What's interesting to me is what's missing in this post is ethnicity.
When I first started online dating, I noticed something curious, as an Asian male I got zero responses from non-Asian women from my parents country of origin. For me at least, I don't care about the ethnicity of the woman I'm dating especially given that I'm not the majority ethnicity in the country/city so I've always kept an open mind as to who I'd want to date.
Many of my Asian female friends had no trouble finding matches with white/black men. For background, I live in the West in a region which is 50% white and 50% mixture of Black/Asian/Latino, I write/speak fluent English, I have progressive and liberal values, and I have a very stable life.
I decided to record my interactions with the dating app for a multi-year period manually by putting in details in an excel spreadsheet. I receive 10-20 profiles per day, and if any of them like me back, chat unlocks. I put their details ethnicity, age, how attracted I was to them based on photos, and the outcome.
Well after 5 years of using it I can say that I have had zero White/Black/Latino women ever chat with me. Zero from thousands of matches over a period of years. We're not talking about first dates, relationships, we're talking about literally someone on the other end hitting the 'like' button to unlock chat. And I'm not someone who just likes super attractive women I was open to literally anyone ranging from less conventionally attractive profiles. At
To be honest, it completely changed my perspective of women altogether.
Men and women experience dating sites very differently. Women get annoyed/numbed being bombarded with low-effort pings. Men get annoyed with low response ratio. This causes a negative feedback loop. And dating sites earn more money by not quite solving their client's problem. Though I got dates and two relationships out of dating sites, their dishonesty/manipulation was apparent to me.
Yes, match.com has been sued by the FTC for all their fake crap and still they are doing it, especially when your profile is about to expire. A few days from that date you will all the sudden get attractive women that never bothered with you previously. These are fake accounts to get you to re-up your membership and again/even after being sued by the FTC are pulling this crap!
Yup. Nearly 20 years ago one of my friends was paid to create profiles on a dating site, and then even to respond a couple of times before ghosting people.
Facebook has been doing that to me for years. It’s tough with women because I sometimes click the bait when I think it might be someone I know who got married.
Except for Black women in the US. Together with Asian men (especially from India), they have a really, really tough time. There are a number of peer reviewed studies on the matter, it seems to be a stable pattern.
I don't know if OKCupid's old metrics have been peer reviewed but black and Indian men, at least on that platform-at the time of writing-didn't even get a 20% response rate. Literally every other demographic exceeded 20%.
I'm thinking the problem is local fragmented markets. If people could date across longer distances, then I think the preference would be averaged out a lot better. For example, in the USA, Asian might not be viewed as highly but in Australia, they might be.
The OKCupid data science team released some interesting data on this stuff a long time ago (but still interesting and relevant) that backs up your experience that Asian males have it tough. You have to head to the archives to find the articles - "How your race affects the messages you get": https://web.archive.org/web/20140728212935/http://blog.okcup...
Because humans today, especially the cyber-anglosphere, have a lot of issues about race and its often easier to avoid talking about it than to risk offending one group or another.
There's a bunch of good graphs and analysis in there (which matched my anecdotal experience of online dating).
The takeaway for me - if you're a man looking for a woman and you're not in the top 5% of attractiveness for men (really top 2%) then online dating is a waste of your time and you're better off doing pretty much anything else. This is doubly true in skewed dating markets like the bay area (less so in favorable markets like NYC, DC).
There's a lot of 'what you can't say' [0] in that book, sexual selection is skewed in lots of ways people pretend it isn't. I think it'd be better to acknowledge some of these things and consider it in an intellectual way - not so you can leverage it in some sleazy/misogynistic pick-up-artist way, but because understanding how it works helps you know how to behave/show confidence etc. Helps for the aspie-er among us where this doesn't come naturally (and is more important for men seeking women where for better or worse we have to be the ones to figure it out [1]).
I believe the blog was taken down, but there are a few copies of it online, and the author (Christian Rudder) published "Dataclysm", which contains many of the same insights.
Should take findings with grain of salt.
I asked Rudder at a conference if he normalized the results, he said he did not on that blog post. Didn't account for education level, kids, etc. Which may (or may not) had an effect on the results.
I’m sure Asians had the highest education and lowest number of kids and previous marriages, so if anything, normalized data would show Asian males are completely screwed.
Normalized height would be interesting, and could explain some of the bias.
Normalizing the data might indeed show that Asian males do even "worse" in online dating. But how dismissive Rudder was of the need to normalize that data was surprising and a bit disturbing as some many people take what is presented as fact and possibly draw incorrect conclusions.
I would not be surprised if normalizing for height did account for some of it, but the data should be available so outside people can run their own tests. (and half jokingly, as someone who wears glasses, normalizing for that as well).
As for education and kids, I can see how that can explain the difference between Asian women and Black women's response rate. But again, need a real examination of the data.
It is a very touchy subject, which is unfortunately plagued by both uninformed people and also those who just want to cause pain to to others.
That sounds exploitable, in an arbitrage kind of way. If I were single, female, non-asian, and wanting to attract a guy who was above my level socially or financially, my best bet might be to go for asian males.
If there was an objective score for attractiveness then women would rate men of the same race +1 higher than the objective rating. There are probably more men of the preferred race at 7 than there are men at 8 for all races.
I don't know what point you are trying to make. I said everything that was relevant.
If your numbering system introduced only now in this reply is regarding physical attractiveness, then women don't have this issue in their own race.
The point is that this doesn't help asian men because it barely makes a dent in the pool of asian men that would ever be exposed to a women with this predilection, as her pool is so much larger and also includes asian men. Even if her pool only included asian men in this strategy, from the perspective of the men, nothing has changed because the odds they will be exposed to it are slim.
My reply is only about the men's UX, not your "arbitrage" from the woman's UX.
If you look at it only from the man's perspective, then it may not make much difference. If you look at it from the woman's, though, it may make a difference to her.
If you can't look at it from her point of view, I don't know how to make my statements make any sense to you.
I think you’re out of touch then. I see what perspective you are trying to make happen, its not very relevant. The answer was “yes”, three times now. You are trying to make this other Hallmark fanfiction happen thats just isn't the worth entertaining.
Being an Asian American male myself, my friends and I had similar experiences. Asian males have it rough on dating apps. I really think the reduction to text and photos emphasizes racial disadvantages in the dating market, at least in the USA. I had a lot better luck abroad.
I've had a related experience. Ethnically, it's hard to place me by looks, and I get an ok number of matches. However, once I've started chatting with women, some 2 dozen times I've gotten ghosted IMMEDIATELY when they find out where my family is from (it's a country that doesn't get much positive press).
I don't think it's a reflection on women, specifically. I think it's more an indication of how strongly cultural biases are ingrained in all of us.
I do find it interesting that intentional UX choices like allowing people to filter others out by race go pretty much unchallenged in the straight community.
For comparison, Grindr used to allow filtering out other people based on race, but as a result of people pointing out that it not only recognized existing racial biases but also reinforced them, they removed that feature, and connections became more equitable across different racial groups.
On the other hand, straight dating apps don't really seem to care about this. Sometimes companies even gaslight about it--"we put in this filter to allow for people to search for people with a shared background!"--even though these filters are overwhelmingly used to filter out non-whites (except for the occasional white male user filtering exclusively for Asian women).
The fact that dating and matching patterns actually did change indicates that this isn't about attraction but UX choices that encourage thoughtless biases. Yes, of course Asian men would still have worse outcomes, but those outcomes would be those determined by actual patterns of attraction and not exacerbated by app design. And if someone has to swipe left an extra 10% of the time because they absolutely can't stand Asian guys... I mean, so be it. No one's entitled access to a particular filter.
For point of comparison, most heterosexual dating apps steadfastly refuse to add weight filters, despite them being the most demanded filters (aside from height). Why? Usually there are excuses about how it's impossible to implement or that the people who want weight filters are confused about what they want, but somehow LGBT dating apps all are able to add weight filters without any difficulty or controversy. Why weight filters are considered an undesirable feature in heterosexual dating apps is left as an exercise to the reader.
And dating apps could, in principle, tell the people who want race filters to pound sand just as much as they tell the people who want weight filters to pound sand. The fact that they don't is a political choice.
Straight dating apps suffer from a relative lack of women to men. On net, women dislike being subject to weight filters more than they like the ability to apply them. Not having weight filters results in attracting and retaining more women to your platform, which means more male users and more revenue.
An example of this in action is Hinge. They require users to include height in their bios (and always show it on profiles), but don't have a field for weight.
It's funny how height (a trait which we have very little control over) gets the green card for filtering but weight (a trait we very much have control over) is deemed too offensive to ask for.
I think it's because we know that our weight is completely up to us and that a failure of keeping the weight that is desirable to others is a failure of ourselves. It's a thing we deep down know is our own fault and it scares us. As for height, it's not my fault I'm short or tall, if you don't like it, meh, I didn't screw up or anything.
Is it market dynamics in action? Someone above said that women hate the idea of having a weight filter, and they tend to have the power on the market here (because they are more "in demand"). I know many men hate being subjected to a height filter, but they tend to have less power on the market (because most are a dime a dozen).
Yep. Most intrinsic theories of "why not have a weight filter" fail because they can't explain the many online dating sites (primarily LGBT) that do offer a weight filter, because it's very obviously a major factor in attraction that's easily quantifiable. The theory that the available filters are driven by which market participants have market power, on the other hand, does.
This is absolutely right, and is not being highlighted enough in these threads. Outside of the dating sites, the numbers and the reality is not so bad. People fall in love with personalities, and personalities are presented to people longitudinally. In other words, it takes months to really get to know someone's personality. They can become attractive in ways that a dating profile would never show.
Dating apps have artificially forced people into making superficial choices.
I actually am looking into some really interesting data about match rate between different personality types and it seems like people with compatible with personalities match at a higher rate. Not sure about long term success but it's pretty crazy that I'm seeing that in match rate.
Well that would be making perfect sense. Once initial attraction wears off (and it always will), what remains is personality. The bigger the difference, the more conflicts. Whoever came up with 'opposites attract' didn't do a followup after couple of years.
I'm a cofounder of a dating app and we actually resisted letting people filter for race. Not sure about the impact on metrics but it is our current position. We let people filter on nationality instead because that speaks to the person's values and world views. We also let people filter based on personality and language.
It seems to me that not being able to filter people for things like race is an antipattern designed to increase engagement. IE waste my time trying to find what I want. Unless you're willing to not optimize your income, I doubt you'll be able to solve online dating.
To state the obvious, I know some of us white folks have despicable views on race. But, surely we’re not the only people using the race filters on dating apps. Maybe in the most innocent of ways as a proxy for cultural values but it’s used by non-whites too.
Anecdotal, but I have a decent number of (East) Asian female + other ethnicity male couples in my social circle. But only one (East) Asian male + white female couple.
I'm wondering if the advent of things like BTS will alter dynamics, as quite a few non-Asian women seem to go crazy over K-pop boyband idols. Then again, I'm pretty sure if you're ridiculously good looking, extremely fit, and hugely successful like a boyband idol singer, you're likely to do well on the dating scene regardless of ethnicity.
From what I heard while living in Asia, some of the boyband idols used drugs to rape girls because they were super frustrated about their regular dating success. So apparently, even being rich and good looking is not enough.
I don't think the Burning Sun scandal implies anything about male idols success (or lack of) in the dating market. It's more about them abusing their power/influence/wealth if anything.
The dynamics of dating in Asia amongst native population Asians is a whole different story than that experienced by Asian-Americans in the US (or other Western countries). The demographics there are largely homogenous and expectations by far are that you're most likely going to date and marry someone of your own ethnicity.
If you're a Korean man in Korea, you're probably not at any disadvantage on the domestic dating scene because of your ethnicity, you probably have close to zero expectation that you'll be dating someone who is not Korean, or at least not Asian.
> Well after 5 years of using it I can say that I have had zero White/Black/Latino women ever chat with me.
This must be a horrible experience. This seems like a good reason to stop using the website or app and maybe to write to the developers about why they're losing you.
> To be honest, it completely changed my perspective of women altogether.
Not sure if that was the intention, but it sounds like you're changing how you see all women. However your experience comes from women whose profile you liked, who do online dating via a given app.
Technically it’s their app and they’re providing bad user experience to that particular user.
The interactions in the app are likely very structured (maybe viewing profiles in a specific context). I’d guess experimenting with a different form could change how users interact.
Obviously we can’t change things like an individual’s attraction and that’s not the focus. App devs sould act on larger patterns, i.e. if the app devs receive a significant number of reports that their users are feeling excluded, they should go to work. Maybe change something small and see if it helps.
Wow, we are blaming app developers for a lack of success in dating. Ok maybe it has an effect, but I can think of a ton of other things that would be worth addressing fist.
Dress well, have good fitting clothes. Look groomed and clean. Stand with a decent posture. Try to say something interesting in your profile. Look as if you have your life in order. Look as if you have interests, especially one that might be interesting to a potential partner.
I have no reason to suspect that the user is not doing the above.
And from the point of devs it doesn't matter. As I wrote earlier, I believe devs (or maybe product owners) should act if they receive a sufficient number of reports like this.
Sexual marketplaces have different set of parameters. Whatever the popular media says women are attracted by high social status male. Higher social status can be taller/muscular men, richer men, famous men or men with many girlfriends(proxy for higher status).
I don't know how many signals for higher social status your profile ticks. But in my opinion improving any one of the signals can improve dating outcome.
There's a certain subset of people who prefer to only date within their race. That can seriously shrink the candidate pool, and might make a woman give someone the benefit of the doubt.
Is this the highest ranked comment in this thread because GP is a weirdo or because his experience rings true to many other people reading the comments?
That’s happening but your ranking in the app can be manipulated and this can change your matches.
Without manipulating your ranking you are not being shown at all to those other women.
They never see your profiles.
The apps are just as much to blame as the cultural preferences. (The cultural preferences distort what ‘attractiveness’ is and influence your ranking, and for you this also dilutes the potential of interest in your profile, so of the people less likely to be looking for you only a few of them see you and reject, the others never saw you to consider.)
As you can distort this ranking (literally just act like you think a hot girl would act on a dating app, ignoring everyone that matches them for a few weeks, and also selectively swiping to try matching someone), you should redirect that energy towards the apps more so than the women.
Guys and unattractive women get frustrated and end up swiping more and entertaining what they can get - casting a larger net. This puts them all in the same bucket and why you see more of each other, and people looking specifically for your attributes, ie. same race. It is aiming to mirror the physical world but has flaws because it lacks inputs available in the physical world.
Topics like this are like minefields, especially online, but I had to comment just to say that sucks and I hope it changes.
For what it's worth, outside of dating apps, I see men of all backgrounds (including Asian men) have success with women of other backgrounds if they look after themselves, are confident, friendly, put themselves out there and take initiative. Those things are required for men of any background I guess, and men of some backgrounds definitely have to get it right more than others, and even when they do, their odds can still be worse, but still.
The dance scene is a good example, it has lots of interracial couples of all flavors. If you're interested in meeting more Latino and Afro women, check out some Latin and Afro dance classes and it won't take long before you get to know a bunch. (I appreciate there's an ongoing global pandemic, jussayin', I'm sure there are other examples like that)
Just a completely useless anecdote from a stranger online ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
What is the evolutionary benefit of the 'Asian look'? If women are inclined to choose other looks how can it be that men with Asian features have obviously been chosen for thousands of years?
Like most genes, it affects all sorts of systems at once, so pinning down which of its changes from the ancestral type are most responsible for the selection is a very difficult problem. Empirically it has clearly been a successful variant, though.
I don't think it's obvious that those men were chosen for thousands of years. In those long-gone societies, did the women really get to pick men based on looks? Maybe they didn't get to pick at all, or maybe they picked based on survival resources.
In most cases, it isn't even possible for male looks and female looks to be separately selected. That can only happen if a sex-specific gene promoter is in front of the gene. Most traits are selected without regard to sex.
So if selection by looks is mostly a matter of men choosing women, traits that create attractive women will spread through the population even if those traits are also changing male appearance in ways that women dislike.
Isn’t it blatantly obvious? For thousands of years women could only pick from one of a few guys in her village, if she could pick at all. Now a woman can download an app and swipe through hundreds of men in minutes. That allows her to pick what she wants.
Asian men do the worst of any group. I would chalk it up to ambiguity of cultural compatibility. But as with all these posts, it's hard to say anything without being able to see your profile.
You say
> I have progressive and liberal values
but also say
> it completely changed my perspective of women altogether.
which, granted, may be justified by your experiences but off the bat this is giving me a set of weird assumptions.
Sociological point aside, you might do better to improve other aspects of your life before reaching some fixed "perspective of women".
Dating's not easy, but it gets much easier if you improve your life holistically (and especially the things you are weakest in). Photos are poor quality? Dress like a slob? Overweight? Aren't witty? These are all things that can be improved with effort, even if it is challenging to do so.
It's really easy to come up with some explanation for a lack of dating success, especially a generalized fatalistic thesis from a limited data sample; it's much more difficult to take some time to figure out why you're unsuccessful, and then put in the work to fix it.
Have you ever met someone who seemed naturally good looking? Usually they care a lot about clothes, accessories, and are passionate about style and appearance. One guy I know always enjoys going "thrifting" at secondhand stores, and is incredibly enthusiastic and helpful if you go with him. So his success is related as much to work as it is to luck.
There's a lot that goes into being attractive in the same way there's a lot that goes into being "smart" (e.g. someone with a phd may be born smart but they worked incredibly hard to earn that phd).
People are and can be naturally good looking. Many override average/mediocre genetics with makeup, money, status, gym time, etc. Unless extremely disfigured by genes, being appealing (enough) is a matter of time and effort.
She tries to get as many matches and dates as possible using the male host's pictures. Spoiler: after a week of paltry messages and matches, she says she's "struggling" and "feeling down, even though it's not my damn profile. I thought this would be easy. I don't want to do this again. I hate this."
Tinder looks a lot of fun. Wasn't around before I got with my current partner. The closest we got was "hot or not" where you could rate pictures of the opposite sex (or the same sex if you preffered) from 1 to 10. Had a lot of fun "competing" with friends on that.
Tinder might be a lot of fun for college kids on campus or spring break, because the pool is fairy homogenous and almost everyone will be within walking distance leading to instant dates. For adults looking for something substantial in a broader area it's hot garbage. There's also a VERY specific skill set to Tinder you'll have to develop; you can be attractive, do well on other online dating sites and be able to meet women at parties easily enough and still fail hard.
As someone recently single for the first time in over 14 years... it was an eye opening experience to see how things had changed.
Online dating is very much a skill, and books I have read point and tell me even more.
My short version of what I have learned (and have succeeded with):
1. Appearance matters, but more so for females
2. For men, it is more important that you convey what you are doing than absolute attractiveness. Women are most attracted to “rocket ships”, people that are going places with their lives (it doesn’t matter your current state).
Also, I recommend Hinge over most of the apps out there... for what it is worth, I have had my most success there, including the girl I am currently dating.
I'm reminded of a 6 ft tall, blonde roommate I once had who advised me to "make sure your photos have you doing something in them, so the women you match with have a hook to start the conversation with.".
(If you don't see what's hilarious about that advice, you are either not a man, are extremely attractive, or haven't ever used a dating app)
I have male friends who get approached by women in bars, rather than the other way around. I guess their advice would be "go to bars and just wait, someone will notice you." I go to bars and this has never happened to me in my life.
I’m reasonably good looking, but I’m really into weightlifting so I guess that’s why women will approach me first sometimes. There are genetic limits to strength but fitness and being in shape are psychologically attractive to women. A lot of guys would be attractive if they would at least do the minimum requirements for maintaining their health. But I digress.
Guys who complain about women ignoring them are usually themselves ignoring lots of women around them who would be suitable for them but they aren’t good enough for whatever reason. I’ve seen it SOOOOO many times when average looking guys complain about how shallow girls are or how good looking guys have it easy (this second point isn’t exactly completely untrue mind you) yet they still focus on the most classically attractive women they know or at the bar wherever who are out of their league.
If average looking guys were to spend more time on themselves- grooming, having a hobby outside of work/tv/games, fitness, reading a book once in a while- they would be surprised to see how the world around them will change.
Also there are lots of good girls who may not be supermodels looking to date regular guys. At least give them the green light once in a while.
I'd go out with two friends: one was very fit/muscular and charismatic, the other was tall and functionally mute.
The tall guy was constantly approached by women. Never saw it happen with the fit guy. Anecdotal sure, but the results were consistent across many bars and clubs.
All that to agree with the ancestor comment about taking this kind of "if you build yourself they will come" advice with a grain of salt.
Girls love tall guys. This is true. I’m also willing to bet that your tall mute friend is more attractive than you probably realize. Being tall for all I care could be the male version of having big boobs. This doesn’t change anything about what I said.
Please imagine how much worse your friend would have it if he were overweight and boring.
Also, you should build yourself irregardless of women. Reading is good for you. Exercise is good for you. Having a passion is good for you. Coincidentally, these are all signifiers of someone who would be a good dad.
Most guys are clueless how women approach men and often don’t even realize when women are coming onto them. It’s never (or rarely) as crass as “hey let’s fuck”. It’s more like they take initiative to say hi first and ask follow up questions.
You could be right that the tall guy's face was more attractive than the fit guy's, who's too say.
My point is the fit guy didn't meet the threshold for being approached by women while the tall guy did. It relates to what you originally said by suggesting there could be plenty of guys, even a majority, for whom no amount of self-improvement will boost them above that threshold.
Anyway even if thats the case, it's still a good idea to take care of yourself and cultivate your interests regardless of their application to dating. And being approached by women isn't at all necessary for a successful dating life.
Actually, I’m mostly commenting on this notion that good looking people give bad dating advice because they are playing the game on easy mode and their insight would be meaningless to below average looking people.
Here’s an analogy: If you were trying to learn how to play basketball, would you take advice from someone who isn’t very good at the game but shares the same disadvantages as yourself or would you listen to what Allen Iverson has to say?
This is kind of how the argument being presented here sounds to me. Obviously, Iverson won’t get you into the NBA but I would listen to him.
Good looking people may come across as arrogant when they say to be yourself or take care of your self but it’s still true.
I wouldn't say the dating advice is bad, nor arrogant, just that it isn't as generally applicable as one might think. Of course that assumes you, to whom I'm replying, are actually tall.
It'd be like getting football advice from a 190-pound wide receiver when you weigh closer to 300. Some of the advice will still be good, but it does ignore a key difference, and you'd be better off hearing advice from offensive linemen, who'd be in your weight class.
>spend more time on themselves- grooming, having a hobby outside of work/tv/games, fitness, reading a book once in a while
All of this is nice activity, but not if you're faking yourself or faking it to yourself. I've read a whole home library (est. eight shelves each 1m wide), but not interested in reading anymore. Does that count? And no way I'm going have a hobby out of my interests purely for dating purposes. PC games are not about playing mario, it's the world of problems, solutions and efforts¹. If you cannot see that, or never seen that, you're likely "stereotyped basic" to me rather than "more evolved". This advice advises me to being "not me" in a most disturbing way possible. And for what? To see a shallow glimpse of interest and then proceeding to that plain chit chat until it comes to lust, if it ever does. The pretence is big but in the end it is either ONS or a family/dating life without all these cool entry attributes.
The problem with non-supermodels is that they have all the exact downsides and quirks. It's not easier after the date and they do not market-value themselves less, like you expect.
¹ I have a buddy who is a racer, country-level. We sometimes talk about his problems (beyond astro money spent on a single race) and it seems that my trackmania canyon (e-sports) progress has many similar issues like apex, drag, curve trade-offs, entry points and so on. Yes, I'm not experiencing hard pulls on a wheel and 80kg force to brake in timely manner, and I don't account for a tire wearout, but if you try to make it close even to my 2 years old PBs, you'll have a hard time for sure. And when you compare us, he is a sports man and I'm a jerk who plays mario cart. Sigh.
Upd.note: I used "you" at some places, where it should read "they". It is not intended to be personal in any way.
There's nothing wrong with having a nerdy hobby. But if you expect to find a romantic partner, limiting yourself to people who share your enthusiasm on this one thing is playing the dating game on extra hard mode.
It's way easier if you have a few interests that others can relate to, like going to concerts or going to the theater or rock climbing or whatever.
It's not "faking it" when you do something outside your comfort zone, I'd see it more as "expanding your horizon".
I see logic in this, but sequitur is that his hobby must leave him with no dates at all, which is so far from reality. Of course "racing" can be more easily related to, but this interest is shallow as I described. I bet that he speaks to me about these details because barely somebody else can understand it and has the same level of interest in it. Not even because I do e-racing (he's unaware of that), just because tech details are not popular, but money and fame are.
For me the ban on smoking in bars was a great leveler, smokers would have to go outside and hang out with people that are all in different groups inside and everyone would chat to each other. Obviously "take up smoking" is bad advice, but is there anything else that forces cross group interaction like this?
Awful advice. Attractiveness doesn’t matter for women, you can sign up as a female without a picture at all and you’ll still get more matches than an average man. And women don’t care what you do for a living unless it’s something flashy like a rapper. I’m a software engineer and I get rejected by women working at Chick Fil A.
Many swiping on women are bots or males that swipe on everyone. A bit of an illusion. On the other hand, women do have an easier time. For example, even on OkCupid from back in the day women had a higher response rate when sending the first message (compared to men sending the first message).
The thing most beneficial for women online (in addition to being prey rather than predator) is the gender skew. There are usually 2x as many males compared to females, leaving the top 50% of women (the ones seen as viable) gobbled up by the top 25% of males. With a bit of a skew in the swipe ratio, the top 20% of males (ones the top 80% of women are chasing) are enough to take all viable/acceptable women.
However, what is interesting, and what they talk about in the link above, a highly attractive women (good pics), will get 10-20x the interest than just an “okay” looking woman.
To your point on software engineer... no woman really cares too much... (unfortunately). There are dozens of software engineers already expressing interest in her, the question that you need to answer for her is “What makes you special?” Can you make her laugh? Do you and her share common interests, etc. Anyway, not a professional here... all of this is based on my observations and “intense learning” over the last 3 months of being single again.
I can, but depends on your stage of the dating “funnel”. Here is my advice in a nutshell:
Imagine dating as a funnel, where you have the following steps:
1. Your profile (landing page)
2. Initial message
3. Banter
4. Initial phone call
5. 1st Date
6. Follow up banter
7. 2nd date
8. Deepening of relationship
9. Go/no-go determination
Where I personally initially struggled was the first two steps. What I learned most was there is an art to taking good profile pics. Doing a great job here makes 95% of the difference. Learn how to take the best profile pic you can. We can’t help our natural attractiveness, but even the best looking guy can look horrible if they don’t focus on this. Best way to help yourself is use an objective “scoring” method. I used this site:
https://www.photofeeler.com
It is somewhat painful initially (as you get scores below 5), but if you work on taking better pictures of yourself... it gets better, currently my best pic is a 9.4/9.5/8.0... but it took me literally 3-4 weeks of taking TONs of photos... I started at 4.5/4.8/4.5.
Once you master your pics, then you need to practice grabbing their attention, and keeping it. I can go farther, but hopefully that helps at least a bit.
Can someone explain the seeming asymmetry between men's and women's experiences in online dating?
Average looking and better women seem to get huge amounts of matches: if you're better than average this can be hundreds per day in a big city.
Going by my own experience and friends experiences, as a guy, even if you're better than average looks with a good job, nice photos etc, are lucky to get a handful of matches per week.
So what I don't understand then is if all these women are getting huge amounts of matches, how can men be getting less matches? Is it literally only the top 0.1% of men that are getting the majority of the matches?
i.e. are women who are say 7-8/10 on the looks scale only matching with guys who are 9.5/10 on the looks scale, so guys who are 7-8/10 getting zero matches?
Yes, it's long been known in scurrilous "manosphere" sections of the internet that "80% of the women go for 20% of the men" on dating apps (the 80/20 rule is an oft-quoted one but intended probably more as illustrative than researched).
It's an unpleasant and politically incorrect idea that despite clearly being the experience of most normal men you talk to about these things, is probably career-damaging to academics who would research it honestly so you see it backed up in that regard either by amateur blogs or very cautiously worded "respectable" research.
Think of harems in the old days and alpha males in some species in the animal kingdom.
Tinder and the like (so the theory goes) apply a massive magnifier affect to the natural tendency of "elite" men to clear up.
Side note: the tactics of average men mentioned elsewhere in these comments such as swiping on everything, and similar techniques are effects of this phenomenon, not the cause.
An interesting corollary of this is that a lot of research has indicated that in societies with polyamory, the profusion of unmatched men actually destabilises society, leading to more frequent civil war.
Honestly, this is what concerns me most about China. There are literally 30 million more men than women. That's equivalent to the entire population of a mid-size country who will never marry. Add in unemployment and drugs, and you get an extremely combustible situation.
The rest of the world should worry, too. There are countless examples throughout history where wars have been started to put a lid on internal unrest. What's more, unmarried men are inevitably the ones sent to fight, so it's a solution that kills (pun intended) two birds with one stone.
Polyamory is fairly rare in human societies, the link you pasted talks about polygamy. Polygyny has been practiced in a few societies and the numbers would be too few to conclude anything.
It's legal if you have the will. Most men don't want to meet prostitute. I think they have the desire to be desired, for what they are, and not for their wallet.
It seems natural that the women would be highly selective as they have a huge number of potential matches to sift through before choosing.
Maybe a better question is: why are there so many more men than women on dating services? The ratio seems completely out of whack. It's not like there are 10 boys born per every girl, so somewhere along the way the women are filtering out. Perhaps women prefer face to face interaction?
These studies seem to be focused on a symptom instead of the cause.
It's not like there are 10 boys born per every girl, so somewhere along the way the women are filtering out.
Yes, that's the entire point of the original question and my response.
These comments are regarding mainstream dating platforms where male to female participation is reasonably balanced (or at least not exponentially imbalanced as you seem to believe). That massive imbalance is present in the matching.
> Maybe a better question is: why are there so many more men than women on dating services?
One answer can be found in census data. The number of childless male adults is almost twice of that of female adults, but the desire to have children has been found to be identical among women and men.
I’d say most women know that dating sites are mostly a cesspool of dickpics and stupid pick up lines and the chances of having an actual interesting conversation is pretty small. So most likely we prefer exhausting all other options before resorting to dating sites.
There are definitely different downsides for women, undoubtedly including those examples you give - especially when they are looking for a serious relationship, but my observations above are strictly on the number imbalance once on the dating site.
Only when the databases get leaked sadly. It's hopefully somewhat atypical, but I remember the Ashley Madison dump had something like 100 men per 1 woman once you filtered out the bot accounts.
I can't imagine AM would be representative of most dating sites. OkCupid has claimed that their user base had a roughly even gender split, depending on city and age group. This is immaterial though. Take a group of 100 men and 100 women, and 80 of the women will go for 20 of the men, making it seem imbalanced when it's not.
Do you feel that only women are pursuing the most attractive options?
What's certainly clear, and the data released by OKCupid bears out, that mean invariably send messages to women much younger, while women are more likely to message someone closer to their age.
Maybe the real advice to men is to pursue women closer to their age and leave the 20 somethings alone.
The culture is supporting that at the moment. Zoom back to the 1960's free love culture and the 'alpha' males are washed out or replaced by hippies.
The Pareto principle pops up in so many places, I don't think you can justify an arbitrary interpretation about harems and alphas on top of the principle. We don't know why the power law keeps popping up in earthquakes, mass of stars, size of trees in a forest and a whole slew of natural phenomena. When we finally understand what natural force is shaping these distributions, it'll stop being a nice fairy story which contributes to other stories.
> Zoom back to the 1960's free love culture and the 'alpha' males are washed out or replaced by hippies.
I wasn't around in the 60s, but the cynic in me suspects that even within hippie circles the 80/20 rule was still in effect in the dating game. Because the same thing is happening today within progressive/SJW circles - the "male feminist" types tend to proceed directly to the friendzone, regardless of the claimed preferences of progressive women.
Don't forget that most hippies were alpha males, or at least from well off families. The free love culture passed my parents by as they were too busy making a living.
Your parents let it go by and it doesn't prove the rule.
The culture permeates every level. The "alpha male" culture benefited most men in 2015-2016, even if they didn't capitalize on pointless sex. The free love movement expanded it's own movement into most parts of the culture. These patterns aren't 'optional forces' that only the rich have enough spare time to participate in.
The culture force of elitism is the current phase and idolizing the rich is eternal in america.
> the tactics of average men mentioned elsewhere in these comments such as swiping on everything, and similar techniques are effects of this phenomenon, not the cause.
Clearly that sort of behavior is just further feeding into the dynamic.
Women getting flooded with bad matches hurts everyone.
I think the main problem is that the prime selection criterion for most women is not looks. For women, online dating has a rather small signal to noise ratio. So then they are left with choosing the top % based on looks.
>I think the main problem is that the prime selection criterion for most women is not looks.
Says who? The men who do best with women are the most physically attractive. No other demographic does better. You can have $10M in the bank and still not elicit the same kind of attraction as the stereotypical tall, dark and handsome white man.
> So what I don't understand then is if all these women are getting huge amounts of matches, how can men be getting less matches? Is it literally only the top 0.1% of men that are getting the majority of the matches?
> Can someone explain the seeming asymmetry between men's and women's experiences in online dating?
The key factor is that dating app userbases are often 80% to 90% men. Couple this with the inequality others point to, and you get a very toxic outcome. Most women are absolutely overwhelmed, and most men are starving for crumbs of attention.
The experiences are so wildly different as to be unimaginable to most people. So people don't develop strong empathy for their counterparts.
Women don't use dating apps as much because they can't vet the candidate through social circles first. Men don't understand socially matching are more important compared to looks within a few points.
Some of the absolute BEST women to date (Personality, Character, Career, Family, Attractiveness) that I know, always typically prefer dating through social circles. Almost all of the women I know, especially women that are extremely attractive, with average or below average attractive partners, are through social circles. A friend of a friend. These are men that typically receive near zero likes on online dating platforms, yet, in the real world, can do extremely well with women because of their character (Charming, Funny) etc. This I know Anecdotally of course.
Yeah this is a good point. All these comments about dating sites are true, and they really suck. Which is a great reason to get off dating sites if you can. They make every problem with dating much worse.
More to the point I think the population of men on those services grossly outweighs the population of women. The women have to be selective because they don't have time to engage with each of the hundreds of responses they get.
It might be interesting to run a dating service that limited signups to an even gender ratio. Or at least didn't let the imbalance grow more than a modest amount. Of course then most men would complain that they can't even sign up. You'd have to be very aggressive about culling idle accounts.
Alternatively, the site could limit the number of introductions that users could send per month. For example, if there were 10 men for every 1 woman, but men could only contact one woman per month (but women could contact a new man every day), women might be willing to give those introductions more consideration.
In fact, rather than hard-coding those rate limits (or generating them algorithmically from the gender distribution of accounts) it might be viable to let each user decide on the limit themselves. It may not be a good idea to show users the specific rate limit that another user has chosen, though, as that number might give all sorts of weird signalling about how "desirable" they consider themselves to be.
Bumble's whole premise is that (for heterosexual matches at least) women must send the first message.
For the men who were using the apps (and talking about it) in my social circle it doesn't seem like it improved much from this side of the gender divide. YMMV of course.
Personally, I've been struck by the overwhelming majority of women who match and don't actually send that first message. Matches last at most 48 hours - message or lose them.
If men had the choice of messaging one supermodel-looking woman per month (with no guarantee of a reply) or, say, four better-than-average-looking women, I think eventually they would learn to be more realistic in who they approach.
In any case, if the supermodels can set this spamminess/selectiveness parameter for themselves, they can tune it to a value where they don't get clobbered (unless they like the validation of being clobbered).
I met my now-wife through online dating, and used online dating over a year. I'll share my experience before my theory.
I never used matches. I assume this is some variation on the "like" or "swipe-right" system. Women get bombarded with these. Conversely, women don't a high ratio of high quality messages.
I maybe looked at the compatibility score if it's there (e.g. OKCupid), read through the profiles, and if there was enough to grab my interest I'd write a message that at least makes some reference to what's mentioned in their profile. I got a response 8-9/10 times. Personally I think I look average enough and don't have amazing conversation skills, I just put in the work to send thoughtful messages.
As to why the match system doesn't work, the sheer amount of noise in online dating (and over-representation of men, I think) is such that these "match" systems amount to glancing through a ton of pictures and picking the best-looking ones. Particularly since profiles are best fairly compact, and don't tell you a ton about a person at the onset. You're a complete stranger to women on these platforms, with 0 trust value to your name, and so actually having a meaningful interaction is a great way to expedite that trust. You won't get there with "hey babe", "nice pic", "nice outfit", "nice smile". I mean, maybe you can if you're one of the fortunate few to cut through the noise and get someone's interest on the strength of your "playboy" looking mug. But most likely, it's a weak approach.
EDIT: worth taking a good picture of yourself. Get a second opinion on it.
> worth taking a good picture of yourself. Get a second opinion on it.
Wow, this 1000%. Every time I hear a guy complaining about how bad their online dating experience is I ask to see their pictures. It's almost always cringeworthy what they selected.
Another underlying problem is that people who aren't of above average attractiveness don't like having their photo taken. Then they have less pictures to select from and end up settling for some really awful ones.
As parent poster stated, please get feedback from multiple people on your photos, particularly people of the gender you're targeting. You will most likely be surprised at their feedback.
> I maybe looked at the compatibility score if it's there (e.g. OKCupid), read through the profiles, and if there was enough to grab my interest I'd write a message that at least makes some reference to what's mentioned in their profile. I got a response 8-9/10 times. Personally I think I look average enough and don't have amazing conversation skills, I just put in the work to send thoughtful messages.
Dating apps have all converged on being swipe-to-match based. Generally you cannot just try to send a message to start a conversation anymore. The option of sending a thoughtful message to get a conversation started is just gone.
They had matches, and you could still message. I don't imagine the app version was much different than the web version in that respect and I used the latter.
The only thing that's changed since I used it is they want you to hit "like" on their profile before you send a message. That's not an impediment. The option to send messages is not gone. Use it.
I don't think that's necessarily true. The economics of online dating seem fairly straightforward. Given a pool of men that are willing to speak to them, women will focus their attention on the highest value men in that pool. Unfortunately for men, other men set their "value floor" for women well below their estimation of themselves, leading average men to entertain conversations with below average women, whereas below average women are still only interested in engaging with average or higher men.
There are so many men who employ a strategy of just bombarding every single woman on the platform. This results in women getting dozens to hundreds of extremely low quality matches for every quality match. If this somehow doesn't cause the woman to just give up immediately, then she's at most going to only look at most at a dozen or so of those matches before she gives up, and they're almost all going to all be garbage.
This means that there at best only a 1-10% chance of a woman even seeing a quality message directed at her, given the sheer volume of garbage being directed at them.
It's the same reason why you don't notice the genuinely good deals in the massive amounts of advertisements you're bombarded with every day. The sheer volume of noise just makes the whole system far more useless than you would expect.
The point in discussion is what is a quality message? And what is considered garbage? While men think they are unattractive when they don't get matches in dating apps, women think they mencare unattractive when they can't match the best looking guys in the app.
Do most women on online dating sites care about the quality of a message? And even if they do, how much quality does a man need to invest in drafting a message before he hits the point of diminishing returns?
I imagine a scenario that could happen frequently is that man new to online dating signs up, initially puts good effort into messaging select women he finds attractive, gets ignored a gazillion times, then throws in the towel and starts shotgunning. Or gives up on online dating altogether.
Thanks to evolution, it's in the psyche of both men and women that the men compete with each other for the attention of the women. This plays out in the dating forum, both online and offline.
The author understood this, apparently explicitly, and took the time to successfully craft a 'Very, very creative' initial message to the most attractive account he could find in 3 minutes.
>Can someone explain the seeming asymmetry between men's and women's experiences in online dating?
Different use cases.
Men are there to find a date. They mostly fail because the vast majority of women are not looking for a date.
Reapply whats happening to real life. Vast majority of women don't engage men on online dating. That's the same offline. Women can find their dates through their social circles; social circles tend to be small compared to online dating but does the job.
Million $ question, what is online dating for women? It's about self-esteem or new choices. Say she's in a relationship with a guy and it's not exactly working out. Well she can join online dating and look at the options.
There's a break point around age 25-30 though. That's the age where women lose the driver seat in dating and men get the seat. Yet women don't know it or something. This creates a divide that really confuses women, they've enjoyed their control. They still see tons of connections. Surely they are still driving? nope.
This is what leads to historic low marriage, fertility, and birth rate.
4.5% makes a lot more sense to me than 61.9%. If you're liking more than half of everybody, you're not really filtering anything. And that puts all of the work on them to do the filtering, which is inconsiderate.
Why artificially limit your dating pool based on something as superficial as a 10-word profile and some photos? Surely makes sense to be open to meet as many people as possible?
A picture really is worth a thousand words. There's a lot you can learn from a picture. Often enough to say "You don't seem like my type."
If I don't want kids, I won't swipe on a picture with kids. I'll rule out somebody whose picture is doing shots with friends in a bar. Conversely, if a photo has a bookshelf, I'm certainly going to take a closer look.
The filtering happens at some point. There are thousands of women there and I don't have time to chat with all of them. I swipe the ones I think I have something to talk about with. Your photo conveys your personality, and people who put time into selecting a photo that gives me something to talk about are attractive to me.
Or that photo conveys awareness of how it all works and it's a fake filter. Having a bookshelf behind you doesn't mean that you've read it and vice versa. Same for shots in a bar, which may happen one time in few months or years even. Photos do not speak, unfortunately.
I know a girl who travels often. When we occasionally spoke about India and pictures she took there, her comments were like "I've seen this and that". It was ok, but I couldn't get rid of a feeling that I know an order of magnitude more about India from a basic (well, a more like a good hist-pop) history channel alone. It was boring and un-deep at the level of scrolling google images.
It's in their best interest to put up a photo that portrays them honestly. If they haven't read any of those books, it'll be immediately obvious, and they've wasted their own time. If they never do shots in a bar, but put up a photo of the one time they did that, it still tells me something about what they think is special and how they see themselves.
It's not perfect. It's not meant to be. It's a heuristic that still leaves plenty of people to talk to for the second pass, and that lets me spend enough brain power to present myself well while we decide if we should meet in person.
"Surely makes sense to be open to meet as many people as possible?"
Tell me that after a dozen awkward first dates! The more particular I have become about finding new people to go out with, the better the quality of my dates. Now, I usually feel more or less certain I'll at least get along with the person. And yeah, I missed out on another dozen potential dates, some of which probably would also be good matches, but many surely would not be.
Going from a 60% swipe rate to a 5% swipe rate doesn't mean going from a dozen awkward dates a month to one good date a month. It means going from one or two awkward dates per month to zero dates per month.
If I am so undateable, or women as a class are so undateable, then I would put my effort into finding some alternative view of my life that doesn't put so much of my self-worth on finding an opposite-sex partner.
Personally, I've found that women aren't nearly so obsessive about wealth, looks, etc. as is constantly claimed in HN threads. More than anything they seem to want a good partner, somebody who understands them, and is kind, considerate, thoughtful, and interesting.
When I see posts declaring that women are, as a class, only interested in a tiny percentage of men, that suggests to me that those men aren't very good at being kind, considerate, thoughtful, and interesting. Which is too bad, because those are fairly easy things to achieve, and shouldn't be the bar to a relationship.
There are lots and lots of other things that get in the way of relationships. Those are hard things, and require a lot of picking through people to find a pair that is able to work on hard things together. That will fail right off the bat if they can't do the easy things.
Indeed. Women want the best 5% from the available pool. If you're not in the top 5% on Tinder, go find a smaller and more selective pool and you'll do fine.
Also, Tinder has a very specific age demographic which skews younger - which is when women are most desirable. Women start having a harder time once they reach 35, and a nearly impossible time when they reach 50.
How do you think that translates to the context of online dating?
There are no rooms, just 1-1 matches.
You can't stand out more by swiping less, can you? Your best strategy is always simple to swipe as much as possible (until the algorithm punishes you for doing that.)
Is tinderthe only site you use ? Why not go more niche. Are you Jewish, Christian, plenty of sites can be found. Are you into a specific sexual preference or gender? Plenty of sites around those...
I think you're missing the point. The disparity in match rates is such that most men are not able to get matches while being selective. If he only swipes on goth profiles, he'll get no matches unless he's incredibly lucky. Between swiping selectively and having a high probability of zero matches, and swiping liberally and having a good probability of getting at least a few matches I'm not surprised most men choose the latter.
If he isn't targeting a group his odds are 5%. By hyper targetting those odds could be much higher
Randomly adding private ig profiles as a male probably has a 1-3% chance of success but as a good looking female that number probably jumps to 15%+. But if he was a goth had interesting goth photos that person will identify with him and add him.
Swiping everyone is just like emailing every company your resume. Spend sometime craft your profile and target who you want.
Want a ton more matches? Post a pic of your cat as your picture. Women may not find you interesting but many will want to meet your cat.
Why do you think a narrow search is any more likely to result in a match? The other party does not know who else you swipe right on. Narrowing a search does not yield an increase in match rates.
Bob is interested in goth women. There's 5 of them in his area. Plus another 95 non-goth women. If he accepts only the 5 goth women, he might get lucky and get a match but at 1-3% change of matching he's still likely to have zero matches. But if he swipes right on all 100 women his chances of having at lease a couple matches goes up drastically, and the 5 goth women he's especially interested are no less likely to match with him.
Sure, taking better pictures and working out to become more attractive increases the likelihood of matching. If Bob hits the gym, gets some professional photos taken, and crafts a better profile his match rate with those 5 goth women will increase. But his chances also increase for the other 95 women, and he has no reason to refrain from swiping right on them.
> Swiping everyone is just like emailing every company your resume. Spend sometime craft your profile and target who you want.
Yes! When you're job searching there's no reason to limit your job search. Yes, you should craft your resume and cover letter to emphasize the skills the company is looking for. But you're still strictly better off applying to 100 companies as compared to 10 companies. Online dating is no different.
In fact I was job searching not long ago and I applied to ~50 companies a day. Why not apply to a company I'm only lukewarm about? If it turns out I don't like the company I can just not schedule an interview. Or do the interview anyway, and use a potential offer as leverage in negotiating.
Do you really want those 95 other women? If you ended up out with one of those other girls and a goth girl swipes back and you miss that opportunity are you still happy. Plus you waste an evening to beef up your goth profile to attract all 5. You could be using the time to research what areas have more goths and move.
If you want any girl, swipe everyone. In that case why not use the money you were planning on impressing this girl and just hire a girl for the evening. Your odds/costs will be less and relationship prospects about the same.
Let's say you swipe, find success and meet this person.
Getting to that hook up finish will take much more legwork compared to if you are prequalified.
For job prospectives I find if I do that (apply to every job) you end up wasting a lot of time and energy in low chance opportunities or high chance but low quality opportunities. It worked when I first started but didn't work out so well after 15 years of experience.
If one of those goth girls Bob is into ends up matching with him, he can still go out with her even if several of the other 95 women match with him.
If some of the low quality companies respond to you, you can always turn them down in favor of the companies you're most interested in if they respond.
I'm not sure what I'm failing to explain. It's strictly better to do a broader search. Save for the time it takes to apply. But in the case of both online dating and applying to jobs it's not that much work to apply even with a customized cover letter. You're selecting from the subset of people who respond to your initial application - or swipe. The more applications you send the bigger this subset will be.
You are explaining your point well. You would be happy with any of the 100. In that case your strategy of swipe all makes sense.
But if you want to increase your successful swipe % rate within a target group a different strategy of profile management is in order.
I believe the targeted approach is more successful for repeated interactions and perhaps a relationship where the swipe all approach would get higher numbers with more low quality matches.
The job conversation is a bigger discussion. Spending a day on a cover letter, custom sample application, researching history and changing your resume to fit each job takes time but also provides a lot of value when trying to form a connection in the interview.
Sure, if narrowing the set of people you accept increases your match rate this strategy makes sense. But it's not the case in most online dating. The subset of people you're interested in are individuals, who all have different tastes. You can't show different profiles to different people, so a targeted approach is not feasible. Those 5 goth girls Bob is interested in like different types of men.
Likewise, spending a day on crafting a cover letter and resume is a waste of time. A customized cover letter and resume probably takes 15-30 minutes, tops. Why are you worried about forming a connection in an interview when you don't even have an interview yet? Spend a day researching the company in depth once you have an interview scheduled.
It could be that women don't want the "top 5%", but rather are seeking men who are simply acceptable, who don't exude misogynistic tendencies, who bother to groom themselves, who treat others with respect. A tall order, considering most men are trash, including the good-looking ones.
I strongly agree. Some might call the comment sexist, and inherently it is so, but that misses the point.
The point is we live in a society that is male dominated (sexist) and it has unpleasant effects on socialization which leaves many "normal" men to be problematic (or as you put it, "trash").
I don't know about anyone else, but I'm kinda tired of "dating sites are horrible for men, but it's hard for women in a different way" being the extent of the discussion. Article is from 2012, so I'll give the benefit of the doubt that this same experiment hadn't yet been repeated over and over with slight variations to the same result when it was written. It is at this point common knowledge that online dating as it exists today is horrible. My personal take on that is it is because dating itself is horrible and there are some things you just can't fix with a website, but if we're going to have a discussion around online dating are there at least any studies out there that might inform a better way to do things?
The "online" part is the inherent problem because suddenly every user has access to 10,000 other users, which creates problems for both sides.
When you have people meeting irl, they are meeting far less new people at a given time so they put more effort into each interaction, making dating more pleasant.
Isn't the solution to add artificial scarcity by limiting the number of users that someone can contact per month, say?
A user should be able to tell the app/site "Don't let anyone contact me if they've contacted someone else in the past week".
Of course that would be terrible for ad revenue of the app/site, and there could be some interesting meta-gaming of how users set these rate limits (or try to get around them), but I think it would lead to a more balanced experience over all.
Coffee Meets Bagel implements something like this, where each person is presented a small number of people per day, regardless of whether you choose to match or not. They seem to have had issues with the quality of number on it recently, but I was a big fan of it in around 2015-2017
maybe this is overly cynical, but I suspect there is a business reason for this. a successful "find my soulmate" app would be actively destroying its customer base. a "find a hookup" app can be very effective and still have lots of repeat customers.
This is why I was excited for Facebook Dating. Although I don't really like Facebook as a company, they don't really have this problem. If two users meet on Facebook dating and form a LTR then it's unlikely to make them leave Facebook.
> a successful "find my soulmate" app would be actively destroying its customer base.
This is actually sort of how hinge advertises itself. I found the app however to be somewhat jarring when I downloaded it. In my area at least, it seemed to attract a very specific archetype which could be good if you fit into that, but it wasn’t for me.
Capitalism can't solve this problem, it can't solve every problem. Any solution ends up being about money, which is the opposite goal, because people get greedy and will change anything to make it harder to get people to spend more money on their "solution".
I worked at a dating service, pre-Web, in many capacities. After seeing various listed preferences, matches, relationships, and so on, I began to do my own (amateur, although I did take rather a lot of statistics for my major) probes of trends.
First, you can take away the "online" component. None of the trends OKCupid had blogged about (and were since deleted) were new to my experience. Online magnifies trends through sheer numbers but that's about it.
The men tended to make a lot of requests; the women tended not to. Most of the men were rejected; most of the women were not. Women tended to have more "must haves" than men. And so on and so forth.
It was all very disheartening.
I wonder if I could still pry the data out of dBase III.
"I wonder if I could still pry the data out of dBase III"
Is that in .dbf file format? I happened to be working with that format today, there are 2 up to date and complete libraries for Python for it, it's trivial to get such data out.
Well, it is a bit more than that. I would have to remember the field mappings for something that used dBase III as its underpinning for all kinds of preference questions, which I would also have to find the template for. And then there's the decades-old floppies ...
In any case, I think the deletion of the old OKCupid statistical analyses is fairly telling: most people do not want to look at the evidence, and ignore it when it goes against the grain. You will get a lot of pushback when you conclude "men have a harder time dating than women" from what you gather.
I've often considering "doing something" with it, but it is likely unethical and, in any case, wouldn't really change any minds.
Match, who owns most of them (okcupid, pof, ...) has all kind of other services they offer: boost, profile makeovers, date coaching, etc...
They limit you and force you to go through profiles 1 by 1 because it benefits them to do so. Because you are more likely to pay to have more access, get boosts, etc. They have optimized the site to make money, so the longer you are single the better.
While you might find someone on the site, I find real life is better, granted with COVID things are a bit rough now.
Nevermind that many people now have overinflated egos and feel they have tons of option. In the case of women I think they forget most of the thristy guys are just looking to hit it and quit it and take it as their value and worth is higher than it really is.
My now-wife was relatively new to the city we were in when I met her. we were both on OkCupid at the time but I didn't meet her from there. I wonder if we had met on OkCupid we would have hit it off as well
I had a great lesson in the reality of online dating a few nights ago. At a friend's house I overheard three late-twenties women talking about one of them going on a date with a guy.
Looking at the pone all three of them exclaimed in joy "OHHHH - He's CUTE!!!".
The guy proceeded to stand her up three times - no showing to planned dates -, said he can't hold a job, his car broke down, and then stood her up again.
I'm quite confident a doormat could be a better person/partner in terms of dependability and respecting someones time.
All three of them are still enthralled with him. Because he's cute.
I got banned for deleting and re-creating my account too many times. (on the same device)
I also tried being a "marginally" attractive woman one time and the results were stunning. 100's of matches in the first hour. Even creating an account with male pictures easily 5-6x as attractive as me yielded meager results at best (1-2 matches per day).
I will say, these apps work better in large cities. However, the real reason I suspect my account was banned, was from me realizing you get a default "boost" on your account for the first 24-48hrs (seems to be the case both on Tinder and Bumble). If you really want results, just keep deleting and re-creating your account after results start to fall off after a few days.
(Note: Loved this story, so I don't want this comment to be interpreted criticism.)
If you strip away the machine learning/computer/math part, the story is: After 88 first dates, Chris finds someone he thinks he wants to marry. (Article says from the first 55 1st dates -> 3 2nd dates -> 1 3rd date).
It seems possible that going on 88 random dates would lead to a similarly shaped funnel.
While "use math" sounds like smart strategy, many (most probably?) happily married people have not gone on 88 actual first dates.
Let's say your response rate for initial messages is 10%. Next is if a girl will engage beyond the initial response chances drop from 10% to something like 3%. Then they have to accept your call to action. We are down to even a lower percentage now.
With these kinds of numbers working against you you need scale on your side or your getting nowhere fast. But if you are able to contact 10k people what comes out of those small percentages are decent numbers.
Presumably the two uses of the word "scale" refer to "the scale of the problem of being just one person competing against thousands" and "scaling up your chances by going on many first dates", respectively.
As a maybe slightly above average Australian male, I found it interesting travelling around Europe. I do ok-ish on dating apps at home, it's not fun but I could get a date or two a month if I made a consistent effort to message people. Maybe a short relationship or a handful of hook-ups a year if I'm lucky.
In northern Italy, Spain, south of France, I got virtually no matches at all. However in the week or so I spent in Scandinavia, almost every woman I swiped right on matched back, many of them messaged as well. I would consider men and women in Scandinavia somewhat more attractive on average than people elsewhere and of course vastly more attractive than I am. Unfortunately I don't speak any Danish!
I was actually hoping to hear more about the kinds of messages that men receive. Back in my single days I never received any messages from women unsolicited so I'm curious what these are like
Looking at the last few times a woman messaged me* first:
1. Oh hey [Name] Srry for the late msg [3:24 AM] I just wanted to take initiative since I was the first to match and all..
2. hey! having any good adventures in quarantine?
3. hit me up w a netflix rec [my bio mentioned this]
4. Hi there. From your emojis you say art is helping you get through this. What kind of art are you doing?
5. Hi [Name]
6. Hi [Name]! You seem adventurous
7. why are u holding onto that [mammal in one picture]! that's horrible !
8. Where’s that volcano picture from?
Of these, 3, 4, 7 and 8 are tailored to my profile. 4 is a decent, if unexciting, opener. 8 is pretty dull.
*30's straight white American male without visible issues, based in a major city listing college, a good job, and a female friend-vetted bio and gallery. As other comments suggest, my match rate went from awful to not terrible when I got better pictures.
Online dating messages and resumes have one thing in common - the more specialized to the recipient, the more hits you will get. If your message to every girl is “what’s up”, then you are doing the resume equivalent of creating a single resume and sending to every job on LinkedIn. The more your resume matches the job, the better your chances of getting called. The more your first response to a woman on the dating site shows you’ve read their profile and have interest in their interests, the more responses you will get back.
It’s better to pick 1-2 people every day you are truly interested in (more than just looks) and put some time into a real message. Not just “what’s up” to 30 girls.
Oh i always kept sending messages to new people no matter how I was doing with someone else on the site. These things would fizzle out suddenly after a few weeks for all sorts of reasons and you could miss out on some great people.
Another massively asymmetric market. Yes; personalization helps, but most efforts are simply wasted because a majority of the jobs are inactive, overwhelmed, or just using interviews to get free help on their problems.
The author doesn't try their own advice on how to send an interesting message, using less attractive men. The presumption here is that the interesting message matters, but I'm doubtful that the bottom two men in terms of attractiveness would have gotten a response.
Why isn't there a more political movement around "lookism?"
Seems equivalent to the body positivity movement and the anti fat-shaming movement. Incels and other types who find little success with women have a certain right to be frustrated that we just accept other forms of social justice while leaving them out.
Incels and other folks who are truly marginalized from the dating and/or casual sex market should have have a good reason to long for state assistance. This would be very good for society as a strong reason for radicalization of the youth is shame over being marganalized from the sexual marketplace...
I tend to agree. However it's not hopeless - we already have a system to serve them. It's the culture of monogamous relationships and marriage. That removes the most attractive men from the dating pool, leaving the remaining women available for the less attractive men. If we didn't have that, we'd probably instead have a lot of polygamy with most men missing out entirely and most women sharing a partner. That's effectively what it's like for short term relationships - women don't get exclusive access to the attractive men - they have to take turns.
if nothing else, it's just not practical. fulfilling basic material needs is a tractable, if politically difficult, problem. a dollar taken at gunpoint buys just as much food as one freely given. moral qualms aside, you can force people to marry, but you can't make them care about each other.
>you can force people to marry, but you can't make them care about each other
That's incorrect. Arranged marriages are forced in some sense, but people do come around to care. Put a man and woman together in captivity and they start caring for each other. That's how human nature is.
And regarding the gunpoint thing, there's something called Bride kidnapping in central asia. Ofcourse those brides cry for first few days or so, but eventually settle in, with equal or probably more happiness than the women of the so called free world.
"Morals aside (where would space travel be without the unpleasant demise of Laika the Soviet space dog?), I set about creating ten dummy dating profiles on the world’s fastest growing online dating site: OKCupid."
And this is why real researchers have to deal with a review board.
Has anybody ever done something like this for the tech job market? I’m aware of the resume name variation studies, but more interested in what it’s like from the hiring side.
When I first started online dating, I noticed something curious, as an Asian male I got zero responses from non-Asian women from my parents country of origin. For me at least, I don't care about the ethnicity of the woman I'm dating especially given that I'm not the majority ethnicity in the country/city so I've always kept an open mind as to who I'd want to date.
Many of my Asian female friends had no trouble finding matches with white/black men. For background, I live in the West in a region which is 50% white and 50% mixture of Black/Asian/Latino, I write/speak fluent English, I have progressive and liberal values, and I have a very stable life.
I decided to record my interactions with the dating app for a multi-year period manually by putting in details in an excel spreadsheet. I receive 10-20 profiles per day, and if any of them like me back, chat unlocks. I put their details ethnicity, age, how attracted I was to them based on photos, and the outcome.
Well after 5 years of using it I can say that I have had zero White/Black/Latino women ever chat with me. Zero from thousands of matches over a period of years. We're not talking about first dates, relationships, we're talking about literally someone on the other end hitting the 'like' button to unlock chat. And I'm not someone who just likes super attractive women I was open to literally anyone ranging from less conventionally attractive profiles. At
To be honest, it completely changed my perspective of women altogether.