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Comment by pcbro141 | Hacker News Reader

Interesting times ahead. Especially for Gen Z and younger, who rely heavily on dating apps instead of going out to meet new potential partners. Dating apps which are highly ineffective at actually generating relationships for most people (particularly for straight males). I predict Gen Z birth rate will be less than 1 per woman, but this might not be a problem for Western economies for now as Western countries can just increase immigration.

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> Dating apps which are highly ineffective at actually generating relationships for most people (particularly for straight males).

I didn’t really find that’s the case. I think that’s the perception, but it wasn’t that hard to meet nice, educated people looking for actual relationships on the various dating apps I once used. The failure rate has got to be much less than the failure rate out of all the potential partners one meets naturally.

If anything, dating apps are equalizers. They don’t require you to break into a clique in any activity where you might try to naturally meet people.

The incentive for dating apps is towards one night stands. If a relationship is formed on their platform they lose 2 customers and their revenue.

That's not at all true for all dating apps and their users. I used apps nearly exclusively geared towards and users who were looking for standard dates and relationships with long term horizons. The model for these apps is to get new or returning users under subscription. Apps and/or users targeting the short term are easily avoided.

Birth rates have been falling for decades at this point. Pretty much since the industrial revolution. Dating apps are new. Hard to blame birth rates on them.

I like how gender is now considered a spectrum

Eventually western countries will be taken over by Muslims and non white Christians and we will have normal social structures again.

This is not a pejorative. As an immigrant, I think this will be great.

> we will have normal social structures again.

Does this basically translate to, "we'll judge the shit out of any non-traditional family again"?

I'm not sure what a 'non-traditional' family is. It has nothing to do with judgement, just a return to a culture that produces success, including in the form of a culture that can reproduce itself. Cultures that fail to do such things and transmit their beliefs on to the next generation are doomed to fail, which is why the vast majority of extant cultures that have survived several thousands of years, typically mainly celebrate the kinds of families naturally lead to children and provide a proper environment for child-rearing.

You can argue whether it's good or bad. Natural selection has no moral value attached to it. It's a simple matter of survival.

> we will have normal social structures again.

What do you consider "normal"?

Monogamous marriage between a man and a woman is historically far and away most common social structure around the world, although obviously there is a vast amount of variety.

Okay, but we still have monogamous long-term relationships between straight men and women as the norm, in terms of what is most common. Those haven't gone away.

We've just become more accepting of people who don't fit the standard mold. So it sounds like anyone clamoring for a return to historical norms is actually clamoring for a return to bigotry: returning to treating gay people like garbage, for example, and denying their relationships legal rights.

> returning to treating gay people like garbage, for example, and denying their relationships legal rights.

A lot of what gay people claim is treating them 'like garbage' is just the natural limitation of a homosexual relationship.

For example, not being able to rent a womb is not being treated like garbage. No one has been allowed to do that for most of history, and most straight people can't do that. Not being allowed to rent wombs is just not being allowed to being what amounts to a slaveholder.

Monogamous for whom? Muslims hardly revere monogamy, though they draw the line at tetragamy for most.

While Islam permits up to four wives, the vast majority of Muslim men have only one.

For the vast majority of history, the vast majority of muslim men have only had at most one wife.

I'm doubtful of that. Homosexuality was very normalized in the ancient western world, but it looked very different then modern conceptions.

How many people do you know recently that used marriage to secure an economic/political alliance? Pretty common among elites historically, almost unheard of today.

> I'm doubtful of that. Homosexuality was very normalized in the ancient western world, but it looked very different then modern conceptions.

Indeed... most of what modern day LGBTQ+ activists conceive of as homosexuality in the ancient world is just close male friendship.

Half the things people claim were instances of 'homosexuality' in ancient literature are just men fooling around. There are very few instances of men (or women) actually forming stable social structures with commitment in the absence of marriage to the opposite sex.

Ultimately, our confusion in this regard is due to the fact that so few men have actual friends. I sometimes go out 1-on-1 with my male friends to restaurants (often fancy ones). It's a guys night. We're all married with kids. And yet, oftentimes, people will think we're dating or something. It's weird. FFS, I went with my father to a nice restaurant, and they thought we were married. Something has gone very wrong with how we conceive of men being friends, which makes sense, because so few men have any (which probably explains the rise of homosexuality as well).

As a white Christian male, I’ve often had the thought that Hispanic immigration into the US, being largely practicing Catholics, could very well trigger a turn toward more traditional values in this country.

I’m all for that :)

Personally I am hopeing for nano-tech and neovictorians, but that is just me.

We can make marriage attractive again, if we make divoce very, very hard or very, very easy. What we have now is in between and that helps nobody.

Divorce can't be easy because it often involves children, which are not easy. They are the reality check on life.

We can make it as easy as what happens when you aren't married and split up.

Right, we should do something like require fathers to pay support to their children, and become involved in visitation rights should the parties request it.

I don't understand what you thinks happens in divorce that's so special. If an unmarried father and mother have children, then any dispute they may have regarding children that can be taken to court in a marriage can also happen to them.

I hope very much that doesn’t happen. That’s not pejorative.

I understand that white people would find this scary, and I honest to goodness hope that the majority of white people in this country go back to having some semblance of a successful culture, but I don't see that happening in the white culture at large, so we will have to take what we get.

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