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Comment by pizza234 | Hacker News Reader

> Dating apps just make it easy to connect with potential matches (relative to not having dating app burnouts)

I don't know what's the universal experience regarding this, but for me and other people I know, males are extreme disadvantage in the context of dating apps; this applies also to the app that supposedly reverses the roles.

I have the suspicion that the elephant is the room is that for men, online dating takes many, many hours (I can't quantify, but an hour a day or so, seems the minimum to me) of effort, often for nothing (I definitely know at least one man who's able to game the system, but he's an exception).

This is definitely a recipe for burnout, and it's very specific to online dating . If one wants to find potential mates, any organized activity (sports, etc. - Meetup is perfect) will do; the effort to talk to a potential partner, in that case, is virtually zero.

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What you're saying about the male disadvantage is indeed one, if not the most, important immediate cause of this burnout. However, I take a more systemic view. I think that the main problem is this:

    Dating apps, as for-profit publicly-traded enterprises, have no incentive to work on fixing the problem

To put it bluntly, a large pool of men who struggle to get a date (an event that may even result in losing them as customers) and who feel the need to "pay to win" are the goose that lays the golden eggs for Tinder and the like.

The only way out of this would be for a non-profit fully-FOSS dating platform to be created that considers satisfying its users dating objectives its one and only priority, rather than seeing them as a source of income. Make matching more likely by applying two-way filters in the swipe queue, discourage pointless accumulation of matches by clout-chasers and attention junkies, refuse any gamification, don't offer any feature for money but encourage donation on successful connection, and make "engagement" a negative KPI—the KPI should be how many users successfully connect to another and stop using the app, and how quickly they achieve it in terms of app usage.

Of course, setting up something like this would require significant effort and "investment" with no hope of profit. It's in my bucket list of plans on how to become a millionaire (from billionaire, that is).

This has literally been a major function of the church and other neighborhood organizations and activities.

I think the problems are different. Men have a lot of trouble getting matches sure, and they think they have a rough time because of it. Women get matches, but the majority of the interest is low quality / aggressive / inappropriate and they spend a lot of time filtering, blacklisting, and otherwise getting burned out. Women spend as much time, if not more, wading through dross trying to find good matches: and are also at a significant safety disadvantage in the process.

The net result is that neither men or women match easily, in many cases it's a tragedy of the commons. Even on the "app that reverses the roles" it's difficult to match to likely partners for either gender.

"Women spend as much time, if not more" - I think the ratio of men:women is about 2:1 on most apps, but I would imagine it takes men more than 2x the time to wade through profiles and send a message, than to read that message and move on (even if the message is low-effort). So I'm not sure I can believe that women spend as much time, and certainly the effort spent on the app per date will be much higher for men, not least because of the gender ratio.

The ratio is more like 4:1. And women receive such an overwhelming amount of low-quality messages that there's no point in crafting a high-effort message, as it will just be buried by spam in their inboxes.

Don't worry. I, an engineer, have the solution. We simply make a dating app with at least regex support for message filtering, you get to shoot yr shot and get immediate feedback in the form of being auto-blocked if you didn't make it past the filter.

Just thinking about it makes me want to start dating again, it'd be like ad-block but for crypto bros.

> Don't worry. I, an engineer, have the solution

I'm ready for the sarcasm

> auto-blocked if you didn't make it past the filter

This, if it could be made people-friendly, would be perfect. Block based on non-real and mis-spelled words to stay a step ahead of anyone trying to evade the filter with "dik", as well as filtering based on phrase, and down to the word. Then just auto-prioritize a list of words on a per-person basis, and let the rest be left as-is.

It may not scale perfectly, but it'll be fun until Match group apes your product, makes it pay-to-play, and puts you out of business.

Nah I don't think that's true, at least for me - I tried low effort, I tried high effort. High effort has definitely worked better.

> I think the ratio of men:women is about 2:1 on most apps

Ratio is actually 3:1 and I agree with your viewpoint partly. People just keep swiping while talking to each other, so I don't see why x would be taking more time than y, however, women do indeed also need to spend that time finding their matches and QA them (excuse the engineering term), so I don't believe there are any parties winning here.

Hence the value of one’s network in introducing potential suitors. Someone’s mom or cousin or friend or uncle vetting potential (life) partners is a very valuable part of the process that saves everyone time.

Of course, this requires having and maintaining the type of relationship with family and friends where this is possible.

This type of “screening” value provided by brokers is not limited to dating, but also any low frequency, high cost transaction such as real estate, businesses, hiring workers, etc. This is the less cynical side of “it is not what you know, it is who you know”, meaning that the cost of evaluating certain risks can be so high that it is worth offloading that onto one’s network.

True from my experience and talking to female friends. Men have trouble at the top of the funnel; women have trouble further along (when, of course, more emotional investment has gone in, and more time too).

>Women get matches, but the majority of the interest is low quality / aggressive inappropriate and they spend a lot of time filtering, blacklisting,

It's not exactly surprising that the top % of men that most women keep matching with treat them as disposable. To those men they are.

> Women get matches, but the majority of the interest is low quality / aggressive / inappropriate and they spend a lot of time filtering, blacklisting, and otherwise getting burned out. Women spend as much time, if not more, wading through dross trying to find good matches: and are also at a significant safety disadvantage in the process.

This makes the common mistake in assuming that when a man gets a match, the majority of time it will be a good, high quality one that puts equal effort into the dating process. This is not the case.

Ha, no kidding. Probably half of the matches I get on Bumble (which are few and far between) open with "hey" and then barely seem interested in having a conversation at all.

From what I can tell, the dating apps are really really good for "good" looking men, and very bad for average to bad looking men.

lucky for me I suppose I got married before dating apps became a thing..

N=1 my friend did very well on Tinder as what I would consider below average in looks.

How tall is he?

Average height. Grad student with minimal income living at home.

That correlates with the data Okcupid published a while back where women rated 80% of men as below-average.

I'm trying to picture a distribution where this holds true and holy crap, dating apps should display a "Abandon all hope ye who enter here" warning to every man who falls below or near median ELO scores.

I wonder though, what kind of distribution heterosexual men would provide if scrolling through registered as a woman. My guess? Pretty similar. A lot of guys, especially younger guys, just don't have a good idea of self presentation, chasing images that are very unappealing to a lot of women. Either lacking self confidence or just filling their profile with red flags.

Not like women's profile's are on average much better. They are simply much more in demand.

It's still a relevant question. The narrative so many men champion is that women are too picky and it's not fair. If men would be equally picky trying to find worthy men on these platforms, it's a very different story.

That's somewhat misleading. Here's the original post: https://web.archive.org/web/20091121080804/http://blog.okcup...

It says that women rate most men as less attractive than average, yes. But then women are quite willing to message men who are rated as less attractive than average.

Meanwhile, the men rank attractiveness on a shockingly mathematical-looking curve. However, at the same time, men overwhelmingly refuse to message any but the most attractive of women.

Thus, if you're an average-looking man, your odds of getting messages are actually greater than they are for an average-looking woman.

Thus, if you're an average-looking man, your odds of getting messages are actually greater than they are for an average-looking woman.

Untrue. If you're an average-looking man your share of female-to-male messages is greater than an average-looking woman's share of male-to-female messages. The woman is still getting a far larger number of messages.

Sure, adjust for the fact that 80% of users are men. That doesn't change the fact that talking about attractiveness alone is misleading, because men and women use that data in very different ways. Despite ranking most men at 2/5, women message those men at the same rate that men message women ranked 4/5.

Despite ranking most men at 2/5, women message those men at the same rate that men message women ranked 4/5.

No, they don't, or at least it isn't shown in that data. Those graphs refer to the proportions of messages for each gender, not raw numbers. Each male user sends 3.5 times as many "first contact" messages as each female user, according to their 2016 data.

average-looking women are disadvantaged because men appear to be far more selective than women are:

Absolutely agree. But they're disadvantaged against other women, not against men, if you're measuring by, as you specified, "the odds of getting messages". An average man will receive fewer messages than an average woman.

I'm not sure how that changes anything? Divide the all raw numbers by 3.5, the rates will stay the same.

The point is, while average-looking men are disadvantaged by the sheer number of men on these apps, average-looking women are disadvantaged because men appear to be far more selective than women are:

"2/3 of male messages go to the top 1/3 of women. When it comes down to actually choosing targets, men choose the modelesque. Someone like roomtodance above gets nearly 5 times as many messages as a typical woman and 28 times as many messages as a woman at the low end of our curve. Site-wide, two-thirds of male messages go to the best-looking third of women. So basically, guys are fighting each other 2-for-1 for the absolute best-rated females, while plenty of potentially charming, even cute, girls go unwritten."

> men appear to be far more selective than women are

It's unclear what you mean by more selective. If you're an average woman, you get more inbound interest than an average man. The tricky statistical massaging you're doing amounts to "well men are even more open-minded when it comes to more attractive woman." But that doesn't make sense: if a man has sent you a message, does it suddenly become half a message if he then messages someone else? You're penalizing men on open-mindedness for messaging more women.

That said, the blog post is weirdly presented and its graphs a bit misleading because of the skewed distributions. What would be most useful is comparing the median number of messages received by men and the median number of messages received by women (or best of all calculating the Gini indices of the respective distributions), instead of bothering to use the star ratings at all.

ETA:

> Divide the all raw numbers by 3.5, the rates will stay the same.

You're misunderstanding the data. It's not that men collectively send 3.5/4.5 of the messages; it's that each individual man sends 3.5 times as many messages as an individual woman. I.e. it already corrects for there being more men on the app. If men comprise 2/3 of users on dating apps, that means that 87.5% of all first messages are sent by men.

> Thus, if you're an average-looking man, your odds of getting messages are actually greater than they are for an average-looking woman.

Any research/analysis on the topic pales compared to reality.

Here's what happens in real world ("Tinder Experiment: 18 Yr Old Woman Tries Being A Man!!!"): https://youtu.be/DZTIbHIsIYw?t=615. It's a larger view compared to the number of messages, but the principle still applies.

really good for those good looking men, who happen to don't want nothing serious, and then the women get burned of being dumped after a couple of nights.

There's really aa difference between what men and women expect, and also between what they say and what they do. I'm pretty honest when I talk with someone, something serious and compromises are not on my horizon, a lot of women discard me when I say that, and I'm ok with it, but sometimes I continue talking with them, and they told me how many man lie saying that they want something just to get on the their bed sheets and they disappear after that. Overall, I found some great people and nice aquitances, but the time I had spent is not despreciable.

Women have no idea what a "super swipe" is, or that it costs $2 every time you use one to try to get their attention. Being in the Bay Area, which is famously hard for men to find matches, without using any of the paid boosts, I'll never get a match. The apps are literally designed to extract money from desperate men.

Tinder specifically should be sued out of existence. It ignores location, will happily tell you your boost has been a "success" without a single match or you'll get a couple from 7,000 miles away. It's outright fraud.

Organized activities can be a good way to meet people, but don't be that creepy guy in a sports league or hobby group who is constantly hitting on all the women. It just wrecks the activity for everyone, and discourages women from showing up at all. Context matters.

For me it’s the opposite, when I get a match on a dating app my intentions are clear to the woman so it’s easy for me to go straight in flirting/being romantic etc. In a neutral setting you first have to direct the conversation away from the neutral towards the romantic and then go from there. Much harder and more time intensive.

> any organized activity (sports, etc. - Meetup is perfect) will do

Please don't come to my clubs looking to get laid -- parasitic mentality.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with going to Meetup for social networking, that's the whole point of it. "Getting laid" is an indirect outcome for people with better social networks, there is no need to shame people for trying to improve their outcomes in that regard.

Indirect outcome -- come off it.

Creating a Meetup group that filters all the horny trolls out of it is such a hassle. If a workplace can be toppled by one errant affair, small club groups can implode off the wrong wink.

Idiots trying to use my Meetup groups as a stand-in for dates suck all the air out of the room.

What sucks all the air out is people demanding perfectly normal social behaviour be banned for puritanical and controlling reasons.

To be clear, I'm not implying that's your motivation but just as there are bad extremes in the behaviour of some attendees and organisers, so are there extremes in the gatekeeping and sensitivity of others. Both are regrettable.

> To be clear, I'm not implying that's your motivation

Then why say it? Comes across to me like a "no offense but..."

Well, offense taken.

I'm not puritanical and neither are the clubs I was referring to. However, American culture is so puritanical that they can't even think straight about sex -- can't even talk about and don't know how to get it.

And so idiots (all of them) end up at my tabletop clubs, my hiking clubs, my movie clubs, my woodworking clubs, and then chase someone's butt the whole time.

That makes it really uncomfortable for everyone else and also usually uncomfortable for whoever's butt is being chased. And then a club has to spend social energy creating a Code of Conduct and wondering who will enforce it.

Horndogs need not apply.

I agree with the observation on more general cultural puritanism and lack of options for males - as pointed out elsewhere in these comments - which means meetups are better choices for improving social networks.

That doesn't excuse idiocy and horndoggery but social networking (and by extension improving dating chances) is a perfectly valid and ethical path to take beyond the advertised scope of the group.

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