Comment by rjknight | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rjknight | Hacker News Reader

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I don't get it. Let's take your software engineer example. Software engineers often do complain about spam from recruiters, in cases where the recruiters:

a) Plainly have not taken your skills or location or pay grade into consideration

b) Refuse to take "no" for an answer

c) Turn hostile or somehow imply that you owe them your time or should be grateful for their attention

And we generally assume that the engineers are correct in their complaints. I can't say I've ever seen recruiters being abusive, but I have heard voicemail messages that start with "I know you said not to call you again, but...", and there's really no question about who is in the wrong there.

Whether it's actually important is a different question. I get a fair few pointless enquiries via LinkedIn, and I ignore them. I can't say that it troubles me much. But if the people sending those messages were insulting me, making sexually explicit statements or generally being persistent beyond all efforts to make them stop, I would probably feel much more strongly about it.

What puzzles me is that the behaviour of the recruiters does make at least some sense in a way that the dating site behaviour doesn't. Sure, getting a job spec for a senior Java developer and then mailing everyone with "senior [something] developer" in their past job titles on LinkedIn is going to fail quite often, as you'll hit Senior Python Developers and Senior C++ Developers and so on, but sooner or later the recruiter has to get lucky. But who the hell responds positively to the kinds of comments that the OP received? Are the people sending the messages doing so because they believe that sooner or later it's going to work? Even worse, does it actually work sometimes? I can't easily believe that it does, but it's hard to understand the behaviour otherwise.

I complain about recruiters. I also complain about fat girls/gays (note: not comparing gays to fatties) hitting on me, touching me in ways I dislike, not taking no for an answer and cockblocking me when I talk to people I find more attractive.

But I don't adopt the same victimhood that the Jezabel blog post is trying to imply, i.e. I won't favorably quote people making statements like this: "I came away thinking that software engineers have it so much harder than buggy-whip makers do when it comes to that kind of stuff..."

Fair enough, in principle. However, I think the OP is saying that there is a difference in the nature and the quantity of the comments such that it crosses the line from mild annoyance to something worse; it's so off-putting that it prevents the women in question from participating in online dating sites. And, since the women are an important component of dating sites, it's probably important to take that into consideration when designing such sites.

If you're happy being a bit more stoical about the problems you've encountered, that's fine. Perhaps some of the women receiving unwanted messages on dating sites could be a bit more stoical too. But it does seem to me that they're being given a bit more to be stoical about, and this is unfair, to some extent (it is perhaps hardly the greatest injustice in the world, but it does seem genuinely unfair).

This post manages to both miss the point spectacularly, and make you sound like a thoroughly unpleasant person.

I doubt you get hit on by "fatties" or "gays" every day and in unsuitable situations.

I think there is a fundamental difference you're missing between the experiences you're describing and that of online dating: it's not so much about the amount of noise and more about the signal-to-noise ratio, as well as the overwhelmingsness of the situation that the author argues makes dating websites (not life in general!) a difficult experience.

On a dating website, messages are the only signal available to the receiver. This means the person had to go through a lot of noise (or as the article says, "wade through a mountain of shit") to find out if anyone interesting to them messaged them. If on top of that these messages are as numerous and off-putting as the person in the article says, then it's easy to see the online dating experience can become rapidly unpleasant. Furthermore, this is a problem because finding matches is the only function of a dating website!

Now, back to your example. The thing is that not only do you hopefully get utility from socializing at a bar beyond being able to find sexual partners and you're presumably not constantly in such a situation (which already makes your analogy miss the point), but you have many other signals at your disposal: you can simply visually identify those who are more attractive to you in the room and physically make your way through them, and even though, as you said, you can get cockblocked at times, this is still an option that's not available to people on dating websites.

I don’t know - you come across as fairly victimized in this post.

I somehow doubt your failures with more attractive girls are down to “being cockblocked by gays and fatties” - my initial feeling is that it may have something to do with your stellar perception of other people.

Seriously, “I complain about fat girls hitting on me.” “I complain about gays hitting on me.”

My wife has a friend who is forty and has never had "luck with men" for long term relationships. I can easily see why now. My wife and her worked together and made a thoughtful post on Craigslist for an invitation to a thanksgiving dinner date, with a picture and lots of personality description. It actually worked - we got 40 applicants and half were decent guys, and 10 were attractive to her in looks and had thoughtful messages. She ended up only contacting one back who aaid, "Hey baby you hot whats up?" or something like that. I've seen this many times now and have no sympathy anymore when they turn out to be assholes.

This is kinda my experience too, but it makes me very uncomfortable. It's as if some people have no asshole radar, and consistently end up being hurt because of it, but you can't simply tell them this (and worse, since they have no asshole radar then they have no reason to think that you aren't the asshole). However, this is a pretty self-serving thing for me to believe - I'm a decent person, other people are assholes, yet other people can't tell that the assholes are assholes and this is why my decent nature is insufficiently appreciated. But it does happen to be a fairly straightforward answer to the question of how sending spammy and borderline creepy messages to women on dating sites could be a viable strategy and I am struggling to think of a better one.

This doesn't amount to "Women! It's actually all your fault for encouraging these guys!", although it could easily be taken that way. I presume it's more complicated than that, though I am not a sociologist or psychologist and can't really take the analysis much further.

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