Hacker News Reader

Comment by pcbro141 | Hacker News Reader

I went on Tinder again for the first time in several years and they just keep adding new 'Premium' memberships for men to pay for, it's insane. Tinder Plus, Tinder Gold, Tinder Platinum, Tinder Super Like, Tinder Boost, Tinder Super Boost, Tinder Top Picks.

They're making a sh*t ton of money (highest grossing app 2019) off mostly men's desperation (~$1.4 billion in 2019 reportedly), but there's only so much paying for all these boosts and memberships can do when there's just so much more demand for women on there. Tinder is also reportedly as much as 75-85% male.

I hope young men aren't letting their lack of matches on the dating apps lower their self esteem/make them depressed and try approaching in real life (post-pandemic). I know for some the feeling of getting close to 0 matches while others get hundreds a day can be crushing to their mental health. But real life is much better, don't let a lack of online success (what's the point, she wouldn't swipe me online so why should I approach her?) stop you from approaching women in real life .

View on HN

Well... before the internet, if you wanted to meet somebody you probably went to a nightclub, paid $20 to get in, and then $15-$20 per drink so you wouldn't be wandering around without a drink in your hand. A lot of these places had cover charges for men but not for women, so they were making money off mostly men's desperation, too.

> if you wanted to meet somebody you probably went to a nightclub

I'm sure that I have seen somewhere here before some hard statistics on where partners meet in Western countries – maybe someone still has a link. In spite of the existence of known meat markets, those meat markets are not the source of most of the population’s relationships. Instead, people come together through mundane things like friends of friends, people at work, people in the neighbourhood, classmates, etc.

It doesn't seem _mundane_, it seems safe. They meet via social proof rather than via randomness.

This Stanford study (2017) says 39% of hetero couples meet online today. Wow, that's really high if true: https://www.statista.com/chart/20822/way-of-meeting-partner-...

Waste enough time flinging pigeons at the wall and eventually they all end up in holes.

If everyone spends a stupid amount of time with online dating then that's where a lot of the matches are gonna be even if it's not an efficient way to get that end result.

How do you measure efficiency? Isn't "eventually leads to significant other" a relevant metric?

If couples are finding each other online more than they are elsewhere, then online matchmaking is outperforming offline channels.

"Online" is not equivalent to using a dating app.

The club thing is popularized by ads, movies, video clips, etc. It is not as common as TV makes it to be.

College as a Marriage Market https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26923692

Only if by “meet somebody” you mean for casual sex only. If you wanted an actual girlfriend you were (and probably still are) better off meeting through friends or in-person activities that demonstrate actual shared interests beyond getting drunk.

This is a bit old-fashioned...

"Getting drunk with friends" is an in-person activity. The point isn't getting drunk, the point is to socialize with barriers of anxiety and inhibitions lowered.

There are plenty of people who want to ensure physical compatibility for a long term relationship as much as emotional one. Society deems one "shallow", but for many people sex is a crucial aspect of any relationship, and just because they are willing to sleep with someone liberally does not mean they are also not interested in something deeper.

Sorry for the tangent, but can someone elaborate on what it means to be "physically compatible"?

I'm assuming it doesn't mean being capable of basic sexual activity, because that seems like a given for 90% of potential couples. I.e., not something you'd really need to "test".

And if it means "capable of giving each other a really enjoyable sexual experience", I wouldn't think that's something you can falsify in just 1-2 dates. Because there's a learning curve, and that takes (among other things) time and practice.

That answer heavily depends on the individual. Of course, some folks have very specific needs an interests, and need a certain amount of intimacy and comfort before getting there. And they absolutely should!

My broad point was that it's not universal. And for a lot of people "sexual chemistry" is something they want to evaluate from the very beginning. Even they will probably admit that it takes more than 1 or 2 attempts to validate.

People rarely buy a car advertised as "capable of basic transportation" but even so you might be surprised how often it struggles to get into gear or is obnoxiously loud or has unadvertised kinks in its coolant lines, so a test drive is a good idea.

You can't easily tell whether a car will get better or worse the more you drive it, but you can tell when a car is immediately fun to drive. Start with the car that's fun to drive and hope it gets better (with proper care and maintenance) not worse.

> I'm assuming it doesn't mean being capable of basic sexual activity, because that seems like a given for 90% of potential couples

I would suspect that more than 10% of women complain about a male partner being unwilling to perform oral sex on them, or bad at it, even though this might be very important for them and the main way they can orgasm. Men, too, complain about women’s ability or receptiveness to things they need for satisfying sex.

"and then $15-$20 per drink so you wouldn't be wandering around without a drink in your hand"

Wow. This is the first time I've heard anyone express this concern.

It boggles my mind that anyone would care about being seen without a drink in their hand.

What consequences do you imagine will come from that?

Personally I don't think there are consequences, but I just feel way less confident and conspicuous when I don't have a drink in my hand. Like I don't belong somehow. I'm sure it's all in my head, but there it is.

I trick I learned long ago at house parties or BBQs is to drink one beer, then constantly re-fill it with water for the rest of the time. That way I have something to hold onto and a way to entertain myself where there is a lull in conversation or whatever.

Noted!

If you're wandering with a drink in your hand you have plausible deniability that you are just drinking and wandering.

If you are just walking around without a drink, then you're stalking/leering.

Of course it's much more nuanced than that - you can look like a lecherous creep stalking woman with a drink in your hand just as easily.

But that would be the premise: With a drink you don't need anything else to have a good time, you're already "doing something". Without, you're literally trying to fill a void.

"If you're wandering with a drink in your hand you have plausible deniability that you are just drinking and wandering. If you are just walking around without a drink, then you're stalking/leering."

Is this how you think of others, or do you imagine that's how they think of you?

For me, whether or not someone has a drink in their hand, if they're in a party or a club or a bar they're all doing basically the same thing: wandering, listening, looking to meet and talk to people.

I really don't get why holding a drink would change any of that.

Of course everyone is actually there to meet people, but you can't look like that's what you're doing. You have to look like you're doing something else, to lower the stakes of the interactions. Everyone has to look like they're not trying.

You're not fooling anyone.

The intent is not to fool anyone, but to provide a face-saving interpretation when socializing falls flat. You didn't stop in for a conversation that might or might not go well; you stopped in for a drink, and that worked.

Having some other activity involved (having a drink or otherwise) lowers the stakes when interacting with new people.

That cynicism won't help you in life.

Most of human interactions is a facade of some sort. Smalltalk, icebreakers, most of early dating, even most professional conversations.

I know introverts and folks on the spectrum find this intolerable. But it's the foundations of human society.

You can hate it, but hating it will only make you angry. Instead, treat it like a game. There are many games you can play in the world to deal with something painful or frustrating.

If you're stuck trying to fall asleep, you pretend you're counting sheep jumping a fence.

If you're stuck in traffic, you try to guess which lane might be moving faster and make micro optimizations to get their faster.

If you're stuck looking for a life partner in a social setting, the game is act like you don't need one, that your life is fully complete without them, and that you don't care about any one specific given social interaction. Of course, the best way to play that game is to actually live that authentic life. But we all fail at hiding our emotions and true intentions in one way or another. So we play games to camouflage it like holding a drink and acting like that's all that we need to be engaged and interested.

With respect, have you been in many club-like settings yourself? It's very easy to look down upon these ridiculous unwritten and fuzzy social rules (yes, they're ridiculous) from behind a screen, but in the moment, holding that glass of carbonated water with a citrus slice in it suddenly feels a lot more natural.

The charges of the venue itself might be higher for the men but women usually spend a lot more time and money on makeup, care products, hair dressers, nails, clothing, etc.

Also note that when you go with a traditional "man is the provider" model, then being in an environment where men have demonstrated their provider ability is beneficial for both parties. For the women as the options are pre-filtered and for the men as there is less competition noise.

As for dating apps/online dating... if you look at user statistics you see a strong gender imbalance, so apparently men want to use them far more than women do. I've heard this situation expressed in terms of those apps being less appealing to women than they are to men. However, due to the imbalance, the premise of these apps is essentially broken for most male users.

> women usually spend a lot more time and money on makeup, care products, hair dressers, nails, clothing, etc.

I don't think they really do that "to get a man", though

> For the women as the options are pre-filtered and for the men as there is less competition noise

I mostly go into and create circumstances where the same is true of the women, pre-filtered.

One thing I liked about being on my promoter acquaintances' VIP tables is that the women also at the table have been pre-filtered like 4 or 5 times before I ever see them.

1. State department ->

2. Host family (with heavy input choice by the husband) ->

3. Promoter ->

4. Doorman (who would definitely reject guys and gals alike, no matter what name they dropped) ->

5. me.

So yes in that environment, there is also even less competition noise amongst men, because we wouldn't ever fight over a woman given the quantity and only chuckle at our predictably similar preferences if a pattern emerged. But, the selective evolution at play is much more extreme than the general population or the rest of the club.

and yeah, that also allows us to inherit the social validation and assumptions about our ability to provide that many women would also look for, which would be convenient enough to never think about. In quantity, some people are just more forward and assertive than others, so with a lot of women now competing for attention instead of men, this has been a much more optimal use of energy for men. Occasionally relationships are nice too, this wasn't about that.

Male desperation and female vanity seem to be evergreen industries

I think people get this pretty wrong.

As for the drinks, you can get a mineral water with lime if you need a drink in your hand.

The point of the cover charge for men is to: Increase the barrier to entry, keep the riff-raff out and maintain a certain level of male clientele. This improves male to female ratio, improves the likelihood of females attending because they have better environment (you should love ladies night- you are paying for the club/bar to set out the bait) and better options to pick from. The higher the cover the less likely you will get into a fight over talking to the wrong girl.

I used to hate cover charges but then I realized like most people I got it all backwards. It's only desperation if you pay the cover, buy the drinks, only to not take proper advantage of it.

I can assure you the nightclub is not the only venue where you can meet a new life partner. nor is it a place you want to.

> Tinder Plus, Tinder Gold, Tinder Platinum, Tinder Super Like, Tinder Boost, Tinder Super Boost, Tinder Top Picks

I can't tell whether you're joking which in itself is hilarious to me.

I'm dead serious:

https://www.help.tinder.com/hc/en-us/sections/115001014406-P...

https://www.help.tinder.com/hc/en-us/articles/115004487406-T...

It's so pointless for most men anyways, as women compete for the top 10% of men (woman get plenty of options on those platforms anyways) while men might compete for maybe 90% of women. I know my brother would just swipe "yes" to pretty much all women, hoping at least a few women would respond. And I bet he's not alone in doing this.

I'm sure it's just a second language thing, but it's interesting that you use the plural of "men" but the singular "woman". Is that more grammatically appropriate in your first language?

Woman in the above case doesn't at all read correctly. It's simply a clear cut spelling mistake and not really worth further discussion.

> I'm sure it's just a second language thing,

Thanks for your comment and I fixed the typos in my earlier post.

English is indeed not my native language, but I should have noticed this spelling mistake, since I use English most every day.

In my first language (Dutch) there is a clear distinction between singular and plural (men: man - mannen, women: vrouw - vrouwen).

In Tinder, all of the Match Group near monopoly, and similar style apps, this behavior ensures you get less of the people you want to see.

Basically just like in multiplayer game matchmaking, you get matched with people of a similar rank and never even see the people of different ranks. So if you yourself are matching people of lower ranks (ie. less visually attractive people, you know what the consensus is whether that matches your preference or not), that means you yourself have a lower rank and are not even shown to people with higher ranks. You might see higher ranked people, might super like them (like everyone else), might form clever a message because you paid for that feature too, but they will never see your profile.

There are articles claiming the dating apps don't do this kind of ranked matchmaking anymore, but did you know they even used to? so yeah imagine believing them.

These apps are not good for your mental health, and your own behavior influences other people's ranks whether you wanted it to or not. Caveat emptor.

Oh, just wow for that simplicity. Yes, people are one-dimensional, or something. Really, dating is not like ELO-rating, do they really not think people can better be categorised in certain ways of thinking, instead of a one-dimensional ELO-rating? Like, how you view a relationship, just as one example.

Just today I started in the often advised book by Christian Rudder from 2015, from OkCupid. And yes, this one-dimensional thinking seems to be prevalent amongs this kind of people.

I very much prefer a dating website where I don't get the idea that I am an experiment. I want to meet someone with similar views on a relationship, views based on giving, trust, you know, the simple things. People who want other things, like traveling, will probably find similar minded matches.

They do it because the A/B test results also matched their revenue improvement results.

I don't think many people involved actually believe this or actively think this way.

That being said, the result does have some similarity to how the physical world operates in large gatherings like primary schools or military, where people of similar attractiveness and few differences in their supportive ability would congregate. People figure out where they are on the consensus-attractiveness scale and match with people in the same range. This doesn't match how the world outside of that works, and therefore almost all guys and unattractive women have the same result on dating apps. For dating apps they haven't figured out a better solution, and don't want to or need to as it is also a perfect frustration feedback loop for them.

> You might see higher ranked people, might super like them (like everyone else), might form clever a message because you paid for that feature too, but they will never see your profile.

Don’t believe that’s accurate for superlikes. Those tend to get put near the top of the pile.

But, if you are a much lower rank, and use a superlike on someone higher ranked, the likely result is a quick swipe left.

But with a regular swipe you won’t be seen at all.

This isn't actually how it works out though, because average women or below average women can get dozens of matches, not ever receive a message or have the conversation fizzle out quickly from about 80% of those matches, end up on dates with 10 of them, and then have 6-8 of those men just end up ghosting after 1-5 dates or just eventually saying they don't feel a romantic connection after a few months of uncommitted casual sex.

So yes men swipe right on tons of women, but the percentage of women in that pool that those men would date and not just hook up with is much much smaller.

Obviously caveat that men truly at the bottom of the dating pool might behave differently.

I don't have proof of this, but I strongly suspect that either tinder creates fake profiles or they do a piss poor job of removing fake profiles from their site.

why?

Its hard to tell in the US, but it areas with strong sectarian separation, you see profiles that are just "weird" if not fake.

I.e. I'm in Israel. if I see a profile of someone who wrote their name in hebrew (and a jewishy name at that), but it says they went to Al Quds University it just doesn't make sense. Is it possible? sure, i guess, but it would seem more probable that someone just sicked a profile generator choosing random universities in the general area with pictures from the internet.

I stopped paying for Tinder, Bumble, Match, etc. when I discovered that they tell me someone liked my profile just moments after the monthly subscription ends. That way, you're more incentivized to subscribe again, and again, ...

It's a shady business and I'm sure others have noticed it too (esp. on Bumble and Tinder).

The older I get the more I come to realize that Dan Jenkins wisdom about aircraft, watercraft and similar financial shackles was spot on.

Having a good business relationship with Penske takes quite a bit of pressure off when you're shopping for a used box truck if you catch my drift.

I do think 'pay for play' will become more common among younger men (20s/30s as opposed to stereotypically older men) as fewer men get married/have children, still not legal in Canada or the US though. I think with the rise of sexless young men, and decreasing interest in marriage/kids, pay for play could sound like an increasingly attractive option for a lot of young men to get some intimacy.

It’s also convenient, especially for men that regard themselves as part of the MGTOW movement.

Just the fun without any of the shackles. Keep more time available for your own hobbies and interests.

If I’d ever separate from my current girlfriend, I would probably stick with ‘pay for play’ and not bother looking for a new girlfriend.

> if you catch my drift.

Try as I might, I honestly cannot catch your drift on this one.

Can you restate this with a non-car analogy?

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9622552-if-it-flies-floats-...

Yup, that's it.

I thought it was a Dan Jenkins quote.

It certainly feels like seeking.com is the only honest dating app out there...

> men’s desperation

I don’t know, if $10 get me a girlfriend in a week without leaving my couch that’s money well spent.

Regarding the evolution of Tinder, I also despise all the options they added while slowly making the default worse. It got to the point that I don’t use Tinder at all because it’s become nearly useless for me at the moment. Probably because I have better options elsewhere.

So tinder is essentially iPimp at this point, except the women get 0%.

Not sure that's a fair comparison. As far as I can tell, Tinder doesn't physically assault the women who don't match frequently enough.

If you’re in the camp that considers every PIV as rape, sure. Every action can be bent into something ominous-sounding: There’s a small group of people in DC forcing a whole country to follow their rules “or else”.

Women here get to choose, it’s hardly pimping.

I disagree.

If 20 years ago it was rare for romantic/sexual partners to meet online vs in person, the trend is now reversed. We are now in a fully democratized app dating landscape. It therefore stands to reason that the same people who were successful at converting meetings in person would be successful at converting online as the skills are essentially the same.

Depends on the app, but Tinder for example is reportedly up to 80% male. That fact alone condemns most men seeking relationships on there, there's simply not enough women on there for every guy no matter how much 'game' you have.

4:1 is a rather typical night club/bar ratio.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com