not like they've settled down with anyone they met in real life either. It's probably not the apps' fault.
Maybe if I can delete my account from the platform at any time (even without marrying anyone) and get my money back I'd be OK with it. Ideally, the money in escrow should also earn interest or have the option to invest it in some generic index fund.
All the options people have are using toxic apps which entire business model is to undermine the self-esteem of young men and scamming them out of their money. And then people wonder where the mental health problems and mass shootings come from.
I really don't understand how this stuff is still not regulated anywhere, it's a dangerous scam.
Because dating apps have distorted courting even if we elect to ignore them.
They alter expectations and make the proverbial sea seem much more filled with fish than it truly is.
And even if this distortion has no impact on us, we can't control whether or not it has had impact on our prospective date(s).
Why would your date willfully overlook a glaring fault of yours, for instance, if they have 999 likes in their pocket from seemingly-flawless suitors?
Hell, even if your date doesn't use dating apps either, then they likely know what's available from friends, relatives, etc.
They are so incompetent that famine/frost/nuclear apocalypse are serious possibilities..
Seriously though, this seems like an area where anti-trust and transparency regulation (service X has a Y rating for producing matches that meet standard Q) could play a useful role.
Users that want relationships want to find someone ASAP and delete the app.
Those two goals are completely incompatible.
We’re not still confusing bypassing encryption by compromising device security with “[undermining] effective cryptosystems” like those articles when everyone was leaving WhatsApp?
Because its outside the scope & role of the government?
> I really don't understand how this stuff is still not regulated anywhere
This is a common theme I see in alot of discussions about everything. Do not confuse regulation with enforcement. Any regulation that is not enforced is useless, or it is used selectively (a.k.a "corruption"). Adding more rules wont solve anything.
And plus, we have the rules. Match group, who basically own the entire western world online dating market, should have not been allowed to buy all their competitors in the first place. This is a failure of the regulating bodies to do anything and now the users end up paying the price.
Is it? Governments care very much about what their demographics will be in the future. Governments get involved in trying to modify birth rate. Hooking people up seems like an interesting idea, especially if the government thinks they're going to deal with massively bad demographic shift in the midterm future.
That doesn't align with the fact that there are government funded programmes for things like mental well being, sexual health and education, and even music appreciation.
The government is concerned with whatever the heck we say it is. It's _our_ government.
P.S. No, I don't live in America ;)
This is such a weird take when you think about it. It's like saying "people can just run traffic lights; therefore, adding more traffic lights cannot prevent accidents." Okay, well, preventing people from running traffic lights is just a separate issue that should also be solved if it's a problem. The answer isn't to stop putting up traffic lights! And it doesn't follow that some people not following the rules means rules are worthless. Besides, different governments (and different agencies within governments) have vastly different levels of "teeth". I know it's easy to get jaded seeing all the regulatory capture in the U.S., but that's not the entire world. Even in the U.S. some regulations are rigorously enforced, e.g. FAA regulations.
In Plato's Republic, he proposed his vision for a utopian city-state. Essentially, citizens would be ranked into castes: bronze/iron for laborers and artisans, silver for soldiers, gold for leaders. When people came of age in this utopia, they would be paired off through what they would be told is a random lottery.
In reality, however, the city's leaders would decide on the couplings ahead of time, pairing like with like. Plato called this the "noble lie", and it neatly demonstrates what any government-run dating system would probably develop into: a systemic eugenics program.
I just want the incentive of making profit removed and provide a decent service that does what it promises. If that service can only be provided at a loss (which seems to be the case) then let the state do it. Nobody would force anyone to use it.
Well-intentioned government mandates have a nasty habit of being used coercively when authoritarian-minded administrations get their turn at the helm.
Publicly-run (= by government) open source script would be most transparent I guess. Otherwise some sort of algorithm would sneak in sooner or later.
In a future where dating apps (and technology in general) becomes the only way to meet potential mates, only those who successfully "engage" with the apps/tech in a way that the company approves of will be allowed to reproduce.
Those that either refuse to engage on principles, or don't "engage" with it the "right" way (let's say by not falling for dark patterns, etc) and end up banned are effectively prevented from reproducing.
Both options can end up dystopian, but I'll take a government-run scheme any day. Not only are governments at least theoretically accountable to their citizens, but they are also as slow as molasses and terrible at tech, so they'd fare much worse at eugenics than a private company.
Blaming online dating sites for mental health problems and mass shooting is a new one. I don't discount the feeling of despair that can occur on dating sites for men. However, the experience of a being woman on a dating app is absolutely harrowing, even if you have incredibly low standards and/or are incredibly desirable.
To put it differently, I'm reading your argument as equivalent to saying that the existence of the USPS (which will deliver to remote rural areas, despite the fact that doing so isn't profitable) is more dystopian than the existence of UPS and FedEx (which will not).
I once was a part of making a Facebook clone for the US military so service men and women wouldn't be on Facebook giving away secrets.
It was garbage and nobody used it but nobody cared because we weren't being paid to get people to use it.
https://www.msf.gov.sg/policies/Marriages/Pages/Finding-a-Pa...
The problem is the population has already been divided and Match exists using predatory practices. You could maybe dethrone it using regulations or an organic campaign.
0 [ https://www.pof.com ]
https://www.msf.gov.sg/policies/Marriages/Pages/Finding-a-Pa...
You could say they can tap into that currently, and that's probably true, but deliberately broadcasting it to them would probably be out of question for many people.
Also, consider what government run IT projects look like. Now mix that with a dating app, perfect recipe for a disaster.
From what I heard it's mostly speed-dating stuff.
EDIT: Aand I got ninja'ed. Twice.
https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2017/06/27/China-lau...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/comrade-me...
Sounds like a great idea. I nominate NSA as the host organization. You wouldn't even need to bother creating a profile, they will just use all the surveillance data to find you the best matches.
https://crossdysfunctional.tumblr.com/post/109024982557/fund...
I think the fundamental problem is that more men always sign up on these apps than women. That would be true of a government app also. It seems like this ruins the experience for both men and women alike. I am speculating here because we don't really know much about how these apps work since no one releases their user data. But women I have talked to complain about married men, copy-pasted pickup lines, and men treating women like prostitutes. With my own experience men complain about fake accounts, having to do all the effort and getting nothing for it, and for both, meeting people, going on dates, and then after you've become attracted to each other you find out how deeply damaged and incompatible the other person is because they hid all their baggage.
A lot of this just seems like it's exacerbated by the use of an app. I think the apps drive decent people away. This is all speculation.
I somewhat think the whole proposition of online dating was doomed to fail. I don't know if a non profit/government office could fix this leaving aside how politics could affect it.
California kind of accidentally did so a few years. They thought they were simply running a public sex offender registry, but it occurred to some sex offenders it was also a state run directory of people that would be less likely to be put off by their own record and might even have at least one important shared interest to bond over.
The state was not pleased with this.
Popular does not mean effective. Online dating is the most toxic way of dating invented, so why would the governments contribute?
Your first mistake was thinking that culture actually cares about this.
Hinge's free tier is absolutely excellent and I have gotten multiple dates, as well as a girlfriend, without paying a cent.
What's the catch, you may ask? As with most dating apps, let's just say that if you don't have a "highly competitive" profile, you will struggle if you don't pay for high-volume swiping.
If you have a higher than average Elo, it will seem like having a free lunch. But that's because it's fueled by someone else's desperation at being caught in low Elo feedback loop early.
You then have high Elos who cycle through the app quickly and don't pay, and the rest who cycle more slowly and are more likely to pay during their time there.
I don't plan on returning to any apps, because the whole experience feels dehumanizing, and I'm looking for something enduring now.
I found the people in the "rose list" to just look like Instagram profiles with fairly vanilla profiles and standard TV/socmed good looks, whereas I usually fit better with other nerdy weirdos of average/decent looks. It's oversimplification, but that's about as good as I can get as a generalization.
I still spent some weekends taking care of things at home and plenty of others with dates over the course of several months. I met a few lovely people who I'd totally say hi and chat with if I ran into them out and about today. I went out a few times with one or two that eventually fizzled. And I went out with one that I wouldn't have met otherwise (lives 45min away) and am still involved with a year later.
I never paid for it (Hinge) and just treated it as a way to "surface" potentially interesting people to say hi to, chat with, and potentially date. For all the flaws, it's a more effective way to do this than counting solely on meeting people in your physical sphere.
Since you have a limited number of "likes" per day, you have to actively "say no" to people that's attractive to you.
That said, this is not the only thing happening, and the platform apparently also does the opposite, or does batches (exclusively low-Elo followed by exclusively high-Elo for a while). At the end of the day, it's an ML blackbox.
I have seen this on NYC subway adverts, but is there anything substantially different about their app or business model that backs up their motto?
That sounds pretty counterproductive to me? I feel like many people on Tinder already volunteer way too little information about themselves in their bios. I guess maybe that's OK if you're just swiping based on the person's pics but that seems like a bad strat for finding a partner.
To a complete outsider it feels as if Hinge is just becoming the new Tinder. Anecdotal of course (mostly from women friends), but partly supported by the growth of Hinge lately.
People looking for relationships don't want to be matched with people only looking for hookups, and people looking for hookups don't want to part of a club that accepts them. Apps have the incentive to make money so they don't really do anything.
Could you put a lien against someone's marriage, such that in order to marry someone you meet on HappyDating.com you had to pay the outstanding debt?
Anything less extreme?
Hookup apps. Apps for non-monogamous people. You're looking for repeat customers.
The only other way is paying when the couple gets into something long-term, but the fee would probably be higher than people want.
I definitely agree that if your service depends on a subscription model and is explicitly aimed at people whose goal begins and ends with finding a life partner and deleting their account, then there is really no easy way to reconcile this.
The people I knew who could pull it off didn't really need an app!
In any event, "pay a regular subscription for X years and free thereafter" is just a lifetime subscription paid in installments, not a fundamentally different business model.
In theory, this could create a perverse incentive for the app to set you up for matches that last just long enough for a few dates, but not long enough that you get off the app. In practice, I don't think matching algorithms are precise enough that the app could act on that incentive.
The bigger problem is that most users would completely ignore the monetized dates.
Unless you interject before people get a chance to talk to each other. You might even be able to spin this as a safety feature, you matched with this person - Click here to join our dating even next Tuesday that they are going to...
If that's truly the attitude of apps (albeit a disgusting one), they could simply take the view that there's always a "new crop" of money being born each day and will be ready for their churn in 18 or so yrs.
Of course, matching people well is hard - so any model that isnt good at that will be better off trying to game their customers and brute force their marketing. (for example, if their entire model is based on superficial values like how well they can take a photo of themselves - it may not be good at actually matching people)
I thought OKCupid did a great job. The second person I had a conversation with ended up becoming my wife.
I really liked how OKCupid had a seemingly never-ending set of personality questions. You could answer none of them, or you could answer 100 of them, and the more you answered, the more confidence it had in its matching. You would even flag the importance of each question, so you can tell it if something is an absolute deal-breaker (like your desire to have kids or stay child-free), or if something is a mild preference, like hair color.
> (for example, if their entire model is based on superficial values like how well they can take a photo of themselves - it may not be good at actually matching people)
IMO, Tinder ruined online dating. AFAIK, it makes zero attempt at actually matching people based on any metrics other than location and age.
Actually, I take that back. Tinder didn't ruin online dating, shitty men that send unsolicited dick pics or go ape-shit when they get rejected did.
> shitty men that send unsolicited dick pics or go ape-shit when they get rejected did.
I'm afraid that's so true.
They were community made questions so often very vague and not very reliable, another attempt would work if someone remade that feature with user voting maybe on best questions
If you had a low-percentage match, then I wouldn't think it would lead to a successful relationship. Gaming the percentage doesn't seem like it would have a good overall outcome.
That's true only for users who have this goal.
... success stories, marriages per day due to the app (as per Match.com's advertising material in the article), word of mouth advertisement for the app to your friends...? Again, from the article, even in 2011 match.com was proudly reporting that its active user base changed out every six months. So the "dating apps don't want you to find someone perfect" narrative strikes me as a little simplistic.
On the other hand, plenty of people use dating apps like Bumble and Tinder to find hook-ups, not the love of their life. These people will keep coming back to the app as a result of being frequently successful.
Tobacco companies are spending serious money to stop kids from smoking, because they really care about their health.
Read the article again; their explanation is that after 6 months, people either butt out, or pair-off and butt out.
Same thing.
Can we for once build something good and useful, and leave the greedy gamblers out of it?
Unfortunately, they made a pretty shitty 'dating' system and left it to rot.
I'm not sure this is a fair modeling of how an app must work -- think of other industries that have extremely long sales cycles like, say, a realtor. Realtors are incentivized to match you to a home in such a manner that you might recommend them to others (and leave positive reviews), perhaps even use them again on the buy/sell side later on if their career is long.
Mind you Realtor is closest to professional match maker, but there's no reason an app couldnt take a middle ground between tinder and a highly involved match making service.
I contacted the staff, but never found out what this meant in the end.
https://www.amazon.com/Dataclysm-Christian-Rudder-audiobook/...
At this point, I had refused to pay for a subscription because it felt cringe/sad as a reasonably attractive guy who doesn’t have terrible luck dating in real life. At some point I got over my dumb ego and paid for the highest tier subscription—cause, hey, why not? I kid you not the number of matches I got went up 10x. I would swipe on someone and match within 30 mns vs 1 week 1 month later. I had multiple dates a week, more dates than I’d ever had in my life. And eventually met my current girlfriend.
My point: the game is clearly rigged. Nothing about me changed. My behavior using the app, my physical appearance, my bio were all the same. As soon as I gave them my money Tinder flipped a switch and my profile which was likely barely being placed in front of women was now pushed front and center.
Never Pay for Online Dating (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26945413 - April 2021 (116 comments) Related:
Never Pay for Online Dating (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25055501 - Nov 2020 (265 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)
Most people look at 3-4 images and pass, this probably was the inspiration for Tinder.
One example of this was personality score, which they ended up removing. "In short, according to our users, “looks” and “personality” were the same thing". In this example it was just a profile picture with no text...
Whole bunch of interesting knowledge from this:
Further down the page.
Gotta hand it to gay men, they're pretty honest about what they're looking for.
I think most dishonesty in dating is just lack of self awareness.
Most gays I know don't use grindr anymore however.
But to be honest, I did online dating for almost 20 years and got like 10 dates from it, 2 of which turned into a relationship.
Some of my friends did much better, though. You know, the tall, buff guys with beards, etc. Had at least one date a month. So, even with the "show personally via questions" kind of stuff, looks are still king in online dating.
I did much better with offline dating. Talking to a interesting person is more exciting than just reading about it, I guess.
So, if you wanna go the online route, hit the gym and eat well.
If you're prepared to meet people offline and date at parties, meetups, etc. Then you can get away with a less helathy lifestyle, haha.
I had been using several dating apps and had paid subscriptions to all of them. I was getting burned out by the experience and decided to let my subscriptions expire and take a break from dating, so I wasn’t actively checking the apps anymore.
A paid feature of one of the apps I was paying for (Coffee Meets Bagel, for the curious) was that it notified me whenever someone liked my profile. One day I got one of those notifications, checked her profile and arranged a first date.
And now here we are, happily married :)
Can someone please make another one? We need a site dedicated to Test Taking! OkCupid wasn't just about dating; it was about the tests you could create and take. It was awesome.
The dating was also based on tests and archetypes OkCupid created and they were pretty good. We need something pure like that from the early 2000s.
There were a series of archetypes that were your ideal matches and you could search by peoples archetypes if they shared it. (I believe you could keep it private, too.. I can't totally remember.)
Otherwise, the entire site was geared towards creating tests and taking tests. Their test creation system was awesome. I had several tests on tv shows and entertainment. You could get really detailed with the response types and question structures.
OkCupid themselves, as outlined in this thread, shared their data freely and collected it without a bunch of invasive coding. People were literally creating data collection tests and we took them for fun. That's how you collect data!
The entire site had a much more mellow approach to dating then the alternatives at the time, yet it was still geared towards matches not just sex.
Plus, the whole OKCupid experience wasn't a game of deception to trick you into buying subscriptions or IAP.
One fake account later (required to view attachments), I saw pictures of her dog doing her in... Uh... various ways.
I stopped online dating for like 5 years after that.
Not nearly as extreme, but last time I tried Online dating I messaged someone and found out she was only looking for someone to get her pregnant and be a father. Straight up, first thing, not interested in a first date unless I was interested in getting her pregnant.
I'm Christian so sex outside of marriage is a huge no-no for me anyway, so unmatching was not a hard decision even though she was attractive.
My last relationship was practically begging to get her pregnant from the first 6 months. Eventually it didn't work out after 2 years.
Next guy met her, and got her pregnant within 2-3 months. Married 3 months later. He's set to inherit an 800 acre ranch on the coast of California very soon. He has no idea who he just married. The girl was a nightmare. I'm 38 and have serially dated for 20+ years, and I've never met a girl so mean and cold and unpleasant. I'm not sure if he's seen that side yet, and he's about to be a dad next month.
It would probably be worth it to pay Kim Kardashian her $250k featured post fee to get a bunch of women to join. Something along those lines.
The social media influencer idea solves the problem of onboarding a lot of people fast, particularly women. I disagree that the audience self selects to have low attention span- I doubt that matters if there is sufficient demand for a non-Tinder dating app experience.
I paid for a single month of premium back in the day. So this article is odd.
When I did online dating again a year or so ago, it seemed both more expensive and more blatantly creepy (pay to "like" the most in-demand people! yech...)
The one nice thing was realizing quickly that what they were charging for in 2021 wasn't something I wanted to pay for, so I could safely skip it. Even without paying a dime, I found Hinge to be a useful way to meet people and go on dates that were largely fun and a mostly decent experience. Currently involved with someone I met there a year ago and haven't used the apps since then.
I think dating apps would be creepy, but to be fair I am a person who married before they were that popular. I have a college age son who is in a committed relationship with someone he met through friends so I believe IRL meeting is still possible. The important thing is to build strong relationships so do what works for you.
At any rate it’s easier to find someone nice with things in common online.
The article though gives details of what they see as the problem: forcing people to pay to allow communicating means that well over 90% of profiles on their systems are just filler and unable to communicate with you.
Bought a Bumble Premium with a one time payment of ~120 EUR. In three months got only one match which led to a date. But what a date! We are in love now and I am quitting all dating apps I have used before.
My match was ONLY possible due to a Premium subscription. These 120 EUR were the best spent money of my live.
Here's why -- On average, matches are essentially trying to maximize the ELO score they match with, someone with a maximized score across many variables like social aptitude, wealth, future prospects, looks, (and many other attributes). Now, obviously people have their own weighing function for each aspect but some of them are simply universally valued -- for example healthy is near-universally preferred to someone who is critically ill. So What do you indicate to a match that you most likely _needed_ to use a rose to attempt to match with them ? You reveal that the app generated Elo score is actually too low to be presented them in normal swipes. (Especially in hinge which has a weekly rotation of people you cannot swipe/match with except if you rose, perhaps in other apps but I'm less well versed in their mechanics).
[1]: at least as a man, idk if a woman would ever send a rose to a man, and if they'd work even if they did. Women will get a match >50% of the time w/o a rose, so why pay?
With the assimilation of the ecosystem into Match some sort of alignment was inevitable, and a hook-up service is a ‘good’ SaaS service by classic metrics, while a matchmaking service does not fit the model well (at least yet).
That’s the core reason these apps print money.
In terms of the larger point about the overall incentive structure of dating sites, it seems to me there are a few possible solutions:
1. Sites should only allow "lifetime" subscriptions, eliminating the perverse incentive to keep people from having successful relationships.
2. Some sort of system for paying per successful match. Something like "I'll pay you $1k if I meet my wife through your service." That seems way harder to enforce, but would align the incentive structures almost perfectly if it could be achieved.
It seems to me that microtransactions and dating apps are a perfect match, and I wonder why no one has done this yet? Is it because it's too closely associated with ideas of prostitution? It's only a stone's throw from the concept of OnlyFans, but instead you pay for attention instead of exhibitionism. Why should Tinder/OkCupid get paid for "boosts" when you're really just buying the attention from your target demographic? Seems like crypto would fit nicely into this sector.
That said, I imagine the actual thing that would need to be paid for is someone's time, so posting a kind of smart contract crypto bond that someone gets for showing up in person to a coffee date or something like that. Yes it would still be abused, but there would be a equalibrium reached between price and time sacrificed. Maybe you make it so that you can only go on a certain number of coffee dates per week or something like that.
The cost isn’t prohibitive to me so I just go with it.
The one thing that should be clear to everyone is that no matter what, the most important aspect of dating is to be as geographically close to your perceived dating pool as possible.
So figure out the two or three basic requirements you have (politics, culture) and try to live where those things are common. No amount of effort online or not is going to improve your chances of meeting viable partners if you live too far away. I think you really need to be within 15 minutes or less. As a man, I firmly believe this is a top filter for women when looking at profiles.
I met my wife while using PlentyOfFish. We have been married for 12+ years. I would never pay for a dating app/site.
If you can't find somebody on the free sites, join a forum where you might find somebody with similar interests/hobbies/skills. Be a kind, polite person and once you have developed a friendship, then see if it can expand into more.
Most of these other apps are more geared to hook-ups, (hump-and-dump); and not towards long-term relationships anyway.
The gist of the article seems to be combining two different things: why you should pay for online dating, and false advertising. I don't think the OP joins those arguments very well. Plus, again, this was 12 years ago. I think today OKC might be guilty of the same thing they are pointing fingers at back then.
Just posted it for everyone to - enjoy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dt3LAaq8XKY - discuss https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33164287
eHarmony told me I was unmatchable and match.c was worthless- I agree with this article reply rate was nil. OKC reply rate was awesome and people were much more chill to just IM for a bit and have real exchanges. I met my wife in under two months on the OKC platform.
It seems like you have to always go to a newer app to find success before Match ruins it.
By focusing on quick relationships too, both Tinder and Happn can be more liberal about message limits for free tier users, at the same time making sure that man derive value from a paid subscription.
I really appreciate this kind of self-awareness, and find it incredibly lacking from a lot of things that founders, CEOs, et. al. post, whether it's on a blog, an HN comment or on Twitter.
He got canceled a few years ago for saying off-color things at an academic conference... hope he's doing OK these days.
if traditional matchmaking has worked, why not just apply new tools to what humanity has been doing?
> "According to Rhode Island's Department of Health, the numbers for STDs rose drastically between 2013 and 2014. Syphilis cases increased by 79 percent, newly identified HIV infections increased by 33 percent, gonorrhea cases increased by 30 percent — and it's mostly young adults (along with African-Americans and Hispanics) who are becoming infected at these higher rates."
https://www.techtimes.com/articles/55888/20150527/tinder-dat...
Now if we look at the majority shareholder ownership of say, Gilead Sciences (a major provider of STD pharmaceuticals) and Match Group (owner of Tinder) on Yahoo Finance, the overlap is fairly large. (This of course is true for most corporations in the USA, so it's perhaps not as much of a plot as it might seem).
But still... it makes one wonder about investment capitalism. It's always finding a way to create value and improve people's lives. A nice square deal. Make money promoting risky sexual behavior when they come in the front door, make more money treating the resulting STDs when they leave via the back door. Rather similar to pushing the soft drinks and junk food on the kids, and then reaping profits from the high hospital bills a few decades later. Gifts that keep on giving, right?
Go out and talk to people with similar interests in real life.
Sure, you can pay to get the opportunity to swipe on more profiles, but you can't pay to give everyone else the opportunity to swipe on yours. That means paying for more swipes doesn't really get you more matches.
Dating is a numbers game, and Tinder/etc. are rigged not to play.