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Comment by Shish2k | Hacker News Reader

I wonder where all the women are? I'm fairly sure that the human race as a whole is 50/50 split; but dating sites are 99% men, the tech industry is 90% men, when I take public transport it's 75% men, pubs are 80% men, construction workers I pass on the walk to work are 100% men, etc etc. I can't remember the last time I was in a room which was mostly women; the last time I even got to 50/50 was high school... It's really hard to avoid bias when the bubble that I live in is so skewed :/

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Here's a real sample of most of the messages women get on dating sites:

hi [that's the whole message]

u r so beautiful [again, the whole message]

hey babe do u want a real man i will treat yuou lik a lady

This represents the vast majority of messages men send on dating sites. And the volume of messages women get is insane. It is a firehose of garbage. Why would anyone volunteer to be on the receiving end of that?

I moderated on OKCupid for years, and this is so, so true.

In fact, it usually went more like:

"Heyyy guurllll lemme holla at you"

"Thanks, but no thanks"

"Fine bitch, you ugly anyway"

That, or dick pics. So many dick pics.

Right, I know personally of more success stories from Everquest and WoW (and maybe one eHarmony story) or other random online communities than actual dating sites.

The first site that can reliably filter this stuff out before it even gets to the target will probably make enough money to form a small black hole. As a moderator, were you just responding to reports from users, or were you preemptively checking into messages, or something else?

No, it will cost them money because it's the men spending all the money on subscriptions. If they knew their messages were filtered they'd leave it droves.

You're assuming that everything would continue to work as it does now. I'm proposing that if you can filter out the dickheads, you could end up with a site where it's no longer just men signing up. If you're the only site where women actually want to sign up, then you'll get all the men too, and you'll rake in the cash.

Also, you're assuming that the idiot men would even be able to tell. Women mostly ignore their nonsense now, right? So it wouldn't look much different.

>As a moderator, were you just responding to reports from users, or were you preemptively checking into messages, or something else?

I also worked as a moderator for a (local) dating site. We only checked on the messages that were reported either by the users or by the anti-spam filters. Also this was clearly specified in the privacy policy and EULA pages.

I did see one girls 'research'. Any time a guy on a dating site told her how 'fine' she was, she said "Thank you" or "Yes".

9 times out of 10, the response was "Well, you ain't all that".

The implicit assumption was that girls should feel flattered to have some random man tell them they're attractive, and have no ego or self-confidence of their own.

Maybe there's space for a site like this where only the women are allowed first contact.

you mean tinder for women? it's called bumble

Not that I want to stereotype, but you can find places that are skewed as heavily towards women: nursing, sociology classes, yoga and pilates, book clubs, feminism forums, dance lessons, etc. That's off the top of my head, there are likely better examples - and (disclaimer!) yes I'm aware that some men frequent these too, but point is the women are in fact congregating somewhere while the men are at the sausage fest.

Can definitely confirm about yoga, pilates, social dance.

I've seen studies that most women in affairs or who ended up in one said they don't go seeking them, at least not outright. They start innocently enough as a relationship with a coworker or platonic friend that they start to feel a connection with, start developing feelings, and it snowballs from there. Based on that pattern, I doubt many women go "I want to have an affair" and just go do it so the dedicated website model is probably not where online affairs start for women. Probably more likely FB reconnecting with an old flame or talking with someone at a point where they at least convinced themselves it was innocent at first.

> when I take public transport it's 75% men

Where do you live? In New York, the split seems to be much closer to 50/50. In fact, during the day there seem to be more women (though I'm guessing that's because more men than women have day-jobs, and so women probably tend to run errands during the day rather than after work.

This is very noticeable in London. Commuter-trains are skewed towards men. Take the trains later in the morning/earlier in the afternoon, and very different. It's a very stark illustration of how far we are from gender equality.

"when I take public transport it's 75% men"

UK Birmingham: my experience is the total inverse of that. I work a three day week in a College that is a reasonable commute from where I live. Bus and train.

One early morning per week (out at 6am): cleaners and nurses.

One night I'm coming home after 9pm. Its (mostly female) care staff coming off shift until we hit the outskirts of Birmingham when we pick up some of the the postal workers coming off shift.

Other commutes: admin and retail workers - mostly women.

One of the other days of the traditional working week I'm doing sessional work locally and its women and children all the way on a mid-morning and late afternoon bus ride.

Chaps: construction workers going into the New St site of an early morning come in by coach and have breakfast in a cafe. Guess what gender the cooks and servers are. And guess how they got to work.

Rooms mostly full of women: management meetings. I work in UK public sector (and its fine).

In the US, the vast, vast majority of restaurant cooks are men, as are all of the other back of the house jobs. Servers are predominantly female. The back of the house jobs pay less except in restaurants where tip-sharing is enacted, unless the restaurant has poor business and gets few customers/tips.

Yep restaurant cooks/chefs are predominantly male. I was talking more about the greasy spoon cafes, which tend to have predominantly female staff. I gather tip sharing is the norm in UK for the kind of restaurant where people do tipping e.g. pizza houses upward.

If you are in SF, this is partially due to how the tech industry distorts the sex ratio there:

http://pics.city-data.com/agegraph/2455.png

(This is for residents of SF only, so it won't account for any differences that might arise due to commuters who live outside SF)

Edit, source page: http://www.city-data.com/housing/houses-San-Francisco-Califo...

Dating sites like OkCupid, Match, and Tinder (yes, it's used for dating alot) have a decent balance.

Yoga, Tennis, Beach Volleyball all have a high percentage of women. And whole foods...

Women don't need any of the online stuff. Men throw themselves at women on a daily basis. Even average looking women get an overabundance of sex options.

And most of those options are ones they don't want; I'd wager that most women don't particularly want to sign up for a site and deal with 50 garbage messages a day.

> I'd wager that most women don't particularly want to sign up for a site and deal with 50 garbage messages a day.

Likely more than that on a site like AM.

11,000,000 active accounts, of which about 2,000 were women. That's a 5,500 : 1 ratio.

One wonders how many of those 2000 are actually women.

It's a numbers game for them. You get hit on by 5-10 guys a day, one per week is guaranteed to be handsome/funny/rich/whatever they are looking for.

That's why we end up in a situation when 20% of guys have sex with like 80-90% of women, and the rest 80% of the guys are struggling online, in bars, in gyms, etc.

> It's a numbers game for them. You get hit on by 5-10 guys a day, one per week is guaranteed to be handsome/funny/rich/whatever they are looking for.

I'd wager it's way more than 5-10 per day, and I'd wager that it takes a fairly long time to ascertain which one is actually a rich guy.

It's like saying you're fine with getting pelted by a dozen rocks a day, because probably one a week is going to be a golden nugget.

You know that's interesting. I was going to comment that I'd be okay with that amount of rock pelting for a gold ingot per week but I'm not actually sure anymore. After doing the math (assuming .5 inches per side rock pellets)(http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=.5%5E3+cubic+inches+of+...) it only comes out to roughly $18 per rock...

You need to move to NYC. I'd say the city is far more skewed towards women. And by far I mean, at least in the single un-married space the ratio of women to men is something like 1.05:1... I dont have a citation - just from memory.

At Starbucks. At work. At Nordstrom, Saks, Bloomingdales, etc ...

Pinterest.

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