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.
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.
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 ↗
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 ↗
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hobo123 · · focus · HN ↗
Der_Einzige · · focus · HN ↗
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mylies43 · · focus · HN ↗
hobo123 · · focus · HN ↗
Teever · · focus · HN ↗
[deleted] · · focus · HN ↗
[deleted]
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.