I mean 1) 'stable matching' is not how anyone would describe the experience of using IRL meetup apps
2) at best gale-shapley is being used for ranking, not for preference inference; IMO they removed the 'have you met' feature (guessing because users found it invasive and hated it), but would be interesting to use it for scheduling meeting slots, a resource problem more similar to med school matching. The idea of using math to meet a mate goes back at least to kepler https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/05/15/312537965/h...
3) gale-shapley is old science about how to rank given preferences, but the actual interesting question is how they're detecting preferences. What are the factors? Are some factors excluded? What can hinge (and their cousins at match.com and elsewhere) detect about a person from their profile + interactions? Are they using image analysis / NLP on profiles / chats?
(they're definitely not just using the user settings toggles for preferences; at minimum, they must have a global rank for showing popular profiles at the top of the stack. Also it makes sense this stuff is secret, it's a liability landmine)
I was wondering the same thing re: #3. Some of it is answered in the article but it reads like it was written by a pop-tech blogger and obviously very light on details. I'm not sure where the linked article gets its information, but it seems to suggest that Hinge might be doing some kind of image analysis, maybe:
> Your likes also play into it. The more you like certain types of people, the more Hinge learns about your preferences, as founder Justin McLeod told British Vogue: “It gets better and more accurate the more that you reveal your tastes.” It’s kind of like if you look at the past ten people you’ve dated or fancied, you’ll eventually start to see a pattern emerging, so you’ll have more success (in theory) if you start to seek these types of people out. I.e what’s the point in me going for short blondes when I know I’m only really attracted to tall brunettes? The answer is there is no point, and Hinge knows that.
And why wouldn't they be? It seems like an incredibly easy target for aligning visual preferences without having to ask.
Has Hinge avoided the dark patterns of the Match Group and/or Bumble (not sure if they were subsumed yet) in which men are shown "likes" only as bait to purchase a premium product and only rarely show up as potential matches? If so, what is their monetization strategy? It is fairly clear that a successful result in a dating app means at least one less user, polygamy and "ENM" notwithstanding. I believe that some apps have used success and subsequent loss of user as marketing to "prove it works" but I haven't seen that tactic lately. How does Hinge work?
Aside and FWIW I just starting using Bumble/Tinder after years of refusing, which came after years of a (disastrous) relationship developed via friend-of-a-friend-of-a-relative and I can't fathom how things work anymore since I don't encounter anybody of the gender I'm into in contexts where it's appropriate to initiate contact. I know the tropes and standard advice (hobbies, church, etc) but it ain't working anymore.
I can say that me personally found Hinge much more effective in finding someone than all the other apps. Among my friends is the one with highest success rate of long term relationships. I’ve gotten hookups or short lived stuff on Bumble, nothing I’d call luck off of tinder. We’ve all been trying to figure out what makes Hinge different and we think is that you get a lot of information when someone makes a comment on one of your posts (pictures, facts, whatever) that lets you select much faster than a simple empty match with no info.
> Has Hinge avoided the dark patterns of the Match Group and/or Bumble
The way likes function on Hinge makes it a bit harder to implement those dark patterns.
What they have done is pull out the most attractive users and put them in a 'Standouts' section. These users can only be liked by using a 'Rose'. Uses get one Rose every 48 hours (I think) and need to purchase more if they want to like more of the Standouts.
You get a separate stack where you can see the full profiles of the people who liked or messaged you, the only thing is that you have to react (match, message, or reject)to the top profile in the stack before you can see the next (which you might be able to skip with premium?)
I was talking to someone the other day who told me he was dating a woman he met on Match (I believe this was several years ago) and noticed her profile was still active after they had decided to be exclusive. He asked what was going on. She told him Match gave her a really good deal on a year membership, but only if her account remained active. Since it was still early in the relationship, she didn’t want to kill her membership if things didn’t work out. So when women aren’t responding, it’s likely they are in a relationship already and just leaving their account hanging out there to keep their deal. This gives guys the impression they have a lot more options on these sites than they actually do.
Can you imagine what it would have looked like if dating apps existed in the war ravaged nations of Eurasia post World War II? Ladies would have been fighting tooth and nail for a good man, because they were hard to find after the world went to war with itself.
> Ladies would have been fighting tooth and nail for a good man
They probably already were.
I have heard factoids that the emphasis on heavy makeup and dressing up among Eastern European women was as a result of the dearth of eligible young men post WW2.
This is getting voted down, but while the percentage is debatable, it still feels somewhat true (in a limited set of contexts).
Online dating (which often gets mentioned in regards to this) gives people a sense of choice which they wouldn't necessarily get to such a degree when dating more "organically", thus it becomes easy to compare people against one another in a standardized manner and go for the ones you find to be the most appealing, which you wouldn't necessarily otherwise even meet in person. Similarly, being someone who's interesting and fun in person might also naturally catch others' attention - being the person with interesting stories, nice jokes and just someone who feels fun to be around and is confident.
If you are close to "average", this might also lead to you comparing yourself against others to a degree that is similar to the one found in social media, the effects of which on one's sense of self-worth aren't necessarily all that positive, unless they make you strive to improve yourself. People suggest that you really should socialize outside of online dating and not get too caught up in it - both to improve your social skills, gain actual friends and acquaintances, as well as become more comfortable with approaching people in the romantic context, should the opportunity present itself.
Personally, I've largely resigned myself from online dating and much of social media, though perhaps that's because of my introverted nature. Regardless, actually visiting other countries or even just participating in interest groups/events has been nice, as has been expanding my social circle - over the years, it has also lead to a relationship or two.
There was a very detailed article that used data collected in Tinder. It showed something like 80% of women fought for 20% of top men and other way around. This basically meant that large number of men are being left out cold in dating scene. This pattern is across all online dating causing steep rise in men who are alone without partners in their 30s. However, there will likely no impact on birth rates significantly because women ultimately bear children for multiple highly desirable men but from small pool (either through multiple marriages or staying single). This is not very different from times before agriculture as DNA analysis shows significant portion of men didn't had offspring as more powerful men had access to larger than their fair share of women. The online dating has made the game as fierce again but this time voluntarily from both genders.
> There was a very detailed article that used data collected in Tinder.
Survery* OkCupid* and 2011*.
> It showed something like 80% of women fought for 20% of top men and other way around.
It showed that women rated 80% of men below average. Which is pretty understandable, in okcupid and in 2011. That is an insane sample bias, when women look at men in ACTUAL research they tend to rate in a bell curve, and are actually kinder to age than men that tend to rate older women super low.
> This basically meant that large number of men are being left out cold in dating scene.
The data from the same survey showed a lot of those women ended up in relationships outside that 20%. Women rate look as the 4th most important thing in a man.
It seems like you probably need to check first hand sources instead of parroting whatever youtuber you heard this from cause you extrapolated conclusions from data you never checked and got all the conclusions wrong.
I used to work at a dating service pre-Web. I was in the thick of the data, so to speak, and noticed a lot of trends which haven't really changed.
1) Men ask women out a lot; women only rarely ask men, and when they do, they tend to all be the same guys. They really converged.
2) Women rated the importance of their preferences higher than men do, at almost every aspect.
3) When someone says, "Oh, women would never actually judge men based on ..." assume the opposite. Income and height were always in the top five.
4) Despite pushing people to match on commonalities of interest and psych stuff, it was the "chemistry" factor that dictated who got asked out, who accepted, and so on.
5) It was in no way egalitarian and always tended toward "grim and depressing truth about people." All of this has only been accelerated in online dating.
Tempted to see if those old floppies survived and if I could retrieve anything in dBase III or whatever it was. I'd still have to find a document stating what those referred to. Sample size wasn't too bad, a few thousand ... The thing is, I could do all that work, and the people who don't want to believe that people are like that? wouldn't believe it anyway. They'd just look for confounding variables and reasons to dismiss.
> The thing is, I could do all that work, and the people who don't want to believe that people are like that? wouldn't believe it anyway. They'd just look for confounding variables and reasons to dismiss.
That is probably the most frustrating thing about all this discourse. When people see the structure of dating (online and otherwise) presented, they ascribe negative traits to the populations whose behavior is described and assume that everyone else would make the same judgment. Because of that, they assume negative motives and take it on themselves to debunk or censor that data.
> That is an insane sample bias, when women look at men in ACTUAL research they tend to rate in a bell curve, and are actually kinder to age than men that tend to rate older women super low.
I think that the survey was pretty controversial and has since been quoted to death in all sorts of contexts. It would be nice to see this actual research which paints a different picture, so that folks here might actually discuss the findings.
I might have nothing to offer there, but people who work with statistics and whatnot would probably offer a good point or two.
> Women rate look as the 4th most important thing in a man.
I do think that the problem with most surveys is that there will certainly be biases in self-reported answers.
For example, if asked about what I'd prefer in a country, I might claim that I value human rights and liberty really highly, but then turn around and vote for politicians that would promise to lower the taxes instead. I would actually be picking a different set of characteristics/priorities than I had indicated previously - regardless of whether I actually believed my own answers and didn't know, or simply wanted to appear virtuous.
(just a made up example, I'm not sure how one would even measure what people actually value outside of asking them, maybe try to classify people based on various indicators)
> I do think that the problem with most surveys is that there will certainly be biases in self-reported answers.
Yeah and it's very typical with this question especially. You can't ask a woman what she values in a partner, because she will say whatever makes her look like a good person.
That's why so many girls list intelligence as an important thing in a man, and still the most intelligent guys get the least girls.
You need to look at how women actually choose their partners, not ask them how they would hypothetically choose. Look at the men that always have hot girlfriends and what they have in common, that's how you can make an empirical conclusion.
This is actually how you feed your confirmation bias, please be careful as a lot of the language you are using makes me worry about you.
There are many explanations for the phenomenon of dating, but your comment reads like a textbook example of someone looking to confirm beliefs.
Why couldn’t attractiveness simply be a cross product of money and physical activity level? In that case, hot people end up together due to economics and interests.
Isn’t that the whole “system 1” and “system 2” thinking? One being your logical brain and one being your practical brain. Hence why some supermarkets are testing shelving layouts in VR because if you survey people they’ll tell you one thing but in practice they’d actually do something different :)
The OkC study (and the Tinder study mentioned in a sibling comment) are pretty much worthless either way, and people should stop citing them. The only really meaningful way to look at these things are measures of the actual relevant outcomes (likes, matches, conversations, dates), which is hard without access to actual dating app data.
An engineer at Hinge did exactly this for a post on the blog, calculating a Gini coefficient for (IIRC) match rates:
Naturally, it was taken down, but it did show that heterosexual matches were distributed in a much more lopsided way among men than among women. Though that can't be taken as a justification of "20% of the men get 80% of the women", which is either (obviously) false as stated, also true of the distribution of X among women, or incoherent as a meaningful metric.
> Though that can't be taken as a justification of "20% of the men get 80% of the women", which is either (obviously) false as stated, also true of the distribution of X among women, or incoherent as a meaningful metric.
Not that I agree with the quote, but... why would any of these assertions be true?
I suppose that depends on what "get" means in the quote. I think it's immediately evident that, say, 20% of men aren't married to 80% of women, for example -- so if that's what "get" means, then that doesn't add up. But I see nothing inherently wrong with the notion that 20% of men could be taking 80% of women off the market. Not because these men are dating approximately 4 women each at the same time, but because they could be rapidly playing the field. If these men are engaging in short flings with women, it would seem reasonable that the women might not want to settle on anything less than the 80 percentile of men, knowing that they can briefly hold out until another top 20%er comes along. That effectively takes them off the dating market for the other men.
Again, the stats could disagree with such a hypothesis, but I don't think there's any inherent logical contradiction in the hypothesis itself.
If we're talking about hooking up with people met at the bar, I can maybe see the quote making sense. But if we're talking about meaningful relationships, I actually find it hard to believe that a man is having a hard time finding a partner because "20% of men are stealing all of my opportunities." Though that could be easy for me to say if I'm just that damned attractive, but I don't suspect that's the case :).
Noting that we agree that the actual stats would disagree about the hypothesis.
If I might take the liberty of riffing off your model, let's take it as "looking at the the sexual encounters that occurred over a duration on the scale of months, you can select a certain subset (~80%) of women who will have had sexual relationships exclusively with a certain subset (~20%) of men." I'd put that version down as falling into my first category of obviously false. I.e. sexual relationships don't form a disjoint graph, even excluding the edges from that 20% of men to the nonselected 20% of women. I don't think it's inherently incoherent, just wrong.
We can weaken it to "Over some duration on the scale of months, you can select some relatively small subset of men (~20%) who will have been the partners in a disproportionate number (~80%) of sexual relationships." This is likely and plausible, but it's likely and plausible that you could apply that same procedure to women to get a similarly surprising pair of numbers, because of how social graphs work, i.e. the bulk of a measure is driven by the extremes of the distribution. It's interesting, but it doesn't tell us much about the differences in how heterosexual men and women pair.
I'd read your proposed model as stronger than the second version and perhaps a bit weaker than the first. Maybe modifying the first model by adding something like "Half of those selected 80% of women will also have formed a single edge with the nonselected 80% of men." I think this is a viable way to recover it into something more plausible, but in doing so we've the changed the actual claim to something like "you can select a certain subset (~80%) of women who will have had sexual relationships exclusively with a certain subset (~40%) of men." That's a much weaker and less shocking claim than the original, and I wouldn't be surprised if you could again apply that same procedure to women and get similar numbers out of it.
I think we can make statements about the structure of the sexual relationship graph that point to differences in how men and women form sexual pairs, but those aren't as easily understandable. "The distribution of sexual encounters among men have a Gini coefficient of 0.654, while among women it's 0.562" doesn't really make for a punchy soundbite.
But the Hinge data only shows, a fairly obvious in hindsight, observation. That if we live in a society where men are expected to ask women out, the only men women will ask out are those they really wan't to get.
In other words, if you checked for example superlikes which are capped for men, or Roses on hinge, I am sure the same lopsided percentage shows up.
I don't have the actual Hinge post on hand, but if I recall correctly it measured heterosexual matches, which each involves one woman and one man, and it was the distribution of those matches that was more uneven among men than among women. That wouldn't be affected either way by who initiated.
Power and compatibility doesn't correlate from visual attractiveness, especially in photos where many otherwise attractive people are simply not photogenic. Yes the market (because that's exactly what it is now, which is what sets it apart from the pre-agriculture era) is fierce, and it's based on faulty preferences - it's almost completely about the photos.
Statistically, couples who vet each other based on purely visual characteristics like height, body shape, skin colour and facial structure do not fare well in terms of relationship stability. This is a net negative for both women and men.
Women do not find powerful or uniquely attractive men, they find conventionally attractive men and push the market towards homogenisation. That's incredibly damaging from a societal growth perspective; it weeds out innovators and eccentrics. It forces people to change their priorities to become more homogeneous, and at the same time be the best at it. This is keeping up with the Jones' on steroids.
The technology we made for convenience is incredibly dangerous and potentially harmful in many aspects to both individuals and communities, and trying to rationalize it as weird but acceptable because of some parallels in history does nothing to address valid issues.
> Statistically, couples who vet each other based on purely visual characteristics like height, body shape, skin colour and facial structure do not fare well in terms of relationship stability.
You’re talking about people finding each other physically attractive. What world are you living in where physical attraction isn’t the dominant deciding factor for finding a mate?
It's not a good basis for a relationship. In traditional courtship couples woo each other and show attractive characteristics besides the way they look - in fact your behaviour changes the way you look to others. That's why "friend of a friend" relationships have always been so common. It was always a safe and appropriate environment for courtship. Dating apps are creating a powerful disincentive against the possibility of creating relationships through communal meetings by changing the rules of courtship through market dynamics.
Physical attractiveness may be pretty important, but romantics find a way to create beauty regardless; like the Quasimodo story. It should make it easier to find mates, not be a prerequisite.
People as a whole have about double as many female ancestors as they do male ancestors. The last century is a relative abnormality with monogamy and chastity outside monogamy being pushed for the sake of social stability, along with not as much war killing off most young men.
>People as a whole have about double as many female ancestors as they do male ancestors.
I'll take your word for it, but I don't think that means "women bear multiple children with a small pool of highly desirable men..." or something. It's equally likely that the converse situation makes offspring less successful for some reason. For example, women with multiple partners could have access to more resources by proxy of those relationships, which in a patriarchal society would be greater than the resources a man with multiple partners could access.
When you speak of monogamy and chastity being a rarity in antiquity, you’re talking about men, right? Were the women involved in these polygamous relationships expected to engage with other men freely?
Not just men, no. Chastity insists women don't put out easily and vet beyond initial expectations, which is what you see in more traditional "no sex before marriage" type of relationships. Our more savage ancestors couldn't care less about that when they were in heat, be it men or women.
Monogamy isn't something you can attribute to just men either, when it requires women to be okay with sharing a guy (either active sharing or the guy monkey branching). Ever noted the stories of men in relationships/married tend to get more attention from women other than their partner than before? If you're going to actively flirt or seduce taken men, you're not just an idle player.
On top, women have a fairly large window they could have sex with anyone and be at incredibly low risk of getting impregnated. Even if female ancestor count is double that of male, that doesn't mean there wouldn't be women giving out pity sex for desperate men in exchange for other favors.
It takes two to tango chastity / monogamy, just like all (legal) things relationships.
Writing the definition hurts peoples feelings and they downvote. Humans haven't evolved a lot in the last 200K years. But doing the opposite of: being short, poor (not stocks poor, you can't drive a stock), clueless of social interaction, being fat, no muscle, not being fun, reading hacker news, having low social status, being unfunny, being needy, being `unsexy`, bad fashion, being bald and not owning it, etc.
The 5% thing is entirely unsupported by any evidence whatsoever.
You can just look outside your window and see the thousands of couples that exist, most of whom do not include a "top 5% man". The theory of hypergamy, and the idea that is so much worse in the digital age, is unsupported by facts.
For exampple Tinder has a hidden rating for each person, so lets say you are an average girl and Tinder has rated you as a 5/10. You can probably only see men that Tinder has rated 4-6. Even if you wanted to go for a "top 5%" man, algorithmically he would not even show in your feed.
Humans are biologically programmed to find suitable partners, we value many things beyond looks or social status and the basis of relationships is varied, complicated and researched to death.
There is no gaggle of desperate women running after a succesful hot man in a suit who keeps denying their advances. This is simply not happening
Of course it's not happening, because that's a weak-man version of the argument (at best).
We still have a strong norm for monogamy, so of course you're going to see plenty of couples when you look out the window. The "stable marriages problem" resolving itself is always going to lead to a lot of marriages... What you don't see is how those people feel. Do they feel lucky to have their partner? Or do they feel that it's mostly the partner who's lucky in having them?
> What you don't see is how those people feel. Do they feel lucky to have their partner? Or do they feel that it's mostly the partner who's lucky in having them?
This is not a magical question, its been researched multiple times. People are less picky than they think, and we grow attached to people. Even if someone had feel like they settled in a relationship (btw this isn't happening, young people are taking twice as long in the dating part before marriage) the feelings grow quickly and we are progressive in the sense of progressing the relationship over breaking it.
If anything the problem is the opposite, people grow attached too quickly and many existing relationships shouldn't.
>This is not a magical question, its been researched multiple times. People are less picky than they think, and we grow attached to people.
I'd really like some actual sources on this. This has not been my experience nor the experience of many people I know, at all. Both sides are pickier than ever before with instant gratification running rampant, both sides are advised not to settle too quickly. Even if I want to agree with the growing together part, I'm not getting nearly the same vibe from society pushing people to settle together as was prevalent prior to the sexual revolution.
> I'm not getting nearly the same vibe from society pushing people to settle together as was prevalent prior to the sexual revolution.
Young people ARE taking longer to settle, and divorces are also down, the longer courtship before the commitment can be related to a million things, including lessons learnt from the mistakes of our parents, overcoming religious pressures etc
I can only access the abstract, but it seems fairly obvious there's a massive selection bias here which doesn't hold for the total populace. These people are selected to speed date in person by a commercial firm. That already surpasses the initial hurdle of trying to get a date. Furthermore, this doesn't tell me anything about pickiness, rather than "what people say isn't as they do".
Same story, only abstract. Without knowing the details, I can only assume they got people over the initial hurdle of establishing contact. Yes, I agree once you get over the hurdle, it isn't as bad as people say. It's the initial hurdle which is the problem.
The study also doesn't refute what I'm saying. Even if people are less picky than is indicated, it doesn't make a single mention that people are less picky or just as picky as they were a few decades ago. Given, that wasn't your point, but it is the point I am most interested in.
I fully agree with this one anecdotally, but again, it doesn't really deal with the initial hurdle. All it confirms is "once you get over it, it's not that bad". It speaks far more favorably of people willing to work through their problems and working together, but that won't help you if your potential partners never give you a chance. It's the approach phase I am most curious about and whether this has changed among younger generations.
I'm not gonna try to defend GPs theory, but you're misrepresenting their post. The claim was that women supposedly "fought" for those "5%", in the context of dating apps. OP didn't claim women exclusively dated them or ended up with them in the real world. There's no "man in a suit denying advances". This is Tinder, people can just swipe to one direction or the other.
thats true, I replied to what they implied rather than what they said. And then they replied and proved what I had read between the lines is what they meant.
> The claim was that women supposedly "fought" for those "5%", in the context of dating apps. OP didn't claim women exclusively dated them or ended up with them in the real world.
If you fight for something, then your attention, time and effort is spent on that. The resulting relationships would therefore just be women spent from trying to get with those men and settling for everyone else, again something demonstrably false by the countless happy couples out there. It would be impossible if the basis of 95% of them was a tired, desperate women who ended up with Craig cause that top 5% man said no to her repeatedly.
Again, nobody is "saying no repeatedly" to anyone, because the app works by swiping and matchmaking. There are no conversations without matches, so there's no "tired, desperate women" that got "rejected" by lots and lots of men (and vice versa, men also spend a lot of time there). That's absurd, there's just a lack of matches. Similarly, in the real world there would be no "hard rejections" if this OPs theory were true, just harmless refusal to flirt.
> There is no gaggle of desperate women running after a succesful hot man in a suit who keeps denying their advances. This is simply not happening
Go to a place where there are a lot of women. The simplest example is dancing class(es). Become the top 5% guy there (not 5% in dancing, top 5% male in general) and see. The same thing by being top 5% in your high school or university.
Literally anywhere, they are 50% of the world population
> The simplest example is dancing class(es
In what sitcom universe is dancing classes the simplest example of a place to find women? Also not a dating place, they are there to learn to dance.
> Become the top 5% guy there (not 5% in dancing, top 5% male in general) and see.
Do you need a card? Or is this one of those "if you are 6ft tall and rich women swoon over you like a disney movie" spiel?
I have danced a lot and trust me, people who go in front of others and can dance, even if they are average, get way more attention than pretty boys who sit standing still in the back acting like they are too cool. Courage, getting out there, skill, practice, being fun to be around, are skills people value much more than looks.
Btw see how I said people all the time and not women, because those skills work beyond dating, even if they certainly work for dating.
> Also not a dating place, they are there to learn to dance.
What is a dating place then? Do girls actually go anywhere specifically to date? In my experience any event/meetup/whatever that explicitly mentions dating/singles/mingling becomes a sausage fest right away.
You could say exactly the same thing about bars and clubs. They are there to have fun with their friends, not to date.
Well the topic of this post is dating apps where everyone there is explicitly down to date.
> In my experience any event/meetup/whatever that explicitly mentions dating/singles/mingling becomes a sausage fest right away.
>You could say exactly the same thing about bars and clubs. They are there to have fun with their friends, not to date.
I agree, some men act like dating is a hunting ground probably part of the reason why dating apps have so few women.
Well my point is that if you ask a woman out at a dance class, she can certainly turn you down because she is not interested in you. But it can also be because thats not what she came for. Like I might love Pizza, but if I go to my accountant and he offers me some, I probably will turn it down.
Common interests like dance, can be a starting point for a relationship, and classes with people can be a jumping point to talking and seeing if there is any chemistry. But your intention to going to dance classes shouldn't be dating women, it will never work out that way.
I see your point, I even heard something like this from a female acquaintance: "oh, I dance bachata because I just love the dance, why are they all hitting on me?!"
And yet, I can hardly believe that the dance where the main point is "how to make a girl grind on your crotch in a way that is acceptable in public?" can be seen as just a dance and nothing else. Before you ask, yes, I danced bachata for many years.
As for online dating per se, if we accept that there are a lot more men on dating apps than women, it means only a minority of single women use them at all. If you rely only on apps you will miss out on a huge part of your dating pool. Who wants that?
> And yet, I can hardly believe that the dance where the main point is "how to make a girl grind on your crotch in a way that is acceptable in public?" can be seen as just a dance and nothing else.
Well I can speak of Salsa more than bachata, but you can like the dance without liking the partner. Like I would love to dance a Waltz in my wedding, and would have to practice first, doesn't mean I wanna marry the lady in the class. Some women might want to have their boyfriends crotch but in the class they just have to put up with whoever is there.
And again, if you go to a dancing class cause you are interested in dancing. And in a break talk to the people in the class. And one guy likes movies and one girl likes rock climbing and youre like "oh I love rock climbing too" and you talk about that and the next class you talk some more and then you ask her out for a coffee. Thats normal. But if you go to a bachata class, rub yourself like a monkey on people and before knowing their name ask a girl out, then you wont get turned down because you are not a top 5% man.
> If you rely only on apps you will miss out on a huge part of your dating pool. Who wants that?
I wanted that when I used them. Mostly because it had the advantage that I knew they were looking for dates, and could unmatch if they werent feeling it. I never felt I was imposing on any girl by talking to them on a dating app, so even if it has drawbacks, their ability to leave anytime made it much easier to be forward and honest than if you talk to someone in a cafe.
> Literally anywhere, they are 50% of the world population
In a bar that plays soccer games, 3% are women. In a dancing class of bachata, ~75% are women. In a kickboxing class that have active fighters, 7% women. At least it is where I live in Europe.
> Do you need a card? Or is this one of those "if you are 6ft tall and rich women swoon over you like a disney movie" spiel?
You are there to watch a game not flirt, who cares about percentage of women? Also in most of europe the percentage is much larger (for big games), same as superbowl parties in america have more than 3% women.
> In a dancing class of bachata, ~75% are women.
Yes every bachata class in the planet has 75% women. Also there to dance, not to flirt.
Those are insanely varied, and vague things though. Signifiers of social status can get vain people interested but that does not realte to long term relationships or success in dating. Attracting gold diggers is not a superpower, and honestly a pretty undesireble thing to want anyway. It'd be like writting a guide into how to attract Pick Up artists as a woman, why would anyone want that.
If anything the list being so long proves the 5% thing cannot possibly be true, you can do the math, but if people happen in a regular bellcurve, being top x% of something, across multiple variables exponentially decreases the chance of finding anyone. Therefore someone close even to top 5% in even half of those categories would be 0.001% of the human population.
In other words, women like a varied number of things, men do too, and in that complicated mix of wants, needs and preferences dating is a varied exercise that leads to finding suitable partners, which happens for most people.
I'm sorry but this conversation is in vain. Feel free to say the last word.
> Also there to dance, not to flirt.
Because you are not hot enough.
> Yes every bachata class in the planet has 75% women. Also there to dance, not to flirt.
I'm pretty certain of my opinions on only things that I have 5+ years experience in (bachata/salsa, kickboxing, programming, few other personal things).
> that does not realte to long term relationships or success in dating
I was never speaking of long term relationship success. I was saying what woman "want".
Yes women are unable to say no if you are hot enough. Its a defect they have from birth. You said you are pretty certain in things you have 5+ years of exp in, so how come you are sharing your opinion on what women want? Shoouldn't you at least get an internship on that before sharing your "knowledge" ?
> I'm pretty certain of my opinions on only things that I have 5+ years experience in
Google sampling bias, confirmation bias, empirical data != research and "how to not confuse my personal experience with reality". I knew most people didn't know that correlation != causation but I wasn't expecting people to not know their bachata class might not represent 8 billion peoples experience...
> I was saying what woman "want".
And you would be wrong about that, because your research is you confirmation bias and not any actual study.
Talking to a woman who isn't your mum is usually a good first step.
> I never researched and never wrote that I researched.
Yet you claimed as universal truth that women fight tooth and nail for the top 5% of men.
Why not just say "In my limited, biased and provably wrong opinion I think dating looks like this".
You said you have a background in CS right? Cool, you are using a training set of 2005 songs and now you are trying to analyse all the music in the world. Your training set is insufficent, personal anecdotes are not data, and there is enough noise on the internet for you to add more pollution on men/women dynamics.
> Courage, getting out there, skill, practice, being fun to be around, are skills people value much more than looks.
I don't think this is universally true, I bet it works in a lot of cases, but the opposite is often true as well. Try too hard and you look desperate. And looks will always win past a certain level, if you are johnny depp level attractive, you will always get the girls over some average looking guy who is working his ass off.
I bet the same goes for money as well past a certain level.
You can easily google it. Women rate looks as the 4th most important attribute in dating. as always, its an average, there are some vain people who only care about looks. They are by no means common or enough to make 95% of men undateable.
> And looks will always win past a certain level
pretty people who are single say the same thing about people with money. People with money say this about younger people. Turns out its never their fault, and its just something unattainble someone else has.
I guess blaming women is easier than working on yourself but that doesn't make it true.
I think you and those responding to you are saying many valid things, but there are ambiguities still. Does "dating" mean "late-stage worried-about-dying-alone parents-nagging-me dating"? Or does it mean "screw around and go where the wind takes me?". Is the context online or offline?
I think "looks win" accurately describes the way many women select men online for many of their dating years, but it can't continue forever. The "20% of the men get 80% of the women" works in short term dating, but it won't work out for more permanent relationships. From 100 men and 100 women, 20 men would pair with 20 women, and you have 80 men and 80 women left over. So they start to change preferences as they get older. And women know that a man can have a trait that's useless in the bedroom but very useful when raising a child.
It's also hard to say what "4th most important" means. Maybe looks are the 4th most important thing, given that the man is, at a minimum, in the top X%. But what's the formula? There are nonlinearities also, i.e. you can't always compensate. Having a million dollars and being 5.5 feet tall is better than having a billion dollars and being 4.5 feet tall, I'd predict. Something can be low-importance, but just about anything can be a dealbreaker.
I think you're correct in saying the gender inequity isn't so terrible at the end of the day. I predict if you surveyed both genders about whether they get what they really want out of online dating, they'd largely say no. Yes, the average woman has lots of options on Tinder, but that doesn't mean the average woman enjoys using Tinder much. Men think women have it great online because the women have what men want - lots of choice. But I have many female friends who are depressed about dating despite their long list of suitors. They struggle to build satisfying connections. We could ask who is to blame, but I'll just note at the end of the day, one side might be slightly happier than the other ... but only slightly! So frustrated people should keep that in mind.
Something about the way dating apps are set up lead to suboptimal outcomes, for both sexes.
As a point of evidence, I mostly used Tinder before meeting my current girlfriend on it, because Hinge and Bumble are unusable for me because they both require listing height, which results in me getting no matches from women on them. But, interestingly, my current girlfriend (and the girlfriend before her!) said that she wouldn't have matched with me if I had listed my height: in real life, however, it's not a concern, and she bemoans the fact that we spent so much time within a half mile of each other without meeting and she wasted so much time with people who weren't as compatible.
Women are inundated with options, so they have to filter them somehow: most women have similar preferences in men, and so once they filter their particular matches to those men who meet those easily filterable preferences, they end up with men that have already been heavily picked over and haven't left the market, either because they don't want a relationship or because they have other characteristics that result in them exiting relationships relatively soon after they start. So it ends up being a market for lemons (if a relationship is what the woman is looking for), leading to lots of mediocre or bad experiences.
Yeah, traditional Boolean search would be an improvement in some ways: “show me men taller than 6, or programmers of any height” (heh), but that’s either too overwhelming for users, or promotes spam or scraping or stalking or something. But maybe more choice isn’t the answer. Or maybe if you gave people the flexibility, they would be more cognizant of all the things they’re missing out on, and of the difficulty of getting it right, and take a less targeted approach with less “overfitting”. But the current system of independent “AND” cutoffs is what people get forced into. And an algorithm is a good alternative, but people don’t trust the algorithms much.
I'm pretty sure that if you somehow gave people an accurate filter for "loving partner who is looking for a long-term monogamous relationship underpinned by mutual care and affection," it'd instantly become the most popular one. But that's impossible to verify without weeks or months of dating. And there really isn't a good proxy for it, and if there were, it'd be quickly gamed.
I do suspect you could mitigate the market-for-lemons/selection effect by allowing filters on number of likes/matches and duration of time spent on the app: if someone has been on an OLD app for years consistently getting dozens of likes per day, they probably aren't a likely candidate for a long term relationship. But that'd be much less popular, because few people are willing to focus on potential partners not many other people want.
> Does "dating" mean "late-stage worried-about-dying-alone parents-nagging-me dating"? Or does it mean "screw around and go where the wind takes me?". Is the context online or offline?
Screw around part, before the predisposed expected monogamy bit usually called boyfriend/girlfriend. Holds for both.
> I think "looks win" accurately describes the way many women select men online for many of their dating years
This cannot be true. Just algorithmically, they have a rating for you, so women cannot pick men outside their rating regardless of their preferences. (I don't agree it would hold if they could pick any man, but its a moot question because they simply can't)
> The "20% of the men get 80% of the women" works in short term dating,
It doesn't. That fact comes from a horrible game of telephone, from a survey ran in a blog over a decade ago. The attempts to make an intellectual sounding argument for redpilling started early with comments about the Paretto principle. But thats not what the data showed at all.
> From 100 men and 100 women, 20 men would pair with 20 women, and you have 80 men and 80 women left over.
In the uk less than 50% of people are single in their 20s which is the heaviest user base of online dating sites.
> And women know that a man can have a trait that's useless in the bedroom but very useful when raising a child.
The idea that women go on sexual rampages after tall chiselled bodied men in their 20 and find a chubby bald rich 40 year old to settle after they are done is unsupported by data, research and anything outside of 4chan greentext stories. Which is where the idea started and should have died.
> It's also hard to say what "4th most important" means.
Women are asked to name what is important in a relationship, what is a dealbreaker, etc And looks hardly come first. Funnily enough in men appearance is quite an important metric early but goes down with time. Women usually say "stable income" as one of the most important things, many times above wealth (specially inherited many women prefer a smaller stable income over a one time larger paycheck).
> but just about anything can be a dealbreaker.
Sure, but thats on the extremes. Most humans fall in a bell curve, and 80% of them are not being tossed away over some perceived lack of top percentagedness.
> I think you're correct in saying the gender inequity isn't so terrible at the end of the day.
And at the start of the day.
> I predict if you surveyed both genders about whether they get what they really want out of online dating, they'd largely say no.
at the end of the day, its a company, they are there to make money not make you happy. Their product is access to women, their business model exploiting men loneliness.
> that doesn't mean the average woman enjoys using Tinder much.
They don't, which is why there are few women and why most feautures are designed either to make money or to retain women and nothing else. Those are the two metrics tinder checks.
> Women rate looks as the 4th most important attribute in dating.
You can't ask women this, see instead who the men are that get the most girls, there's your answer. Actions speak louder than words, and women are infamous for their cognitive dissonance in the field of mating.
> pretty people who are single say the same thing about people with money. People with money say this about younger people. Turns out its never their fault, and its just something unattainble someone else has.
And the young, pretty and rich people don't say anything, because they do in fact get first choice.
Well there are a number of ways to show some of those in your profile. From your job, your photos, the activities you are doing in those photos, the people with you in them, your bio....
you can obviously lie about a number of them, but that probably would lead to a number of unsucessful first dates. On the other hand a weaker profile might lead to less dates, but if you have those skills in real life it might lead to a number of succesful dates.
When attributes people desire in something are hard to judge, but there are some secondary attributes which are easier to judge, then they often go for the latter. To at least get "something". The less willing they are to do that, the less willing they are to participate in the first place.
There are some really nasty "market for lemons" effects in online dating, and it seems clear to me it really makes things harder for young people. I am not young myself, and have no need for online dating, so this is how it looks to me from the outside.
Your repeated dismissal of these experiences in this thread comes off to me as a bit callous.
There are tons of celebrity gossip about super attractive people who don't sleep with each other anymore. Dead bedrooms and non working partner dynamics has nothing to do with the silly "women only want top 5% of men". Some of those men are in dead bedroom situations, thus if anything it furthers my point.
Dating apps are so bad, the ratio of men:women matches would impress a red-pilled 4channer.
Most men get somewhere like 0-4 matches a week and most women get somewhere like 100-1000. That’s a 25x difference best-case scenario and often it’s over 100x. Which is kind of insane considering there are about 50/50 men to women ratio in real life.
People say “the 20% top men get 80% of matches” but it’s worse than that. The 20% top men may get something reasonable like 3-4 matches a day, but your average women is getting something crazy like 1 match every 15 minutes.
Because a lot of men like to swipe right on nearly everyone and buy passes which get them unlimited swipes. And most women get extremely choosy and swipe right on only the super handsome nearly-perfect men, but you can’t even blame them when they have literally 1,000 matches.
On top of that, the bios suck. Even on Hinge. You can’t base someone off of 6 pictures and 3 quotes. If you’re not judging them on plain attractiveness / photogenics, you’re judging them on one random quote or minor character trait you relate to.
Online dating sucks. You’re much better off trying to meet people in real-life situations, where there is a more reasonable ratio of men and women, you can learn more about people then their favorite vacation spots, and the people have a lot more time to learn more about you too.
Or, you can try meeting people online but not in a surface-level dating-oriented site. Plenty of people formed couples through discord or their favorite video games. Unfortunately my understanding is that most online places are still male-dominated, but hopefully that’s changing as we are becoming a more tech-oriented and women-inclusive society.
Dating does suck! Though I'm not sure that dating apps suck more than what they replaced - pubs and bars really. I'm old enough to have dated before apps were the default and it wasn't exactly a less superficial time.
My personal experience with bars is the ratio still isn't great at face-value (counting men vs women) and even worse when you dive deeper to consider the girls-night-out groups with women interested exclusively at spending time with their friends rather than looking for their partner (think bachelorette parties with half the girls in stable relationships).
Men (and women?) in IRL situations must overcome the barrier of: "is this person single or is their bf at home or in the bathroom"? Whereas dating apps provide an explicit context as to why both people are there.
Bars are great if you want to meet bargoing people. Personally, it seems more like selecting for an alcoholic, although that might say more about me than the people I meet at bars?
I am not sure I would recommend going to bars to find a partner.
That's really stretching it, having any disdain for any alcohol consumption. Having a drink in a bar to decompress after work is hardly being an alcoholic.
I think that as an average, alcoholics would rather not waste their money paying for alcohol in bars. Drinking cheap is more important than socializing fore people with an actual addiction.
I think you don't understand that you cannot escape the consequences of human mating behavior by making dating online to offline. 80% of women will prefer top 20% of men. You can go to bar and get some beer goggles for a while, but it will wear down eventually. In Western world, 30% of the couples end up in affairs and 50% marriages end up in divorce. Ask why.
I think it's obvious that people have preferences, and will seek partners that match those preferences better. But even if that's true, people have different preferences. People don't adhere to some universal rating system.
Because of the biological asymmetry between the sexes. A man can have thousands of children, and women can only have a small amount. It's what drives natural selection and evolution of the species. Some part of the men are supposed to get rejected.
I know this will be hard to swallow for a lot:
No polygamy is not stable and that is why it is outlawed in a lot of countries. Consider that men physiologically have a drive to produce wealth and "grow" to attract and sustain a family. (Nations I hear want that.)
What do you think throughout history the men that could not find a match did? They joined wars, became vagabonds, thieves, joined piracy or similar and went to forcefully acquire wealth and/or women (and rape). Needless to say a peaceful nation does not want that.
Men are going to fight the rejection tooth and nail (a trait evolved in a similar fashion).
I tend to agree with you that nations are essentially trying to optimize for wealth under their jurisdiction, but I don't think that _necessarily_ tells you anything about how they'll treat polygyny.
But this is natural because men like almost everyone while women like maybe a few men per day. It's not because their ratio is wildly out of balance, here in EU it is close to 50/50 and 60/40 in the U.S. In some countries like Peru, Tinder has considerably more women than men, and yet, men still get very few likes vs women there. It's not about numbers, it's about behaviour. It's never difficult for a woman to get laid vs man.
Don’t think that’s true. If the median man and woman went to the bar for the purpose of having sex that night the woman would be way more successful.
For most men if they are single and a reasonable attractive woman they have never met before walk up to them on the street and ask if she can sleep with them the man would think of course what is the catch, in the opposite case it would be what a creep.
It’s possible this is all cultural/social factors. But they are real.
There is still a gender-skew in the bar scenario, but less extreme as in the app.
If bar scenario had same gender skew as app, one man would go home with all the women in the bar that night.
There are physical limits that prevent this from happening. When a man is paired up with a woman in the bar, the man must ditch potential opportunities from other women in the bar.
>Don’t think that’s true. If the median man and woman went to the bar for the purpose of having sex that night the woman would be way more successful.
The men would be more successful, too if they would care less about the sex or gender of their sex partner. I heard gay bars have a very high rate of success.
>It’s not natural because if you go to a bar or other in person event, the dynamics are much less gender-skewed.
Many bars are in fact men clubs where men go to discuss stuff with each other. AT least, here, in Europe.
Also, in my country, I am not aware of "dating bars". Sure there are many bars full of both sexes, sometimes people begin relations or have sex with persons they've met at the bar, but that is not very common because people don't go to a bar with the expectation to have sex or begin a relation, instead they go to a bar to have some time with their friends.
Dancing clubs are a bit different, for people between 18 and 30 as some people go there with the expectation to find sex or a relation.
Aren't you comparing the ratio of males and females in the bar to the ratio of matches/messages for males and females on the apps? I'd guess males are initiating contact more than females in bars as well, unless things have changed?
No. I am comparing matches on app with matches at a bar.
Both cases would be gender-skewed. But to have the bar scenario be as skewed as the app, one man would go home with all the women in the bar. This is not the case in reality.
There are physical limits that prevent skews from being as extreme as in apps.
>It's never difficult for a woman to get laid vs man.
True and that's an evolutionary trait. Women evolved to find someone help them bring healthy offspring with good genes and help them care for their offspring while men evolved to spread their DNA as much as they can.
The goal is the same in the end, to have successfully spread their DNA, the strategies are different because the biology is different for each of the two sexes.
It's at the point where women don't benefit either though. Getting 1000x matches just leaves most women overwhelmed.
Plus a lot of those matches end up being low-quality even despite trying to be picky, because the apps are so surface level. Plenty of men manage to get great pics and quotes but turn out to be complete douches.
You're assuming that women want to find a relationship on a dating app. Tinder is essentially porn for women, where they get all the attention they want without doing anything for it. It's primarily entertainment. Using the app itself is the goal, so more interaction and more options are good for attracting a female user base. Of course this female user base has no interest in actually dating the male users and is thus worthless if your goal is matchmaking, but this is also good for the app since frustrated male users pay for premium accounts while happy couples uninstall the app.
If men are the ones paying and women getting in for free, this is no different to the nightclub cover charge model. In both cases, men are the real customers (big spenders) and women are the product. It's the same as the social media business. Advertisers are the customers and users are the product.
Why? In traditional products, the users pay for access to the assets. Dating app men pay for access to dating app women.
Women on the other hand are often given perks for free to get them to continue to use the app, making them a cost center the app must finance to maintain.
Edit: like don’t get me wrong, if we’re going to use such cold analogies the companies definitely care about their supply, they need to be able to sell it
Note that this is inherent to the current dating app models. Everyone I have spoken to who uses dating apps, male or female, intuitively understands this. The best strategy for men is to spam matches and messages as much as possible and hope you grab someone's attention. The best strategy for women is to filter heavily and pick randomly from the ones who get through and hope they aren't a weirdo. But those strategies, while optimal for individuals, make the experience overall disappointing.
I wonder if there is a way (in the game theory sense) to craft a strategy that is both optimal for individuals and the community, and then design an app around that.
> The best strategy for men is to spam matches and messages as much as possible and hope you grab someone's attention.
That’s a naive idea that makes it worse for everybody, including yourself.
If you’re genuinely looking for attention from anyone that’ll give it to you, you probably want to do some self-reflection.
More likely, I hope, you actually do know something about yourself and your tastes and can recognize that you’ll only be a good fit with a tiny fraction of the people on there.
If you’re not seeing that tiny fraction on the app or not matching with them, you either need to be patient, figure out ways to improve your profile, or figure out a different way to meet people.
Spamming indiscriminately may get you the a few extra internet points, but it doesn’t get you any good matches that you wouldn’t have gotten from being a genuine human person on there.
And it’s just makes an already crappy environment even worse.
In the book Dataclysm by Christian Rudder, he performs an analysis of OkCupid messages and responses. Number of responses received after an initial message was used as the success metric (because that's really the only thing they can accurately measure, no reliable way to quantify the quality or satisfaction from a conversation). Unsurprisingly, the men who sent the most messages performed better than average. More surprisingly, men who copied-and-pasted the same messages over and over again to different women did even better.
I don't know if this applies exactly to apps like Tinder and Bumble who use a hidden elo system, but it seems like sending as many messages as possible is (intuitively) a winning strategy. More messages = more opportunities.
EDIT: Sorry this is like the fifth time I've edited this. I think the conclusion from the OkCupid data is that writing thoughtful openers quickly hits diminishing returns. Thoughtful discussion won't ever be a bad thing, though.
Choosing a metric because it’s the only one you have doesn’t make it a good one.
The only person who cares how many responses you get from random people is a data scientist.
Presumably, you’re there to connect with people you’d have a good time with. You want to optimize for suitability, which has nothing to do with that metric.
(And besides, all of the apps now penalize indiscriminate swiping and other spammy behaviors that are cheap to track)
Both can be true. Is spamming the best strategy for Tinder? Yes. Spamming may be penalized but using the app discerningly (for men) is penalized more harshly.
Is using Tinder a waste of time? Yes, unless your value to the opposite sex can be encapsulated in one photograph (i.e. you spend a lot of time in the gym). There are easier ways to get laid.
> Presumably, you’re there to connect with people you’d have a good time with
It’s a casual sex app. Real dating apps have profiles.
I have comment before when his name comes up, I would take books or articles by Christian Rudder with a grain of salt. What he writes is probably generally true. But for the somewhat well known race and dating Ok Cupid article he didn't normalize the data. Didn't hold things like education constant.
What is presented in articles and books is probably a little more complicated than the conclusions that the readers is given.
The problem is, with so little information to go on I do actually think spamming quite a few women is probably the best policy, even if it has costs for the platform. Until you speak to someone a little you have not idea, so best to at least see unless you are getting so much attention it’s a burden.
I do think commercial dating apps need competition from something which isn’t having to optimise for revenue
>If you’re genuinely looking for attention from anyone that’ll give it to you, you probably want to do some self-reflection.
Not true. The larger you can make the pool the more fish swim in it. And mor sharks. But you get to pick the fish.
>Spamming indiscriminately may get you the a few extra internet points, but it doesn’t get you any good matches that you wouldn’t have gotten from being a genuine human person on there.
You don't really get to know a person from it's profile. Until you get to chat and meet in person there is still a % that you might like that person. Optimizing for outcomes brings the success here.
I always assumed this would be a winning play for dating apps. Limit the browsing and offerings so people are realistic in assessing others. Give people thousands of choices and they'll go after the best. Give them a realistic selection and they're more likely to take time and see positives in each opportunity.
Make sure the listings are accurate (quality, recent photos). Then repeat daily for each gender interest, location, etc.
> Limit the browsing and offerings so people are realistic in assessing others.
I've often wondered if there isn't some clever marketified/gamified version of this, where users can put on their profile "To contact me, you have to wait N days", where N is some variable they can control, and if the viewer clicks "Wait", they are prevented from browsing or messaging (or "Waiting" for) other people through the app for that period of time.
Of course people could still use other apps, which is probably the major flaw, but it would make people more selective about who they expressed an interest in, and in turn make the recipients feel more valued. Some people might set the parameter a little higher than their desirability really warrants, but I'd be intrigued to see how the meta-game around this develops.
I think people would still try their luck with more desirable prospects and end up getting frustrated.
Another idea is having a moderator of sorts. The moderator would pick from the "applicants" that make it through to the prospect, and mean that only high-effort options are seen. Removes "hey" and abusive messages from the pool.
Maybe applicants pay a $5 fee which is refunded if they are not picked as one of a handful of dates.
I like that, and it could be marketified/gamified too. People could put themselves forward as potential match-makers, i.e. moderators who screen introductory messages, and they can stake a certain number of points on whether they think the recipient will like the message. (They could also review abuse reports after the fact, including ghosting).
Over time, certain match-makers with a track record for finding good matches would be highly valued, and they could be given a free premium membership (giftable to friends) to reward them. I suppose the downside is that people who do a bad job at screening messages would end up having to pay more as a consequence, and the community might end up relying on a minority of users to do all this extra work.
> So you basically propose a Stack Overflow for dating?
If you put it like that, it sounds like a great idea!
> Why not let the community vote who has sex with who?
Isn't that how most societies have effectively been run for thousands of years? I'm not saying it's the best we can do, but it in terms of societal outcomes it can't be much worse than the current dating scene.
If you're in a public space and the most attractive person is surrounded by more desirable prospects and ignoring you, do you join the throng or potentially lower your expectations and talk to someone less crowded by competition?
I haven't experienced online dating and I'm sure it's grim, but I also know people who've perhaps had unrealistic expectations and stayed largely single into their forties.
I've said before, but I think the dating apps are mostly grim for people around 20-25. Anyone after that is more realistic about their prospects and what's worth looking for in a partner.
As a mid-40s guy who used the apps (not sure about my expectations, but I just wasn't interested in marriage, family or dating). I really believe that people do not get more realistic as they get older. Its probably the reverse, most just add more to the requirements for their "soul mate". At the same time the dating pool shrinks dramatically, and the people in it are often, like me, "discounted" so to speak.
I do agree the 20+ crowd seems to have the worst of it, but it really doesn't improve all that much. I think the best strategy is to find someone as early in adult life as possible.
Yes there is, and it is quite related to the article.
But it is not practical - both men and women should rank their preferences and then an optimal matching can be found. In online dating, I would not expect people to have complete and transitive preferences.
>I wonder if there is a way (in the game theory sense) to craft a strategy that is both optimal for individuals and the community, and then design an app around that.
That wouldn't be possible unless both the individuals and the community is settling for less. And that is true for anything. In socialist or leftist countries, people are levelled off, most having and average outcome and no individual doing really great or really bad. In other countries, some have really great outcomes and others have really bad outcomes.
All of the apps have that. Some openly stop users who hit the limit, some shadowban them.
And they all penalize indiscriminate swiping by giving spammers lower priority.
Sometimes I swear that the advice that men should swipe on everybody is put out there by successful users to trick others into getting hidden and deranked.
I get four matches a week on average. Converting those matches into dates is the hard part in my opinion. Even when I seem to be connecting and having a good conversation on text, it's always been so difficult to go beyond that.
I don't know, I must be doing something wrong I guess. I wonder what the match to date conversion rate is.
Speaking as someone now married to a woman he met on tinder.
I took the view that if I matched with someone and they replied to a message there was a pretty high chance they were interested in a date, so I would generally just ask on the second or third message. Something like
Hi, <basic small talk question based on something in the profile>.
Hopefully receive a reply with some kind of conversational hook.
<reply to the hook, ask a follow up question>.
Would you like to meet for a drink sometime this week, would central Gotham work for you? My number is 123556679
Pretty much everyone is on the site to go on real dates, so best to think of the messages as for organising them.
Your mileage may vary, but I'd say this led to a date 80% of the time (assuming the match and reply had already happened)
I've experimented and varied my time to ask out for a date. I've asked out after a few texts after matching, and also after a few days of texting. For me, it has mostly worked out when I gave it more time.
Most of my matches have indicated they like to get more familiar before going out with a stranger. But then again, I live in India, so that probably has a lot to do with my experience.
Someone should build an app where women have to create an “application” form, and men have to fill it out. If women are the choosy ones, let them be upfront with their choosiness and adjust the level of friction that men have to go through to contact them.
For an individual woman they might have the luxury of being able to do this but it doesn't really scale because (the subtext is) that the men who would need this (versus the body-carousel you get on tinder) have the issue that most of the women who could actually articulate an interesting questionaire aren't dating online IME.
Also women do already do this in a sense on tinder - "Don't swipe if you're under six foot, here are my red flags, guys with hayfever aren't real men" blah blah.
I also think the whole idea of a romantic checklist is very narrow minded. Inferring people's beliefs from their actions would be interesting but just letting people basically only pick and extremely specific type of person seems like a route to nothing good socially.
OkCupid effectively used to do this, multiple ways. Before it turned into a blatant photo gallery (to maximize revenue from straight men paying for advantage, I suspect).
One of the ways was that OkCupid let anyone add their own multi-choice (plus optional freeform) questions, to the database from which people would answer. You could rate what each answer meant to you, and you could (IIRC) make answering a particular question mandatory before messaging you. Good for litmus tests.
It still does this and I like it. I do worry that the answer to the brexit question (good/bad?) is perhaps too diagnostic for me, but much better than cliched bios that all read the same.
I wonder though if there is room for a. It’s transparent not for profit dating app? It feels like the incentives currently are misaligned with either individuals or societal benefit. All the apps seem to be optimism for engagement and stickyness rather than well considered matches and good conversation.
Even the fact that the chat functions in these apps are so bad belies this… it doesn’t really reward them for you to meet and stop using the app!
The only country I could see doing this successfully is China. They're the only ones with enough foresight and competency to do something like this. Of course, it will probably also be super totalitarian with an algorithm that penalizes political dissent, doesn't allow participation of gay people, etc.
The problem with algorithmic dating is that people don't know what they want. I evidently don't, at any rate; I've mostly ended up with partners that initially seemed to be pretty unpromising material. They only began to appeal to me as I got to know them. I'd never have met them if I'd pre-filtered through an application form.
Sure, smoking/non-smoking; perhaps dietary preferences; education; location. But I, a veggie, used to cook for a carnivorous family, for example. If I were preparing an application form consisting only of dealbreakers, I doubt it would have more than a couple of questions.
I think this is the biggest factor for me in not liking online dating. It lets people filter TOO MUCH for shit they THINK they want. In real life people tend to branch out more
> This is Bumble, men can't send the first message on it
Right, but almost every female-initiated conversation I ever had on Bumble was "hi" or an emoji, and then a wait for the man to drive the conversation. It's a marketing gimmick rather than something that in any way changes the dynamic compared to Tinder, where I also found that I (the man) had to initiate the conversation.
The best thing about Bumble when I last used it was it was a small-enough pool that you could browse everyone, so when you opened it up and started swiping you were interacting with people who'd newly joined (or newly re-opened their account), and were a little less jaded / over the whole thing.
>Someone should build an app where women have to create an “application” form, and men have to fill it out. If women are the choosy ones, let them be upfront with their choosiness and adjust the level of friction that men have to go through to contact them.
No need for a form. Women subconsciously select a partner for the ability to produce healthy and successful offspring and taking care of them and her.
A lot of women do signal what they want in their profiles but in reality matches probably just come down to hot + might not rape me + some kind of funny peacocking confidence thing so in the end this survey won’t matter.
No WTF, if you read any ancilliary info around womens engagement in dating apps this is pretty much it. (not dating, not going to be dating, do read stuff online)
If you want to argue otherwise, consider the situational awareness of telling your wing(person) where you're going if not heard from in 24h and why people do this.
Wouldn't that just exacerbate the existing issues? Women already have the choice of applicants despite being roughly half the global population. Wouldn't it make more sense to make it harder for women to find a match based on their very specific requirements shown only to those who are seeking those particular traits so as to reduce the glut of inconsiderate matches the women receive?
It would make sense to just not allow men to swipe first at all, it was an obvious improvement when they only let the women start conversations. I think the issue is it will lower engagement.
The problem is that this is discrimination, by definition. From my own personal experience, there are plenty of women who have immediately rejected me because I'm 5'11" and not 6'. I'm sure they would love to be able to filter men by height. There's also plenty of people who would like to filter by race. One of these things is socially acceptable but the other isn't. How should the dating apps decide what questions go on the application? They can't, anything more than filtering by gender and there will be some subset of their userbase that they completely alienate. And they need to show growth and profits for investors. Not to mention, you know, the moral implications?
(Note that even that doesn't work... I'm not interested in dating trans women or gay men but I see their profiles all the time, because they set their profiles as "women seeking men".)
Of course people can have preferences for race - just as they can preferences for height, weight, disabilities, gender, sex, and any other attribute.
This is not discrimination, it is personal preference. It is an area where these properties objectively matter - different from job applications say.
Where do we land when people are not allowed to pick the parter they actually want?
Preferences are unfair - the same will be felt by many transgender people (you might swipe away), disabled people and what have you. Heck, it certainly holds for some of my attributes...
And yet, you simply can't make someone desire you. There are infinitely many ways to draw a short straw in life, this being one of them.
>Where do we land when people are not allowed to pick the partner they actually want?
We land in reality.
There tends to be a bit of a gap between what people 'want' and what they can actually 'get' and I think this is where a lot of online dating falls down as the illusion of endless choice means people keep looking for perfection when in reality that person doesn't exist or if they do, they aren't going to be interested in the other person.
Most people throughout history pretty much had to look in their fairly narrow social circle or village/town etc and pick whoever they could get who would also like them. Most people knew more or less where they stood amongst everyone else and had a general idea of whether you stood a chance or not and didn't bother if you knew you had no chance.
These days you are basically competing with essentially the entire world and it's hard to know who your competition is or where you stand, does this person I swiped right on already have 5000 other matches in their inbox and how do I compare? Even if I'm the best option they will ever have, do they know that or will they keep in swiping in the hope that someone absolutely perfect might come along?
Most dating apps are now optimising entirely for the superficial things like looks, which is one of the least useful metrics of a long term successful relationship and almost everyone now manipulates their photos and is deceptive or outright lies about negative factors (usually height for men and age for women) to the point everyone is basically a catfish now and all you're swiping on is more or less how someone wants to portray themselves, which means you are going to mostly match with those who are best at deception and lies which is probably not ideal in most relationships.
Discrimination: the quality or power of finely distinguishing
The word has taken a negative connotation in recent usage, but every association, intimate or otherwise is discrimination. Applying the term "personal preference" is a euphemism. That one prefers one set of traits over another necessitates that one discriminates between the substance and value of those traits.
A) if you filter out someone based on race you are potentially throwing lots of opportunities away. I find it hard to believe people who have race preferences aren't attracted to a single member of their non-preferred race.
And B) People will interpret this as racial bias on the part of the app regardless.
> if you filter out someone based on race you are potentially throwing lots of opportunities away. I find it hard to believe people who have race preferences aren't attracted to a single member of their non-preferred race.
meh i don't know. I have some races I tend to find more attractive on average. There is only one gender I have ever personally had a non-zero sexual attraction to. I don't think this is that rare.
Yes, my point is that they're all preferences that people have and that's okay. Saying people are "missing out" because they prefer a certain race is like saying they "miss out" for preferring a certain gender. Maybe technically true, but not really helpful in practice.
It is absolutely perfectly fine to be interested in dating a particular race. Because if you really break down what that statement actually means, it means that the person is attracted to certain physical characteristics that are more pronounced in that particular ethnicity.
We are attracted to what we're attracted to - no justification needed.
>It is absolutely perfectly fine to be interested in dating a particular race. Because if you really break down what that statement actually means, it means that the person is attracted to certain physical characteristics that are more pronounced in that particular ethnicity
But is it politically correct to say certain characteristics are more pronounced in a particular ethnicity? Wouldn't you be branded as a nazi?
On Grindr, at least, that filter was removed because it was considered an invalid preference. (I agree with that decision.)
More broadly, though, if you politely request people of certain racial groups not contact you on Tinder/Hinge/Bumble, you will rapidly be reported and then banned by the administrators of the app.
I've read this app gives the ability to filter based on religion, but I don't know any details. What are the possible values of this filter? Can I filter out all religions?
It has all the major religions (8 or so named ones), and atheist, agnostic, other, spiritual. Note people aren't obligated to put religion in there and many don't. In my area about 1/3 of women's profiles don't have any religion listed. You can filter people, based on specific religions, but I'm actually not sure if you can do a filter like "Atheism or nothing".
One of the big problems with filters is that most filterable things are optional, so a lot of people won't have anything specified for one category or another. Exceptions are height and age, which people must specify for themselves, and so some people lie about those. People can lie about or omit even more important details, like the fact that they are married. Pictures can be very inaccurate as well. And there are scammers. You have to be quite skeptical and cautious on these apps whether you are man or woman.
I think you can if you pay. However, in my experience people often put Christian to indicate they were raised that way and it implies very little current belief. Unless hardcore atheism is itself a requirement I’m not sure it would be a good idea.
hmmm yeah i was paying for premium for a month or two so you’re probably right.
and yes, it’s incredibly shallow - it’s online dating after all :)
For what it’s worth I filtered on neither of those dimensions - I get few enough matches as-is.
I will say that I got far far more dates from Hinge than every other service combined, primarily (I think) because I could actually flex my “soft skills” by replying to prompts and photos with a bit of wit. My looks alone aren’t going to make me stand out in the deluge of dudes.
Additionally, Hinge is/was much better at dynamically showing me women that were actually likely to be compatible with me.
It's no more "shallow" than being attracted to any characteristic: physical or even intellectual. Nearly all of which comes down to your natural genetic advantages... or disadvantages as it were.
> Most men get somewhere like 0-4 matches a week and most women get somewhere like 100-1000. That’s a 25x difference best-case scenario and often it’s over 100x. Which is kind of insane considering there are about 50/50 men to women ratio in real life.
How is this statistically possible? Women getting way more _likes_ is plausible if men swipe right much more than women do. But each _match_ involves a man and a woman getting a match.
Say there are 10 women and 30 men on the service, and each woman matches with 3 men. 30 matches total. Assuming equal distribution, the men have 1 match each.
You can also then have a more extreme distribution. 3 of those men could have 10 matches and the other 27 have zero. Median man has zero matches, 80th percentile ("top 20%") has zero matches.
I'm not sure of that extreme of a ratio, but many of my single women friends will use the app, match with people, and it turns out that loads of the guys are just really useless... so it's not clear whether the matches are actually worthwhile.
Imagine a guy with a very interesting profile, who swipes right all the time. People match with him cuz he has the nice profile. Turns out that he sticks around on the platform for a long time.
Suddenly this one person is responsible for loads of matches. So if you have these long-term users, they can generate disproportionate amount of matches with themselves, biasing the pool.
This could be even more accentuated by Tinder-style algos. Somebody's popular? Of course their profile will show up more often!
If you combine this with people on the other side matching pretty conservatively... then suddenly you can have a handful of men receiving the large majority of the focus.
Paraphrasing some tweet, at least at parties the most popular guy can only talk to so many people at once!
Yep, exactly. That's what the grandparent post [1] meant with "Because a lot of men like to swipe right on nearly everyone and buy passes which get them unlimited swipes".
This is where the majority of Tinder's money is coming from, so I doubt this will be ever be curbed.
I think you're right about 100-1000 being a count for "likes" rather than "matches" (terminology would differ by platform). If a woman had 100 people with a mutual interest, ready to talk, they wouldn't keep swiping to get to 200.
(Not super relevant to your point but maybe to the whole page) I think many swiping apps mostly show people that are already interested, which seems reasonable as a prioritization method. So a "like" from a woman is converted into an instant "match". I've heard some women brag like "90% of guys I swipe on like me back", but there's some bias in there.
I've also known men who are perfectly likable, who took a more passive approach, and never received a single incoming "like" from a woman in months. It's inconceivable that in a city of millions, _nobody_ finds the man attractive, not even the bottom 1% of women. It's just that they're not showing the profile much, and it's unclear if they're even giving it a tiny amount of random exposure. Even if you swipe, it's probably not enough to get to the top of the pile of thousands of horny dudes. So one has to buy the exposure for an hour or so then, possibly for hundreds of dollars a month. It's a good scheme, and the platforms like the information asymmetry on how it all works too - many people are guessing about things in these threads, which platform employees know the simple answer to.
Important to distinguish between matches and likes here. Women get a lot of likes but not 1 match every 15 minutes. Out of the people who like them, the viable matches are far lower than 1 every 15 minutes. Maybe a couple every week are actually decent matches they would like back. I don't find the difference between likes men get and women get surprising at all, it's the same for face to face meetings. Most of the men striking out on dating apps also strike out with face to face meetings probably at a higher rate if they were actually approaching all the random women they "like" at a glance. It isn't the general ratio of men to women that determines the like to match rate here, it's the ratio of desperate and frankly not attractive men to discerning and attractive women.
For less confident people IRL, the ability to like with low cost is actually great. I have had dates with people I would probably never have approached in real life and online dating has been a confidence boost generally.
>"Most men get somewhere like 0-4 matches a week and most women get somewhere like 100-1000. That’s a 25x difference best-case scenario and often it’s over 100x. Which is kind of insane considering there are about 50/50 men to women ratio in real life."
I always suspected something similar. Is this documented anywhere though that I could look? My response to this was to simply get rid of that app and quit. Why would anyone continue putting in the hours a week for something that led to 0-4 matches a week? How is the platform not a total failure based on this? Doesn't everyone of the guys not in that top 20 percentile turn around and tell everyone it is garbage?
> How is the platform not a total failure based on this? Doesn't everyone of the guys not in that top 20 percentile turn around and tell everyone it is garbage?
Yeah it is total garbage. Even when you put in all the work to get matches and arrange dates (which takes a ton of work), it's still basically a blind date, so when you actually meet there's still only a small chance that you will actually match.
And you always get worse matches, as a man, through the apps compared to real life. You will pay a price for that convenience of swiping.
There's an increased risk for women when they let men bypass that filter of being sociable and brave enough to befriend people in real life social situations.
If a woman can already go to a bar and easily pick out a guy, and easily judge the men, why would they use a dating app? It only makes sense if they somehow would get better matches there, so the men will have to lower their standards as a result of that convenience.
I just see online dating, and classified ads in the paper before that, as a way for people who don't fit the social norm to meet. And that's fine. But I don't see any reason for everyone to start doing that, and people who are normally sociable will just have a worse experience.
> I always suspected something similar. Is this documented anywhere though that I could look?
The book Dataclysm and the OkCupid blog have a lot of analysis about things like this. Both are about a decade old now and were written by one of the guys who founded OkCupid, so it focuses on dating sites instead of apps, but I would assume the trends are the same (or even amplified).
It's been a while since I've read either, so I don't remember exact data, but it's true that women get way more men reaching out to them than the reverse.
A few matches a week seems... fine though, right? Unless one wants to go on a first date every day of the week, and really who has time for that? If anything, hundreds of low-quality matches (because men just say yes to everyone) seem worse than a few considered ones.
In my experience it wasn't too hard to convert most matches I was interested in in dates. Once I have someone on the hook it's easy to get the fish out of the water.
Dating after the online part also sucks, where you pretend to be so busy that you can only meet once a week and only on weekdays, and you can never answer a message in under 24 hours. Don't really see how two people can start to like each other when it's so standoffish.
Who has every hour of their weekend booked? Who doesn't have two minutes to look at their phone in a whole day? It's such bullshit, this game is so exhausting and just zaps out any positive energy you get during a date.
> You’re much better off trying to meet people in real-life situations, where there is a more reasonable ratio of men and women
I think is a thought-stopping cliche that sounds right but just isn't true. People went to apps because real life situations have failed them. The hobbies that attract the most young people tend to be the most gender skewed (gaming is a great example).
>Because a lot of men like to swipe right on nearly everyone and buy passes which get them unlimited swipes
I think you're wrong. I've read that the main apps have done some work in the past years to make the "swipe on everything" strategy non-optimal. However, the fact of the matter is that the main apps could have been lying to me and you could be right and I could be wrong. It's so very difficult to draw conclusions from these dating apps when they're effectively black boxes to us common folk.
There's definitely a great deal of money and interest that could be had from creating an open-source dating app such that no one would be in the dark on what's being served to whom.
How does Hinge correct for the ratio problem? If women can only like a finite number of profiles, doesn't this further restrict the supply of Women Likes?
Sure, but it's still more equal if both sexes send the same number of likes rather than having 2x as many men swipe 10x as many times. And maybe women get more swipes per day, I have no idea.
I agree, but it is a surface level retort still in my opinion.
What I find more insidious is the way people on HN deal with such statistics.
The HN typical person is a relatively well-off suburban CS employee. The rhetoric on HN when markets are talked about, e.g. the labour market, often revolves around free markets being good -- because it favors this typical HN's user position. They have never experienced any precariousness.
Now, comparing dating apps to a market is very slimey, but the analogy work to the extent where the focus is the HN user's expectation and how prevalent the market discourse seems to be here: like the worker offers their labour force to a company, a pretendent offers their social time and skills on a dating app. Except that the HN's user is experiencing the precariousness in the latter -- an unacceptable thing, apparently.
Except one is not owed this attention, time or privilege. Thinking the imbalance is unfair is a mark of expected privilege as they have in other space. It's a bit bonkers.
Thinking of it -- dating -- as a market is a bad thing, morally, ethically, and psychologically, but it remains the underlying tone I see in this thread.
> e.g. the labour market, often revolves around free markets being good -- because it favors this typical HN's user position.
Care to explain? I'd imagine that something along the lines of unionization wouldn't hurt the salaries of tech workers.
> Thinking the imbalance is unfair is a mark of expected privilege as they have in other space
I find it interesting to refer to labor exchange value as a "privilege", as if it were something arbitrarily bestowed from some higher authority. Wage is the result of adversarial relationships between demand and supply and not one of some arbitrary authority doling out favors left and right with strings attached
> Wage is the result of adversarial relationships between demand and supply and not one of some arbitrary authority doling out favors left and right with strings attached
Except there are:
- systematic biases in access to the skills needed for this contest
- systematic asymmetries of information/social capital/access which skew access to high earning professions
- outright discrimination against minority groups and women in payment
All of which means current remuneration is in part (not wholly) a reflection of privilege.
> systematic biases
> outright discrimination against minority groups and women in payment
How do you know that demographic differences are significantly linked to wage differences and there aren't other factors at play? For example, a mother may want to spend time with her children and work part time instead of full time. Would you consider this discrimination? Do you think the mother should be paid a full time salary for working only part time? If the husband of the mother works full time and earns more because of it, would you consider this difference in compensation to be a product of privilege? I'd love to hear your thoughts
Yeah it makes perfect sense for a woman to maximise their time and resources to their fertile years, and not shift that over to older age.
Funny also how nobody is looking at the expense gap, if women are making the same money as men, then obviously they should share expenses 50/50 as well. How many couples actually do that?
Women are underrepresented in the top level of society, but always turn a blind eye to the fact that they are underrepresented in the bottom of society as well.
Women should get the same share of rewards as men, but not take any of the risks? How does that make any sense?
If women are taking place in the boardrooms, are they also going to increase their share in prisons? Among homeless? Premature death?
And self actualisation is having children anyway, so women are already at endgame. The reason why men work so hard with careers, is because it enables them to have children and start a family, not because it's just fun to play around with money and power.
The fertility thing is far worse than that. Modern society is actively teaching women that their value as a partner comes from things which they would normally select men for. Ambition, money, etc. So women are gaining things men don't really care for, while losing the things men do select for. On top, their higher socioeconomic status generally translates into a smaller dating pool, as they select equal or higher socioeconomic men. The surface of the bell curve only grows smaller as you go further.
And the answer to this? Trying to shame men into liking something else instead of being honest and admitting women are sabotaging themselves listening to the "work is life" mantra.
> So women are gaining things men don't really care for, while losing the things men do select for. On top, their higher socioeconomic status generally translates into a smaller dating pool, as they select equal or higher socioeconomic men.
Yeah it's as if it's been decided suddenly that men are attracted to highly educated high earning women, which really doesn't work. Men are attracted to the prospect of having children, which means youth and health, and there are very real practical matters that have limits to their flexibility.
> - outright discrimination against minority groups and women in payment
No there isn’t.
Purported wage gaps for women have never been on a peer basis and always about aggregate earnings — which fail to reflect the realities (such as the fact men die 10x as often in the workplace).
Agreed on pay gaps but There is plenty of evidence that women and minorities are interviewed at different rates and differently In Practice. That’s enough for my statement to be true (in the sense that they end up being paid different amounts because they do different jobs because of the discrimination)
> (in the sense that they end up being paid different amounts because they do different jobs because of the discrimination)
Or maybe there's the idea that some groups of people are more willing to do certain jobs than other groups of people and money isn't the only factor? Take investment banking for example: it's incredibly stressful and also predominantly male. Is it possible that more men than women choose to do investment banking because they value the money more than having low stress? Money isn't the only factor in evaluating inequality.
Your line of reasoning assumes that there are no other factors at play and each person is just a bag of demographic categories and nothing more. Also (more importantly) it assumes that everyone prioritizes money to the same degree, but we both know that this is wrong and certain demographics are more money-obsessed than others. But hey, maybe we can fix things by guilt tripping everyone to worship the dollar in equal quantities, maybe that will fix our ails as a society?
Unionizing indeed wouldn't hurt for a vast majority of workers. However, people on HN seems to generally be anti-union because, by virtue of their career position, they do not experience the instability that a lot of people suffer under. Moreover there is also this idea that unions would reduce their career/salary prospects. i.e. HN people tend to enjoy a comfy position on the labour market that makes them removed from and sometimes disdainful of the plight of a majority of workers.
When I say privilege, it is less about the value of the work itself, and more about the overall stability (and of course wealth) that CS jobs have guaranteed over the past 20 years. As you mentioned it, adversarial is a good term here. A lot of HN people have not experienced how adversarial and imbalanced the labour market really is (think people stuck in the poverty trap working retail jobs in the US for instance).
So you have a lot of people here that seem to apply the labour market logic they're accustomed to, to a social relationship setup they ultimately see as a market -- which is a bad thing in my opinion.
> Moreover there is also this idea that unions would reduce their career/salary prospects.
I don't know why it would, but you did also say it was just an idea. I have a hard time believing that an SWE union wouldn't be able to improve compensation and wlb
> So you have a lot of people here that seem to apply the labour market logic they're accustomed to, to a social relationship setup they ultimately see as a market -- which is a bad thing in my opinion.
Yeah I wholeheartedly agree with this because it's essentially the commodification of relationships, which makes me sick to my stomach
The idea that a union would lead to a loss of revenue is a recurring anti-union rhetorical point because unions usually involve membership "fees" (which are more organisational cost payment). There is also the idea that unions are corrupt, but it's more of a tu quoque than anything.
Talking about something as a market doesn't mean it should be a market. I've known plenty of people - women too - who spoke with disdain of the "meat market", but still went to bars to meet strangers, put up online profiles etc., things they hated, because what can you do? People get lonely, and women are people too.
Which is why it's so arrogant to say participating is optional. You have to go where people are, unless you're OK with being lonely for a long time.
Can't we say that the labour market is a market, and is unfair to some people, and the dating market is a market, and is unfair to some people? I'd guess that would be the "typical" HN person take, and I don't see a problem with it. I also don't see a problem with wanting to increase your chances of success, in either arena.
> one is not owed this attention, time or privilege
I thought this[0] was a really good piece about this kind of framing
Not sure what you mean by "pseudo-economic value" How is that different from "value"? It's not like people are putting dollar values on their dating prospects, from what I've seen.
I get that the "market" framing is not very endearing, for a lot of people, and maybe not very healthy. But I don't think it's wrong. Worrying about your position in the labour market also isn't particularly healthy or endearing, but I don't think it's wrong. How are you supposed to ununderstand what you've understood?
"value" in economics is a term applied to goods and services. my use of "pseudo", as in spurious or invalid, here really plays with my critique of using the market framing for social relationships. They're not goods or services.
This "worry" as you purport it to be can only exist in a system that makes it so. The worry of >tfw no gf is not comparable to the fear of losing one's job and health insurance, and the utter lack of opportunity to bounce back, meaning a job is a matter of survival. But since a lot of people on HN don't experience this latter situation, it's easy to see dating as a market where goods and services should be easy to get. The market analogy breaks down in more than just this aspect.
So, it's not wrong per se, sure, you can say that, but it's deeply, even inherently, flawed in my book.
I don't understand you ending rhetorical question.
> I don't understand you ending rhetorical question.
Take a statement like "Not many people want to date Steve, so it's likely Steve will have to work harder to find a partner". Is that incorrect? If it isn't, how would you suggest I go about not believing it?
Edit: I don't agree with your second paragraph's suggestion that relationships aren't important (relationships and jobs, or the lack of them, can both have huge impacts on people's lives), but why does that matter here? There are markets for both important things (eg. jobs) and unimportant things (eg. baseball cards). There are also markets for things that are easy to get and things that are difficult to get. Those considerations aren't what makes something a market / not a market.
Sorry I re-edited the edit quite heavily after writing the first version.
Yeah it's just the way it is. And relationships, and marriage, is an economic union more than anything else, and the main goal is to gather enough cold hard economic value to provide for children, and each other.
> It's not like people are putting dollar values on their dating prospects, from what I've seen.
People (women) are putting dollar values on their dating prospects, from what I've seen, and I don't blame them, it is important. Sure it's not everything, but love is hardly a mystical force completely detached from economy.
> People shouldn't see social relationships as a market with pseudo-economic value attached.
People from all perspectives regularly do this, but it's only considered seedy when it's used to point out a way men are disadvantaged.
No one is owed a partner who contributes equal work in the household; no one is owed a partner who cares about their sexual pleasure; no one is owed a partner who performs certain types of emotional labor. But we consider these things as Important Issues (which they are!) because they disproportionately disadvantage women. But there's nothing wrong with doing the same on the other side of the divide.
There is a network effect of the critical mass of people who assume and use apps as the best way to date these days, and many of the traditional ways to date have eroded.
2) at best gale-shapley is being used for ranking, not for preference inference; IMO they removed the 'have you met' feature (guessing because users found it invasive and hated it), but would be interesting to use it for scheduling meeting slots, a resource problem more similar to med school matching. The idea of using math to meet a mate goes back at least to kepler https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/05/15/312537965/h...
3) gale-shapley is old science about how to rank given preferences, but the actual interesting question is how they're detecting preferences. What are the factors? Are some factors excluded? What can hinge (and their cousins at match.com and elsewhere) detect about a person from their profile + interactions? Are they using image analysis / NLP on profiles / chats?
(they're definitely not just using the user settings toggles for preferences; at minimum, they must have a global rank for showing popular profiles at the top of the stack. Also it makes sense this stuff is secret, it's a liability landmine)