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Comment by k-mcgrady | Hacker News Reader

Thousands of matches isn’t a good thing. If you ever have the opportunity ask a female friend to show you the kind of messages they get on dating apps. They’re pretty appalling. It genuinely worries me that there are so many creeps out there. The men you know may not be getting many matches but at least the ones they get are more than likely from relatively normal people. If I had to sort through the garbage women do on dating apps I wouldn’t be on them.

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But surely you can see how hopeless dating feels for many men when they swipe right on hundreds of women and get 0 matches? I'm not saying they aren't getting many — they're getting none (I know you just have my word on this, but trust me when I say they are not ugly or fat or anything, just nonwhite and without high paying jobs, but otherwise average-looking guys who have dated successfully in the past).

The situation isn't great on either side, but plenty of statistics show it's mostly women having sex off these apps, so clearly there is an actual imbalance.

And you can't write off the sheer hopelessness and isolation that the thought "there's not a single woman out there who would date me" induces in young men. I'm sure it's not fun for women but it is absolutely __brutal__ for many men.

> nonwhite

Uh, trust me, white men can easily accumulate zero matches too.

Oh certainly. Their experience is that there’s a huge racial factor in how many matches they get (e.g. having an Indian name seems to be a death sentence) — I was just reporting their experience and didn’t mean to imply anything else!

> Thousands of matches isn’t a good thing.

He didn't say it was, he said it was preferable to having no matches.

I recall seeing the OkCupid stats once (okstats?). The numbers pretty much said that although women were getting most of the messages, they were all only responding to the same 10% of males, while most men were sending messages to almost all the women.

You've pretty much got 80% of the women competing for the top 10% of the males.

That 80% number might give a false hope to readers. In fact it's 100%, but the bottom 20% give up without trying because they correctly assess their chances.

If thousands of matches are not a good thing, why keep swiping? They could choose instead to talk to the matches they already have. The matches they have are already the ones they've screened for.

It's just numbers game. If you're interested in quick sex and you can send messages to dozens on women with very little effort, you do it. If just one percent signals interest, you already have a win.

Why invest more time and energy than absolutely necessary?

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