It’s interesting to track college kids for dating app viability. They are surrounded by their peers constantly. They would be far less likely (hypothetically) to struggle to meet people in real life.
I'm not even sure why college students would need dating apps. You are in a relatively dense environment surrounded by people your own age, in a similar phase of life. You have to actively work not to meet people you want to date.
there are some really out of touch takes here. dating apps haven't been about necessity for 10 years, that's exactly why the stigma of using an online matchmaker disintegrated.
people are moving away from them because they don't work well enough to justify the time and cost, and the negative effects on confidence are now known enough that thinly veiled digs at the user complaining about them don't work either. so because bad experiences aren't invalidated anymore, and the bad experience can be quantified, people are opting out entirely.
Comparatively, but women outnumber men in college, many will be single. If you aren't repellent and aren't dating outside your league then it's a numbers game, a matter of time.
I think there is also a stigma and fear associated with approaching someone today. No one wants to be seen as a creep or to find themselves on social media branded as one. This frightens me very much.
> I don’t think there is anything stopping people from talking to other students while drunk at parties
Usually the music is so loud that you have to scream into someone's ear to be heard. Also a girl with her friends who is approached by a random guy will usually say no simply because she doesn't want to be perceived as easy.
My faculty back in 2004 had exactly 1 woman, out of 120 graduates. I am sure things in IT got better, but lets not act like everything is equal, since nothing really is
The character/modes of rejection have gone from maybe mortifying titters/giggles amongst the friends of the person being hit on to the potential of literally having one's shame splayed across the internet for all to see. Perhaps with embellishments about how creepy or clueless they were, etc.
There are a ton more unwritten/unspoken rules about this now, it seems, than even a decade or two ago. Rules about when/where it's okay to hit on someone, what is permissible to say, etc. And these rules seem to change from person to person: so one never knows what they actually are.
> The character/modes of rejection have gone from maybe mortifying titters/giggles amongst the friends of the person being hit on to the potential of literally having one's shame splayed across the internet for all to see. Perhaps with embellishments about how creepy or clueless they were, etc.
That can still happen using an app. You just won't be standing there to see it. Speaking of which, why would one even ask a girl in front of their friends if one can't handle the inevitable giggling? If you see them often enough to spark your interest, then you'll find a better opportunity to ask then to make a show of it.
I agree with you on that point about the gigles, as that's always (in my lifetime) been a risk. It's the other stuff--the "canceling" effect of social media posts--that has changed things. Risking laughter from the person of interest or their friends is one thing; risking a potentially life-changing social media blitz is entirely different.
I'm not sure what you mean exactly, that asking someone out on a date poses the risk of being "cancelled" for it? That doesn't make much sense to me, but one way to avoid such a ridiculous reaction is to suss out whether the girl you're interested is batshit insane.
I've never solicited a complete stranger except at a bar. Basically every time I've gone on a date with someone I've met out-in-the-world, I had the chance to talk to them about something then ask if they want coffee, or whatever. On campus you eventually get this opportunity through colleagues. You make a few friends and then have friends, and if you show up to stuff the chances are always there.
I think a lot of anxiety comes from the idea that one is meant to confront people on-sight at inappropriate moments. One shouldn't do that, nor is it even necessary to be successful.
Furthermore, under federal Title IX regulations, if you are accused of rape or sexual assault the college is required to adjudicate your case using a preponderance of evidence standard. You face expulsion and utter loss of professional reputation if your accuser can convince an administrative panel that you assaulted them. The administration can impose arbitrary obstacles including preventing you from retaining counsel, confronting your accuser or even knowing their name, or submitting evidence in your defense. The Trump administration overturned these rules but I believe they were reinstated under Biden.
Best thing to do in college is keep your hands or other body parts to yourself. You don't need to be worried about getting laid while you have studies to focus on.
Probably, because they aren't mutually exclusive. Apps let you see women you don't otherwise run into through a social medium, bigger pool bigger chances.
Except that many of those women aren't real, and the ones who are are getting hundreds of messages a day.
The opposite is true on campuses. There are now far more women than men at college. Outside of IT/engineering, the ratio is around 3:2 and very favourable to men.
Many isn't a number. There's not much incentive to "fake" being a woman except to bait for payments without ever even meeting, so the pool is smaller than you project. The other incentive is on the part of the app owners who want to create the illusion of high membership, but I've only heard of this for Ashley Madison or the like. THere are plenty of women on Tinder, OKC, etc.
Yes they get more messages, they also filter and ignore many. That doesn't mean you can't land a date. There's a difference between guys who chase after absolutely everyone and guys who show more genuine interest in a person, and that comes through in the communication.
You're also preaching to the choir on college, I think the opportunity should be exploited to meet people in person, that doesn't mean online dating is rendered redundant.
I was in engineering and we had 4 or 5 women and hundreds of dudes.
Needless to say I was using dating apps a lot in that time.
I always pushed to meet in person early instead of weeks of chatting. Far easier to fight out if there is chemistry and you can continue chatting after (if it goes well ofc)
The computer systems technology program had around 300 people when I started it, and 3 of them were women. By the time we all graduated there were zero.
A few of us tried to game the system by choosing electives like "The Mating Game" but to no avail.
College kids are constantly spending a good deal of time trying to meet people to date. I’m not sure why getting dressed up and spending an entire night at a dance/mixer/bar trying to meet someone is understandable, but spending 5 minutes swiping left or right trying to meet someone is considered superfluous.
>> 79% of respondents — college and graduate students around the country — said they don't use any dating apps even as infrequently as once a month.
That number doesn't check with what i'm observing on college students. It's more the other way around. I also got the feeling that for more than a decade every month some article claims the end of the tinder/bumble/etc age.
> Methodology: This study was conducted Oct. 11-16 from a representative sample of 978 students nationwide from 2-year and 4-year schools. The margin of error is +/- 3.4 percentage points. The Generation Lab conducts polling using a demographically representative sample frame of college students at community colleges, technical colleges, trade schools and public and private four-year institutions.
Maybe there was some bias they didn't account for; a thousand students isn't that many.
It's not even clear how they were recruited. Generation Lab says only that it was via proprietary methods i.e. they won't tell you. Why not? Is there anything so sensitive how they got in touch with students? Normally, polling firms are more open. It suggests they don't want you to know where their lists came from (could be as bad as MTurk).
It is enough, but only if you collect a good sample. I'm not sure what a good sample is. In college I'd expect a big difference between undergrads and grad students (as students get older they are more likely to settle down with someone and marry, so even seniors vs freshmen should show a difference)
Talking to my younger friends, two salient points rise to the surface:
1) For men, the app is absolutely flooded with sex workers and bots.
2) For women, the app is filled with the small subset of men who haven't been repulsed by the sex workers and bots - namely the desperate and the chronically lonely
Not sure if anyone knows the reality, as the dating apps for sure aren't sharing data on relevant metrics.
The study's omission of controls for a social desirability bias might skew its findings, or at least I didn't see anything mentioning one. Considering lingering stigma about using dating apps, despite the large change in acceptance, it wouldn't be surprising if people under-reported heavily.
This is evident even in this discussion where college students are partially stigmatized for resorting to dating apps amidst a sea of peers.
I use a dating app and I get a lot of people who want to sell me something, or invest in their business enterprise. It is very depressing. Supposedly if I pay and subscribe to the dating app it would be better, but I do not yet have enough faith to pay $25/wk (Tinder) to find out.. The apps have not seem to have done anything to stop scammers.
What could be done to stop scammers? One thing I believe would help is for the app to accurate reflect the person's geographical location, and if that person's geographical location changes wildly, to flag them and tell the viewer. "This person's geographical location cannot be assured." If more was done to verify and police location, it might lead to at least encountering less scammers.
Great question. Something like you suggest could help. I definitely think it's possible to do better, because some of the apps have a lot fewer fake profiles/scammers compared to say, Tinder.
I think there isn't enough incentive for some of them (again, Tinder) to bother. If enough people stop using them, maybe they will incentivized to do better.
There were years that I would travel constantly for work. All around Europe, and later in US, India and a bit of China. I never use dating apps (and have exited the social media many years ago), so tracking my location would have me banned in two weeks. It will have to be very strict, to e.g. move to 3 cities in 1 day, where the cities are over 200km apart or something. Kinda like trying to catch the Pokemon-Go Android modded apps 'walking' cheaters.
Strongly incentivizing monthly subscriptions versus weekly? I do not know but that is what it says. Is does not seem like low balling.. more like high balling? It does seem very strange.
Love the idea of dating apps, but have a lot of questions to the execution.
As other people mentioned in the thread I did not really need them while in University, but after graduation, being in SF Bay Area in tech, meeting women became challenging.
In this geography (SF Bay Area) and subculture (tech) the number of women, especially good looking, who are single is objectively small. You rarely meet them in real life.
Dating apps solve this issue - open an app, match, chat, meet.
But in other geographies and subcultures, meeting in person would be more efficient and enjoyable.
But even if students stay away form it, dating apps industry waits for disruption. And I hope, this time executive teams in Tinder, Bumble, etc will not ignore this signal and invest into creating a better experience for all sides.
Women have similar issues finding quality men. Men who aren't looking for a live-in maid/sex-worker/nanny/cook. Men who are responsible, and yes, ideally good looking too. Men don't raise boys to see women as equals, so the pool of quality men can be rather small.
Good, dating apps were scams and people are getting wise to them. Don't buy lottery tickets, don't gamble, don't use slot machines, and don't waste precious time on dating apps. Those apps had the same effect on relationships for whole generations as gambling addictions as well.
When you hear someone say, "sounds like you had a bad experience there friend, maybe you should try again and do something different," admit that yes, you got taken at a casino, and the different thing to do is to not spend your time in casinos.
>When you hear someone say, "sounds like you had a bad experience there friend, maybe you should try again and do something different," admit that yes, you got taken at a casino, and the different thing to do is to not spend your time in casinos.
And also those that say "I've met my wonderful wife/husband in Tinder, maybe you should keep trying" and most of those cases (in my personal experience) date back to 2016 and before. When there weren't so many people just trying to get followers, bots, scammers, etc. etc. Besides survivorship bias, of course.
I think so. Apps never worked for me finding a long term partner but they used to be kinda okay at least. Maybe something about reducing the profile to just swiping yes or no based on a photo has made it awful? And inviting men to pay to be the topmost left swipe in a series of a woman's hundreds of low-compatibility "matches."
YMMV but this doesn't seem true to what I've witnessed in my own life. I can think of many friends (I'm 29) who found either an LTR or their spouse using dating apps. In many cases they were single for long stretches and complained bitterly about the process of finding a partner, but in this respect, I'm not sure if apps are different from any of the alternatives.
> I'm not sure if apps are different from any of the alternatives.
What benefit or life experience do you get sitting in your apartment, or even in public, swiping left on thousands of faces in the hopes of one matching, vs. the alternatives like participating in other relationships, growing, developing skills, enjoying activities, and living life? Like gambling, the winnings only seem free when you ignore the opportunity cost.
Obviously, enjoy your winnings if you have them. I've met some great women on the apps as well, and mainly I benefitted from how they were so unhappy with what they had they were looking for literally anyone else, but ultimately that unhappiness didn't change. As a life strategy the apps are as wishful and passive as reading your horoscope for lucky numbers and imagining what you would do if you won the lottery.
>What benefit or life experience do you get sitting in your apartment, or even in public, swiping left on thousands of faces in the hopes of one matching, vs. the alternatives like participating in other relationships, growing, developing skills, enjoying activities, and living life?
there are no time requirements on dating apps. you could spend a few minutes a day looking for matches and still go out and do all the activities you listed.
I personally had great experience with dating apps.
Met two of my long-term partners on an app.
Not sure if I would still use them now, but back then it wasn't bad.
Of course social media and the internet has enshittified a lot over the last 10 years, so my experience could be different now.
Yeah, like for a lot of things, there was a window. Tinder was probably the pivot. When Tinder was at its peak, so were dating apps. Now, they're all just kind shit. They've gamified the wrong aspects.
I think it's totally not in the interests of dating apps for you to find a long term partner and stop using the app. They need a charging structure that is a fixed single cost, not a subscription. Ideally if you don't get a match in, say, 2 years, you should get your money back.
It’s a bit complicated because they rise and fall by word of mouth.
People will say things like, “everyone on Tinder is gross lately but I’m going out with someone cute from Hinge Thursday so fingers crossed”. And their friends will download Hinge/be more likely to delete Tinder if it’s not working for them either.
Maybe the ideal situation for the apps would be to match you with a steady stream of short term partners who turn into good friends, so you both say good things about the app and also keep using it.
Met my wife through OKC when it was still good, with that percentage questionnaire match score and such. By all accounts it's about as crappy as all the other dating apps now, so I suppose I lucked out on hitting the right point in time.
I would posit that _most_ apps are losing luster. People are wary about Silicon Valley's business models and promises to make their lives better. Take Airbnb: it was supposed to be cheapter/more convenient but now people are using traditional services like hotel because of how expensive/inconvenient VC-backed platforms are. Same thing with dating apps, it just doesn't deliver on its promises and makes things more inconvenient than going to a house party.
I remember going to University of Washington. When I got into the freshman dorms, I met my roommate and his older brother excitedly talking about how the library there was considered the 2nd best pickup place in the country. I still don't know what that meant and I certainly didn't contribute to the statistics. My how times have changed.
How long ago was this? I went to UW about ten years ago and it was definitely one of the worst campuses to date on out of any college I’ve ever heard of.
Problem at college is consent for intercourse. How do you record consent, so it does not get revoked a few days latter? Too many students were dragged through mud, and had their lives destroyed!
An immutable blockchain record would seem to be appropriate? I will let you come up with a suitable name for such a chain (and the corresponding coin).
We could also solve cheating by representing romantic interest as an NFT which can be traded from one partner to the nest, with hotels and restaurants only accepting two-person bookings from couples who are confirmed as owning each other’s tokens!
This doesn't really feel that surprising when the vast majority of Tinder's users can be better described as predatory in nature rather than building up real emotional connections Tinder and all online dating apps have essentially become the adult friend finder which was never popular to begin with.
