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I did appreciate on Bumble that women got to realize that writing that first message wasn't easy. I always carefully crafted my first message on any site, and it is disheartening to get no reply to that.

(Some of it, I think, is Tinder et al showing me profiles that it knew perfectly well were defunct. They're hoping to attract the person back, but it's a very dark pattern.)

I did find that the vast majority of women on Bumble wrote tolerable first messages. Some were better than "hi" but nonetheless didn't say much, which I interpreted as "OK, you can go ahead and write the first message." That rarely turned out well, but at least I knew the account wasn't dead and not a bot (at least, probably not).

I met a lot of great women on both Bumble and Tinder, leading to relationships everywhere from one-night stands to decade-long romances. I don't think it's easy for either men or women, albeit in different ways. It's very easy to make the mistake that thinking that if X is hard for me then X must be the only important thing, and that leads to a lot of ill will.

> Women, in general, don't really have to try to get solicitations.

Women put in high effort up front and lower effort per solicitation. Men put in lower effort up front and more effort per solicitation. Women's approach scales better, though they also bear the safety risks.

> those that feel the system is tilted against them in general don't understand that it's just them

Absolutely. Imagine if dating apps showed users their rating!

> At Tinder headquarters, I ask them if the data they’re about to show me will scar my ego. The beauty of Tinder, after all, is that rejection has been removed entirely from the process. Now, in an instant, I’d learn exactly how I ranked on Tinder. Then Solli-Nowlan revealed my score. “It’s 946,” he said. What does that mean? “It’s on the upper end of average.” It’s a vague number to process, but I knew I didn’t like hearing it. Something about “upper end of average” didn’t exactly do wonders for my ego. https://www.fastcompany.com/3054871/whats-your-tinder-score-...

On the other hand, showing your rating could be good IF coupled with actionable ways to improve it. Credit Karma but for Tinder anyone?

> I don't think dating apps/sites favor either sex more so than dating in general does.

It's a force multiplier and the dynamics that are already present in dating in general get reinforced. So you end up with 99% of the women competing for the top 1% males and the remaining 99% males competing for nothing at all because all their advances get ignored.

It's just the result of our reproductive strategies exerting an incredible influence on our behavior, more so than we personally realize.

I think you're right about dating apps not really favoring either gender. Hiring is the first thing I think of when reading about dating apps. There's just a very strong natural imbalance.

Dating apps are especially good at making people not have to face their shortcomings, i.e. I don't have to fix my shortcomings, because with a large enough pool there's going to be someone broken in the right way to accommodate me. Maybe that's rational, or maybe it's not, it really depends on expectations.

Counter intuitively, accepting that we're just stupid hairless apes makes me believe we're rational. We're not failing to find anything meaningful; we're not interested or looking.

We have our moments. But relying on rationality is an assumption that will bite you in the ass every time. Just look at markets, even when there's a clearly superior option, there's been plenty of times the inferior product wins.

Often because that inferior product manages to exploit our irrational selves either intentionally or unintentionally.

> Hiring is the first thing I think of when reading about dating apps

I agree for a different reason. The circus show about hiring is mostly bullshit. You could probably randomly select qualified candidates and turn out just fine.

Likewise with dating, ordering up another human like a sandwich creates a weird dynamic designed to keep you shopping — you stop paying when you meet someone.

If you paired 10 pairs of average people at random and had them doing some task that took them a couple of weeks, half would be “together” at some level by the end.

Doing things together in groups, which leads to almost by definition having to build relationships, including romantic, seems like the best way, and that's how things were before Internet. Some commenters above hit kind of the same notes, and I wonder, maybe an app that builds a mixed group of men and women to do some activity together offline, would result in better outcomes. Of course this will be gamed in no time by the bad intentioned. I think the truth is, that finding a mate has always been a crapshot, and largely random, through out history of life itself. Internet does not seem very successful as a mating platform, I have never been a user of dating apps so what would I know, but maybe on average it's just a little better than randomly stumbling on potential life partners. Still, going out and meeting people instead of staring in screens feels more natural to me.