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Comment by ealexhudson | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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.

"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.

>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.

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).

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