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Comment by LeonM | Hacker News Reader

I've tried a number of dating websites in the past year, and all of them are like this.

First and foremost: No matter how hard they try to hide it, the male/female balance on all straight dating sites is completely off. I'd say it's about 80% male. So most of them fill with fake accounts to get the balance backs.

The matching algorithms don't really exist, they are extremely primitive and usually optimised for engagement. All services show you a whole load of super attractive people on the first use (either fake or just popular profiles), only at the second day of use you get to the real profiles.

Due to the imbalance and fake accounts, as a male you rarely get response on messages. Most men just give up after a while and start to spam generic pickup lines to just about every profile. Woman get loads of messages per day and stop responding. It's vicious circle. As a male, it becomes very difficult to stand out if you are actually interested in someone.

The marketing is optimised badly towards your emotions (loneliness or sexual drive), I regularly got email messages where they "urgently need men to sign up for the next dating event, because only woman have applied so far". One of the services send me a total of 8 (!) reminder emails after I cancelled my subscription, that suddenly all these photo models were trying to send me a match request but couldn't because my account was closed.

I like meeting new people but online dating just raises my anxiety and frustration. I don't think this can be 'disrupted' either, it's just a terrible business to be in since the incentives are completely misaligned.

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I think the most effective way to stand out is for women to contact men. With men spamming all women with meaningless messages, there's little point for women to respond to men contacting them. But if a man received a message from a woman, it's more likely they're real and not a fake profile, and that they're actually interested.

But dating sites that create fake profiles and use all these dark patterns to try to con you into joining should simply be avoided like the plague. Nothing good can come out of those, and there's no point in rewarding bad actors with your money.

Articles exposing these bad dating sites serve a very important purpose here.

That's the idea behind bumble. AFAIK men and women rate each other similarly to Tinder (yes/no). However, when a match occurs, women have to send the first message.

This doesn't solve the gender inbalance though. This problem is much more difficult to solve, and requires further homogenization (?) of the male and female gender role.

This should be one of the more important challenges of our time. Lonelyness and sexual frustration have only negative impacts and are two accelerators for radicalization - which is a pressing concern in developed countries.

The reality for someone like me, a very average looking guy, is then that I get zero messages. Doesn't really solve anything either.

Average looking shouldn't be a problem to most people. Just don't look for people who want to date models. Use a dating site that focuses on content and interest rather than looks. But even if you're somewhere where the initial decision has to be made based on a photo, you can make that photo interesting.

I met my wife on a dating site 13 years ago (a small, cheap one focused specifically on Christians), and although I probably had a profile with a whole supposedly-witty story about myself, the thing I remember is the photo; I used a photo from a recent vacation to Africa, with me selfie-style in front of the gate of Timbuctoo. Her first message to me included some reference to Ouagadougou, and that got the ball rolling. (Her photo was her on a sailing boat; also effective.)

Don't use a photo where you look average, use a photo where you do something interesting. That says more about you than a chiseled jaw line.

Apps like Tinder seem like they'd be looks-focused, but it's true that a picture is worth a thousand words. What you're doing in the picture says a lot about you. So does being well-groomed and choosing a picture that's well-focused and well-composed. A nice smile goes a long way.

Women aren't as looks-focused as a lot of frustrated men present them. Average is just fine, as long as your picture suggests somebody that they can engage with. "Below average" can also go a long way if you've chosen a picture that makes you look like what she wants, which might be "fun" or "family" or "kind". The men who think it's all about their looks are most likely the ones who only judge women by theirs. And while some women do that, the vast majority don't.

Do you have any data to back up your claims? Everything points to this not being the case.

What exactly points to that not being the case? A lot of people of average looks are happily married.

You've been off the market for 13 years and have no clue how much things have changed.

That's entirely possible, but at the same time, I don't think the nature of people themselves changes so fundamentally. Culture and customs change, but not everybody wants to go along with that.

I'm also an average looking guy but got successful from learning pickup IRL.

Bumble's rule is that Men are not even allowed to initiate contact. This is gender-based. Given everything else happening in the world around gender discrimination, I find it interesting that a discussion around Bumble's practises has not come up. Maybe it's because as humans we are not always internally consistent with how we apply our logic to the world.

I don't understand the inconsistency, are you saying that Bumble discriminates against men somehow? The issue for the people I've talked to is the underlying asymmetry in dating that leads to Bumble, not Bumble itself.

Edit: essentially I don't understand how men are getting hurt by Bumble, I know a lot of people that prefer it to something like Tinder so maybe that skews my perspective.

I feel like in Western society, a certain narrative is being pushed that everyone should be treated equally regardless of gender (i.e. Wimbledon winners should get paid the same amount). From what I can tell, it is selectively being used by certain groups when it suits them to push their agenda.

However when observing the real world, it is clear that people are not treated equally based on gender (i.e. Bumble, restrooms, changing rooms, dating). And I am fine with that to a certain extent which is another rabbit hole/discussion. What I find interesting, is that the generation using Bumble tend to be more progressive and aligned with the "all people are equal regardless of gender" ideology yet this is not consistent with how the Bumble app works. This is where I find inconsistency in terms of thinking but I recognize that I'm making wide generalizations which is not ideal.

I think to understand your argument I would need to understand how you think Bumble is harming men. In my experience people generally care much more about situations where there is harm in the discrimination (there are so many better targets for energy is a waste). As someone who cares a lot about gender issues Bumble is a symptom of the problem but not problematic itself, why should I care?

Edit: you are talking about a whole generation but the people who are vocal about things like Bumble are a very very small minority and not really indicative of the movement at large in my experience.

I never said it is harming men. I just said that the rules are gender-based. What made you think that?

I find it an interesting thought exercise to understand why society apply rules differently in certain situations. Context certainly plays an important role here and I feel like you made a good point around harm.

EDIT I feel like sometimes this is a sensitive topic to discuss broadly within Western society. From my end, I want to break things down to first principals and have a frank discussion. However I feel like certain elements within society would shoot down these kind of discussions since it threatens their ideology which is akin to a religion which cannot be questioned. I feel like I am going to get downvoted for saying this and I'm already negative on my karma for my other comments today...

To me I've always run in liberal circles do it feels like your assumptions of the philosophy are off in my experience. I've met very few of those sorts of fundamentalists (literally only 2 ever), most people are more into dismantling the systematic forms of oppression and therefore prioritize things that actually harm people.

I feel like I was making an observation rather than outlining a philosophy. Secondly, I feel that my observations are not quite aligned with the liberal status quo so that may be why they are "off" in your experience. I also agree that most liberals are reasonable people and there are only a few outliers.

The fact that you thought that I said Bumble was harming men and the way you identified my thoughts as a 'philosophy' as opposed to an observation to me speaks directly to point I was making in my previous post albeit you come across as someone who listens and is reasonable.

“Man” and “woman” are role scripts, i.e. requests to be treated differently in traditions that have those gendered role-slots (e.g. chivalry, weddings, etc.), which society goes along with.

Society is fully willing to dispose of the scripts if you dispose of the gender identity. Just call yourself nonbinary and cultivate an androgynous appearance, and most of (the more cosmopolitan parts of) Western society—including the dating parts!—will literally stop caring about your gender.

(Come to think, I’ve never seen a 100% enby dating app. You could make one where—like France with religion—having a legible gender-presentation would be against the rules!)

> Society is fully willing to dispose of the scripts if you dispose of the gender identity

Why is disposing of said "scripts" a good thing, especially to the extent that they are at least in part shaped by biological pre-dispositions?

> cultivate an androgynous appearance, and most of... Wester society... will literally stop caring about your gender

First, why would I need or want to "cultivate" an androgynous appearance? I'm not necessarily that handsome, but I am very distinguishably masculine. Why would I need or want to obscure natural characteristics? You are also greatly over-estimating the number of people, even in "cosmopolitan" parts of society, which would ignore gender. The population of transsexuals, homosexuals, etc. is still very small in relation to the broader population, and most people have definite ideas of who they are romantically interested in. They will not simply "stop caring".

> like france with religion

France does not allow religion on dating apps? That seems like a very silly rule, as it is an excellent predictor of shared values.

> France does not allow religion on dating apps? That seems like a very silly rule, as it is an excellent predictor of shared values.

I was talking about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_law_on_secularity_and_c... (though I didn't realize until looking it up just now that it was only "in schools"; I was under the impression that it was in all public spaces.)

Nature gender discriminates, there’s only so much people can do to fight it without also restricting freedoms. Nature would say the top males get all the females, but that doesn’t lead to very stable, productive societies.

Bumble was founded because online dating is broken to a degree. Of course they're going to go to extreme measures to attempt to solve it.

Context matters. People concerned about gender discrimination aren't usually as concerned about distinctions drawn between genders when the context is ballroom dancing or weddings. They're almost always concerned when the context is employment. Somewhere in between you've got dating and religious rules.

A good point regarding context.

Gender-equality has been coming into religion (i.e. women bishops in the Church of England) and dating (i.e. splitting checks). Given the way things are trending, it feels like this will continue to the point that it will impact things such as ballroom dancing and weddings.

I love Bumble's concept because it attempts to complete what feminism espouses. Aren't we all about empowering women, and how we can all be capable in the jobs we do, and the lives we lead? It's a great thing and I believe in it.

But... Women collectively stopped short of picking up an equal responsibility for initiating romantic or casual interest. As a guy, you are absolutely expected to make the first moves. That doesn't sound very fair to me.

(Don't say it's because women aren't as interested as men. We're all pretty horny on average, and we all want to make connections. Equality, remember?)

I agree with people being empowered regardless of gender.

However...imagine an app where only men could contact women. I feel like certain groups would be outraged....what do you think?

A big difference is that that app would double down on a specific gender-based inequality in dating, whereas an app that turns it around, subverts that traditional gender-based inequality. That is less sexist, and might indeed be more effective because of it. It forces women to take a more active role in dating when in traditional society, they're often expected to take a passive role.

So it doesn't confirm the sexism, it addresses and counters it.

If at some point in the future, it becomes expected that men take a passive role while women always take initiative, then your imagined app would be better because it would subvert that sexist expectation. It's all about context.

Ideally of course we should end up somewhere in the middle, where men and women are equal partners in the dating arena.

Nobody would be outraged because the app would fail and nobody would be using or talking about it. We’re only talking about Bumble because their approach works in some sense.

Are you trying to say that there's a responsibility for women to hit on you in order for feminism to not "stop short"?

Nobody owes me anything; but (single, lonely, would-really-like-a-partner) women might have a responsibility to strike up a conversation with somebody, somewhere, some of the time. Like a “good deed for the day” sort of thing, but a “fearless attempt to satisfy one’s own desires of-the-day” sort of thing. (Sort of in the mould of Rejection Therapy?)

Though I would say, since a lot of the reason women don’t seem to hit on men comes down to inculcated social anxiety from being raised to view strangers as unpredictable scary people who can only mean harm (a view which sticks around even in adulthood, long after it’s “helpful”; a view that boys seem to get along just fine never being burdened with), maybe the real responsibility here is on parents to... not do that. If that’s the case, I don’t know what to suggest for the generations of women that exist right now and have already been screwed up by being raised this way. (What do you do for the adults who were victims of foot-binding as children? Their feet just are that way now. And these women’s brains just are this way now, too.)

there's a phrase I use to remind myself of reality when I go down these thought paths:

>Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.

Remind yourself the demographics who overwhelmingly commit violent crimes, especially domestic abuse, when considering relationship dynamics. Eliminating violent domestic abuse by men would help bring equity this situation.

Simple counterarguments: gay and lesbian culture.

If fear of romantic socializing were something correctly calibrated by knowledge of violent tendencies of your potential partners, then gay men would be just as afraid of asking other men out as women are—because, of course, there's the same probability of a male stranger to turn out to be a homicidal maniac, whether you're a man or a woman asking out that male stranger.

But gay men are not afraid of approaching other men—in fact, they approach one-another quite successfully, usually very quickly after first deciding they're attracted to someone. And gay men aren't all suddenly dying in ditches from all the homicidal maniacs they run into.

Meanwhile, lesbian women are just as socially-anxious about approaching other women, as straight women are about approaching men. One of the "universal experiences" of lesbian culture is feeling mutual attraction with someone, but neither of you working up the nerve to ask the other out, sometimes for years.

Seems less like this is any rational reaction to any properties of the romantic target, and more just a property of the subject.

I see you're making a lot of sweeping generalizations about groups of people. Could you provide any evidence?

Given how most men just swipe right 100% of the time to find the women who swiped right on them, I’m surprised there isn’t a dating app that has just admitted to this and made the matching unilateral: men would be assumed to be okay with matching any woman, whereas women would have to swipe right on a dude to “match.” Then either party could contact. It’s sort of like Bumble’s attitude, just moved one step forward in the process.

> "men would be assumed to be okay with matching any woman"

That assumption might be correct for some men, but certainly not for all, and I would expect not even for most.

In any case, requiring men to swipe right first doesn't hurt the process in any way. And requiring both sides to agree to contact makes a lot of sense.

No, not for all; but it’s an assumption, it doesn’t have to be true. Bumble itself assumes that women will ever bother to make the first move, even though most women won’t. That assumption just means that Bumble draws in an audience of the people who fit that assumption, and pushes away the people who don’t. It’s serving a niche more particular than “everybody.” If you’re a woman with social anxiety who just wishes someone would help you get over your mental block around striking up a conversation? Bumble might not be for you.

(But, to be clear, this assumption isn’t that men are okay with dating any woman interested in them; allowing-to-message doesn’t imply interest. The real assumption here is that, while the average woman sees a spammed message of interest as an annoying bit of desperation, the average man will see that same message as an esteem-boost (“hey, someone actually contacted me on this website!”) even if they are just as unlikely to engage with it. In other words, the assumption is that men are more okay with receiving spam from women, than women are okay with receiving spam from men; and so that a site that favours men receiving spam from women will have less churn than a website that favours women receiving spam.)

> requiring men to swipe right first doesn’t hurt the process in any way

I see you’ve never actually tried to enact a “swipe right 100% of the time” policy: it’s tiring, and also, apps have daily limits on how many likes you can give, precisely because this forces this rote “engagement” with the app to turn into a daily return to the app to continue swiping.

There are actually other apps, built to directly submit batched “like” API calls to these app’s backends, in order to avoid doing what is basically “work” every day (just in order to allow people who have already expressed interest in you to send an initial message to you!) And these services do everything they can to kill these auto-like apps, because they want to make men go through this pointless work, because it “fosters engagement” (i.e. makes their DAUs look better, and increases the chances someone will get fed up with running out of likes—because it turned out nobody in this batch had already seen+swiped right on them—and so pay for Gold to be able to continue swiping right.)

I guess, if you’re speaking in a game-theoretic sense, then yes, the same equilibrium state is achieved either way, because men are willing to go through a lot of pointless “work” to meet women. (You could probably build a Tinder-like app where men have to solve a CAPTCHA every time they swipe right, and use this to power a botnet.) But in an economic sense, you’re introducing a lot of inefficiency; these men could be doing other stuff with their time. (And women would prefer they do; what’s less interesting than a guy who spends all his time trying to hook up?)

> Requiring both sides to agree to contact makes a lot of sense.

No, allowing either side a choice to first have to verify the other side before they can make contact, makes a lot of sense. Requiring it is just a dark pattern. Even Facebook has the option to allow others to “reach out to you” with a message when you haven’t added them yet. It’s an option; you can disable it; but it’s on by default, and not that many people disable it.

Isn’t it weird that the current popular model for online dating is more paternalistic (“you can’t have a default-allow policy even if you want it”) than our current model for regular social networking?

> "It’s serving a niche more particular than “everybody.”"

That may be a good thing. Different people prefer different ways of dating, so expecting one way to suit everybody may be unreasonable.

> "The real assumption here is that, while the average woman sees a spammed message of interest as an annoying bit of desperation, the average man will see that same message as an esteem-boost (“hey, someone actually contacted me on this website!”) even if they are just as unlikely to engage with it. In other words, the assumption is that men are more okay with receiving spam from women, than women are okay with receiving spam from men; and so that a site that favours men receiving spam from women will have less churn than a website that favours women receiving spam."

I would expect that's strongly influenced by how new that spam is to you. For plenty of women, the first time a man expresses interest may also be a self-esteem boost. It's just that after 50 times, it gets a bit tired. A system that turns this around so men get all the spam may be interesting and new to men, but I would expect that when they get that kind of spam as much as women do on other systems, many men may also get tired of it eventually.

> "No, allowing either side a choice to first have to verify the other side before they can make contact, makes a lot of sense."

I agree that making this configurable probably makes more sense than enforcing one specific type of behaviour. It's certainly something I'd generally prefer.

On the other hand, men who just want to contact everybody who expresses an interest in them and only start considering whether they are actually interested in the other party after that contact has been established, may still end up wasting a lot of people's time. So in that sense I can still understand if a site doesn't allow it. Which dating site you choose to use will always be a user option.

That involves women doing more work.

The reason why women tolerate the current system is that it is less work. You just apply a filter to the incoming requests.

It's much easier than having to produce requests.

That's why women's profiles say "don't just say 'hey'" and they get to respond with...

Hey.

I met a lot of great women on Bumble. I really appreciated having them do the hard work of speaking first.

Yeah, I got a few "hey"s, which just put the ball back in my court, and I'd decide whether I wanted to put for the effort of opening the conversation. It's actually a really good skill for showing that you're interested in her, by picking up on some detail of her profile. It shows that you're perceptive and have some common interest. And conversely, if she can't do better than "hey", that tells me something about her.

I like it better than the assumption that I was required to do it, as on most other dating sites/apps. That assumption is sexist, though less annoying than being bombarded with dick pics and "DTF?" openers as so many women are. Dating sites are hard for them, too.

One simple technique a dating website could use to “disrupt” this market, without doing the only-women-can-contact thing, would be just to disallow men (or anyone) from sending messages with the same content as any message that person has sent previously.

How long until we get messages like:

> Hey!

> djdjrntbdjc

So now I have to find new and unique ways to explain what I do for a living or where I live?

> So where are you from?

> Austin, Texa^H^H^H^H^H^H^H

> Uh... the capital of Texarcana

First messages, not messages generally. I.e., you could never repeat a pick-up line, and therefore you probably wouldn't be able to use "pick-up lines" at all.

The point is to require people to put some effort in their first message and make it personal to the person they're messaging, so they won't simply spam every person they can find with identical pick-up lines.

I like the idea.

It sounds like a good idea, but on average women are the absolute worst at first messages.

A site where women message first means their first message is a limp cold “Hey”, after which you are expected to craft some sort of interesting and thoughtful message for them to grace you with their response, otherwise they’ll just move on to one of the other hundred men available.

Online dating cannot work without the asymmetry in the dating game being resolved.

I don't know about the ratios (or how a user looking through could really tell what the true ratio is) but as far as none of them having a decent matching algorithm... I'm a big fan of OkCupid here... (I know they were aquired by match but they still operate independently AFAIK) I interviewed for them 12-13 years ago but never worked there, but they were Harvard math guys who founded SparkNotes and "opensouced" an early version of their basic matching algorithm in 2004 or 2005 on their blog, I'll see if I can find and post here or perhaps someone else will share bit the gist was only using the intersection of questions you both answered, and both of you don't just answer the question but also give how much you care about the answer to this question and "acceptable" answers from your match (if you care at all, if not answers don't matter) and they use those to customize weight of each question in matching... I don't know if it has any special romantic matching qualities but it's WAY better than anything else I've tried for a metric of people worth meeting and who you'll sometimes have INCREDIBLE amount in common with, when match percentage is over 90 or 95%... I've dated two 96+% matches for over a year FWIW.

EDIT: couldn't find original blog post but this article seems to have some of the same math/details in less entertaining form https://blogs.ams.org/mathgradblog/2016/06/08/okcupid-math-o...

> couldn't find original blog post

When match.com bought them a number of posts about the inner workings, along with any posts that were critical of paid dating sites, were quickly taken down, and they took some effort to chase down exact copies hosted elsewhere and demand they be taken down too.

It's worth pointing out that the Match buyout made the entire experience significantly worse. All of a sudden there was a lot of swiping ala-tinder and suddenly you can't actually see messages that've been sent unless you both match with each other...

OKC used to actually be a nice place to meet people (I'm still in contact with a number of friends I met on there) but it's turned into a cesspit. Off topic, but if anyone can suggest a non-awful replacement I'd be all ears. Ideally one where I can talk to people rather than having to make a yes/no decision based entirely on 3 photos.

The co-founder also wrote a book about statistics behind dating sites, as well as a variety of other topics, called “Dataclysm”. I read it a couple years ago and I definitely recommend it if you’re interested in this kind of stuff. https://www.amazon.com/Dataclysm-Identity-What-Online-Offlin...

* I don't think this can be 'disrupted' either *

Tinder disrupted the online dating scene by introducing the feature that you can only write someone after you've liked their profile, AND they've liked yours.

That makes a huge difference, and solves the spam problem.

That may have solved the problem initially, but not forever.

I got back on Tinder about 6 months ago and bought a premium account after they kept waving the number of potential matches I had, only to discover that the vast majority of them (roughly 18 in 20) were 2,000+ miles away from me and looked like spam.

It also made it that most guys never get noticed, because women have thousands of likes to go through.

From what I understand, it didn't entirely solve the problem since the behavior of men has evolved. Some of my friends are swiping right on everything to get matches and seeing what sticks.

Men are setting up emulator rigs to swipe right in parallel.

The app should create a fake account listed as a woman, but with a picture of a man and the text: Fake Account

Ban anyone who swipes right on it.

Or limit the amount of right swipes allowed per day.

Possible, but you'll end up in the same arms race you get with cheaters and on-line games. I.e. I could probably sniff the requests and responses coming off a phone and throw together a python script which would automatically "swipe right". They add a fake account, so I now parse for "Fake Account". It seems as though the model of having women initiate conversation makes more sense anyway, from what else I've read in this thread.

Why go through all that trouble when you would get the exact same effect from banning people who swipe right on everyone

The reality is that they don't care at all. It's not in any way aligned with their incentives.

It's been a while since I've used Tinder, but they were rate-limiting swipes - unless you paid up for premium features.

Tinder most definitely has not solved the spam problem. I think it's gotten even worse over the past couple years.

Photos with spammy gmail addresses and URLs written in them has been on the rise recently too.

Google should do dating based on people's every day searches...

"Hey, we know you're both single, or at least looking for other partners. You're literally the only two people on earth that share this fascination, everyone else thinks it's weird and creepy. You should chat. Based on the personality profiles we've created for you both based on your search history, we think you'd make an amazing couple."

That could totally disrupt dating, it would be organic in a way that could actually work for relationship longevity and it would be based on things people are actually interested in rather than what they think they should present as being interested in to signal mates. It has the potential to be far more real than dating sites.

Well, why would I want a partner with the same interests? To share one or two, great. But I can learn much more from a person that is very different compared to me.

This is why I think this clustering based on interests was always bullshit on dating sites. And this is why people use Tinder now.

I think Google is probably able to determine based on personality profiles created from our searches who we're most likely to mesh well with... whether that's based on interest or personality profile, who knows. It would be an interesting experiment.

Google can't even figure out that when I search for something in maps I probably want locations that are close to me and not across the country

The essential problem with dating websites is this:

- Women and men join.

- Women are immediately dogpiled by creeps, catfished, dick-picked, called names and given death threats for saying no.

- Women turn right the fuck around and leave.

- 80% ratio if you're lucky (and 100% plus bots, employees, and ghost accounts if you aren't).

It might also be an age thing, younger women have no problem meeting people IRL. When I used a couple of these sites, including Match, when I was in my late 40's and I had no problem setting up multiple coffee dates. Nothing came of it and I met my wife at the running club.

I'm actually working on a new type of dating app that addresses this conflict of interest.

Most dating apps want you to be addicted (single and swiping) to their screens so that they can keep earning billions of dollars from subscriptions, power-ups, and ads. Even if you aren't paying, they want you addicted to their platform for their paying members. There is a serious conflict of interest.

We are different. We understand users want to find someone, so they get on with their lives-- to have amazing life experiences with someone they like. We give our users exactly that and our main revenue stream is tied to that. Just like Uber and Lyft sell rides because customers want rides-- we sell adventure dates because our users want breathtaking dating experiences.

We also hate screen addiction. We want to be in the background, so people can focus on living in the moment. And every day, we'll sprinkle their lives with like-minded, kind people and travel opportunities.

Would love your feedback on it. Here's more info I wrote about our business model:

https://blog.fairytrail.app/2019/09/reinventing-online-datin...

Also I am happy to share my user data with the community too.

The only evidence I've seen to counter this (very common) critique is the disturbing practice of 'chadfishing'. If you make a profile and put a picture of a hot guy, you will be flooded with female interest.

Make a profile with a really hot guy pic and see what happens. You'll find there are way more women on those sites than you thought. Or better yet, don't do that, but look into the people who have. They tend to be crazy people (who invented 'chadfishing'), but their results are fascinating.

> Most men just give up after a while and start to spam generic pickup lines to just about every profile Exactly! I mean it doesn't make any sense not to. I'd bet most of the men that do this have spent a very long time making long thoughtful messages only to get absolutely nothing back. Every single time. And honestly getting something back like "Next time If you want to talk to a woman then say more than just 'hey'" once in awhile is far better than feel like you're trying to talk to people that don't actually exist.

> Due to the imbalance and fake accounts, as a male you rarely get response on messages.

That may have an effect, but it is also that women tend to go for the "top" guys while men in general have an more even spread on what they like. This is a more likely scenario.

If you are male and not an alpha male that is very good looking and / or successful, it is unlikely that you will have a good experience on dating apps.

This has been found again and again:

OkCupid (which later deleted the post because the truth is controversial, and they are progressive): http://archive.is/pLAWq

Tinder Study: https://i.redd.it/huqtbknjvoc31.png

(There are many more, just search for it)

I think the main differentiator is whether you pay for the dating site or not... These sites are all geared towards generating money from accounts. When you're operating on the free side, profiles are fake and you get limited interactions with people (and bots) just enough to keep you engaged. When you pay, it's still not great in terms of matchmaking and functionality, and most of the features now are meant to up-sell you, or to keep you paying monthly. Actually connecting people has really become the last concern of most sites.

I've liked Bumble's solution, make it so only woman can start a conversation if matched with someone.

And typically they don't or just write "hi" and wait for the men to answer.

The other thing some will do is just not say anything, and wait for you to use your one daily "extend", to show her you're really interested in her and not just right-swiping everyone.

or they won't write to anyone, and they're merely collecting matches for self validation.

Bumble is also (or was) loaded with fake profiles too. I had a friend see my own profile on there, with a city that I wasn't in (but had been) and there's no indication that I wasn't an active user - I had deleted the Bumble app 6 months before. I did finally go and delete the whole account after their anti-gun stance.

That's pretty sad. I used OkCupid pretty successfully 5+ years ago in Chicago. I did not notice a spam/fraud problem at all (maybe one or two obvious spam messages here or there). It worked almost too well, to be honest. Women initiated contact with me rather than the other way around, and I had enough flow in that direction that I only initiated contact once. I ended up marrying a woman I met on OKCupid. I assume that as online dating has grown in popularity, the spam and fraud problems have increased. It probably also depends on location, age, and a bunch of other factors.

For-profit dating sites also share a common problem: they need to extract revenue out of you, but the more successful they are at being dating sites, the sooner they lose you as a customer.

All the problems we discuss are pretty much related to this point: They probably have good matching algorithms, but they only showed you actual good matches you'd be gone from the site (taking the other person with you). So they have an incentive to show you 99% noise and 1% signal, and some go to the length of more or less explicitly paywalling the good 1%.

That's one dynamic. But there's also the opposite incentive of word of mouth from positive experiences.

When I hear of real people paying money on a dating site and finding what they want, that's a powerful motivator.

So we can only hypothesize whether a few desperate users do cough out more cash than a larger number of one-time subscribers would, but the later strategy is certainly more sustainable over the long term.

It's a strange situation where they're literally telling you the great thing they found on that website is no longer available!

It's also a very personal decision, perhaps more like picking movies or music you'd like. I don't generally trust any of my friends' movie or music recommendations.

That's an amusing comparison, but I would compare it more to job or house rental listing sites. Of course the "item" you end up settling on is always going to be an intimately personal decision, but the benchmark would be the number of decent candidates you had the opportunity to consider, and the effort you had to expand during the search.

To some extent, isn't that true of all products? When you sell a product to solve a problem, once you make the sale, assuming it actually solves the problem, the customer won't come back.

That's why, for example, Photoshop used to cost $1000 (outrageous!) and now costs $20/month (outrageous!), and users hate it both ways. Or why electronics are less repairable than ever, and companies are optimizing for cheapness, and you can just buy a new one when it breaks. When you open the hood on your car you just see another hood, and you couldn't really work on your engine (it's a big noisy proprietary computer now) if you even could get to it, anyway.

This is simply how the economy works today. People complained yesterday about software patents being legal roadblocks to make easy things hard. Then they go back to writing proprietary APIs for closed-source web services, which are mostly just technical roadblocks to make easy things hard. Most of the work we do now is to serve the preservation of the capitalist system, not because it's actually useful work.

> I don't think this can be 'disrupted' either

I know one French dating website, AdopteUnMec, where it's free for women and paying for men, the owner are claiming the user split is 50-50 between men and women. But I've never used it, so I don't know how well it works.

I think it also depends on what your looking for.

At my small office of 10 people, where's 2 people that found matches on e-harmony, resulting in marriage.

i'm not a woman, but i've seen women getting spammed with dick pics leading many to stay away completely from these sites

I think the users on eHarmony are mostly women.

What about the ones on those pop-ups that keep telling me about horny women in my area?

I tried eHarmony for a little while. I finally gave it up because 1) it wasn't free and 2) most of the women were religious, so I got almost no dates on there. I've gotten most of my dates in the last year from CMB; that one doesn't attract as many religious people for some reason.

> I'd say it's about 80% male.

It's more like most women will go for 20% of the men. If you're part of the 80% you'll feel alone. As an experiment just make a fake profile with some model's picture to discover how many women are around.

This is correct. It’s become a winner takes all situation.

It probably was that way since the dawn of humanity. In 100 BC it was probably worse, if anything

Create a fake profile to prove these are not all fake profiles?

In any case, any site where the profile focuses primarily on your photo is probably going to see this going both ways: men going for the hottest women and women going for the hottest men.

If you focus more on people's interests, I'd expect you're going to see a very different pattern.

The only major remaining website that tries to match people based on interests is OKCupid. And even it is changing every few months. Unfortunately, the success of Tinder and move to mobile phones first ruined most of the dating websites, which try to emulate its success. Because people mostly use phone nowadays for dating websites, long profiles are mostly gone, sending long letters is gone, many conversations are single sentence now. Also, instead of matching based on shared interests/values, most of the matching is based on "swipe left/right on photo".

I don't get why Match.com, OkCupid should converge to a Tinder-like working model if they share ownership. I guess that there are different niches of people for those different websites/apps, no?

Perhaps so that later on they can transition all OKC users onto Tinder and maintain only one product?

Use profiles from one site as basis for fake profiles on another site, and when someone responds to those profiles, mail the user to pressure them to also join the other site.

Highly doubt that's their goal. Maintaining multiple dating sites probably just increases their reach and revenue...

Both are true. Most people on dating sites are men, and the women that are there heavily skew towards a small portion of men.

there was an interesting data-analysis blog-post about this, I think i found it on HN but right now I can't find it. It presents some evidence that your statement is very true.

edit: here it is https://web.archive.org/web/20170330131859/https://theblog.o...

Here is another one I have seen floating around, but I am not sure the veracity of its analysis.

https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-g...

Is this more than just speculation? According to the linked occupid data (https://web.archive.org/web/20170330131859/https://theblog.o...) while women underrate attractiveness of men, the distribution of messages fllows the attractiveness curve: Men receive about the same amount of messages independent of attractiveness (https://web.archive.org/web/20170331084200im_/https://cdn-im...). Especially compared to the behaviour of men, which tend to value attractiveness much more.

One hypothesis is that it depends on the service you use. E.g., Tinder vs Okupid, where Tinder reinforces decision based on looks while Okupid encourages much more detailed profiles.

The study from OkCupid that I saw a long time ago showed that the top 78% of women were only interested in the top 22% of men (where top denotes a score that rates how often others are interested in you, the amount of messages you receive etc).

The reverse then meant that the bottom 78% of men had to compete for the attention of the bottom 22% of women. They retracted that study after a while, but other dating sites roughly get the same percentages eventually.

If it is 80% male, that would mean that the women generally simply matched available males and then were done with it all.

There is no way to achieve monogamous one-to-one pairing for everyone in place that is 80% male. Of course only minority of men succeeds. And while here it is not exactly 1-to-1, it is not actually all that much far off.

It’s interesting to see the Pareto Principle working here as well.

On tinder the issue isn’t that women only go for the top 20%, the issue is that the elo algorithm is so aggressive and the gender ratio is so skewed that women won’t even see your profile if it’s in the bottom 80%

Fractional Reserve Speed Dating http://captaincapitalism.blogspot.com/2013/04/fractional-res...

OKCupid doesn't have fake profiles, right?

I met my previous girlfriend on OkC, with whom I was for 3 years, and the current one, 1 year and counting, hopefully a lot of counting.

There are definitely fewer people than e.g. Tinder, but they tend to be a lot more real vs spammers / scammers / engineered profiles designed to keep you in.

Most Tinder matches were bots, most OkC matches were actual people. Of course this is with a sample size of 1, in Germany. Your mileage may vary.

"...with whom I was..."

Is that grammatically correct? It appears to be, but wow does it ring strangely in my ear.

There is a delightful sketch that might help you see things differently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTv5ckMe_2M

English is not my first language, but yes, to my knowledge that is grammatically correct.

Maybe it is a bit ambiguous, although from the context it should be reasonably clear that I was with my (now-ex) girlfriend for that period of time, and not with OkC itself :)

Most English speakers would say, "a woman who I was with for 3 years." In this case "with" is understood to mean in a romantic relationship.

I don't think what you said is technically correct. "With whom I was" calls for something (a verb or phrase) to be tacked onto the end, but it would still be awkward. For example, "with whom I was dating for three years."

> Most English speakers would say, "a woman who I was with for 3 years."

Actually, I'm pretty certain you're supposed to use "whom" there, not "who".

From another perspective: whom is one of the few relics of the entirely dropped dative case in English (via the also disappearing objective or oblique case which mostly only remains in English personal pronouns I versus me). It's generally relegated only to formal writing, and some (including the Oxford English Dictionary since the 1980s) consider "whom" to be entirely deceased, ancient, and no longer an active English word.

It depends on whether you are using who/whom as the subject or object. Who = subject, whom = object.

I'd say OKcupid is better than most (the higher barrier to entry i.e. having to answer questions) helps to a degree but there's still plenty of fake / scammer accounts.

But you don't even have to answer those

OKCupid has many fake profiles. Some are real people, just using fake pictures. Some are obvious fakes with copy-paste description that you'd see on hundreds of profiles and professional photoshoot photos that have hundreds of matches with google image search. There is a more advanced fake profile method though. It involves professional scammers writing people lengthy, personalized messages for days or even weeks, and then luring them into payment, either through some different "russian brides" website, or telling some sob story about missing money for rent and asking for help.

I think tiglionabbit was being sarcastic ;)

They're owned by Match, so I wouldn't bet on it.

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