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Comment by lqdc13 | Hacker News Reader

I guess I really don't get it. Why do women use Tinder when they could be using OkCupid?

It's literally 25-28% women and 72-75% men in the Bay Area. These are the numbers I got from scraping OkC profiles that had words in them. There are more college educated men than there are women. There are more masters+ graduated men than there are bachelor+ women.

Even in NYC, there is something like 60% men compared to 40% women (and I'm being generous here).

From anecdotal evidence, you are also much more likely to get a boyfriend as a girl than a hookup on OkCupid compared to Tinder.

I asked several girls why they use Tinder, and they basically tell me that it is because they think that by having an intercourse, they can get the guy to like them more, leading to an instant relationship. But why not just start with an instant relationship and not go through something you don't want to do?

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Because OKCupid overwhelms you with worthless information. It provides you with all sorts of stats that don't matter: favorite movie (re: movies I think will attract the person I want), favorite music (re: what bands might impress the person i want?), ridiculous quizzes (not that different from fashion magazine quizzes). Presented with this deluge of useless data on your partner, you can then filter on these worthless parameters (because why not? you're getting a ton of messages anyways, might as well filter on something). Anyways, after you've successfully gotten the number down to something reasonable you proceed to... make your decision based almost entirely on a picture.

The actual important thing to realize about Tinder is that it maximizes the only metric that matters: face to face contact. Everyone on there is on the same page: lets get together and in 30 minutes we'll have a WAY better idea of whether we vibe than reading a glorified resume online and going back and forth trying to by witty (often to then find out we have no chemistry in person!). Ironically enough Tinder actually uses technology to rehumanize the dating experience: its always been about going out and meeting people, Tinder is a simple extension of that, OKCupid tried to replace it with a "compatibility score".

This is half of it.

The other half is that many women enjoy looking for casual hookups, just as men do. Certainly this can be (and is) done on OkCupid, but on Tinder the cultural expectations are more tailored towards something short-term.

Related: OkC heightens all participants' expectations of one another, which is counterproductive particularly in advance of even he first face to face encounter.

I disagree that OKCupid (and many similar sites) focus on useless statistics. I can tell more about what someone is like by their interests and their writing than by their face. Of course meeting in person is important, but it's also time consuming, and that's better spent on someone you might actually have something in common, than on some random person with a nice face.

Tinder's swipe mechanic, while incredibly superficial, helps with the biggest problem with OkC and other traditional dating sites: The experience is horrible for women. Their inbox receives a torrent of marriage offers and incredibly explicit sex offers from men they have no interest in. Tinder's reciprocality system, where you both have to show interest before a chat is even possible, solves this elegantly. The downside IMO is that it's incredibly hard to find someone that you have more than a physical interest in. OkC's matchmaking questions and match% system is actually a really good solution to this. I think there's a business opportunity in combining the two - enforce the reciprocality like Tinder does, but have matchmaking questions, so it can try to pair you with more likely matches first. (OkC actually has a feature like this, but when they don't enforce its use, it's entirely meaningless). Of course this would begin compromising Tinder's other big advantage, the incredibly easy setup (it doesn't really _feel_ like making a dating profile, so it attracts a much wider audience) - but I think it'd be worth experimenting with nonetheless.

OkC has (or had when I used the site) a quickmatch mechanic where it's essentially the same. If both sides match, both receive a message that they matched each other.

I guess all they could do is just filter all messages and only keep the quickmatch mechanic? Initially, they had something like that as well!

Basically a forced requirement that someone can set. Such as... you can only message me if this or that. One would be only if I first match you. They had more success when they got rid of that mechanic.

The problem is that they try to fully integrate Quickmatch with the existing system. That means that swiping right on someone in Quickmatch is the same as liking them on their profile page. And as a paying user, I can see who likes me without having to like them back. So the anonymity of showing interest that is not reciprocated is completely lost. If Tinder did this they'd lose most of their users. And frankly, adding this on top of an existing platform as an opt-in is just hopeless - it just exacerbates the problem of too much configuration to get started. Not to mention focus (or even space) in the UI - Tinder works because swiping and chatting are the only two things you can do. This would only ever work as a new app.

I haven't used Tinder but I've watched as my friends use it. The other problem with these dating apps and sites is people like or are merely confused about what they want. For someone to positively answer the question "would you sleep with someone on the first date?" but then put that they want a long-term relationship - these things seem counter to each other, imho. Both sexes need to be able to say it straight out that they just want sex, then there needs to be a filter to remove these people for the LTR dating pool users. Instead it's "if I can have sex, then the LTR can wait til someone else comes along". That being said, there is a question on OKC that asks how long one would wait before having sex (ex, 3-5 dates, etc). They could make this question have much, much more weight.

Why are wanting a LTR and wanting sex on the first date incompatible?

It's likely I'm just old-fashioned, where getting to know someone precedes having sex with them.

Traditional dating sites can definitely be horrible for women. I think it'd help if you could autoblock anyone you haven't contacted. Or separate between a spam box and one for messages you're actually interested in.

As most people aren't unique snowflakes when it comes to mate preferences, the likelihood of being the only woman fancying a certain man is low. With Tinder women trade the obnoxious problem of heaps of unwanted attention for the less glaring but quite insidious problem of letting the eligible bachelors know exactly how well off they are. With OkCupid, these men play the same game as everybody else, just with more success. At Tinder they have an exact count of how in demand they are, giving less incentive to commit.

Maybe women and men are not as different as you think? Maybe women like hookups just as much as men do, and it's our environment (society, "norms", tv, the fact that "slut" is an insult, &c) that makes you think otherwise?

Asking women is not the answer here, because you still go through that societal filter. Besides, rarely does someone know what they want, in the first place.

"Ask a customer what they want, and they'll say they want a faster horse."

The article makes an implicit assumption that girls don't want a fling and want marriage instead.

Then it argues that it is because the ratios are skewed.

I am arguing that the ratios are only skewed if they look in the places where the ratios are skewed.

It is possible that the assumption is not correct, but then the whole argument about the ratios being skewed makes no sense, because the "fling problem" disappears.

>I am arguing that the ratios are only skewed if they look in the places where the ratios are skewed.

well It's a US article and they give the sats for the US, as well as some major metropolitan areas. Where else should they be looking?

>The article makes an implicit assumption that girls don't want a fling and want marriage instead.

They do address this, for Silicon valley they show that in an area where the gender ratio favours women there are more marriages which are more stable. It's just one data point, but addresses your concern and this is an article not a study.

Ok, first of all, the article says that women are forced to look for sex on dating apps, because the ratio of desirable men to desirable women is small.

This is not the case, as there are dating apps where the ratio of desirable men to desirable women is large and where LTR is emphasized compared to instant sex.

Women aren't using these sites/apps.

So either the assumptions about women are wrong, or the argument that women are in this terrible situation where there are not enough educated men on dating sites looking for a LTR and where women are forced to have sex to possibly get to a relationship is incorrect.

In order to show that women are having a hard time finding men, the number of women on dating apps doesn't have to be larger than the number of men. It just has to be larger than it would otherwise be. But that raises an interesting point. It would be useful to know the gender ration for Tinder users in the Valley compared to e.g. the gender ratio in NY. Anyway, thanks for the thoughtful chat.

Nobody jokes about an old surgeon man with cats/dogs drinking wine/beer alone in the evening.

> Asking women is not the answer here

I'd add a big "but" here. There are pleanty of women who speak out and say that, yes, sometimes women just want a fling. Ask a woman who identifies as a feminist. They are usually less concerned with upholding traditional gender roles, and often can speak freerer.

However you're right that the societal filter can apply. If a conservative older, more powerful, man asks a woman (e.g. a 40 y.o. boss asking a 20 y.o. new employee), then yes, sometimes people don't tell the boss everything.

A general advise of "don't listen to women!" is very disturbing.

The general advice is don't listen to people when they say what they want.

I agree that the general advice is disturbing. However, looking at grandparent's post, I highly doubt that he asked the question in a way that indicated a judgement free response to the answer. This will not get him honest answers.

The main pull of Tinder for women, I thought, is that they get to decide who can talk to them.

OkCupid, POF etc is like a scene from World war Z - hoards of men pinging girls with messages constantly.

The downside is that Tinder requires less investment - most don't even enter a bio - and so things kick off with a match based on physical attraction rather than any other attribute. I call that a 'downside' but guess that's only true if your criteria for a partner extends beyond looks.

In which case there's OkCupid. So yeah I don't see the problem here. The optimal choice may be to install both apps and filter accordingly.

Ironically, that had (previously) caused men to swipe right on everyone, putting the ball back in their court for selecting who to talk to once matches were made.

That doesn't matter. Women still got to pick who was allowed to send messages to them.

Tinder's less effort than OKC.

With OKC you have you go through a whole set-up process and monitor it more like you would Facebook.

With Tinder you install, login with Facebook which pulls in all your photos/interest, swipe left + right, wait for a response, message and hope luck ever falls in your favour.

You assume women are just interested in getting "a boyfriend" rather than seeking a certain type of man.

OkCupid had many analyzes about demographics and activity of their users. This one was quite famous: http://static.izs.me/why-you-should-never-pay-for-online-dat...

You can't just look at raw percentages without looking at their composition: how in-demand are the users on Tinder vs. the ones on OKCupid?

For guys with higher "market value", OKCupid is really a waste of time relative to Tinder, and so fewer of them will use OKC. That makes the 72-75% figure quite misleading, since a good deal of those men might not be considered particularly desirable.

> Why do women use Tinder when they could be using OkCupid? It's literally 25-28% women and 72-75% men in the Bay Area. These are the numbers I got from scraping OkC profiles that had words in them.

What makes you think that (i)women don't frequently use both, if they're interested in online dating and (ii)the Tinder profiles aren't at least as skewed male-wards?

The simple fact is that men are generally more proactive in looking for dates/hookups and so are more likely to go to the effort of registering for a website to find members of the opposite sex to meet, so basically every dating website not created exclusively for lesbians is majority male. Also, as others have pointed out, Tinder's selling point is that women get to choose which proactive men actually get to talk to them, which saves the rudeness of having to ignore/block lots of men rather keener on the idea of an instant relationship than they are.

Regarding where I'm getting the info:

https://www.globalwebindex.net/blog/what-to-know-about-tinde...

62% of dating app users are men. This is actually much better than OkC. Also, Tinder has 2x more users in general:

https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F05rbwm%2C%20%...

There's oxytocin effect after intercourse which literally helps to build the relationship between two intercourse partners, so they have a point.

There is always a discrepancy between what people say they want and what their actions show they want.

When looking at technology adoption, women prefer the mobile phone. Computers are still predominantly masculine and mobile phones due to their communicative nature a lot more feminine. That's what feminist academic literature I've read says anyways.

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