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Comment by thrwawytiktok | Hacker News Reader

For me tiktok is so depressing. I am single 25+ guy and seeing all those beautiful girls my age or younger makes me so sad. Than I can go to Tinder and match with pretty but not stunning girls and feel like I am getting robbed. And according to my friends I am easily in top 20% of attractiveness. Feel bad for rest of guys

I guess this is life in 21 century. Governed by algorithms and feeling empty inside

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I'm gonna go out on a limb but if this comment is reflective of your attitude, I don't think Tik Tok or algorithms are your biggest problem in establishing relationships with women.

TikTok could be exacerbating this attitude in men who are already predisposed to feeling helpless in their dating efforts. I notice that I feel worse about my appearance when I've spent more time on TikTok. I also notice that I see more extremely conventionally attractive people on TikTok.

I see the issue being more so with dating app algorithms, though. Those companies/algorithms are incentivized to keep men in the dating pool and paying Bumble/Tinder for dates. The best way to do this is to make those men think that they need to pay to win the game and will lose otherwise.

I think this is a huge problem for many people born in the past 30 years. We see all these amazing people on (social) media and compare ourselves to them if they're the same sex, or feel attracted to them. I can only imagine what it does to the body image of 14yo girls. In a somewhat similar vein, boys in puberty masturbate to porn that sets completely unrealistic expectations with regards to their partners and experiences in real life. It is a huge, and I think not often-enough talked about, problem. I hope we will find a solution some day, but I have no idea what it could be.

Really doesn't help that American porn imports a lot of the ideas from Japan, wager its not a coincidence they're dealing with a more severe version of the same "gender gap" issue here amongst people under 35.

> Really doesn't help that American porn imports a lot of the ideas from Japan

What now?

Its not just tech companies fault. There are a lot of fathers that dont teach their sons about sex and relationships. Often they just hope for the best. That is not how you raise a son to be effective in the dating world.

If the fathers are bad at sex and relationships maybe doing nothing and hoping for the best is the right idea?

Evolutionarily, can you consider them a failure though? They've procreated. That checks the box for being "successful" but it doesn't mean your offspring will be.

Fatherhood is way more than transferring genes. That’s the fun part. The real work starts ~ 9 months later.

That is my original argument. The parent to my recent comment is saying not teaching your kids is somehow going to make your kids more successful.

Oh shit, I’m sorry. I didn’t do a very good job that comment.

I mean look at the world. Evolutionarily we've all failed.

Man I feel you!

Don't fall in the trap of social media / social-relationship.

Girls on TikTok are beautiful as actress are beautiful, it takes a tons of effort to look so attractive effortlessly!

Similar deal on tinder, maybe even worse.

Go out and bound with real people in real life! Do the effort of being the first one to reach out.

Feel ok with having friends that are busy and that may not reply immediately.

But meet people outside internet, and you will be happier.

If you're really in the top 20% you should have no problems. Go out and try to game with girls.

The whole point of this post is that this is just TikTok reflecting your own desires back to you. Some part of you wants to obsess, ruminate over and feel bad about digitally enhanced and literally unattainable girls dancing to a camera on the other side of the world, you engage with Tiktok on that content, and then they show you more! The definition of a personal problem. Even though it is quite different than yours, my TikTok feed says a lot of things about me too, to the point that I am reluctant to scroll through it in someone else's presence.

This is partially why I trained my TikTok to be a nature channel, the other part obviously being a desire for exploraion.

High expectations is the key to unhappiness.

These responses get boring pretty quick. None of this is the real world. Start participating in the world off-screen. Start something new, drop bad habits and eventually you will fill that emptiness inside you.

It's the same for everything people get hooked on, it changes you perception but in reality it's all in your mind.

Yeah it is not always simple, we need empathy when dealing with this kind of problem, not brushing off people that may be having difficult times.

It's not "brushing off" to suggest that someone use their phone less. If picking up the phone is an automatic behaviour to fill moments of dullness, then that's a problem.

All the empathy in the world won't save anyone here. On one side of that screen is you, alone. On the other side are an army of designers, developers and behavioural experts whose job it is to keep you looking at the screen for as long as possible.

I don’t disagree with you on a personal level, but it is worth noting that “social disgust” is what has driven down tobacco rates as a population, even if it’s perhaps less effective for any one individual than empathy, etc.

Quit judging partners by looks alone. Looks fade, character that clicks with you likely won't.

The relationships I've had and hate most in my life are almost perfectly inversely proportional to how much time they spent trying to look 'beautiful.'

At the risk of dating myself, can I give you some advice my Dad gave me in my early twenties? Shallowness is highly addictive and the more often you turn to it, the stronger the addiction gets.

Sooner or later we just use algorithms to generate girls for you, so you can have whatever you wish to have.

Women and girls aren’t objects to be generated by an algorithm on a whim to fulfill “whatever wish” a man may have. Women and girls are people.

or a VR headset with an addon - or even better direct stimulation of the brain.

in my past I have dated a women of a wide range of attractiveness and of all those girls the less attractive ones are actually the ones I'd put the most effort into getting back with...

If the girl I'm with is pleasing to look at I'm content with that. How pleasing hardly matters

The difference between pretty and stunning is a lot of work with makeup, lighting, dressing and so on. I dated a model briefly, she could change from and 8 to a 10 depending on how much effort and time she wanted to put in. This is true for guys too.

Yeah I think the infamous Jenna Marbles video where she puts on makeup really was the first time it opened my eyes to it. She goes from average or less to amazing in short time.

Link for those who haven't seen it. Can't believe it's been 11 years...

https://youtu.be/OYpwAtnywTk

Tik Tok also automatically edits your appearance with default filters.

And front-facing cameras now come with face-smoothing features right out of the box. I have a Galaxy A51 (2020 phone) and even with the default settings, the FFC photos are much more generous in smoothing out your skin, than the regular rear camera.

There's an insidious element present even at the optical hardware level: the limited arms-length distance necessitates wide-angle lenses, which exaggerates the foreground elements and caused an uptick of people thinking their noses were bigger than they "actually" are (at typical viewing distances with our own organic eyeballs) [1]. Perhaps the aggressive smoothing is an attempt to rectify this, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's some automatic computational photography pincushion warping to compensate for the larger-than-reality nose effect.

I sometimes ponder over the alternate timeline where front-facing cameras selfie cams were never invented.

[1] https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/3/1/17059566/pla...

Wait what, is this for real? Do phones automatically beautify photos taken with the selfie cam? Why is this legal?! Isn't this a surefire recipe to create a generation of adolescents with insecurity/body issues?

Every time you take a selfie it subtly confronts you with what could be better about you. It's like a fridge that whispers "you're a fatty" every time you open it.

It's real. In some cases it's turned on by default and some are not https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/digital-wellbeing/m... has some information (not affiliated, just found this a while ago) . I can't find any info right now about apple or samsung or any of the other big vendors.

I think the impact is fairly damaging. I'm surrounded by people with body image issues, and the impact their issues are having on them is heartbreaking.

Sadly when I discuss this with some folks from that industry they pushed me to an academic debate about "well everything is post-processed after the sensor anyway".

There's probably some debate to be had again about whether this is creating issues, exacerbating existing body image issues, or actually just not having any impact one way or another. But I find myself believing that it is both creating and exacerbating.

And for a while I thought these were "first world issues" but many, if not most, of my friends are not part of the "first world" and they still have them.

I finally realized it after wondering why I looked 'worse' in photos with friends, when the rear camera is being used to take the picture. That's when I did a rear v front photo comparison.

The face smoothing effect is subtle, but it's definitely there. It's not as extreme as "filters" that can basically change your skin tone and texture.

And it's possible that Samsung does this and not others. My last Samsung phone had this as well, and I usually buy from them.

You should get rid of your smartphone. They're designed to make you depressed so you respond better to ads.

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