Never Pay for Online Dating (2010)
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Look at Tinder, the paid plans started out with features like changing location, unlimited likes, more superlikes etc. All of these seem fair as they don't necessarily disadvantage you if you are not paying, your rank in recommended profiles more or less remains the same.
I recently saw that Tinder introduced one more tier now where even your likes are boosted if you are in the paid plan. This would make the app kind of useless for anyone who is not paying and is not hot enough to be ranked at top.
Sidenote: I wonder why OkCupid deleted their old posts. I loved posts like these and others like Race and reply rate. If it was because of not wanting to offend someone, it is even worse that we are pushing things like these under the rug.
Popular theory is their acquisition by the same company that owns every other dating site on the planet had something to do with it.
Political correctness. Hopefully there are copies around the web, those posts were very very interesting.
Not sure if it's a bad thing either, as the common saying goes: if you're not paying then you're the product and non-paying Tinder users are there to prop up paying ones. The only down-side I'd argue is mentally hurting ignorant people with self-image but I think Tinder is doing good amount of effort explaining this.
Reasons include but are not limited to:
Inciting of violence
Threats of death
General stupitidy of idea
Legitimate criticism of authoritarian powers that be
General rudeness
1. the holocaust was a hoax
2. democrats are run by a secret cabal of satanists that use the blood of children to make immortality drugs
3. illuminati exist and are alien lizard people
4. Donald trump is smart and did a great job with the coronavirus
>use the blood of children to make immortality drugs
has actually been the topic of notable research. Though the studies I've read were with regard to growth factors and proteins in youth blood plasma. Democrat links I leave on the cutting room floor. Vanna White is the only potential candidate I have currently for an immortal.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/05/science/young-blood-may-h...
Ambrosia was the big name startup around the time iirc.
The rest is mostly hogwash, I agree, but if you actually do a bit of digging, a tall tale sometimes has a nugget of truth. There is also a level of translation and realism required.
>In fact, illuminati exist and are alien lizard people
becomes much less insane if you filter it through the understanding information propagates with less resistance through lower reliability channels and extract the oh so much more likely meaning:
>There exists a small kernel of individuals with influence spanning far beyond what any normal person would experience or recognize, and their mentality or approach to dealing with things is so different as to be hard to understand from a casual observer's or outsider to their number's point of view.
1 and 4 my pedantism and integrity will in no way allow any reasonable entertaining of however.
I do not need your funding at this time, and do hope it isn't taken personally if occasion should find I do in the future, or we end up in the same startup. I just wished to point out that sometimes what sounds absolutely batshit insane is merely missing explicit context.
The old posts were critical of Match.com, who OkCupid were acquired by.
You pay for the scarest resource: attractive people.
What is attractive has been evaluated and optimized over time by Tinder.
Tinder is not your only option. Good old dating still works magic even more now since everybody seems to date via app. The tides have changed.
What Tinder in my point of view evolved, is more a chat platform, than a dating platform. Good looks and speed is everything. I find it way easier to date offline than online even though I am on the attractive tier. No answer for 4 hours? Off you go. Does not happen offline + WhatsApp.
1. Objectives. The article might be correct if your objective is marriage. If your objective is to schedule as much low-effort sex as possible, or even just juggling multiple long-term relationships, especially if you operate over a wide geographic area......expanding your search online is invaluable. Treat paid sites as just another tool in your harem management toolbox.
2. Stale profiles. This is why I really liked the $COUNTRYNAME_Cupid websites. They take more effort to put a profile together, AND they have a "last logged in" feature, so when you do a profile search "No smokers, no kids, etc..." you don't have to worry about messaging people who haven't touched the site in 9 months, and it's easy to ignore blank profiles. Also, typically women with free accounts will "poke" you or view your profile, and that webpage listing those women is where you start your screening.
For anyone who might want to re-read them, gwern archived the old OKCupid blog here: https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/okcupid/
Then you go on to say, but wait online dating isn't real life? Or is it? An increasing amount of people are meeting through online dating these days. I'd say it very accurately represents real life, granted personalities may not always be attractive and result in a breakup there is a looks threshold that needs to be met before anything meaningful emerges.
I met my current (and last) wife on OKCupid. Only messaged two or three women, she the last. We've been married now for four years and get along like two peas in a pod. Luck, I guess. (I certainly had it coming.)
We leverage an entrance fee to reduce that conflict of interest. Once someone pays the entrance fee, we have little incentive to keep them single and looking. We actually want them to go on dates and make a margin on the dates we book.
https://stories.fairytrail.app/reinventing-the-online-dating...
The sign up fee makes sense. The per-date margin seems to be diametrically opposed.
The upshot of this however is that, if you are being honest in your profile, these things are things that you want to do anyway.
If you still take the effort to talk to the person before going on a booked trip, it should be an experience you will enjoy.
Of course, things can go wrong. But part of any relationship is taking that risk.
I don't think this is a silver bullet, no, but I think it is a pretty good framework for people who are in a good place to find in a healthy relationship. I.e. comfortable and honest with themselves and looking for a partner to enrich their lives rather than just seeking 'a relationship' (i.e. trying to fill some other void in themselves).
> From the ad, we can see that just 86,140 of those subscribers get married, a mere 6.2% of the people who paid the company to find them a mate.
I know a lot of people who would easily drop $120 for a 6.2% chance of finding a partner in a year. These odds are not horrible.
But are the people who would drop $120 to find a partner the same people who belong to that 6.2%?
I think most people absolutely suck at being original or appealing in texting. Going through tinder or any dating app makes you see the worst of humanity. Scams, lot of them. Catfishers. Kids pulling prank and laughing at desperate middle-aged men. Exaggerations, too high expectations. It makes you compare with others. It makes you desperate. Just avoid it.
I mean, people don't really know themselves or what they look for, generally speaking.
Anyway, matchmakers are not a new concept.
My wife would get upset if I did that.
> I think most people absolutely suck at being original in texting or appealing.
Yup
Those are in fact horrible odds. I would prefer to pay $2,000 for a 100% chance. Or $20,000.
The only way you can get 100% chance is if you go the route of a mail-order bride. Not sure if that's even legal anymore.
For legitimate options that include only legal means with consenting adults... 6.2% is pretty good.
No, it isn't. At those odds, your expected wait to marry is over 16 years, which defeats the purpose.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_age_at_fi...
Most people who are motivated to get married explore more than one option at the same time. So you do this plus some combination of other things likely to get you socializing with members of the other gender: start doing the weekly ski/ bike trips; going to pubs; going to yoga; join the square dancing club, etc etc. (Clearly my recent experience socializing with the opposite gender is pretty badly out of date).
Again, nothing legal/ ethical and guaranteed so the only way to increase the odds is to increase your exposure to your audience. If your goal is marriage, $120 and 6% on eHarmony is price and time competitive. Though likely not as fun as going on weekly ski or bike trips.
Even if people get many matches in the first place, the rate of any meaningful interactions is low.
When I was a user, I met a lot of people outside of my town and social circle. I dated a few here and there for quite a while. It isn't magic but it can be a controlled way to meet other people.
We’re also evolutionarily optimized to recalculate and reconsider almost constantly, so even if that works for you at the start, as soon as you have just one conversation that goes on a week, you’ll forget that little lie and pine for what you got a taste of. Or most people would, anyway.
Doctor: "Then stop doing that."
I gave up online dating 10 years ago. A few months ago I tried again after a relationship ended. I'd quit again within a week. Honestly it was even worse than I remembered.
Patient: decides to ignore the advice and seeks medical advice on the internet
Is this still true? When was the last time you tried Tinder/Bumble/OKC? There are tons of attractive people there.
Definitely not true and likely has never been true. Many of the most attractive women I know are active on online dating. People join online dating for various reasons. One is to expand your dating pool. If you've burned through a lot of your social network (or you don't want to poison it) then online dating is a great way to expand your horizon.
From what I gather, it really only amplifies what you experience in real life already. If a significant amount of people show interest in you from a very early stage - you will have no problems with online dating. If you require any kind of barrier to get interest, I wouldn't bother unless you have the incredible ability to not evaluate your self-worth from the app regardless of what happens.
Therefore it's in their best interest to give you illusion of success in bite size chunks.
These services only amplifies the already attractive people who don't need matches anyway.
Online dating just never worked for me, for the same reasons you describe. I think part of it is a combination of paradox of choice and part of it is people just not having faith in technology finding them something human. I went on dates where the other person sooner or later doubted the possibility of marrying someone they met online, and it usually degenerated from there into either friendship or nothing.
There's also the weird social expectation on many apps that males should message first, which results in females getting spammed, which then further results in females not messaging first, and the cycle perpetuates.
As a technology lover I really want online dating to work in bringing more compatible people together and increase overall societal happiness by increasing the average quality of marriage, but time and time again it seems to me that the best way to bring compatible people together is with offline events. Compatible people tend to want to go to similar places and do similar things, and any successful online dating app really should exploit that fact.
In fact, the most successful organizations I have seen at bringing together singles into stable marriages were not even explicitly about dating. I've seen far more stable couples form at mixed-gender sports teams, hiking groups, volunteer organizations, conference organizing teams, and other professional organizations where participants largely cared about the same causes.
I was about to delete my OK Cupid account and she msg'd first, sending me something kind of clever and we met up for a beer. Before the date I decided it would be my last dating app date. Friday is our 2nd anniversary.
It's a pretty great reflection actually...looking back and seeing how many last attempts actually worked out.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surely_You%27re_Joking,_Mr._Fe...
It’s not quite as bold as Feynman’s approach, but clear intentions and not trying to hedge a situation or avoiding being shot down was the key to success for me.
On multiple occasions I met a girl and just said out loud to my friends or hers that I am going to date her/go home with her and in the case of my wife I told some of her friends that I was going to marry that girl. My wife and I took another 5 years after that to get the timing right, but when either of us were single we’d start chatting again.
Also, it was 1946 - when women saw men as a necessary meal ticket. It's waaay less likely to work today, particularly for people living comfortably above the poverty line.
So I got bored, and posted haiku to entertain myself. I realized that it was actually more fun than dating :)
Then I got a long rant by a crazed creative woman, she actually was perfect so I said whatever, let's meet and see what happens!
Today is our 3rd wedding anniversary :)
I met and became friends with one of my still best friends by contacting them on a dating site and having zero expectations of ever meeting them, just because I thought they'd be cool to hang out with online (and they were).
My partner of the last 10 years was a friend of theirs. Never would have met my partner if not for the dating site, and never would have met them on a dating site.
A lot of it boils down to mental framing. In other words, think of yourself as providing an opportunity for someone to participate in something great. If they don't take advantage of that opportunity, that's their loss not yours. One of the best quotes is from Patrice O'Neal: "You MUST believe in your own righteousness."
To be clear, she had a mental breakdown when at a therapy session with a bunch of men who were talking about chopping up their wives. The context in your post frames it as if it had been because of her lack of success in dating, but that's not what it was. (Also, she talks about how she actually had dating success to the point that straight women she was dating would agree to sleep with her even after finding out that she has female parts. I wish I was that hot.)
Calling them "stone-cold losers" for remembering a number doesn't make any sense to me.
The last part -- matching with people you like is where I see a real need for a specialist that I'm an unaware to exist -- there could be soooo much at play there. The demographics of that group, what that group REALLY wants in a partner, honest feedback for yourself, what to improve in yourself etc etc.
My wife and I are wondering how the Indian Matchmaker business model work. How do you align the incentives so you can help people and get some extra income?
Also - bug your desired-sex friends and family. Show them your profile. Focus-group it. This has been massively helpful for me.
At the end of the day: change stuff and see what happens.
Actually getting dates? That's easy enough. Being white, attractive enough, 6' tall, between 150 and 180lbs, no kids, and make a tech salary seems to tick off a lot of boxes for girls.
I have had relationships and am engaged to a beautiful woman now so I found a way to work around it but it is near impossible. My short male friends are either single or have made considerable compromises.
It's a factor that is weirdly denied in society too. Nobody wants to hear that an immutable characteristic plays such a role on the male side...
This said, you can still somewhat compensate for height with status and other looks. Tom Cruise is 172cm but I don't think he ever struggled for dates.
We men of course have our own biological preferences perhaps equally irrelevant in the modern era, so this isn't a blame thing just an oft denied fact.
Oh and as to Tom Cruise - it is a hilarious kind of example I have heard so many times. The fact that people have to reference those who are monumentally successful in the top .000001% kind of proves the point.
Yes there other factors but height tends to be a prerequisite before they apply. Odds goes exponentially down based on how far from the mean you are. 5'9" vs. 5'5" is a world of difference.
'Success' is also not Boolean. I know very successful short guys who have had zero success with women.
Talking in blasé terms 'oh it is just one of many factors' is like saying possessing functioning legs is just one of many factors a footballer requires. Or having enough petrol is one of many factors in a car functioning properly. It's true but kind of missing the point.
The really interesting point is why people are so in denial about this fact that is so blatantly obvious.
I suspect it is a mix of those without this issue wanting to think their success was all attributable to their own skills, people not liking the idea that something uncontrollable could screw you so bad, women feeling it is an attack (it isn't at all), those who are shorter but not significantly below the mean having success (though reduced) and thinking it must apply to those shorter than them, etc.
Another interesting thing I have noticed is that short men is one of the few remaining immutable characteristics society allows people to mock openly. "What is she doing with that little squirt" is something I heard from a friend recently without a hint of self-awareness.
On the mocking, I agree but hopefully that’s slowly going away. It’s one of those things, like casual racism and casual sexism, that will take a while to fully disappear from everyday conversations. Some animal instincts are just what they are.
Most of the examples of guys who do well at very short height are either - some MASSIVE compensation in some other way (hugely confident, etc.) with a MASSIVE failure rate, or they are actually in a dating pool with a lower male height.
Obviously exceptions happen (I'm engaged for one!) but the impact it has is massive and I didn't know until my mid 20's, nobody wanted to admit it or talk about it and it would have saved me a lot of pain to know.
I find that quite hard to believe. Otherwise, the range of heights would be much narrower, and humans would probably be much taller (we're barely taller than gorillas), with much less variation between cultures. I'd say either it's unlikely that there was that much genetic pressure on height, or that most of evolution height wasn't genetic (but limiting factor was something else, e.g. food - so only well-fed people could grow as tall as their genetic potential).
Also all of literature would suggest otherwise. Look at any documentary talking about a man who is considered attractive and see what word they use first. "Tall, dark and handsome" - notice the order. The list goes on and once you start looking for it you'll be surprised. Look at romance - novels - see how many of the men are short.
You could also speak to some women and ask them about it. If you ask enough you'll get at least some honest responses (not disparaging women, equally men may often be deceptive on this kind of question).
I'm also not sure I understand your argument - both men + women contribute to height, male height is only part of the equation (my dad is normal height my mum is very short and I am short for example). Also nutrition has been HUGE in stunting growth, societies with better nutrition have a very big increase in height (which also suggests sexual selection plays a role I'd say).
Height is also in a pretty narrow range anyway, +-2SD.
Finally I'd say that if you were significantly shorter than average and male + had tried your hand with dating you'd have a very raw and immediate series of data points that would be pretty compelling.
This isn't really a controversial point, in the same way men have a preference for a certain hip/waist ratio in women ("why don't all women then have that hip/waist ratio" you might ask following your existing argument...!)
But I agree that women are obviously filtering on that.
As an anecdote - one site I was on took a while to publish my height and I started having conversations with women. As soon as it showed one dropped contact and the other said she felt 'no chemistry' after we had basically said hello to each other :)
What barnacled is saying is absolutely true, and unless you've spent time as a single man of below average height, you really just won't understand.
The difference in attention and respect that a few inches make is pretty astounding. I'd imagine it's pretty similar to the stories I hear of people shedding hundreds of pounds and being treated as a completely different person. Once again, unless you've been on both sides of the equation, it's unlikely you'll be able to grasp how much physical traits like height and weight affect how people treat you.
As you say, unless you've experienced it for yourself it's hard (but not impossible) to get quite how extreme it is.
I've heard plenty enough from women talking directly about it, from basically all fiction ('tall, dark, handsome' in that order, no romance novel has a short guy, etc.), the fact that height rockets up when nutrition improves - sexual selection likely to be a big factor on that too.
It's nuanced and it's all relative to the average height of the dating population you're in but a few inches can be the difference between some attention and absolutely none.
If in 'real life' you could communicate with that many people outside of your social circles, it'd be the same.
Bumble is definitely more popular among my female friends. There are a lot of “fake” profiles too, profiles created with the intention of getting you to follow their Instagram, but there are real profiles out there with real people on the other side. Bumble is one of the many dating apps I tried after my divorce and it’s the one I have the most success with. I’m not a model so Tinder doesn’t work. I’m not interested in diving into another marriage so eharmony and hinge don’t work. I tried the league but I’d rather eat dog shit than listen to a 1%’er cry about money problems.
Woman just want dogs. Men just want a woman. Men, get a dog.
Even if you're a cat person? Doesn't make sense. There must be women who like cats, too. I at least found one. Not within a dating app though. Unless you consider World of Warcraft a dating app, that is.
My statement was an (I guess poorly worded) attempt to show how ridiculous courtship is, yet we all do it.
Revoking the message right to every male user is not the answer.
The "women message first" rule takes a lot of pressure away from my shoulders.
By applying a few common sense rules (eg only swiping rights on profiles that have a minimum of text), I've been able to have conversations that were mostly with women who were actually interested in talking to someone.
I've still had some bad experiences (eg woman who already had a boyfriend and only mentioned it after a month, then dropped out), and there's still a sense of "you're a man so you're the one who has to keep the conversation going no matter what", but overall the interesting-conversation-to-effort ratio of the app has been way higher than I expected it to be.
The conversations pick up faster, there's way less ghosting, I actually get the sense that the woman I'm talking to actually read my profile, etc. I really wouldn't call it humiliating.
(I've heard from others that their experience was more in line with the usual apps though)
I didn’t have many friends and none were going out regularly. I went on my own. Made some friends (basically women I wasn’t attracted to) which made it marginally less awkward but still spent many hours alone on dancefloors.
I get the practically of online dating, but not why people would expect it to be easier than going out, breaking a sweat, talking to (and getting snubbed by) women. If anything in nightclubs the element of physical attraction (which isn’t just looks but pheromones and spit and whatever else) is immediately available, whereas in online dating you have to painstakingly evoke an atmosphere.
But sure, not everyone enjoys dancing to DJs. But it’s hard either way.
But yeah, I have to say I’ve been tempted to try “the old-fashioned way”. I just fear the conditioning we get from Hollywood - anybody alone in any social setting must “obviously” be a serial killer or weirdo.
However, you do upload pictures of yourself and are asked to rate pictures of others - possibly not in your geographic area. The AI gets a feel for what your preferences are and matches you.
Granted - its all a bit superficial that its really just about how you look - but this seems to be the underlying issue with tinder: the benefits accrue to the top percentile "best looking" people. Everyone else gets (unfairly) left in the dust.
Thats as far as I got... thoughts?
In an online dating situation, you have extremely little to determine what the other person is like, so appearances (photo) becomes significantly more weighted. You look at the photo, find him/her unattractive, and move on.
Whereas in a more organic situation, you may find the person unattractive at first meet, but as you interact with them, decide otherwise.
I think it is time we admit that there are some problems that just can't be solved with a website.
I worked for $large_dating_site years ago at their peak. We spent countless days weeks and months in meetings, spitballing all kinds of ideas, building prototypes, and coming up with "innovative" ideas for new dating app products. In the end it turns out the only thing users really want is a picture, a name, and a paragraph. Everything beyond that is in the realm of direct human interaction. Any kind of artificial friction you create between people that is any more complex than that just ends up being annoying and driving away casual users.
The problem with dating apps is not a technological one. It all comes down to who's using them. Wherever the women go, the men will follow. This is why Bumble has been so successful. Catering to women is the only way to have a successful dating app. At any given time, there's a curve of adoption for dating apps, and they all go through the same lifecycle. Cool/new/hip/cheap/free with a 50/50 young male/female ratio and no bots -> established/revenue generating/mature users with fewer women than men -> bot ridden scam with no real women. At any given time there are three major apps that fill these roles. Right now it's Hinge -> Bumble -> Tinder.
The main problem I see with this idea is if I knew that's how the app worked, I could upload a picture of someone from the "best looking" subset of my gender, probably get quite a few matches, and no user of the app would be able to call me out on my BS, because "oh, the AI must have been really terrible at understanding my preferences..." rather than "this user just uploaded a model's photo"
Right now, you just get invisibly and unknowingly filtered out by those who don't find you attractive. That gives a certain amount of esteem preservation to the activity at least.
Which, of course, why this blog post was deleted.
In 2010 it was weird to date on the internet. In 2020 everybody and their mother is on tinder.
This is especially true for zero sum purchases, such as boosts to the top of the profile deck in a given area, where the transaction anxiety felt by most users causes outsized rewards to users who make in app purchases.
On Tinder, £2 boosts can elevate an average male profile from 0.5 matches per day to 5-10 matches per 30 minute boost period. Roll this out with a decent conversion funnel and for £100/mo that average male profile will readily get more dates than a reasonable life schedule can accommodate.
The closest is a friend who is poly, meets all of her partners online, and then has a heavily one-sided poly relationship, since it's much, much harder for the guy to get any side-action.
This last guy has made it to two years, which is a record. Online dating is perfect for finding guys like that.
The biggest problem with OLD is that nearly everyone actively using it has problems. Problems that need to be addressed with time, effort, therapy, psychiatric counseling, and/or medication. Also potentially surgery, if a pitbull mauled your face as a child or something.
Don't feel bad if you aren't finding what you want on OLD, because you don't actually want to date the people who don't want to date you. And they're completely justified in not wanting to date you. You shouldn't want to date yourself either. You're both using dating apps, after all. That means there's lots of room for self-improvement, for everyone involved. Just being on the app is a red flag.
If I had to succinctly describe the vast majority of people who aren't using OLD for hookups (without digging into underlying causes), who spend extended periods of time unhappily single, searching in vain for a partner on dating apps:
men: too shy
women: too picky
The person you dated or the app?
2014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2170998
Discussed at the time:
Users sticking around for a long time means you failed horribly at your mission.
I'm really not sure how one would create a good revenue model for something like this. Many apps try a subscription-based approach and all I can say is that for someone who is earnestly looking for a partner, an annual subscription is the last thing they want.
Marriage is correlated with a lot of measures of societal health---perhaps government grants?
Someone must have attempted this before; I’m curious what obstacles they ran into. My guess would be that this model is radically less profitable than the standard “casino” model where you effectively string users along with the evergreen promise of “maybe this time.”
The reality also is that once you know someone's name and if there truly is mutual chat interest you can just connect with them on other social media, and it's extremely hard for any dating service to avoid that.
If I'm shopping I'll smile and say "thanks" for any little consideration (moving aside, putting a "between shoppers bar" on the conveyor, holding a door, etc.), and when waiting for something I'll say something "chit chatty" to the person next to me, male or female, old or young. Sometimes it will be met with a conversation, mostly a polite reply but no chat, others will be shocked that a stranger spoke to them.
Anything can be used as a conversational gambit. I think "how about dem Yankees?" comes from an old film.
The point is that it doesn't cost anything to be rebuffed. Being open, approachable, and friendly is worth learning.
Not being creepy, slimy, or a Lounge Lizard helps. Just speak to people.
The gay community is famously promiscuous (it’s not just hearsay, there are clear stats). I have several gay friends and none of them has ever struggled finding either occasional or stable relationships. They definitely never felt forced to strike a conversation with random people off the streets just to find a partner. If anything, they always joked that us “heteros” are illogically self-restricting when looking for sex and relationships.
Most people are actually quite friendly and open to chatting. Talk to the people around you at bars, restaurants, parks. Offer to help people. Conversations happen naturally, just be open and confident. If you struggle with that, maybe some more structured group activities help break the ice (e.g. attend a class, sport, volunteer somewhere, etc.)
My goal. Meet one great person, be with them for a very long time. Ideally for life but lets say 10 years. At 10yrs I'd have 6 to 7 relationships my entire life. If you tell me, "it's easy. I have a few new relationships a month" you haven't achieved the same goal.
I too can achieve the different goal of sleeping with lots of people but I choose not to because that's not my goal.
More leads / dates = more chances for long term relationships.
If OP dates 100 women to find 1 long term relationship, is it more likely OP will find a better 'match', than you, who may date 1-3 women before converting them into a long term relationship.
Shouldn't more opportunities = more selective = better long term fit?
Being open minded, meeting a lot of people, and seeing what happens is the best way to meet a long term partner in my opinnion.
Every time I'm single, I'm out there meeting new people for everything from one night stands to flings to casual relationships and on occasion you realize that the person you're seeing that started just casually is the one you want to be with seriously. It's what has happened to me a couple times and again recently.
- Find out if you can diagnose with the Big 5 whether you'd be more of a fit with someone (or in my case: the HEXACO model -- a derivative of the Big 5). In my case: I need someone who scores quite high to extremely high on openness. My whole strategy on finding an amazing girlfriend always revolves around this. So far, I'm 4 years in :)
- Read up on assorted mating theory (check the wiki, just a few paragraphs)
When you have the right approach, finding an amazing partner is actually really easy, albeit there's work to do.
For more inspiration see also [1]. What I took away from this talk is not that she went all techy on it, but that she made a very clear strategy on how to find her life partner. It's the best example I could find of that it's quite easy (but hard work), when you have an approach that works for you.
Finding an approach that works for you is the toughest part.
[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/amy_webb_how_i_hacked_online_datin...
So maybe the average is bleak, but if it has a good P90 or P95 success rate, it might still be worth the try.
Everyone I know who've found love online seem to be in the first category. Those that find dating difficult offline don't seem to have significantly better luck online either.
I feel online dating gave them a chance to meet some other people, pre-meet prior to first date, and than go on a first date, which they'd otherwise wouldn't have been able too. Either from never meeting the person in the first place, never asking to go out on a date, or messing up that date.
That's all my personal analysis though, like I have no data here appart from a few people I know and my interpretation.
Do you mean like... Given enough time they'd have married someone offline as well?
I think some of them that are more socially active offline probably, but some I could see easily going a long time without. There's a lot of people who have really small social circles without any new face coming into it ever. And they don't have the motivation or personality to go and seek it out in real life, but do if it's behind a screen at home in their pijamas.
While back there was a stigma a bit around online dating too, which I think has gone away now.
It was a long time ago and I certainly don't have the data anymore. IIRC, there used to be a tell on the site where careful inspection of the user's profile page would tell you whether or not they had a full, paid profile (it was something like the background color of one of the fields being slightly different).
Once I discounted the unpaid profiles from my numbers, it was actually a pretty high percentage of people that would respond, go through the several layers of canned intro questionaires, a few back-and-forth messages, and finally agreeing to a date.
The end result was something like 25% of the people with whom I matched whom also had paying profiles would end up in a date. But if you were just tracking "percentage of 'matches' that lead to dates", it was something like 0.1%.
Basically, it boiled down to eHarmony's system giving out less than 1 paying profile per day out of the 5 or 7 or 10 or whatever they gave you. You had to be diligent, working it every day, to get that number above 1 per week. Filter that down to 25%, it was about a date a month.
It was exhausting. I had better luck talking to random people at social events. I met a few people through Craigslist by gamifying my posts, stuff like "to prove you're not a bot, you have to decrypt this ROT13 message and copy it in your email to me" [0]. I actually dated a woman for a little while whom I met when she came to my door looking for donations for some charity.
But really, getting out of bars and going out to specific social events, getting into a group of people with whom I became friends, and letting them introduce me to women, was the ultimate key to finding my wife of 6 years.
[0] Aaaah, Craigslist personals ads. It's all fun and games, until you meet the crazy one who tries to get you into a fight at a biker bar.
Anyway I was a paying customer until I noticed they came out with even more expensive plans. I don’t want to be nickled and dimed so I’m back on free.
I used okcupid back in 2010 when this was written. It was a great website for taking quizzes and personality tests but far too noisy to effective for meeting people without becoming a spammer.
Do people still remember Geek Code blocks?[0]
In theory, all existing online dating services could be replaced by a global decentralised system, where people upload a somewhat standardised dating profile[1] and crawlers would compete to find as many of these as possible and match compatible people. Of course they would also compete in terms of how nicely they presented this data and how easy it was to create a profile.
One approach for stopping spam would be to limit the number of messages that each profile (owner) can send per time period. For example, the profile could contain a "send-introductions-to" field, specifying the node that stores their inbox, and a "max-introductions-per-month" field which tells a sending node how many other introductions a user can make while still being allowed to contact them.
As usual with federated systems, there is then the problem of nodes deciding which other nodes to federate with, but it should be fairly easy to test if a node is not enforcing spamminess limits. The other problem is stopping people from generating profiles on multiple nodes, which might require either a centralised service or some sort of economic system like "proof of burn"[2], unless email providers were to all start issuing time-limited anonymous tokens.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geek_Code
[1] I'm imagining using the taxonomy of Wikidata, allowing statements like { "has": "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q202466" }
Most dating sites are a bad deal for males, mainly due to the gender skew. There are at least 2x as many males. The top 20-25% is then enough to gobble up all viable women (top 50%). 1 out of 2 are at least not unattractive, 1 out of 3 are outright attractive, and 1 out of 5 are hot. That is, not even out of attractive males and the women are already gone.
And that's just one dimension. If you have 2 or 3 other axes where you cut off anybody below the median (intelligence, income, politics, interest, etc.) you're quickly finding yourself looking only at a few percent of the population.
And if you have no other metrics other than attractiveness, you'll find that few women wish to date you.
Further, the most superficial experience highest success. That is, they are most likely to lie.
A high percentage of viable matches is uncommon. 1/2 minimally mutually satisfying match * 1/2 at least not unattractive * 1/2 reciprocating attractiveness = 1 out of 8 random pairings find each other minimally mutually satisfying and at least not unattractive (by their own measure of what that is; whether aesthetics, social status, money, etc).
Truth.
[1] "Alle 11 Minuten verliebt sich ein Single über Parship"
I've tried Parship this year, which is quite "popular" (or at least advertised a lot) in Germany. I'm paying around 50€/month for a membership for one year and have cancelled the membership now. I don't think it's worth it.
From the outside, and also at the start, it's very professional. There's a lengthy personal test and everything has some kind of class. They really try not to be some lower-level "fuckbuddy app" or something like that. I liked that image because I'm not looking for something like that and I thought the price would "filter" out all the people who are just in for a quick chance.
So I really took my courage and tried to make good first steps with the womens I had high "matching points" with. I read their profiles, tried two write a nice first message, asked questions about what they wrote in their profile, sometimes pointed out similarities. Possibly I'm very clumsy in doing that, but I think very few people are actually "good" in "dating" (probably not those an apps anyway?!?) so I thought it might be good enough. Anxiety and low self-esteem don't really help much either with all of that.
Quick note: Parship will not show you an image of the partner right from the start. It's blurred until you approve that your chat partner may see it. I like that because as someone who's probably not that good looking, this somewhat helps putting personality before looks.
What I quickly found out is that there are lots of dead profiles. Last activity weeks ago. Nevertheless, parship is happy to recommend those profiles in-app and via mails ("If you find your love today, it might be because of our recommendations" - actual mail title), but messages to those profiles were usually never read.
I also found out that women seem to be massively getting spammed. One woman wrote me and told me she'd really love to answer every message but she received over 50 messages in a day, sometimes from guys hundreds of kilometres away, and she would just have to make a cut somewhere. (Obviously she made a cut at/with me.) Not sure if those guys from hundreds of kilometres are actually ready to leave everything behind for da date, seems more like some high-level "fuckbuddyism".
Something, that might be related to this, is that women are active on the platform, like "last activity yesterday", but will still not read your messages and not visit your profile. Not sure if they are simply not interested or also overwhelmed.
Besides that you have the same problem with premium/non-premium accounts. I've received messages from woman who wrote that they are not able to read any further messages from me, because they have no premium account and are not planning to buy one. As I am somewhat brief in my first message I will obviously not post my postal adress, mail address and mobile phone number. Also rumors are that Parship will ban your account if you do that. Not sure though if it's true. Anyway, I'd find it impolite at least to "spam" somebody with that.
From the outside you can not see which accounts are premium and which not. Which means, in my case, that I'm having a good look at the profile, trying to write a good first message and making a good first impression (while fighting hordes of anxiety) only to receive a "nice message, sorry that I've got no premium. bye."-type answer. I asked Parship support about this and obviously it's not planned to mark non-premium accounts as such.
Another thing I found "complicated": Parship offers you various different methods of contacting the other person. You can like single entries in their profile, you can simply message them (premium function, I think), you can send "ice breakers" (choose five images, see what the other person chose), you can also "smile" at people (can also add a message here - that's what I'm usually doing) and you can also have video chats (never tried that).
This makes using the platform somewhat complicated. Is something better than the other? What should I use for the first contact? Smile only? Should I allow my chat partner to see my image right from the start? Or only after we wrote? What to do with "ice breaker results"? Are two matches good? Bad? Something to talk about? Why would I even video chat through parship and not trough WhatsApp or something else? Who knows? I surely don't.
Parship also has a message board for its members. Topics are... well... recurring. "Why does nobody write me back?", "Do you like my pictures?", "How big should my search radius be?". All in all it's a mixture of very old topics, where Parship itself also engaged and tried to help, and mainly dealing with rejection. Not sure if that helps anybody, it just feels like they felt the need to have a message board somewhere back in the past.
So, after almost a year, 600€ less in my wallet, lots of times getting turned down I wonder if I should just have invested that money in treating myself with some nice dinners and going to a bar every other week. Maybe I'd have met a woman that way.
My expectations, everybody on Parship is really into serious dating, has been disappointed. It's not that it was unbelievable high, but I wonder that it seems to be as low as is.
For Parship it's fine I think. There will be the next guy like me who feels like something is missing and that "serious online dating" might be a good way to find what he's looking for.
Last words: If you're single woman from Baden-Württemberg (Germany), drop me a comment. I've got two cat and enjoy writing long comments on Hacker News. Maybe we'll fit. :-)
Another one: "women rate an incredible 80% of guys as worse-looking than medium" - https://archive.is/ZJymw
I'm not sure if I agree. From the perspective of the dating site you'd be right, the longer people are unable to find the kind of relationship that they want, the better it is for their business. However, from the point of view of the people looking for dates, if people are shown little to no profiles where it's highly unlikely that a relationship will happen, and shown mostly profiles where matches are likely, regardless of their stated preferences, and thus response rates and relationship likelihood rises, that seems like it can be a better outcome to me.
The real criticism of this model is completely different, and much deeper. People don't actually know what they want and who would make them happy, and they often conform / default to social conventions in their public preferences - e.g. maybe you want to filter out 10+ older men because you don't want to go on dates with "creepy" dudes, or you want to filter out fat women because you don't want your friends to judge you - even though in reality, you might actually be happier with those matches, or, more likely, those attributes are often orthogonal to your actual happiness.
1. Attractive / high value men are happy to sleep with less attractive women they wouldn't consider as 'relationship material'.
2. Women are generally more sexually liberated so there's an increasing chance they will have had several of these encounters, and therefore believe they are entitled to men of the same level (also known as becoming an 'alpha widow').
Like most of these theories it's pretty depressing to contemplate, but I'm yet to see a convincing refutation of it.
I can not tell who is going to be the most miserable in such relationship. My guess is the woman, who will not be able to understand how "she settled like that, since she could do so much better". In the best case scenario, the man will be oblivious of the fact, so probably he will be unaffected.
I would love to find a way of coming to terms with this that doesn't involve adopting the full red pill attitude of "never get married, all women are like that" etc
Of course, this is possible because the average man will have far fewer relationships than the average woman. So in the end the numbers for this imaginary couple will look like:
For the man: He will marry then number 2 mate out of a total of 5.
For the woman: She will marry the number 10 mate out of a total of 15.
Obviously the numbers are totally made up, but you get the point.
So be positive! When you will settle, your mate will probably exceed your expectations.
Disclaimer: I am also a man.
Best is to find your own self esteem. Whoever gets your company and attention is lucky, because you chose to give it to them and no one else...
It’s just you in the Boltzmann brain... no one else means anything. Also the universe is big, really big. And the block universe is here all at once. You can’t really change anything... we don’t know anything. What were we talking about again ?
[1] https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-g... (Tinder Experiments II: Guys, unless you are really hot you are probably better off not wasting your time on Tinder — a quantitative socio-economic study)
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22406583 (RFC: Let's Disrupt Dating Apps)
The problem is that the comparison totally falls apart. You are not competing to get the most likes on Tinder, you are just trying to meet someone to form a relationship or make out or whatever. If you’re really interested in comparing Tinder against other avenues for achieving this goal (or whatever goal you have), then you should be looking at something like WAR—wins against replacement. How likely are you to have a positive outcome using Tinder versus using some other site, or trying to meet people in person.
If you want to find a place where it’s easy to find someone cute who wants to make out, then the only real answer is to be a gay man (do whatever you need to make that possible), clean yourself up, and move to the city.
If you’re interested in a heterosexual relationship, you are simply going to have to deal with the fact that men and women in our culture have, on average, differing preferences when it comes to relationships. If you have typical preferences for a single man in our culture, then they don’t match typical preferences for a single woman in our culture, and if you find a relationship, it will involve some bridging of the gap between your different desires. Tinder doesn’t change that, and neither do any of the other sites.
Being happy in a relationship is not about somehow managing to trick someone into being with you, nor is it about somehow lifting yourself up to the standards of masculinity / femininity you see in media.
—Olaf, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVCCYAYr-24
I’m not a therapist or relationship counselor. I really only have my opinions and personal experiences to share.
Women rate 80% of online images of men on a dating site as worse-looking than their personal definition of medium.
I think it's important to keep in mind that:
* There are disparities between gender for how much appearance factors into attractiveness.
* The fact that a person is on an online dating site itself sends an attractiveness signal.
This is an unattainable level of health and fitness for most Americans. Bet you’re way more attractive than you think you are.
I'm 42 and probably in the best shape of my life. But that's mostly because I spent the first forty years absolutely shunning any form of physical exercise.
Presumably the hot dudes aren't the people on online dating sites. (Not to be objectifying, but dating is a bit of a lemons market i imagine)
It's also why the median job-seeker in a field is less skilled than the median person in the field of interest: the median person has been evaluated by at least one employer to be sufficiently skilled.