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Comment by globular-toast | Hacker News Reader

Of course it wouldn't. Why would women suddenly find a man attractive just because some app brings up a match? The matching algorithms are not there to show you who you find attractive, they are there to filter out the 95% (for women), or 50% (for men) of people you definitely don't find attractive.

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If 95% of women reject your profile, would you get more matches if your profile was in front of 10 women or 10,000?

The trouble is it's not "95% of women reject your profile" but rather "women reject 95% of profiles" -- which is something else entirely.

Generally it’s not 95% of women rejecting a given profile, but all women (or near enough to make no difference) rejecting mostly the same 95% of profiles and not rejecting the rest.

I.e. boosting visibility probably brings proportionate benefits to the most desirable men, but little additional benefit to the ugly/short/older guy.

Source? With 51.5% of American men presently married I have a hard time believing 95% of men are consistently rejected by every woman!

It’s 95% of the men on dating apps, not 95% of all men. The men who get married presumably delete their profile. It’s not hard to see that all of the gold had already been panned out and there’s nothing left but mud (in the eyes of the women on those dating apps).

That sounds like how hiring managers describe the tech job market.

Sellers' markets all have this dynamic.

Edit: wtf @ stripping emoji HN

It's probably a misremembering of actual findings:

At least on OKCupid, women rate 80% of men as below-average attractiveness, while men rate women at right about 50% as below-average and 50% as above-average [0].

OKCupid has since deleted the post with their findings [1], but references to it still exist all over, as does an archived copy [2].

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2009/11/18/okcupid-inbox-attractive/

[1] https://theblog.okcupid.com/your-looks-and-your-inbox-8715c0...

[2] http://web.archive.org/web/20100324074028/http://blog.okcupi...

It sucks that they deleted it. It's so hard to know the truth in this area because the truth offends people.

Their blog was a goldmine but decommissioned when they were bought by match.com

Maybe men just answer the question more literal and find the real average (50%). Women understand the question more figuratively. Below average is what they don't like and they don't like 80% of men.

Why even ask for above/below average ratings? What people like/don'tlike is more interesting.

Maybe he most attractive men in the population aren't on dating apps.

If someone had good experiences with people the app recommended previously, then the app recommending someone can be enough to make them willing to date them.

It's basically the same mechanism that works for physical attraction, i.e. if you had good interactions with people of a certain "type" then you'll be attracted to other people of that "type".

Are those percentages based on data you got somewhere, or are they a part of the 84% of statistics that are made up on the spot?

Not sure why folks are downvoting me... perhaps giving the humorous out is rubbing folks the wrong way.

I looked at the links and didn’t see mention of those values, and I don’t know if they are commonly known, so I’m going to ask again.

Where are these numbers (95% of women and 50% of men) coming from?

The OKCupid and Tinder studies, as linked elsewhere. The OKCupid study showed women rate 80% of men as "below average". But if you assume that most women don't want an average or even just slightly above average man, it easily becomes more than 90%.

It is probably based off the OkCupid data that found that women rated 80% of men as below average attractiveness or the Tinder data which has the top 50% of women chasing 5-10% of the men.

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

https://qz.com/1051462/these-statistics-show-why-its-so-hard...

http://archive.is/BtTP2

I can't find the actual statistic the above people are repeating, but these are similar.

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