A 4-month online dating experiment using 10 fictional singletons (2012)
jonmillward.com
jonmillward.com
When I first started online dating, I noticed something curious, as an Asian male I got zero responses from non-Asian women from my parents country of origin. For me at least, I don't care about the ethnicity of the woman I'm dating especially given that I'm not the majority ethnicity in the country/city so I've always kept an open mind as to who I'd want to date.
Many of my Asian female friends had no trouble finding matches with white/black men. For background, I live in the West in a region which is 50% white and 50% mixture of Black/Asian/Latino, I write/speak fluent English, I have progressive and liberal values, and I have a very stable life.
I decided to record my interactions with the dating app for a multi-year period manually by putting in details in an excel spreadsheet. I receive 10-20 profiles per day, and if any of them like me back, chat unlocks. I put their details ethnicity, age, how attracted I was to them based on photos, and the outcome.
Well after 5 years of using it I can say that I have had zero White/Black/Latino women ever chat with me. Zero from thousands of matches over a period of years. We're not talking about first dates, relationships, we're talking about literally someone on the other end hitting the 'like' button to unlock chat. And I'm not someone who just likes super attractive women I was open to literally anyone ranging from less conventionally attractive profiles. At
To be honest, it completely changed my perspective of women altogether.
I don't think it's a reflection on women, specifically. I think it's more an indication of how strongly cultural biases are ingrained in all of us.
Except for Black women in the US. Together with Asian men (especially from India), they have a really, really tough time. There are a number of peer reviewed studies on the matter, it seems to be a stable pattern.
https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/okcupid/howyourraceaff... (archived copy of the 2009 blog post)
As for education and kids, I can see how that can explain the difference between Asian women and Black women's response rate. But again, need a real examination of the data.
It is a very touchy subject, which is unfortunately plagued by both uninformed people and also those who just want to cause pain to to others.
The woman interested in doing that also has men of other races to choose from and the same preferential hierarchy plays out, let alone the numbers.
And, sure I have other races to choose from, but if I do, I'm going to get a man who's a 6.
If your numbering system introduced only now in this reply is regarding physical attractiveness, then women don't have this issue in their own race.
The point is that this doesn't help asian men because it barely makes a dent in the pool of asian men that would ever be exposed to a women with this predilection, as her pool is so much larger and also includes asian men. Even if her pool only included asian men in this strategy, from the perspective of the men, nothing has changed because the odds they will be exposed to it are slim.
My reply is only about the men's UX, not your "arbitrage" from the woman's UX.
If you can't look at it from her point of view, I don't know how to make my statements make any sense to you.
I'm not sure what the problem is, but we seem to continually be talking past each other. I'm tired of it, so I'm out.
This is how I can tell you're not a woman.
For women, finding someone who wants to marry for citizenship that also likes them is probably the best bet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interracial_marriage_in_the_Un...
Indian Americans are an exception to this asymmetry according to wikipedia.
You say > I have progressive and liberal values
but also say
> it completely changed my perspective of women altogether.
which, granted, may be justified by your experiences but off the bat this is giving me a set of weird assumptions.
Without manipulating your ranking you are not being shown at all to those other women.
They never see your profiles.
The apps are just as much to blame as the cultural preferences. (The cultural preferences distort what ‘attractiveness’ is and influence your ranking, and for you this also dilutes the potential of interest in your profile, so of the people less likely to be looking for you only a few of them see you and reject, the others never saw you to consider.)
As you can distort this ranking (literally just act like you think a hot girl would act on a dating app, ignoring everyone that matches them for a few weeks, and also selectively swiping to try matching someone), you should redirect that energy towards the apps more so than the women.
Guys and unattractive women get frustrated and end up swiping more and entertaining what they can get - casting a larger net. This puts them all in the same bucket and why you see more of each other, and people looking specifically for your attributes, ie. same race. It is aiming to mirror the physical world but has flaws because it lacks inputs available in the physical world.
I'm wondering if the advent of things like BTS will alter dynamics, as quite a few non-Asian women seem to go crazy over K-pop boyband idols. Then again, I'm pretty sure if you're ridiculously good looking, extremely fit, and hugely successful like a boyband idol singer, you're likely to do well on the dating scene regardless of ethnicity.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/nov/29/k-pop-stars-ja...
The dynamics of dating in Asia amongst native population Asians is a whole different story than that experienced by Asian-Americans in the US (or other Western countries). The demographics there are largely homogenous and expectations by far are that you're most likely going to date and marry someone of your own ethnicity.
If you're a Korean man in Korea, you're probably not at any disadvantage on the domestic dating scene because of your ethnicity, you probably have close to zero expectation that you'll be dating someone who is not Korean, or at least not Asian.
This must be a horrible experience. This seems like a good reason to stop using the website or app and maybe to write to the developers about why they're losing you.
> To be honest, it completely changed my perspective of women altogether.
Not sure if that was the intention, but it sounds like you're changing how you see all women. However your experience comes from women whose profile you liked, who do online dating via a given app.
The interactions in the app are likely very structured (maybe viewing profiles in a specific context). I’d guess experimenting with a different form could change how users interact.
Obviously we can’t change things like an individual’s attraction and that’s not the focus. App devs sould act on larger patterns, i.e. if the app devs receive a significant number of reports that their users are feeling excluded, they should go to work. Maybe change something small and see if it helps.
Could you elaborate?
And from the point of devs it doesn't matter. As I wrote earlier, I believe devs (or maybe product owners) should act if they receive a sufficient number of reports like this.
For comparison, Grindr used to allow filtering out other people based on race, but as a result of people pointing out that it not only recognized existing racial biases but also reinforced them, they removed that feature, and connections became more equitable across different racial groups.
On the other hand, straight dating apps don't really seem to care about this. Sometimes companies even gaslight about it--"we put in this filter to allow for people to search for people with a shared background!"--even though these filters are overwhelmingly used to filter out non-whites (except for the occasional white male user filtering exclusively for Asian women).
For point of comparison, most heterosexual dating apps steadfastly refuse to add weight filters, despite them being the most demanded filters (aside from height). Why? Usually there are excuses about how it's impossible to implement or that the people who want weight filters are confused about what they want, but somehow LGBT dating apps all are able to add weight filters without any difficulty or controversy. Why weight filters are considered an undesirable feature in heterosexual dating apps is left as an exercise to the reader.
And dating apps could, in principle, tell the people who want race filters to pound sand just as much as they tell the people who want weight filters to pound sand. The fact that they don't is a political choice.
I don't get it, why is that?
I think it's because we know that our weight is completely up to us and that a failure of keeping the weight that is desirable to others is a failure of ourselves. It's a thing we deep down know is our own fault and it scares us. As for height, it's not my fault I'm short or tall, if you don't like it, meh, I didn't screw up or anything.
Dating apps have artificially forced people into making superficial choices.
It's been interesting and fun trying to fix what's wrong with online dating. The big thing being the misalignment of interest. https://www.fairytrail.app/reinventing-the-online-dating-bus...
Could you elaborate what you mean by this?
I'm currently out of the market, but your app looks more interesting than the typical one. Best of luck with it!
Dating's not easy, but it gets much easier if you improve your life holistically (and especially the things you are weakest in). Photos are poor quality? Dress like a slob? Overweight? Aren't witty? These are all things that can be improved with effort, even if it is challenging to do so.
It's really easy to come up with some explanation for a lack of dating success, especially a generalized fatalistic thesis from a limited data sample; it's much more difficult to take some time to figure out why you're unsuccessful, and then put in the work to fix it.
My 2c. Good luck
Have you ever met someone who seemed naturally good looking? Usually they care a lot about clothes, accessories, and are passionate about style and appearance. One guy I know always enjoys going "thrifting" at secondhand stores, and is incredibly enthusiastic and helpful if you go with him. So his success is related as much to work as it is to luck.
There's a lot that goes into being attractive in the same way there's a lot that goes into being "smart" (e.g. someone with a phd may be born smart but they worked incredibly hard to earn that phd).
(or, hilariously, both)
https://www.amazon.com/Dataclysm-Identity-What-Online-Offlin...
There's a bunch of good graphs and analysis in there (which matched my anecdotal experience of online dating).
The takeaway for me - if you're a man looking for a woman and you're not in the top 5% of attractiveness for men (really top 2%) then online dating is a waste of your time and you're better off doing pretty much anything else. This is doubly true in skewed dating markets like the bay area (less so in favorable markets like NYC, DC).
There's a lot of 'what you can't say' [0] in that book, sexual selection is skewed in lots of ways people pretend it isn't. I think it'd be better to acknowledge some of these things and consider it in an intellectual way - not so you can leverage it in some sleazy/misogynistic pick-up-artist way, but because understanding how it works helps you know how to behave/show confidence etc. Helps for the aspie-er among us where this doesn't come naturally (and is more important for men seeking women where for better or worse we have to be the ones to figure it out [1]).
On a somewhat related note, this Ted Chiang short story explores some of this and is just generally great: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:vSPLnv...
For what it's worth, outside of dating apps, I see men of all backgrounds (including Asian men) have success with women of other backgrounds if they look after themselves, are confident, friendly, put themselves out there and take initiative. Those things are required for men of any background I guess, and men of some backgrounds definitely have to get it right more than others, and even when they do, their odds can still be worse, but still.
The dance scene is a good example, it has lots of interracial couples of all flavors. If you're interested in meeting more Latino and Afro women, check out some Latin and Afro dance classes and it won't take long before you get to know a bunch. (I appreciate there's an ongoing global pandemic, jussayin', I'm sure there are other examples like that)
Just a completely useless anecdote from a stranger online ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I don't know how many signals for higher social status your profile ticks. But in my opinion improving any one of the signals can improve dating outcome.
A 2020 version: 18 Yr Old Woman Tries Being A Man on Tinder https://youtu.be/DZTIbHIsIYw
She tries to get as many matches and dates as possible using the male host's pictures. Spoiler: after a week of paltry messages and matches, she says she's "struggling" and "feeling down, even though it's not my damn profile. I thought this would be easy. I don't want to do this again. I hate this."
Also, discussion from back then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4165544
Reminds how eternally grateful I should be that my romantic life predates Tinder.
Online dating is very much a skill, and books I have read point and tell me even more.
My short version of what I have learned (and have succeeded with): 1. Appearance matters, but more so for females 2. For men, it is more important that you convey what you are doing than absolute attractiveness. Women are most attracted to “rocket ships”, people that are going places with their lives (it doesn’t matter your current state).
Also, I recommend Hinge over most of the apps out there... for what it is worth, I have had my most success there, including the girl I am currently dating.
Just my two cents...
(If you don't see what's hilarious about that advice, you are either not a man, are extremely attractive, or haven't ever used a dating app)
Guys who complain about women ignoring them are usually themselves ignoring lots of women around them who would be suitable for them but they aren’t good enough for whatever reason. I’ve seen it SOOOOO many times when average looking guys complain about how shallow girls are or how good looking guys have it easy (this second point isn’t exactly completely untrue mind you) yet they still focus on the most classically attractive women they know or at the bar wherever who are out of their league.
If average looking guys were to spend more time on themselves- grooming, having a hobby outside of work/tv/games, fitness, reading a book once in a while- they would be surprised to see how the world around them will change.
Also there are lots of good girls who may not be supermodels looking to date regular guys. At least give them the green light once in a while.
The tall guy was constantly approached by women. Never saw it happen with the fit guy. Anecdotal sure, but the results were consistent across many bars and clubs.
All that to agree with the ancestor comment about taking this kind of "if you build yourself they will come" advice with a grain of salt.
Please imagine how much worse your friend would have it if he were overweight and boring.
Also, you should build yourself irregardless of women. Reading is good for you. Exercise is good for you. Having a passion is good for you. Coincidentally, these are all signifiers of someone who would be a good dad.
Most guys are clueless how women approach men and often don’t even realize when women are coming onto them. It’s never (or rarely) as crass as “hey let’s fuck”. It’s more like they take initiative to say hi first and ask follow up questions.
Maybe your fit friend is too passive??
My point is the fit guy didn't meet the threshold for being approached by women while the tall guy did. It relates to what you originally said by suggesting there could be plenty of guys, even a majority, for whom no amount of self-improvement will boost them above that threshold.
Anyway even if thats the case, it's still a good idea to take care of yourself and cultivate your interests regardless of their application to dating. And being approached by women isn't at all necessary for a successful dating life.
Here’s an analogy: If you were trying to learn how to play basketball, would you take advice from someone who isn’t very good at the game but shares the same disadvantages as yourself or would you listen to what Allen Iverson has to say?
This is kind of how the argument being presented here sounds to me. Obviously, Iverson won’t get you into the NBA but I would listen to him.
Good looking people may come across as arrogant when they say to be yourself or take care of your self but it’s still true.
It'd be like getting football advice from a 190-pound wide receiver when you weigh closer to 300. Some of the advice will still be good, but it does ignore a key difference, and you'd be better off hearing advice from offensive linemen, who'd be in your weight class.
All of this is nice activity, but not if you're faking yourself or faking it to yourself. I've read a whole home library (est. eight shelves each 1m wide), but not interested in reading anymore. Does that count? And no way I'm going have a hobby out of my interests purely for dating purposes. PC games are not about playing mario, it's the world of problems, solutions and efforts¹. If you cannot see that, or never seen that, you're likely "stereotyped basic" to me rather than "more evolved". This advice advises me to being "not me" in a most disturbing way possible. And for what? To see a shallow glimpse of interest and then proceeding to that plain chit chat until it comes to lust, if it ever does. The pretence is big but in the end it is either ONS or a family/dating life without all these cool entry attributes.
The problem with non-supermodels is that they have all the exact downsides and quirks. It's not easier after the date and they do not market-value themselves less, like you expect.
¹ I have a buddy who is a racer, country-level. We sometimes talk about his problems (beyond astro money spent on a single race) and it seems that my trackmania canyon (e-sports) progress has many similar issues like apex, drag, curve trade-offs, entry points and so on. Yes, I'm not experiencing hard pulls on a wheel and 80kg force to brake in timely manner, and I don't account for a tire wearout, but if you try to make it close even to my 2 years old PBs, you'll have a hard time for sure. And when you compare us, he is a sports man and I'm a jerk who plays mario cart. Sigh.
Upd.note: I used "you" at some places, where it should read "they". It is not intended to be personal in any way.
It's way easier if you have a few interests that others can relate to, like going to concerts or going to the theater or rock climbing or whatever.
It's not "faking it" when you do something outside your comfort zone, I'd see it more as "expanding your horizon".
Where I personally initially struggled was the first two steps. What I learned most was there is an art to taking good profile pics. Doing a great job here makes 95% of the difference. Learn how to take the best profile pic you can. We can’t help our natural attractiveness, but even the best looking guy can look horrible if they don’t focus on this. Best way to help yourself is use an objective “scoring” method. I used this site: https://www.photofeeler.com It is somewhat painful initially (as you get scores below 5), but if you work on taking better pictures of yourself... it gets better, currently my best pic is a 9.4/9.5/8.0... but it took me literally 3-4 weeks of taking TONs of photos... I started at 4.5/4.8/4.5. Once you master your pics, then you need to practice grabbing their attention, and keeping it. I can go farther, but hopefully that helps at least a bit.
However, what is interesting, and what they talk about in the link above, a highly attractive women (good pics), will get 10-20x the interest than just an “okay” looking woman.
To your point on software engineer... no woman really cares too much... (unfortunately). There are dozens of software engineers already expressing interest in her, the question that you need to answer for her is “What makes you special?” Can you make her laugh? Do you and her share common interests, etc. Anyway, not a professional here... all of this is based on my observations and “intense learning” over the last 3 months of being single again.
Many swiping on women are bots or males that swipe on everyone. A bit of an illusion. On the other hand, women do have an easier time. For example, even on OkCupid from back in the day women had a higher response rate when sending the first message (compared to men sending the first message).
The thing most beneficial for women online (in addition to being prey rather than predator) is the gender skew. There are usually 2x as many males compared to females, leaving the top 50% of women (the ones seen as viable) gobbled up by the top 25% of males. With a bit of a skew in the swipe ratio, the top 20% of males (ones the top 80% of women are chasing) are enough to take all viable/acceptable women.
Average looking and better women seem to get huge amounts of matches: if you're better than average this can be hundreds per day in a big city.
Going by my own experience and friends experiences, as a guy, even if you're better than average looks with a good job, nice photos etc, are lucky to get a handful of matches per week.
So what I don't understand then is if all these women are getting huge amounts of matches, how can men be getting less matches? Is it literally only the top 0.1% of men that are getting the majority of the matches?
i.e. are women who are say 7-8/10 on the looks scale only matching with guys who are 9.5/10 on the looks scale, so guys who are 7-8/10 getting zero matches?
Yes, basically massive "wealth inequality" among men as expressed by Gini coefficient: https://qz.com/1051462/these-statistics-show-why-its-so-hard...
I don't understand what you're confused about.
Men swipe on a large proportion of women.
Women swipe on a small proportion of men.
So most women's swipes will be reciprocated, most men's won't be.
Not sure why you can't see how it would work?
It might be interesting to run a dating service that limited signups to an even gender ratio. Or at least didn't let the imbalance grow more than a modest amount. Of course then most men would complain that they can't even sign up. You'd have to be very aggressive about culling idle accounts.
In fact, rather than hard-coding those rate limits (or generating them algorithmically from the gender distribution of accounts) it might be viable to let each user decide on the limit themselves. It may not be a good idea to show users the specific rate limit that another user has chosen, though, as that number might give all sorts of weird signalling about how "desirable" they consider themselves to be.
In any case, if the supermodels can set this spamminess/selectiveness parameter for themselves, they can tune it to a value where they don't get clobbered (unless they like the validation of being clobbered).
For the men who were using the apps (and talking about it) in my social circle it doesn't seem like it improved much from this side of the gender divide. YMMV of course.
Outside them the problems aren't quite as bad.
This means that there at best only a 1-10% chance of a woman even seeing a quality message directed at her, given the sheer volume of garbage being directed at them.
It's the same reason why you don't notice the genuinely good deals in the massive amounts of advertisements you're bombarded with every day. The sheer volume of noise just makes the whole system far more useless than you would expect.
I imagine a scenario that could happen frequently is that man new to online dating signs up, initially puts good effort into messaging select women he finds attractive, gets ignored a gazillion times, then throws in the towel and starts shotgunning. Or gives up on online dating altogether.
It's an unpleasant and politically incorrect idea that despite clearly being the experience of most normal men you talk to about these things, is probably career-damaging to academics who would research it honestly so you see it backed up in that regard either by amateur blogs or very cautiously worded "respectable" research.
Think of harems in the old days and alpha males in some species in the animal kingdom.
Tinder and the like (so the theory goes) apply a massive magnifier affect to the natural tendency of "elite" men to clear up.
Side note: the tactics of average men mentioned elsewhere in these comments such as swiping on everything, and similar techniques are effects of this phenomenon, not the cause.
Says who? The men who do best with women are the most physically attractive. No other demographic does better. You can have $10M in the bank and still not elicit the same kind of attraction as the stereotypical tall, dark and handsome white man.
Maybe a better question is: why are there so many more men than women on dating services? The ratio seems completely out of whack. It's not like there are 10 boys born per every girl, so somewhere along the way the women are filtering out. Perhaps women prefer face to face interaction?
These studies seem to be focused on a symptom instead of the cause.
Yes, that's the entire point of the original question and my response.
These comments are regarding mainstream dating platforms where male to female participation is reasonably balanced (or at least not exponentially imbalanced as you seem to believe). That massive imbalance is present in the matching.
What's certainly clear, and the data released by OKCupid bears out, that mean invariably send messages to women much younger, while women are more likely to message someone closer to their age.
Maybe the real advice to men is to pursue women closer to their age and leave the 20 somethings alone.
One answer can be found in census data. The number of childless male adults is almost twice of that of female adults, but the desire to have children has been found to be identical among women and men.
https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2017/12/19/the-...
The rest of the world should worry, too. There are countless examples throughout history where wars have been started to put a lid on internal unrest. What's more, unmarried men are inevitably the ones sent to fight, so it's a solution that kills (pun intended) two birds with one stone.
The Pareto principle pops up in so many places, I don't think you can justify an arbitrary interpretation about harems and alphas on top of the principle. We don't know why the power law keeps popping up in earthquakes, mass of stars, size of trees in a forest and a whole slew of natural phenomena. When we finally understand what natural force is shaping these distributions, it'll stop being a nice fairy story which contributes to other stories.
The culture permeates every level. The "alpha male" culture benefited most men in 2015-2016, even if they didn't capitalize on pointless sex. The free love movement expanded it's own movement into most parts of the culture. These patterns aren't 'optional forces' that only the rich have enough spare time to participate in.
The culture force of elitism is the current phase and idolizing the rich is eternal in america.
There's a bigger picture than the current myth.
I wasn't around in the 60s, but the cynic in me suspects that even within hippie circles the 80/20 rule was still in effect in the dating game. Because the same thing is happening today within progressive/SJW circles - the "male feminist" types tend to proceed directly to the friendzone, regardless of the claimed preferences of progressive women.
Clearly that sort of behavior is just further feeding into the dynamic.
Women getting flooded with bad matches hurts everyone.
I never used matches. I assume this is some variation on the "like" or "swipe-right" system. Women get bombarded with these. Conversely, women don't a high ratio of high quality messages.
I maybe looked at the compatibility score if it's there (e.g. OKCupid), read through the profiles, and if there was enough to grab my interest I'd write a message that at least makes some reference to what's mentioned in their profile. I got a response 8-9/10 times. Personally I think I look average enough and don't have amazing conversation skills, I just put in the work to send thoughtful messages.
As to why the match system doesn't work, the sheer amount of noise in online dating (and over-representation of men, I think) is such that these "match" systems amount to glancing through a ton of pictures and picking the best-looking ones. Particularly since profiles are best fairly compact, and don't tell you a ton about a person at the onset. You're a complete stranger to women on these platforms, with 0 trust value to your name, and so actually having a meaningful interaction is a great way to expedite that trust. You won't get there with "hey babe", "nice pic", "nice outfit", "nice smile". I mean, maybe you can if you're one of the fortunate few to cut through the noise and get someone's interest on the strength of your "playboy" looking mug. But most likely, it's a weak approach.
EDIT: worth taking a good picture of yourself. Get a second opinion on it.
Wow, this 1000%. Every time I hear a guy complaining about how bad their online dating experience is I ask to see their pictures. It's almost always cringeworthy what they selected.
Another underlying problem is that people who aren't of above average attractiveness don't like having their photo taken. Then they have less pictures to select from and end up settling for some really awful ones.
As parent poster stated, please get feedback from multiple people on your photos, particularly people of the gender you're targeting. You will most likely be surprised at their feedback.
How often are you having these conversations?
Dating apps have all converged on being swipe-to-match based. Generally you cannot just try to send a message to start a conversation anymore. The option of sending a thoughtful message to get a conversation started is just gone.
It's really not hard to look up. See here: https://help.okcupid.com/article/40-how-to-send-an-introduct...
The only thing that's changed since I used it is they want you to hit "like" on their profile before you send a message. That's not an impediment. The option to send messages is not gone. Use it.
The key factor is that dating app userbases are often 80% to 90% men. Couple this with the inequality others point to, and you get a very toxic outcome. Most women are absolutely overwhelmed, and most men are starving for crumbs of attention.
The experiences are so wildly different as to be unimaginable to most people. So people don't develop strong empathy for their counterparts.
The natural inclination based on this alone would be to be picky.
This will then set up other second order and third order effects.
Different use cases.
Men are there to find a date. They mostly fail because the vast majority of women are not looking for a date.
Reapply whats happening to real life. Vast majority of women don't engage men on online dating. That's the same offline. Women can find their dates through their social circles; social circles tend to be small compared to online dating but does the job.
Million $ question, what is online dating for women? It's about self-esteem or new choices. Say she's in a relationship with a guy and it's not exactly working out. Well she can join online dating and look at the options.
There's a break point around age 25-30 though. That's the age where women lose the driver seat in dating and men get the seat. Yet women don't know it or something. This creates a divide that really confuses women, they've enjoyed their control. They still see tons of connections. Surely they are still driving? nope.
This is what leads to historic low marriage, fertility, and birth rate.
So bumble was created to reverse it. women have to make the first move. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bumble_(app)
Everyone knows how that's going. Badly.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027277571...
Seems backward?
Why artificially limit your dating pool based on something as superficial as a 10-word profile and some photos? Surely makes sense to be open to meet as many people as possible?
There are no rooms, just 1-1 matches.
You can't stand out more by swiping less, can you? Your best strategy is always simple to swipe as much as possible (until the algorithm punishes you for doing that.)
Is tinderthe only site you use ? Why not go more niche. Are you Jewish, Christian, plenty of sites can be found. Are you into a specific sexual preference or gender? Plenty of sites around those...
And the only logical answer is to swipe as much as possible. Moving to another app doesn't change that.
You control the words in your profile, your picture. Want a gothic girl make your profile and pic match. Swipe only on goths profiles.
When you try to be everything you become nothing.
Randomly adding private ig profiles as a male probably has a 1-3% chance of success but as a good looking female that number probably jumps to 15%+. But if he was a goth had interesting goth photos that person will identify with him and add him.
Swiping everyone is just like emailing every company your resume. Spend sometime craft your profile and target who you want.
Want a ton more matches? Post a pic of your cat as your picture. Women may not find you interesting but many will want to meet your cat.
Bob is interested in goth women. There's 5 of them in his area. Plus another 95 non-goth women. If he accepts only the 5 goth women, he might get lucky and get a match but at 1-3% change of matching he's still likely to have zero matches. But if he swipes right on all 100 women his chances of having at lease a couple matches goes up drastically, and the 5 goth women he's especially interested are no less likely to match with him.
Sure, taking better pictures and working out to become more attractive increases the likelihood of matching. If Bob hits the gym, gets some professional photos taken, and crafts a better profile his match rate with those 5 goth women will increase. But his chances also increase for the other 95 women, and he has no reason to refrain from swiping right on them.
> Swiping everyone is just like emailing every company your resume. Spend sometime craft your profile and target who you want.
Yes! When you're job searching there's no reason to limit your job search. Yes, you should craft your resume and cover letter to emphasize the skills the company is looking for. But you're still strictly better off applying to 100 companies as compared to 10 companies. Online dating is no different.
In fact I was job searching not long ago and I applied to ~50 companies a day. Why not apply to a company I'm only lukewarm about? If it turns out I don't like the company I can just not schedule an interview. Or do the interview anyway, and use a potential offer as leverage in negotiating.
If you want any girl, swipe everyone. In that case why not use the money you were planning on impressing this girl and just hire a girl for the evening. Your odds/costs will be less and relationship prospects about the same.
Let's say you swipe, find success and meet this person. Getting to that hook up finish will take much more legwork compared to if you are prequalified.
For job prospectives I find if I do that (apply to every job) you end up wasting a lot of time and energy in low chance opportunities or high chance but low quality opportunities. It worked when I first started but didn't work out so well after 15 years of experience.
If some of the low quality companies respond to you, you can always turn them down in favor of the companies you're most interested in if they respond.
I'm not sure what I'm failing to explain. It's strictly better to do a broader search. Save for the time it takes to apply. But in the case of both online dating and applying to jobs it's not that much work to apply even with a customized cover letter. You're selecting from the subset of people who respond to your initial application - or swipe. The more applications you send the bigger this subset will be.
But if you want to increase your successful swipe % rate within a target group a different strategy of profile management is in order.
I believe the targeted approach is more successful for repeated interactions and perhaps a relationship where the swipe all approach would get higher numbers with more low quality matches.
The job conversation is a bigger discussion. Spending a day on a cover letter, custom sample application, researching history and changing your resume to fit each job takes time but also provides a lot of value when trying to form a connection in the interview.
Likewise, spending a day on crafting a cover letter and resume is a waste of time. A customized cover letter and resume probably takes 15-30 minutes, tops. Why are you worried about forming a connection in an interview when you don't even have an interview yet? Spend a day researching the company in depth once you have an interview scheduled.
The point is we live in a society that is male dominated (sexist) and it has unpleasant effects on socialization which leaves many "normal" men to be problematic (or as you put it, "trash").
Also, Tinder has a very specific age demographic which skews younger - which is when women are most desirable. Women start having a harder time once they reach 35, and a nearly impossible time when they reach 50.
If I don't want kids, I won't swipe on a picture with kids. I'll rule out somebody whose picture is doing shots with friends in a bar. Conversely, if a photo has a bookshelf, I'm certainly going to take a closer look.
The filtering happens at some point. There are thousands of women there and I don't have time to chat with all of them. I swipe the ones I think I have something to talk about with. Your photo conveys your personality, and people who put time into selecting a photo that gives me something to talk about are attractive to me.
I know a girl who travels often. When we occasionally spoke about India and pictures she took there, her comments were like "I've seen this and that". It was ok, but I couldn't get rid of a feeling that I know an order of magnitude more about India from a basic (well, a more like a good hist-pop) history channel alone. It was boring and un-deep at the level of scrolling google images.
It's not perfect. It's not meant to be. It's a heuristic that still leaves plenty of people to talk to for the second pass, and that lets me spend enough brain power to present myself well while we decide if we should meet in person.
Tell me that after a dozen awkward first dates! The more particular I have become about finding new people to go out with, the better the quality of my dates. Now, I usually feel more or less certain I'll at least get along with the person. And yeah, I missed out on another dozen potential dates, some of which probably would also be good matches, but many surely would not be.
Personally, I've found that women aren't nearly so obsessive about wealth, looks, etc. as is constantly claimed in HN threads. More than anything they seem to want a good partner, somebody who understands them, and is kind, considerate, thoughtful, and interesting.
When I see posts declaring that women are, as a class, only interested in a tiny percentage of men, that suggests to me that those men aren't very good at being kind, considerate, thoughtful, and interesting. Which is too bad, because those are fairly easy things to achieve, and shouldn't be the bar to a relationship.
There are lots and lots of other things that get in the way of relationships. Those are hard things, and require a lot of picking through people to find a pair that is able to work on hard things together. That will fail right off the bat if they can't do the easy things.
Women 4.5% maybe.
This goes along with social norms. Tinder is a hookup app.
1. Men in the top 5% who are seeking commitment-free sex.
2. Women in the top 50% who are seeking commitment-free sex.
If you happen to fall into one of those two groups, online dating is wonderful.
The find someone who would fit in socially with me issues hasn't even been addressed by anyone.
The find a soulmate algo hasn't been written yet.
This is actually sort of how hinge advertises itself. I found the app however to be somewhat jarring when I downloaded it. In my area at least, it seemed to attract a very specific archetype which could be good if you fit into that, but it wasn’t for me.
Real life is better, that is the only solution
A user should be able to tell the app/site "Don't let anyone contact me if they've contacted someone else in the past week".
Of course that would be terrible for ad revenue of the app/site, and there could be some interesting meta-gaming of how users set these rate limits (or try to get around them), but I think it would lead to a more balanced experience over all.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-26/australia-talks-natio...
https://news.stanford.edu/2019/08/21/online-dating-popular-w...
That's from the top few things on a search.
So it's probable that somewhere between 1/3 and 2/5 of couples meet online. Higher than any other single method.
First, you can take away the "online" component. None of the trends OKCupid had blogged about (and were since deleted) were new to my experience. Online magnifies trends through sheer numbers but that's about it.
The men tended to make a lot of requests; the women tended not to. Most of the men were rejected; most of the women were not. Women tended to have more "must haves" than men. And so on and so forth.
It was all very disheartening.
I wonder if I could still pry the data out of dBase III.
Is that in .dbf file format? I happened to be working with that format today, there are 2 up to date and complete libraries for Python for it, it's trivial to get such data out.
In any case, I think the deletion of the old OKCupid statistical analyses is fairly telling: most people do not want to look at the evidence, and ignore it when it goes against the grain. You will get a lot of pushback when you conclude "men have a harder time dating than women" from what you gather.
I've often considering "doing something" with it, but it is likely unethical and, in any case, wouldn't really change any minds.
Match, who owns most of them (okcupid, pof, ...) has all kind of other services they offer: boost, profile makeovers, date coaching, etc...
They limit you and force you to go through profiles 1 by 1 because it benefits them to do so. Because you are more likely to pay to have more access, get boosts, etc. They have optimized the site to make money, so the longer you are single the better.
While you might find someone on the site, I find real life is better, granted with COVID things are a bit rough now.
Nevermind that many people now have overinflated egos and feel they have tons of option. In the case of women I think they forget most of the thristy guys are just looking to hit it and quit it and take it as their value and worth is higher than it really is.
Looking at the pone all three of them exclaimed in joy "OHHHH - He's CUTE!!!".
The guy proceeded to stand her up three times - no showing to planned dates -, said he can't hold a job, his car broke down, and then stood her up again.
I'm quite confident a doormat could be a better person/partner in terms of dependability and respecting someones time.
All three of them are still enthralled with him. Because he's cute.
I also tried being a "marginally" attractive woman one time and the results were stunning. 100's of matches in the first hour. Even creating an account with male pictures easily 5-6x as attractive as me yielded meager results at best (1-2 matches per day).
I will say, these apps work better in large cities. However, the real reason I suspect my account was banned, was from me realizing you get a default "boost" on your account for the first 24-48hrs (seems to be the case both on Tinder and Bumble). If you really want results, just keep deleting and re-creating your account after results start to fall off after a few days.
With these kinds of numbers working against you you need scale on your side or your getting nowhere fast. But if you are able to contact 10k people what comes out of those small percentages are decent numbers.
If you strip away the machine learning/computer/math part, the story is: After 88 first dates, Chris finds someone he thinks he wants to marry. (Article says from the first 55 1st dates -> 3 2nd dates -> 1 3rd date).
It seems possible that going on 88 random dates would lead to a similarly shaped funnel.
While "use math" sounds like smart strategy, many (most probably?) happily married people have not gone on 88 actual first dates.
In northern Italy, Spain, south of France, I got virtually no matches at all. However in the week or so I spent in Scandinavia, almost every woman I swiped right on matched back, many of them messaged as well. I would consider men and women in Scandinavia somewhat more attractive on average than people elsewhere and of course vastly more attractive than I am. Unfortunately I don't speak any Danish!
1. Oh hey [Name] Srry for the late msg [3:24 AM] I just wanted to take initiative since I was the first to match and all..
2. hey! having any good adventures in quarantine?
3. hit me up w a netflix rec [my bio mentioned this]
4. Hi there. From your emojis you say art is helping you get through this. What kind of art are you doing?
5. Hi [Name]
6. Hi [Name]! You seem adventurous
7. why are u holding onto that [mammal in one picture]! that's horrible !
8. Where’s that volcano picture from?
Of these, 3, 4, 7 and 8 are tailored to my profile. 4 is a decent, if unexciting, opener. 8 is pretty dull.
*30's straight white American male without visible issues, based in a major city listing college, a good job, and a female friend-vetted bio and gallery. As other comments suggest, my match rate went from awful to not terrible when I got better pictures.
archive.org to the rescue: https://web.archive.org/web/20191130004809/http://jonmillwar...
It’s better to pick 1-2 people every day you are truly interested in (more than just looks) and put some time into a real message. Not just “what’s up” to 30 girls.
Oh i always kept sending messages to new people no matter how I was doing with someone else on the site. These things would fizzle out suddenly after a few weeks for all sorts of reasons and you could miss out on some great people.
Seems equivalent to the body positivity movement and the anti fat-shaming movement. Incels and other types who find little success with women have a certain right to be frustrated that we just accept other forms of social justice while leaving them out.
Consider that some european states already believe that sex is a transcendental enough experience to call for or implement policies like this: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/germany-sexu...
https://www.mic.com/articles/85201/the-surprising-way-the-ne...
Incels and other folks who are truly marginalized from the dating and/or casual sex market should have have a good reason to long for state assistance. This would be very good for society as a strong reason for radicalization of the youth is shame over being marganalized from the sexual marketplace...
You won't have a right to romantic love, but you'll have a right to become hot enough to qualify for it.
That or sex robots fill the demand. Either way, the economy grows.
That's incorrect. Arranged marriages are forced in some sense, but people do come around to care. Put a man and woman together in captivity and they start caring for each other. That's how human nature is.
And regarding the gunpoint thing, there's something called Bride kidnapping in central asia. Ofcourse those brides cry for first few days or so, but eventually settle in, with equal or probably more happiness than the women of the so called free world.
And this is why real researchers have to deal with a review board.