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Comment by armchairhacker | Hacker News Reader

Dating apps are so bad, the ratio of men:women matches would impress a red-pilled 4channer.

Most men get somewhere like 0-4 matches a week and most women get somewhere like 100-1000. That’s a 25x difference best-case scenario and often it’s over 100x. Which is kind of insane considering there are about 50/50 men to women ratio in real life.

People say “the 20% top men get 80% of matches” but it’s worse than that. The 20% top men may get something reasonable like 3-4 matches a day, but your average women is getting something crazy like 1 match every 15 minutes.

Because a lot of men like to swipe right on nearly everyone and buy passes which get them unlimited swipes. And most women get extremely choosy and swipe right on only the super handsome nearly-perfect men, but you can’t even blame them when they have literally 1,000 matches.

On top of that, the bios suck. Even on Hinge. You can’t base someone off of 6 pictures and 3 quotes. If you’re not judging them on plain attractiveness / photogenics, you’re judging them on one random quote or minor character trait you relate to.

Online dating sucks. You’re much better off trying to meet people in real-life situations, where there is a more reasonable ratio of men and women, you can learn more about people then their favorite vacation spots, and the people have a lot more time to learn more about you too.

Or, you can try meeting people online but not in a surface-level dating-oriented site. Plenty of people formed couples through discord or their favorite video games. Unfortunately my understanding is that most online places are still male-dominated, but hopefully that’s changing as we are becoming a more tech-oriented and women-inclusive society.

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Dating does suck! Though I'm not sure that dating apps suck more than what they replaced - pubs and bars really. I'm old enough to have dated before apps were the default and it wasn't exactly a less superficial time.

>it wasn't exactly a less superficial time.

Bars do work way better due to 'beer goggles' (or cocktails/vodka). Usually there are other activities available, e.g. dancing/snacks

> Bars do work way better

Bars are great if you want to meet bargoing people. Personally, it seems more like selecting for an alcoholic, although that might say more about me than the people I meet at bars?

I am not sure I would recommend going to bars to find a partner.

I think that as an average, alcoholics would rather not waste their money paying for alcohol in bars. Drinking cheap is more important than socializing fore people with an actual addiction.

>selecting for an alcoholic

That's really stretching it, having any disdain for any alcohol consumption. Having a drink in a bar to decompress after work is hardly being an alcoholic.

Settle down - I didn’t disdain - I had hoped the tongue-in-cheek was somewhat obvious.

I am talking about my opinion, in my country, at my age, at the bars I go to, for my definition of alcoholic.

My personal experience with bars is the ratio still isn't great at face-value (counting men vs women) and even worse when you dive deeper to consider the girls-night-out groups with women interested exclusively at spending time with their friends rather than looking for their partner (think bachelorette parties with half the girls in stable relationships).

Men (and women?) in IRL situations must overcome the barrier of: "is this person single or is their bf at home or in the bathroom"? Whereas dating apps provide an explicit context as to why both people are there.

I think you don't understand that you cannot escape the consequences of human mating behavior by making dating online to offline. 80% of women will prefer top 20% of men. You can go to bar and get some beer goggles for a while, but it will wear down eventually. In Western world, 30% of the couples end up in affairs and 50% marriages end up in divorce. Ask why.

In nonwestern countries, polygamy is acceptable.

I think it's obvious that people have preferences, and will seek partners that match those preferences better. But even if that's true, people have different preferences. People don't adhere to some universal rating system.

>Ask why.

Why?

Because of the biological asymmetry between the sexes. A man can have thousands of children, and women can only have a small amount. It's what drives natural selection and evolution of the species. Some part of the men are supposed to get rejected.

I know this will be hard to swallow for a lot: No polygamy is not stable and that is why it is outlawed in a lot of countries. Consider that men physiologically have a drive to produce wealth and "grow" to attract and sustain a family. (Nations I hear want that.)

What do you think throughout history the men that could not find a match did? They joined wars, became vagabonds, thieves, joined piracy or similar and went to forcefully acquire wealth and/or women (and rape). Needless to say a peaceful nation does not want that. Men are going to fight the rejection tooth and nail (a trait evolved in a similar fashion).

I tend to agree with you that nations are essentially trying to optimize for wealth under their jurisdiction, but I don't think that _necessarily_ tells you anything about how they'll treat polygyny.

But this is natural because men like almost everyone while women like maybe a few men per day. It's not because their ratio is wildly out of balance, here in EU it is close to 50/50 and 60/40 in the U.S. In some countries like Peru, Tinder has considerably more women than men, and yet, men still get very few likes vs women there. It's not about numbers, it's about behaviour. It's never difficult for a woman to get laid vs man.

It’s not natural because if you go to a bar or other in person event, the dynamics are much less gender-skewed.

Aren't you comparing the ratio of males and females in the bar to the ratio of matches/messages for males and females on the apps? I'd guess males are initiating contact more than females in bars as well, unless things have changed?

No. I am comparing matches on app with matches at a bar.

Both cases would be gender-skewed. But to have the bar scenario be as skewed as the app, one man would go home with all the women in the bar. This is not the case in reality.

There are physical limits that prevent skews from being as extreme as in apps.

Don’t think that’s true. If the median man and woman went to the bar for the purpose of having sex that night the woman would be way more successful.

For most men if they are single and a reasonable attractive woman they have never met before walk up to them on the street and ask if she can sleep with them the man would think of course what is the catch, in the opposite case it would be what a creep.

It’s possible this is all cultural/social factors. But they are real.

There is still a gender-skew in the bar scenario, but less extreme as in the app.

If bar scenario had same gender skew as app, one man would go home with all the women in the bar that night.

There are physical limits that prevent this from happening. When a man is paired up with a woman in the bar, the man must ditch potential opportunities from other women in the bar.

>Don’t think that’s true. If the median man and woman went to the bar for the purpose of having sex that night the woman would be way more successful.

The men would be more successful, too if they would care less about the sex or gender of their sex partner. I heard gay bars have a very high rate of success.

lol that’s true, I guess most men can get on grinder and find a partner if they just want sex

Maybe for the same reason as why getting freelance gigs is much easier when meeting clients in-person vs on Upwork?

>It’s not natural because if you go to a bar or other in person event, the dynamics are much less gender-skewed.

Many bars are in fact men clubs where men go to discuss stuff with each other. AT least, here, in Europe.

Also, in my country, I am not aware of "dating bars". Sure there are many bars full of both sexes, sometimes people begin relations or have sex with persons they've met at the bar, but that is not very common because people don't go to a bar with the expectation to have sex or begin a relation, instead they go to a bar to have some time with their friends.

Dancing clubs are a bit different, for people between 18 and 30 as some people go there with the expectation to find sex or a relation.

I am not sure how things are in US.

>It's never difficult for a woman to get laid vs man.

True and that's an evolutionary trait. Women evolved to find someone help them bring healthy offspring with good genes and help them care for their offspring while men evolved to spread their DNA as much as they can.

The goal is the same in the end, to have successfully spread their DNA, the strategies are different because the biology is different for each of the two sexes.

Have you read the cold start problem? The online dating marketplaces optimize for women and the men naturally follow.

Ie. If there were a bunch of single women in any marketplace, men would naturally flock there, like any social media platforms dms

The users for online dating are women, men are the commodity/supply

Couldn’t you just as easily have said men are the users (they’re the ones paying usually) and women are the supply?

I could've easily said it but that would've been completely wrong

Why? Is it wrong that men are the ones who pay?

Edit: like don’t get me wrong, if we’re going to use such cold analogies the companies definitely care about their supply, they need to be able to sell it

Why? In traditional products, the users pay for access to the assets. Dating app men pay for access to dating app women.

Women on the other hand are often given perks for free to get them to continue to use the app, making them a cost center the app must finance to maintain.

If men are the ones paying and women getting in for free, this is no different to the nightclub cover charge model. In both cases, men are the real customers (big spenders) and women are the product. It's the same as the social media business. Advertisers are the customers and users are the product.

It's at the point where women don't benefit either though. Getting 1000x matches just leaves most women overwhelmed.

Plus a lot of those matches end up being low-quality even despite trying to be picky, because the apps are so surface level. Plenty of men manage to get great pics and quotes but turn out to be complete douches.

You're assuming that women want to find a relationship on a dating app. Tinder is essentially porn for women, where they get all the attention they want without doing anything for it. It's primarily entertainment. Using the app itself is the goal, so more interaction and more options are good for attracting a female user base. Of course this female user base has no interest in actually dating the male users and is thus worthless if your goal is matchmaking, but this is also good for the app since frustrated male users pay for premium accounts while happy couples uninstall the app.

>Of course this female user base has no interest in actually dating the male users

Are you suggesting that females like being alone? In my experience that is not true.

No, but largely that's not what they use dating apps for. Women have no issues getting dates in other ways.

Dating apps is still much more convenient.

Note that this is inherent to the current dating app models. Everyone I have spoken to who uses dating apps, male or female, intuitively understands this. The best strategy for men is to spam matches and messages as much as possible and hope you grab someone's attention. The best strategy for women is to filter heavily and pick randomly from the ones who get through and hope they aren't a weirdo. But those strategies, while optimal for individuals, make the experience overall disappointing.

I wonder if there is a way (in the game theory sense) to craft a strategy that is both optimal for individuals and the community, and then design an app around that.

Yes there is, and it is quite related to the article.

But it is not practical - both men and women should rank their preferences and then an optimal matching can be found. In online dating, I would not expect people to have complete and transitive preferences.

OKCupid used to do that, but when I tried it the 100% match was someone I knew and didn't like because they were too similar to me.

> The best strategy for men is to spam matches and messages as much as possible and hope you grab someone's attention.

That’s a naive idea that makes it worse for everybody, including yourself.

If you’re genuinely looking for attention from anyone that’ll give it to you, you probably want to do some self-reflection.

More likely, I hope, you actually do know something about yourself and your tastes and can recognize that you’ll only be a good fit with a tiny fraction of the people on there.

If you’re not seeing that tiny fraction on the app or not matching with them, you either need to be patient, figure out ways to improve your profile, or figure out a different way to meet people.

Spamming indiscriminately may get you the a few extra internet points, but it doesn’t get you any good matches that you wouldn’t have gotten from being a genuine human person on there.

And it’s just makes an already crappy environment even worse.

In the book Dataclysm by Christian Rudder, he performs an analysis of OkCupid messages and responses. Number of responses received after an initial message was used as the success metric (because that's really the only thing they can accurately measure, no reliable way to quantify the quality or satisfaction from a conversation). Unsurprisingly, the men who sent the most messages performed better than average. More surprisingly, men who copied-and-pasted the same messages over and over again to different women did even better.

I don't know if this applies exactly to apps like Tinder and Bumble who use a hidden elo system, but it seems like sending as many messages as possible is (intuitively) a winning strategy. More messages = more opportunities.

EDIT: Sorry this is like the fifth time I've edited this. I think the conclusion from the OkCupid data is that writing thoughtful openers quickly hits diminishing returns. Thoughtful discussion won't ever be a bad thing, though.

Choosing a metric because it’s the only one you have doesn’t make it a good one.

The only person who cares how many responses you get from random people is a data scientist.

Presumably, you’re there to connect with people you’d have a good time with. You want to optimize for suitability, which has nothing to do with that metric.

(And besides, all of the apps now penalize indiscriminate swiping and other spammy behaviors that are cheap to track)

Both can be true. Is spamming the best strategy for Tinder? Yes. Spamming may be penalized but using the app discerningly (for men) is penalized more harshly.

Is using Tinder a waste of time? Yes, unless your value to the opposite sex can be encapsulated in one photograph (i.e. you spend a lot of time in the gym). There are easier ways to get laid.

> Presumably, you’re there to connect with people you’d have a good time with

It’s a casual sex app. Real dating apps have profiles.

>There are easier ways to get laid.

Which are those? Unless you count paying for sex.

I have comment before when his name comes up, I would take books or articles by Christian Rudder with a grain of salt. What he writes is probably generally true. But for the somewhat well known race and dating Ok Cupid article he didn't normalize the data. Didn't hold things like education constant.

What is presented in articles and books is probably a little more complicated than the conclusions that the readers is given.

The problem is, with so little information to go on I do actually think spamming quite a few women is probably the best policy, even if it has costs for the platform. Until you speak to someone a little you have not idea, so best to at least see unless you are getting so much attention it’s a burden.

I do think commercial dating apps need competition from something which isn’t having to optimise for revenue

>If you’re genuinely looking for attention from anyone that’ll give it to you, you probably want to do some self-reflection.

Not true. The larger you can make the pool the more fish swim in it. And mor sharks. But you get to pick the fish.

>Spamming indiscriminately may get you the a few extra internet points, but it doesn’t get you any good matches that you wouldn’t have gotten from being a genuine human person on there.

You don't really get to know a person from it's profile. Until you get to chat and meet in person there is still a % that you might like that person. Optimizing for outcomes brings the success here.

Limiting the rate at which men can send messages seems like it would be a clear improvement for everyone.

All of the apps have that. Some openly stop users who hit the limit, some shadowban them.

And they all penalize indiscriminate swiping by giving spammers lower priority.

Sometimes I swear that the advice that men should swipe on everybody is put out there by successful users to trick others into getting hidden and deranked.

Coffee Meets Bagel has people be presented with a handful of profiles a day ("handful" being a bit variable but...). So no infinite profile browsing.

Everyone I know (and I met my partner through that) has felt like it's a nicer system.

I always assumed this would be a winning play for dating apps. Limit the browsing and offerings so people are realistic in assessing others. Give people thousands of choices and they'll go after the best. Give them a realistic selection and they're more likely to take time and see positives in each opportunity.

Make sure the listings are accurate (quality, recent photos). Then repeat daily for each gender interest, location, etc.

> Limit the browsing and offerings so people are realistic in assessing others.

I've often wondered if there isn't some clever marketified/gamified version of this, where users can put on their profile "To contact me, you have to wait N days", where N is some variable they can control, and if the viewer clicks "Wait", they are prevented from browsing or messaging (or "Waiting" for) other people through the app for that period of time.

Of course people could still use other apps, which is probably the major flaw, but it would make people more selective about who they expressed an interest in, and in turn make the recipients feel more valued. Some people might set the parameter a little higher than their desirability really warrants, but I'd be intrigued to see how the meta-game around this develops.

I think people would still try their luck with more desirable prospects and end up getting frustrated.

Another idea is having a moderator of sorts. The moderator would pick from the "applicants" that make it through to the prospect, and mean that only high-effort options are seen. Removes "hey" and abusive messages from the pool.

Maybe applicants pay a $5 fee which is refunded if they are not picked as one of a handful of dates.

I like that, and it could be marketified/gamified too. People could put themselves forward as potential match-makers, i.e. moderators who screen introductory messages, and they can stake a certain number of points on whether they think the recipient will like the message. (They could also review abuse reports after the fact, including ghosting).

Over time, certain match-makers with a track record for finding good matches would be highly valued, and they could be given a free premium membership (giftable to friends) to reward them. I suppose the downside is that people who do a bad job at screening messages would end up having to pay more as a consequence, and the community might end up relying on a minority of users to do all this extra work.

So you basically propose a Stack Overflow for dating?

Why not let the community vote who has sex with who?

> So you basically propose a Stack Overflow for dating?

If you put it like that, it sounds like a great idea!

> Why not let the community vote who has sex with who?

Isn't that how most societies have effectively been run for thousands of years? I'm not saying it's the best we can do, but it in terms of societal outcomes it can't be much worse than the current dating scene.

If you're in a public space and the most attractive person is surrounded by more desirable prospects and ignoring you, do you join the throng or potentially lower your expectations and talk to someone less crowded by competition?

I haven't experienced online dating and I'm sure it's grim, but I also know people who've perhaps had unrealistic expectations and stayed largely single into their forties.

I've said before, but I think the dating apps are mostly grim for people around 20-25. Anyone after that is more realistic about their prospects and what's worth looking for in a partner.

As a mid-40s guy who used the apps (not sure about my expectations, but I just wasn't interested in marriage, family or dating). I really believe that people do not get more realistic as they get older. Its probably the reverse, most just add more to the requirements for their "soul mate". At the same time the dating pool shrinks dramatically, and the people in it are often, like me, "discounted" so to speak.

I do agree the 20+ crowd seems to have the worst of it, but it really doesn't improve all that much. I think the best strategy is to find someone as early in adult life as possible.

>I wonder if there is a way (in the game theory sense) to craft a strategy that is both optimal for individuals and the community, and then design an app around that.

That wouldn't be possible unless both the individuals and the community is settling for less. And that is true for anything. In socialist or leftist countries, people are levelled off, most having and average outcome and no individual doing really great or really bad. In other countries, some have really great outcomes and others have really bad outcomes.

I get four matches a week on average. Converting those matches into dates is the hard part in my opinion. Even when I seem to be connecting and having a good conversation on text, it's always been so difficult to go beyond that.

I don't know, I must be doing something wrong I guess. I wonder what the match to date conversion rate is.

Speaking as someone now married to a woman he met on tinder.

I took the view that if I matched with someone and they replied to a message there was a pretty high chance they were interested in a date, so I would generally just ask on the second or third message. Something like

Hi, <basic small talk question based on something in the profile>.

Hopefully receive a reply with some kind of conversational hook.

<reply to the hook, ask a follow up question>. Would you like to meet for a drink sometime this week, would central Gotham work for you? My number is 123556679

Pretty much everyone is on the site to go on real dates, so best to think of the messages as for organising them.

Your mileage may vary, but I'd say this led to a date 80% of the time (assuming the match and reply had already happened)

I've experimented and varied my time to ask out for a date. I've asked out after a few texts after matching, and also after a few days of texting. For me, it has mostly worked out when I gave it more time.

Most of my matches have indicated they like to get more familiar before going out with a stranger. But then again, I live in India, so that probably has a lot to do with my experience.

Someone should build an app where women have to create an “application” form, and men have to fill it out. If women are the choosy ones, let them be upfront with their choosiness and adjust the level of friction that men have to go through to contact them.

Great in theory but it's hard to know what you want, kind of like asking a user what to build them

A lot of women do signal what they want in their profiles but in reality matches probably just come down to hot + might not rape me + some kind of funny peacocking confidence thing so in the end this survey won’t matter.

Dude wtf

No WTF, if you read any ancilliary info around womens engagement in dating apps this is pretty much it. (not dating, not going to be dating, do read stuff online)

If you want to argue otherwise, consider the situational awareness of telling your wing(person) where you're going if not heard from in 24h and why people do this.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yRzs7v0do_Q

The problem is that this is discrimination, by definition. From my own personal experience, there are plenty of women who have immediately rejected me because I'm 5'11" and not 6'. I'm sure they would love to be able to filter men by height. There's also plenty of people who would like to filter by race. One of these things is socially acceptable but the other isn't. How should the dating apps decide what questions go on the application? They can't, anything more than filtering by gender and there will be some subset of their userbase that they completely alienate. And they need to show growth and profits for investors. Not to mention, you know, the moral implications?

(Note that even that doesn't work... I'm not interested in dating trans women or gay men but I see their profiles all the time, because they set their profiles as "women seeking men".)

on hinge, at least when i last used it, i (a man) could filter by both height and race

Huh, I don't see that on the Android version. Maybe it is a premium feature?

Also - doesn't that seem shallow?

hmmm yeah i was paying for premium for a month or two so you’re probably right.

and yes, it’s incredibly shallow - it’s online dating after all :)

For what it’s worth I filtered on neither of those dimensions - I get few enough matches as-is.

I will say that I got far far more dates from Hinge than every other service combined, primarily (I think) because I could actually flex my “soft skills” by replying to prompts and photos with a bit of wit. My looks alone aren’t going to make me stand out in the deluge of dudes.

Additionally, Hinge is/was much better at dynamically showing me women that were actually likely to be compatible with me.

It's no more "shallow" than being attracted to any characteristic: physical or even intellectual. Nearly all of which comes down to your natural genetic advantages... or disadvantages as it were.

> doesn't that seem shallow?

Everybody has aesthetic preferences, including yourself.

When you have to sift through hundreds of profiles, those are a legit and simple way to narrow it down to something manageable.

I've read this app gives the ability to filter based on religion, but I don't know any details. What are the possible values of this filter? Can I filter out all religions?

I think you can if you pay. However, in my experience people often put Christian to indicate they were raised that way and it implies very little current belief. Unless hardcore atheism is itself a requirement I’m not sure it would be a good idea.

It has all the major religions (8 or so named ones), and atheist, agnostic, other, spiritual. Note people aren't obligated to put religion in there and many don't. In my area about 1/3 of women's profiles don't have any religion listed. You can filter people, based on specific religions, but I'm actually not sure if you can do a filter like "Atheism or nothing".

One of the big problems with filters is that most filterable things are optional, so a lot of people won't have anything specified for one category or another. Exceptions are height and age, which people must specify for themselves, and so some people lie about those. People can lie about or omit even more important details, like the fact that they are married. Pictures can be very inaccurate as well. And there are scammers. You have to be quite skeptical and cautious on these apps whether you are man or woman.

If as a hiring manager with a budget of 80K/year all my applicants demand 300K/year, what now?

Include that in a job listing, it will filter out the 300K/year applicants.

Of course people can have preferences for race - just as they can preferences for height, weight, disabilities, gender, sex, and any other attribute. This is not discrimination, it is personal preference. It is an area where these properties objectively matter - different from job applications say.

Where do we land when people are not allowed to pick the parter they actually want?

Preferences are unfair - the same will be felt by many transgender people (you might swipe away), disabled people and what have you. Heck, it certainly holds for some of my attributes...

And yet, you simply can't make someone desire you. There are infinitely many ways to draw a short straw in life, this being one of them.

I personally agree, but...

A) if you filter out someone based on race you are potentially throwing lots of opportunities away. I find it hard to believe people who have race preferences aren't attracted to a single member of their non-preferred race.

And B) People will interpret this as racial bias on the part of the app regardless.

If you’re using filters at all, it’s because you face more profiles than you have ability to sift through.

Throwing away opportunities is the point.

> if you filter out someone based on race you are potentially throwing lots of opportunities away. I find it hard to believe people who have race preferences aren't attracted to a single member of their non-preferred race.

Ditto gender

meh i don't know. I have some races I tend to find more attractive on average. There is only one gender I have ever personally had a non-zero sexual attraction to. I don't think this is that rare.

Yes, my point is that they're all preferences that people have and that's okay. Saying people are "missing out" because they prefer a certain race is like saying they "miss out" for preferring a certain gender. Maybe technically true, but not really helpful in practice.

>Where do we land when people are not allowed to pick the partner they actually want? We land in reality.

There tends to be a bit of a gap between what people 'want' and what they can actually 'get' and I think this is where a lot of online dating falls down as the illusion of endless choice means people keep looking for perfection when in reality that person doesn't exist or if they do, they aren't going to be interested in the other person.

Most people throughout history pretty much had to look in their fairly narrow social circle or village/town etc and pick whoever they could get who would also like them. Most people knew more or less where they stood amongst everyone else and had a general idea of whether you stood a chance or not and didn't bother if you knew you had no chance.

These days you are basically competing with essentially the entire world and it's hard to know who your competition is or where you stand, does this person I swiped right on already have 5000 other matches in their inbox and how do I compare? Even if I'm the best option they will ever have, do they know that or will they keep in swiping in the hope that someone absolutely perfect might come along?

Most dating apps are now optimising entirely for the superficial things like looks, which is one of the least useful metrics of a long term successful relationship and almost everyone now manipulates their photos and is deceptive or outright lies about negative factors (usually height for men and age for women) to the point everyone is basically a catfish now and all you're swiping on is more or less how someone wants to portray themselves, which means you are going to mostly match with those who are best at deception and lies which is probably not ideal in most relationships.

>Most dating apps are now optimising entirely for the superficial things like looks

It's easy to optimize for physical features. Other traits would be harder to asses for algorithms.

Discrimination: the quality or power of finely distinguishing

The word has taken a negative connotation in recent usage, but every association, intimate or otherwise is discrimination. Applying the term "personal preference" is a euphemism. That one prefers one set of traits over another necessitates that one discriminates between the substance and value of those traits.

It is absolutely perfectly fine to be interested in dating a particular race. Because if you really break down what that statement actually means, it means that the person is attracted to certain physical characteristics that are more pronounced in that particular ethnicity.

We are attracted to what we're attracted to - no justification needed.

>It is absolutely perfectly fine to be interested in dating a particular race. Because if you really break down what that statement actually means, it means that the person is attracted to certain physical characteristics that are more pronounced in that particular ethnicity

But is it politically correct to say certain characteristics are more pronounced in a particular ethnicity? Wouldn't you be branded as a nazi?

Of course it’s politically correct to say certain races have certain physical characteristics.

That's how we identify race to begin with.

>I'm sure they would love to be able to filter men by height. There's also plenty of people who would like to filter by race.

I don't see why you shouldn't be able to filter by everything. In real life you do filter, so why not do it online, too?

>I'm not interested in dating trans women or gay men but I see their profiles all the time, because they set their profiles as "women seeking men".

That's nasty.

One of these things is socially acceptable but the other isn't.

Says who? you can most definitely filter by race on a lot of apps.

On Grindr, at least, that filter was removed because it was considered an invalid preference. (I agree with that decision.)

More broadly, though, if you politely request people of certain racial groups not contact you on Tinder/Hinge/Bumble, you will rapidly be reported and then banned by the administrators of the app.

Wouldn't that just exacerbate the existing issues? Women already have the choice of applicants despite being roughly half the global population. Wouldn't it make more sense to make it harder for women to find a match based on their very specific requirements shown only to those who are seeking those particular traits so as to reduce the glut of inconsiderate matches the women receive?

This is Bumble, men can't send the first message on it. It's only app I've heard of coworkers getting relationships from.

(Last time I tried it, every woman on Tinder in SV was a young extremely poor French au pair.)

Just to check, did you mean to say Tinder here?

I sure did. Don’t ask me why, I’m not a French au pair.

The first message on bumble is usually just a prompt for the bloke to start speaking.

That being said things are probably better with the age of the users.

> This is Bumble, men can't send the first message on it

Right, but almost every female-initiated conversation I ever had on Bumble was "hi" or an emoji, and then a wait for the man to drive the conversation. It's a marketing gimmick rather than something that in any way changes the dynamic compared to Tinder, where I also found that I (the man) had to initiate the conversation.

The best thing about Bumble when I last used it was it was a small-enough pool that you could browse everyone, so when you opened it up and started swiping you were interacting with people who'd newly joined (or newly re-opened their account), and were a little less jaded / over the whole thing.

For an individual woman they might have the luxury of being able to do this but it doesn't really scale because (the subtext is) that the men who would need this (versus the body-carousel you get on tinder) have the issue that most of the women who could actually articulate an interesting questionaire aren't dating online IME.

Also women do already do this in a sense on tinder - "Don't swipe if you're under six foot, here are my red flags, guys with hayfever aren't real men" blah blah.

I also think the whole idea of a romantic checklist is very narrow minded. Inferring people's beliefs from their actions would be interesting but just letting people basically only pick and extremely specific type of person seems like a route to nothing good socially.

OkCupid effectively used to do this, multiple ways. Before it turned into a blatant photo gallery (to maximize revenue from straight men paying for advantage, I suspect).

One of the ways was that OkCupid let anyone add their own multi-choice (plus optional freeform) questions, to the database from which people would answer. You could rate what each answer meant to you, and you could (IIRC) make answering a particular question mandatory before messaging you. Good for litmus tests.

It still does this and I like it. I do worry that the answer to the brexit question (good/bad?) is perhaps too diagnostic for me, but much better than cliched bios that all read the same.

I wonder though if there is room for a. It’s transparent not for profit dating app? It feels like the incentives currently are misaligned with either individuals or societal benefit. All the apps seem to be optimism for engagement and stickyness rather than well considered matches and good conversation. Even the fact that the chat functions in these apps are so bad belies this… it doesn’t really reward them for you to meet and stop using the app!

The only country I could see doing this successfully is China. They're the only ones with enough foresight and competency to do something like this. Of course, it will probably also be super totalitarian with an algorithm that penalizes political dissent, doesn't allow participation of gay people, etc.

They could do the not-for-profit part. I seriously doubt the "transparent" part.

>the brexit question (good/bad?) is perhaps too diagnostic for me

Let me guess, saying that brexit is good is bad.

The problem with algorithmic dating is that people don't know what they want. I evidently don't, at any rate; I've mostly ended up with partners that initially seemed to be pretty unpromising material. They only began to appeal to me as I got to know them. I'd never have met them if I'd pre-filtered through an application form.

Sure, smoking/non-smoking; perhaps dietary preferences; education; location. But I, a veggie, used to cook for a carnivorous family, for example. If I were preparing an application form consisting only of dealbreakers, I doubt it would have more than a couple of questions.

I think this is the biggest factor for me in not liking online dating. It lets people filter TOO MUCH for shit they THINK they want. In real life people tend to branch out more

Tinder is that form, because 98% of it is the picture.

>Someone should build an app where women have to create an “application” form, and men have to fill it out. If women are the choosy ones, let them be upfront with their choosiness and adjust the level of friction that men have to go through to contact them.

No need for a form. Women subconsciously select a partner for the ability to produce healthy and successful offspring and taking care of them and her.

It would make sense to just not allow men to swipe first at all, it was an obvious improvement when they only let the women start conversations. I think the issue is it will lower engagement.

> Most men get somewhere like 0-4 matches a week and most women get somewhere like 100-1000. That’s a 25x difference best-case scenario and often it’s over 100x. Which is kind of insane considering there are about 50/50 men to women ratio in real life.

How is this statistically possible? Women getting way more _likes_ is plausible if men swipe right much more than women do. But each _match_ involves a man and a woman getting a match.

I'm not sure of that extreme of a ratio, but many of my single women friends will use the app, match with people, and it turns out that loads of the guys are just really useless... so it's not clear whether the matches are actually worthwhile.

Imagine a guy with a very interesting profile, who swipes right all the time. People match with him cuz he has the nice profile. Turns out that he sticks around on the platform for a long time.

Suddenly this one person is responsible for loads of matches. So if you have these long-term users, they can generate disproportionate amount of matches with themselves, biasing the pool.

This could be even more accentuated by Tinder-style algos. Somebody's popular? Of course their profile will show up more often!

If you combine this with people on the other side matching pretty conservatively... then suddenly you can have a handful of men receiving the large majority of the focus.

Paraphrasing some tweet, at least at parties the most popular guy can only talk to so many people at once!

Yep, exactly. That's what the grandparent post [1] meant with "Because a lot of men like to swipe right on nearly everyone and buy passes which get them unlimited swipes".

This is where the majority of Tinder's money is coming from, so I doubt this will be ever be curbed.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31749379

Ratio of women:men using the service.

Say there are 10 women and 30 men on the service, and each woman matches with 3 men. 30 matches total. Assuming equal distribution, the men have 1 match each.

You can also then have a more extreme distribution. 3 of those men could have 10 matches and the other 27 have zero. Median man has zero matches, 80th percentile ("top 20%") has zero matches.

I think you're right about 100-1000 being a count for "likes" rather than "matches" (terminology would differ by platform). If a woman had 100 people with a mutual interest, ready to talk, they wouldn't keep swiping to get to 200.

(Not super relevant to your point but maybe to the whole page) I think many swiping apps mostly show people that are already interested, which seems reasonable as a prioritization method. So a "like" from a woman is converted into an instant "match". I've heard some women brag like "90% of guys I swipe on like me back", but there's some bias in there.

I've also known men who are perfectly likable, who took a more passive approach, and never received a single incoming "like" from a woman in months. It's inconceivable that in a city of millions, _nobody_ finds the man attractive, not even the bottom 1% of women. It's just that they're not showing the profile much, and it's unclear if they're even giving it a tiny amount of random exposure. Even if you swipe, it's probably not enough to get to the top of the pile of thousands of horny dudes. So one has to buy the exposure for an hour or so then, possibly for hundreds of dollars a month. It's a good scheme, and the platforms like the information asymmetry on how it all works too - many people are guessing about things in these threads, which platform employees know the simple answer to.

Important to distinguish between matches and likes here. Women get a lot of likes but not 1 match every 15 minutes. Out of the people who like them, the viable matches are far lower than 1 every 15 minutes. Maybe a couple every week are actually decent matches they would like back. I don't find the difference between likes men get and women get surprising at all, it's the same for face to face meetings. Most of the men striking out on dating apps also strike out with face to face meetings probably at a higher rate if they were actually approaching all the random women they "like" at a glance. It isn't the general ratio of men to women that determines the like to match rate here, it's the ratio of desperate and frankly not attractive men to discerning and attractive women.

For less confident people IRL, the ability to like with low cost is actually great. I have had dates with people I would probably never have approached in real life and online dating has been a confidence boost generally.

>Online dating sucks. You’re much better off trying to meet people in real-life situations, where there is a more reasonable ratio of men and women

Online dating is a competition like anything else in life. I had some success at online dating and I am not the best looking guy, so it's possible.

>"Most men get somewhere like 0-4 matches a week and most women get somewhere like 100-1000. That’s a 25x difference best-case scenario and often it’s over 100x. Which is kind of insane considering there are about 50/50 men to women ratio in real life."

I always suspected something similar. Is this documented anywhere though that I could look? My response to this was to simply get rid of that app and quit. Why would anyone continue putting in the hours a week for something that led to 0-4 matches a week? How is the platform not a total failure based on this? Doesn't everyone of the guys not in that top 20 percentile turn around and tell everyone it is garbage?

A few matches a week seems... fine though, right? Unless one wants to go on a first date every day of the week, and really who has time for that? If anything, hundreds of low-quality matches (because men just say yes to everyone) seem worse than a few considered ones.

That said, I have heard that a large percentage of men get zero matches, just none at all. At that point yes it's a poor proposition.

>That said, I have heard that a large percentage of men get zero matches, just none at all. At that point yes it's a poor proposition.

I've heard that is true in real life, too. Women have it easier and are more picky.

But a match with a new person who is getting hundreds of matches is still not likely to turn into a first date.

In my experience it wasn't too hard to convert most matches I was interested in in dates. Once I have someone on the hook it's easy to get the fish out of the water.

I think the ratio of a match to an actual date though is much much worse.

I'm convinced a lot of people use those apps simply as a convenient source of ego boost.

> I always suspected something similar. Is this documented anywhere though that I could look?

The book Dataclysm and the OkCupid blog have a lot of analysis about things like this. Both are about a decade old now and were written by one of the guys who founded OkCupid, so it focuses on dating sites instead of apps, but I would assume the trends are the same (or even amplified).

It's been a while since I've read either, so I don't remember exact data, but it's true that women get way more men reaching out to them than the reverse.

Here's a random OkCupid blog post that focuses on it a little bit: https://theblog.okcupid.com/a-womans-advantage-82d5074dde2d. I think the book has more detailed data though.

> How is the platform not a total failure based on this? Doesn't everyone of the guys not in that top 20 percentile turn around and tell everyone it is garbage?

Yeah it is total garbage. Even when you put in all the work to get matches and arrange dates (which takes a ton of work), it's still basically a blind date, so when you actually meet there's still only a small chance that you will actually match.

And you always get worse matches, as a man, through the apps compared to real life. You will pay a price for that convenience of swiping.

There's an increased risk for women when they let men bypass that filter of being sociable and brave enough to befriend people in real life social situations.

If a woman can already go to a bar and easily pick out a guy, and easily judge the men, why would they use a dating app? It only makes sense if they somehow would get better matches there, so the men will have to lower their standards as a result of that convenience.

I just see online dating, and classified ads in the paper before that, as a way for people who don't fit the social norm to meet. And that's fine. But I don't see any reason for everyone to start doing that, and people who are normally sociable will just have a worse experience.

>it's still basically a blind date, so when you actually meet there's still only a small chance that you will actually match.

The chance is small only if you are very picky or don't know how to optimize for the outcomes.

Dating can be seen as anything else in life: a game or a competition. Some people are naturally better, some people can learn to really do it good.

>Why would anyone continue putting in the hours a week for something that led to 0-4 matches a week?

Because, in my experience, I can convert half of those matches in dates. And some of the dates I can convert in other things like relations or sex.

Dating after the online part also sucks, where you pretend to be so busy that you can only meet once a week and only on weekdays, and you can never answer a message in under 24 hours. Don't really see how two people can start to like each other when it's so standoffish.

Who has every hour of their weekend booked? Who doesn't have two minutes to look at their phone in a whole day? It's such bullshit, this game is so exhausting and just zaps out any positive energy you get during a date.

> You’re much better off trying to meet people in real-life situations, where there is a more reasonable ratio of men and women

I think is a thought-stopping cliche that sounds right but just isn't true. People went to apps because real life situations have failed them. The hobbies that attract the most young people tend to be the most gender skewed (gaming is a great example).

>Because a lot of men like to swipe right on nearly everyone and buy passes which get them unlimited swipes

I think you're wrong. I've read that the main apps have done some work in the past years to make the "swipe on everything" strategy non-optimal. However, the fact of the matter is that the main apps could have been lying to me and you could be right and I could be wrong. It's so very difficult to draw conclusions from these dating apps when they're effectively black boxes to us common folk.

There's definitely a great deal of money and interest that could be had from creating an open-source dating app such that no one would be in the dark on what's being served to whom.

Some dating apps are better than others, and most (but not Tinder) have a mechanism to prevent this kind of thing.

Hinge, for example, only shows you a limited set of people per day, and it filters those based on who it thinks you like who also would like you back.

How does Hinge correct for the ratio problem? If women can only like a finite number of profiles, doesn't this further restrict the supply of Women Likes?

It also restricts the number of men likes, which means a more equal number of likes are given out between the sexes.

In addition, the limited number forces both sexes to be selective, rather than just the women.

> It also restricts the number of men likes, which means a more equal number of likes are given out between the sexes.

It is an open secret that dating apps have more men than women.

Sure, but it's still more equal if both sexes send the same number of likes rather than having 2x as many men swipe 10x as many times. And maybe women get more swipes per day, I have no idea.

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