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Comment by saberience | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain the seeming asymmetry between men's and women's experiences in online dating?

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?

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Yes, it's long been known in scurrilous "manosphere" sections of the internet that "80% of the women go for 20% of the men" on dating apps (the 80/20 rule is an oft-quoted one but intended probably more as illustrative than researched).

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.

I think the main problem is that the prime selection criterion for most women is not looks. For women, online dating has a rather small signal to noise ratio. So then they are left with choosing the top % based on looks.

>I think the main problem is that the prime selection criterion for most women is not looks.

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.

It seems natural that the women would be highly selective as they have a huge number of potential matches to sift through before choosing.

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.

It's not like there are 10 boys born per every girl, so somewhere along the way the women are filtering out.

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.

Women have to deal with near-constant harassment on dating apps. That's a pretty big disincentive to stay active on an app.

I’d say most women know that dating sites are mostly a cesspool of dickpics and stupid pick up lines and the chances of having an actual interesting conversation is pretty small. So most likely we prefer exhausting all other options before resorting to dating sites.

There are definitely different downsides for women, undoubtedly including those examples you give - especially when they are looking for a serious relationship, but my observations above are strictly on the number imbalance once on the dating site.

How have you been able to count the number of men and women on dating apps?

Only when the databases get leaked sadly. It's hopefully somewhat atypical, but I remember the Ashley Madison dump had something like 100 men per 1 woman once you filtered out the bot accounts.

I can't imagine AM would be representative of most dating sites. OkCupid has claimed that their user base had a roughly even gender split, depending on city and age group. This is immaterial though. Take a group of 100 men and 100 women, and 80 of the women will go for 20 of the men, making it seem imbalanced when it's not.

Do you feel that only women are pursuing the most attractive options?

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.

> Maybe a better question is: why are there so many more men than women on dating services?

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.

In the olden days, the ratio in bars was the same.

An interesting corollary of this is that a lot of research has indicated that in societies with polyamory, the profusion of unmatched men actually destabilises society, leading to more frequent civil war.

https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2017/12/19/the-...

At some point when going out isn't any fun there's not much to do but polish your rifle and your gun.

What might stabilize is it legalized sex work.

It's legal if you have the will. Most men don't want to meet prostitute. I think they have the desire to be desired, for what they are, and not for their wallet.

Polyamory is fairly rare in human societies, the link you pasted talks about polygamy. Polygyny has been practiced in a few societies and the numbers would be too few to conclude anything.

Honestly, this is what concerns me most about China. There are literally 30 million more men than women. That's equivalent to the entire population of a mid-size country who will never marry. Add in unemployment and drugs, and you get an extremely combustible situation.

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 culture is supporting that at the moment. Zoom back to the 1960's free love culture and the 'alpha' males are washed out or replaced by hippies.

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.

Don't forget that most hippies were alpha males, or at least from well off families. The free love culture passed my parents by as they were too busy making a living.

Your parents let it go by and it doesn't prove the rule.

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.

> Zoom back to the 1960's free love culture and the 'alpha' males are washed out or replaced by hippies.

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.

Progressive guys conserve themselves. What else is new. The 80/20 hits across demographics with cultural highlights. The world is too narrow atm.

> 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.

Clearly that sort of behavior is just further feeding into the dynamic.

Women getting flooded with bad matches hurts everyone.

> 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?

Yes, basically massive "wealth inequality" among men as expressed by Gini coefficient: https://qz.com/1051462/these-statistics-show-why-its-so-hard...

> Can someone explain the seeming asymmetry between men's and women's experiences in online dating?

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.

Women don't use dating apps as much because they can't vet the candidate through social circles first. Men don't understand socially matching are more important compared to looks within a few points.

Some of the absolute BEST women to date (Personality, Character, Career, Family, Attractiveness) that I know, always typically prefer dating through social circles. Almost all of the women I know, especially women that are extremely attractive, with average or below average attractive partners, are through social circles. A friend of a friend. These are men that typically receive near zero likes on online dating platforms, yet, in the real world, can do extremely well with women because of their character (Charming, Funny) etc. This I know Anecdotally of course.

Yeah this is a good point. All these comments about dating sites are true, and they really suck. Which is a great reason to get off dating sites if you can. They make every problem with dating much worse.

Outside them the problems aren't quite as bad.

I think this, in part explains why some people find “real life” as despairing as online. I haven’t had a “social circle since HS”.

> 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?

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?

More to the point I think the population of men on those services grossly outweighs the population of women. The women have to be selective because they don't have time to engage with each of the hundreds of responses they get.

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.

Alternatively, the site could limit the number of introductions that users could send per month. For example, if there were 10 men for every 1 woman, but men could only contact one woman per month (but women could contact a new man every day), women might be willing to give those introductions more consideration.

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.

Maybe, but I think that would result in the supermodel looking ones still getting clobbered with requests while the majority of women get nothing.

Right, but isn't that the current situation for men?

If men had the choice of messaging one supermodel-looking woman per month (with no guarantee of a reply) or, say, four better-than-average-looking women, I think eventually they would learn to be more realistic in who they approach.

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).

Bumble's whole premise is that (for heterosexual matches at least) women must send the first message.

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.

Personally, I've been struck by the overwhelming majority of women who match and don't actually send that first message. Matches last at most 48 hours - message or lose them.

I met my now-wife through online dating, and used online dating over a year. I'll share my experience before my theory.

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.

> 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.

>Every time I hear a guy complaining about how bad their online dating experience is I ask to see their pictures.

How often are you having these conversations?

During the pandemic: alarmingly often.

> 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.

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.

Without knowing what apps you're talking about, I used OkCupid and PlentyOfFish. It's only been 3 years, I'm sure they still allow direct messaging

OKCupid moved to being swipe-based several years ago.

They had matches, and you could still message. I don't imagine the app version was much different than the web version in that respect and I used the latter.

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.

Men and women don't have equivalent interest. Women are really only interested in men that are well above average.

I don't think that's necessarily true. The economics of online dating seem fairly straightforward. Given a pool of men that are willing to speak to them, women will focus their attention on the highest value men in that pool. Unfortunately for men, other men set their "value floor" for women well below their estimation of themselves, leading average men to entertain conversations with below average women, whereas below average women are still only interested in engaging with average or higher men.

There are so many men who employ a strategy of just bombarding every single woman on the platform. This results in women getting dozens to hundreds of extremely low quality matches for every quality match. If this somehow doesn't cause the woman to just give up immediately, then she's at most going to only look at most at a dozen or so of those matches before she gives up, and they're almost all going to all be garbage.

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.

The point in discussion is what is a quality message? And what is considered garbage? While men think they are unattractive when they don't get matches in dating apps, women think they mencare unattractive when they can't match the best looking guys in the app.

Do most women on online dating sites care about the quality of a message? And even if they do, how much quality does a man need to invest in drafting a message before he hits the point of diminishing returns?

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.

Thanks to evolution, it's in the psyche of both men and women that the men compete with each other for the attention of the women. This plays out in the dating forum, both online and offline. The author understood this, apparently explicitly, and took the time to successfully craft a 'Very, very creative' initial message to the most attractive account he could find in 3 minutes.

a.k.a the tinder jesters. I think it takes loosing a big dump of self esteem to "compete" for attention in this way.

>Can someone explain the seeming asymmetry between men's and women's experiences in online dating?

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.

Men swipe more = Women get far more choices.

The natural inclination based on this alone would be to be picky.

This will then set up other second order and third order effects.

Because the active users are almost all male.

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