Hacker News Reader

Comment by subjectsigma | Hacker News Reader

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".)

View on HN

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com