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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.