SingleSpot: meet singles in bars and cafés around you
singlespotapp.com
singlespotapp.com
However, if like another poster said, only women can see the "targets" and the onus is on them to make the first move, then I can see this app having utility as it can be a way for men to make themselves available to an in person interaction without feeling like they'll come off as predatory by making the first move (and likewise allowing women to encounter men in person without having to worry that every man in the room will think she's inviting interaction). But it isn't readily apparent that the app works that way.
-need more attractive/higher-quality photos
-need to revise your seduction-by-text techniques (get their phone#/WhatsApp#/whatever, build a little rapport, move the conversation OFF of Tinder ASAP, arrange a face-to-face low-pressure coffee "date", etc...)
-need to try a different geographic area (some areas just have a terrible dating market, even on Tinder)
Self-Made Man: One Woman's Year Disguised as a Man ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/0143038702/ ) has quite a few interesting things to say. Relevant here are the author's observations on dating: she writes that she expected to have a lot of success as a "boyfriend" with her insight into the female mind. That didn't happen -- women picked up on her lack of masculinity and in general weren't happy with it... in person.
But she did experience staggering success in the pre-first-date courtship portion of online dating, allowing her to get dates at rates much superior to what a real man would expect. Online, the women apparently didn't have a good sense of what they wanted.
Your observation reminded me of that -- people preferring a certain approach even though it's actively counterproductive.
What value does it provide? The fact that you know with certainty that someone is single (or at least claims to be)? You still know nothing about them and cannot converse with them on your phone. You must initiate face to face contact, which is all fine and great. But all of this would theoretically happen anyway without the app.
Also, there at least two issues I see with the concept that make dating worse.
First, the example on the site of the guy who "doesn't want to be actively looking for singles tonight, he wants to let people know that he's single". That's called laziness. This fictitious guy is going to basically just put out the digital equivalent of "hey ladies I'm single" and wait for the women to swarm? Yeah, ok. Only in rare instances will that happen because socially we still function in mostly the same way (men are still expected to pursue). And in the reverse scenario where a woman does that...well, that's basically exactly how society functions right now. Women know how to project that they are single in a setting like a bar. Men observe, figure out who they might have a chance with, and then attempt to strike up a conversation and pursue. So the app literally offers nothing in that regard.
Second, people will probably be more prone to only risk talking to someone they see on the app as a confirmed single because it's less risky. This would make their choices smaller because they are probably unconsciously eliminating everyone else on the basis of risk. This makes the dating scene worse, not better. Unless damn near everyone was on the app and used it all the time. Which I'm sure the app developer would love. But realistically almost surely won't happen.
In all seriousness, people already use tinder and similar apps like this. Sitting at bars, swiping. Not talking to strangers because “it’s not normal to just go up and talk to women/men that you don’t know”.
This is the world we have built for ourselves! Technology is wonderful, isn’t it?
I understand the sentiment, sadly, being a male, there’s little I can do to thwart its own impact on my social life, except, of course, not be creepy.
Oh wait, you said “in pursuit of romantic and sexual interest”. I didn’t real your full sentence off the bat. Well, how does one know a “strange” (unknown) man is “bothering” (strong word, I’d have chosen introduce) in pursuit of sexual or romantic interests?
Are men and women really not allowed to be friends on a non-intimate level? Does introducing myself to a woman immediately imply that I want to seduce her? I wish that weren’t the case. I feel in many ways I relate and have more interests in common with women, and no, I am not a homosexual, or any modern label, just a normal guy.
You'd also know that they're advertising that they're open to being approached - it might relieve some anxiety knowing that you're going to be rejected simply for approaching someone that isn't interested in being approached at all.
>just put the digital equivalent of "hey ladies I'm single" and wait for the women to swarm? Yeah, ok.
Yes, they've gender-inverted their example in order to be politically correct. You're right that men will still pursue, but I think the app might offer something to men who are less than perfect at detecting which women are signalling they want to be approached. A lot of men would like some de-risking on that front, even at the expense of reducing the total size of the pool.
EDIT: wait, unless it's a thing like bumble where only the woman can make the first move? In that case yeah, I don't see it taking off
Also, I had always viewed the ability to deal with sub-optimal outcomes well as a form of character-building. For example, would you rather be the person who has never encountered/taken the risk of approaching someone who is taken, says no to you, or is just not in the mood to be approached that specific night? I'd much rather be able to deal with those situations gracefully. Similarly, I'd much rather learn to observe body language and everything else to determine which women are indicating certain things non-verbally. The general case of that is reading people and it's a critical life skill.
I think a lot of technology, particularly the stuff surrounding dating, does a lot of harm to society, human interaction, and people's character overall. This is just another one to add to the list for me. I can't tell you how many people who are roughly 10-15 years younger than me have zero skills in talking to the opposite sex. And many have, shockingly, never really been in a scenario where they've had to actually turn on the charm, make an effort, and hold a conversation. This manifests itself in the workplace when we have events, meet clients, go out for drinks, etc. They are duds and have zero personality. It's utterly depressing.
Basically: Say, hi... what are your reading, working on...etc...
99% of my interactions this way have been positive
My suggestion: Seek out interesting conversation with people, don't target a potential mate. You'll greatly increase your potential pool of both friends and romantics, plus improve your standing within it
I've spent a lot of time in coastal California cafes near population centers like SF and Santa Cruz over the past 5 years, and it's perfectly normal for strangers to start conversations.
It's perfectly socially acceptable to chat up women and strangers in a public place like a bar or coffee shop as long as you have proper boundaries and leave people alone if they make it clear they want to be left alone. In fact, that's how I met my husband. Nowadays we frequent the same locations and we say hi and sometimes chat up the other regulars when we see them.
Might be true for your area, not for mine. Sounds like you live in a really bad place. Have you considered moving?
I just don't particularly enjoy working out around people. I like having a home gym.
Women filter their choices more than men. Bumble works for a good chunk of women who will initiate once filtered to something they're vaguely interested in. The number of conversations initiated by women on tinder must be close to 1%, if that.
Ok so maybe that's not it. Maybe the first step is to find women that are single in the first place! So now I find out that there are a few girls on SingleSpot at the bar. I go to the bar and now we're back to the first situation.
Ok so maybe it's for places other than the bar. SingleSpot says there's a cute girl... at Starbucks. Am I supposed to go into Starbucks, hope that she's still there 10 minutes from now, and then invite myself for coffee at that moment? Am I supposed to walk around with my phone at the library, the grocery store, the gas station looking for Cute Singles Near Me? And why do I need an app to do that anyway? I can just, you know, see girls and say hi if I want to.
I'll even add a personal experience. In college, I caught up with a girl after a class we shared that I had matched with the previous night. I had sent her a message but just assumed she didn't see it. I introduced myself and said that we had matched on Tinder, and got back a (hilariously) blank and bewildered stare. We exchanged numbers and never spoke again. I can't imagine it would have gone better if I said I saw her on Facebook and thought she was cute. People get freaked out when you to pull their online personas into the real world.
On the other hand, and as people have mentioned, there's definitely already countless venues that cater to the single scene where it's fair to presume it's ok to approach anyone you like. But this might entice people who don't know where those hangouts are to find them.
I think some useful things might be marking spots most frequented by singles and somehow incentivizing location owners to get people to sign up. A great advantage would be that the friction for signing up is very low.
I'll check it out when I have an Android phone again, but honestly don't expect more than 10 people in my area to have even heard of it.
One way to do this is for the bars to somehow indicate they are on the network (a sign in the window kinda like grubhub, yelp, and others use today), and then allow them to put in coupons or something similar (points?) to attract users to the app (and their spot).
The back end was based on PHP and something called "Whitebox CSS Admin" template, and the app was developed using PhoneGap and JQuery Mobile (this was sometime around 2012).
It was very interesting to develop, and the first JS SPA I ever did (before I knew the term). I'm glad to see that someone has done something similar.
Good luck with it!
Either way, couldn't this app be a handy tool for antisocial behavior? (anything from laughing at randomers to finding a victim of some sort of crime)
But with this app I can purposefully visit a place known to have a user.
i.e. real-world interactions have a lot more repercussions than cyber-bullying.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ks8nkoC5og8&feature=youtu.be...
The idea is use an app to overcome “approach anxiety” by initiating in a neutral, digital environment.
With any app like this, it’s tough to launch and overcome the challenge of getting the initial user base for it to be useful, though.
I will admit that I chuckled when I read the suggestion of SAT filtering, but now that I think about it that's mostly because I'm in my mid-30s now so SATs would not be an up-to-date indicator for me. But if I were 17, education level would be a useless filter, and I might use SAT instead.
General rule. Women like being able to preemptively filter men out of their dating pool based on a variety of fairly arbitrary criteria. Men who fear being so eliminated want to not be filtered out by those criteria.
Given that this site has mostly men, most of the opinions expressed will be against any such filtering.
Put another way, suppose that a woman wants to find single men, over 6' tall, under 35, with a university degree, and a job making more than 100k. Men who fail to meet any of those criteria do not wish to be filtered out.
What woman doesn't want that list?
In fact, all the characteristics you're looking for can be satisfied by going to a top-tier university or a nearby city: most college graduates have higher income levels and probably higher SAT scores, and most move to metropolitan areas after graduation. In this case, we call a "sorting mechanism".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_sorting
Note: I'm not encouraging this behavior – just pointing out that it exists without technology. A dating app like this would just cause more sorting.