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Comment by mdorazio | Hacker News Reader

One thing I don't think gets enough discussion is how bad apps like Tinder are for men's sense of self-worth. The larger percentage of men on these apps combined with the fast swipe setup turns it into a complete meat market where a lot of men can very quickly think that women don't want them.

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This combined with the fact that women rate the average man way below average and the average man rates women normally.

https://mobile.twitter.com/stevestuwill/status/1053677226003...

The actual link, for anybody who doesn't consider Twitter a good source: https://web.archive.org/web/20120723173702/http://blog.okcup...

Thanks, I couldn't find it. OkCupid blog posts were a treasure trove of facts about online dating that absolutely do not care for the readers feelings.

Further reading:

Race in hetero online dating:

https://web.archive.org/web/20091011031410/http://blog.okcup...

Race in same sex online dating:

https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/okcupid/samesexdatafor...

I've seen some people claiming that Tinder's userbase is 90% men, 10% women.

Most (any?) women can get a date by opening Tinder twice, so I guess that distribution is about steady state.

More interesting data would be gender ratio on former Tinder users. Or like users over a year.

If you don't have self esteem issues you definitely will after a week of trying online dating.

Are the apps really at fault here? It's it possible that some men had an inflated sense of self-worth, and the apps are just providing a reality check?

Nope. 80% of top women exclusively go for 20% of top men (pareto principle, true numbers may vary).

Either the average male doing online dating is significantly less attractive than the average male generally, or women have very high standards.

I am gay btw. Got no skin in the game. I had sex with average bisexual men who told me they‘d prefer to have sex with women but can‘t get any.

https://web.archive.org/web/20120723173702/http://blog.okcup...

Those percentages don't pass a simple sanity check. Look around you. The average heterosexual man is in a long-term relationship with a woman. Regardless of dating apps, that is still the default state.

Young male students and technology industry workers are heavily over represented among HN users. Let's not assume that their anecdotal experiences are representative of the broader population.

it works that way for both genders

dating services are a good idea in principle, but not competetive as long as there is money to be made with keeping users on the platform.

This is actually an issue on both sides of the power law: you might feel terrible from having zero matches, but it might also not be entirely healthy for you to be part of the group of men who have all the matches.

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