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Comment by stared | Hacker News Reader

Things IRL work differently. I mean, if you are into picking people at bars just by their looks, then yeah, dating apps go in that line. If you have long conversations with a friend of a friend at a party (or on some special interest groups), then dating apps are nothing like that. OK, maybe OkCupid, but back in the good old days.

I often hear from women dating men that they would have swiped left their partner on Tinder.

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I think the problem for most people is that we simply don't have many opportunities for these type of interactions at a certain point in life. Also, why do you need to have deep conversations before going out on a date? If there is physical attraction and some shared interests, what's the harm of meeting for some drinks?

I don't claim that dating apps are a bad idea - but that they are not optimized for my use case.

Why talking first? Well, for me:

P(attractive|interesting) >> P(interesting|attractive)

and by a few orders of magnitude (1000?). YMMV.

But the best way to talk is...on date!

Texting or whatever is terrible. There's no way to convey sense of humor and text is rife with misunderstanding tone.

Almost every partner I have had (including my wife) where duration of relationship exceeded two months, I met IRL by pure chance.

Online? Pretty much only ever resulted in a couple of dates with the person, or a one and done hookup.

Its anecdotal, and friends have had the opposite experience, so I can't draw much of a conclusion from it besides that I was not suited to online dating.

Your experience mirrors mine. My wife and my last serious relationship before - both IRL chance encounter or created through pre-existing friend connections. Some meaningful relationship-ish connections through online dating.

I think the issue here is that if you're the type that prefers the latter method then there's no real app for that and I'm not convinced you can have such an experience on an app. Best I can think of is that you provide chat rooms and pressure people into talking one on one. But the in person experience you're describing also highly depends on a lot of non-verbal cues, albeit noisy and easy to misinterpret. These cues don't translate really well in text (and I'm sure that the metaverse isn't going to fix this either).

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