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You forgot dating.

Since it has moved online, my younger male friends have spent quite a lot of money on professional photographers(not in studios, but outdoors) to get that perfect candid shot at dusk in their new attire, hoping for an edge in the overcrowded dating market.

Thanks to tinder and Instagram, dating is now a continuous arms race for young males and I assume it comes with it's own set of potential mental illnesses.

In my circle of friends I’m the de facto photographer and usually use my iPhone and while we all have the same technology the majority of my friends end up using the pictures i take of them. I think even with a flattened playing field technologically and near endless storage the ability to edit and see the best side of someone is still a valuable skill

Can confirm as my startup addresses this market [https://www.photofeeler.com].

The top dating apps are designed such that photos are literally all that matter. What's worse is all of the popular cultural ideas we have about photos are wrong.

Photos don't just show people accurately -- in fact, you need some level of skill just to look as attractive as you do in real life. So no, that unsmiling selfie you took in your basement isn't "just what you look like" or "authentic."

Not to mention, people think and do. Images are still. This creates a situation where humanity can be easily lost. And where the need to brand yourself and put a lot of effort into showing hobbies etc. is paramount.

It's sad to see so many young guys tie their identities to the good or bad performance of their profiles when it's not really them being judged but the pictures they chose.

I really love the idea of photofeeler, and I want it to work.

Just to share my 2c: I can't get over how strange the pricing structure for photofeeler is. I've come to the site a few times with my credit card ready, willing to drop a few dollars to get results.... but the abstraction of your pricing model is just confusing enough that I've dropped off the funnel each time.

Ok, so I need credits or karma to run a test. So I answer a few photos, get my karma to medium, and leave the test over night. The results are often inconclusive - my photos are consistently rating as "meh->ok" across the board. Ok, that's fine, I'll try another. Upload another, get more karma, leave that over night. Ok, this photo has +.8 attractiveness, but -.6 smart. Ok, not sure what to do with that information, but it's intriguing. The results are close enough, that I'm curious what the margin of error is if each is getting ~10 votes.

Ok, well maybe this is just the downside of the freemium model. Let's take a look and see what I can buy. 40 credits for $10. Ok, so 1 credit is .25c. Cool. What's a credit get me. A CREDIT GETS ME ONE VOTE! Ok, hold on, that can't be right.

Let's think about this backwards. How many credits do I need? So I probly want 15-20 votes on any one photo to get enough data to be conclusive about the results. Sure. And I'll want to run at least 3 photos. So, I'm looking at $15 per test to know which of 3 photos is preferred.... but realistically if I want to get rid of my own biases, I'd be testing 5-10 photos... Hmmmmm.

At this point I do some work to get some free karma (note: if there were hotkeys for voting it would make a WORLD of difference).... leave the test over night. Look at it the next day, say "meh, results are inconclusive based on sample size" and forget about the site for 8 months.

Perhaps there's an opportunity for a startup to automate and simplify this.

Photofeeler will go that way: https://blog.photofeeler.com/photofeeler-d3/

You probably have already thought about this—and it is a bit of a derail—but it seems to me that a "veriface" service that provides attestations, or some combination of verifications, as to the accuracy with which a photo represents someone could be useful.

"Yeah, that's him… 10 years ago."

>Ok, this photo has +.8 attractiveness, but -.6 smart. Ok, not sure what to do with that information

Use that photo for dating, but not for potential employers, unless you're searching for a modeling job - just my guess.

You can choose different categories (work, casual, dating) but all of them have 3 characteristic which you're voting for.

If I remember these 2 are part of dating

Thanks, will pass on. I think 1 vote = 1 credit used to be clearer.

Thanks for sharing. This looks interesting, and I might end up using it in the future. (Right now I'm holing up due to the pandemic, and not venturing out; later, I plan to get on the various online dating apps that are out there.)

Some feedback:

1. When I click "Get Started", I'm presented with bright blue "Sign up with Facebook" and "Sign up with LinkedIn" buttons, and a small faint "Sign up with email" which I can barely read. Why is this?

I feel like Facebook is selling everything I do to the Russians. Or... something. :) In any case I don't trust social login, and by extension I tend not to trust websites which push me to social login.

2. Out of curiosity I created an account, didn't upload any photos, but started rating other people. Immediately afterwards, I'd love to see how others rated the same photos. I'd learn something interesting about how people present themselves.

3. After rating 20 or so photos I got accused of "poor vote quality", with "Our AI has detected randomness or patterns in your votes." Ummm... huh? By definition, any data will always either be random or have patterns. Anyway, I got chided for doing something-or-other wrong, with a request to vote better (how?).

I recognize there's a problem here -- you don't want people to just give everyone top ratings on everything, because they just want to increase their own credits. Nevertheless, at this point I got discouraged and stopped.

Looks like a cool idea! Good luck with it.

Not all poor quality voting is conscious/malicious. An individual with alexithymia, for example, might give unuseful feedback despite their best effort.

What, then, do you consider "poor" or "unuseful"?

Proper photography is important, and a sense of personality is needed to start a conversation.

There are differences in the way men and women are expected to behave on Tinder and elsewhere, but a critical step is getting past "your photo is worth a swipe" to having something to say to each other. Many women will delete you if you have nothing better to open with than "hi". You are expected to actually look at the photos (and read the text) so that they feel you are actually interested in them.

They want to know something about you, too. Action shots, backgrounds, even just your smile says a lot. Taking the time and thought to get a good photo will attract more interest than just a random selfie. But it's more than just being the best approximation to ideal maleness. It's a sense that you are a person worth hanging out with.

If you can teach this to men, awesome. I would say that I found some of the portraits on your front page a little stiff. One had a purely black background, and while an attractive photo in itself it was a blank about personality.

In practice, I think what matters a lot though especially for guys is ones ethnicity, especially for Asian men. I think that rarely gets mentioned in these discussions.

This Asian male model's story of online dating is pretty much my experience as well as the experience of my other Asian male friends, except while he's obviously very physically attractive, I'm not. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAo_mZMIUgg

Having a nicer headshot didn't change any of that, including for some of my male Asian friends who are also models and thus, have actually very well polished photographs.

I remember saying that to my white male friend and he just couldn't understand why I wasn't getting as many hits per week as we was.

I found this video to be fairly demeaning towards women. I got the sense of entitlement that he deserves to sleep with a certain number of women. He should be less set on the numbers and more focused on the women that do respond.

I haven't online dated in 10 years but I had more success when I focused more on quality than quantity.

Thanks for saving me time watching the video.

The dating section starts at 1:52. He says he had days of swiping with no matches, whereas his white friends had matches.

The comment you’re replying to has completely misrepresented the video. You can’t focus on “quality” if you have no matches.

The dating comment was a ten second section of the video. Ironically, the conclusion of the story is the man realizes online dating doesn’t work for him and he focussed on quality dating in real life.

Fair enough.

Thinking further, "using a dating platform meaningfully"(often paying) you would expect some level of service from that platform.

Assumptions often are: - dating service members represent all of society, IE "Everyone is doing it!"

- someone out there is for me, I just have to find them"

- paying this business will result in them helping me. People get dates on there all the time!

And so paying for a service resulting in zero dates is a pretty poor result.

Hence it is less, "women should want him" IE relationship between him and women. And more, "I am paying for a service that doesn't work!" which is about the relationship between him and dating platform.

Ultimately I think the original assumptions are wrong, likely skewed because of dating platform marketing. Who would've thought marketing causes problems in society!

As much as I appreciate your point, I've heard that dating is very much a numbers game for men, and that's not out of a misguided focus on quantity over quality. In online dating, it's extremely common to be in a situation where the other party, if they respond at all, seems unable to answer with anything but one-word responses, and it's diifficult or impossible to have a conversation like that. A focus on quantity is actually an optimisation, becuase to have a chance at quality you need quantity.

Women suffer precisely the opposite problem when dating online: a barrage of first messages, most of them low quality, from just about every man who has seen their profile. Therefore, the pressure on men to get anticipate and navigate this situation is even greater - either by sending a well thought out and canned message to multiple women (to beat the other men), or to spend a longer time customizing a message to each woman. The second is typically a losing strategy when the response rate is so low.

There are some good writeups using results from subreddits for dating on Reddit which iterate on this point. It's worth noting that Tinder is great for validation so long as you're getting a lot of messages. In fact, it's so good, I've heard of people simply swiping through matches because they enjoy the idea that so many people are into them. It's the dating version of the 'refresh your HN profile to see if you have more upvotes' game.

I'd like to end on another, related point. Often, people claim that men get so few matches and/or responses because they have a bad time taking photos of themselves, and tend not to bother nearly as much as women tend to. From what I can gather, this is far from the truth; most women's profiles and photos have just as bad craftsmanship as men's do.

I suspect this is one of the biggest changes in the dating world within the past 10 years.

I am an outside too. I have a disability. For a long time, I felt like you describe, like the world is discriminating against me when it comes to dating (and a lot of other things). Regarding dating I am pretty sure I was wrong. It is not called discrimation, rather, it is called personal preference. You can't force other people to choose you by claiming they are discriminating against you. That train of thought simply doesn't work.

Once everyone starts jumping the bandwagon, it's time to go out and do it the good old day by simply talking to people in various places. I think the success rate would be much higher considering nobody is really doing this anymore:)

>The photo studio isn't going anywhere

Well, tons of them have just closed down and many more will. So they're definitely going somewhere -- to bankrupty.

The fact that a handful will still survive is not the same as "not going anywhere". We still have vinyl too, but it's 1/10th of what units it used to move...

Counterpoint to your counterpoint: the prevalence of inexpensive off-camera light kits means it's much easier than it used to be to get the kind of lighting you want, where you want it (i.e. somewhere less sterile than a studio). None of the photographers I know have studios, but they all have great strobe kits and are quite skilled at creating the kind of light you're talking about outdoors or in some other interesting location.

> and get an authentic

Man, the "silicon valley" writers are crushing it today!

I realize you can read irony into what I wrote. ;)

But it's actually true. In any social situation, we have layers of emotional defenses that we build up, and they're especially brought out in a portrait session. Am I attractive enough? Is my smile genuine enough? Am I confident enough? Am I trying too hard? Not enough? Am I wasting my money? Is this worth it? Should I just leave now and cut my losses? This makes us tense and pretty much as far away from our authentic emotional self as we can be -- and it shows on our face, clear as day.

The job of the headshot photographer is to undo all those layers so they can capture your expression when you feel totally at ease, believing in yourself, without all those worries and tensions layered on top. They're almost amateur psychologists or acting coaches in this way.

So I get why it seems ironic, but being emotionally authentic in an extremely artificial situation isn't a natural thing. It takes a lot of work. But it's still authentic -- it's not creating something fake, but rather working to bring out what's most real about you.

(At least, this is what the good headshot photographers do, which is why they make $$$. Bad/cheap photographers will just tell you to smile, get a forced uneasy expression from you, take a bunch of shots, ask you to choose one, and call it a day.)

It's the same way speaking on stage. There is absolutely nothing natural about getting up on a stage with hundreds or thousands of your "closest friends" looking on. And, yes, good speakers are acting at some level. But many/most of them are acting to get back some of the authentic interaction that would be there if there were talking to you individually over a beer.

I've seen plenty of awe-inspiring photography across many genres, but I have literally never seen a corporate headshot or a dating photo that does anything like this.

The closest not-really-corporate shots are probably the official NASA pre-launch astronaut portraits, which do indeed do a great job of humanising the astronauts.

But as soon as you see someone in a suit, you can pretty much guarantee they're going to be smiling a little too hard while trying and failing to hide that they're stiff, stressed, and guarded. Or possibly slightly dazed. Or overcompensating by trying to look in-control and dominant.

Grey, white or black studio background, corner window shot, corridor shot, water cooler shot, in-focus background, out-of-focus background - none of it seems to help.