You know, there's probably fewer perverse incentives with a government run dating service. Obviously I can imagine ways it could suck, but when I compare them to how commercial dating services are run it's hard to see how they could do a _worse_ job.
On the other side you got a fresh supply on both sides from kids growing up to be adults and from adults divorcing and even if your matchmaking is perfect and divorce culturally shamed against, people still die which leaves widow(er)s behind, of whom a certain amount will want a new relationship.
Dating apps are a race to the bottom. They're collecting a tax on the lonely and desperate of dwindling populations. Ironically it's not sustainable over the long term.
> Ironically it's not sustainable over the long term.
The entire idea of just wanting MRR and be done with it is a huge, huge part why the world is so screwed. So much of the economy is just devolved into rich people seeking rents.
A dating app with an MMR score for the players is an interesting idea, with matchmaking done based on MMR similarity. Then there could be an annual dating tournament for the best players.
I don’t think that a market for lemons is the right analogy or how it relates to your other claims. A market for lemons is one where buyers cannot distinguish between high and low quality goods (eg used cars). I think people are mostly ok at judging the ‘quality’ of romantic partners and the problem you describe is a different thing.
You’re not really demonstrating anything with this comment. My complaint was with your above non-sequitur. You’re welcome to claim that dating looks like a market for lemons but I encourage you to follow up that claim with explanations or corollaries that line up with what a market for lemons is, rather than your other opinions on dating.
The divorce rate doesn’t really show that people are bad at judging the ‘quality’ of romantic partners for the same reason that cars breaking down or needing maintenance after hundreds of thousands of miles does not show that people cannot judge the quality of second-hand cars.
I think that's a bit too reductive, but the incentive mismatch is real. Commercial apps generally benefit from people staying on the app; a government service theoretically benefits if people pair off and leave.
It's an interesting question, because on one hand the government goals will remove a lot of the perverse incentives. E.g. having people who aren't going to answer in the pool of profiles shown is mostly a negative. Doing actual, well thought out matches makes sense where for a commercial app favouring one-sided matches that keep one side wanting and not getting frequent answers can be better.
But on the other hand, if it appears "too limited" because the most desirable people disappear off quickly because of a successful match, maybe they'll still struggle to keep the users coming back to it even if they're actually doing a better job at matching people up...
Really depends whether the track record (assuming its good) becomes known enough to people, I'd guess.
That's half of it. The other half is make people think they have a chance of pairing up but try to avoid them actually pairing up because, as Plenty of Fish once wrote in a blog post, it's not just that your users leave you, it's that they leave your service in pairs
Tinder side-stepped this issue when they changed to be a hookup site. The downside, of course, is you end up with a bunch of one-night stands instead of stable families producing babies.
The government also wants stable couples (divorce are costly to society) and non-toxic relationship (because these too are costly), which is also what the users desire.
How do we know that divorces are more "costly" to society than people being stuck together even if they aren't happy together? Would seem like the opposite to me.
Maybe better to put it as "emotionally unhealthy relationships" are costly to society. Singlehood is also less economically 'optimal' than partnerships, and divorce combines some of both.
That's a different question though. It's in society's interest to ensure couples (or at the least couples who have children) are compatible enough long-term to not end up divorcing/separating.
The societal costs otherwise aren't just the obvious direct costs - there are other things like (in divorces where there are children involved) negative effects on labour force mobility.
Both are bad, and I actually put the later in the “toxic relationship ” category above.
There are many situations for which a divorce is better than staying in a bad mariage, but divorce are still obviously costly for society: it drives the housing demand up, the legal process is costly and encumbers courts, single-mom households are more prone to poverty and its negative effects, etc.
The key point is that ideal for individuals (a couple that is happy together) is also the ideal for governments.
I give it about a month before they start gaming the algorithm to pair people who are likely to be on government benefits with people who can support them.
You make $150k, congratulations all your matches are McDonalds crew members.
You make $200k, the same but now they're all mentally ill because the algorithm deems you capable of supporting thyat too.
As long as you're going dystopian, maybe the government decides that it'll be better for the country if they raise a generation of super-babies and secretly pivots to eugenics as a service.
This is the primary worry with governments getting involved with dating apps, is it not?
Many of our countries are just one election cycle away from the politicians mandating that the official government dating app only incentivise Anglo-Saxon baby-making...
>This is the primary worry with governments getting involved with dating apps, is it not?
<insert bad faith comment about how it's ok because they're not literally sterilizing anyone and you can opt out of you want>
(bonus points if it's from an account that has a bunch of comments whining about interface defaults and algorithmic nudges matter in technical contexts)
Yeah, the precedent for the idea of a .gov dating service is Plato’s Republic along with comments in the Timaeus/Critias which make it clear that Plato envisioned a rigged service designed for eugenics. Central control over matchmaking is incentivized to eugenics.
I think its inevitable, especially if we get to artifical wombs. Think about the other side of the coin: you dont want to breed stupid and ugly people, right? Or maybe you want people who will immediately go on welfare and are genetically predisposed to vote reliably for the right party?
The nice think about artificial wombs is that they can solve some problems with the abortion issue (provided embryos can be safely transplanted). Fathers who want to keep their child when mothers want to abort could have the fetus develop in an artificial womb and pick the kid up once it's "born". Signing away your rights/responsibility to the child and leaving your embryos to be "birthed" and raised by the state could replace many abortions.
>Signing away your rights/responsibility to the child and leaving your embryos to be "birthed" and raised by the state could replace many abortions.
For a given quality of "output" at age 18 it takes a certain amount of input to get there, at least at a macro level.
Even assuming that you can figure something out that doesn't suck and produce way to high of a ratio of shitty non-productive people the way the current foster care system does, where is the surplus that the state can seize to raise these kids gonna come from?
A lot of the people crying about low birth rates aren't the least bit concerned about how affordable raising those children will be for families. Why should it matter to them how affordable raising children is for the state?
If artificial wombs will get them to stop forcing women to have children they don't want or can't afford, that should have many economic advantages.
Consider for example, if we didn't force 13 year old rape victims to give birth and raise children (<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/14/mississippi-abortion-ban-girl-raped-gives-birth" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/14/mississippi-ab...). The pregnant child could focus on healing from what she went through, complete her education, get a well paying job and be a stronger contributor to the economy. The infant wouldn't be raised by a traumatized and impoverished 7th grader which could help raise the "quality of output" as you put it. To be honest though, I suspect they really just want an underclass to exploit so "quality" isn't a metric they're worried about.
First off your argument is just the "women in the workforce will make us all richer" argument but with Epstein island demographics of women.
Second, I wasn't even looking at it on that level. I was just looking at the high level economics. I'm saying that it takes certain amount of material plenty to get a kid from vagina to workforce. You've got food, clothing, the labor of educators, etc, etc, etc. None of that is free. Current foster care system costs do not scale. Our society is simply not wealthy enough to afford that for any sizable fraction of children. You could perhaps cheapen it up but I don't see much potential there since the outcomes are already sub par. You could perhaps make it more efficient, but what form would that take?
Unless we commit to walking back the standards of acceptable levels of investment in children by 70-100yr there's just no way rich western countries are gonna have more kids. Even if you pop them out of artificial wombs the whole rest of the "infant to workforce" pipeline is a mess.
I'm not sure what "Epstein island demographics of women" are, but I honestly do think that allowing women to work outside the home (and get an education, and own property etc.) has been a net win for our economy, but removing unnecessary constraints on people's ability to pursue their own career/education goals seems like a good thing for everybody
> Current foster care system costs do not scale. Our society is simply not wealthy enough to afford that for any sizable fraction of children.
I suspect that the US is more than wealthy enough, it's just historically been unwilling to do any better. It would take some massive changes, and there'd still need to be a lot of administration to make sure that the kids were safe and well cared for, but our current foster care expenses probably aren't a good way to judge the cost.
Forster care is hugely inefficient and involves a lot of overhead which pushes the price tag way above the usual cost of raising a child. A child might cost a typical family $18,000 a year, but the cost for one child in the foster care system over that same period could cost $40,000 to $200,000.
Many of those costs wouldn't apply to a situation where the state was committed to raising a kid from birth though. For example all the legal costs involved in determining if kids should be placed into or taken out the system and then also doing that wouldn't exist. There would a lot less need for kids to be shuffled around. Plus lots of kids in the system need extra care, either because those needs made it impossible for their parents to care for them, or because they ended up in the system after traumatic circumstances.
Honestly, the levels of desperation and despair I'm seeing in the hellscape that is modern dating, I think a lot of people would sign up for this. I probably would if I were single. It's very similar to how matchmakers work, and they're popular all over the world, and have been for millennia. They're an unbiased and impartial judge and coach. We all have enormous biases and weaknesses in so many ways, and we could all do with help to better ourselves.
The important distinction here is no one is forced to marry anyone. This is entirely optional.
I am also pretty disillusioned with government right now, and I share your views on common law marriage and alimony, but I see this as one of the few things a government is doing right.
>Autocratic goverment gets all your personal info
They got your birth record, your education records, your bank account details, your employment record. They can write themselves a warrant to dig through your life. The government already knows all this.
>chooses a mate for you.
You're not forced to marry whoever you match with in the app.
>This is beyond incentives, it is just perverse!
Where in the 48 countries in Asia this is like that? Are you reducing the largest, most populated, and most diverse continent on Earth to a single country?
If people are oriented towards traditional relationships, then pairing people up younger probably leads to higher overall fertility rate in the population, so I could see governments with existentially declining fertility rates (read: almost all of them) taking an interest in actually providing a successful service here (unlike the commercial dating apps).
Of course, a lack of a match is not the only thing that prevents people from having kids, but I'm curious what the impact of an optimal matching service would be on fertility rates.
edit: I think governments might do well to provide funding for dating apps (whether privately or publicly owned) based on how many matches from the app actually lead to children. Completely flip the classical incentives on their head. Should be easy enough to ask if newborns were a product of a participating app as part of the birth certification process.
Every platform. Just being authenticated by government ID doesn’t change the issue. You still have fraud and inauthentic behavior.
India is a billion plus people. Google says that the dating app user base is 100mn, which is much lower than the total number of people who would use a government match making app.
That’s why the question regarding scale. That assumption makes a 10 person firm for a nation viable or impossible.
Singapore's population is 6 million, about 1.7 million are aged between 16 and 40.
That's 1000 times smaller than your "few billion" scale, before you remove those already in partnerships or those who don't want to.
> You could make an app for a whole country with a company of less than 10 people.
Perhaps you could do it for Singapore, I’d love to know how those 10 people would be split across functions, and how they would handle the fraud and safety issues that crop up.
In practice it would be 10 managers and in-between contractor types siphoning all allotted money and then an unexperienced dev building a terrible overburdened service that noone wants to use.
depends on the country. this type of corruption is guaranteed in some countries, less so in others. Singapore is usually good at avoiding it. Their online services are very good.
the government can switch up the incentives and for example make payment contingent on people actually using the platform as well as opening the tender to startup teams (usually they are locked out).
Sure it's easier to keep eyes on in a tiny country like Singapore, but basically all major western countries struggle with stuff like this because politics is way too spread out and ingrained with too many local interests. Strong federalism is the cradle of corruption, but if you can walk across your country in a day there's simply not enough room to federalize. OTOH federalism is necessary if your seat of government is 500 miles away, because there is no way for them to effectively govern local issues anymore.
The UK had some success with GDS. Not all IT in bigger countries is failures.
I honestly think that labeling corruption as corruption and a popular sentiment towards slamming a few people in jail for it would go a long way towards fixing these problems.
Instead even among the general public the sentiment is "government is just incompetent" which helps soften the reaction to it and thus indirectly encourages it to get worse.
There's no shortage of countries around the world that have dug themselves a corruption hole they struggle to get out of. It's easier to fix it starting from here than there but we don't want to end up there.
Things similar to GDS exist in many wealthy countries by now. And quite a few of them do work more or less. But it you ever get to work with the government on something like this or even just get a peek behind the scenes at how critical software decisions are made, you would share the same opinion.
my previous comment was about my peek behind the scenes.
the worst software decisions were primarily about corruption, even when they looked like they were about competence.
ime the private sector isnt any more competent on average it's just that most companies' IT budgets can't be milked endlessly with the right connection. even there there are exceptions though.
The modern trend of most families with 0-2 kids isn’t sustainable. We don’t need to go back to 5+ being the norm but a self stable society needs to be able to offset non parents thus requiring 3+ children families to be quite common.
Well I mean the whole discussion was about "why is the fertility rate so low it should not be so low".
So that does sound like it is very much an issue. To someone, anyway.
I don't really care. I have no horse in this race.
__
To cover the expected pedantic reply:
Of course technically it's everyone's problem. But just because it technically affects you doesn't mean that you have to emotionally involve yourself in stupid online discussions that don't comprehend systemic views and mistake them for personal whining.
That still works up to like age 7. It really is needed for that age up to ~18, which means you can get with providing that service for ~15 years (multiple children) and then going back to smaller apartments.
Or you can keep the smaller apartments and make boarding schools more common. Small kids all live in the same room while the ones old enough to need their own space move out completely to a boarding school. Depending on the specifics, may be a much better solution overall.
I actually attended high school in that way in Poland, despite it being very rare here. I was 15 when I started. While I think it was great for me, I would not recommend doing it for younger people - you need some basic emotional maturity and safety.
Even then, it would not solve any problems here, really.
It is not about preference, but because of regulation. Nowadays the government demand is that each child needs to have a separate studying and sleeping area. If a sliding wall in a room counts as a separate area is up to the officials' discretion.
On one hand, all of this is understandable, but on the other hand these policies do indeed raise the cost of having children.
This is very much a worst case. It assumes three children, each with their own bedroom, and two work from home parents each with their own office.
Why do you need an entire room each for an office? I work in a corner of a bedroom, and have previously had a desk in a living room. I know lots of people who do the same. I know few families where both parents work from home. Where more than one person works from home they can share an office.
If people work from home to a large extent, less office space is required, so the cost of land should go down. It does not because most people are not working from home.
Yes, but, as said, there are probably also a lot of people that decide either against children at all or against having +1 of them due to these constraints.
No one said that one cannot make do. One can always make do.
Maybe we can also go back to the "traditional relationship" where a single person's income can pay for a house, a car, and support 7+ people.
For a time, everywhere people typically had homes and cars and families it was required that they could afford it all on a single person's income because women were property, and not allowed to work outside the home (at least after marriage), or get an education, or own anything.
Exact times do vary by country, but female 'emancipation' is largely starting around WWI, whereas the middle class lifestyle you're suggesting doesn't arise until after WWII.
In the early 20th century, most women in the United States did not work outside the home, and those who did were primarily young and unmarried. In that era, just 20 percent of all women were “gainful workers,” as the Census Bureau then categorized labor force participation outside the home, and only 5 percent of those married were categorized as such. (<a href="https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-history-of-womens-work-and-wages-and-how-it-has-created-success-for-us-all/" rel="nofollow">https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-history-of-womens-wor...)
A marriage bar is the practice of restricting the employment of married women. Common in English-speaking countries from the late 19th century to the 1970s, the practice often called for the termination of the employment of a woman on her marriage, especially in teaching and clerical occupations. Further, widowed women with children were still considered to be married at times, preventing them from being hired, as well. (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_bar" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_bar)
> the middle class lifestyle you're suggesting doesn't arise until after WWII.
Most US families owned a car before WWII. 60% in 1929.
Around half of the people in the US owned their home in 1890. They actually owned the homes too. Before 1934 Americans typically paid off their homes in just 3-5 years. After that the 15 and 30 year mortgage had a strong majority of Americans in houses, but they were actually owned by the bank for decades.
That was never traditional anywhere. It was possible in the 1950s in a few places. Anyone thinking it was traditional is seriously undervaluing women's work.
I thought it was clear from context that I was referring to people who want to have kids with a romantic partner (I suppose for fertility rate purposes it doesn't even necessarily need to be with just one romantic partner, or within a monogamous relationship).
Lots of people don't want kids these days relative to 50 years ago, but even among those who do, they're delaying the process, often to the point where it becomes less ideal due to age. Many people who wanted kids when they were younger end up not having them as a result (and many who want them haven't had them yet).
Having a partner (or partners) to do it with is a significant factor for many, among other factors like concerns about affording food and housing for oneself, let alone for additional dependants.
I think it's unlikely for your worst case scenario to be realized. Underspecified objectives can cause unexpected results, but it can also lead to desired results. Fortunately experimentation is relatively cheap and tuning optimization metrics is the norm for most apps.
It is important to remember governments aren’t living things with their own agency. The people at the top running the governments are usually all dead in 30 years tops. They have no long term incentives. Put them in charge of a dating app and they will run it to enrich themselves just like all the other ones.
At least in the US, the declining fertility rate seems to be entirely caused by a combination of fewer people getting married and fewer people having children out of wedlock. Between 2007 and 2023, the percentage of reproductive-age women who were married fell from 42% to 37% and the births/1,000 unmarried women fell from 41.0 to 30.3, but the births/1,000 married women actually went up a bit from 102.3 to 107.4. See <a href="https://read.dukeupress.edu/demography/article/63/2/695/409215/Decoupled-The-Persistent-Relevance-of-Marriage-for" rel="nofollow">https://read.dukeupress.edu/demography/article/63/2/695/4092...
I contemplated whether to try to build a dating site a few times while I was single, and every time what stopped me was the perverse incentives. Making a financially viable dating service without actively making things worse on purpose is really hard.
E.g. at one point I spoke to a woman who told me she'd out of curiosity paid for a month of Tinder's premium sub to see how many had swiped right on her, and her queue was over 3000. She wasn't swiping much. The queue was basically perpetually growing, and the odds for any of the men swiping was accordingly low and dropping. Which was good for Tinder of course - a larger pool of people for men to swipe and get frustrated over lack of responses from, until some proportion pay.
If you're not dependent on frustrating your users into wanting to pay for priority, or getting people off the service because they've found someone is in fact your goal, it's trivial to fix this issue (and many others): Stop showing a profile when the queue gets too deep.
Same thing with not showing inactive profiles. Or actually trying to match profiles of people who are likely to match up (again there's a perverse incentive: you want to match up profiles that one side will like, but not match up profiles where both sides are interested too often; rack up the swipes but not the connections...)
That's the long way of saying I agree, and to get out some of the frustration from past years of using them (hopefully never again...). There are truly few types of services where the interests of users and commercial operators are so totally misaligned.
If I wouldn't have to deal with the legal liabilities around moderation and user data, I would love to make a non-profit dating site that was truly optimized towards some benevolent goals.
It’s just the latest new tech right wing obsession (see Elon Musk ranting about it on twitter, meanwhile no Tesla has middle seat LATCH). In a couple of years they’ll move on to something else.
I do think society would be better off in many ways if more people had kids but the current dialogue about it is offputting.
This reminds me of a black comedy movie called The Lobster, People are essentially forced into confinement into a hotel until they find a romantic partner, otherwise they will be transformed into an animal of their choice.
If you couple up with someone you are evaluated in a compatibility period to which if you argue you get given a child, if you argue again, you get given a second child haha.
Stats consistently show that women only select about 5% of options displayed from online dating apps. Men select about 50%. And women disproportionately give their attention to the most conventionally attractive men. (To say: That 5% is not evenly distributed amoung men.) The bottom half of men (from attractiveness ratings) basically get zero matches... ever. Online dating is brutal.
No, all women get some attention using online dating apps. A bunch of YouTubers have created fake online dating profiles with incredibly ugly women (bad face or bad body), and they still get matches. This guy on X has run lots of these tests with hilarious results: <a href="https://x.com/MurrayHillGuy1" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/MurrayHillGuy1
> Dating is brutal.
I can confidently say that dating was not brutal before the apps. (I am pretty old.) Before the apps, couples were mostly looks-matched: the ugos dated each other, the mids dated each other, and the best dated each other. Unless the guy was very personable/funny/rich, most people were looks-matched. Online dating has reduced everyone to a few photographs.
Women demonstrate incredibly different behaviour when "selecting mates" when comparing (1) familiar settings, like work, school, church/temple, friend/activity/hobby groups vs (2) unfamiliar settings, like bars, clubs, public places, and online dating. For (1), they find many more men attractive because they can evaluate them on more than looks. For (2), they can only evaluate on looks. If you ask women to rate strangers based only upon looks, they will rank only 20% as attractive. That is what makes online dating so awful for average men.
When young (average looking) guys tell me about their awful/non-existent dating lives at the office, I always recommend that they try approaching women in public more often. Ignore the shit you see on social media where the fake #MeToo women come on to put guys on full blast for approaching. Don't worry about them. They are awful people, and you don't want them. Yes, you will get rejected a lot (maybe 5-10% hit rate), but it is way better than online dating apps. You can approach in supermarkets, stores, cafes, festivals/concerts, gym, parks, etc. That way, plenty of other people are around, and she won't feel unsafe. And start by approaching ugos/low-mids. You only need to get their socials or chat app. Even if you have no serious interest in that woman, you can practice chatting with her. Once you build some confidence, approach average looking women. Eventually, you will find success. As long as you dress average/OK, groom (comb/style hair, etc.) and don't smell bad, they won't put you on full blast if she is not interested. She will politely decline, or give socials, but never reply to chats.
Please don't read this post as an attack on women. It is an attack on our current ecosystem of online dating apps.
> I can confidently say that dating was not brutal before the apps. (I am pretty old.)
What? Dating been brutal and unforgiving for as long as I've been alive, but I wouldn't say I'm old (between 30 - 40). it was definitely harsh before the apps and had the exact same "everyone wants to date beautiful people, no one wants to date ugly people" "problem" that exists today, not sure what makes you say it's any different than today.
> Please don't read this post as an attack on women
I don't read your comment as an "attack" on anything, women or dating apps. But things like "women can only evaluate based on looks in bars, clubs, public spaces, etc" is wildly out of touch with reality, and makes your comment rightly seem out of touch rather than an attack on anything at all.
Encounter someone interesting? Chat more. Someone boring and not interesting? Don't chat so much. Speak to a whole bunch of people, a little bit, stay with less to speak more, like how its always worked.
You literally give the advice to "start by approaching ugos/low-mids. This entire post comes off as vain, but your disclaimer at the end doesn't absolve it of also being misogynistic.
You're telling men to use "conventionally" unattractive women as target practice, implying they will be more receptive to attention, presumably due to a general lack of it. Then your advice is to leave these women behind once you've gotten what you needed, and to then seek women more attractive to you.
What, exactly, is why the dating "marketplace" as ugly as it is? Is there actually a point you wanted to make, or was there just a vague notion of a point?
> Just wait until you hear what women actually say amongst themselves
1. You assumed without asking that I was male. This indicates an inherent bias on how you perceive and interact with others.
2. You assume I have a nascent understanding of how women think and feel, compared to yourself, who must be an expert on women.
3. You group all women into a single monolithic group with shared motivation and behaviors. This is textbook prejudice and misogyny.
4. You claim that women are even more misandrist than men are misogynist, implying a justification for OP's and your own misogynistic perspective. In actuality, you're only further expressing the depths of your own misogynistic attitude towards women.
5. You claim to know what they say amongst themselves while implying I don't have the same knowledge; Are you a woman? Or do you have hidden cameras on women? How else could you have possibly ordained this forbidden knowledge?
5. My partner, a woman, does not think or act the way you described. She does not engage in overt misandry with her friends.
6. I have encountered plenty of extremely misogynistic and legitimately creepy/abusive attitudes towards women at "Sunday school" and while receiving religious education. Every one of the many dozens of churches I've been to have had extreme misogynistic undertones, and often brazen overtones. If you are trying to establish a basis for what isn't misogyny, you couldn't have picked a worse target.
7. "But I'm not the only one who does it" has never, ever, ever been an excuse for prejudice.
8. Dating "marketplace"? What are you even talking about? Apps? Websites? Dating in general? I am not conventionally attractive by modern society's standards, I'm overweight, and outspoken. I have not had issues finding or attracting women. Determining long-term compatibility is much more difficult, but a lack of vanity or a misogynistic outlook was never the problem.
My advice? Touch grass, ask a woman what she actually thinks, and listen. You clearly are not currently in a position to give others advice on women; you are in need of advice.
I made my point. are you incapable of reading? All I see is trying to avoid recognizing the point I made, using manipulative and snarky comments. Why not respond in kind?
Males are so used to holding all the cards and having everyone do their bidding that women having self-agency and making decisions feel like emasculating humiliations and an attack on the bases of masculinity.
They won't listen because they know what's at stake.
I guess you haven't met an actual misandrist. Actual misandry, like misogyny, is pathological. I assure you that my masculinity is not threatened by women making decisions and I fully support dismantling the patriarchy. Unfortunately, things seem to be sliding backwards.
I understand, and unfortunately pedantry becomes important here when we're agreeing upon and elevating shared ideals with the intention of establishing new institutions.
So for me, I understand and support the distinction you're making about how resistance to oppressive institutions is not hate or violence, "misandry isn't real" just doesn't tell enough of the story. The type of misandry I'm speaking of isn't systemic or institutional in the way misogyny is. It's much more pathological and individual. I haven't met many people like this and it is definitely an outlier, whereas misogyny in men is commonplace. Humans, of course. The spider dating scene is a whole different conversation.
I'm curious what in particular you meant by one of the biggest roots of the problem facing the world today. The patriarchy, or something else?
Patriarchy, to be sure. But I'm also rallying against the false conceptions many people have about the acts of males in patriarchy.
Put simply, there is no male who does not benefit from the patriarchy. What's more, masculinity itself is a toxic expression of itself. You'll find that naïve liberal humanists often speak about "positive masculinity", yet they either struggle to define it or define it through traits that have no reason to be male-exclusive. Masculinity and, thus, maleness itself is a poison on this world that has been choking it for as long as we've been alive.
> define it through traits that have no reason to be male-exclusive
Well, this is what I do. When I think about what it means to me personally to be a man, to be masculine, I think about the ideals I try to live by. They're all universal ideals; but I think myself and the rest of the male community are better off for embodying them.
I expect women to do this as well; I think the majority of positive feminine traits one might try to identify are traits that have no reason to be female-exclusive. I don't think either femininity or masculinity are inherently toxic. What I would call the dominating ideas of modern "masculinity" are mostly toxic.
But I'd ask of you to consider that many of us are trying to be positive examples to other men. I myself have isolated toxic traits within myself that were learned from the male community; I didn't have a dad or a present mom, my male guardian was extraordinarily abusive and patriarchal (Catholic deacon ex-boxer), and I grew up in a backwards, rural area. I'm still working on being the best version of my self.
Especially when you consider that for any change to be effected within the male community, the conversation takes place with respect to any notion of masculinity. You are not going to be able to sell to men as a whole the idea of shedding their gender identity. Believe me, I would love if the entire concept of gender identity disappeared tomorrow and we all just saw ourselves as people, free to express ourselves in whichever manners we choose, without constraints such as "maleness" or "female...ness". But, gender identity exists today, it is culturally inherent and the best way to effect change today is to discuss what masculinity should be. I'm glad that the traits that come to mind for me are not male-exclusive. I would be very sad if there really were such fundamental, irreconcilable differences between men and women.
Oh jeez someone in this thread who recognizes women are people, too. Reading this thread was so disheartening.
Every time I go online I try to remind myself that the majority of comments are coming from bots. The men in my life don't talk this way.
And where is this sentiment that women will only look at the same 5% coming from? One woman's 5% is going to look very different from another woman's 5%. Go outside and don't interact with just women, but a variety of people and a variety of different couples to see what normal relationships look like.
It seems in these conversations that the main concern for men is attracting women, but going by the way they talk about them, it doesn't sound like they respect them as fellow human beings. Some of the concerns women have during dating are: are they safe to be around (read: am I walking into a situation where I am going to get raped), am I going to be called a slut or a whore if I do x y and z? (Am I going to be called a slut if I don't?) It's what the internet talks about, and what media and your family will constantly warn you to be on the alert for.
A lot of people seem to think that attracting women involves changing superficial aspects of yourself so that they take the bait and discover you also have a huge, throbbing personality. Yet the very thought of entertaining such a superficiality speaks more about the shallowness of the man in this situation than the women.
Do women also engage in superficial behavior? Sure. Yet, I don't fault them for it. Women have been subjected to centuries of socially reinforced mass commercial and government propaganda, just like men. We are living in an age of manufactured consent and commodified personality traits. Gillette leveraging womens' magazines to convince women and men that body hair on women is not sexy. I hate what this culture of propaganda has done to us as social beings.
And yet, as you've described, the difference in experience between men and women is chilling. From how they perceive the world when walking alone at night, how they have to be more careful when consuming intoxicants at parties (and are socially shamed for failing to do this even when men are given a pass for getting so plastered they shit themselves), have to be more considerate of their presentation, their words, etc. And what is sad is that when you try to bring these things up as a man, you're often met with suspicion that you are against the entire concept of manhood. Which on its own is quite telling about how men subconsciously perceive themselves on a collective level.
The conversation seems unbalanced to many men because the world we live in is unbalanced, but many just don't see that because they see benefit in the status quo.
Please point out where the commenter used the word 'white'.... Oh wait nope, that was just you bringing race into this for no reason. This speaks volumes about your internal hangups.
And talk about missing the point; You are either ignorant or deliberately manipulative to admonish someone for speaking plainly about women's experiences. Are you next going to tell the Black community they're no longer allowed to use the n-word?
‘white’ was autocorrected ‘whore’, which they did use. Race makes zero contextual sense in that sentence. Nice try though!
I was speaking plainly about womens experiences, and was responding to the poster who was denying them. The poster who was shaming recognizing women as people who are not actually on pedestals.
Your comments are increasingly hard to follow and if you can't even be bothered to proofread them first then I see no reason to continue feeding a troll.
Please don't read things that I didn't say. I did not state that they aren't the same as everyone else. Of course women can be horny (that's why a lot of them like attractive men -- they aren't blind) and absolutely they can be superficial. When in positions of power they can be just as evil. That's what makes them people.
My objection to the original thread was the dehumanization of women (and men) using the words ugos, mids, "the best", and grooming (young) men to approach situations in a calculated manner and assigning value to people based on their looks. If they happen to get rejected by an ugo that they perceive as being of lower attractiveness, how is that going to make them feel?
I'm not a psychologist nor do I understand human behavior, but this entire wording makes me uneasy, and it is awful to see it being promoted in something as benign-seeming as a tech forum. Also see: hypergamy, "explain them the math" -> "share the same top 5% of men", "women actually say amongst themselves".
The entire point of me including that last paragraph was to share a little picture of the kinds of expectations/language women are thinking in (sounds like I failed?), hopefully humanize them, and may also add color to these "natural dynamics", on top of other factors than just pure number ratios.
Men having the ability to date 100 women isn't the same as women having the ability to date 100 men because the risk factor and thinking is different. And if you are coaching men to think in this sort of language, well... IDK. I'm just glad I don't need to date in this current climate.
I love my SO and he adds so much to my life, but if I hadn't found him, a life with a snuggly cat sounds just as lovely :). I hope people who are afraid of being alone after they see this-and-that scary number are able to see a future in which they can also just be content by themselves, if it comes to that.
>
3. You group all women into a single monolithic group with shared motivation and behaviors.
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You will be shocked, if you talk with men who are really able to analze their traits and talk openly about it, how SIMILAR and shared these are :-)
Men are quite simple on some layer. Especially this dating layer. Even if some claim not being part of these "mind & traits behaviour", nonetheless they mainly think the same.
Now we're also assuming that I don't know how men talk to each other, either? Is the assumption that I live in a box with no windows or doors?
You might be interested to know that "this is the way things are" is not a valid excuse for perpetuating learned prejudice. I in fact take issue with some of the collective behavior of both men and women. Shocking, right?
You can speak out against whatever is your desire. But more interesting is, why you think that whatever Babo in US would behave differently to whatever Babo in Europe vs against whatever Babo in Asia.
Men are simply >simple<. You do not have to accept this, even if its statisticly true.
And upon this adds men-specific behaviour with huge costs to society,but thats not part here.
Indeed. It's literally lampooned, including the specific language, in a Big Bang Theory episode, because it fit perfectly to Howards creepy early-seasons personality.
Going out and desensitising yourself to anxiety over approaching strangers by talking to people without the intent or expectation of it going anywhere is the less offensive version, and one that works, without any need to rank people by appearance to do it.
> You're telling men to use "conventionally" unattractive women as target practice, implying they will be more receptive to attention, presumably due to a general lack of it. Then your advice is to leave these women behind once you've gotten what you needed, and to then seek women more attractive to you.
I dunno, this seems to be interpreting the comment in the worst way possible. Like, assuming bad faith.
The comment above suggested that guys approach less-attractive women until they "build some confidence". This is not about the woman's receptivity to attention, this is about the guy's confidence or lack thereof. It makes sense: when confidence is worse, the conversation is more awkward and stilted, and that awkwardness is more likely to reinforce the idea that talking to strangers is a waste of time.
The charitable interpretation would be this: that you practice talking to strangers in scenarios that feel safe. Gradually, work up towards your goal - making new friends, talking to people you want to date, etc.
I halfway agree with you. The comments underlying advice isn't that awful. But he really shot himself in the foot with the wording, and so I don't think it's weird that people take issue with the wording.
As I pointed out in another comment, he could've just argued for approaching people without expectations and intending it to go anywhere and suggested that a way of doing that is to approach people you're not attracted to.
In other words, make it about your intent and preference rather than about ranking women by appearance.
The reason why I suggest these co-workers approach ugos/low-mids: They tell me that they are too nervous to approach women "on their level" (whatever that means). (1) Most people are more comfortable to speak to strangers that they do not find (particularly) attractive. (2) Who knows... maybe that ugo/low-mid suddenly becomes a lot more attractive when you see their personality. Maybe they are funny, unusually kind/friendly/intelligent, or adventurous.
The Red Pill movement is about social manipulation to sleep with as many women as possible or have an endless string of situationships. My advice aims to help them to learn to meet strangers... and maybe spark a romantic connection. It is exactly how I dated my younger days... long before dating apps (when it was less brutal).
Again, my issue wasn't so much about your recommendation, but about how you presented it. As you can see in the responses, the way you worded it drew attention away from the advice and to that.
Meeting people in public really is the answer, but I think shifting the focus from romantic to being genuine, friendly, and focusing on community in places where it’s not just guys is way more successful (for hetero men)
I met my girlfriend at a coffeeshop. I was a regular and just actively friendly to everyone. Our first date felt more like a second because we already had multiple conversations.
Men have a much greater emphasis on physical attraction than women which is why women need a much higher level of physical attraction when only using that. But building community lets us show off our other qualities which women put a much greater emphasis on.
I was into the PUA thing, and I disagree the comment above is that.
The PUA scene was about gamifying or exploiting dating - hacking how you go about it for your own gains (getting laid)
Approaching women in public with good intentions and to feel more comfortable talking to women is not PUA. It’s one of the suggested things to do, but I think intentions matter a lot.
Maybe not how the term is used now, or for the last few years, but there's been several waves of it with very different styles.
After Neil Strauss "The Game" almost destroyed several of the early exploitative PUA companies, many of them survived by refocusing on "softer", more self-improvement focused material. You'd find "old school" PUA companies like Real Social Dynamic[1] suddenly pushing exercise, meditation, and other self-improvement focused programs alongside their old routine-based pickup bullshit.
The comment above fits into that era, I think - on one hand there's language that fit right into some of that eras PUA mindset, on the other hand it's mostly arguing for the "softer" self-improvement stuff.
I agree with you that the intentions matter a lot, though. But I think the comment above would've gone down a lot better if worded differently...
[1] RSD later totally imploded after a campaign targeting one of their trainers - Julien Blanc, who pushed the exploitative angle to dizzying new heights.
RSD was one of the few "big" ones. Most of the others seems to have been single-person enterprises focused around a single coach. They ran a large message board and a had a bunch of coaches before it blew up.
The crazy thing is RSD has resurfaced since I wrote that comment and they don't seem to have learned a thing since their last implosion (I was on their mailing list briefly around 15 years ago, until I realised how creepy a lot of their material was, and clearly I didn't manage to get off it, as I got an e-mail about their relaunch)
I'd recommend picking up Neil Strauss' "The Game" - it gives a first hand account of how Strauss embedded himself in that scene in general and RSD in particular, and it's bizarre. Strauss' actually started his own PUA business after the success of that book.
I'd also recommend "Nine Ball: Confessions of an Angst-Ridden Maniac Who Decided to Get Laid or Die Trying" by Jeff Allen. Jeff Allen was one of the RSD coaches that was described in The Game, so it's very much biased. But if you take it as the slightly self-delusional autobiography it is, it's quite fascinating.
Redpill is normalized/accepted by gen Z now. Trying to convince young men that the language used by 4chan /fit/ circa 2016 (-pilled, -maxxing, "mogging", etc) isn't the truth of this world will fail. Gen Z men have seen that the tactics described by these people objectively work.
The failed men are having less sex than ever. The successful chads getting swole and using test? They're cleaning up using red pill tactics because the gender ratio on college campus's is so favorable now that white men are so statistically underrepresented that they're doing actual affirmative action for them.
#MeToo women do exist, they used to gang up on men out in public who were alone and scream at them to not approach women.
This is reality they're talking about, outside of work and home. Your inability to accept this doesn't make these trends any less observable.
> I doubt the 50% is evenly distributed either and men for sure disproportionately give attention to conventionally attractive women.
It's not evenly distributed, for sure, but the stats say that almost every women get 1 or more interested men, while only about 5% of men get 1 or more interested women.
Seems to track that way in RL too, not just online dating, so yeah, I agree that online dating tends to speedrun to the conclusion.
I do not think that it is online dating that is brutal, but these dating sites.
I have been through a couple of online dating and personality usually came first, so by the time appearance was revealed, we already could not care much. She was not my type, I was not her type, but that affected nothing.
The reason it did not work out is financial and logistics (different country, I have MS, I am heavily dependent on healthcare, and so forth), not because of any moral failing or what have you.
You should try AFK dating sometime, it's even worse! Out of all the women I've met, only 0.00000001218% been interested enough to date and marry me, and I didn't even touch any of the apps! Brutal.
> You should try AFK dating sometime, it's even worse! Out of all the women I've met, only 0.00000001218% been interested enough to date and marry me, and I didn't even touch any of the apps! Brutal.
I'd probably pick only the top 5% too if I was inundated by matches, so I'm not surprised.
And so while we can't fix that, guys can certainly improve their chances of being in that 5%. The thing is, what a picture shows on an online dating profile really is a lot down to you, irrespective of your actual appearance.
But men have a horrible ability to select pictures that are either incredibly low effort and poor quality, or the type of pictures that men would find other men cool in, rather than what will attract women, before even considering how you compete on actual appearance. When I spent some time figuring out my profiles back in the day, my match rate went up by a large factor.
>You can punch far above your metaphorical weight very easily because most guys hardly tries.
Like? I haven't tried online dating in a long time, but all guys I knew had normal profiles and rarely got any matches let alone dates.
>most guys hardly tries
That's irrelevant. Women on dating apps are still only going to interact with the top guys that are above their league, let's say a 9/10. Whether there's more who don't even try, doesn't help you at all. Like if you now try and you go from a 4/10 to a 6/10, you're still below the 9/10 throeshold the top guys have set the bar at. Women don';t choose on statistical distribution, thinking that there's only a handful of guys at the top so they'll have to lower the bar to find a mate, meaning you'll have a chance by going to a 6/10.
> Like? I haven't tried online dating in a long time, but all guys I knew had normal profiles and rarely got any matches let alone dates.
"Normal profiles" for men typically means hardly trying. It means poorly lit pictures. It means bad angles. Often it means things that instantly puts most of the women off, like shirtless pics [1], and poorly written profiles.
I've never had any problems getting matches and dates, but I did have to work for it. That meant ensuring I had good quality pictures, and ensuring my profile matched what women on the given site that I might want to date said the were looking for.
I went from rarely if every getting matches and dates to getting a steady stream of them not by magically getting better looking, but by improving my profile.
Just fixing the writing multiplied the number of dates I got by a decent factor.
> That's irrelevant. Women on dating apps are still only going to interact with the top guys that are above their league, let's say a 9/10. Whether there's more who don't even try, doesn't help you at all.
The point is that those "9/10"'s also mostly don't try (I'd argue most 9/10's aren't on the dating sites, so really you're competing against "dating site 9/10's" who are mostly going to be relatively regular guys who know how to pick a good photo)
[1] Shirtless pics works if you're built - it worked for me after I'd spent 10 years in the gym powerlifting, it did nothing before that - and are posting on a hookup focused site like Tinder, and have a profile written to focus on giving off that vibe. It does not work well on a more "serious" dating site even if you're seriously muscular. But still if you look at the guys profiles, you'll still see a steady stream of them. Most men going on dating sites really ought to take a look at the competition, and then do pretty much the opposite of what most guys are doing.
>"Normal profiles" for men typically means hardly trying. It means poorly lit pictures. It means bad angles. Often it means things that instantly puts most of the women off, like shirtless pics [1], and poorly written profiles.
No, they had good pics. What then? When can we just admit short stature, ugly face, small, jawline, etc. are just not attractive to women on dating apps, and lighting conditions, angles and all that and everything is just cope.
My experience from looking at how men presents themselves to gauge "the competition" back when I was single was that most guys have absolute garbage photos on dating profiles.
> When can we just admit short stature, ugly face, small, jawline, etc. are just not attractive to women on dating apps, and lighting conditions, angles and all that and everything is just cope.
You're never going to make the bottom 5% look like the top 5%, but you can certainly move yourself very significantly up. To take your examples, if you're short don't post pictures of yourself next to things that highlight how short you are. If your face is ugly, don't highlight it, and so on.
What is cope is to dismiss that your failure to get responses can't at least to a very significant degree be mitigated by presenting yourself better.
It's how guys decide to keep posting the utter shit pictures most men put on their dating profiles.
Seriously: Ask women to help you pick photos or for advice on how to do better. Worst case, hire a female photographer.
Wow, must be a US bubble. I've never heard of this in Germany, and I'd say iPhone vs Android seems to be more of a gender thing over here (although plenty of counterexamples as well).
I went on a date with a woman in Romania. During the date she commented that my phone wasn't an iPhone but that I had a fancy Sony mirrorless camera (as I was a tourist) so that made up for it.
> individual guys can improve their chances of being in the 5%, but that pushes out others already in the 5%.
When everyone invests equally in getting to the top 5%, because of how competitive it is, then it results in people maintaining their same spots as before on the leaderboard.
Also you can't improve things like height which is one of the most important things women care about.
>there's very little you can do to make them look at the top 50% of men
Historically it's been solved using religion and families enforcing monogamy in society, like in the past 2000 years of human history, to ensure most men and women get to find a pair to make a family and giving them a relatively equal opportunity/stake in the future of society as an incentive to help maintain and defend it.
Without these traditional enforcement mechanisms, I guess we can explain them the math that if they wish to find happiness and not die alone surrounded by cats, then they can't all share the same top 5% of men, and so will need to settle for a realistic man in the same league as them, instead of waiting for gigachad because their biological hypergamy instincts tells them to.
> When everyone invests equally in getting to the top 5%, because of how competitive it is
Yes, but everyone isn't doing that. You'd think men would, but I suggest you ask around some women on their experience of the quality of mens dating dating profiles.
The fault is in the assumption that "That 5% is static". There's zero proof behind that assertion.
If every man groomed himself and presented just "good" portraits and captures in his dating profile pics, that 5% would probably improve.
I'm a hetero man, but I've formed a fake female profile just to investigate. Wow... my competition is 95% disappointing. My non-existent labia recoiled in dismay. "May or may not be an axe murderer." "Thinks sports fanwear is dressing to impress." "I just killed this animal! Date me!" "Dude, do you realize you are grimacing?"
> I guess we can explain them the math that if they wish to find happiness and not die alone surrounded by cats
Let me tell you, women are waiting with bated breath to hear you explain this to them.
Last I checked, most western societies don’t allow polygamy and most people still prefer monogamy. You don’t have to explain anything to anyone, women get it. They are just happier living by themselves than surrounded by dudes who make condescending remarks about them dying surrounded by cats. I guess maybe we can explain that to men.
I don't have trauma. I have two eyes, a pair of ears and a brain.
I was raised as a classical cis male. I have spent most of my time in male-exclusive or male-majority circles.
I have yet to find a male with even a sliver of moral or ethical behavior. Behind closed doors, in a male-only environment, you discover the truth about males. There is not a single salvageable male.
"Aren't you a male, too?" Do you think I haven't tried to kill myself? It's surprisingly difficult. Besides, I'm trying to get as far away from masculinity as physically possible.
>Let me tell you, women are waiting with bated breath to hear you explain this to them.
Are you saying women can't understand the basic arithmetic of demographics relationship pairing, on their own? That they don't understand they can't all realistically settle down with the top % of men, if they don't want to end up alone?
> They are just happier living by themselves
Says who? Polls and studies show a massive drop in womens' happiness since the 70s, along with a massive increase in use of alcohol, antidepressants and SSRIs, especially amongst childless women over the age of 40 in the present, because as it it turns out, human evolutionary biology engineered womens' bodies and brains to desire to have kids for a good reason(procreation of the species), and years/decades of feminist anti-natalist propaganda takes its biological toll on the mind eventually, no matter how hard the cope is that they're "happy alone". Is that what womens' "happiness alone" looks like to you, popping pills and getting drunk?
If you don't believe me then just Google it, ChatGPT it, Gemini it, etc. and see for yourself.
You can tell yourself and others whatever you want and what makes you feel better about yourself, but in the end, biology always wins, as it has for the past two thousand years of human existence and for the next two thousand years in the future, as people who are "happy alone" get selected out of the gene pool. Reproductive biology is the undefeated champion over everything else humans created.
> Are you saying women can't understand the basic arithmetic of demographics relationship pairing, on their own? That they don't understand they can't all realistically settle down with the top % of men, if they don't want to end up alone?
No, that’s what you were saying and I was responding to that. I’m genuinely baffled at this response. Did you lose context? Do you really think I am saying that? Are you unfamiliar with sarcasm, or do you assume everyone being sarcastic always labels it with /s? Genuine question because I thought my meaning was pretty clear.
Similarly with the other point you quoted (out of context). Yes, women are happier living by themselves than with men who feel only contempt for women. The worst thing in life is not to end up alone, it’s not ending up selected out of the gene pool, the worst thing in life is to end up chained to a bad partner.
By the way I did chatGPT your claims and, unsurprisingly, they range in accuracy and substantiation. The claim about childless women over 40 being particularly unhappy is especially badly substantiated (particularly since it mixes those who are willingly childless with those who wanted children but couldn’t have them). In fact, older men who are childless seem to be unhappier than older women who are childless.
It’s interesting to see the narrative in men’s spaces about how dumb women are and how they’re going to end up dying alone surrounded by cats and how the men pushing this narrative don’t realize how supremely unattractive this makes them to women.
I don’t know if you’re capable of actually hearing this, but I will repeat it for you again. Talking about women like they’re idiots and expressing this kind of contempt towards them makes you supremely unattractive to women. And yes, they absolutely can tell that this is what you think, no matter how well you think you hide it in person. I hope that, if not today, then maybe a year from now or five years from now, you will sit with yourself and really consider that idea.
> That 5% is static - individual guys can improve their chances of being in the 5%, but that pushes out others already in the 5%.
Why makes you think that? It seems much more likely to me that women are selecting whatever profiles that interest them, which would be >5% if potential matches made better profiles. I've seen the women experience of dating apps from women friends, and indeed men profile quality is abysmal (my bisexual and lesbian friends seem to swipe on a much higher proportion of women profiles FWIW), to the point that 5% even seems pretty high once you also take into account personal preferences.
I mean there is lot of research behind this. I read a book also by a guy who was founder of eHarmony or some similar portal, and this 5% statistic match real data from their site. Individual success stories are not replacement for hard statistical facts.
That isn't a rebuttal to the point made. You haven't differentiated between a fixed 5% on the part of women versus a fixed 5% on the part of how men present themselves. Both mechanisms can explain the observed outcome.
Yes, it's more difficult - I'm old enough that there was a period I had regular dates by sending corny chatup lines on IRC and it worked so I know well how easy it used to be.
But my point was that most men are doing such a shit job at presenting themselves on their profiles that it isn't that difficult to massively improve your odds by making a profile that is better than average.
Spending more than 5 minutes ensuring you have a profile picture that is decently lit, taken from an angle that present you well, and that you look like you're capable of taking care of yourself is a good start, but judging from conversations with a lot of women while I was dating, that is a high bar to clear for most guys on dating sites.
Exactly. And then they complain about not getting matches.
It is still effort if you make a decent profile on places like Tinder, because Tinder is very much intentionally trying to frustrate you to make you pay, but even just having a female friend you could ask to help pick a photo that won't actively repel every woman that ever sees your profile ups your chances so much...
I met my first girlfriend ever on Yahoo! chatroom.. that's right, all the effort it took for me was to send a "hi" message to a random woman online..
We ended up dating for 5 years after that after meeting this person.
This is why women are very upset about the existence of bisexual men (and why casual biphobia is tolerated among straights and the rest of the LGT community). Women hate knowing how easy it is for a bisexual man to leave/cheat. They hate having far less "control".
Men need an equivalent to political lesbianism.
Gay men have excellent marriage/partnersahip statistics. They stay together, they don't (or tolerate/accept) "cheating", very low physical abuse, very happy/satisfying relationships etc statistics.
Lesbian women have literally the opposite. The memes about domestic violence and other serious problems among lesbian communities would be funny if they weren't so true.
When I see these sad "women are from Venus, men from Mars" style of comments, all I can feel is that this is a sad truth of the universe.
The men who enjoy showing off pictures of their fishing/hunting haul. The men who use android phones, the men who want to show themselves topless (even in contexts where this makes sense). These man are not "low quality" or even "less desirable" partners in any objective sense because their photography choices are not amicable to women's desires. Women account for like 80% of consumer spending and advertising/marketing folks know some extremely uncomfortable truths about group-think/hive-mind mentality among women. These men should celebrate that they are showing their authentic selves, not the contorted version they have to repeatedly summon to satisfy foids.
Basically, men should actively be proud of our achievements, and any who can ignore societies intense biphobia should lean into the masculine side of their desires, as their relationship satisfaction will likely go significantly up.
> Gay men have excellent marriage/partnersahip statistics. They stay together, they don't (or tolerate/accept) "cheating", very low physical abuse, very happy/satisfying relationships etc statistics.
What.
Have you ever met a gay male? Maybe even talked to him?
Gay males are still males at the end of the day so they always land themselves in the most damaging relationships possible. Males already cause tons of harm by themselves, so sum them together and you get a truly dreary mess.
There's a reason there are so many gay males who are so homophobic they make Evangelicals seem like a Pride Parade Organizing Committee.
I was like that. I simply managed to realize that the problem wasn't homosexuality, but rather that it's always been males.
Dating males in general is a form of self-harm if I'm being honest with you. I'm bisexual and I do still feel attracted to males but I am at a good enough spot that I don't want to hurt myself that way.
> These man are not "low quality" or even "less desirable" partners in any objective sense because their photography choices are not amicable to women's desires.
They are not objectively "low quality", but they are objectively less desirable to women if women find them less desirable for it.
You can enjoy leaning into those things all you want, but you are not owed anything from women. They have no obligation to look past how you present yourself. And so if how you present yourself reduces their interest in you, that is on you. If you're fine with that, then by all means go ahead.
For my part, it was a very small sacrifice to spend a couple of hours figuring out which parts of my personality women actually finds attractive, and how to signal that with my pictures and profile text.
It’s only brutal because heteronormativity and beauty standards have made certain promises to boys, that they’ve grown expecting to be kept as men - and our society is entirely unable / unwilling to deliver on that promise. “It’s okay, everything will work out,” we hear as boys, and then as men, have our faces rubbed in, “of course it’s not okay, it was never okay, you have to work it out yourself, nobody owes you anything!”
It’s whiplash for a lot of guys, and that’s if you’re even savvy enough to clock it.
I don’t think it needs to be any more of a brutal realization than say the existence of say Santa, and yet here we are.
The original OKCupid was the best dating site and the only one that I enjoyed using. It has since been gobbled up by the Match.com behemoth and is now basically useless.
Amen to that. OKC back in the day was wonderful, for nerds like myself who loved answering questions and data in general.
The great thing was that it was self-selecting -- the less compatible types answered very few questions and stumbled over anything involving basic general knowledge, logic or ethics. The compatible ones added thoughtful or witty freeform comments to their answers. You could essentially clear all the usual first-few-dates compatibility dances just by running through people's answers.
I met many wonderful people via that site, and I never went on a bad date with OKC; we always had heaps to talk about. I thankfully found my perfect match for all time via OKC nine years ago, just before match.com ripped up the matching algorithm and the questions and destroyed the site entirely.
It is not a good business model to match people well, and match.com clearly knows that.
Match Group also knows that buying sites that match people well is good business because there's so much room to juice the profits by applying the lessons from their other sites to them, and the valuations will be relatively low relative to user numbers...
Owned by Match? Yes, along with Hinge, Meetic, Tinder, and several smaller ones. The only big player outside of Match is Bumble (which also owns Badoo).
Of the two, Bumble seems to be the slightly less evil one (fun tidbit: Bumble at least used to value a lifetime premium subscription at roughly the same amount as 6 individual months subscription, which tells us something about the expected lifetime value of their users...), but their both of course profiting wildly of exploitative practices.
To run a business you either need to show ads, have everyone pay, or have a freemium model where it can be used for free but some portion of users pay.
It’s easy to imagine making a better service by removing all of the parts that fit what I just described. I could make a better Instagram if it didn’t show any ads and was free for everyone. I don’t think my developers or hosting providers would want to work for free though.
The reason dating apps have this freemium model is because building a large pool of users is important to their success. Most people will not pay for an app if a free alternative exists. Most people hate ads. So the product which wins will always be the one lets people get started without paying, bringing in the largest dating pool.
There have been many dating app businesses that tried models where everyone pays the same flat fee. Most either converted to freemium or disappeared. There are still some niche social apps that use their expense and difficulty of getting an invite as a selling point, but they target very niche audiences because they’ll never be mainstream.
Your friend just discovered one of the harder realities of dating apps: Your odds of getting a response from an individual profile is very low. Swiping on a lot of profiles is necessary. For people who get easily frustrated by these odds and who get angry at having to pay for anything they’re going to be generally very frustrated with the apps in general.
Dating apps are one of the most poignant examples of a service that provides a lot of value relative to alternatives (you’ll spend more on a single drink at a bar or even on transport to a restaurant to meet someone) yet the nominal charge still makes users scoff. It’s hard to sell apps to consumers.
I recently married, and when registering the person at the registry office asked which dating site we met via, and was surprised to hear it was an "old school" one (Badoo) rather than Bumble or Hinge. The notion that it might not have been a dating site wasn't in the cards at all.
Yes, we know why. The problem is that the incentives this creates for dating apps are among the worst around. Many sites have business models where they paywall is locking away content or functionality that is desirable, but few other types of sites benefit nearly as much not by just locking away content or features, but by actively making the site functionality worse for everyone - including for the paid users, who may get e.g. priority access but are still wading through a sewer of zombie profiles and other effects of the user hostile monetisation.
As for ads being such a big problem, I'm not convinced - we've had several reasonably successful dating sites that did well with ads instead of or in addition to freemium.
The biggest challenge to that model flourishing is that Match Group tends to buy them and start locking away the features and pushing more towards the subscriptions. E.g. Plenty of Fish was mostly ad funded until Match Group bought them, OkCupid more mixed, but then Match Group bought them.
I'm not blaming the founders of those. If I started a site like that and Match Group offered to throw money at me, I'd probably sell too, knowing I'd gotten their attention and they'd probably do their best to clobber me if not.
You will get more limited growth if ad funded compared to what you can squeeze out of maximally frustrated men. And as a result you'll be a more attractive acquisition target for Match Group to snatch up at a bargain knowing they can drive up margins by enshittifying you, and you'll have lower margins to fight them with if you don't sell.
> To run a business you either need to show ads, have everyone pay, or have a freemium model where it can be used for free but some portion of users pay.
True, but there are still alternatives.
This would be niche, but a self-hosted solution could be made for the more technically minded to use and network. The dating-net. Where efficiency and getting off the app are the priority. no profit seeking, no ads, no perverse incentives.
As long as that government is benevolent enough to avoid demographic engineering. Singapore is a fine melting pot, but I'd probably avoid using a closed source government-run dating app in both my home (EEU) and my current (WEU) country.
>t's hard to see how they could do a _worse_ job
Spending a couple decades with the government putting it's thumb on the scale trying to get people who score high on government metrics to pair up with other people who score high on government metrics seems like a great way to start a civil war a couple generations down the line.
But I'm sure the marriages will be stable all the way there so there's that.
If you do a good job - all the people find partners, and leave, and you need to find new people to join
If you do a bad job - all the people see it as desparate, and leave, and you need to find new people to join
It's a high churn environment so there's no real way to make money from... er... bums on seats.. so there's no real choice but to make some sort of barrier forcing people to spend money
water-data-dude · · focus · HN ↗
sergiotapia · · focus · HN ↗
Keep supply of women high because men will pay anything for a chance?
I am very curious how this will be changed in this government platform. Maybe it won't LOL
some_furry · · focus · HN ↗
Bluestein · · focus · HN ↗
mschuster91 · · focus · HN ↗
On the other side you got a fresh supply on both sides from kids growing up to be adults and from adults divorcing and even if your matchmaking is perfect and divorce culturally shamed against, people still die which leaves widow(er)s behind, of whom a certain amount will want a new relationship.
stymaar · · focus · HN ↗
derangedHorse · · focus · HN ↗
Dating apps are a race to the bottom. They're collecting a tax on the lonely and desperate of dwindling populations. Ironically it's not sustainable over the long term.
mschuster91 · · focus · HN ↗
The entire idea of just wanting MRR and be done with it is a huge, huge part why the world is so screwed. So much of the economy is just devolved into rich people seeking rents.
logicchains · · focus · HN ↗
dan-robertson · · focus · HN ↗
some_furry · · focus · HN ↗
dan-robertson · · focus · HN ↗
The divorce rate doesn’t really show that people are bad at judging the ‘quality’ of romantic partners for the same reason that cars breaking down or needing maintenance after hundreds of thousands of miles does not show that people cannot judge the quality of second-hand cars.
some_furry · · focus · HN ↗
You must be really lonely lol :D
dan-robertson · · focus · HN ↗
SwtCyber · · focus · HN ↗
eru · · focus · HN ↗
> Keep supply of women high because men will pay anything for a chance?
Grindr has a different fix.
jansan · · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-42609353" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-42609353
vidarh · · focus · HN ↗
But on the other hand, if it appears "too limited" because the most desirable people disappear off quickly because of a successful match, maybe they'll still struggle to keep the users coming back to it even if they're actually doing a better job at matching people up...
Really depends whether the track record (assuming its good) becomes known enough to people, I'd guess.
bluecheese452 · · focus · HN ↗
tomjen3 · · focus · HN ↗
Tinder side-stepped this issue when they changed to be a hookup site. The downside, of course, is you end up with a bunch of one-night stands instead of stable families producing babies.
SwtCyber · · focus · HN ↗
brabel · · focus · HN ↗
stymaar · · focus · HN ↗
ourmandave · · focus · HN ↗
Maybe they should have a Rebound app as well.
embedding-shape · · focus · HN ↗
Windchaser · · focus · HN ↗
tomatocracy · · focus · HN ↗
The societal costs otherwise aren't just the obvious direct costs - there are other things like (in divorces where there are children involved) negative effects on labour force mobility.
stymaar · · focus · HN ↗
There are many situations for which a divorce is better than staying in a bad mariage, but divorce are still obviously costly for society: it drives the housing demand up, the legal process is costly and encumbers courts, single-mom households are more prone to poverty and its negative effects, etc.
The key point is that ideal for individuals (a couple that is happy together) is also the ideal for governments.
fransje26 · · focus · HN ↗
Or at least to start practicing how to make babies.
cucumber3732842 · · focus · HN ↗
I give it about a month before they start gaming the algorithm to pair people who are likely to be on government benefits with people who can support them.
You make $150k, congratulations all your matches are McDonalds crew members.
You make $200k, the same but now they're all mentally ill because the algorithm deems you capable of supporting thyat too.
autoexec · · focus · HN ↗
swiftcoder · · focus · HN ↗
This is the primary worry with governments getting involved with dating apps, is it not?
Many of our countries are just one election cycle away from the politicians mandating that the official government dating app only incentivise Anglo-Saxon baby-making...
cucumber3732842 · · focus · HN ↗
<insert bad faith comment about how it's ok because they're not literally sterilizing anyone and you can opt out of you want>
(bonus points if it's from an account that has a bunch of comments whining about interface defaults and algorithmic nudges matter in technical contexts)
Telemakhos · · focus · HN ↗
a34729t · · focus · HN ↗
autoexec · · focus · HN ↗
cucumber3732842 · · focus · HN ↗
For a given quality of "output" at age 18 it takes a certain amount of input to get there, at least at a macro level.
Even assuming that you can figure something out that doesn't suck and produce way to high of a ratio of shitty non-productive people the way the current foster care system does, where is the surplus that the state can seize to raise these kids gonna come from?
autoexec · · focus · HN ↗
If artificial wombs will get them to stop forcing women to have children they don't want or can't afford, that should have many economic advantages.
Consider for example, if we didn't force 13 year old rape victims to give birth and raise children (<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/14/mississippi-abortion-ban-girl-raped-gives-birth" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/14/mississippi-ab...). The pregnant child could focus on healing from what she went through, complete her education, get a well paying job and be a stronger contributor to the economy. The infant wouldn't be raised by a traumatized and impoverished 7th grader which could help raise the "quality of output" as you put it. To be honest though, I suspect they really just want an underclass to exploit so "quality" isn't a metric they're worried about.
cucumber3732842 · · focus · HN ↗
Second, I wasn't even looking at it on that level. I was just looking at the high level economics. I'm saying that it takes certain amount of material plenty to get a kid from vagina to workforce. You've got food, clothing, the labor of educators, etc, etc, etc. None of that is free. Current foster care system costs do not scale. Our society is simply not wealthy enough to afford that for any sizable fraction of children. You could perhaps cheapen it up but I don't see much potential there since the outcomes are already sub par. You could perhaps make it more efficient, but what form would that take?
Unless we commit to walking back the standards of acceptable levels of investment in children by 70-100yr there's just no way rich western countries are gonna have more kids. Even if you pop them out of artificial wombs the whole rest of the "infant to workforce" pipeline is a mess.
autoexec · · focus · HN ↗
> Current foster care system costs do not scale. Our society is simply not wealthy enough to afford that for any sizable fraction of children.
I suspect that the US is more than wealthy enough, it's just historically been unwilling to do any better. It would take some massive changes, and there'd still need to be a lot of administration to make sure that the kids were safe and well cared for, but our current foster care expenses probably aren't a good way to judge the cost.
Forster care is hugely inefficient and involves a lot of overhead which pushes the price tag way above the usual cost of raising a child. A child might cost a typical family $18,000 a year, but the cost for one child in the foster care system over that same period could cost $40,000 to $200,000.
Many of those costs wouldn't apply to a situation where the state was committed to raising a kid from birth though. For example all the legal costs involved in determining if kids should be placed into or taken out the system and then also doing that wouldn't exist. There would a lot less need for kids to be shuffled around. Plus lots of kids in the system need extra care, either because those needs made it impossible for their parents to care for them, or because they ended up in the system after traumatic circumstances.
throw930839009 · · focus · HN ↗
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Gareth321 · · focus · HN ↗
The important distinction here is no one is forced to marry anyone. This is entirely optional.
throw930839009 · · focus · HN ↗
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Gareth321 · · focus · HN ↗
stoltzmann · · focus · HN ↗
They got your birth record, your education records, your bank account details, your employment record. They can write themselves a warrant to dig through your life. The government already knows all this.
>chooses a mate for you.
You're not forced to marry whoever you match with in the app.
>This is beyond incentives, it is just perverse!
ok this is just slop
throw930839009 · · focus · HN ↗
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eru · · focus · HN ↗
amunozo · · focus · HN ↗
pcthrowaway · · focus · HN ↗
Of course, a lack of a match is not the only thing that prevents people from having kids, but I'm curious what the impact of an optimal matching service would be on fertility rates.
edit: I think governments might do well to provide funding for dating apps (whether privately or publicly owned) based on how many matches from the app actually lead to children. Completely flip the classical incentives on their head. Should be easy enough to ask if newborns were a product of a participating app as part of the birth certification process.
phreeza · · focus · HN ↗
ant6n · · focus · HN ↗
zurfer · · focus · HN ↗
hypfer · · focus · HN ↗
intended · · focus · HN ↗
What size of population are you considering for this hypothetical nation?
hypfer · · focus · HN ↗
And which nations are scaled to a few billion people?
And they all date? Every single one of them? The married couples? The children and the elderly?
intended · · focus · HN ↗
India is a billion plus people. Google says that the dating app user base is 100mn, which is much lower than the total number of people who would use a government match making app.
That’s why the question regarding scale. That assumption makes a 10 person firm for a nation viable or impossible.
hypfer · · focus · HN ↗
intended · · focus · HN ↗
iso1631 · · focus · HN ↗
That's 1000 times smaller than your "few billion" scale, before you remove those already in partnerships or those who don't want to.
intended · · focus · HN ↗
> You could make an app for a whole country with a company of less than 10 people.
Perhaps you could do it for Singapore, I’d love to know how those 10 people would be split across functions, and how they would handle the fraud and safety issues that crop up.
sigmoid10 · · focus · HN ↗
pydry · · focus · HN ↗
the government can switch up the incentives and for example make payment contingent on people actually using the platform as well as opening the tender to startup teams (usually they are locked out).
sigmoid10 · · focus · HN ↗
pydry · · focus · HN ↗
I honestly think that labeling corruption as corruption and a popular sentiment towards slamming a few people in jail for it would go a long way towards fixing these problems.
Instead even among the general public the sentiment is "government is just incompetent" which helps soften the reaction to it and thus indirectly encourages it to get worse.
There's no shortage of countries around the world that have dug themselves a corruption hole they struggle to get out of. It's easier to fix it starting from here than there but we don't want to end up there.
sigmoid10 · · focus · HN ↗
pydry · · focus · HN ↗
the worst software decisions were primarily about corruption, even when they looked like they were about competence.
ime the private sector isnt any more competent on average it's just that most companies' IT budgets can't be milked endlessly with the right connection. even there there are exceptions though.
eru · · focus · HN ↗
4848488484 · · focus · HN ↗
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expedition32 · · focus · HN ↗
Retric · · focus · HN ↗
The modern trend of most families with 0-2 kids isn’t sustainable. We don’t need to go back to 5+ being the norm but a self stable society needs to be able to offset non parents thus requiring 3+ children families to be quite common.
hypfer · · focus · HN ↗
Which, in times of working from home, means 4 bedrooms, 2 offices, 1 living room.
Ideally with walls not built from paper mache, so that they can actually be used for encapsulation of different requirements.
watwut · · focus · HN ↗
hypfer · · focus · HN ↗
If we want them to have 3+ children, we need to reduce these sources of friction of doing so.
sacado2 · · focus · HN ↗
hypfer · · focus · HN ↗
So that does sound like it is very much an issue. To someone, anyway. I don't really care. I have no horse in this race.
__
To cover the expected pedantic reply:
Of course technically it's everyone's problem. But just because it technically affects you doesn't mean that you have to emotionally involve yourself in stupid online discussions that don't comprehend systemic views and mistake them for personal whining.
b3ing · · focus · HN ↗
somenameforme · · focus · HN ↗
hypfer · · focus · HN ↗
"Just stop preferring that"? Good luck enforcing that.
KptMarchewa · · focus · HN ↗
Lvl999Noob · · focus · HN ↗
hypfer · · focus · HN ↗
I guess this will work for something like 10-20%? Maybe? (Speaking from a very german cultural background)
watwut · · focus · HN ↗
KptMarchewa · · focus · HN ↗
Even then, it would not solve any problems here, really.
bragh · · focus · HN ↗
On one hand, all of this is understandable, but on the other hand these policies do indeed raise the cost of having children.
hypfer · · focus · HN ↗
vidarh · · focus · HN ↗
Calazon · · focus · HN ↗
kubb · · focus · HN ↗
Fuck that.
Amezarak · · focus · HN ↗
graemep · · focus · HN ↗
Why do you need an entire room each for an office? I work in a corner of a bedroom, and have previously had a desk in a living room. I know lots of people who do the same. I know few families where both parents work from home. Where more than one person works from home they can share an office.
If people work from home to a large extent, less office space is required, so the cost of land should go down. It does not because most people are not working from home.
hypfer · · focus · HN ↗
No one said that one cannot make do. One can always make do.
autoexec · · focus · HN ↗
cucumber3732842 · · focus · HN ↗
That's a lot of bodies.
watwut · · focus · HN ↗
autoexec · · focus · HN ↗
jcranmer · · focus · HN ↗
Exact times do vary by country, but female 'emancipation' is largely starting around WWI, whereas the middle class lifestyle you're suggesting doesn't arise until after WWII.
autoexec · · focus · HN ↗
A marriage bar is the practice of restricting the employment of married women. Common in English-speaking countries from the late 19th century to the 1970s, the practice often called for the termination of the employment of a woman on her marriage, especially in teaching and clerical occupations. Further, widowed women with children were still considered to be married at times, preventing them from being hired, as well. (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_bar" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_bar)
> the middle class lifestyle you're suggesting doesn't arise until after WWII.
Most US families owned a car before WWII. 60% in 1929. Around half of the people in the US owned their home in 1890. They actually owned the homes too. Before 1934 Americans typically paid off their homes in just 3-5 years. After that the 15 and 30 year mortgage had a strong majority of Americans in houses, but they were actually owned by the bank for decades.
graemep · · focus · HN ↗
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bluGill · · focus · HN ↗
pcthrowaway · · focus · HN ↗
Lots of people don't want kids these days relative to 50 years ago, but even among those who do, they're delaying the process, often to the point where it becomes less ideal due to age. Many people who wanted kids when they were younger end up not having them as a result (and many who want them haven't had them yet).
Having a partner (or partners) to do it with is a significant factor for many, among other factors like concerns about affording food and housing for oneself, let alone for additional dependants.
intended · · focus · HN ↗
As a worse case example, you could succeed by matching people least likely to abort, but most likely to have multiple partners.
derangedHorse · · focus · HN ↗
intended · · focus · HN ↗
Even without my personal experience being used, we see the outcomes and decisions made by dating firms.
Firms have to satisfy their investors/shareholders.
fidotron · · focus · HN ↗
forshaper · · focus · HN ↗
bluecheese452 · · focus · HN ↗
ndiddy · · focus · HN ↗
vidarh · · focus · HN ↗
E.g. at one point I spoke to a woman who told me she'd out of curiosity paid for a month of Tinder's premium sub to see how many had swiped right on her, and her queue was over 3000. She wasn't swiping much. The queue was basically perpetually growing, and the odds for any of the men swiping was accordingly low and dropping. Which was good for Tinder of course - a larger pool of people for men to swipe and get frustrated over lack of responses from, until some proportion pay.
If you're not dependent on frustrating your users into wanting to pay for priority, or getting people off the service because they've found someone is in fact your goal, it's trivial to fix this issue (and many others): Stop showing a profile when the queue gets too deep.
Same thing with not showing inactive profiles. Or actually trying to match profiles of people who are likely to match up (again there's a perverse incentive: you want to match up profiles that one side will like, but not match up profiles where both sides are interested too often; rack up the swipes but not the connections...)
That's the long way of saying I agree, and to get out some of the frustration from past years of using them (hopefully never again...). There are truly few types of services where the interests of users and commercial operators are so totally misaligned.
sfdlkj3jk342a · · focus · HN ↗
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piker · · focus · HN ↗
- we get paid for date $1
- we get paid for second date $10
- we get paid for proposal $100
- we get paid for marriage $1000
- we pay for divorce $1500
- we get paid for first child $500
- we get paid for second child $1000
- we get paid for nth child $2000 * (n - 2)
manvillej · · focus · HN ↗
epihelix · · focus · HN ↗
vigilantpuma · · focus · HN ↗
I do think society would be better off in many ways if more people had kids but the current dialogue about it is offputting.
piker · · focus · HN ↗
vablings · · focus · HN ↗
If you couple up with someone you are evaluated in a compatibility period to which if you argue you get given a child, if you argue again, you get given a second child haha.
throwaway2037 · · focus · HN ↗
sokoloff · · focus · HN ↗
Dating is brutal.
Online dating seems like it perhaps speed-runs that a bit, but I don’t think it dramatically changes the essence.
throwaway2037 · · focus · HN ↗
Women demonstrate incredibly different behaviour when "selecting mates" when comparing (1) familiar settings, like work, school, church/temple, friend/activity/hobby groups vs (2) unfamiliar settings, like bars, clubs, public places, and online dating. For (1), they find many more men attractive because they can evaluate them on more than looks. For (2), they can only evaluate on looks. If you ask women to rate strangers based only upon looks, they will rank only 20% as attractive. That is what makes online dating so awful for average men.
When young (average looking) guys tell me about their awful/non-existent dating lives at the office, I always recommend that they try approaching women in public more often. Ignore the shit you see on social media where the fake #MeToo women come on to put guys on full blast for approaching. Don't worry about them. They are awful people, and you don't want them. Yes, you will get rejected a lot (maybe 5-10% hit rate), but it is way better than online dating apps. You can approach in supermarkets, stores, cafes, festivals/concerts, gym, parks, etc. That way, plenty of other people are around, and she won't feel unsafe. And start by approaching ugos/low-mids. You only need to get their socials or chat app. Even if you have no serious interest in that woman, you can practice chatting with her. Once you build some confidence, approach average looking women. Eventually, you will find success. As long as you dress average/OK, groom (comb/style hair, etc.) and don't smell bad, they won't put you on full blast if she is not interested. She will politely decline, or give socials, but never reply to chats.
Please don't read this post as an attack on women. It is an attack on our current ecosystem of online dating apps.
embedding-shape · · focus · HN ↗
What? Dating been brutal and unforgiving for as long as I've been alive, but I wouldn't say I'm old (between 30 - 40). it was definitely harsh before the apps and had the exact same "everyone wants to date beautiful people, no one wants to date ugly people" "problem" that exists today, not sure what makes you say it's any different than today.
> Please don't read this post as an attack on women
I don't read your comment as an "attack" on anything, women or dating apps. But things like "women can only evaluate based on looks in bars, clubs, public spaces, etc" is wildly out of touch with reality, and makes your comment rightly seem out of touch rather than an attack on anything at all.
KellyCriterion · · focus · HN ↗
then, you are entering a place with loud music - how else apart from looks are you judging to speak some words to?
embedding-shape · · focus · HN ↗
soulofmischief · · focus · HN ↗
You're telling men to use "conventionally" unattractive women as target practice, implying they will be more receptive to attention, presumably due to a general lack of it. Then your advice is to leave these women behind once you've gotten what you needed, and to then seek women more attractive to you.
This is a perverse way to approach people.
lazide · · focus · HN ↗
Just wait until you hear what women actually say amongst themselves, this dudes comments will sound like Sunday school talk.
soulofmischief · · focus · HN ↗
> Just wait until you hear what women actually say amongst themselves
1. You assumed without asking that I was male. This indicates an inherent bias on how you perceive and interact with others.
2. You assume I have a nascent understanding of how women think and feel, compared to yourself, who must be an expert on women.
3. You group all women into a single monolithic group with shared motivation and behaviors. This is textbook prejudice and misogyny.
4. You claim that women are even more misandrist than men are misogynist, implying a justification for OP's and your own misogynistic perspective. In actuality, you're only further expressing the depths of your own misogynistic attitude towards women.
5. You claim to know what they say amongst themselves while implying I don't have the same knowledge; Are you a woman? Or do you have hidden cameras on women? How else could you have possibly ordained this forbidden knowledge?
5. My partner, a woman, does not think or act the way you described. She does not engage in overt misandry with her friends.
6. I have encountered plenty of extremely misogynistic and legitimately creepy/abusive attitudes towards women at "Sunday school" and while receiving religious education. Every one of the many dozens of churches I've been to have had extreme misogynistic undertones, and often brazen overtones. If you are trying to establish a basis for what isn't misogyny, you couldn't have picked a worse target.
7. "But I'm not the only one who does it" has never, ever, ever been an excuse for prejudice.
8. Dating "marketplace"? What are you even talking about? Apps? Websites? Dating in general? I am not conventionally attractive by modern society's standards, I'm overweight, and outspoken. I have not had issues finding or attracting women. Determining long-term compatibility is much more difficult, but a lack of vanity or a misogynistic outlook was never the problem.
My advice? Touch grass, ask a woman what she actually thinks, and listen. You clearly are not currently in a position to give others advice on women; you are in need of advice.
lazide · · focus · HN ↗
soulofmischief · · focus · HN ↗
lazide · · focus · HN ↗
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soulofmischief · · focus · HN ↗
lazide · · focus · HN ↗
soulofmischief · · focus · HN ↗
erxam · · focus · HN ↗
Males are so used to holding all the cards and having everyone do their bidding that women having self-agency and making decisions feel like emasculating humiliations and an attack on the bases of masculinity.
They won't listen because they know what's at stake.
soulofmischief · · focus · HN ↗
erxam · · focus · HN ↗
Of course I know them. It's me! (joshing)
Don't take it as an attack on you, by the way. But we have to recognize one of the biggest roots of the problems facing the world today.
soulofmischief · · focus · HN ↗
So for me, I understand and support the distinction you're making about how resistance to oppressive institutions is not hate or violence, "misandry isn't real" just doesn't tell enough of the story. The type of misandry I'm speaking of isn't systemic or institutional in the way misogyny is. It's much more pathological and individual. I haven't met many people like this and it is definitely an outlier, whereas misogyny in men is commonplace. Humans, of course. The spider dating scene is a whole different conversation.
I'm curious what in particular you meant by one of the biggest roots of the problem facing the world today. The patriarchy, or something else?
erxam · · focus · HN ↗
Patriarchy, to be sure. But I'm also rallying against the false conceptions many people have about the acts of males in patriarchy.
Put simply, there is no male who does not benefit from the patriarchy. What's more, masculinity itself is a toxic expression of itself. You'll find that naïve liberal humanists often speak about "positive masculinity", yet they either struggle to define it or define it through traits that have no reason to be male-exclusive. Masculinity and, thus, maleness itself is a poison on this world that has been choking it for as long as we've been alive.
soulofmischief · · focus · HN ↗
Well, this is what I do. When I think about what it means to me personally to be a man, to be masculine, I think about the ideals I try to live by. They're all universal ideals; but I think myself and the rest of the male community are better off for embodying them.
I expect women to do this as well; I think the majority of positive feminine traits one might try to identify are traits that have no reason to be female-exclusive. I don't think either femininity or masculinity are inherently toxic. What I would call the dominating ideas of modern "masculinity" are mostly toxic.
But I'd ask of you to consider that many of us are trying to be positive examples to other men. I myself have isolated toxic traits within myself that were learned from the male community; I didn't have a dad or a present mom, my male guardian was extraordinarily abusive and patriarchal (Catholic deacon ex-boxer), and I grew up in a backwards, rural area. I'm still working on being the best version of my self.
Especially when you consider that for any change to be effected within the male community, the conversation takes place with respect to any notion of masculinity. You are not going to be able to sell to men as a whole the idea of shedding their gender identity. Believe me, I would love if the entire concept of gender identity disappeared tomorrow and we all just saw ourselves as people, free to express ourselves in whichever manners we choose, without constraints such as "maleness" or "female...ness". But, gender identity exists today, it is culturally inherent and the best way to effect change today is to discuss what masculinity should be. I'm glad that the traits that come to mind for me are not male-exclusive. I would be very sad if there really were such fundamental, irreconcilable differences between men and women.
sopperfix · · focus · HN ↗
Every time I go online I try to remind myself that the majority of comments are coming from bots. The men in my life don't talk this way.
And where is this sentiment that women will only look at the same 5% coming from? One woman's 5% is going to look very different from another woman's 5%. Go outside and don't interact with just women, but a variety of people and a variety of different couples to see what normal relationships look like.
It seems in these conversations that the main concern for men is attracting women, but going by the way they talk about them, it doesn't sound like they respect them as fellow human beings. Some of the concerns women have during dating are: are they safe to be around (read: am I walking into a situation where I am going to get raped), am I going to be called a slut or a whore if I do x y and z? (Am I going to be called a slut if I don't?) It's what the internet talks about, and what media and your family will constantly warn you to be on the alert for.
soulofmischief · · focus · HN ↗
Do women also engage in superficial behavior? Sure. Yet, I don't fault them for it. Women have been subjected to centuries of socially reinforced mass commercial and government propaganda, just like men. We are living in an age of manufactured consent and commodified personality traits. Gillette leveraging womens' magazines to convince women and men that body hair on women is not sexy. I hate what this culture of propaganda has done to us as social beings.
And yet, as you've described, the difference in experience between men and women is chilling. From how they perceive the world when walking alone at night, how they have to be more careful when consuming intoxicants at parties (and are socially shamed for failing to do this even when men are given a pass for getting so plastered they shit themselves), have to be more considerate of their presentation, their words, etc. And what is sad is that when you try to bring these things up as a man, you're often met with suspicion that you are against the entire concept of manhood. Which on its own is quite telling about how men subconsciously perceive themselves on a collective level.
The conversation seems unbalanced to many men because the world we live in is unbalanced, but many just don't see that because they see benefit in the status quo.
lazide · · focus · HN ↗
I’m not seeing anything about attracting women, just the natural dynamics present in populations.
You’re the only one I see using ‘slut’, ‘white’, etc.
soulofmischief · · focus · HN ↗
And talk about missing the point; You are either ignorant or deliberately manipulative to admonish someone for speaking plainly about women's experiences. Are you next going to tell the Black community they're no longer allowed to use the n-word?
lazide · · focus · HN ↗
I was speaking plainly about womens experiences, and was responding to the poster who was denying them. The poster who was shaming recognizing women as people who are not actually on pedestals.
what are you even talking about?
soulofmischief · · focus · HN ↗
lazide · · focus · HN ↗
sopperfix · · focus · HN ↗
My objection to the original thread was the dehumanization of women (and men) using the words ugos, mids, "the best", and grooming (young) men to approach situations in a calculated manner and assigning value to people based on their looks. If they happen to get rejected by an ugo that they perceive as being of lower attractiveness, how is that going to make them feel?
I'm not a psychologist nor do I understand human behavior, but this entire wording makes me uneasy, and it is awful to see it being promoted in something as benign-seeming as a tech forum. Also see: hypergamy, "explain them the math" -> "share the same top 5% of men", "women actually say amongst themselves".
The entire point of me including that last paragraph was to share a little picture of the kinds of expectations/language women are thinking in (sounds like I failed?), hopefully humanize them, and may also add color to these "natural dynamics", on top of other factors than just pure number ratios.
Men having the ability to date 100 women isn't the same as women having the ability to date 100 men because the risk factor and thinking is different. And if you are coaching men to think in this sort of language, well... IDK. I'm just glad I don't need to date in this current climate.
I love my SO and he adds so much to my life, but if I hadn't found him, a life with a snuggly cat sounds just as lovely :). I hope people who are afraid of being alone after they see this-and-that scary number are able to see a future in which they can also just be content by themselves, if it comes to that.
KellyCriterion · · focus · HN ↗
You will be shocked, if you talk with men who are really able to analze their traits and talk openly about it, how SIMILAR and shared these are :-)
Men are quite simple on some layer. Especially this dating layer. Even if some claim not being part of these "mind & traits behaviour", nonetheless they mainly think the same.
soulofmischief · · focus · HN ↗
You might be interested to know that "this is the way things are" is not a valid excuse for perpetuating learned prejudice. I in fact take issue with some of the collective behavior of both men and women. Shocking, right?
KellyCriterion · · focus · HN ↗
Men around the world are functioning the same way,esp. on some levels like dating. Like it or not :-)
soulofmischief · · focus · HN ↗
KellyCriterion · · focus · HN ↗
Men are simply >simple<. You do not have to accept this, even if its statisticly true.
And upon this adds men-specific behaviour with huge costs to society,but thats not part here.
soulofmischief · · focus · HN ↗
KellyCriterion · · focus · HN ↗
KellyCriterion · · focus · HN ↗
Once a girlfriend "invited" me to those conversation by giving some examples, so ..yeeessss. :-D
vidarh · · focus · HN ↗
Going out and desensitising yourself to anxiety over approaching strangers by talking to people without the intent or expectation of it going anywhere is the less offensive version, and one that works, without any need to rank people by appearance to do it.
Windchaser · · focus · HN ↗
I dunno, this seems to be interpreting the comment in the worst way possible. Like, assuming bad faith.
The comment above suggested that guys approach less-attractive women until they "build some confidence". This is not about the woman's receptivity to attention, this is about the guy's confidence or lack thereof. It makes sense: when confidence is worse, the conversation is more awkward and stilted, and that awkwardness is more likely to reinforce the idea that talking to strangers is a waste of time.
The charitable interpretation would be this: that you practice talking to strangers in scenarios that feel safe. Gradually, work up towards your goal - making new friends, talking to people you want to date, etc.
vidarh · · focus · HN ↗
As I pointed out in another comment, he could've just argued for approaching people without expectations and intending it to go anywhere and suggested that a way of doing that is to approach people you're not attracted to.
In other words, make it about your intent and preference rather than about ranking women by appearance.
throwaway2037 · · focus · HN ↗
The Red Pill movement is about social manipulation to sleep with as many women as possible or have an endless string of situationships. My advice aims to help them to learn to meet strangers... and maybe spark a romantic connection. It is exactly how I dated my younger days... long before dating apps (when it was less brutal).
vidarh · · focus · HN ↗
manvillej · · focus · HN ↗
I met my girlfriend at a coffeeshop. I was a regular and just actively friendly to everyone. Our first date felt more like a second because we already had multiple conversations.
Men have a much greater emphasis on physical attraction than women which is why women need a much higher level of physical attraction when only using that. But building community lets us show off our other qualities which women put a much greater emphasis on.
graemep · · focus · HN ↗
ambicapter · · focus · HN ↗
darkwater · · focus · HN ↗
testing22321 · · focus · HN ↗
The PUA scene was about gamifying or exploiting dating - hacking how you go about it for your own gains (getting laid)
Approaching women in public with good intentions and to feel more comfortable talking to women is not PUA. It’s one of the suggested things to do, but I think intentions matter a lot.
vidarh · · focus · HN ↗
After Neil Strauss "The Game" almost destroyed several of the early exploitative PUA companies, many of them survived by refocusing on "softer", more self-improvement focused material. You'd find "old school" PUA companies like Real Social Dynamic[1] suddenly pushing exercise, meditation, and other self-improvement focused programs alongside their old routine-based pickup bullshit.
The comment above fits into that era, I think - on one hand there's language that fit right into some of that eras PUA mindset, on the other hand it's mostly arguing for the "softer" self-improvement stuff.
I agree with you that the intentions matter a lot, though. But I think the comment above would've gone down a lot better if worded differently...
[1] RSD later totally imploded after a campaign targeting one of their trainers - Julien Blanc, who pushed the exploitative angle to dizzying new heights.
testing22321 · · focus · HN ↗
vidarh · · focus · HN ↗
The crazy thing is RSD has resurfaced since I wrote that comment and they don't seem to have learned a thing since their last implosion (I was on their mailing list briefly around 15 years ago, until I realised how creepy a lot of their material was, and clearly I didn't manage to get off it, as I got an e-mail about their relaunch)
I'd recommend picking up Neil Strauss' "The Game" - it gives a first hand account of how Strauss embedded himself in that scene in general and RSD in particular, and it's bizarre. Strauss' actually started his own PUA business after the success of that book.
I'd also recommend "Nine Ball: Confessions of an Angst-Ridden Maniac Who Decided to Get Laid or Die Trying" by Jeff Allen. Jeff Allen was one of the RSD coaches that was described in The Game, so it's very much biased. But if you take it as the slightly self-delusional autobiography it is, it's quite fascinating.
Der_Einzige · · focus · HN ↗
Don't like redpill? Make it stop working.
lux-lux-lux · · focus · HN ↗
Redpill is ‘working’ as it always has, as an obvious red flag
Der_Einzige · · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://theweek.com/culture-life/the-gender-education-gap-is-having-an-impact-on-dating" rel="nofollow">https://theweek.com/culture-life/the-gender-education-gap-is...
<a href="https://www.the-independent.com/us/money/dating-struggles-women-college-education-gap-b3023024.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.the-independent.com/us/money/dating-struggles-wo...
<a href="https://edworkingpapers.com/sites/default/files/ai25-1199.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://edworkingpapers.com/sites/default/files/ai25-1199.pd...
<a href="https://mindingthecampus.org/2025/10/23/college-students-in-a-romance-recession-boys-blame-hoeflation/" rel="nofollow">https://mindingthecampus.org/2025/10/23/college-students-in-...
4MOAisgoodenuf · · focus · HN ↗
I think whatever website you’re getting this jargon from is hurting you
DeluluDon · · focus · HN ↗
This is reality they're talking about, outside of work and home. Your inability to accept this doesn't make these trends any less observable.
KellyCriterion · · focus · HN ↗
lelanthran · · focus · HN ↗
It's not evenly distributed, for sure, but the stats say that almost every women get 1 or more interested men, while only about 5% of men get 1 or more interested women.
Seems to track that way in RL too, not just online dating, so yeah, I agree that online dating tends to speedrun to the conclusion.
johnisgood · · focus · HN ↗
I have been through a couple of online dating and personality usually came first, so by the time appearance was revealed, we already could not care much. She was not my type, I was not her type, but that affected nothing.
The reason it did not work out is financial and logistics (different country, I have MS, I am heavily dependent on healthcare, and so forth), not because of any moral failing or what have you.
[deleted] · · focus · HN ↗
[deleted]
embedding-shape · · focus · HN ↗
You should try AFK dating sometime, it's even worse! Out of all the women I've met, only 0.00000001218% been interested enough to date and marry me, and I didn't even touch any of the apps! Brutal.
Windchaser · · focus · HN ↗
Sampling bias. How many did you ask?
vidarh · · focus · HN ↗
And so while we can't fix that, guys can certainly improve their chances of being in that 5%. The thing is, what a picture shows on an online dating profile really is a lot down to you, irrespective of your actual appearance.
But men have a horrible ability to select pictures that are either incredibly low effort and poor quality, or the type of pictures that men would find other men cool in, rather than what will attract women, before even considering how you compete on actual appearance. When I spent some time figuring out my profiles back in the day, my match rate went up by a large factor.
lelanthran · · focus · HN ↗
That 5% is static - individual guys can improve their chances of being in the 5%, but that pushes out others already in the 5%.
IOW, if women are only looking at the top 5% of men, there's very little you can do to make them look at the top 50% of men.
vidarh · · focus · HN ↗
And that was exactly my point. You can punch far above your metaphorical weight very easily because most guys hardly tries.
> IOW, if women are only looking at the top 5% of men, there's very little you can do to make them look at the top 50% of men.
I didn't come even close to suggesting otherwise.
PorciiVorbesc · · focus · HN ↗
Like? I haven't tried online dating in a long time, but all guys I knew had normal profiles and rarely got any matches let alone dates.
>most guys hardly tries
That's irrelevant. Women on dating apps are still only going to interact with the top guys that are above their league, let's say a 9/10. Whether there's more who don't even try, doesn't help you at all. Like if you now try and you go from a 4/10 to a 6/10, you're still below the 9/10 throeshold the top guys have set the bar at. Women don';t choose on statistical distribution, thinking that there's only a handful of guys at the top so they'll have to lower the bar to find a mate, meaning you'll have a chance by going to a 6/10.
vidarh · · focus · HN ↗
"Normal profiles" for men typically means hardly trying. It means poorly lit pictures. It means bad angles. Often it means things that instantly puts most of the women off, like shirtless pics [1], and poorly written profiles.
I've never had any problems getting matches and dates, but I did have to work for it. That meant ensuring I had good quality pictures, and ensuring my profile matched what women on the given site that I might want to date said the were looking for.
I went from rarely if every getting matches and dates to getting a steady stream of them not by magically getting better looking, but by improving my profile.
Just fixing the writing multiplied the number of dates I got by a decent factor.
> That's irrelevant. Women on dating apps are still only going to interact with the top guys that are above their league, let's say a 9/10. Whether there's more who don't even try, doesn't help you at all.
The point is that those "9/10"'s also mostly don't try (I'd argue most 9/10's aren't on the dating sites, so really you're competing against "dating site 9/10's" who are mostly going to be relatively regular guys who know how to pick a good photo)
[1] Shirtless pics works if you're built - it worked for me after I'd spent 10 years in the gym powerlifting, it did nothing before that - and are posting on a hookup focused site like Tinder, and have a profile written to focus on giving off that vibe. It does not work well on a more "serious" dating site even if you're seriously muscular. But still if you look at the guys profiles, you'll still see a steady stream of them. Most men going on dating sites really ought to take a look at the competition, and then do pretty much the opposite of what most guys are doing.
PorciiVorbesc · · focus · HN ↗
No, they had good pics. What then? When can we just admit short stature, ugly face, small, jawline, etc. are just not attractive to women on dating apps, and lighting conditions, angles and all that and everything is just cope.
vidarh · · focus · HN ↗
Who had?
My experience from looking at how men presents themselves to gauge "the competition" back when I was single was that most guys have absolute garbage photos on dating profiles.
> When can we just admit short stature, ugly face, small, jawline, etc. are just not attractive to women on dating apps, and lighting conditions, angles and all that and everything is just cope.
You're never going to make the bottom 5% look like the top 5%, but you can certainly move yourself very significantly up. To take your examples, if you're short don't post pictures of yourself next to things that highlight how short you are. If your face is ugly, don't highlight it, and so on.
What is cope is to dismiss that your failure to get responses can't at least to a very significant degree be mitigated by presenting yourself better.
It's how guys decide to keep posting the utter shit pictures most men put on their dating profiles.
Seriously: Ask women to help you pick photos or for advice on how to do better. Worst case, hire a female photographer.
Der_Einzige · · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
hobo123 · · focus · HN ↗
Der_Einzige · · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://www.npr.org/2024/03/28/1241473453/why-green-text-bubble-stigma-is-part-of-the-anti-trust-case-against-apple" rel="nofollow">https://www.npr.org/2024/03/28/1241473453/why-green-text-bub...
<a href="https://leafandcore.com/2019/08/24/green-bubbles-are-a-turn-off-why-some-iphone-users-wont-date-android-users/" rel="nofollow">https://leafandcore.com/2019/08/24/green-bubbles-are-a-turn-...
<a href="https://mindingthecampus.org/2025/05/01/30876/" rel="nofollow">https://mindingthecampus.org/2025/05/01/30876/
<a href="https://blog.seeking.com/the-green-bubble-deal-breaker" rel="nofollow">https://blog.seeking.com/the-green-bubble-deal-breaker
<a href="https://gizmodo.com/im-buying-an-iphone-because-im-ashamed-of-my-green-bubb-1787965756" rel="nofollow">https://gizmodo.com/im-buying-an-iphone-because-im-ashamed-o...
<a href="https://thetab.com/2026/02/27/expert-reveals-shocking-reason-you-might-be-single-and-its-to-do-with-your-phone" rel="nofollow">https://thetab.com/2026/02/27/expert-reveals-shocking-reason...
mylies43 · · focus · HN ↗
hobo123 · · focus · HN ↗
Teever · · focus · HN ↗
[deleted] · · focus · HN ↗
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vigilantpuma · · focus · HN ↗
None of those things are why you can’t get a date.
> Thanks "AWFUL" (Affluent White Female Urban Liberal) women!
This is though.
vidarh · · focus · HN ↗
It's perfectly valid for women to want men who are willing to put in more effort than the barest minimum.
PorciiVorbesc · · focus · HN ↗
When everyone invests equally in getting to the top 5%, because of how competitive it is, then it results in people maintaining their same spots as before on the leaderboard.
Also you can't improve things like height which is one of the most important things women care about.
>there's very little you can do to make them look at the top 50% of men
Historically it's been solved using religion and families enforcing monogamy in society, like in the past 2000 years of human history, to ensure most men and women get to find a pair to make a family and giving them a relatively equal opportunity/stake in the future of society as an incentive to help maintain and defend it.
Without these traditional enforcement mechanisms, I guess we can explain them the math that if they wish to find happiness and not die alone surrounded by cats, then they can't all share the same top 5% of men, and so will need to settle for a realistic man in the same league as them, instead of waiting for gigachad because their biological hypergamy instincts tells them to.
vidarh · · focus · HN ↗
Yes, but everyone isn't doing that. You'd think men would, but I suggest you ask around some women on their experience of the quality of mens dating dating profiles.
PorciiVorbesc · · focus · HN ↗
THe top % are. Which is the yardstick you're being judged on, even when you're not in the top %.
IAmBroom · · focus · HN ↗
If every man groomed himself and presented just "good" portraits and captures in his dating profile pics, that 5% would probably improve.
I'm a hetero man, but I've formed a fake female profile just to investigate. Wow... my competition is 95% disappointing. My non-existent labia recoiled in dismay. "May or may not be an axe murderer." "Thinks sports fanwear is dressing to impress." "I just killed this animal! Date me!" "Dude, do you realize you are grimacing?"
vidarh · · focus · HN ↗
vigilantpuma · · focus · HN ↗
Let me tell you, women are waiting with bated breath to hear you explain this to them.
Last I checked, most western societies don’t allow polygamy and most people still prefer monogamy. You don’t have to explain anything to anyone, women get it. They are just happier living by themselves than surrounded by dudes who make condescending remarks about them dying surrounded by cats. I guess maybe we can explain that to men.
erxam · · focus · HN ↗
Oh no, how will we ever deal without billions upon billions of abusers and molesters.
PorciiVorbesc · · focus · HN ↗
Have you tried touching grass or better yet, professional therapy to cope with your misandrist traumas?
erxam · · focus · HN ↗
I was raised as a classical cis male. I have spent most of my time in male-exclusive or male-majority circles.
I have yet to find a male with even a sliver of moral or ethical behavior. Behind closed doors, in a male-only environment, you discover the truth about males. There is not a single salvageable male.
"Aren't you a male, too?" Do you think I haven't tried to kill myself? It's surprisingly difficult. Besides, I'm trying to get as far away from masculinity as physically possible.
kortilla · · focus · HN ↗
>"Aren't you a male, too?" Do you think I haven't tried to kill myself? It's surprisingly difficult.
Brother, you need help.
PorciiVorbesc · · focus · HN ↗
Are you saying women can't understand the basic arithmetic of demographics relationship pairing, on their own? That they don't understand they can't all realistically settle down with the top % of men, if they don't want to end up alone?
> They are just happier living by themselves
Says who? Polls and studies show a massive drop in womens' happiness since the 70s, along with a massive increase in use of alcohol, antidepressants and SSRIs, especially amongst childless women over the age of 40 in the present, because as it it turns out, human evolutionary biology engineered womens' bodies and brains to desire to have kids for a good reason(procreation of the species), and years/decades of feminist anti-natalist propaganda takes its biological toll on the mind eventually, no matter how hard the cope is that they're "happy alone". Is that what womens' "happiness alone" looks like to you, popping pills and getting drunk?
If you don't believe me then just Google it, ChatGPT it, Gemini it, etc. and see for yourself.
You can tell yourself and others whatever you want and what makes you feel better about yourself, but in the end, biology always wins, as it has for the past two thousand years of human existence and for the next two thousand years in the future, as people who are "happy alone" get selected out of the gene pool. Reproductive biology is the undefeated champion over everything else humans created.
vigilantpuma · · focus · HN ↗
No, that’s what you were saying and I was responding to that. I’m genuinely baffled at this response. Did you lose context? Do you really think I am saying that? Are you unfamiliar with sarcasm, or do you assume everyone being sarcastic always labels it with /s? Genuine question because I thought my meaning was pretty clear.
Similarly with the other point you quoted (out of context). Yes, women are happier living by themselves than with men who feel only contempt for women. The worst thing in life is not to end up alone, it’s not ending up selected out of the gene pool, the worst thing in life is to end up chained to a bad partner.
By the way I did chatGPT your claims and, unsurprisingly, they range in accuracy and substantiation. The claim about childless women over 40 being particularly unhappy is especially badly substantiated (particularly since it mixes those who are willingly childless with those who wanted children but couldn’t have them). In fact, older men who are childless seem to be unhappier than older women who are childless.
It’s interesting to see the narrative in men’s spaces about how dumb women are and how they’re going to end up dying alone surrounded by cats and how the men pushing this narrative don’t realize how supremely unattractive this makes them to women.
I don’t know if you’re capable of actually hearing this, but I will repeat it for you again. Talking about women like they’re idiots and expressing this kind of contempt towards them makes you supremely unattractive to women. And yes, they absolutely can tell that this is what you think, no matter how well you think you hide it in person. I hope that, if not today, then maybe a year from now or five years from now, you will sit with yourself and really consider that idea.
williamdclt · · focus · HN ↗
Why makes you think that? It seems much more likely to me that women are selecting whatever profiles that interest them, which would be >5% if potential matches made better profiles. I've seen the women experience of dating apps from women friends, and indeed men profile quality is abysmal (my bisexual and lesbian friends seem to swipe on a much higher proportion of women profiles FWIW), to the point that 5% even seems pretty high once you also take into account personal preferences.
geodel · · focus · HN ↗
fc417fc802 · · focus · HN ↗
elmer2 · · focus · HN ↗
6/10 would get a response and some, dates.
The apps make it so there's no conversation and it's all about your profile.
Way more difficult to get noticed.
vidarh · · focus · HN ↗
But my point was that most men are doing such a shit job at presenting themselves on their profiles that it isn't that difficult to massively improve your odds by making a profile that is better than average.
Spending more than 5 minutes ensuring you have a profile picture that is decently lit, taken from an angle that present you well, and that you look like you're capable of taking care of yourself is a good start, but judging from conversations with a lot of women while I was dating, that is a high bar to clear for most guys on dating sites.
testing22321 · · focus · HN ↗
90% of the guys had a photo of them with their pickup truck, a pic of them drinking heavily, and a pic of them giving the middle finger.
Not in a particularly redneck or rural area either. Lowest effort possible.
vidarh · · focus · HN ↗
It is still effort if you make a decent profile on places like Tinder, because Tinder is very much intentionally trying to frustrate you to make you pay, but even just having a female friend you could ask to help pick a photo that won't actively repel every woman that ever sees your profile ups your chances so much...
swat535 · · focus · HN ↗
We ended up dating for 5 years after that after meeting this person.
I miss the old internet.
Der_Einzige · · focus · HN ↗
Men need an equivalent to political lesbianism.
Gay men have excellent marriage/partnersahip statistics. They stay together, they don't (or tolerate/accept) "cheating", very low physical abuse, very happy/satisfying relationships etc statistics.
Lesbian women have literally the opposite. The memes about domestic violence and other serious problems among lesbian communities would be funny if they weren't so true.
When I see these sad "women are from Venus, men from Mars" style of comments, all I can feel is that this is a sad truth of the universe.
The men who enjoy showing off pictures of their fishing/hunting haul. The men who use android phones, the men who want to show themselves topless (even in contexts where this makes sense). These man are not "low quality" or even "less desirable" partners in any objective sense because their photography choices are not amicable to women's desires. Women account for like 80% of consumer spending and advertising/marketing folks know some extremely uncomfortable truths about group-think/hive-mind mentality among women. These men should celebrate that they are showing their authentic selves, not the contorted version they have to repeatedly summon to satisfy foids.
Basically, men should actively be proud of our achievements, and any who can ignore societies intense biphobia should lean into the masculine side of their desires, as their relationship satisfaction will likely go significantly up.
erxam · · focus · HN ↗
What.
Have you ever met a gay male? Maybe even talked to him?
Gay males are still males at the end of the day so they always land themselves in the most damaging relationships possible. Males already cause tons of harm by themselves, so sum them together and you get a truly dreary mess.
There's a reason there are so many gay males who are so homophobic they make Evangelicals seem like a Pride Parade Organizing Committee.
I was like that. I simply managed to realize that the problem wasn't homosexuality, but rather that it's always been males.
Dating males in general is a form of self-harm if I'm being honest with you. I'm bisexual and I do still feel attracted to males but I am at a good enough spot that I don't want to hurt myself that way.
vidarh · · focus · HN ↗
They are not objectively "low quality", but they are objectively less desirable to women if women find them less desirable for it.
You can enjoy leaning into those things all you want, but you are not owed anything from women. They have no obligation to look past how you present yourself. And so if how you present yourself reduces their interest in you, that is on you. If you're fine with that, then by all means go ahead.
For my part, it was a very small sacrifice to spend a couple of hours figuring out which parts of my personality women actually finds attractive, and how to signal that with my pictures and profile text.
mock-possum · · focus · HN ↗
It’s whiplash for a lot of guys, and that’s if you’re even savvy enough to clock it.
I don’t think it needs to be any more of a brutal realization than say the existence of say Santa, and yet here we are.
We need to do better about teaching our kids.
erxam · · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
a34729t · · focus · HN ↗
graemep · · focus · HN ↗
Its non better than saying 1% of women are actual people. The same bigotry.
erxam · · focus · HN ↗
Things are never the same and equivalencies don't exist.
graemep · · focus · HN ↗
You are wrapping up your bigotry in ideology. You are closer to being a fascist than anyone else here.
hobo123 · · focus · HN ↗
FuriouslyAdrift · · focus · HN ↗
[edit] mixed up Plenty of Fish with OKCupid
vidarh · · focus · HN ↗
That's okay - keeping track of all the sites Match Group have bought and trashed is difficult.
epihelix · · focus · HN ↗
The great thing was that it was self-selecting -- the less compatible types answered very few questions and stumbled over anything involving basic general knowledge, logic or ethics. The compatible ones added thoughtful or witty freeform comments to their answers. You could essentially clear all the usual first-few-dates compatibility dances just by running through people's answers.
I met many wonderful people via that site, and I never went on a bad date with OKC; we always had heaps to talk about. I thankfully found my perfect match for all time via OKC nine years ago, just before match.com ripped up the matching algorithm and the questions and destroyed the site entirely.
It is not a good business model to match people well, and match.com clearly knows that.
Ntrails · · focus · HN ↗
vidarh · · focus · HN ↗
KellyCriterion · · focus · HN ↗
Na,this should be true for both brands these days?
vidarh · · focus · HN ↗
Of the two, Bumble seems to be the slightly less evil one (fun tidbit: Bumble at least used to value a lifetime premium subscription at roughly the same amount as 6 individual months subscription, which tells us something about the expected lifetime value of their users...), but their both of course profiting wildly of exploitative practices.
Aurornis · · focus · HN ↗
To run a business you either need to show ads, have everyone pay, or have a freemium model where it can be used for free but some portion of users pay.
It’s easy to imagine making a better service by removing all of the parts that fit what I just described. I could make a better Instagram if it didn’t show any ads and was free for everyone. I don’t think my developers or hosting providers would want to work for free though.
The reason dating apps have this freemium model is because building a large pool of users is important to their success. Most people will not pay for an app if a free alternative exists. Most people hate ads. So the product which wins will always be the one lets people get started without paying, bringing in the largest dating pool.
There have been many dating app businesses that tried models where everyone pays the same flat fee. Most either converted to freemium or disappeared. There are still some niche social apps that use their expense and difficulty of getting an invite as a selling point, but they target very niche audiences because they’ll never be mainstream.
Your friend just discovered one of the harder realities of dating apps: Your odds of getting a response from an individual profile is very low. Swiping on a lot of profiles is necessary. For people who get easily frustrated by these odds and who get angry at having to pay for anything they’re going to be generally very frustrated with the apps in general.
Dating apps are one of the most poignant examples of a service that provides a lot of value relative to alternatives (you’ll spend more on a single drink at a bar or even on transport to a restaurant to meet someone) yet the nominal charge still makes users scoff. It’s hard to sell apps to consumers.
elmer2 · · focus · HN ↗
Now that it's a much bigger business, it makes it much more difficult to actually meet someone.
None of the women I met on these sites worked out long-term. I met my wife through a meetup group where we were friends for a few years first.
Aurornis · · focus · HN ↗
I don't think I can accept the idea that having a larger population of users makes it less likely for people to find matches.
vidarh · · focus · HN ↗
vidarh · · focus · HN ↗
As for ads being such a big problem, I'm not convinced - we've had several reasonably successful dating sites that did well with ads instead of or in addition to freemium.
The biggest challenge to that model flourishing is that Match Group tends to buy them and start locking away the features and pushing more towards the subscriptions. E.g. Plenty of Fish was mostly ad funded until Match Group bought them, OkCupid more mixed, but then Match Group bought them.
I'm not blaming the founders of those. If I started a site like that and Match Group offered to throw money at me, I'd probably sell too, knowing I'd gotten their attention and they'd probably do their best to clobber me if not.
You will get more limited growth if ad funded compared to what you can squeeze out of maximally frustrated men. And as a result you'll be a more attractive acquisition target for Match Group to snatch up at a bargain knowing they can drive up margins by enshittifying you, and you'll have lower margins to fight them with if you don't sell.
altruios · · focus · HN ↗
True, but there are still alternatives.
This would be niche, but a self-hosted solution could be made for the more technically minded to use and network. The dating-net. Where efficiency and getting off the app are the priority. no profit seeking, no ads, no perverse incentives.
vovavili · · focus · HN ↗
cucumber3732842 · · focus · HN ↗
Spending a couple decades with the government putting it's thumb on the scale trying to get people who score high on government metrics to pair up with other people who score high on government metrics seems like a great way to start a civil war a couple generations down the line.
But I'm sure the marriages will be stable all the way there so there's that.
awesome_dude · · focus · HN ↗
If you do a bad job - all the people see it as desparate, and leave, and you need to find new people to join
It's a high churn environment so there's no real way to make money from... er... bums on seats.. so there's no real choice but to make some sort of barrier forcing people to spend money
chasd00 · · focus · HN ↗
the major> No, I figure if the Marines wanted me to have a wife they would have issue'd me one!
-Major Payne
edit: isn't a government run dating site like a more gentle handmaid's tale basically?
DeluluDon · · focus · HN ↗
chasd00 · · focus · HN ↗