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.
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.
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 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.
water-data-dude · · 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.
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.
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 ↗
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