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Comment by mettamage | Hacker News Reader

Man, am I glad I ignored this kind of stuff and always took shots that I felt were way out of my league when I was in my early twenties.

I approached 5000+ women. The women with the most amazing personalities tended to stick, some of them being models and way out of my league.

Now that I am thinking about it, my chance of anything going somewhere was 0.1%.

People say it’s a numbers game. I’d like to more specifically say: go for volume and then more volume. Meet lots and lots of people in general. Social adventures are more fun than purely looking for love.

My point is: have these low chances (0.1%) been taken into account? I have many stories where people won’t believe it’s true. But when you have a big n, your range gets wider as well.

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I am curious if you mean the "chance of anything" as objective, or subjective number here.

0.1% means, after approaching 5000 women, only 5 (1 in 1000) decided to give you a shot. Or was the number higher? (And you are using 0.1% just as a figure of speech?)

If a woman stuck with you, then they are not "way out of your league" - you are exactly in their league. So many misconceptions here.

My point here, there is some subjective level setting, 0.1%, "out of my league" which may or may not be consistent with actual, hard numbers. It does not matter what you think (it's quite counter productive to overthink): what matters is how it plays out in reality. What is the actual statistic. That's what your chance was, that's what your chance is.

On tinder 0.1% is accurate for many men.

0.1% successful match or successful date?

That seems very very low for matching success.

For a match.

According to this about 15% of men on tinder have 0.1% or lower match rate, and an average man have 1%:

https://paulvanderlaken.com/2019/07/31/two-tinder-experiment...

> Tinder actually can work, but pretty much only if you are an attractive guy

I did actually manage to get close to "attractive guy" for a short period, ie. the sweet spot of decent look, good photos, educated bio, catchy conversation starters, and purchasing the premium subscription. Then at around 200-300 matches and no real life encounters yet... got a nuclear irrevocable ban on the device, email address, and phone number.

I'm close to saying there are really no male winners in online dating. Females notoriously compain all they get is a queue of horny sexual partners willing for short encounter, wouldn't call it a win either.

I am curious what would get you a "nuclear ban" like that.

Didn't do anything more vulgar or pushy than explicitly mentioning sexual intercourse and inivitng for a meeting.

That's so insane.

I had a situation where a women on Tinder started asking very direct questions about my kinks and sexual proclivities within the two or three messages and while it made me feel very uncomfortable because of the way she asked the questions I never once thought that I should report her or that her kinds of communication shouldn't be allowed on an online dating platform.

I'm really disappointed with the direction that match.com has taken the online dating sector.

I personally prefer my online dating experience to be something like the way OKCupid was before it was acquired, that is to a platform more focused on crafting thoughtful profiles engaging in thoughtful conversations online for a while before meetingin real life.

With that said it's really lame how Tinder has changed due to it becoming the face on online dating apps. I hardly used it when it first came out but it was designed and billed as a 'hookup app' and now it's full of people looking for life partners or short-term dating and people who are using the app as it was originally intended for are banned?

Like I totally get the whole issue of 90% of the users being male and mercilessly creeping on the 10% of women but why isn't there room in Match.com's strategy for hookup app like Grindr or the way Tinder used to be?

Why isn't there a mainstream hook-up app where it isn't taboo to be forward about sexual intent?

> Why isn't there a mainstream hook-up app where it isn't taboo to be forward about sexual intent?

I think it's ok to be forward about sexual intent on Tinder. I think there's a big difference between "Hi - I like your pics. Are you DTF?" and some possible messages that are "explicitly mentioning sexual intercourse and iniviting for a meeting" (to quote the message you are responding to).

200-300 matches and no encounters seems very high!

I'd say my match-to-meet ratio is more like 15-30%, and I don't think I'm doing anything amazing. Very average looking, and I just talk to women like humans.

Even my most "I'm not looking for a relationship" profile (I had something like "just out of a long relationship. Looking for something casual." or something like that on my profile) get less matches but the meeting ratio seemed the same.

I was using premium feature to set my location to nearby hotspots with the intent to travel for a meeting. My location at that time was a social desert. This might be a reason for a nil ratio. Anyway feels bad that even at the peak performance still something - the right location - was missing....

That's not what that link says. Here's the original post it was based on: https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-g...

To quote that: "According to this analysis a man of average attractiveness can only expect to be liked by slightly less than 1% of females (0.87%)." (And there is a graph showing that rate extending down to 0.1%).

However that is a like ratio, not a match ratio. Given the way Tinder works this isn't the same thing (Tinder is more likely to present women who have liked you).

0.1% for getting to know someone intimately and then deciding (together) where to go from there.

I am talking 10 years back. I didn’t do online dating.

> I am talking 10 years back. I didn’t do online dating.

That's a different era. 10 years ago 10 minutes spend on OKCupid and then looking out of the window were enough to realise it doesn't make sense. Nowadays you have no choice.

mettamage, thanks for confirming. I suspected as much, but was much more optimistic about the chances.

Keep in mind that people evolved in a completely different environment.

First of all, it was more violent. Go around and chat up 5K women in the stone age, see if you learn something about spear tips. In the modern world I also chatted up a lot of women and it never turned violent.

Second, you couldn't even find 5K women back then. People lived in little tribes that weren't nearly as dense as a modern city, and people tended to not meet people that they didn't meet a lot.

You don't want to get stabbed, and also you don't want to be an outcast within your tribe, because once one woman notices you got no game, she'll tell the rest of your tribe.

So the effect of this is we're all too shy for modern dating. The effective strategy these days is like you say, go and roll the dice over and over.

This costs money and consumes time so is difficult while working full time also one has to be in geographic location where people are curious and willing for "social adventures". In Europe that's maybe a dozen cities in total? So you basically have to sustain yourself in most expensive locations with most brutal housing markets, without income. Then in Europe even within 300km radius there is language barrier and people stereotype heavily based on your ethnicity, quickly grade your desirability, even if it's a native EU ethnicity. In short - it all flows towards hotspots, nothing redistributes of trickles down.

On the other hand, most Europeans speak more than one language precisely because of how close the next country with a different one is.

Why do you estimate only dozen suitable cities?

And why go by number of cities rather than population sizes? Cambridge (UK) was a good place with smart, fun, and adventurous people, and has a population about 27 times smaller than Berlin.

> Europeans speak more than one language

If your skillset is English, German, and French then you're good to go. Over 30 official languages on the continent produce countless subsets though. Polish, Lithuanian, and Hungarian will not get you far even though knowing these three would be an enormous achievement.

> And why go by number of cities rather than population sizes?

> Cambridge (UK)

I mean locations like Amsterdam, Barcelona, Balearic Islands maybe Munich and Madrid, and few more. British society is heavily class-based, not only language is important but accent as well. What chance to socialize I have in Cambridge as a foreigner not studying in or not associated with Oxbrige?

> What chance to socialize I have in Cambridge as a foreigner not studying in or not associated with Oxbrige?

Better than you might think. While I have a middle-class South Coast accent, my degree is from Aberystwyth, my friends and acquaintances in Cambridge include a Hong Kong-Canadian dual-national, an Irish drummer, a Scottish goth, two Germans who were aqui-hired into the same startup as me, and an American-British dual-national whose degree was from Belfast.

Even Cambridge, small as it is, is big enough to not be homogeneous, to support multiple different groups for assorted hobbies and special interests — furries, a maker space, game dev, bouldering, kink, LARP, revolutionary communism, music old and new, comedy, … I never fully explored it before I left for Berlin, despite being there for nearly ten years.

You don’t have to be an Etonian.

(That said, post-Brexit, it will be harder to even get into the U.K. than before if you’re an EU citizen…)

> What chance to socialize I have in Cambridge as a foreigner not studying in or not associated with Oxbrige?

Pretty good. Cambridge is far more than the university (despite being smaller than Oxford), and even the university's reputation as being full of toffs is quite overblown (not that they don't exist, but they're far from the majority). Like most UK cities there's a substantial fraction of immigrans: Brits were actually a minority at one point at the startup I work at.

Being in a relationship also costs money? The money you'd be spending out you'll likely spend in different forms during the relationship.

I wasted a lot of time chasing women and dated many attractive ones, including a few signed models, in my mid 20s and now I’m married to someone I consider hot (plus a ton other great qualities that models often lack). I think wasted a lot of time. I don’t think you’re wrong at all but this is PUA-centric life advice. If your goal is to have sex with beautiful women, sure, it’s possible (for more than just rich, established, or extremely good looking men), and after great effort and sinking a lot of time in, you can accomplish that and brag to the internet how successful you are.

But, none of that negates what the poster above you is saying. If you spend your younger years focusing on yourself and your career and gaining meaningful life experience instead of chasing thousands of women, that problem should solve itself. I can’t imagine any woman that would make a non-miserable partner would be attracted to the Tucker Max type - although sadly this is what our culture is heading towards.

I think both are true, if you are accomplished, but know no woman (n=0), your chances of finding a suitable partner are very low, same for if you are full of problems but have a big n.

Tbh I don't think this is particularly PUA advice. Clearly if you know more woman your chances of finding one you like who likes you back are higher than if you just wait for someone to present herself to you (which is very unlikely as a man particularly).

> Social adventures are more fun than purely looking for love.

Eh, that's subjective. Personally I rather dislike 'social adventures'. It's probably why I stopped dating relatively early. Eventually I met someone through a friend, but had it come to it I was prepared to be alone rather than engage in what constitutes the modern dating experience.

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