Hacker News Reader

Comment by BitwiseFool | Hacker News Reader

You also have the problem of writing dozens and dozens of seemingly engaging and individualized messages only to get no response back. So eventually, you start putting less and less effort into each message and even start to repeat old ones. It's a sad fact of life.

View on HN

When I was dating I was fortunate to have a large enough match pool to experiment with this. The result: a stupid copy-pasted throwaway line or emoji had roughly the same results as a message I put some thought into. The second category got a few more responses but in terms of conversion to an actual date there wasn't an appreciable difference.

The takeaway for me is profile pictures, physical appearance and class/status signifiers (vacations, hobbies, nice things in/around the picture) were all that mattered and if someone was sold on that all you really had to do was not get in your own way by saying something stupid.

> You also have the problem of writing dozens and dozens of seemingly engaging and individualized messages only to get no response back.

To use a property analogy: if I am not the highest offer on a house, I probably won't get it. Doesn't matter if I have a trust fund or work for minimum wage (effort put into the offer) my offer wasn't accepted.

Similarly if I'm the seller, I can decide "No, actually I don't want to sell my house to BlackRock, I'd rather sell it to this young family" and that's entirely my choice. This choice might leave money on the table, but at least I get the warm fuzzy feels inside for doing what I think is best.

What you describe sounds like you want some kind of "thank you for putting in some effort" but you decide the amount of effort to invest, the other party owes you nothing.

You're right, the ideal solution is to keep putting in the effort to be sincere and engaging. I certainly don't believe I am entitled to a response. I'm just trying to convey how demoralizing it can be to put your best foot forward so many times only for nothing to come from it. I think it's human nature to be tempted to slack when your big efforts have had so little payoff.

I assure you, women feel the same way. It's incredibly demoralizing to receive hundreds of swipes, of which the vast majority produce only a copypaste first message. Or worse, "DTF?", of which they'll see plenty.

It's hard to say which is worse: the messages that say that they haven't put any thought into you at all, or the messages that say they have exactly one thought about you -- and everybody else.

Everybody gets poor payoff percentages. You play if you think the game is worth the candle.

Can't the woman just pick someone to talk to and then get a real response most of the time? Even if it's 10% that's really easy to get.

While if a guy wants a proper conversation... get lucky punk?

All day can say is I never had any problems finding a woman to talk to. It wasn't hard. There are lots of fish in that sea. All I had to do was be thoughtful, polite, and interesting.

I'm told it's different in other places but I suspect that has more to do with the men than the women.

Well if it's not hard then that invalidates the conversation chain I was replying to.

You're saying the "it's not hard" situation is similarly demoralizing to what women face? Sure I guess.

But BitwiseFool was describing a situation where it's extremely hard to get a reply, and that is much more demoralizing because there's no easy fix.

I never found it hard to get a reply. I don't really know what I was doing right that everyone else seems to be doing wrong. I'm neither excessively handsome nor wealthy.

My suspicion is that I worked to make myself interesting, and worth conversing with. And I see a lot of comments here that betray a deep distrust of women, with a ton of stereotyping and lack of empathy. I hear tons of complaints from women about men's profiles, and it never has to do with looks or money.

I've sometimes thought of opening a dating profile consultancy. I may be completely off base, but I believe that in a lot of cases, men can do better without changing jobs or their appearance. And my first piece of free advice is that if you're blaming women, women aren't going to like you.

> My suspicion is that I worked to make myself interesting, and worth conversing with.

In what sort of ways are you “ interesting”? Genuinely curious. FWIW most advice I’ve seen regarding advice for dating profiles (particularly for guys) involves removing anything that might signify personality and to make it as formulaic as possible. Your pictures all have to be the right things, the profile description can’t be too short or too long, and can only say certain things, etc. I think on these sort of apps it’s almost seen as positive to be as basic as possible. Even I find myself suspicious of profiles that say to much or try to stand out now.

The other piece of advice I see almost always has to do with quality of pictures, which is understandable, but let’s be real, if I had the kind of life where I was happy all the time, doing cool things and taking pictures with friends, I probably wouldn’t need to be on this app ;)

I'm sure there are some women who want blank slates for men, but not the type of women I like. I like to post vacation and activity pictures, and use the text to suggest that I've got stories to share on our first date.

So many women I've met complain that they start the date with "so tell me about yourself" and get, "uh I dunno. I like to play video games." (Not that there's anything wrong with video games but at least have some stories to tell. Maybe she'll also play. Jackpot. Unless you start telling her she's not a real games.)

I do lots of things. I act, i juggle, i run marathons. The tricky part is phrasing it in a way that doesn't come off as "I'm too cool an expect you to shut up and listen."

That is of course just what works for me, and for the kind of women I like. (Talking about dating sites is a really easy topic of conversation on a first date, so I hear a lot.)

If they're telling you to be dull, maybe that works for other men with other women. But to me it sounds like a recipe for a boring date.

I try to go in with the attitude that if we do nothing more than spend a few minutes chatting nicely over coffee, it will have been fun and worth my time. That kind of attitude seems best for making myself seem worthwhile and fun, so that she wants more.

Sure, I wasn’t commenting on the preferences of women, but more of the culture of dating apps, which seem to reduce people to some photos and a few snippets of text. From what I hear women have their own crap to put up with on those platforms.

I think you're being a bit unfair. The parent comment describes a hardship, investing time, effort, and some sense of self-worth and seeing it vanish into nothing, and your response makes the parent seem entitled. "Like you want some kind of 'thank you for putting in some effort.'

If someone told you they were having a hard time buying a house and all their offers were silently rejected replying "The sellers owe you nothing" might be true, but it is beside the point.

> the other party owes you nothing.

No, that's an aberration perpetrated by software. The same problem has manifested in interviewing. Maybe you're thinking of "nobody owes you sex" instead?

If you greet a person in real life or over a call and they intentionally ignore you, they are being rude. Obviously, if you're being rude first, that's different. They can say "hey" back, or "sorry, I'm not interested" or "kind of busy right now, can we pick this up later?" There are plenty of options.

I understand that the way these apps are set up, responding like this isn't a winning strategy. Despite what the Internet would have you believe, there is a minimum social bar when there's a human on the other end of a comm channel.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com