Tinder Experiment: Gini coefficient is 0.58 – worse than 95% of global economies

This is a pseudo-science article commonly quoted on incel sites. The "data" is based on claimed interviews with a small group of women.

When you look at studies that used real messaging patterns on a dating website, you can see that people tend to message other people of similar "desirability".

See for example figure 3 in https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/8/eaap9815 : "Both women and men tend to contact others who are ranked somewhat—but not excessively—higher than themselves."

N=27, no mention of geographic diversity, self reported "data" via "interviews" (ie dm-ing while pretending to be a normal user), no actual visibility into who the women were liking.

This entire article is just confirmation bias...

Its pretty much what one would expect. There is a common 4chan "wisdom" that 90% of women want the 10% of men (the "chads") and are rather willing to share that top 10% than settle for anyone of the bottom 90% of men. This seems to support that sentiment with slightly less dramatic numbers but i am also sure the author was biased by these incel communities it would be super interesting to have real scientists do a study on anonymised tinder-internal data. On the other hand i find little evidence for the outcome in general to be false. The only escape route i know of is to focus on more favorable sub communities that a) value monogamy for male and female members and b) have a major second value-system that reduces pool size and reduces community fluidity significantly. Random examples are small local communities like villages, religions, vegan groups. Whenever i observed a really attractive female with a very average partner and had a chance to find out the reason, the answer was never that the partner was rich, but always that they came from a distinct cultural background (religion, rare language or dialect, special geographic region) and valued the shared background higher than other factors.

> Guys, unless you are really hot you are probably better off not wasting your time on Tinder

I have zero experience with Tinder, but a friend of mine has recently been on a Tinder binge (rebound after a bad divorce) and he was getting lucky left and right. He's looks are somewhere around average (definitely not "hot") and he has shitty profile photos to boot. So, the reality must be more complex than the quote above.

Anecdotally , this seems similar to what I observe in the job market (most employers fighting for the top 20% of candidates). Average is out in all aspects of life.

Maybe this is why so many people are unhappy .

This piece is from 2015. Not being on Tinder I have no idea how things have changed since then.

Why is so much of the Internet taken up by mediocre person X complaining that technology Y or cultural practice Z isn't making their lives less mediocre?

I'm old enough to have passed the dating stage of life by the time Tinder came out, so have never used it, but it seems to be doing what it is intended to do. There is a huge difference between the actual finding here that Tinder is mostly useful if you're in the top 20% of most attractive men versus the title that you shouldn't bother if you're not "super hot." A lot more people are in the top 20% than can reasonably be classified as "super hot." Tinder is free to use, and if you never get a single date out of it, at worst you wasted some number of hours looking at pictures of women that you would have otherwise spent doing what? Looking at pictures of women is something I spend a lot of time doing even when I'm not hoping to date any of them.

There isn't any way to express this without being a dick about it, unfortunately, but if people don't find you attractive, there is no technology that can make life easier for you. Tinder isn't making your life suck. The fact that women don't like you is making your life suck.

However, assuming your lack of attractiveness is purely physical, then obviously some method of presenting to other people that entirely relies on them evaluating pictures of you is not likely to work. So do something else. There is no shortcut to presenting your truer, fuller self to people. Online dating platforms initially tried this. eHarmony, the original incarnation of match.com, and of course the initial implementation of OkCupid that relied on extremely detailed personality profiling and a proprietary matching algorithm that was supposed to be all the rage from Harvard math PhDs. They tried digging into very deep evaluations of what makes people compatible and to specifically show those people to each other. To some extent, it worked, but it doesn't scale and it only worked when few people were using it. As soon as you're in a competition with everyone, no one is willing to make detailed assessments of each and every prospect that takes too long when you want to get around to at least looking at all prospects. It's the classic problem of choice paralysis.

I'm sure whoever wrote this is no different. On what basis are you swiping right on women? Either it's because you find them hot, too, or you're just swiping right on everyone in an attempt to game the system, which is forcing the opposite sex to be more selective than they might otherwise be just to not be overwhelmed by more messages than they can possibly ever read.

If it's not working for you, do something else. I don't know what that something else is, but at some point, this incel argument that dating is impossible for some men doesn't seem to be born out by reality. Go to any random WalMart or trailer park and you're going to see the fattest, grossest, most worthless, unemployed, drug addicted, wife-beating men on the planet nonetheless finding people somehow willing to marry and breed with them. Shitty people have had no problem getting laid for as long as humans have existed. Richard Ramirez, who raped children, murdered probably at least 30 people, never showered, and had all of his teeth rotting out, still had women throwing themselves at him. If it's not happening for you, you're either psyching yourself out, not really trying, or setting your sights way too high and you need to recalibrate and be more honest with yourself about the kind of person you should even be trying to attract.

let's put it that way: It is not a surprise to me

While I tend to agree with the results, this study is highly unethical, probably statistically useless and incredibly biased, and the use of ‘females’ vs ‘men’ (as opposed to men/women or male/female) is ... rough, at best.