Young women fall out of love with dating apps
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Consolidated oligopoly seeking creative inspiration. Reward offered.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Match_Group
Also, if memory serves, the first thing Match did after acquiring OkCupid was take down some of their blog posts, including "Why You Should Never Pay for Online Dating".
Cities can discourage human-hostile architecture in public meeting places, e.g. prevent Standbucks without tables and chairs.
Algo transparency reform for human bloodline management.
Being at the mercy of one mega-corps's paywalled lootbox algorithms deciding whether you meet someone or not, is some dystopian hellscape shit.
The regulators are punishing Microsoft, Apple and Google for their grip over the internet apps, but we don't punish the Match group for its monopoly over the entire human online dating scene? How is this possible?
Match President/CEO is former president of Zynga, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zynga
https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/03/match-names-zynga-presiden...
> Kim was also instrumental in the company’s expansion into new markets including blockchain and hypercasual gaming, as well as to new platforms like Nintendo Switch, Snapchat and smart home devices.. The move to bring in a mobile gaming exec to lead a dating app company is an interesting choice, particularly as Match is looking to grow its business beyond traditional, swipe-based matchmaking and into the so-called “metaverse.” Match has spoken previously about its plans for a dating metaverse, complete with a virtual goods-based economy, real-time audio and the ability for online daters to meet up in a virtual space to have conversations.
"could I find my best friend through an app like this?"
I met my current partner through a friend (who also set me up with my previous partner, which did NOT end well). This is the woman I intend to marry and both her and I knew we had something different pretty quickly. I don't think this would have happened if we met on an app weirdly enough. But I think if you're in a relationship, try to set up your friends. Truth is, a lot of them want it (get their permission first obviously). It's still a roll of the dice, but the odds are better. It's kinda like the same reason you prefer to hire someone through a recommendation from a current employee or someone you know/trust. There's more signal. But also, these types of setups can be softer and more natural, allowing you to get your feet wet knowing the person.
And let's also be honest, sometimes you got to meet someone a few times and dating apps lead to a lot of first dates and very few second dates because you get the idea that if you're not a perfect fit (might be an off day for either of you) that there's plenty more people to choose from.
Of course, there are many different apps, more casual, more serious, some bots all around... you need the right app for the job
But my impression was a lot of people alone lookig for a serious someone, and not many opportunities to meet new people
The article was not about who is happy really. It was about who is not using the apps.
From a business perspective, they make a ton of sense. And I'm sure the people behind them have made thousands of experiments while developing them but I feel like(just like anyone I've spoken to), they never managed to simulate what would happen at scale and most importantly they can't fully simulate human behavior.
At large, us men are very used to hearing "no" from a very early age. Which has one of two effects: those that excel in some areas are more likely to keep trying even when they fail. Those who seem to be on the back foot in most areas become the outcasts but strangely it looks as if that yields some results for them in the dating apps. But there is a group in the middle that are the real losers in this(and likely the vast majority).
For women it's kind of different: they are the more likely ones to say "no" to a man, even if they feel some attraction - "there's always another one". Which is not to say that I don't know instances where this philosophy has massively backfired but what can you do.
The truth is, dating apps are very appealing to those with low self-esteem and bad social skills: at a glance they provide some form of protection, which is unfortunately not true. Dating apps, just like real dating is a numbers game and all they do is digitalize social anxiety and insecurities. If anything, they probably make it worse: people can hide to a degree things that they are insecure about: height, high pitched voice or whatever. But sooner or later that has to materialize and the blow often is much bigger than having to go through it out of the gate.
Here's a real life example with a former colleague of mine: finding a partner was his sole purpose in life. Really nice guy, very educated, great sense of humor but, as I said in the previous paragraph, kinda short and a really squeaky voice. The good news is that he made it and is now married and has a son. Great. But he spent ungodly amount of time on dating apps and spent thousands of bucks on them-like literally in the 5-digit realm. Kudos for being this persistent - I honestly don't think I know anyone that has gone through as much effort as he has - the process spanned over a period of 5 years. The truth is he was actively being exploited by dating apps and while he was aware of it, he saw it as his only chance. Personally I did not understand his urge and not because I had a partner or a family - I still don't in my dead-center mid 30's: my philosophy on that topic is literally "meh, whatever". But seeing this guy struggle so much, it honestly was heart breaking.
On the other end of the scale, I know women that scroll through tinder endlessly, nope-ing out of everyone they see and the second they tap yes on someone they are are even vaguely interested in, it's an instant match. It kind of looks like playing age of empires with the ac cobra cheat always on: it is fun the first three or four times but it gets boring fast. But remember when I said that women are not used to hearing "no"? Well I was having a coffee with her a while back and she said that at some point she really wanted to ask me out. I laughed and asked her why she didn't: "You are a very strange breed: most men will say yes instantly because it's an easy shortcut. You are not most and you wouldn't even bat an eyelash while telling me to take a hike in my face. That thought was absolutely terrifying". Those wouldn't have been my words of choice but she definitely had the right idea. But the fact that a woman that has a magnitude of good qualities and is way more attractive than I am is terrified of getting rejected speaks volumes.
In reality men have to go through a lot of effort to get any results at all with dating apps. Women... Well they simply need to be on them.
How would a dating app work if it actually worked in the user's favor? It would focus on finding great mutual matches that are personalized to exactly who you are and what you're looking for. But this is a tricky problem because there's two competing criteria: 1) we want to give each user the ability to express their personal preferences and match with the people they're most excited about, but also 2) we need to prevent spam and encourage compatible matches, otherwise some people will get inundated while others will be left shouting into the void with no reply.
This is something I've been obsessed with figuring out, and it turns out there's an elegant solution drawing on mechanism design (a subfield of game theory), combined with cutting-edge preference learning algorithms that are able to learn your personal tastes with high accuracy.
My cofounders and I are currently building a new app called Rarebird based on these insights. We're currently looking for a Creative Director (Lead Designer) and an ML R&D Engineer. See more details here, including a deck and technical overview: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vRfo082XRQWUfIwQ...
Really, there should only be one dating app if it actually worked. What has stronger network effects than a dating app? The only reason we see such fragmentation is because the current apps don't actually deliver better matches as the population increases, instead what users experience is congestion as there's more and more irrelevant potential matches on the platform. Which is why most new apps just try to carve out a niche segment of the population, e.g. based on religion, ethnicity, or a special interest. But an ideal app would understand you holistically and find the best matches for you as a complex and multidimensional person, without forcing you to collapse yourself into one particular niche as the determining factor.
The problem with dating sites is not insufficiently smart machine learning. It's more like human nature when faced with a large homogenous pool of candidates, combined with the shift to smartphones as the primary way young people interact with online services (significantly restricts how many words people can be expected to produce and therefore how much data you can get for ML).
OkCupid explained the problems on their blog many years ago:
1. Men aren't that picky and are willing to make a lot of effort to find a mate. They would like a nice girl who will take care of them and not be too crazy. Ideally a pretty one younger than them, but most men will settle for plain and same age or older if they have to. This lack of pickiness combined with willingness to make an effort manifests in simply swiping right on / messaging every single woman ("spam" as you put it). They are also pretty fair judges of women's attractiveness: the ratings they give are normally distributed.
2. Women become extremely picky. Tinder is/was notorious for women putting minimum heights in their profile, some also like to specify minimum salaries, specific kinds of jobs, very specific age ranges (invariably older than themselves) and so on. You don't see men do this! They also become unwilling to put in even small amounts of effort. Tinder expects only a few sentences about yourself in a profile but many women don't even write that much. Why would they, they feel like they can pick men from a menu without needing to write a personal essay. Unfortunately, women's ratings of men aren't even close to normally distributed, as they rate most men as being far less attractive than average. There are only a relatively small number of 6ft5 35-40 year old men earning 250k+ a year with a great sense of humor, the problem is women don't seem to reflect that reality in the distribution of attention they're willing to give. Only a tiny sliver of men are considered as being worth replying to, these men get all the female attention and can then sleep around as much as they want, leaving lots of heartbroken ladies in their wake.
Your description of Rarebird makes it sound like the service assumes men and women are pretty much the same and a good dating service would just use AI to make everything better. OkCupid tried that and although it had its fans, once Tinder came out it became something of a ghost town. There's simply no way to satisfy women's expressed preferences no matter how fancy your ML gets. It's a social problem, not a technical one.
(I am so glad to be married and out of that scene...)
1. Both sexes are willing to lie.
2. Some just want sex. Others want companionship. And yet a third loves getting attention. Others are looking for financial help. And criminals are looking for victims.
3. Any metric the matchmaking algorithm uses will be gamed by someone smarter than you, willing to ruin the experience for everyone else.
Not necessarily; mechanism design studies how to construct systems that aren't gameable, even though everyone in the system is acting out of self-interest.
E.g. The game of poker changes if two or three at a table are secretly working together. Counting cards in black jack is harder to detect if a there's a team behind it.
Frankly, I'm approaching this as an engineering problem, so I haven't tried to work out all the gory mathematical details to fully theoretically characterize the distortion achievable by coordinated action. If you want to work on this and can apply the theory of [1], [2], and [3] below, send me an email.
1. https://doi.org/10.1093/restud/rdy042
Since people are expected to lie in poker, what rules do you add in to change the behavior of people to reduce the chance of coordination, without changing the dynamic of the game?
First let's get OkCupid out of the way: while OkCupid was great for 2008 and deserves a lot of credit for pioneering the idea of actually trying to find great matches, it certainly wasn't at the upper limit of how well a dating app could work. For one thing, OkCupid didn't solve the spam problem (since anyone can message anyone else), and that's why over time Match Group has dismantled OkCupid and turned it into another Tinder clone (i.e. double opt-in through swiping) but with different branding. Their matching algorithm also left a lot to be desired, with its core assumption that two people answering multiple choice questions the same is a good measure of match quality[1].
Rarebird solves both problems. It works in three steps: 1) You are shown two user profiles at a time and asked "Who would you rather meet?"[2]. This trains your personal AI which searches for matches on your behalf. 2) Each user on the platform gets an equal stipend of 100 pebbles/day, which is an in-app currency used to balance incentives. 3) Your matches are delivered to you ordered from best to worst[3], but contacting each match costs a price in pebbles such that it's cheaper to contact better matches. This can be thought of like a carbon tax that charges you for the risk of "polluting" the platform with spam. (Note: you only pay when initiating contact with a new match, then the message channel stays open until it's closed by either party.)
Because of Rarebird's use of a forced choice between two profiles, users do better when they create a profile that shows their uniqueness and is polarizing, to draw in the best matches and turn off people who would be a bad match. The use of contact prices also gives people a lot of information about who is interested in hearing from them. They can still optimize their personal preferences, but the contact prices give an upfront hint about who is likely to reciprocate and respond. It's fine to have high ideals and dreams, but even someone who has very high ideals is ultimately still looking for a good match.
This design lets everyone search and filter to find the people they're most excited about contacting, while also solving the other major problems. The most obvious is that it reduces spam, since it costs more to contact people who are predicted to be not interested. But it also directly addresses your point regarding "[people] being extremely picky".
While you're probably right that men and women have different thresholds to consider entering a relationship, in our modern society we're all picky when searching for a long-term partner. We all have the idea that we can be a differentiated unique individual and still find a partner who is a great match and appreciates us for who we truly are. In the ancestral environment of small tribes, the situation was very different, with only a few potential partners in the neighboring tribes, and far less individual differentiation.
We don't assume that "men and women are pretty much the same" -- instead we embrace the individual complexity and variation between people, and give people the tools to express themselves and act on their individual preferences. While our app's design is the same for everyone, we don't expect everyone will use the app in the same way. For example, maybe Alice doesn't want to reach out first, but instead to be found and contacted. But she still wants to find her ideal match, not just some random person! Rarebird accounts for this naturally. To make it harder, let's even assume Alice is "conventionally attractive" and there's a lot of guys who want to contact her. In this situation, most people will find that Alice is expensive to contact, but the people who Alice wants to be contacted by will find they have a low cost in pebbles to message her.
Much of what you describe in your comment is the fact that the underlying game theory of current dating apps is terrible, and when people play the game as it’s designed, the outcome is awful for everyone. On Tinder, people are just trying to get over the right-swipe threshold, so it encourages this homogenization where everyone looks generic, and conceals the more vulnerable unique aspects of themselves. Plus it gives no feedback about who is a realistic match, so everyone just stays anchored to their prior beliefs based on their ideals.
So while online dating is a platform design problem, and not an algorithms problem, we believe that algorithms are a useful tool in the toolbox.
Footnotes:
1. This has two flaws: 1) What about features that aren't captured, like physical attraction? 2) It assumes that people have reflective abstract verbal access to accurately say what is important in a partner. That's a hard thing to know accurately, except maybe if you are particularly self-reflective and have a lot of relationship experience through which you've honed your conception of a good match.
2. There's also a "neither" button, to be used when you'd rather be single than match with either person.
3. You can sort matches by predicted match quality, predicted attraction, or cost to contact.
As you note, the big challenges are going to be:
1. Getting people to provide enough (true) information to let your algorithm work without becoming self-referential via pebble spending feedback loops.
2. Incorporating physical image features. Realistically this is your primary source of data. Modern DNNs could do a great job of this but there is a strong chance it'll learn blue-sky-tank confounders like camera quality, framing etc. IIRC that's a big problem with trying to use ML to find good candidates on dating sites but I can't remember where I read this.
3. If it's cheaper for the alpha males to message women than most men, won't that just accelerate the problem existing sites already have? It means most women will end up with inboxes full of messages from the top few percent of men because the others can't afford to message more than one or two per day, which would just reinforce the perception that all men are pigs who aren't serious about relationships.
Many stats show that the younger generations have less friends, have less sex, etc. They value a life partner or romantic partner more for the stability and less for the "thrill" because living with a permanently online record of their lives and the viciousness of the entire Internet being able to "cancel" you for things you said or did years ago has made everyone a bit less thrill-seeking, a bit less adventurous, etc.
And that doesn't really vibe with dating apps that encourage meeting someone you don't know, your friends don't know, for what's probably going to be a short term relationship.
I think it's a bit of a pendulum effect. We went really hard into hookup culture in the 2000s (just check out all the American Pie type movies back then that would never be made today). Now people are swinging back more to wanting stable relationships that benefit on paper rather than in our hearts and all.
This certainly isn't conducive to sex, and often makes it difficult or impossible to host friends (meaning that people often choose to meet at venues such as restaurants instead, a situation which often necessitates more infrequent catch-ups due to the expenses involved).
https://www.futari-story.metro.tokyo.lg.jp/
And there are detailed dating tips too if you don't want to register
Of course relationship rates and birth rates might not have a very strict correlation (which they probably do), but Japanese society is so very different from western societies that unintended consequences could prove.. fun
Perhaps we need something like a non-profit donation-driven Signal Foundation but for free dating. It would use concepts from distributed systems, namely backpressure, throttling, and rate-limiting to ensure that almost everyone can feel a winner.
It would be like your PT offering you infinite visits. The whole point of PT is for me to get better. If I’m still coming in a year I probably need surgery not more Physical Therapy.
One possible way to remedy this: the dating app is free to sign on, but you pay a fee when you quit. This would incentivize the app to find you a good match as soon as possible. The issue is, how to know when a match is successful?
Surely the promise of "exactly like what OKCupid used to be and without secretly trying to fuck your wallet or waste your time, $5/month" would bring in tons of customers, including women.
And then when Match Group comes knocking with a bag of money, even if you sell to them, they can't own the model. Just spin it up again with a new name.
People like to talk about how making successful matches loses customers, but you can honestly view the business like how real-estate prices always go up because there are just always more people today who need housing than there were yesterday. You don't need to keep milking existing customers. New potential customers are constantly coming of age faster than you can match them together anyway.
How’re you going to get people to know about your app if you don’t have a large marketing budget? It’s gonna be hard. You’d need a big influencer or celebrity or something to pimp it out. You’re then running into the same issue.
Also, no one wants to pay for a dating app upfront. Especially women. Remember, women basically never pay for these apps. It’s men who pay. It’s the same shit for nightclubs. Women are insanely desirable users purely for the sake of generating more revenue off the men.
Why would you not have a marketing budget?
> Also, no one wants to pay for a dating app upfront. Especially women.
That's interesting, because I just read an article talking about how people, especially women, are fed up with their dating apps now.
Maybe instead of abusing the women on your platform by stringing them along to keep them around for as long as possible, give them a good experience and get them to get their friends to sign up.
If you take VC money, you’re back at the same issue as every other dating app. Growth at all costs.
You’d need a benevolent billionaire or something to make this app happen.
There are many ultra wealthy people that recognize declining birth rates and population will destroy economic growth, and that this isn't a problem that can be solved with more competition.
In software, when there's a technology that can benefit everyone in an industry but individual control creates perverse incentives, companies will band together to create standards organizations or non-profits to harness the tech in a way that benefits everyone. This already happens with the Linux Foundation and open-source more generally.
Dating apps should have the same model because the negative externality of a perpetually single society is going to kill the economy and possibly destroy the world.
Hence the corporate and government push for open borders and mass migration despite citizen/voters opposition and the shift towards right wing populism.
Ever hear of Angela Merkel and her Willkommenskultur which upset a lot of people and countries? And various EU politicians promoting the same policy.
It can't destroy the world if it kills the economy. One or the other.
The men I know that are attractive (can attract a woman with relatively little effort) are not likely to be spending money on online dating. Ergo, women are seeing a lot less of 'attractive men' in online dating?
Almost every dating app out there now is based around Grindr’s original formula. Show a few photos and about three sentences of text. It’s completely catered to men’s sexuality. For men, personality is important but if you aren’t physically attractive - there’s almost nothing that will move that. The same cannot be said for women - as most women find most men physically unattractive (often including their own partners).
Most of the women I know who didn’t meet their partner from a dating app usually say they wouldn’t match with their partner if they had seen their profile online. For women, in person interactions are incredibly important for determining overall sexual value. This is why many women will meet very physically attractive men in real life but then find the men very off putting in some way or another - leading them to feel disenchanted with the process.
Online dating is inherently a male gays oriented game as it has been developed over the last decade.
I am sure women are being bombarded with date request to the point they will get burnout. Never mind the men who are faking their profile.
As a man who has used all the modern dating apps and who knows many other men who have also used them, I think I can say without hesitating that the experience almost universally sucks.
As a man, even if you’re on the better looking side, with a good job etc, the numbers look something like: swipe right on 150 women, of that 150 you might get 10-12 matches. Of those matches, 3 will probably write you a single message. Of those three, one will go on a date with you. And there’s a fair chance when you go on the date, the person doesn’t look at all like their pictures. (This has happened to me twice)
In one of the apps I used, Hinge, I have about 203 matches. I.e. the woman chose me and I chose her. Out of 203, I ended up going on five dates. Of that 203, 50 of them never responded to a first message.
So, while I agree the experience isn’t nice for women, it’s equally soul crushing as a man. It seems more like a game where people are trying to “collect” matches like they’re Pokémon, and getting more matches fills some strange sort of immature psychological need.
The whole thing deconstructs the fairly beautiful idea of falling in love or meeting someone wonderful and levels it down to some base and insidious numbers game, while also creating a sort of “dating picture” arms-race of filters, choreographed pictures, etc to ensure you stick out in a world where image becomes everything.
We talk about how “objectifying” others is bad… well, dating apps are practically training us to objectify others and treat them as fungible entities to treat our loneliness and low self esteem.
The whole thing is depressing, what’s worse though is that since most of the western world is less social, alone more often, has no “third space”, etc this dating app world has become many people’s only option for finding a meaningful relationship.
Ok, time to swipe through another hundred women…
It became so absurd that even IRL it's much easier to meet someone and start a conversation than on the app that was literally created to simplify that.
It wasn't. The Financial Times is about business. Fewer women using a service is a business problem. Men feeling sad is not a business problem yet.
Need for validation I guess. But it's only a surrogate - I believe we are wired for face to face communication including the non-verbal subleties.
Despite women being clear winners and most men clear losers of dating apps, notice how the title of the article is only about women supposed suffering. In a way it's a good metaphor of the dating market: women always demanding more and men just have to suffer and shut the fuck up.
Short-term validation, but have uncommitted relationships, which arguably harms women most.
Welcome to being a man.
It's reminiscent of how clubs will let women in for free, because without them the spendy men, willing to impress the ladies with bottomless overpriced champagne, will not bother coming inc, and the club ends up making no money.
For men,
risk: not get laid, deal with rejection. reward: get laid, possibly meet soul mate
For women,
risk: person you matched with rapes and murders you. reward: get laid, possibly meet soul mate
And before anyone tries to rebut this with the tired argument of "sometimes women commit murder" yeah that's true but exceedingly rare. The overwhelming number of violent crimes are committed by men.
Could it be because for centuries we ran the world and told women they were inferior, didn't let them vote, didn't let them drive, didn't let them have financial autonomy, etc.?
Could it be that, generally, men have things pretty good today and in many ways women still have not caught up?
Could it be that you need to tread a pretty fine line if you want to make humor by poking fun at half the population who were systematically oppressed for the last I-don't-know-how-many years?
One wonders.
I think this is wrong. Both genders are dying from dehydration; just one is dying of thirst in the desert and the other is in the ocean. The person in the desert might envy the person in the ocean but that doesn't change the fact that neither have drinkable water.
Having an oversupply of (even mediocre) potential partners is way better than a chronic shortage of potential partners.
Would you also tell the chronically unemployed person that you being flooded with job offers all day you can't keep track of, means you're dying just like him, but in water instead of sand?
No, you're not dying, you're just overwhelmed with supply, which is still better than having zero supply.
That's the exact problem this article discusses for women -- being surrounded by "un-dateable" men. It's why moderation tools are mentioned repeatedly in the article.
It's more accurate that women on dating apps are far too picky and have far higher standards online (it's been well documented by percentile of sipes) and therefore in their eyes see most men as undatable even if that's not the case (someone might not have the most exciting or handsome profile but he could still be a fun date or a great dad and yet never get any dates).
But women being too picky online is a completely different issue to not being any datable men out there, which can't be true, and the fact still stands that they have the oversupply which lets them be choosy, which is still better than men having an undersupply issue which is the life of men online dating.
So the more accurate "water analogy" would be that online dating women are surrounded by loads of drinkable water but they refuse to drink it because most of it is average tap water which they see as undrinkable, as they all go online looking for the VOSS/Evian water which is indeed in short supply not just online but also IRL, except IRL they're more aware of it and mostly go online looking to find what they don't have IRL.
Not only that but I guess many of them are there for ego boosting pusposes and such rather than dating.
I think you also misunderstand. If given the choice, I'd rather die of dehydration in the ocean than in the desert. They both suck but that one seems better (having spent significant time in both regions). You'll get sunburned in both but in the desert there's nothing to cool you off. You'll be much more likely to survive longer in the ocean than desert, even if we ignore food availability.
So you're giving a really unfair interpretation because no one is saying they're equally bad. They're (I'm) just saying that you're going to die in both situations
As with anything in language, remember that your job is to figure out what the person means, not what they say. The words they use are a signal but it's compressed and fuzzy (especially on the Internet where we have many cultures -- big and small -- interacting with many different expected commission and decompression expectations).
It's always possible to gravely misinterpret anything anyone says, no matter how carefully they say it.
> So you're giving a really unfair interpretation because no one is saying they're equally bad. They're (I'm) just saying that you're going to die in both situations
It is also possible for a person to simply contradict themselves.
What you are saying is they are equally bad outcomes.
You're also simultaneously implying that one is objectively worse than the other in every possible way.
As a clear example, in both these cases the outcome is "death" right? I think we all know we'd rather go out in our sleep that have our intestines ripped out. Both these have equal outcomes but I'd call you a liar if you didn't have a strong preference.
You might say these don't compare. I'd say that they do. If we come to that conclusion, one of us must be misinterpreting the other.
That the paths may seem less or more preferable isn't actually the point of your analogy, it's that either way in the end: You die.
You also made this analogy as a counterpoint to the claim that women are the big winners on dating apps by far.
It's like if someone said smokers and non-smokers are both going to die anyways.
While that's certainly true, the implication (that it doesn't matter whether or not you smoke), is wrong.
Likewise, the implication of your analogy is wrong in my opinion.
One is clearly far worse and you have already acknowledged this.
Getting 0 matches and being inundated with matches that don't work out are in no way comparably bad outcomes on a dating app. Especially because these are -matches-, and that's the key metric of success on virtually every dating app.
No, the analogy means both genders are not achieving their intended and goal.
Apples and oranges are both round fruit, but we still use this as an idiom because the distinction are important. In fact, the idiom itself is about things that have surface level similarities but that details matter.
Which you're right to point out that the details matter. I'm not disagreeing with your thesis. I'm disagreeing with your interpretation. If a doctor says you should eat more fruit, they don't care if you eat apples or oranges. Basically, context. You put too much information into what was intended to be conveyed. This has been explained to you. So now if you don't understand that's on you.
And I need to reiterate. Language is imperfect. You'll always be about to find reasons to disagree or misinterpret. This whole conversation is an illustration of the imperfection.
> and [dates are] the key metric of success on virtually every dating app.
Metrics are the downfall of meritocracies. Maybe this is why you're misunderstanding. No, dates are not the goal. Dates are a step along the path to the goal. The goal is to find a partner. Not for everyone, but that's definitely the goal in the context of this thread.
Your argument is that women are not the big winners on dating apps because the outcomes for both men and women are equally bad.
That is false.
Language is imperfect but that's not the problem right now, it's that you are playing fast and loose with words and blaming it on language.
I also very intentionally said "matches" and not "dates" because again, this entire thread is based on who the big winners of dating apps are.
The goal of dating apps is to get matches. Someone else has even pointed out that these apps might more appropriately be called "matching apps", and I don't think anyone including you would disagree. (But in case you do, note that these apps have no concept of "dates"... Only matches)
I'm not misunderstanding that this is a major failing of dating apps, I'm stating that as they are currently structured, based on the current rules: women are winning in dating apps.
That is and was the topic of conversation.
It wasn't stated that women are the big winners of romance and dating in general, and that's not what this thread is about. But you are attempting to make it about that in order to get away from your original point, which is still wrong, no matter how far we depart from it.
Going to put a pin in this though.
The analogy would be one person not getting any job offers while the other is only getting job offers with compenation that are too low to support their family.
I'm not sure why these are being treated as equally bad. To be one is clearly worse than the other, though both tremendously suck. You'd at least survive longer in the ocean, even if we ignored the higher availability of food.
That doesn't accurately reflect the reality though. You can adjust your standards to find a mate if you have options, if you have no options, there is literally nothing you can do. I would think "death" or "game over" is having zero moves left. Not having few favorable moves and a high chance of making an unfavorable one.
It also implies women exclusively suffer from quality issues when dating.
There are for sure just as many bad actors on the female side of dating apps as there are on the male side.
If you're going to focus in on details and the generalizations that are clearly for convenience and not actual, make sure you don't do this too. Because we both know that the type and number of bad actors that men and women face aren't the same. But I'm not going to hound you for it because that'd be in bad faith. It'd be a willful misinterpreting of what you meant.
Your entire presence here is in response to the statement "Women are the big winners of dating apps"
You disagree with this and your analogy was your way of explaining your disagreement.
You could have used another analogy and I would still disagree if your conclusion was different from the person you were responding to.
> Because we both know that the type and number of bad actors that men and women face aren't the same. But I'm not going to hound you for it because that'd be in bad faith. It'd be a willful misinterpreting of what you meant.
We don't both know that (in regards to number). Bad actors is a very broad term. I have pretty explicitly stated multiple times in this thread (in response to you, IIRC), that I believe the quality of interactions men and women face on dating apps is roughly the same. (To clarify this, I mean the ratio of good vs bad interactions on the app in a binary ranking system is roughly the same for men vs. women)
Yes, that includes all of the bad things you are thinking of, and including some I'm sure you have never thought of if you have never lived in a rough place.
> You're reading way too much into an analogy
You do realize that analogy was pretty much your entire original comment, right? I am directly responding to your entire point, not harping on semantics or nuance.
> I'm not sure why these are being treated as equally bad.
I'm supposed to respond to that without mentioning your analogy..? Because the analogy is why these things are being treated as equally bad. It's literally the entire point of your analogy.
That said, even by this analogy, that would imply the 1% of the time the first person gets an interview, it is also likely a scam or a non-start 99% of the time.
So the second person is still 100x as likely to find a job as the first person. The market just happens to suck for everyone.
There seems to be this mentality of women towards men of, "the odds are good but the goods are odd", but personally it seems to be like 'quality' of men and women seems to be roughly similar in the general population, if you think in terms of attractiveness, intelligence, personality, career prospects, etc.
I've only ever heard that said in the Bay Area, and I think I would agree...
It’s ridiculous and due to our super woke culture. HN is full of typical shitlib wokeist mainstream nonsense because that’s how most of SV is. It’s also great for capital because it distracts from the real issues.
It gets really odious around here when women are discussed.
HN is very very far from whatever spectre the right currently is labeling "woke"
I think often we don't realize how different our experiences are in dating. There are definitely core shared similarities but there are lots of differences and create different strategies that make us often envy the other. For example, many men will just "swipe right" on everyone and then select after a match because being choosy in the first round may be emotionally draining (as a tiny part gets invested in the "potential" matches that never come). But this strategy is much more uncommon in women.
But dating has always been an asymmetric game. The risk/reward structure is very different for the two players. (E.g. getting date raped as a man is so unlikely that it's rarely heard of. But for a woman it's still unlikely but common enough that there's probably a woman you know that has had it happen -- even if you don't know it has).
You actually made the same implication again just now:
> Men typically have a hard time matching, making it hard for them to find the person they want but also making them feel desperate. On the other hand women don't have a hard time getting a match, but the quality of their matches is low.
This again implies men are not also experiencing low quality matches at similar rates. They are.
That's the point that seems to be being glossed over repeatedly in this thread.
Was this studied?
That's why bringing quality up in a conversation about quantity ratio disparities in the dating market is meaningless.
Quantity is objectively demonstrable. Quality is not (in this case at least). Your quality complaints about a partner are the things someone else would praise about them.
That's why every single response I've made in this thread is towards comments on quality as the equalizer/silencer to quantity complaints. You are proving my point by asking this question, not sure if you realize.
It's just a red herring meant to prevent the conversation from moving in a meaningful direction, meaningful as in it helps both sexes (for example, enforcing M:F ratios in dating apps). Mostly because the meaningful direction probably doesn't benefit (or rather, have as much perceived benefit for) most women as much as a one sided approach.
That's also why the implication that "women are the big winners of dating apps" is important.
Most women don't actually want them to change in favor of both sexes, they only want their own problems addressed. Not realizing that addressing the problem for both sexes would benefit both sexes probably much much more. Yes, I'm implying people mentioning "quality" want a relative gain in value, not a net.
And that's just human nature (see the trickle down economics reference next), if men were the big winners of dating apps, it would be the same.
By focusing on quality (a problem mostly only women experience because you need quantity/volume to have quality issues in the first place), all of the benefit goes to women, and the expectation from there I guess is that the perks "trickle down" to the losing side... Right.
Does this situation sound familiar? Also this has historically proven not to be true and in reality it is not true; I feel quite comfortable saying there are far more men who feel completely disenfranchised from dating than women. Femcels exist, but I'm pretty sure there are way more incels.
Dating apps should improve upon reality... Not exacerbate the existing disparities.
Interestingly enough, the example of a meaningful solution I mentioned before (enforced M:F ratios) would directly impact quality... Imagine an app where you sign up and have to wait for your account to be activated until the ratio of males and females in your area is made even by your acceptance..
That implies that when bad actors are removed their spot is filled... By someone who is presumably not a bad actor (or this repeats until someone who isn't a POS gets in and stays). You would probably also think twice about cat fishing or sending obscene messages to people.
Hair: Young women have great hair. 25% of young men are experiencing moderate-to-extensive male-pattern baldness.
Physique: a woman has a great physique if she is thin ( which they usually are at 18 without additional effort) -- a man who doesn't lift weights has a boy's physique which is usually a demerit -- to get an impressive physique as a man takes real gym time.
Wealth: there's no expectation for a woman to have money. Men without success or prospects of success (eg. grad school) is a demerit.
Its massively imbalanced.
Make-up: makes women look even better if done right, men can't pull off make-up.
Facial hair: sometimes makes men look better, often makes them look worse
Other hair: men grow hair every possible place (eg back-hair) because of testostrone I'm told.
Age: women seem to age better, something about the growth of the male jaw-line. Do young women even find Leonardo Dicaprio attractive anymore? idk.
Thin: women are more dialed into how important being thin is than men, it matters more for them, but at the same time they do a better job with it.
I left one out b/c I'm prudish.
Also if you're a fat woman your dating chances suuuuuck.
Most of these systems have to approached in a calculated way. Walking away is always the best technique. Men get boosted briefly when they pay. You attempt to match 8-10, and wait no more than a week then cancel the sub. If no luck, wait 4-6 weeks and wash, rinse, repeat.
Most dudes are dumb. They match everyone and have no plan. Women look at the first few, then compulsively swipe for snarky entertainment. It works out to be a compulsive behavior most of the time.
I’ve had success 3/3 times with doing this, including my late wife of 20 years. Probably spent less than 5 hours working the app each time.
They've won some convenience, sure. But I doubt it has improved their chances in what they, on average, value far more: Finding a lifelong partner to raise a family with.
The entire article is written from the perspective of the app companies and how they're trying to gain market share with women. The article says "Significant gender skew means it is harder for men to find matches..." Therefore, increasing the number of women who use the app would make it easier for men to find matches.
From all sides, it's a shame that the behavior of some men have caused women to shy away or leave these apps. It creates a negative cycle that impacts sincere daters of all genders. Throwing stones at women for not wanting to be harassed, stalked, etc. isn't going to solve the problem.
I skimmed the article: it's not interesting, basically whining about dick pics or something.
> From all sides, it's a shale that the behavior of some len
Yeah yeah, men bad, women amazing, we know the song.
it is interesting to note that, despite being the "clear winners", dating apps have a hard time attracting and retaining straight female users.
Human mating is female selection driven, if there are no females, there's no business.
There's also a lot of pushback against the hookup culture that has become prevalent in the past decade (facilitated primarily by the apps), and of course Covid has made social groups much more rigid. As a single guy in my 30s, going out to a bar and meeting random people (even guys, let alone women) seems much harder than it was just 3-4 years ago.
Dating apps are also extremely superficial where to have a modicum of success these days you essentially need to do a photo shoot. Women hate them because of weirdos and bad dates, men hate them because of atrocious m:f ratios, and frankly, I hope they go away. They've probably done more harm to our society than good.
[1] https://dvt.name/2020/02/24/rfc-lets-disrupt-dating-apps/
And then even dating apps are failing us.
> More than one-in-10 had received threats of physical harm.
Who are these buffoons? Do you really think a lady will respond to your request for a date if you threaten her!?
> Gen Z and women
These two groups, younger people and women are the hardest to reach. I guess gen Z will be the first truly alone generation.
Before that, we went out and met people in meat space. Often at bars, because as bad as that was, it still beat the dating apps of the day.
I think at this point people are getting paralyzed by an overabundance of choice in many cases, and the illusion of the possibility of infinite pickiness (coupled with the ability to pick out flaws before you ever encounter redeeming qualities in a person).
When you look at human history, for most of it, marriages were arranged. Then for the last few centuries, they were arrived at by "love" (aka, raging hormonal passions, and the occasional chemically altered decision making). Now, people are making this match making thing about finding the perfect person. May as well make it about finding a martian for how successful that's likely to be, by anyone who bothers to take a second to look at it.
Humans are messy. Two humans are messier than one. Relationships aren't about perfectly compatible people, they're about learning to work together despite the fact that you're going to have reason to clash on a regular, if not constant basis. And if that prospect is too exhausting, then yea, people should expect to be alone more. If THAT prospect is unacceptable, perhaps consider rebalancing your life to make room for basic human intimacy. There's no such thing as mustering 150% of your available resources.