A Matchmaker Who Flirts on Dating Apps for You (2017)
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Tinder and the likes are a numbers game, with everyone procuring their,"best self" in 6 photos and a witty bio. There is already so much artificiality in the interactions and this will just add more to it.
I was terrible and shy when I first used Tinder but I treated it like any other problem. I iterated and reviewed; improved my appearance and well being.
Then I started getting matches; at which point I couldn't think of anything funny to say. So I went with cliched or weird intros. After another bit of iteration and self reflection and lots of trial and error I was getting dates.
This whole evolution took place over a year or so and was a good benchmark for me.
Whether you are a woman or a man, if you are failing on Tinder/Bumble/Match/Dates etc. I suggest you do a bit of self reflection and try and change it up, I believe in you!
People who are trying to skip parts out are more likely to stumble at the next hurdle in my opinion.
If someone earns so much money that they can pay 700 usd a month for this service, that basically means that they have figured life out and are successful and do not need to change.
People that make money understand that the better investment is to pay someone more competent to do the job.
Personality has also always been something the can be influenced by money. There is a reason why women would prefer rich "jerks" to poor nice guys.
Clients have needs and are willing to pay for the services required.
Rich people also have drivers. That doesn't mean they can't drive.
If you see it as a service, sure, if you are very successful and don't have time that someone literally has to manage your dating, then more to you I guess...
On the other hand, for people who are bad and incorrigible at self reflection, a serious matchmaker who knows you well can do a good job in finding you a suitable partner. But somehow I distrust this kind of online service, and that's me. "Local" matchmaking seems to be working in smaller communities.
I wouldn't be so confident in the personal virtues of wealthy people if I were you.
The moral problem here, at least for me, is intentional deception, users of such a service actively pay somebody to lie to another person. That sounds like a great start for a solid relationship. The article makes is pretty clear that she hides her client's emotional baggage, which in principle is what most people do but how is she sure that transfers to the situation where the client actually meets the other person? Having a few thousand quids disposable might as well mean the client is desparate or simply inapt at social interactions, not sure why that would magically mean the exact opposite to be quiet honest. Being "nice" can hardly be considered a necessary prerequisite for making money.
As for the permanent measures you bring forward, it's not like even modern and progressive societies aren't still split on purely esthetical beauty surgery. But then again that's an odd example because that's people's own choice and permanently changes their own looks so I do not really see how that really relates to the service debated here.
The fact that services like "Pay someone to get you a date on the internet" have a market and seem to be necessary says something pretty awful about our culture. Technology is supposed to make things easier, not be something that needs to be managed by experts.
You have to be incredibly inept if you can't get at least one date by the end of the day. If it is a larger city, you could be booking them out through the weekend.
But hey, anyone that needs this service will probably be a long term customer.
I, personally, do not like the dystopia tech has built. I don't like 20 spam calls a day, ubiquitous tracking, insane "social media" or the fact that nitwits conduct witch hunts on the internet based on "facecrime." It sucks. Drugging yourself to put up with it seems to be standard operating procedure.
I don't understand what your second paragraph has to do with anything I said, it's basically rambling. Maybe off topic rants isnt helping your dating life.
Tech definitely facilitates the ability to meet someone and have a drink or coffee. Someone you probably wouldn't have ever ran into otherwise. I see nothing wrong with that.
No, that only means that they have enough disposable income to afford the service.
> Personality has also always been something the can be influenced by money. There is a reason why women would prefer rich "jerks" to poor nice guys.
The generalisation you make about women is really offensive, furthermore, you can not assume everyone favours income over personality in a partner.
In any case, dating, like a job hunt and many other aspects of our lives, comes down to weighting up your expectations against someone else's, if you're fine with attracting a partner because of your money, good for you.
Though in my case, I found out from one helpful person that tinder had my gender incorrect for the first 6-8 months I spent on it (back before that was user-controlled). So sometimes it's not you at all.
We tend to only see the superficial personalities on social media mostly because they're the most vocal imo.
Networking events and friendships are also selling yourself, since you can’t possibly give the same time and importance to everyone, so you need to pick and choose.
[1] Yes I did just quote Sex and the City on HN.
It's the same here. She might drive the traffic to the landing page, but unless her clients match the messaging, they'll never convert...
"I left after drinks. (S)He was so much wittier on the app - we just didn't connect the same way in real life."
Basically, it means it was the Google software engineers flirting with with the Facebook software programmers!
Seems ripe for a Hollywood romcom script. Two people hook up because of their respective dating AI apps told them what to say. If the movie was long enough, you could include them getting divorced and the husband & wife's attorneys each using legal AI software to optimize the best divorce settlement.
Replace the chirpy lady in this article with an algorithm, replace the potential matches with algorithms too, and we're there.
You're being too pessimistic. Instead, in light of the fact that humans typically married within extremely small communities (and so got along fine with far less matchmaking power than we have today), the couple could learn to live with each other's faults as they realize that even if they start out imperfect, each one can each grow in to what the other one needs.
The divorce rate in New York is pretty high and the matchmaking pool there is gigantic. In fact, divorces tend to be a little more common in dense urban areas. Maybe that's evidence that insufficient matchmaking is not the bottleneck of relationship happiness.
That said, I do believe that most people could be happy with one another with the right mindset. I just dont think the data you presented proves the cause of urban divorce rates.
This is terrible, but I read this and my mind switches back to nerd stuff: how great would it be if software developers could hire someone like this but to handle job outreach and negotiation? You: kick back, solve programming puzzles, go to the occasional tech-out interview. They: reach out to prospects, arrange your interviews, and do the salary negotiation.
They're really different skills, programming and job negotiation. They're not even correlated! I know so many excellent negotiators with excellent jobs who aren't even in the top 50% of programmers I've worked with, and vice versa.
I suppose it's probably similar with dating; being a good partner probably has little to do with being good at arranging dates.
Later
Heading off a bunch of replies right here:
Recruiters work for hiring firms. How you know this is, developers don't generally pay recruiters. The essence of an agent/principal relationship is that the agent works for, and is compensated by, the principal. Recruiters aren't talent agents for developers.
They're called recruiters.
A talent agent is someone you, the developer, have a relationship with. They go out and apply to everything you're interested in for you. They're not working from a book of qualified openings trying to match developers to them. They'll do the negotiating lifting even at firms that won't pay their placement rate --- because you, the developer, are the one who pays them, not the company.
How have you not heard of recruiters? I get spammed by them almost every day.
Recruiters are often essentially human banner ads for job postings, and generally don't do most of the above. (Particularly since recruiters work for the company, not the applicant)
I'm amazed that professional help isn't standard, since your job determines so much of your happiness and future path, but most people rely on skills they dust off every few years to get one.
Much like the article's dating example, it's not clear to the employer that I as an agent exist, because employers often categorically don't want to hear from third parties early in the game. So in practice this involves a lot of ghostwriting on a new, shared email account, which the candidate reviews and submits. Interview coaching is also a big part of it.
Also, from a pure negotiation perspective, Josh Doody at FearlessSalaryNegotiation.com (I'm not affiliated) is very good and specializes in developers.
I'm amazed that professional help isn't standard
They've got a terrible reputation, because their incentives are all messed up.
Candidates somewhat dislike recruiters because they're incentivised to (a) post false adverts to gather CVs, (b) cold call aggressively, (c) be careless with candidates' personal details, (d) misrepresent their willingness to negotiate well on the employees' behalf and their knowledge of pay ranges, (e) misrepresent candidates to employers, and (f) apply aggressive hard-sell tactics.
For both employers and candidates to dislike the results of recruiters' incentives is what I mean when I say the incentives are messed up. Firms may pay them, but it's not true to say firms are 100% happy with the deal they get.
There are lawyers you can hire to do this sort of negotiation for you. A relative of mine is one such, and did a job offer negotiation for me.
Thing is, they usually work on very large deals. Their expense is enormous, so it’s not the sort of thing they usually hire out for.
How much of your life can be outsourced, before it's no longer your life? How much of a man still makes a man?
Edgar Allan Poe had a funny little story about that and technology, all the way back in 1840:
As that EA Poe story skilfully anticipated, and as our modernity puts more and more into practice, "you" is just a chimera, a leaky abstraction. It appears the questions of tomorrow will be around "what's the entity exercising agency" more than "how much agency".
Surrogate matchmakers are but a taste of things to come.
There's no hard and fast rules on what makes an experience worth living. If automating and outsourcing everything makes you happy, do it!
Life is short.
Video: https://datascience.hubs.vidyard.com/watch/tYeyAch76caSFrHDf...
This is about a guy who wrote a Python script to ... "set up 12 fake OkCupid accounts and wrote a Python script to manage them. The script would search his target demographic (heterosexual and bisexual women between the ages of 25 and 45), visit their pages, and scrape their profiles for every scrap of available information... After three weeks he'd harvested 6 million questions and answers from 20,000 women all over the country. "
Not. Creepy. At. All.
"Don't tell her about your D&D group yet!" would've been some good advice in the past. For a friend of mine, of course.
Which to me personally is a step to far. If you're getting tips or even literal phrases, you still have the option of not using or changing them. Not even participating in the courtship until the first date seems morally unsound.
The matchmakers of old would be the dating service itself. Or maybe their shoddy algorithms.
> When she messages potential matches, Golden typically comments on their photos: What a cute dog! Oh, your kids live in the city, how lucky are you? She types out full sentences, and she does not use emoji, and she certainly does not use innuendo. “I’m not gonna say like, ‘How big are your feet?’” she giggled.
Women are absolutely bombarded with so many messages on these apps that they can't possibly respond to most and have to narrow it down. At a very high level, the process of elimination for most women goes like this:
1. First, skip all of the creeps who fortunately make it super easy for you to spot (bathroom selfies & "Wanna sit on my face?" messages).
2. Then narrow it down by intelligence so anyone who seems to have trouble putting together a full sentence or spelling gets a pass.
3. Finally, narrow it down based on effort so 90% of the remaining messages are ignored because they're some variation of "hey" or "there she is!"
These filters suck. But they're the best we can do with an overwhelming amount of inputs and limited additional information. Occasionally creeps get past the filter and we don't find out until we meet in person. Conversely, are all men who take bathroom selfies or ask 'wut u doin' or who play the "numbers game" by sending 'hey' to 1000 women worthy of being skipped over? Probably not. I bet there are a lot of awesome guys who have done one or more of those things and get "filtered out" by women who would otherwise really enjoy their company. But, for now at least, women don't have a better way of separating the wheat from the chaff.
The messages Golden sends on behalf of her clients bypass all of these filters. My boyfriend is 13 years older than me, twice-divorced and has a 12 year old. We never would have met via a dating app because I would've filtered him out for a hundred different reasons. (And he's a numbers guy so he would absolutely be guilty of #3.)
Assuming Golden does some sort of creep-QC on her clients, if two people meet in person and really hit it off because Golden was able to get the right guy past the right girl's tinder filters, well I think that's great.
But also, someone needs to come up with a better way to deal with women's dating-app inboxes. Bumble tried to make an effort but there is a LOT of room for improvement.
What's the long term? Do you tell your partner on your wedding day "hey, remember when we first got chatting? that wasn't me, it was hired help, oho!".
Unless you have a very transactional attitude to relationships (e.g. a sort of elite-dating style situation where you just want a partner that earns well and looks good at social occasions) I can't see this working out well. Your entire relationship is built on a lie.
Oh, then there's the limiting case. Two matchmakers end up pitted against each other. A prime candidate for automation!
I don't see it that way. Dating apps are a game. If you don't play the game "correctly" you're putting yourself at a huge disadvantage. And if you're an average man you're already starting at a disadvantage. To succeed you need the "correct" photos and profile. You need the "correct" opening line. You need the "correct" witty responses. And that's all before you even meet someone in person! I can see the value in a service that bypasses the game to get right to a face to face meeting.
Eventually we can even tune the algorithms to match couples who are most likely to give birth to "influencer babies".
Dating apps are already dehumanising most of the dating process, let's see how bad we can make it. I wonder if people in the future will be able (or even know that it's possible) to start discussions with the opposite sex outside of dating apps.
Ever go out to try and meet women? I'm comfortable enough with it that I've gone to bars alone just to do it, yet I'd still call it uncomfortable at best. You're essentially cold-approaching strangers and don't know if they're single much less if they even find you attractive. Sometimes you hit it off like a romcom which is rewarding, but everything that's not that is a crapshoot. Certainly doesn't feel "humanizing".
Ideally you meet women through your social circle or your social events. I met my last girlfriend through a kayaking event on meetup.com in Guadalajara. But your social circle might not have anything to offer you. Or you find meetups just as impersonal or you don't have time or are still working up the courage to conquer your own anxieties or you're in a new city with no friends yet.
Dating already was a numbers game. Dating apps like Tinder have improved my quality of life here enormously. The ability to narrow down strangers to the ones who at least find you attractive (attraction isn't a choice) is an invaluable tool, and not having this tool in the physical world isn't any more humanizing. You just have to remember easy come, easy go. You can't fixate on one woman and you can't be outcome-dependent, but those were already things you shouldn't be doing in the physical world.
Besides, the point of dating apps is to quickly escalate to a face to face meetup. Something that can help you meet more humans face to face seems the opposite of dehumanizing.
My suspicion is that dating apps are so easy to hate because they bring to the surface what dating really is, and it was never all that pretty to begin with.
Pretty much any sort of sales job has this sort of learning curve. The part where you either hit it off or it's obvious that this is a waste of both your time reminds me a lot of selling used cars on the side. You usually know pretty quick whether your chances of making a sale are <10% or >90%.
I don't want to meet people I "matched" because we watch the same shows, listen to the same music, have the same hobbies. That's not bad per say but I'd much rather learn that organically, even if it ends up being a "waste of time". I feel like reading a tinder profile + the first convo is removing most of the fun of meeting someone.
> Ever go out to try and meet women?
I don't go out with the intent of finding a date but if something happens I'll go with the flow. I met my last 2 ltr like that and learned a lot from it / them. Sure if you compare that to having 3 dates a week on tinder my numbers look low, but I also avoid all the shit I don't want to put up with.
> You just have to remember easy come, easy go.
Yes, that's exactly what I don't like about these apps, you'll always have the occasional "I met my wife/husband on tinder" but it's mostly short term things. My personal theory is that the more people you date / the easier it is to find a mate, the less you'll engage and the faster you'll get disappointed / bored and go look somewhere else. It's always more exciting to start a new relationship than to face and overcome hardships in a newish one.
> My suspicion is that dating apps are so easy to hate because they bring to the surface what dating really is.
You could be right, I haven't dated many people so I'm probably extremely biased. All I can tell is that it saddens me to listen to the tinder stories of my friends and see them glued to their tinder app when I meet them in real life, it brings them way more issues than happiness.