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When I see these numbers, I think: Why do guys bother with Tinder? Why would you give up ALL the alpha, and create 100x more work for yourself down the road, just to have a marginally easier starting experience?

Those numbers are so horrendous that you'd be better off going to a bar and hitting on every single woman. You could get shot down 50 times in a row, yet as long as you want to 3 bars in a week w/at least 20 approachable women each, you'd still have a date within a week, which is already 1/3 of the success the guy in your example had in a tiny fraction of the time.

And of course, bars are pretty much the bottom of the barrel, as unpleasant as it gets. This is hard mode. Try any other setting - a meetup, a birding club, whatever - and things will be easier.

>You could get shot down 50 times in a row

You're treating it here like this is no issue, but do you actually know anyone that can take that many rejections in a row and not have it impact their mental state? Even if you know it's not a judgement on you etc. etc., it is hard for any human to continue in the face of so many rejections. It's not just about dating -- successful entrepreneurs are often those people that can take rejection after rejection and continue going. But it's very hard and very rare.

In general I am on the same side -- you can get much better success approaching in real life vs. on the apps. But what the apps abstract away is that rejection which you feel very intimately when in person.

== Those numbers are so horrendous that you'd be better off going to a bar and hitting on every single woman. You could get shot down 50 times in a row, yet as long as you want to 3 bars in a week w/at least 20 approachable women each, you'd still have a date within a week, which is already 1/3 of the success the guy in your example had in a tiny fraction of the time.==

Treating relationships as an equation to be optimized might be the real hindrance.

You could say that the lowest common denominator of both of these methods is that, in both of them, there is an equation: you are either optimizing the equation, or part of the equation being optimized. You are absolutely being treated like a number on Tinder, after all.

But you can choose the system that gets you what you want, faster.

So, in choosing the lesser of two evils, choose the bar. Choose anything other than Tinder. Because pretty much any dating alternative to Tinder is better than Tinder.

== You could say that the lowest common denominator of both of these methods is that, in both of them, there is an equation==

You certainly could say that, but you have no idea how the variables will react. That sets people up for disappointment when they think they’ve “optimized” human relationships.

Anecdotally, I spent a year on most of the online dating apps with the paid features. Even as a 6’1 guy with a good surfing photo, and some Europe (traveling) photos, it was still a waste of time, effort, and confidence for me. Eventually I met my now girlfriend through a trivia night meetup. No photos and we were all sitting down. Hopefully it lasts.

The issue with real life is 'approach anxiety' and now that online dating has been out for a while - people are not as open to cold approaching as they used to be. The default has shifted. Further more, it's hard to tell if someone is single, or even open to dating - this leads to many more rejections.

The only good thing about online dating apps is the anonymous liking feature, you get match when you mutually like each other - so on paper there is less rejection. However as this thread states - it has other downfalls.

This issue really got to me few years ago and I set out to build an app that would allow you to have this anonymously liking but at events, bars etc So it's hyper localised, you check-in to an event/bar and you see other singles that are there. If you match, you can then 'warm' approach them.

I always just saw this app as an ice breaker app - it was received well by my peers. Unfortunately due to flaky business partners and covid, i'm only now at a point where i'm ready to release. Pending Apple app store approval which has been an absolute pain.

It will be a slow roll out, initially in Bali, Indonesia. Pending response and funding.

if anyone is interested, its called SeeMe http://www.seemeapp.net/

Maybe you should just make sure your profile is top 5%, and if you think you need a six-pack for that, you're wrong. Any average guy can make a Tinder profile that is interesting for women. Women prefer other things in their partner than men (men mainly focus on looks).

Whilst that may be broadly true, I've seen my female friends on various dating apps. They're scrolling photos and going almost entirely on looks.

>Considering that online dating is the most common method used to find a date these days, the options are grim for men who are not in the top 5% of attractiveness if they use these online platforms.

I'm in the top 5% of attractiveness IRL and tinder was bizarre to try and use. It was this weird self referential world where you needed a completely new set of skills to be noticed. I was reminded of trying to learn how to write an effective resume after university.

When I had a woman make my tinder profile attractive to other women I just deleted it: the type of woman who would find that appealing is not the type of woman I would find appealing.

You don't mention what is probably the biggest thing influencing all of the numbers you describe: What is the ratio of men to women on "dating" sites like Tinder? I don't actually know myself but I'd go out on a limb and guess _way_ more men than women.

Which means several things. As you say, for heterosexual individuals, it's much more difficult for a typical male to be matched with a typical female. It also means if you're a male looking for a long-term mate, then you'll do better with the old-fashioned approach of getting out and being social.

> All 3 dates did not materialize into anything long term.

As an outsider whose exposure to Tinder is largely hearsay, my understanding is that long-term relationships are not really the goal of most users on this particular app.

There is a very big, significant, and above 25-30 I would even wager the majority part of the userbase who is there looking for the one.

Of course it's still brutal. Good candidates get out of the pool quickly and so the remaining ones tend to have issues :/

> Online dating apps are rigged for men.

They're rigged for women. Even on the sites that claim to cater to women by forcing them to make first contact, they overwhelmingly use superficial low effort messages to unlock the other side and then proceed to reject 80% of the men they selected just like with regular sites.

> a slightly above average man who generates 16561 swipes on Tinder will generate 7666 likes and 8675 dislikes. Out of these there will be 290 matches and 7596 no-match. A rate of 2.5 matches per day and an overall 3.7% match rate.

I'm that guy (6.5/10). I've never done numbers close to that bad. I could understand if someone was trying to date out of their socio-economic and age ranges (although you can always date up in age, for men).

In southern california, more like 200 swipes, 2 conversations, 1 date. Out of 5 dates, at least 1 overnight.

I don't think I'm in the top 5% of attractiveness, but I didn't have much trouble getting dates with quality people on bumble. Met someone and it's been going strong for 2+ years.

Tinder, however, was a total wasteland. Zero responses to anything. I think it just wasn't my scene.

Honestly it's more the "5% that make an effort to have decent colorful and well shot photos, ok bio and and look vaguely manly" instead of the 95% who either take a crappy selfie or either look like or speak like they are coming out of a trailer park.

I have a friend who ABSOLUTELY do not fit the stereotype of attractive men (1.70m / software engineer and he does climbing but with a small belly) and he f** like 60 girls in 8 months when he discovered the tinder magic.

I've done my time too, but at a lower scale, but since I'm slightly attractive that would not make my point. In general the biggest fuckboys Ive met were really not considered nice looking at best.

Women tend to date up is somewhat similar to how fertilisation of egg is selective with the millions of sperms wanting to fertilise it.

When there is a disproportionate number of males competing for chance at mating, females become very selective. I guess the apps are just going with the data.

Nice statistics. I found my wife on Tinder, and I'm by all means no top 5%. Actually that depends on how you count it of course. Women don't prefer men with 6-packs, if you haven't figured that out already.

My wife works as a dating coach, with both men and women. Men are very reluctant to listen or even try the advice, so I'm not going to try to convince you guys that you can make it work. It's not that hard actually, but most men already made up their mind on the whole dating thing. I'm sure there's plenty of "experts" here that can tell you all about how it can never work.

What's the advice she gives that men don't listen to that isn't easily googleable

She gives personal advice of course, which can be very specific for each case.

One specific example I can give you: Women find it important that you have clean, well-groomed hands. This is not intuitive or obvious to men at all, unless you know.

But I think the main problem is not necessarily the lack of information, but a more a mentality change. A lot of the men think "She has to accept me for who I am". That might be true, but it's not really relevant. You have to show what you can offer in a relationship. A woman doesn't start a relationship with you just because she all of a sudden loves you. No, she starts a relationship because somehow she gets some benefit out of that relationship. So you have to show what you have to offer. You like traveling? Maybe she wants to travel. You like a certain kind of music? Maybe she likes that music and likes to go to concerts. Or whatever.

Answering the question "Why would a woman start a relationship with you? What's in it for her?" seems a question that some men don't want to answer. I don't mean that they don't know the answer, I mean they have a problem with the question itself.

I was pretty skeptical about dating books. But I’ve been reading “Models - Attract women through honesty”, and it has a lot of very good advice in it. I would recommend it to any guy.

The TL;DR is to improve yourself, work on your insecurities, be emotionally open, and become genuinely not-needy. He provides a lot of specific helpful tactics.

Depends on the age also.. women 27+ are 1000 easier to get than 23-25 on tinder

That might be possible. We were both in our 30's

Relationships between couples that are not looks matched are unstable at best. Good luck.

Honestly I'm getting worried about the future of the existence of the human race at this point.

If women would rather remain single than setting for a partner who doesn't match all their expectations and they set their expectations unreasonably high and online dating only benefits the top 5% of men and all real life venues of approach close for various reasons.... what are the bottom 90% of men going to do in the future? Is sex going to become a privilege reserved for only the most elite men? If the majority of men cannot enjoy intimacy, expect incel terrorism to increase exponentially.

> Is sex going to become a privilege reserved for only the most elite men? If the majority of men cannot enjoy intimacy, expect incel terrorism to increase exponentially.

Sex is unconditionally a privilege as long as we believe in consent. It is the prerogative of anyone who owns their own body to decide whether or not to give themselves to anyone. That includes the prerogative of holding out only for metaphorical Brad Pitt.

I'm not sure "but the incels engage in terrorism" is going to persuade women to give their bodies to the men they don't want.

How do the numbers shake out in ape and monkey tribes? Or other animals?

Female primates are generally selective of the males they will mate with, looking for traits in the males that would give their offspring greater chances for survival, while male primates are significantly less selective of the females they will mate with.

I’m surprised people seem to think homo sapiens sapiens has somehow moved beyond instinctual behaviors programmed by thousands upon thousands of years of evolution.

We haven’t.

Maybe not instinctively, but socially we definitely have at some point. Sharia, coverture, old testament laws, etc.

> I’m surprised people seem to think homo sapiens sapiens has somehow moved beyond instinctual behaviors programmed by thousands upon thousands of years of evolution.

> We haven’t.

I have seen my own children develop their understanding of the world through such stereotypical behaviors that it further solidifies my appreciation of just how much human behavior is derived from innate instinct.

Maybe we're just heading toward single motherhood with fewer but more prolific fathers which I think happened before. As a man without children relying on government assistance, the real issue is this arrangement these days tends to rely on welfare and therefore higher taxes for me who has no stake in it.

Equilibrium will be restored after the members of the generation whose minds were poisoned and did not successfully reproduce do in fact die off (with their ideas). This is the process of evolution.

>If women would rather remain single than setting for a partner who doesn't match all their expectations

This is why Lori Gottlieb wrote Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough. <https://smile.amazon.com/Marry-Him-Case-Settling-Enough-eboo...>

One can also see the relation to the message of Susan "the Princeton mom" Patton's Marry Smart. <https://www.cnn.com/2014/03/13/living/princeton-mom-book-mar...>.

I think the taste of men in women is very predictable. We're all focussed on the same 5%.

With women, it's different. Each individual woman has a different taste. Some like men with beards, others hate them. Some like tattoos, others hate them. Some like them more chubby, some skinny. Some like a funny guy, some a serious one that doesn't act childish.

If you don't believe me, play a game with a women where you try to guess which guys she finds attractive. Very hard. With guys, that game is easy.

Make a fake profile on Tinder and the results speak for themselves. Women flock to a specific phenotype of homo sapien with a very high probability (top 5% of men). I think of this phenotype as a race of its own, since its members share many common characteristics, and interestingly the one many focus on first, skin color, isn't one of the distinguishing factors.

Since you seem to know, what does the 5% profile look like? It's all genetically fixed, or does the style and environment in the pictures play a role?

As a starting point geometrically the 95 percentile has proportions like those in the faces you see when you search Google Images or Bing Images for "average face in every country." Notice that the average face of either sex is universally attractive to most people.

Beyond this there are about 55 features that need to come together to get the 95th percentile phenotype. Rather than enumerating them all here, there is a four part analysis on YouTube:

  1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhEuWSXxu5k
  2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwbGW9jeDeo
  3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fz7tI7qT5t8
  4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2otjA_98StY

I'm sorry but that's just the face. It's a bit absurd that women would only take the face into account. In fact, it absurd that women would only take looks into account.

Is there room for anything else on Tinder? Or other dating apps? Do people on those sites care? Debatable. Obviously looks are not the only factor in a relationship, but they are a major one, especially in longer term relationships, and are often the only factor.

Evidence from 2014 craigslist personals: https://incels.wiki/images/6/61/Juggernaut_test_2014.jpg

Looks unmatched couples are unstable and the better looking partner is at elevated risk of monkey branching.

Yeah basically it's pure capitalism:

- before, religion and morals were preventing sleeping around, which was effectively doing "sexual socialism" for the "poor" of the sexual market. this led to everyone having 1 partner as a pareto optimum. (even if in many cases paople were sleeping out of marriage)

- with sexual liberation (both of men and women), top performers get all the spoils, as it is with monopoly and businesses, and the lower perfomer gets... what's left.

Conclusion : be a top performer. Equality is always only a social construct