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.
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.
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!
Let me guess, saying that brexit is good is bad.
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.
(Last time I tried it, every woman on Tinder in SV was a young extremely poor French au pair.)
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.
That being said things are probably better with the age of the users.
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.
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.
(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".)
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.
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.
It's easy to optimize for physical features. Other traits would be harder to asses for algorithms.
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.
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.
Throwing away opportunities is the point.
Ditto gender
We are attracted to what we're attracted to - no justification needed.
But is it politically correct to say certain characteristics are more pronounced in a particular ethnicity? Wouldn't you be branded as a nazi?
That's how we identify race to begin with.
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.
Says who? you can most definitely filter by race on a lot of apps.
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.
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.
Also - doesn't that seem shallow?
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.
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.