I think it's actually very simple... the paradox of choice.
You introduce somebody to your attractive single friend there's a real chance they hit it off and form a relationship. You introduce them to 100 attractive friends, one makes more money, one has a more stable job, one is flirtier, etc then it's both exhausting and none of them seem like a great opportunity.
I think there are certain basic psychological facts that are anti-standard-economics that nerds (and therefore tech companies) almost always tend to be completely blind to. This is one of them.
There's this joke about a man in his 40s. He goes to the gym and asks the instructor which machine he should use to look more attractive to young ladies. The instructor looks at him and says "you'd do well by using the ATM outside".
When I ask myself who in my friends circles has had the happiest, longest lasting relationships it almost never were the guys with the money.
Don't get me wrong, that doesn't mean the inverse is true and you score big time if you are an ugly bum. It just means other qualities matter often more than men think. Being a kind guy, having humor, being emotionally reliable (meaning you're emotionally stable and not easily provoked, angered), being fun to be around, things like that.
I was one of those guys who always had more female friends than the average dude and I can assure you the stuff girls talk about when they consider partners are more often about how a guy is, than what he has.
Not that there aren't women who decide based perceived wealth, of course they exist. But why on earth would you consider catering to those? Got nothing else going for you except money?
Money (or access to money) is often a proxy for a certain kind of stability and access to leisure, two things that many people strive for.
But the joke wasn't about long term, successful relationships. The guy was interested in looking attractive. That could have any kind of relationship goal, from one night stands to marriage, or even meeting someone who could introduce them to even more people.
Being attractive can be helpful to get to know people. But it can also be a curse. If you know really attractive women (like international fashion model types) you will learn that it can be very hard for them at times to find friends that don't just chose them for their looks.
Now if all you want are short hook ups, sure. But I'd suspect most people are looking for a lasting partnership where the other side likes them for who they are and both people have a good time being together. And widely desirable traits can paradoxically make it harder to find that, also because the other side has incentives to fool you.
> When I ask myself who in my friends circles has had the happiest, longest lasting relationships it almost never were the guys with the money.
But that's also consistent with money being the ticket of entry, the thing you need to have to be considered as a partner in the first place (much of the time). Especially in the context of dating apps where there are so many to choose from, you might not even get the chance to show yourself as a kind, emotionally stable, fun guy to be around.
> wouldn't want a partner that mainly chose them because they have money
That type of partner is commonly referred to as a gold digger. It's very rare that gold digger will tell you the honest reason why they're with you.
It does happen though. There's an extremely high profile couple in the US. She was asked in an TV interview if she'd be with him if he wasn't this rich. She responded "do you think he'd be with me if I wasn't this pretty?". Brutally honest I tell you.
Commonly called “analysis paralysis”. For most people, I believe, once you have more than a small number of options it’s basically impossible (or feels so) to analyze and compare all options to make what seems like a rational and logical decision. So some people will just get frustrated and pick one arbitrarily, or give up and pick none. A small number of people will make a spreadsheet and devote way too much time to over-analyzing the situation, and maybe never come to a satisfactory conclusion.
This applies to almost anything, even “which restaurant should we go to tonight?”
> ...once you have more than a small number of options it’s basically impossible (or feels so) to analyze and compare all options to make what seems like a rational and logical decision.So some people will just get frustrated and pick one arbitrarily, or give up and pick none.
In this context (non-work related decisions) I find the “analysis paralysis” stems from a person not knowing themselves well enough or knowing themselves but not sure how to assert it without coming off in an off-putting way.
For the latter, “which restaurant should we go to tonight?” I take that as whatever I pick is it so I pick what I want (as long as I know the other people dont have allergies to the place or something) and that's it. When people ask for a place to pick they usually mean it (from my experience), and they are happy to tag along whereever -- otherwise they will suggest something and ask others opinion, I take that to mean they want to go there but don't want to seem bossy or some other weirdness, and so we go there unless I have a problem with it that I'll voice and suggests something similar.
For the former, I think people are too worried about coming off as "selfish" (and avoid learning themselves). It makes sense because some people really are, and being around them makes decent people really not want to be that. But knowing what you like and want especially when it's not what you have been told to like and want is the biggest hurdle to getting past the “analysis paralysis” here. If you know you and what you like and want than there is really not much to analysis, the analysis should be happening everyday of your life so when these big things come up you have a solid foundation to go on. Otherwise, a lot of it is trying to figure out what the best option is according to outside guidelines you've been given -- which is great for work, but not so much for oneself.
Of course, maybe there are people who can't do the above for whatever, but it's a skill to know what you like and want and a skill to put it into practice without being rude, just like talking to random people or programming. You get better with real world practice/exposure.
If you lived in an area with many restaurants offering the same favorite-cuisine/foods, and you were picking one to eat at indefinitely and exclusively… how would you choose?
That’s where the analysis paralysis would come in to play in dating.
> If you lived in an area with many restaurants offering the same favorite-cuisine/foods, and you were picking one to eat at indefinitely and exclusively… how would you choose?
[edit] I missed the indefinitely, read as definitely - so if you mean only one of them forever. The one I liked best, which really isnt far off from how I do thing now. I use to drive past multiple starbucks to go to the one I enjoyed most. It's not like they had better coffee than the others, I simply knew I liked going to that one the most.
I get this may sound trite, but by knowing myself. I've made it priority to know my mind (and feelings/emotions as best I can) and work on figuring out what is mine and what was given to me or told is suppose to be mine. From food to politics to values, I still find things ingrained that are not me. It's like keeping a workout/exercise routine and not get lazy with it.
How to choose? I will have already put them in order and know what foods I like where, then when asked the question I will know what I want to eat and the places to satisfy that -- from there its about other things too, do we have time to drive the the farthest one that I want? no? okay this other one is closer and it has this other thing I want so we go there. One has a long wait and we are both actually hungry? I hear there is one like it and my date is also adventurous so it'll be fun to try a new place together.
Honestly it's about knowing yourself, what your priorities are and what can be worked around. It's so much easier when you have a solid grasp on "knowing yourself". I know if this swank restaurant is going to take 30min drive and another 1.5 hour wait and I'm hungry, it doesn't matter how impressive the place is because I will be at my least impressive. If the date really wants to go there, I will have a snack before-hand so I wont be a stubborn-hangry-asshat (because I know I will be and instead of fighting it, own and manage it so everyone has a good time)
Paradox of Choice is a book by Barry Schwartz. It is not the same at all as analysis paralysis.
It is a much more pernicious idea. Barry gives the example of salad dressing. If you have the choice between 100 salad dressings, no matter what you pick you will like the salad dressing less than if you only had 3 choices because with a 100 you can't know how much better the others ones might be. It would be quite rational to suspect there is another that you would like more so you aren't going to be as happy with the choice you made relative to having less choice. That is the paradox.
I'm not sure if it's still like this (I've been off the market for a while now), but this was why I liked Coffee Meets Bagel way back when: you only got a small number of possible matches per day.
When I was a kid, I had one video game and played it all the way through. When the system was emulated and access to every single game ever created became available, I lost interest.
Part of my self-administered IT education in my early 20s was to feed my film nerdery through exquisite data hoarding. Automation, NASs, media servers, all of it.
Curiously, I found that the better I got, the less movies I actually watched. It became more about collecting than engaging.
I think this is a corollary to your point: vastly increasing access and reducing our objects of desire to a standardized neatly storable form can easily divert us into hoarding behavior, to the detriment of actual engagement with what’s being hoarded.
I found the way to square the circle of music hoarding is to place your player on full-library shuffle. Music is unique because you can enjoy it while doing other things, such as spamming Hacker News. Movies cannot be appreciated with such divided attention.
But maybe some prefer that? These rich guys who never seem to have long, fulfilling relationships, who's to say they seek long term relationships? (I wouldn't know, I'm not one of them!)
Ditto with the women who like them.
You can, after all, delete all the other games from your emulator, or your entire data hoard except one document etc. Somehow that doesn't seem appealing either, does it?
Ending a lot of sentences with a question here I know, but I honestly don't think I've got this figured out.
I think the secret is "clearly better than anyone I've got".
If I have nobody, and you introduce me to someone, then it's simple. They're absolutely worth pursuing.
If I have one or two "maybes", and you introduce me to someone, it's easy for them to be clearly better than anyone I've got, and therefore clearly "the one", at least the one to pursue right now.
But if you give me one hundred, then there probably isn't one of them that is clearly better than all the others. Hence, analysis paralysis.
> If I have nobody, and you introduce me to someone, then it's simple. They're absolutely worth pursuing.
Not quite. No matter how badly you want a relationship, I guarantee there exist potential partners with whom a relationship would make your life worse, not better. And for most people, the set of absolutely disastrous potential partners is most people.
Let's start simple and say that the average person isn't bisexual, so we need to exclude half of people from the get-go. But maybe you're taking that as a given. So then we also need to consider that less than half the population is within your optimal age range. Maybe you're also taking that as a given. (But note that at this point we're already excluding 85% of humans.) Now consider that you also probably want them to speak your language. Again, maybe another gimme, but you're still down to less than 2% of humans. Of that, pick any ordinary dealbreaker; opinions on having children, political opinions, religious preferences, personal habits, and so on. Find the intersection of these. And don't forget to consider that a not-insignificant proportion of the population are simply high-functioning maniacs who you're better off never coming into contact with. And now consider mutual attractiveness.
I remember the book "Algorithms to Live By" actually also uses finding a life partner as a fun, if perhaps unrealistic, example of applying the secretary problem.
As far as I remember, it jokingly assumes that one's active dating period might be ages 20-40 and then applying the optimal solution from the secretary problem means that you should calibrate your expectations until age 27 (assuming regular dating of course) and then immediately marry the next best person that exceeds this threshold.
There's also something like a "market for lemons" effect where the best people (i.e. those most suitable for relationships and capable of sustaining them) tend to pair off and disappear from the market.
Isn’t market for lemons about a situation where consumers can not tell the difference between good and bad quality product so they only buy the cheapest assuming it’s bad.
Yes, and that also applies to dating apps. It’s easier to fake being attractive on an app than in real life. So the apps will be dominated by low cost fakes.
You’re right that the comment you replied to was describing a different effect (adverse selection?)
It's like making a spider web diagram for each person. Then calculating the area under the polygon to make a decision. With the vertices of diagram weighted by your preference vector. Under normal circumstances, majority can match with majority like a lock and key combintation. This could be the reason why arranged marriages work. I don't think evolution would care for 100% maximum compatibility as a target.
I would consider that arrange marriages work solely for evolution. Usually, arrange marriages / their families usually advocate the people who married to become parents. Thus for evolutionary purpose, maybe they can be good but at the same time, they might only be together later because of their chidren and that is a tough cycle for a children and some anti natalist points can be made in that regards.
I do think that we humans have such complex brains and hyper-specialization and the amount of intellect in the world when you look at it is ridiculous. So the ideas of arrange marriage working in favour of evolution, and not in favour of the person, while somebody does that is, very interesting...
I think cultures play a major impact in how one approaches dating.
> I think there are certain basic psychological facts that are anti-standard-economics that nerds (and therefore tech companies) almost always tend to be completely blind to. This is one of them.
I believe it's the opposite, they're exactly aware of this and have taken advantage of it to maximize engagement and profit, of course with the accompanying insanity, emotional burnout and further division/culture wars fuelling.
It’s impressive to me how many people mistake relationships for a choice issue when it’s entirely a building in common thing. Obviously, having a shared vision or the ability to built one initially matter but the rest is very much work.
At this point in my life, I’m fairly convinced that some people would be able to build a successful relationship with nearly anyone while other are doomed to fail even with the "perfect" person.
The problem of dating is not so much dating. It’s expectations which are totally unaligned with the reality of life.
Speaking from experience gained the hard way, I thing compatibility matters a lot. But it's hard to measure and probably includes a lot of physical stuff like chemistry that can't happen online.
But I also think what you're pointing to is critical. People aren't static consumable objects, and what you are willing to do for a relationship with someone matters as much as anything.
>At this point in my life, I’m fairly convinced that some people would be able to build a successful relationship with nearly anyone while other are doomed to fail even with the "perfect" person.
It may be that some women may prefer being single (for a variety of reasons) than be paired with a large enough portion of men such that the effects become visible on the societal scale.
Women being able to go through life without having to be paired up with a man is a relatively new thing, the long term effects of which are just coming into fore.
> You introduce them to 100 attractive friends, one makes more money, one has a more stable job, one is flirtier, etc then it's both exhausting and none of them seem like a great opportunity.
There is only one way to beat the paradox of choice: fall in love.
Then, it won’t matter that there are richer, more attractive, more intelligent options out there: you love what you love and that’s what you should pursue, and when you get it, that’s when you will know peace. It will feel like you won at life.
If people cannot overcome the paradox, it is because love in this world has become short in supply.
> You introduce them to 100 attractive friends, one makes more money, one has a more stable job, one is flirtier, etc then it's both exhausting and none of them seem like a great opportunity.
I think the author missed an important factor: misaligned incentives.
Dating apps make money when users spend time (and money) on the platform. Users who find a partner tend to leave the platform, so dating companies are incentivized to prevent that from happening. Those companies then have more opportunities to up-sell those users on premium features, which they're more likely to purchase due to repeated failure and/or feelings of inadequacy.
This is often parroted, but the reasoning is flawed. The vast majority of the platform's growth will come from new users, who are entering the dating scene. If they fail to capture that audience (say, by having a reputation of not performing as advertised), then no amount of upsells or string-alongs of existing users will sustain them, as their user base will only ever decrease, and investors will see that and withdraw accordingly.
1) The platforms aren't growing that impressively. Most of their users have been on the platform for a while, were previous users, etc.
2) It doesn't matter how good the app is, you need a network effect. New users are going to go to where the potential dates are.
3) Marketing does wonders. An app can suck and have great marketing. It will get users over an app that actually works and doesn't have good marketing.
4) Lots of people on dating apps are looking for dates (hookups), not partners. If the apps can keep you getting dates, not partners, they can keep you on the app and happy.
"If the apps can keep you getting dates, not partners, they can keep you on the app and happy."
I know this sounds judgemental but I'm not convinced the people going on lots of dates are "Happy" even if they're being successful in dating and hookups.
Match's growth peaked a long time ago. The site is now trying to grow by "offering new products" and "cutting operational costs."
The relative newcomers - Bumble and Hinge - grew by trying to offer a better experience, especially for women, who are traditionally overwhelmed with unreciprocated interest on conventional apps. Both seem to have admitted defeat now and moved to the usual model.
In terms of revenue, the incentive to keep millions of users spending is far higher than the nominal gains from persuading friends of a successful couple to join up. Given that most users aren't successful, that network effect is tiny.
There's an opposing network effect of *keeping customers unmatched, because this provides gossip and entertainment among friends, which gives them a reason to continue using a service.
We know that string-alongs are a real thing on dating sites - especially, but not exclusively, for men.
There's also a small but not negligible subculture of (mostly) women who use dates for free meals and get a good return on their monthly subscription.
And a lot of sites - not just Tinder - overlap hook-up culture with people seeking marriage and kids. If anything the former is a more popular option now.
FWIW, Hinge has been owned by match for some years now. Bumble is still independent by their stock is down ~92% over 5 years. I think they will eventually be bought out by match.
Wrong claim:
"There's an opposing network effect of *keeping customers unmatched, because this provides gossip and entertainment among friends, which gives them a reason to continue using a service."
No, this is implying they are doing it with intention - which they dont even have to insist on! They can keep the users, because matching based on an app does not work for 99.99% real cases.
So if you treat them well, they will stay anyway, unless your product is shitty.
I don't think this counterargument holds. It's a hell of a lot easier to get a customer who already paid once to pay a second time than it is to get a customer to pay for the first time. Also, I think most people are well aware that by and large, dating apps have a very low success rate for the majority of their users. People use them anyway.
Since your marginal costs per customer are veeeery low, you can hammer thm with 50-60% discount, which ends up on most platforms at 10 - 20 bucks per month, and if you make 3 - 4 dinners, you get much more out of it than an evening in the cinema
They don't need that. What option do most young people have?
Most young men can't approach women, most young women can't handle being approached and we don't have shared spaces where people can get to know each other and pair off anymore. Young people think the apps are dumpster fires, they hate them, but the alternative is sadly worse.
> The vast majority of the platform's growth will come from new users...
Userbase expansion is new users less leaving users for a time period. So there are two factors, not just "new users."
In any case, Match Group apps are well into the phase of focusing on extracting the most money possible from their paying users as opposed to gaining new users.
After all, infinite users are useless to a company, even if it costs nothing to support them, if none of them pay.
- i have worked in the space for some years for two of the biggest platforms in my country
- dating sites track a lot KPI and discuss them and test them thoroughly
- the KPI "do-more-users-leave-our-platform-earlier-if-our-matching-algo-is-just-too-good" - I promise: In alle the years, this question WAS NEVER - NEVER!!!!!!! - raised, regardless wich Manager or which Exec. This metric isnt even debated.
And here comes why:
the most important thing to form a relationship are "technicals" which can NEVER be introduced into an app. There may be some advances in genomic matching, but no body deployed this so far and it wont happen unless Apple watch as a gene encoding module.
There are one night stands, there some marriges (we had a "winners board" in our office), but 99% of all cases when people met, its going to be "failure" (in a sense "no match")
Regardless how good your algo is - it doesnt matter when it comes to a reality check.
Therefore, Dating apps have absolutely no fear of you signing off because you fond someome - its very likely that you will come back soon, second: From operators perspective it would be a good thing if people would tell "i found my match on XYZ", but sine this does happen only super rarely, there are only few such stories.
So - NO: Dating sites do fear someone deleting the account.
(except: you are a startup and have to keep every profile to gain some size)
> - the KPI "do-more-users-leave-our-platform-earlier-if-our-matching-algo-is-just-too-good" - I promise: In alle the years, this question WAS NEVER - NEVER!!!!!!! - raised, regardless wich Manager or which Exec. This metric isnt even debated.
What labels do they use for training their algos though? What is their definition of a successful match, is it a date, a recurring date, or something closer to a long-term relationship?
If matches predominantly result in "failure" they might just not have enough "long-term success" labels to go by, and their proxy labels will be biased towards short-term successes.
Wrong approach;
at least until latest, NONE of the standard apps does apply any kind of "real AI" stuff, maybe this changed through the last 3 - 4 years.
All thi matching stuff like "match with X%" is just bullshit.
The only platform having a useful approach here was OKC years ago. (but even for their scoring you would not need any type of sophisticated tech)
- new user sign up
- new subscriptions
- enlengthened subscriptions
- mails send
- overall interactions
- testing of new marketing campaigns/channels (they do massive MVT, even fontsize&coloring)
just to make that clear: churn is tracked/written down for sure, but its not debated in a context of "is churn growing if more people are matching successful" - because in 99.9% of all cases people do not meet successful, so this metric is irrelevant
And yet, the premium features are overtly aligned against user success!
I believe you that these app devs think they are optimizing for user success, but that doesn't change the incentives that frame their work.
The greatest utility of a dating app should be that it provides a higher number of opportunities. This feature is explicitly broken by the most popular dating apps. Often, it is put behind a paywall, which has the same effect as being broken.
Limitting search/result is often used to tease users into the subscription. Eg. Tiner allows in free mode only a certain number of swipes.
Is it this what you mean?
This is usually depends on: Search + text for free but limited, or "pay for everything"
I do not see why putting some features behind a paywall is "against users interest" and how this limits/increases his/her chances?
You are claiming that dating sites should be free - this doesnt work usually (POF as exception) - and making users pay for those does not increase his/her chances: EVERYTHING that happens before you met someone will be crashed usually in the very first second you met (and smell!) someone.
So if you have a chance with another person, is something that is completely(!) out of control of the website operator.
EDIT: this is something website operators do know, they cant change it and this is something that they should put on their website - they are selling dreams and expectations, which wont become true in real.
This is exactly why I always make it a point to discourage my friends from using dating apps.
A dating app that is effective at solving the problem it is ostensibly designed to solve will never make money as people will be matched quickly and will have no need to pay for the service. So clearly no profitable dating app is good at matching people.
I'm of the opinion that using a tool that is constantly setting you up for romantic failure and rejection in the name of keeping you on its platform is a really good way to wreck your mental health.
On the other hand, if it was so easy to find a match, then we wouldn't be trying to use dating apps. I think it is just generally hard to find a good match for many people these days.
The other side of that is that many people are simply terrible and really unsuitable for being in any sort of long term stable relationship. No dating app can solve that problem (unless maybe they incorporate mental health and life coaching services, which seems kind of sketchy as a combination). Whether the situation has gotten generally harder these days is impossible to say but I certainly don't envy those still in the dating pool.
IMHO they should be the best one and use that to draw people to FB. They don't need to keep people in the dating app since its not the primary business.
Bingo. This is the effect that keeps (a) incumbent platforms in place, (b) users on those platforms, (c) and potentially new platforms from coming online and offering a "superior" experience.
This is pretty obviously addressed in the article. The premise of the article is why don't users migrate to better platforms when the large ones are extracting as much money as possible (because the incentives are misaligned)
Anyone can decide a statement is "ideological" just by disagreeing with it. The statement "the government can and should provide services to its people if those services are important to its future and the free market is incapable of providing them" should not, and did not used to be, ideological. The fact that such a statement is far outside of the current Overton Window is the result of a decades-long propaganda campaign to destroy everyone's faith in government so it can be looted, and everyone who parrots "government bad" is (knowingly or not) playing a part in this propaganda campaign. I assume the issue you have with my comment is that I knew 95% of readers would immediately regurgitate "but government bad!", but of course I was right that that happened.
When the Overton Window shifts to the point where saying "people should be decent to one another" becomes a radical ideological statement, make sure you flag every comment that says that too. We can't have radical ideologues on HN, after all.
The question of what goods and services should/shouldn't be provided by government is about as ideological as any question there is, given that the size/role of government has been one of the most central matters of most major ideologies for at least the past couple of centuries.
It's fine to discuss ideology on HN, but it needs to be done so in a spirit of curiosity and exploration, not battle and belligerence.
We've had to ask you to respect the site and observe the guidelines a few times before in the past couple of years. The HN guidelines and HN's intended purpose are the issue here, and sermonizing about ideology seems a deflection.
We just need you to observe the guidelines, no matter what point you're trying to make (and we really don't much care what point you're trying to make). Indeed this is in your interests to do this, because your point will carry more weight if you make it whilst keeping your discussion style within the site's guidelines and norms.
I’m sure there are many people who don’t want their dating lives influenced by whatever rulers are in charge of their governments. Democrats won’t like a MAGA dating service, and vice versa.
> This is exactly why a dating app should be developed and provided by the government. Side note: If this gives you the heebie jeebies, you are part of the problem.
Bravo, I haven't laughed this much in a while. God-tier satire.
Controversial take, but have we considered that possibly dating apps dont suck, and that this perception is driven by a vocal minority of the people who have the worst experience on them? (A sad fact is that dating will just suck for some % of the population. Is it possible that if there were no apps the same % would be saying how IRL dating sucks?) I know many people in stable LTRs or married who met through dating apps. But I don’t think you typically find these people participating in discourse about dating apps. If anything they’ve probably moved on to complaining why wedding planners and baby books or whatever suck.
> Controversial take, but have we considered that possibly dating apps don't suck, and that this perception is driven by a vocal minority of the people who have the worst experience on them?
Yes. The reality is well known. PlentyOfFish used to publish statistics. About 10% of dating app users are "date bacon" and find matches they like. Everyone else is a dissatisfied loser. The losers provide the repeat business and the profits, just like the gambling industry.
What women want is > 6' tall, over $100K a year, reasonably good looking, and reasonably young compared to the woman. This is about 1% of the US male population.
But a much higher fraction of dating service profiles. Two good-looking women I know have shown me their side of a dating app. Each had over 1000 matches, but the ones they met did not live up to their resume. (Fun fact: the organization of ex Navy SEALS says that there are at least 10x as many people claiming to be ex-SEALS as actually exist. There aren't that many of those guys. Only a few thousand. But on dating apps...)
I think it’s true that most people have a bad experience, but I don’t think it’s caused by things like height, age, and income level…. But social skills, confidence, and emotional vulnerability, which are things almost anyone can develop with deliberate effort, and also lead to better and more stable relationships.
For me, developing vulnerability and risk taking caused me to go from completely unsuccessful, to being able to date pretty much anyone I wanted on these apps. Counter intuitively, the main thing I had to do was stop holding back the things I had previously been afraid to share about myself because I was afraid they made me seem unattractive, and instead confidently own who I really am. It’s very rare for a woman on these apps to encounter someone that seems genuine, unafraid, and vulnerable- and you will stand out like crazy.
It’s not just men having a hard time on these apps- despite the huge number of people, most women really struggle to find anyone that seems appealing, and most of the dates they do go on end up awful as the men are emotionally unavailable, nervous, and afraid to be vulnerable, which makes them impossible to connect with, no matter how tall and rich they may be.
It’s very appealing to believe that the problem is something outside of your control, but it’s rarely the case.
You have photos and text, try making them funny and showing off that you’re not afraid to hide things about yourself that others would hide- maybe emphasize and show a weird hobby or interest that other people might be worried to share. Of course this only works if you’re actually funny or actually have unusual hobbies. One guy I know literally posted silly photos of himself awkwardly pole dancing and got tons of matches. Even if you’re tall and rich, I advise being interesting instead and making it impossible to tell those things, if you want to match with people that are not boring and shallow. Have a good time and be light hearted- having a bad attitude about how dating is unfair will be impossible to hide and looks like a major personality flaw.
I thought the Navy Seal thing was to impress other men. Does it have sex appeal? Probably depends on your social circle.. but I'd think being ex-military as highly unattractive (more violent than the average person, and highly likely to have trauma)
The average women as a concept is meaningless for someone looking for a person to date. Even if you could only find someone far in the metaphorical tail, variance and population size are so high we are talking millions of people. Lesbian manages to find people to marry for god sake.
This kind of weird generalisation really needs to die. It helps absolutely no one.
The only problem with this is its defeatist framing.
What most women who use dating apps are looking for, in a profile on that dating app, is essentially what you described, or at least a set of similarly rare attributes. Even worse, is the set of attributes that she is looking to avoid.
Dating apps are nothing but attributes. That's their core problem, and their core success. If you can get a small percentage (probably male) of users to attract a less-small percentage of (probably female) users, you end up with an infinite churn of "success" (read engagement).
The natural incentive in this situation is to show that small percentage of popular male profiles to as many users as possible. This gives you both profitable engagement and actual success metrics that you can brag about!
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So now that we understand the problem a little more, can we start working to solve it?
Bro, women don't care about reasonably young, the vast majority of women want older men, the daddy and silver fox memes are real. For younger women, the preferred age gap is smaller, but the older the woman gets, the larger the age window above her gets. A lot of women in their early 30s are thirsting after men in their mid-late 40s with resources and their shit together.
Real question about those two women with over 1000 matches: Why don't top quality men approach them in public? It is weird they are on the apps. If you are a 7 or above, high quality men are constantly approaching you, to the point of annoyance. Or do they use the apps to find a simp/sugar daddy to pay for their dinner and lifestyle?
The fact is that younger generations are increasingly more single and finding it harder and harder to date. If dating apps are primarily to blame could be up for debate but something about the modern world is clearly not working.
I mean, we’re already six years past COVID—something that placed a heavy mental burden even on older generations. I can only imagine how much worse it was for younger people. I’d argue we’ll need another 20 years before most of the effects fade.
Even before then, I don’t think dating apps were the only issue—it was more the general lack of human interaction, with everything shifting online. Being in a relationship is nothing like just "chatting" or being "connected." I’m not complaining, but during my teenage and young adult years, I feel like I had less-than-ideal real-life experiences, which shaped my social skills and expectations. Talking to people in their 30s now, I get the sense they’re only experience this much later in life.
> I mean, we’re already six years past COVID—something that placed a heavy mental burden
The only new factor that COVID brought in concerning dating is that it separated society into two groups which in German are disrespectfully called "Coronazis" (those who defended the restrictions of civil rights because of COVID-19) and "Covidioten" (those who did not believe in the COVID-19 fearmongering and the government measures). Both of these groups realized that they are not compatible with the other group on a human level and are thus no suitable dating matches.
This actually lead to the inception of a new dating site for those who are skeptical of official COVID-19 narrative or feel attracted to people who share personality traits of such people: https://www.conscious-love.com
No it also brought kids who missed one year of socialization, positive social experiences, mingling.
Just one year? It changed habits forever in favour of remote classes, in which schoolm don’t play their role in giving a cohesive experience for students.
As a kid in final days of high school. This is so true.
I was talking to this about this to my mum just a few days ago and she said that no it didn't impact, but I was so shocked because honestly I feel like its just not even the kids but everyone which got impacted but I genuinely feel like that there was this sense of loneliness in covid
I am not sure but before covid everyone was friends with everybody else kind of things, I was in 6th grade and I would honestly consider it one of the best periods of my life, I remember how one of my friends had prepared covid as a general knowledge fact for an exam and he spoke it in class and we didn't think much of it untill it started spreading and then our 7th class became purely online due to lockdowns etc.
I do feel like that there is a lost year or more and that has impacted people in a lot of ways.
Personally, the one thing I noticed was the fact that a lot of the times, we felt like being watched by others and what not to a bigger degree.
Like, I remember just talking to girls as friends when I was in 6th grade, It wasn't that much of a big deal but later in covid and even after covid, when the school re-opened. I found that girls used to sit seperately and we boys used to sit seperately in completely seperate rows, not even on the same rows or the same benches.
Before covid this wasn't the case and we were sort of forced by our teachers to sit whether with boys or girls randomly and there were some good interactions that I deeply miss.
I am not sure if this is just something that naturally tansitions from 6th to 7th grade thing or something, We boys and girls used to talk but there was clearly this disconnect of 1 year between us, boys used to talk so frequently in boys group and girls in the girls but whenever a girl talked to us, it was most likely in public chats and I mean, you could never just small talk to somebody, I think I loved small talks so I used to create personal groups with my homies just chatting but the mere act of adding a girl to talk personally online felt really making a big deal I guess.
I personally noticed so many smaller things which I have felt as if have somewhat radicalized both girls and boys even in small mannerisms.
There became a us vs them mentality at a younger age which really got radical in 9th grade for sure.
I agree with you in general, but I'm pretty sure the change you saw in how in boys and girls interacted with each other before and after COVID was due to puberty, not COVID, given the ages you were at the time.
Depending on the shape of the discussion, maybe she denied it so you don’t fell into the “I’m victim, it’s over now” trap. Grownups do that. Don’t take it bad. I’m 45 and single, and grownups tell me all the time that it’s not too late for me. I think they deny the obvious to console me, but living in a situation where everyone denies your actual situation is disorienting, and makes things worse than facing the truth.
> boys and girls sit apart
That’s a sudden transition in about 1 year at the age of ~12 (I don’t know what 6th grade is). It’s forever; after that they only rejoin again as couples ;) You can still make girls into friends, and groups like at the workplace include women easily (hopefully), but there’s always a tension on who’s going to date whom, and is this guy trying to creep on me, etc. which makes both genders more natural apart.
Just to help you distinguish between Covid effects and normal life.
What’s probably specific on Covid was: Dating fell off (2021), dating at the workplace is a big nono (2017), cost of living (2022), radicalization of opinion and realization that pro-Covid and doubters don’t fit together (2020). On the last point, I remember leftists and rightwings living together before that, and it might have started in 2017 with the Trump election, but each other deny the sanity of the other group. i.e. really radicalized.
I wasn't intending to victimize myself, I am not saying that its just me whose changed, but its rather the whole world which feels changed idk really
That’s a sudden transition in about 1 year at the age of ~12
Yeah I was of 11 years in 6th grade, and since the sudden transition happened after covid in 7th-8th grade when I was in 12-13 years old, I assumed it was because of covid where this seperation began, its good to know that isn't the case but still
Afyer 7th grade, I wasn't on any social media like instagram even though my whole class generally was.
I feel like online helps reduce the tension but as someone not using insta, I wasn't going to ask a girl her number since even in 7th-8th grade I knew that it felt as if a huge deal.
I always felt like the us vs them thing, we boys didn't need a reason to talk to each other, "hey bro what's up"
Whereas as I said, you always felt like a reason to talk to girls, I mean not always but usually, simply because you haven't talked to a person in 1-2 years and they don't even sit with you and you rarely need their help and vice versa
Honestly all of these things just make me treat woman really in a way to not be myself completely, like as an example, I am confident with my homies, I would just rant about anything or be myself completely and live my life but I will try to present myself in a better light in front of woman generally, not sure if that's a bad thing or good thing but I just want a girl really to be completely honest to each other to see if me and her are compatible or not and if there were some issues, then to read the relationship issues and try to fix what I can fix in my life really.
> I’m 45 and single, and grownups tell me all the time that it’s not too late for me. I think they deny the obvious to console me, but living in a situation where everyone denies your actual situation is disorienting, and makes things worse than facing the truth.
I will tell you the truth in the sense that its a mixed bag. Culture plays an important role in influencing what a girl seeks in a man in the sense that there is just a (sensation?) that if they like a guy or not whereas we males generally have a somewhat fixed/universal standard of what we look for in a girl.
So now whatever a girl feels, one of the most important factors found is culture/shared values. As an example, Girls with strong countryside culture or cultures which value money, might value a guy whose stable in his 40's more than a struggling artist but I have found that there are other girls whose culture makes them value struggling artist more than the stability.
I think you just need to find common values. Try to meet woman more and actually ask for dates etc. start slow, start by asking for time from a random girl (the example the book gave), and move up to complimenting to then asking for dates to random girls
Another key note is that everybody has a very high rejection/ low compatbility rate, mark manson's book gave an idea about it but I found out that rejections are common, in fact more probable so you shouldn't bother about it at all or atleast try not to.
Personally i have tried such things but I wasn't ready and I still think I am not, I am honestly just going to talk to girls asking for dates etc only after getting to know them first instead of the opposite, maybe sharing some common qualities like coding/messing around with linux and niche ideas y'know?
But I would still recommend you that although I understand you, I also understand why everybody denies it, simply because they don't want to make you lose hope in the whole situation.
It maybe hard but there is no definition of hard here really, There are some qualities which other people might envy of you for sure and you might too but you are you and they are them, you are perfectly fine in your own body and playing with whatever thing you have got, no matter how hard or easy it is. I would say its still worth it and also maybe once again, that you might be thinking of it as something too hard and I understand that.
Just try to be a honest guy, if you think you really enjoy the company of some girl, just tell them in an honest way and just be yourself, I feel like that could help the most but I would say to please keep my advice with bare minimum as my track record for dating has been ... rough to say the least and I have taken a break from it for sometime I suppose.
Yep, that’s the moral of the story: Keep trying, for both of us. PS: Don’t expect a girl to share programming as a hobby, it’s virtually nonexistent, even if it looks like this at school.
> PS: Don’t expect a girl to share programming as a hobby, it’s virtually nonexistent, even if it looks like this at school
Oh man, I don't know, I don't have any gaming hobbies or etc.
Whom am I gonna share how I fixed my disk using testdisk and show my dotfiles or any cool project that I found to?
Its a very big part of me and I want a girl to understand it. To embrace it if possible. I wouldn't say I am programming as much as I am tinkering and making shit work and I feel like I can do a lot of things which I am proud of, of which otherwise I would have given up but I persisted.
I do want someone to appreciate it, appreciate me wholly. Understand me.
Although maybe I am having too many expectations.
Would love to have a chat / continue this chat with ya if that's possible really.
Dating apps 100% suck. I'm a good looking guy and I put the effort into getting great pictures and optimizing my profile to the point I was able to get dates 5+ nights a week and date 2-3 new women a week, and while it was validating, the quality of dates was significantly worse than what I used to get from just approaching women in places like bookstores, after yoga classes, etc when that wasn't as culturally abnormal.
Ironically I met my wife while I was on a date with another woman. We had a much better organic connection, and she was way hotter than almost all the girls on the apps.
> I was able to get dates 5+ nights a week and date 2-3 new women a week
For the record, you are probably well into the top 20% of attractive men on the apps. You should know that your experience is very much unlike the average man. The average normie on dating apps (5/10 in looks) gets, quite literally, zero matches, or matches only from scammers/bots/OnlyFans. There are numerous long-form YouTube videos on the topic with first hand experience.
> the quality of dates was significantly worse than what I used to get from just approaching women in places like
This is an interesting comment. Can you share one or two specific things that come to mind? I can offer one from my personal experience: When you approach someone in public (get their number, etc.), then later meet them for lunch/drinks/dinner, their enthusiasm and effort is much higher than people I meet on the apps.
That's a big part of it. When I met women in person they could get my vibe and know 100% what was on offer, so if they decided they were interested they were in it. I think the uncertainty of meeting someone new tends to linger for a while even if a date goes well, so it creates some dissonance.
There's also just the quality aspect. Hot high value women don't need the apps to get a good suitor, and if they're on the apps even tall successful good looking men face rough odds, since these women can skim the cream of the cream on platforms and usually are looking for the best sugar daddy. In person you can be charming, kind and a good conversationalist, and as long as you meet a woman's bar (which I pretty much always did) you can shortcut the line because you're REAL and here NOW. A bird in the hand an all that...
I mean, that’s not really an informed skepticism is it? Respectfully, you’d have an idea of what the commenter means if you’re attractive.
In my own experience I quite agree. When you have more than a hundred matches, it just sucks, because the fact that you have that many matches means you’ve cast your net too wide. You swiped right solely on the basis of looks but the good dates are good because other factors like personality and similarity in interests and sense of humor turn out to actually matter. Those are things best gauged via face-to-face interaction.
Everyone is playing the secretary problem. If you're popular, you have to turn down a lot of candidates before you try to find one that's in whatever you measure to be in your league (better than all the ones you saw previously, but I wonder how many people are really going with that). If you're on an app, that's a lot of people.
At the same time, there's a bunch of people who aren't so popular who are now done checking a short queue of candidates, and willing to go with whoever shows up next above their bar.
But those people are still busy rejecting everyone in a seemingly infinite line of suitors. So we have a problem getting people to match.
Add to this that the sexes are not distributed the same way. There's a few ultra hot guys who will never not have a date, and there's a more even number of hot women who the less hot guys are waiting on.
If you're speed dating or doing any other real-world dating, your queues are a lot shorter. You will feel like your idea of the market is set much sooner, and you can start picking out a candidate.
The secretary problem is a bad way to formalise the problem of dating and the stopping rule doesn't work in that context, for a very simple reason.
The secretary problem is a solution to the problem of having to make repeated choices. In essence it's a solution to the problem of having to choose a secretary every morning for the day. You can even say it's a solution to the problem of a computer process spending a few seconds consuming an infinite stream at the top of every hour for the next hour. It's not a solution to the problem of making a (hopefully) unique choice.
The author didn't consider a more basic selection bias that the 3 contradictory facts are driven by different groups of people. That makes it rather easy to reconcile 3 apparently contradictory views. You can't jump-start a new market for a dating app with in-person speed daters because they are the people who refuse to use an app!
And it is worth being a little suspicious of the people who 'hate' dating apps. There are valid criticisms, but the people who are just bad partners are going to turn up somewhere and it might be that pool of people - they tend not to be big on reflecting on their own flaws with rigorous intellectual honesty and would blame the apps.
Being bad at apps means you are either ugly, or your pictures are bad.
There’s plenty of examples on dating apps of people making fake bios with extremely handsome men described as being evil (I.e child abuseres) and who still had lines of women who wanted to date him.
He had excellent photos and an obvious 6 pack. His pictures looked professional and showed his (large) social group where he was obviously the leader.
I do not blame anyone for not being successful on dating apps because I believe a persons current physical appearance and attractiveness have little to do with their character or suitability as a partner.
> Being bad at apps means you are either ugly, or your pictures are bad.
For the record, I assume you are speaking about men whom are seeking women. The reverse is certainly not true.
> He had ... an obvious 6 pack.
This is very specific. Did he have shirtless photographs? I assume yes.
It fascinates me that if you listen to what women say, 95% will say they dislike dating profiles the most when the man has shirtless photographs. Yet, 95% of women will also say that guys with a six pack are hot. It reminds me of the old adage: "Watch what women do, not what they say."
People come to dating apps for all sorts of reasons, and with different levels of investment. Pretty much every woman I know who has used a dating app has said she has gone on a dating app to alleviate boredom. That's probably not fun for the person on the other end if they are actually trying to find a partner.
If someone shows up to a speed dating event, that indicates minimum level of investment in the interaction.
I think this is an inevitable side effect of the business model. I signed up for these apps to find love, that's the "strategic" reason I use them. But 99 of the time, the actual reason in the moment that I opened the app is for a dopamine hit.
This is a double-edged sword because if the apps hadn't been addictive I just wouldn't have used them that much and I would have ended up with less dates. On the other hand, it obviously plays a part in the toxic underpinnings that make the whole experience so miserable in the long run
Hard to see how you can really address this with design. E.g. OkCupid didn't use to have this dopamine-driven property at least back in the day when I first used it. I found it fucking boring, I didn't invest enough time into it, and ultimately I never met anyone in person (sure, I think part of the reason was also the people I saw there also seemed boring, but that can't be completely orthogonal).
Looking for dates on there gave me a similar feeling as looking for a house on property sites. Yes, I really want a house and there are houses here. But I am still hating this experience of looking at houses.
> Looking for dates on there gave me a similar feeling as looking for a house on property sites. Yes, I really want a house and there are houses here. But I am still hating this experience of looking at houses.
I like this final paragraph. You touch upon an important emotional issue. Most people want to believe in the fairy tale stuff of chance meetings, true love, etc. The whole idea of a "marketplace" to find a partner is so off-putting. Yes, it is practical, but it is emotionally unsatisfying.
> (…) pictures also give lots of information about important non-superficial things, like your personality, values, social class, and lifestyle.
This is the one thing that puzzles me most about dating apps: where do all these pictures come from? People seem to have pictures of them doing all kinds of activities. When I’m out with friends doing whatever, no one is taking pictures. Even if they did, it’s not like we exchange pictures afterwards.
I genuinely don’t have any pictures of myself.
Are me and my friends weird for not documenting every second of our lives?
I've been around someone trying to get into dating apps, he just started asking us to "take a picture of him real quick" while we're doing outings with the bois "so I can out it on tinder".
I assume most people are this way, you just have others start taking pictures of the things you normally do (but didnt normally take pictures of) when you feel the need to make/flesh out a profile.
Ask women (ideally an Asian woman) and they will take pictures in the top 10% or better of what an average person can take. The only more reliable group are professional photographers - and consider that zoomers prefer iPhone or even Kodak style of photos vs a Sony or canon ultra realistic style
I would say, instead of "ideally an Asian woman", a millennial woman. Was recently in a tourist spot for a work outing, we asked a random person to take our photo in front of the big monument and the photos were awful, including a finger of the photographer in each photo. This woman was in easily 50+. Gave the phone to a passing millennial aged woman and got 10 well compositioned photos in both landscape and portrait mode.
You’re weird. The vast majority of instagram using women take so many photos that the joke is that “the camera eats first”.
I’m actively exhausted when I go out with my partner because I know that I’m going to take lots of photos.
I’d love to be in a world where this is so rare that people can’t even explain where the photos go: but unfortunately I ask the opposite question, which is “where do these people get the time to do literally anything else with how crippling their social media and photography addictions are?”
> I’m actively exhausted when I go out with my partner because I know that I’m going to take lots of photos.
Did you ever try to push back? Example: Tell her very directly that you want to focus on the experience of a great dinner, not her taking photos for social media. Another idea: Ask her to leave her mobile phone at home when you go to dinner.
> This is the one thing that puzzles me most about dating apps: where do all these pictures come from?
People actually curate the profile and copywrite the text. It’s not real authentic life documented by accident. Once you put your profile there for others to judge you soon figure out that it needs to be manufactured. That’s when you start asking for others to snap a photo while your out doing the thing you maybe wouldn’t even do if it was not for the show.
You only need a few pictures to fill a profile. Taking a few snaps when doing interesting stuff likely spread over months or years isn’t “documenting every second of our lives”.
+Fifteen years ago, Facebook was amazing for this: everyone posted all the pictures they took at [event] and tagged everyone who was in them. But, you know... That wasn't as profitable as all the [everything else] they thought up, and they ruined the platform.
Practical suggestion: you can ask. Someone takes a picture with you in it, say "hey, you mind sending me that?" Like lots of social things it's not automatic (which, you know, Facebook was for a few years, and that was nice), and you have to "put yourself out there" a bit. Most people won't say 'no', and the thread with the photo is an opportunity for further interaction, if you want it to be.
There’s a pretty big range between “I don’t have any pictures of myself” and “documenting every second of our lives.” Most people are somewhere in that range.
I went to a speed dating thing once that tried to incorporate its own (clearly homemade) tech stack into the experience. Every few minutes you'd get a text telling you who to find next... to look for the person in the red scarf or cowboy boots or something. By the time you found them and found somewhere to sit, you had a few minutes to talk.
It felt a bit unnecessary. In any case, maybe it was just how totally random in age and interest the people there were, but the result wasn't like cramming 15 online dates into the span of a single one. It was more like 15 conversations with people I would never have had the slightest impulse to contact via an online dating app. Most of the conversations had what felt like a comfortable mutual vibe of "we both understand we could not plausibly be attracted to each other." Then again, in online dating, I've come to realize that most guys incessantly swipe right, while I almost always swipe left.
A major factor in my world: the coolest people don't use dating apps because they find the experience awful and they have no problem meeting people in real life
The spicier version: dating apps select for personality disorders, and as such, being on a dating app in the first place is a negative signal
For what it's worth, I think this has always been true of the web in general (forums, chat, social media, comments sections, etc.)
It's even more stark if you weight it by sampling online content rather than a sample of people online (who are mostly lurkers). Certain types of people tend to post a LOT, so a random sample of online content will be biased towards the "high posting frequency" type of person, who is probably not a normal average type of person.
> A major factor in my world: the coolest people don't use dating apps because [...] they have no problem meeting people in real life
> The spicier version: dating apps select for personality disorders, and as such, being on a dating app in the first place is a negative signal
I guess a lot of people you would call "cool" I would rather call "annoying self-centered people who are often very concerned about their public image (i.e. narcists)".
Yes, this people may have a much easier time finding dates in real life, but if you are rather into different kinds of people for a relationship and are more on the introverted side, I guess dating in real life is not the best idea for success.
> I would rather call "annoying self-centered people who are often very concerned about their public image (i.e. narcists)".
You're essentially describing almost the entire online dating userbase here though.
How are people who are marketing themselves as the best chance for sexual gratification through display of their usually either materialistic or pretentiously modest lifestyle, providing useless tmi list requirements from the other party not self-centered?
They have literalized the concept of dating market, they have no existential inhibition of identifying as a product to be desired to be consumed as much as possible and treating others the exact same way.
Of course we have to thank a handful of evopsych "researchers" for that who are gaining traction from mass consumption podcasts by promoting their absurd, academically dubious fringe "findings" about supposedly deterministic human behaviors whose effectiveness is irrefutable for sexual reproduction success (remember, according to them homo sapiens have no deeper intellect and are moving meat that solely care about maximizing their offspring # and will do whatever it takes to succeed, so if you don't fit this description you're disordered and destined to extinction). Ideas that end up being diluted and appropriated by groups to demoralize those psychologically vulnerable.
My personal philosphy is that dating is extremely hard in dating apps to the point that its not worth it
I personally just try to talk to people (girls) my age who have similar interests and maybe express if I feel any emotions to them and accept or embrace both rejections/acceptations.
That being said, there is this idea of desperation of constantly needing someone to love you or is it too much to ask for being loved etc. I had created a place even whose intentions was to help people struggling in finding relationships but that made me realize that people just used it to ship each other or have controversies or use it as a way to meet/date and I was none the wiser/ didn't think much of it as I was decently happy thinking that some people connected because of my efforts yet i personally felt really weird with my niche hobbies and my place felt so mainstream that I couldn't be myself in my own place or didn't feel like it so I quickly abandoned it and now its just abandonware really
I personally feel like dating irl is the best thing after all my experiences or talking to people in general online, Even in dating irl, I would consider for many reasons that dating apps are still net negative. As I said, personally the best thing I feel like doing right now is maybe working on myself to be more confident and if i find a girl attractive and want to know more, then to directly approach her. Atleast, that's my goal in dating to be confident enough and to work on. myself on being a better partner.
The people I had in mind were the ones who are just friendly, kind, loving people (think: Miyazaki film character or something), but there are certainly self-centered people who would be embarrassed to be seen on a dating app too.
I think the core difference is whether you're connected into a healthy community or not, or whether you're outgoing enough to find yourself making friends in circles outside your own regularly.
I get this post is a bit of a hot take, but you make a good point. If you listen to "alpha women" (the most attractive), a common humblebrag that they use is: "Oh, I'm not even on the (dating) apps. I've got plenty of hot guys approaching me public."
My personal experience, based on what I’m going through and what friends have to say:
3) 17 years ago, it was possible to meet and know really attractive women on the apps.
4) These days, the really attractive women no longer use apps.
5) The apps are optimized for engagement, not giving people successful romance.
Right now, the woman I’m currently dating is someone I met at church, not on the apps. The men I know who have success with women prefer the women they meet outside of the apps.
As a shy geek without too many social connections, the apps (websites, actually) were a very positive game changer 17 years ago. These days, they are more a liability than asset when it comes to dating.
I'm just not sure there's a real phenomenon here. People's complaints about dating apps match up pretty precisely with common complaints about dating more generally. It's an inherently frustrating process!
I think it's pretty telling that the alternatives people talk about are always alternative strategies for how to meet lots of people. The most common pre-app experience, where you didn't meet lots of people and married a random person in your social circles rather than a best friend who gets you and shares your key interests, isn't something most people are interested in.
People always "hated" dating apps, even when I used them back in the early 2010s.
However, like the iOS keyboard, people will put up with some annoyances if the overall product is valuable, and swiping for a mate (or, back in simpler times, answering heaps of questions on OkCupid and doing lots of clicking) is easier than doing so through church/school/work/bar/other opportunities through consistent exposure. (To wit: I met many incompatible people through the usual methods and met my wife through OkCupid, so the dating apps aren't useless!)
Also, as a former speed-dating host, speed-dating has always been something people mostly did for the entertainment value. I never did the math on it, but if I had to guess, it probably had about the same odds of finding someone than the apps back then.
I don’t think speed dating is as popular as submarine[1] articles suggest. But the constraint of being in-person and with a limited set of options may be helpful for some people. The paradox of choice is a significant issue on apps.
I do agree that bandwidth is significantly higher in person, we’ve evolved efficient pattern detection, and wish it were more acceptable to meet up for a quick coffee immediately after matching. But a few bad apples spoil the bunch.
There’s an alternate explanation - that the fittest companies prioritize engagement and revenue until reaching some threshold of user dissatisfaction. The healthiest businesses often have customers who wish they could leave, but can’t.
Tangential from your point, but I don’t think this is a submarine article. This is just a single blogger. “Submarine article” typically refers to articles written by large news corporations (NYTimes eg) and incentivized by PR firms - none of which applies here.
The reason I mention this is that “submarine article” is typically used to cast suspicion at the aims of the article. I can’t see any reason to do that to this article.
I was suggesting OP may have been influenced by submarine articles since the popularity of speed dating is a potentially unfounded premise of their argument. (Personally, I know very few folks who’ve done speed dating but of course that’s anecdotal.)
To the point about the incentives of for-profit companies: dating apps are more profitable if they take longer to match you with someone you like. If everyone finds their ideal match within a week, they cancel their subscription and the company makes no more money off them.
If the company puts some barriers in the app that slows down the process, you remain their customer for longer. Of course, there's a tension: they can't drag it out too much, or you'll get frustrated and leave.
OkCupid used to write about this effect, back when they were independent and free. But once they were acquired by Match Group they deleted their old blog and stopped talking about things like that.
Yes. OkCupid basically solved dating, at least for people like me. It took me 2 dates to find the love of my life, and then I left the site (and all dating sites) forever. I paid them $0. Match Group, whose sites are designed to keep you single or in repeated failed relationships forever, made lots more money, bought them out, and ruined the site so they would stop shrinking the market.
It's a lot like how tech companies, data and advertisers have ruined news, friendship, phone, email, politics, ...
Concerning "dating apps suck": OkCupid was decent in its heyday. But even at that time, there were very few users of it near the city where I lived or even in the country where I lived. Thus, it simply was nevertheless not useful to me. But no other dating site uses a similar algorithm; perhaps most people care about other things in dating than what OkCupid is optimized to give them.
Truly one of the more despicable examples of enshitification.
OkCupid was amazing for those who made full use of its “here’s who I am and here’s who I want” question matching system. Removing those features and turning it into another swiping app was a terrible anticompetitive move.
I don't think speed dating is going to replace apps. I did some dating pre-app, it wasn't big then. Its unnatural, and doesn't appeal to many personalities.
I'm one of the men apps don't work for, easy to see why we hate them. For women, I think they say they don't like apps, but they do like the fact they get an endless stream of potentially date-able men from them. So their revealed preference is they like the apps, and that is why the apps continue to be relevant.
Alain de Botton claims (probably with only anecdotal evidence) that we tend to find love in people who remind us of the template our parents gave us… so this is an explanation why certain individuals end up attracted to loving terrible people. How would you hope to possibly convey this?
Also social proof is such a big deal for women, I think being in public your date can pick up on all sorts of qualities like self worth and confidence that are extremely difficult to convey on dating apps…
> I think being in public your date can pick up on all sorts of qualities like self worth and confidence that are extremely difficult to convey on dating apps…
In my personal experience, when I meet people from dating apps, there is a huge disconnect between "online charm" and "in-person charm". So much so, that I now try to arrange an in-person meeting ASAP when I connect with someone. You really know very quickly if the other person is showing enthusiasm and effort, and if you have a connection.
Just one point to add: Have a 5min call before to hear the voice. Weeks ago I had an "experience" with someone, her texts were absolutely OK but with small typos, some which are typical if you are learning the language but all in all it was possible to have a conversation.
Then we met.
She could barely form a useful sentence in real life conversation in our langugage, and she didnt speak English :-/
OkCupid used to work on the basis of high bandwidth of information and excellent matches.
This wasn't profitable enough though so they changed to the Tinder-style swiping which doesn't work. More engagement interactions means more opportunity to show ads. If you find people good matches they will just leave the app.
I like these types of opinions that challenge entrenched beliefs, i.e. network effects etc. But in the end I don't think there's a contradiction -- if you have 30 people in the room speed dating, you have 30 people in the room. If you have 30 people on your app, you have 0 people on the app because most of them are there at different times and then they give up because nobody's there except them. People gravitate towards where everyone else is, in the case of a dating app it's where thousands of people in your area are, and for speed dating it's where 30 people per event are.
Dating apps feel bad not necessarily because they are less effective, but because they encourage a mindset that's draining: endless swiping, ghosting, the paradox of choice, etc.
I think the Job To Be Done of dating apps is "kill time on the couch". Dating apps aren't competing with speed dating; they're competing with Bejeweled. Basically dating apps are to love as Duolingo is to learning a language.
Isn't it weird that they are called online dating apps and you can't date people online on them? You know, doing things like video calls. It's like Omegle and Discord are the actual apps where you get to date, whereas the dating apps are where you beg for attention.
Are there any dating apps that try to bridge the two worlds? That is, put focus on having short video conversations with as many people as possible, rather than just selecting people based on their profile/pics and then texting.
Makes you wonder why innovation hasn’t bridged this gap yet, especially when user dissatisfaction is so obvious. Is the winner-take-all dynamic just too strong?
The problems, in my view, are bandwidth and behavior, but not for the reasons noted. In a dating profile, you can carefully curate every part of your first impression. This means that 1) you need to have basically a perfect profile (doesn't mean you come off as the hottest, just that it's all green flags) because otherwise you are not putting your best foot forward, and 2) the dating profile is not reflective of the reality of the person.
This leads into behavior, as you can spend however much time you want vibing and talking through text, but meeting and spending time together in person will invariably be different. This results in two major high-pressure, high-filter events as opposed to the one from initially meeting in person.
> The problems, in my view, are bandwidth and behavior, but not for the reasons noted. In a dating profile, you can carefully curate every part of your first impression. This means that 1) you need to have basically a perfect profile (doesn't mean you come off as the hottest, just that it's all green flags) because otherwise you are not putting your best foot forward, and 2) the dating profile is not reflective of the reality of the person.
I would rather create a very honest profile because if some potential candidate is rather into the "artificial persona" that I project in my profile, when the relationship gets more serious, the match will soon realize that in real life I'm not a particular good fit.
That filter graph: looks attractive and is not insane, i feel the last part could be its own category. I am prolly insane as well, but I would say 90% of my ‘dates’ through apps were, completely and utterly mental. The other 10% were amazing and friends for life!
Article leans heavily towards American social norms which are so far from global norms because it treats the U.S. model of dating (apps, atomized urban life, and market logic) as universal, ignoring that in much of the world relationships still form through family, community, or social context rather than algorithmic matchmaking. It’s a very “Silicon Valley is the world” kind of framing.
For example a lot of communities in Canada just don’t work like this. Highly incompatible with this kind of social network, mostly due to the pre existing real social fabric.
And: shout out to Max and Chris because they really got it with OKC in the beginning, which this article doesn’t seem to say anything about other than just to name drop.
I don't understand how hedonism fits into your argument. I can be a hedonist enjoying myself privately in my own four walls to the fullest without needing any game and pick-up artists.
I think it's actually very simple... the paradox of choice.
You introduce somebody to your attractive single friend there's a real chance they hit it off and form a relationship. You introduce them to 100 attractive friends, one makes more money, one has a more stable job, one is flirtier, etc then it's both exhausting and none of them seem like a great opportunity.
I think there are certain basic psychological facts that are anti-standard-economics that nerds (and therefore tech companies) almost always tend to be completely blind to. This is one of them.
> one makes more money
There's this joke about a man in his 40s. He goes to the gym and asks the instructor which machine he should use to look more attractive to young ladies. The instructor looks at him and says "you'd do well by using the ATM outside".
When I ask myself who in my friends circles has had the happiest, longest lasting relationships it almost never were the guys with the money.
Don't get me wrong, that doesn't mean the inverse is true and you score big time if you are an ugly bum. It just means other qualities matter often more than men think. Being a kind guy, having humor, being emotionally reliable (meaning you're emotionally stable and not easily provoked, angered), being fun to be around, things like that.
I was one of those guys who always had more female friends than the average dude and I can assure you the stuff girls talk about when they consider partners are more often about how a guy is, than what he has.
Not that there aren't women who decide based perceived wealth, of course they exist. But why on earth would you consider catering to those? Got nothing else going for you except money?
Money (or access to money) is often a proxy for a certain kind of stability and access to leisure, two things that many people strive for.
But the joke wasn't about long term, successful relationships. The guy was interested in looking attractive. That could have any kind of relationship goal, from one night stands to marriage, or even meeting someone who could introduce them to even more people.
Being attractive can be helpful to get to know people. But it can also be a curse. If you know really attractive women (like international fashion model types) you will learn that it can be very hard for them at times to find friends that don't just chose them for their looks.
Now if all you want are short hook ups, sure. But I'd suspect most people are looking for a lasting partnership where the other side likes them for who they are and both people have a good time being together. And widely desirable traits can paradoxically make it harder to find that, also because the other side has incentives to fool you.
> When I ask myself who in my friends circles has had the happiest, longest lasting relationships it almost never were the guys with the money.
But that's also consistent with money being the ticket of entry, the thing you need to have to be considered as a partner in the first place (much of the time). Especially in the context of dating apps where there are so many to choose from, you might not even get the chance to show yourself as a kind, emotionally stable, fun guy to be around.
The parable, the story, is to teach that what brings people running to your doorstep will not always secure your happiness, desired life.
It's an entertaining joke, but I think most people wouldn't want a partner that mainly chose them because they have money.
(Certainly there's a baseline: most people want a partner with at least the financial resources to take care of themselves.)
> wouldn't want a partner that mainly chose them because they have money
That type of partner is commonly referred to as a gold digger. It's very rare that gold digger will tell you the honest reason why they're with you.
It does happen though. There's an extremely high profile couple in the US. She was asked in an TV interview if she'd be with him if he wasn't this rich. She responded "do you think he'd be with me if I wasn't this pretty?". Brutally honest I tell you.
Of course they wouldn't, but compared to not having no partner at all?
How about a partner who chose you because you had money, but stayed because less superficial things?
It's maybe sad, but it's not so surprising.
Commonly called “analysis paralysis”. For most people, I believe, once you have more than a small number of options it’s basically impossible (or feels so) to analyze and compare all options to make what seems like a rational and logical decision. So some people will just get frustrated and pick one arbitrarily, or give up and pick none. A small number of people will make a spreadsheet and devote way too much time to over-analyzing the situation, and maybe never come to a satisfactory conclusion.
This applies to almost anything, even “which restaurant should we go to tonight?”
> ...once you have more than a small number of options it’s basically impossible (or feels so) to analyze and compare all options to make what seems like a rational and logical decision.So some people will just get frustrated and pick one arbitrarily, or give up and pick none.
In this context (non-work related decisions) I find the “analysis paralysis” stems from a person not knowing themselves well enough or knowing themselves but not sure how to assert it without coming off in an off-putting way.
For the latter, “which restaurant should we go to tonight?” I take that as whatever I pick is it so I pick what I want (as long as I know the other people dont have allergies to the place or something) and that's it. When people ask for a place to pick they usually mean it (from my experience), and they are happy to tag along whereever -- otherwise they will suggest something and ask others opinion, I take that to mean they want to go there but don't want to seem bossy or some other weirdness, and so we go there unless I have a problem with it that I'll voice and suggests something similar.
For the former, I think people are too worried about coming off as "selfish" (and avoid learning themselves). It makes sense because some people really are, and being around them makes decent people really not want to be that. But knowing what you like and want especially when it's not what you have been told to like and want is the biggest hurdle to getting past the “analysis paralysis” here. If you know you and what you like and want than there is really not much to analysis, the analysis should be happening everyday of your life so when these big things come up you have a solid foundation to go on. Otherwise, a lot of it is trying to figure out what the best option is according to outside guidelines you've been given -- which is great for work, but not so much for oneself.
Of course, maybe there are people who can't do the above for whatever, but it's a skill to know what you like and want and a skill to put it into practice without being rude, just like talking to random people or programming. You get better with real world practice/exposure.
If you lived in an area with many restaurants offering the same favorite-cuisine/foods, and you were picking one to eat at indefinitely and exclusively… how would you choose?
That’s where the analysis paralysis would come in to play in dating.
> If you lived in an area with many restaurants offering the same favorite-cuisine/foods, and you were picking one to eat at indefinitely and exclusively… how would you choose?
[edit] I missed the indefinitely, read as definitely - so if you mean only one of them forever. The one I liked best, which really isnt far off from how I do thing now. I use to drive past multiple starbucks to go to the one I enjoyed most. It's not like they had better coffee than the others, I simply knew I liked going to that one the most.
I get this may sound trite, but by knowing myself. I've made it priority to know my mind (and feelings/emotions as best I can) and work on figuring out what is mine and what was given to me or told is suppose to be mine. From food to politics to values, I still find things ingrained that are not me. It's like keeping a workout/exercise routine and not get lazy with it.
How to choose? I will have already put them in order and know what foods I like where, then when asked the question I will know what I want to eat and the places to satisfy that -- from there its about other things too, do we have time to drive the the farthest one that I want? no? okay this other one is closer and it has this other thing I want so we go there. One has a long wait and we are both actually hungry? I hear there is one like it and my date is also adventurous so it'll be fun to try a new place together.
Honestly it's about knowing yourself, what your priorities are and what can be worked around. It's so much easier when you have a solid grasp on "knowing yourself". I know if this swank restaurant is going to take 30min drive and another 1.5 hour wait and I'm hungry, it doesn't matter how impressive the place is because I will be at my least impressive. If the date really wants to go there, I will have a snack before-hand so I wont be a stubborn-hangry-asshat (because I know I will be and instead of fighting it, own and manage it so everyone has a good time)
Paradox of Choice is a book by Barry Schwartz. It is not the same at all as analysis paralysis.
It is a much more pernicious idea. Barry gives the example of salad dressing. If you have the choice between 100 salad dressings, no matter what you pick you will like the salad dressing less than if you only had 3 choices because with a 100 you can't know how much better the others ones might be. It would be quite rational to suspect there is another that you would like more so you aren't going to be as happy with the choice you made relative to having less choice. That is the paradox.
It's wild how the brain taps out after like 5–7 options, but dating apps hand you an infinite scroll of possibilities and say "good luck"
I'm not sure if it's still like this (I've been off the market for a while now), but this was why I liked Coffee Meets Bagel way back when: you only got a small number of possible matches per day.
When I was a kid, I had one video game and played it all the way through. When the system was emulated and access to every single game ever created became available, I lost interest.
Part of my self-administered IT education in my early 20s was to feed my film nerdery through exquisite data hoarding. Automation, NASs, media servers, all of it.
Curiously, I found that the better I got, the less movies I actually watched. It became more about collecting than engaging.
I think this is a corollary to your point: vastly increasing access and reducing our objects of desire to a standardized neatly storable form can easily divert us into hoarding behavior, to the detriment of actual engagement with what’s being hoarded.
I found the way to square the circle of music hoarding is to place your player on full-library shuffle. Music is unique because you can enjoy it while doing other things, such as spamming Hacker News. Movies cannot be appreciated with such divided attention.
> Movies cannot be appreciated with such divided attention.
Have you considered setting up "Ersatz TV" and then configuring dozens of movie channels to never watch?
But maybe some prefer that? These rich guys who never seem to have long, fulfilling relationships, who's to say they seek long term relationships? (I wouldn't know, I'm not one of them!)
Ditto with the women who like them.
You can, after all, delete all the other games from your emulator, or your entire data hoard except one document etc. Somehow that doesn't seem appealing either, does it?
Ending a lot of sentences with a question here I know, but I honestly don't think I've got this figured out.
I think the secret is "clearly better than anyone I've got".
If I have nobody, and you introduce me to someone, then it's simple. They're absolutely worth pursuing.
If I have one or two "maybes", and you introduce me to someone, it's easy for them to be clearly better than anyone I've got, and therefore clearly "the one", at least the one to pursue right now.
But if you give me one hundred, then there probably isn't one of them that is clearly better than all the others. Hence, analysis paralysis.
> If I have nobody, and you introduce me to someone, then it's simple. They're absolutely worth pursuing.
Not quite. No matter how badly you want a relationship, I guarantee there exist potential partners with whom a relationship would make your life worse, not better. And for most people, the set of absolutely disastrous potential partners is most people.
The quoted section felt like a portrayal of the individual’s mentality from the example, more so than actual objective logic.
> And for most people, the set of absolutely disastrous potential partners is most people.
Care to expand on why?
Let's start simple and say that the average person isn't bisexual, so we need to exclude half of people from the get-go. But maybe you're taking that as a given. So then we also need to consider that less than half the population is within your optimal age range. Maybe you're also taking that as a given. (But note that at this point we're already excluding 85% of humans.) Now consider that you also probably want them to speak your language. Again, maybe another gimme, but you're still down to less than 2% of humans. Of that, pick any ordinary dealbreaker; opinions on having children, political opinions, religious preferences, personal habits, and so on. Find the intersection of these. And don't forget to consider that a not-insignificant proportion of the population are simply high-functioning maniacs who you're better off never coming into contact with. And now consider mutual attractiveness.
That makes me think of the Secretary Problem [0]... which apparently is also known as the Fussy Suitor problem, at that makes it extra apropos.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem
I remember the book "Algorithms to Live By" actually also uses finding a life partner as a fun, if perhaps unrealistic, example of applying the secretary problem.
As far as I remember, it jokingly assumes that one's active dating period might be ages 20-40 and then applying the optimal solution from the secretary problem means that you should calibrate your expectations until age 27 (assuming regular dating of course) and then immediately marry the next best person that exceeds this threshold.
There are plenty of people you could be with that would be a strictly worse experience than being alone.
Make the shortest list of requirements, and hard-no traits, possible.
It’s the only way.
There's also something like a "market for lemons" effect where the best people (i.e. those most suitable for relationships and capable of sustaining them) tend to pair off and disappear from the market.
Isn’t market for lemons about a situation where consumers can not tell the difference between good and bad quality product so they only buy the cheapest assuming it’s bad.
Yes, and that also applies to dating apps. It’s easier to fake being attractive on an app than in real life. So the apps will be dominated by low cost fakes.
You’re right that the comment you replied to was describing a different effect (adverse selection?)
There is information asymmetry, it's just that it exists on both sides. Neither person really knows the other's history or intentions.
It's like making a spider web diagram for each person. Then calculating the area under the polygon to make a decision. With the vertices of diagram weighted by your preference vector. Under normal circumstances, majority can match with majority like a lock and key combintation. This could be the reason why arranged marriages work. I don't think evolution would care for 100% maximum compatibility as a target.
I would consider that arrange marriages work solely for evolution. Usually, arrange marriages / their families usually advocate the people who married to become parents. Thus for evolutionary purpose, maybe they can be good but at the same time, they might only be together later because of their chidren and that is a tough cycle for a children and some anti natalist points can be made in that regards.
I do think that we humans have such complex brains and hyper-specialization and the amount of intellect in the world when you look at it is ridiculous. So the ideas of arrange marriage working in favour of evolution, and not in favour of the person, while somebody does that is, very interesting...
I think cultures play a major impact in how one approaches dating.
> I think there are certain basic psychological facts that are anti-standard-economics that nerds (and therefore tech companies) almost always tend to be completely blind to. This is one of them.
I believe it's the opposite, they're exactly aware of this and have taken advantage of it to maximize engagement and profit, of course with the accompanying insanity, emotional burnout and further division/culture wars fuelling.
The paradox of choice feels like one of those concepts that sounds trivial until you live it. Dating apps amplify it to an absurd degree
It’s impressive to me how many people mistake relationships for a choice issue when it’s entirely a building in common thing. Obviously, having a shared vision or the ability to built one initially matter but the rest is very much work.
At this point in my life, I’m fairly convinced that some people would be able to build a successful relationship with nearly anyone while other are doomed to fail even with the "perfect" person.
The problem of dating is not so much dating. It’s expectations which are totally unaligned with the reality of life.
See also "taxicab theory".
I wish I could upvote you more.
Speaking from experience gained the hard way, I thing compatibility matters a lot. But it's hard to measure and probably includes a lot of physical stuff like chemistry that can't happen online.
But I also think what you're pointing to is critical. People aren't static consumable objects, and what you are willing to do for a relationship with someone matters as much as anything.
>At this point in my life, I’m fairly convinced that some people would be able to build a successful relationship with nearly anyone while other are doomed to fail even with the "perfect" person.
It may be that some women may prefer being single (for a variety of reasons) than be paired with a large enough portion of men such that the effects become visible on the societal scale.
Women being able to go through life without having to be paired up with a man is a relatively new thing, the long term effects of which are just coming into fore.
> You introduce them to 100 attractive friends, one makes more money, one has a more stable job, one is flirtier, etc then it's both exhausting and none of them seem like a great opportunity.
And then there's "average person fallacy"
There is only one way to beat the paradox of choice: fall in love.
Then, it won’t matter that there are richer, more attractive, more intelligent options out there: you love what you love and that’s what you should pursue, and when you get it, that’s when you will know peace. It will feel like you won at life.
If people cannot overcome the paradox, it is because love in this world has become short in supply.
But what if the paradox of choice is what’s draining the world of its available love?
> You introduce them to 100 attractive friends, one makes more money, one has a more stable job, one is flirtier, etc then it's both exhausting and none of them seem like a great opportunity.
Me when shopping for camera lenses.
I think the author missed an important factor: misaligned incentives.
Dating apps make money when users spend time (and money) on the platform. Users who find a partner tend to leave the platform, so dating companies are incentivized to prevent that from happening. Those companies then have more opportunities to up-sell those users on premium features, which they're more likely to purchase due to repeated failure and/or feelings of inadequacy.
This is often parroted, but the reasoning is flawed. The vast majority of the platform's growth will come from new users, who are entering the dating scene. If they fail to capture that audience (say, by having a reputation of not performing as advertised), then no amount of upsells or string-alongs of existing users will sustain them, as their user base will only ever decrease, and investors will see that and withdraw accordingly.
Everything about this is wrong.
1) The platforms aren't growing that impressively. Most of their users have been on the platform for a while, were previous users, etc.
2) It doesn't matter how good the app is, you need a network effect. New users are going to go to where the potential dates are.
3) Marketing does wonders. An app can suck and have great marketing. It will get users over an app that actually works and doesn't have good marketing.
4) Lots of people on dating apps are looking for dates (hookups), not partners. If the apps can keep you getting dates, not partners, they can keep you on the app and happy.
"If the apps can keep you getting dates, not partners, they can keep you on the app and happy."
I know this sounds judgemental but I'm not convinced the people going on lots of dates are "Happy" even if they're being successful in dating and hookups.
Happy in terms of being a customer of the app perhaps.
Match's growth peaked a long time ago. The site is now trying to grow by "offering new products" and "cutting operational costs."
The relative newcomers - Bumble and Hinge - grew by trying to offer a better experience, especially for women, who are traditionally overwhelmed with unreciprocated interest on conventional apps. Both seem to have admitted defeat now and moved to the usual model.
In terms of revenue, the incentive to keep millions of users spending is far higher than the nominal gains from persuading friends of a successful couple to join up. Given that most users aren't successful, that network effect is tiny.
There's an opposing network effect of *keeping customers unmatched, because this provides gossip and entertainment among friends, which gives them a reason to continue using a service.
We know that string-alongs are a real thing on dating sites - especially, but not exclusively, for men.
There's also a small but not negligible subculture of (mostly) women who use dates for free meals and get a good return on their monthly subscription.
And a lot of sites - not just Tinder - overlap hook-up culture with people seeking marriage and kids. If anything the former is a more popular option now.
FWIW, Hinge has been owned by match for some years now. Bumble is still independent by their stock is down ~92% over 5 years. I think they will eventually be bought out by match.
Wrong claim: "There's an opposing network effect of *keeping customers unmatched, because this provides gossip and entertainment among friends, which gives them a reason to continue using a service."
No, this is implying they are doing it with intention - which they dont even have to insist on! They can keep the users, because matching based on an app does not work for 99.99% real cases. So if you treat them well, they will stay anyway, unless your product is shitty.
I don't think this counterargument holds. It's a hell of a lot easier to get a customer who already paid once to pay a second time than it is to get a customer to pay for the first time. Also, I think most people are well aware that by and large, dating apps have a very low success rate for the majority of their users. People use them anyway.
Since your marginal costs per customer are veeeery low, you can hammer thm with 50-60% discount, which ends up on most platforms at 10 - 20 bucks per month, and if you make 3 - 4 dinners, you get much more out of it than an evening in the cinema
And to add to that- seeing a real world friend go on dates or start a relationship because of an app is better than any marketing you could ever buy.
If you want to drive top-of-the-funnel growth, make the product good even it causes some folks to drop out once they’re in a relationship.
They don't need that. What option do most young people have?
Most young men can't approach women, most young women can't handle being approached and we don't have shared spaces where people can get to know each other and pair off anymore. Young people think the apps are dumpster fires, they hate them, but the alternative is sadly worse.
> The vast majority of the platform's growth will come from new users...
Userbase expansion is new users less leaving users for a time period. So there are two factors, not just "new users."
In any case, Match Group apps are well into the phase of focusing on extracting the most money possible from their paying users as opposed to gaining new users.
After all, infinite users are useless to a company, even if it costs nothing to support them, if none of them pay.
By far absolutely _not_ true:
- i have worked in the space for some years for two of the biggest platforms in my country
- dating sites track a lot KPI and discuss them and test them thoroughly
- the KPI "do-more-users-leave-our-platform-earlier-if-our-matching-algo-is-just-too-good" - I promise: In alle the years, this question WAS NEVER - NEVER!!!!!!! - raised, regardless wich Manager or which Exec. This metric isnt even debated.
And here comes why: the most important thing to form a relationship are "technicals" which can NEVER be introduced into an app. There may be some advances in genomic matching, but no body deployed this so far and it wont happen unless Apple watch as a gene encoding module.
There are one night stands, there some marriges (we had a "winners board" in our office), but 99% of all cases when people met, its going to be "failure" (in a sense "no match")
Regardless how good your algo is - it doesnt matter when it comes to a reality check.
Therefore, Dating apps have absolutely no fear of you signing off because you fond someome - its very likely that you will come back soon, second: From operators perspective it would be a good thing if people would tell "i found my match on XYZ", but sine this does happen only super rarely, there are only few such stories.
So - NO: Dating sites do fear someone deleting the account.
(except: you are a startup and have to keep every profile to gain some size)
The good dating apps just naturally made less money than the horribly destructive ones and got bought out and converted into destructive ones.
> - the KPI "do-more-users-leave-our-platform-earlier-if-our-matching-algo-is-just-too-good" - I promise: In alle the years, this question WAS NEVER - NEVER!!!!!!! - raised, regardless wich Manager or which Exec. This metric isnt even debated.
What labels do they use for training their algos though? What is their definition of a successful match, is it a date, a recurring date, or something closer to a long-term relationship?
If matches predominantly result in "failure" they might just not have enough "long-term success" labels to go by, and their proxy labels will be biased towards short-term successes.
Wrong approach; at least until latest, NONE of the standard apps does apply any kind of "real AI" stuff, maybe this changed through the last 3 - 4 years.
All thi matching stuff like "match with X%" is just bullshit.
The only platform having a useful approach here was OKC years ago. (but even for their scoring you would not need any type of sophisticated tech)
Well, what kind of KPI do you track then?
- new user sign up - new subscriptions - enlengthened subscriptions - mails send - overall interactions - testing of new marketing campaigns/channels (they do massive MVT, even fontsize&coloring)
just to make that clear: churn is tracked/written down for sure, but its not debated in a context of "is churn growing if more people are matching successful" - because in 99.9% of all cases people do not meet successful, so this metric is irrelevant
And yet, the premium features are overtly aligned against user success!
I believe you that these app devs think they are optimizing for user success, but that doesn't change the incentives that frame their work.
The greatest utility of a dating app should be that it provides a higher number of opportunities. This feature is explicitly broken by the most popular dating apps. Often, it is put behind a paywall, which has the same effect as being broken.
> The greatest utility of a dating app should be that it provides a higher number of opportunities.
I'm not sure I agree with that. Limiting opportunities can actually be a better experience. Too many choices can lead to decision paralysis.
> higher number of opportunities. <
Limitting search/result is often used to tease users into the subscription. Eg. Tiner allows in free mode only a certain number of swipes. Is it this what you mean? This is usually depends on: Search + text for free but limited, or "pay for everything" I do not see why putting some features behind a paywall is "against users interest" and how this limits/increases his/her chances?
You are claiming that dating sites should be free - this doesnt work usually (POF as exception) - and making users pay for those does not increase his/her chances: EVERYTHING that happens before you met someone will be crashed usually in the very first second you met (and smell!) someone.
So if you have a chance with another person, is something that is completely(!) out of control of the website operator. EDIT: this is something website operators do know, they cant change it and this is something that they should put on their website - they are selling dreams and expectations, which wont become true in real.
This is exactly why I always make it a point to discourage my friends from using dating apps.
A dating app that is effective at solving the problem it is ostensibly designed to solve will never make money as people will be matched quickly and will have no need to pay for the service. So clearly no profitable dating app is good at matching people.
I'm of the opinion that using a tool that is constantly setting you up for romantic failure and rejection in the name of keeping you on its platform is a really good way to wreck your mental health.
On the other hand, if it was so easy to find a match, then we wouldn't be trying to use dating apps. I think it is just generally hard to find a good match for many people these days.
The other side of that is that many people are simply terrible and really unsuitable for being in any sort of long term stable relationship. No dating app can solve that problem (unless maybe they incorporate mental health and life coaching services, which seems kind of sketchy as a combination). Whether the situation has gotten generally harder these days is impossible to say but I certainly don't envy those still in the dating pool.
Facebook dating has different incentives.
https://www.facebook.com/dating
IMHO they should be the best one and use that to draw people to FB. They don't need to keep people in the dating app since its not the primary business.
The only thing I can dream up less appealing than that would be dating on Nextdoor.
Bingo. This is the effect that keeps (a) incumbent platforms in place, (b) users on those platforms, (c) and potentially new platforms from coming online and offering a "superior" experience.
This is pretty obviously addressed in the article. The premise of the article is why don't users migrate to better platforms when the large ones are extracting as much money as possible (because the incentives are misaligned)
I'm not sure it's purely malicious. It might just be the result of optimizing for engagement metrics
Users who find a partner
Tinder is not Match is not Grind. People partner for various reasons and durations.
[flagged]
Please don't use HN for ideological battle like this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Anyone can decide a statement is "ideological" just by disagreeing with it. The statement "the government can and should provide services to its people if those services are important to its future and the free market is incapable of providing them" should not, and did not used to be, ideological. The fact that such a statement is far outside of the current Overton Window is the result of a decades-long propaganda campaign to destroy everyone's faith in government so it can be looted, and everyone who parrots "government bad" is (knowingly or not) playing a part in this propaganda campaign. I assume the issue you have with my comment is that I knew 95% of readers would immediately regurgitate "but government bad!", but of course I was right that that happened.
When the Overton Window shifts to the point where saying "people should be decent to one another" becomes a radical ideological statement, make sure you flag every comment that says that too. We can't have radical ideologues on HN, after all.
The question of what goods and services should/shouldn't be provided by government is about as ideological as any question there is, given that the size/role of government has been one of the most central matters of most major ideologies for at least the past couple of centuries.
It's fine to discuss ideology on HN, but it needs to be done so in a spirit of curiosity and exploration, not battle and belligerence.
We've had to ask you to respect the site and observe the guidelines a few times before in the past couple of years. The HN guidelines and HN's intended purpose are the issue here, and sermonizing about ideology seems a deflection.
We just need you to observe the guidelines, no matter what point you're trying to make (and we really don't much care what point you're trying to make). Indeed this is in your interests to do this, because your point will carry more weight if you make it whilst keeping your discussion style within the site's guidelines and norms.
I’m sure there are many people who don’t want their dating lives influenced by whatever rulers are in charge of their governments. Democrats won’t like a MAGA dating service, and vice versa.
What about a nonprofit instead?
I think Japan did this last year https://japandaily.jp/japans-government-initiatives-to-boost...
> This is exactly why a dating app should be developed and provided by the government. Side note: If this gives you the heebie jeebies, you are part of the problem.
Bravo, I haven't laughed this much in a while. God-tier satire.
Controversial take, but have we considered that possibly dating apps dont suck, and that this perception is driven by a vocal minority of the people who have the worst experience on them? (A sad fact is that dating will just suck for some % of the population. Is it possible that if there were no apps the same % would be saying how IRL dating sucks?) I know many people in stable LTRs or married who met through dating apps. But I don’t think you typically find these people participating in discourse about dating apps. If anything they’ve probably moved on to complaining why wedding planners and baby books or whatever suck.
> Controversial take, but have we considered that possibly dating apps don't suck, and that this perception is driven by a vocal minority of the people who have the worst experience on them?
Yes. The reality is well known. PlentyOfFish used to publish statistics. About 10% of dating app users are "date bacon" and find matches they like. Everyone else is a dissatisfied loser. The losers provide the repeat business and the profits, just like the gambling industry.
What women want is > 6' tall, over $100K a year, reasonably good looking, and reasonably young compared to the woman. This is about 1% of the US male population.
But a much higher fraction of dating service profiles. Two good-looking women I know have shown me their side of a dating app. Each had over 1000 matches, but the ones they met did not live up to their resume. (Fun fact: the organization of ex Navy SEALS says that there are at least 10x as many people claiming to be ex-SEALS as actually exist. There aren't that many of those guys. Only a few thousand. But on dating apps...)
I think it’s true that most people have a bad experience, but I don’t think it’s caused by things like height, age, and income level…. But social skills, confidence, and emotional vulnerability, which are things almost anyone can develop with deliberate effort, and also lead to better and more stable relationships.
For me, developing vulnerability and risk taking caused me to go from completely unsuccessful, to being able to date pretty much anyone I wanted on these apps. Counter intuitively, the main thing I had to do was stop holding back the things I had previously been afraid to share about myself because I was afraid they made me seem unattractive, and instead confidently own who I really am. It’s very rare for a woman on these apps to encounter someone that seems genuine, unafraid, and vulnerable- and you will stand out like crazy.
It’s not just men having a hard time on these apps- despite the huge number of people, most women really struggle to find anyone that seems appealing, and most of the dates they do go on end up awful as the men are emotionally unavailable, nervous, and afraid to be vulnerable, which makes them impossible to connect with, no matter how tall and rich they may be.
It’s very appealing to believe that the problem is something outside of your control, but it’s rarely the case.
And those social skills, confidence, emotional vulnerability appear where exactly on the profile?
Please. Online dating is 80% looks, 10% height and 10% money.
You have photos and text, try making them funny and showing off that you’re not afraid to hide things about yourself that others would hide- maybe emphasize and show a weird hobby or interest that other people might be worried to share. Of course this only works if you’re actually funny or actually have unusual hobbies. One guy I know literally posted silly photos of himself awkwardly pole dancing and got tons of matches. Even if you’re tall and rich, I advise being interesting instead and making it impossible to tell those things, if you want to match with people that are not boring and shallow. Have a good time and be light hearted- having a bad attitude about how dating is unfair will be impossible to hide and looks like a major personality flaw.
I thought the Navy Seal thing was to impress other men. Does it have sex appeal? Probably depends on your social circle.. but I'd think being ex-military as highly unattractive (more violent than the average person, and highly likely to have trauma)
I'd assume that those guys (falsely claiming to have been Seals) were poor judges of what women find appealing.
Or too wrapped up in their own machismo to particularly care.
Are not (some) women attracted to bad boys ?
Not to mention jody!!!
> What women want
There are 4 billions women on this planet.
The average women as a concept is meaningless for someone looking for a person to date. Even if you could only find someone far in the metaphorical tail, variance and population size are so high we are talking millions of people. Lesbian manages to find people to marry for god sake.
This kind of weird generalisation really needs to die. It helps absolutely no one.
The only problem with this is its defeatist framing.
What most women who use dating apps are looking for, in a profile on that dating app, is essentially what you described, or at least a set of similarly rare attributes. Even worse, is the set of attributes that she is looking to avoid.
Dating apps are nothing but attributes. That's their core problem, and their core success. If you can get a small percentage (probably male) of users to attract a less-small percentage of (probably female) users, you end up with an infinite churn of "success" (read engagement).
The natural incentive in this situation is to show that small percentage of popular male profiles to as many users as possible. This gives you both profitable engagement and actual success metrics that you can brag about!
---
So now that we understand the problem a little more, can we start working to solve it?
Bro, women don't care about reasonably young, the vast majority of women want older men, the daddy and silver fox memes are real. For younger women, the preferred age gap is smaller, but the older the woman gets, the larger the age window above her gets. A lot of women in their early 30s are thirsting after men in their mid-late 40s with resources and their shit together.
Real question about those two women with over 1000 matches: Why don't top quality men approach them in public? It is weird they are on the apps. If you are a 7 or above, high quality men are constantly approaching you, to the point of annoyance. Or do they use the apps to find a simp/sugar daddy to pay for their dinner and lifestyle?
The fact is that younger generations are increasingly more single and finding it harder and harder to date. If dating apps are primarily to blame could be up for debate but something about the modern world is clearly not working.
A big part is that it is now socially unacceptable to ask someone out at what were some of the places most likely to produce couples in the past.
For example, it used to be that something like 30-40% of relationships started in the workplace.
How soon until your (true) point is used to spin RTO propaganda?
The "Me Too" movement fucked all of that. RTO won't help.
I mean, we’re already six years past COVID—something that placed a heavy mental burden even on older generations. I can only imagine how much worse it was for younger people. I’d argue we’ll need another 20 years before most of the effects fade.
Even before then, I don’t think dating apps were the only issue—it was more the general lack of human interaction, with everything shifting online. Being in a relationship is nothing like just "chatting" or being "connected." I’m not complaining, but during my teenage and young adult years, I feel like I had less-than-ideal real-life experiences, which shaped my social skills and expectations. Talking to people in their 30s now, I get the sense they’re only experience this much later in life.
> I mean, we’re already six years past COVID—something that placed a heavy mental burden
The only new factor that COVID brought in concerning dating is that it separated society into two groups which in German are disrespectfully called "Coronazis" (those who defended the restrictions of civil rights because of COVID-19) and "Covidioten" (those who did not believe in the COVID-19 fearmongering and the government measures). Both of these groups realized that they are not compatible with the other group on a human level and are thus no suitable dating matches.
This actually lead to the inception of a new dating site for those who are skeptical of official COVID-19 narrative or feel attracted to people who share personality traits of such people: https://www.conscious-love.com
> The only new factor that COVID brought in
No it also brought kids who missed one year of socialization, positive social experiences, mingling.
Just one year? It changed habits forever in favour of remote classes, in which schoolm don’t play their role in giving a cohesive experience for students.
As a kid in final days of high school. This is so true.
I was talking to this about this to my mum just a few days ago and she said that no it didn't impact, but I was so shocked because honestly I feel like its just not even the kids but everyone which got impacted but I genuinely feel like that there was this sense of loneliness in covid
I am not sure but before covid everyone was friends with everybody else kind of things, I was in 6th grade and I would honestly consider it one of the best periods of my life, I remember how one of my friends had prepared covid as a general knowledge fact for an exam and he spoke it in class and we didn't think much of it untill it started spreading and then our 7th class became purely online due to lockdowns etc.
I do feel like that there is a lost year or more and that has impacted people in a lot of ways.
Personally, the one thing I noticed was the fact that a lot of the times, we felt like being watched by others and what not to a bigger degree.
Like, I remember just talking to girls as friends when I was in 6th grade, It wasn't that much of a big deal but later in covid and even after covid, when the school re-opened. I found that girls used to sit seperately and we boys used to sit seperately in completely seperate rows, not even on the same rows or the same benches.
Before covid this wasn't the case and we were sort of forced by our teachers to sit whether with boys or girls randomly and there were some good interactions that I deeply miss.
I am not sure if this is just something that naturally tansitions from 6th to 7th grade thing or something, We boys and girls used to talk but there was clearly this disconnect of 1 year between us, boys used to talk so frequently in boys group and girls in the girls but whenever a girl talked to us, it was most likely in public chats and I mean, you could never just small talk to somebody, I think I loved small talks so I used to create personal groups with my homies just chatting but the mere act of adding a girl to talk personally online felt really making a big deal I guess.
I personally noticed so many smaller things which I have felt as if have somewhat radicalized both girls and boys even in small mannerisms.
There became a us vs them mentality at a younger age which really got radical in 9th grade for sure.
I agree with you in general, but I'm pretty sure the change you saw in how in boys and girls interacted with each other before and after COVID was due to puberty, not COVID, given the ages you were at the time.
> she said that no it didn't impact
Depending on the shape of the discussion, maybe she denied it so you don’t fell into the “I’m victim, it’s over now” trap. Grownups do that. Don’t take it bad. I’m 45 and single, and grownups tell me all the time that it’s not too late for me. I think they deny the obvious to console me, but living in a situation where everyone denies your actual situation is disorienting, and makes things worse than facing the truth.
> boys and girls sit apart
That’s a sudden transition in about 1 year at the age of ~12 (I don’t know what 6th grade is). It’s forever; after that they only rejoin again as couples ;) You can still make girls into friends, and groups like at the workplace include women easily (hopefully), but there’s always a tension on who’s going to date whom, and is this guy trying to creep on me, etc. which makes both genders more natural apart.
Just to help you distinguish between Covid effects and normal life.
What’s probably specific on Covid was: Dating fell off (2021), dating at the workplace is a big nono (2017), cost of living (2022), radicalization of opinion and realization that pro-Covid and doubters don’t fit together (2020). On the last point, I remember leftists and rightwings living together before that, and it might have started in 2017 with the Trump election, but each other deny the sanity of the other group. i.e. really radicalized.
Yeah radicalization is really bad
I wasn't intending to victimize myself, I am not saying that its just me whose changed, but its rather the whole world which feels changed idk really
That’s a sudden transition in about 1 year at the age of ~12
Yeah I was of 11 years in 6th grade, and since the sudden transition happened after covid in 7th-8th grade when I was in 12-13 years old, I assumed it was because of covid where this seperation began, its good to know that isn't the case but still
Afyer 7th grade, I wasn't on any social media like instagram even though my whole class generally was.
I feel like online helps reduce the tension but as someone not using insta, I wasn't going to ask a girl her number since even in 7th-8th grade I knew that it felt as if a huge deal.
I always felt like the us vs them thing, we boys didn't need a reason to talk to each other, "hey bro what's up"
Whereas as I said, you always felt like a reason to talk to girls, I mean not always but usually, simply because you haven't talked to a person in 1-2 years and they don't even sit with you and you rarely need their help and vice versa
Honestly all of these things just make me treat woman really in a way to not be myself completely, like as an example, I am confident with my homies, I would just rant about anything or be myself completely and live my life but I will try to present myself in a better light in front of woman generally, not sure if that's a bad thing or good thing but I just want a girl really to be completely honest to each other to see if me and her are compatible or not and if there were some issues, then to read the relationship issues and try to fix what I can fix in my life really.
> I’m 45 and single, and grownups tell me all the time that it’s not too late for me. I think they deny the obvious to console me, but living in a situation where everyone denies your actual situation is disorienting, and makes things worse than facing the truth.
I will tell you the truth in the sense that its a mixed bag. Culture plays an important role in influencing what a girl seeks in a man in the sense that there is just a (sensation?) that if they like a guy or not whereas we males generally have a somewhat fixed/universal standard of what we look for in a girl.
So now whatever a girl feels, one of the most important factors found is culture/shared values. As an example, Girls with strong countryside culture or cultures which value money, might value a guy whose stable in his 40's more than a struggling artist but I have found that there are other girls whose culture makes them value struggling artist more than the stability.
I think you just need to find common values. Try to meet woman more and actually ask for dates etc. start slow, start by asking for time from a random girl (the example the book gave), and move up to complimenting to then asking for dates to random girls
Another key note is that everybody has a very high rejection/ low compatbility rate, mark manson's book gave an idea about it but I found out that rejections are common, in fact more probable so you shouldn't bother about it at all or atleast try not to.
Personally i have tried such things but I wasn't ready and I still think I am not, I am honestly just going to talk to girls asking for dates etc only after getting to know them first instead of the opposite, maybe sharing some common qualities like coding/messing around with linux and niche ideas y'know?
But I would still recommend you that although I understand you, I also understand why everybody denies it, simply because they don't want to make you lose hope in the whole situation.
It maybe hard but there is no definition of hard here really, There are some qualities which other people might envy of you for sure and you might too but you are you and they are them, you are perfectly fine in your own body and playing with whatever thing you have got, no matter how hard or easy it is. I would say its still worth it and also maybe once again, that you might be thinking of it as something too hard and I understand that.
Just try to be a honest guy, if you think you really enjoy the company of some girl, just tell them in an honest way and just be yourself, I feel like that could help the most but I would say to please keep my advice with bare minimum as my track record for dating has been ... rough to say the least and I have taken a break from it for sometime I suppose.
Yep, that’s the moral of the story: Keep trying, for both of us. PS: Don’t expect a girl to share programming as a hobby, it’s virtually nonexistent, even if it looks like this at school.
> PS: Don’t expect a girl to share programming as a hobby, it’s virtually nonexistent, even if it looks like this at school
Oh man, I don't know, I don't have any gaming hobbies or etc.
Whom am I gonna share how I fixed my disk using testdisk and show my dotfiles or any cool project that I found to?
Its a very big part of me and I want a girl to understand it. To embrace it if possible. I wouldn't say I am programming as much as I am tinkering and making shit work and I feel like I can do a lot of things which I am proud of, of which otherwise I would have given up but I persisted.
I do want someone to appreciate it, appreciate me wholly. Understand me.
Although maybe I am having too many expectations.
Would love to have a chat / continue this chat with ya if that's possible really.
Dating apps 100% suck. I'm a good looking guy and I put the effort into getting great pictures and optimizing my profile to the point I was able to get dates 5+ nights a week and date 2-3 new women a week, and while it was validating, the quality of dates was significantly worse than what I used to get from just approaching women in places like bookstores, after yoga classes, etc when that wasn't as culturally abnormal.
Ironically I met my wife while I was on a date with another woman. We had a much better organic connection, and she was way hotter than almost all the girls on the apps.
That's a big part of it. When I met women in person they could get my vibe and know 100% what was on offer, so if they decided they were interested they were in it. I think the uncertainty of meeting someone new tends to linger for a while even if a date goes well, so it creates some dissonance.
There's also just the quality aspect. Hot high value women don't need the apps to get a good suitor, and if they're on the apps even tall successful good looking men face rough odds, since these women can skim the cream of the cream on platforms and usually are looking for the best sugar daddy. In person you can be charming, kind and a good conversationalist, and as long as you meet a woman's bar (which I pretty much always did) you can shortcut the line because you're REAL and here NOW. A bird in the hand an all that...
This anecdote does not really feel like an argument that dating apps suck. Sounds like you were using them wrong somehow
I mean, that’s not really an informed skepticism is it? Respectfully, you’d have an idea of what the commenter means if you’re attractive.
In my own experience I quite agree. When you have more than a hundred matches, it just sucks, because the fact that you have that many matches means you’ve cast your net too wide. You swiped right solely on the basis of looks but the good dates are good because other factors like personality and similarity in interests and sense of humor turn out to actually matter. Those are things best gauged via face-to-face interaction.
Everyone is playing the secretary problem. If you're popular, you have to turn down a lot of candidates before you try to find one that's in whatever you measure to be in your league (better than all the ones you saw previously, but I wonder how many people are really going with that). If you're on an app, that's a lot of people.
At the same time, there's a bunch of people who aren't so popular who are now done checking a short queue of candidates, and willing to go with whoever shows up next above their bar.
But those people are still busy rejecting everyone in a seemingly infinite line of suitors. So we have a problem getting people to match.
Add to this that the sexes are not distributed the same way. There's a few ultra hot guys who will never not have a date, and there's a more even number of hot women who the less hot guys are waiting on.
If you're speed dating or doing any other real-world dating, your queues are a lot shorter. You will feel like your idea of the market is set much sooner, and you can start picking out a candidate.
Maybe we need to spread the word about the optimal stopping rule [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem
The secretary problem is a bad way to formalise the problem of dating and the stopping rule doesn't work in that context, for a very simple reason.
The secretary problem is a solution to the problem of having to make repeated choices. In essence it's a solution to the problem of having to choose a secretary every morning for the day. You can even say it's a solution to the problem of a computer process spending a few seconds consuming an infinite stream at the top of every hour for the next hour. It's not a solution to the problem of making a (hopefully) unique choice.
There's less "maybe someone better is one swipe away" and more "this is who's here tonight"
The author didn't consider a more basic selection bias that the 3 contradictory facts are driven by different groups of people. That makes it rather easy to reconcile 3 apparently contradictory views. You can't jump-start a new market for a dating app with in-person speed daters because they are the people who refuse to use an app!
And it is worth being a little suspicious of the people who 'hate' dating apps. There are valid criticisms, but the people who are just bad partners are going to turn up somewhere and it might be that pool of people - they tend not to be big on reflecting on their own flaws with rigorous intellectual honesty and would blame the apps.
Being bad at apps means you are either ugly, or your pictures are bad.
There’s plenty of examples on dating apps of people making fake bios with extremely handsome men described as being evil (I.e child abuseres) and who still had lines of women who wanted to date him.
He had excellent photos and an obvious 6 pack. His pictures looked professional and showed his (large) social group where he was obviously the leader.
I do not blame anyone for not being successful on dating apps because I believe a persons current physical appearance and attractiveness have little to do with their character or suitability as a partner.
It fascinates me that if you listen to what women say, 95% will say they dislike dating profiles the most when the man has shirtless photographs. Yet, 95% of women will also say that guys with a six pack are hot. It reminds me of the old adage: "Watch what women do, not what they say."
People come to dating apps for all sorts of reasons, and with different levels of investment. Pretty much every woman I know who has used a dating app has said she has gone on a dating app to alleviate boredom. That's probably not fun for the person on the other end if they are actually trying to find a partner.
If someone shows up to a speed dating event, that indicates minimum level of investment in the interaction.
I think this is an inevitable side effect of the business model. I signed up for these apps to find love, that's the "strategic" reason I use them. But 99 of the time, the actual reason in the moment that I opened the app is for a dopamine hit.
This is a double-edged sword because if the apps hadn't been addictive I just wouldn't have used them that much and I would have ended up with less dates. On the other hand, it obviously plays a part in the toxic underpinnings that make the whole experience so miserable in the long run
Hard to see how you can really address this with design. E.g. OkCupid didn't use to have this dopamine-driven property at least back in the day when I first used it. I found it fucking boring, I didn't invest enough time into it, and ultimately I never met anyone in person (sure, I think part of the reason was also the people I saw there also seemed boring, but that can't be completely orthogonal).
Looking for dates on there gave me a similar feeling as looking for a house on property sites. Yes, I really want a house and there are houses here. But I am still hating this experience of looking at houses.
From the article:
> (…) pictures also give lots of information about important non-superficial things, like your personality, values, social class, and lifestyle.
This is the one thing that puzzles me most about dating apps: where do all these pictures come from? People seem to have pictures of them doing all kinds of activities. When I’m out with friends doing whatever, no one is taking pictures. Even if they did, it’s not like we exchange pictures afterwards.
I genuinely don’t have any pictures of myself.
Are me and my friends weird for not documenting every second of our lives?
I've been around someone trying to get into dating apps, he just started asking us to "take a picture of him real quick" while we're doing outings with the bois "so I can out it on tinder".
I assume most people are this way, you just have others start taking pictures of the things you normally do (but didnt normally take pictures of) when you feel the need to make/flesh out a profile.
I've asked friends before, but the photos they took were uniformly terrible.
Ask women (ideally an Asian woman) and they will take pictures in the top 10% or better of what an average person can take. The only more reliable group are professional photographers - and consider that zoomers prefer iPhone or even Kodak style of photos vs a Sony or canon ultra realistic style
I would say, instead of "ideally an Asian woman", a millennial woman. Was recently in a tourist spot for a work outing, we asked a random person to take our photo in front of the big monument and the photos were awful, including a finger of the photographer in each photo. This woman was in easily 50+. Gave the phone to a passing millennial aged woman and got 10 well compositioned photos in both landscape and portrait mode.
Where would you place Nikon, Panasonic, and Olympus on the spectrum of Kodak to Sony?
You’re weird. The vast majority of instagram using women take so many photos that the joke is that “the camera eats first”.
I’m actively exhausted when I go out with my partner because I know that I’m going to take lots of photos.
I’d love to be in a world where this is so rare that people can’t even explain where the photos go: but unfortunately I ask the opposite question, which is “where do these people get the time to do literally anything else with how crippling their social media and photography addictions are?”
> You’re weird. The vast majority of instagram using women take so many photos that the joke is that “the camera eats first”.
I’m not a woman nor do i use instagram or any other kind of social media.
If you think this is weird, then whatever culture you're immersed in, I want no part of it.
> This is the one thing that puzzles me most about dating apps: where do all these pictures come from?
People actually curate the profile and copywrite the text. It’s not real authentic life documented by accident. Once you put your profile there for others to judge you soon figure out that it needs to be manufactured. That’s when you start asking for others to snap a photo while your out doing the thing you maybe wouldn’t even do if it was not for the show.
This. People are taking trips just to collect dating/social profile pictures, it's insane how manufactured successful profiles are.
You only need a few pictures to fill a profile. Taking a few snaps when doing interesting stuff likely spread over months or years isn’t “documenting every second of our lives”.
If I take a picture I’m not in it. If someone else takes a picture they don’t share it with me. How would I get pictures for a profile?
Ask your friends for a picture if they take it…
+Fifteen years ago, Facebook was amazing for this: everyone posted all the pictures they took at [event] and tagged everyone who was in them. But, you know... That wasn't as profitable as all the [everything else] they thought up, and they ruined the platform.
Practical suggestion: you can ask. Someone takes a picture with you in it, say "hey, you mind sending me that?" Like lots of social things it's not automatic (which, you know, Facebook was for a few years, and that was nice), and you have to "put yourself out there" a bit. Most people won't say 'no', and the thread with the photo is an opportunity for further interaction, if you want it to be.
“Hey send me that one.”
or
“Hey let’s get a selfie.” (Do young people not say this anymore?)
There’s a pretty big range between “I don’t have any pictures of myself” and “documenting every second of our lives.” Most people are somewhere in that range.
You're not weird. I've wondered the same thing myself.
I used to take more pictures of myself on parties and general group events. Now I am less involved so less pictures are taken.
I went to a speed dating thing once that tried to incorporate its own (clearly homemade) tech stack into the experience. Every few minutes you'd get a text telling you who to find next... to look for the person in the red scarf or cowboy boots or something. By the time you found them and found somewhere to sit, you had a few minutes to talk.
It felt a bit unnecessary. In any case, maybe it was just how totally random in age and interest the people there were, but the result wasn't like cramming 15 online dates into the span of a single one. It was more like 15 conversations with people I would never have had the slightest impulse to contact via an online dating app. Most of the conversations had what felt like a comfortable mutual vibe of "we both understand we could not plausibly be attracted to each other." Then again, in online dating, I've come to realize that most guys incessantly swipe right, while I almost always swipe left.
A major factor in my world: the coolest people don't use dating apps because they find the experience awful and they have no problem meeting people in real life
The spicier version: dating apps select for personality disorders, and as such, being on a dating app in the first place is a negative signal
For what it's worth, I think this has always been true of the web in general (forums, chat, social media, comments sections, etc.)
It's even more stark if you weight it by sampling online content rather than a sample of people online (who are mostly lurkers). Certain types of people tend to post a LOT, so a random sample of online content will be biased towards the "high posting frequency" type of person, who is probably not a normal average type of person.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18881827
"Most of what you read on the Internet is written by insane people"
> A major factor in my world: the coolest people don't use dating apps because [...] they have no problem meeting people in real life
> The spicier version: dating apps select for personality disorders, and as such, being on a dating app in the first place is a negative signal
I guess a lot of people you would call "cool" I would rather call "annoying self-centered people who are often very concerned about their public image (i.e. narcists)".
Yes, this people may have a much easier time finding dates in real life, but if you are rather into different kinds of people for a relationship and are more on the introverted side, I guess dating in real life is not the best idea for success.
> I would rather call "annoying self-centered people who are often very concerned about their public image (i.e. narcists)".
You're essentially describing almost the entire online dating userbase here though.
How are people who are marketing themselves as the best chance for sexual gratification through display of their usually either materialistic or pretentiously modest lifestyle, providing useless tmi list requirements from the other party not self-centered?
They have literalized the concept of dating market, they have no existential inhibition of identifying as a product to be desired to be consumed as much as possible and treating others the exact same way.
Of course we have to thank a handful of evopsych "researchers" for that who are gaining traction from mass consumption podcasts by promoting their absurd, academically dubious fringe "findings" about supposedly deterministic human behaviors whose effectiveness is irrefutable for sexual reproduction success (remember, according to them homo sapiens have no deeper intellect and are moving meat that solely care about maximizing their offspring # and will do whatever it takes to succeed, so if you don't fit this description you're disordered and destined to extinction). Ideas that end up being diluted and appropriated by groups to demoralize those psychologically vulnerable.
My personal philosphy is that dating is extremely hard in dating apps to the point that its not worth it
I personally just try to talk to people (girls) my age who have similar interests and maybe express if I feel any emotions to them and accept or embrace both rejections/acceptations.
That being said, there is this idea of desperation of constantly needing someone to love you or is it too much to ask for being loved etc. I had created a place even whose intentions was to help people struggling in finding relationships but that made me realize that people just used it to ship each other or have controversies or use it as a way to meet/date and I was none the wiser/ didn't think much of it as I was decently happy thinking that some people connected because of my efforts yet i personally felt really weird with my niche hobbies and my place felt so mainstream that I couldn't be myself in my own place or didn't feel like it so I quickly abandoned it and now its just abandonware really
I personally feel like dating irl is the best thing after all my experiences or talking to people in general online, Even in dating irl, I would consider for many reasons that dating apps are still net negative. As I said, personally the best thing I feel like doing right now is maybe working on myself to be more confident and if i find a girl attractive and want to know more, then to directly approach her. Atleast, that's my goal in dating to be confident enough and to work on. myself on being a better partner.
The people I had in mind were the ones who are just friendly, kind, loving people (think: Miyazaki film character or something), but there are certainly self-centered people who would be embarrassed to be seen on a dating app too.
I think the core difference is whether you're connected into a healthy community or not, or whether you're outgoing enough to find yourself making friends in circles outside your own regularly.
I get this post is a bit of a hot take, but you make a good point. If you listen to "alpha women" (the most attractive), a common humblebrag that they use is: "Oh, I'm not even on the (dating) apps. I've got plenty of hot guys approaching me public."
As someone who is on the dating scene after my wife died of cancer some thoughts:
1) There are a lot more men on the dating apps than women.
2) Using just pictures to judge men doesn’t really work for women. See https://archive.ph/20251006053755/https://medium.com/the-kno... for discussion.
My personal experience, based on what I’m going through and what friends have to say:
3) 17 years ago, it was possible to meet and know really attractive women on the apps.
4) These days, the really attractive women no longer use apps.
5) The apps are optimized for engagement, not giving people successful romance.
Right now, the woman I’m currently dating is someone I met at church, not on the apps. The men I know who have success with women prefer the women they meet outside of the apps.
As a shy geek without too many social connections, the apps (websites, actually) were a very positive game changer 17 years ago. These days, they are more a liability than asset when it comes to dating.
I'm just not sure there's a real phenomenon here. People's complaints about dating apps match up pretty precisely with common complaints about dating more generally. It's an inherently frustrating process!
I think it's pretty telling that the alternatives people talk about are always alternative strategies for how to meet lots of people. The most common pre-app experience, where you didn't meet lots of people and married a random person in your social circles rather than a best friend who gets you and shares your key interests, isn't something most people are interested in.
People always "hated" dating apps, even when I used them back in the early 2010s.
However, like the iOS keyboard, people will put up with some annoyances if the overall product is valuable, and swiping for a mate (or, back in simpler times, answering heaps of questions on OkCupid and doing lots of clicking) is easier than doing so through church/school/work/bar/other opportunities through consistent exposure. (To wit: I met many incompatible people through the usual methods and met my wife through OkCupid, so the dating apps aren't useless!)
Also, as a former speed-dating host, speed-dating has always been something people mostly did for the entertainment value. I never did the math on it, but if I had to guess, it probably had about the same odds of finding someone than the apps back then.
I don’t think speed dating is as popular as submarine[1] articles suggest. But the constraint of being in-person and with a limited set of options may be helpful for some people. The paradox of choice is a significant issue on apps.
I do agree that bandwidth is significantly higher in person, we’ve evolved efficient pattern detection, and wish it were more acceptable to meet up for a quick coffee immediately after matching. But a few bad apples spoil the bunch.
There’s an alternate explanation - that the fittest companies prioritize engagement and revenue until reaching some threshold of user dissatisfaction. The healthiest businesses often have customers who wish they could leave, but can’t.
1 - https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
Tangential from your point, but I don’t think this is a submarine article. This is just a single blogger. “Submarine article” typically refers to articles written by large news corporations (NYTimes eg) and incentivized by PR firms - none of which applies here.
The reason I mention this is that “submarine article” is typically used to cast suspicion at the aims of the article. I can’t see any reason to do that to this article.
I was suggesting OP may have been influenced by submarine articles since the popularity of speed dating is a potentially unfounded premise of their argument. (Personally, I know very few folks who’ve done speed dating but of course that’s anecdotal.)
To the point about the incentives of for-profit companies: dating apps are more profitable if they take longer to match you with someone you like. If everyone finds their ideal match within a week, they cancel their subscription and the company makes no more money off them.
If the company puts some barriers in the app that slows down the process, you remain their customer for longer. Of course, there's a tension: they can't drag it out too much, or you'll get frustrated and leave.
OkCupid used to write about this effect, back when they were independent and free. But once they were acquired by Match Group they deleted their old blog and stopped talking about things like that.
Yes. OkCupid basically solved dating, at least for people like me. It took me 2 dates to find the love of my life, and then I left the site (and all dating sites) forever. I paid them $0. Match Group, whose sites are designed to keep you single or in repeated failed relationships forever, made lots more money, bought them out, and ruined the site so they would stop shrinking the market.
It's a lot like how tech companies, data and advertisers have ruined news, friendship, phone, email, politics, ...
Concerning "dating apps suck": OkCupid was decent in its heyday. But even at that time, there were very few users of it near the city where I lived or even in the country where I lived. Thus, it simply was nevertheless not useful to me. But no other dating site uses a similar algorithm; perhaps most people care about other things in dating than what OkCupid is optimized to give them.
That OkCupid was allowed to be sold to the Match Group was yet another massive antitrust failure
Founders selling out should also be viewed more critically than it currently is.
Truly one of the more despicable examples of enshitification.
OkCupid was amazing for those who made full use of its “here’s who I am and here’s who I want” question matching system. Removing those features and turning it into another swiping app was a terrible anticompetitive move.
I don't think speed dating is going to replace apps. I did some dating pre-app, it wasn't big then. Its unnatural, and doesn't appeal to many personalities.
I'm one of the men apps don't work for, easy to see why we hate them. For women, I think they say they don't like apps, but they do like the fact they get an endless stream of potentially date-able men from them. So their revealed preference is they like the apps, and that is why the apps continue to be relevant.
I may be showing my age, but my wife and I both agree that we were very lucky to have met just before the dating apps became a thing.
Alain de Botton claims (probably with only anecdotal evidence) that we tend to find love in people who remind us of the template our parents gave us… so this is an explanation why certain individuals end up attracted to loving terrible people. How would you hope to possibly convey this?
Also social proof is such a big deal for women, I think being in public your date can pick up on all sorts of qualities like self worth and confidence that are extremely difficult to convey on dating apps…
this: > ASAP when I connect with someone <
Just one point to add: Have a 5min call before to hear the voice. Weeks ago I had an "experience" with someone, her texts were absolutely OK but with small typos, some which are typical if you are learning the language but all in all it was possible to have a conversation.
Then we met.
She could barely form a useful sentence in real life conversation in our langugage, and she didnt speak English :-/
Not related directly to the article, but I’m so glad there’s a “tell me mistakes I made to fix” box. I wish more sites, hell even news sites had that.
Well, it could be related to the article, but I don't know how successful a "tell me mistakes I made to fix" box would be on dating sites.
OkCupid used to work on the basis of high bandwidth of information and excellent matches.
This wasn't profitable enough though so they changed to the Tinder-style swiping which doesn't work. More engagement interactions means more opportunity to show ads. If you find people good matches they will just leave the app.
I like these types of opinions that challenge entrenched beliefs, i.e. network effects etc. But in the end I don't think there's a contradiction -- if you have 30 people in the room speed dating, you have 30 people in the room. If you have 30 people on your app, you have 0 people on the app because most of them are there at different times and then they give up because nobody's there except them. People gravitate towards where everyone else is, in the case of a dating app it's where thousands of people in your area are, and for speed dating it's where 30 people per event are.
Dating apps feel bad not necessarily because they are less effective, but because they encourage a mindset that's draining: endless swiping, ghosting, the paradox of choice, etc.
I think the Job To Be Done of dating apps is "kill time on the couch". Dating apps aren't competing with speed dating; they're competing with Bejeweled. Basically dating apps are to love as Duolingo is to learning a language.
So ... dating apps just need to remove text messages and replace them with voice messages. Problem solved. Thanks!
Isn't it weird that they are called online dating apps and you can't date people online on them? You know, doing things like video calls. It's like Omegle and Discord are the actual apps where you get to date, whereas the dating apps are where you beg for attention.
Discord is where you go to be groomed into believing that you want to date anthropomorphic animals or worse.
Are there any dating apps that try to bridge the two worlds? That is, put focus on having short video conversations with as many people as possible, rather than just selecting people based on their profile/pics and then texting.
Makes you wonder why innovation hasn’t bridged this gap yet, especially when user dissatisfaction is so obvious. Is the winner-take-all dynamic just too strong?
My guess is that most startup founders are in a relationship.
I've been in a monogamous relationship for nearly 16 years I would thus not be in a position to be a first customer.
The problems, in my view, are bandwidth and behavior, but not for the reasons noted. In a dating profile, you can carefully curate every part of your first impression. This means that 1) you need to have basically a perfect profile (doesn't mean you come off as the hottest, just that it's all green flags) because otherwise you are not putting your best foot forward, and 2) the dating profile is not reflective of the reality of the person.
This leads into behavior, as you can spend however much time you want vibing and talking through text, but meeting and spending time together in person will invariably be different. This results in two major high-pressure, high-filter events as opposed to the one from initially meeting in person.
Nice theory but in my experience 98% of profiles are generic and say almost nothing.
> The problems, in my view, are bandwidth and behavior, but not for the reasons noted. In a dating profile, you can carefully curate every part of your first impression. This means that 1) you need to have basically a perfect profile (doesn't mean you come off as the hottest, just that it's all green flags) because otherwise you are not putting your best foot forward, and 2) the dating profile is not reflective of the reality of the person.
I would rather create a very honest profile because if some potential candidate is rather into the "artificial persona" that I project in my profile, when the relationship gets more serious, the match will soon realize that in real life I'm not a particular good fit.
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That filter graph: looks attractive and is not insane, i feel the last part could be its own category. I am prolly insane as well, but I would say 90% of my ‘dates’ through apps were, completely and utterly mental. The other 10% were amazing and friends for life!
Article leans heavily towards American social norms which are so far from global norms because it treats the U.S. model of dating (apps, atomized urban life, and market logic) as universal, ignoring that in much of the world relationships still form through family, community, or social context rather than algorithmic matchmaking. It’s a very “Silicon Valley is the world” kind of framing.
For example a lot of communities in Canada just don’t work like this. Highly incompatible with this kind of social network, mostly due to the pre existing real social fabric.
And: shout out to Max and Chris because they really got it with OKC in the beginning, which this article doesn’t seem to say anything about other than just to name drop.
You want one guy writing a blog to be an expert on dating worldwide?
I don’t like rampant US-centrism either, but at some point just write your own article on dating in Canada eh?
I’m guessing the author wasn’t around for the glory days of OKCupid. A distant memory at this point.
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Nerds will do everything to avoid practicing game, including writing blog posts
Not everyone is a disgusting hedonist wanting "game", you know?
I don't understand how hedonism fits into your argument. I can be a hedonist enjoying myself privately in my own four walls to the fullest without needing any game and pick-up artists.
You're reading B => A where I wrote A => B. If you're searching for "game", I reserve myself the right to use the word hedonist when describing you.
1) Good point. 2) Fine.