Salesforce, but for Dating
dateforce.app
dateforce.app
I think this says a lot about the "attention economy" way all the various dating and social apps take up your time to use them, and how we've digitized the process so much that people unironically see the appeal of a CRM system for managing contacts. Classic case of "new tech to solve the problems of all the other tech", where the other tech is actually the source of the problem, and probably shouldn't be relied on in this way.
It reminds me of the early 2000s "pick up artist" stuff, I had a few friends who read the books and would actively hit on women anytime we went out. It was horrible haha.
As for the maker of this app, if it fills a need and gets widely adopted who knows?
In the early 2000s only "professionals" used CAD. Now (almost) everyone with a 3d printer or a shed they want to build uses CAD. It's trickled down.
The pickup artists are on the bleeding edge of the "craft" if you can call it that. It shouldn't be surprising that the stuff they do (or at least the stuff that works) filters down.
A lot of people are picking up on how PUA types are actually annoying grifters who think bullying women is flirting, or even that some forms of PUA are actually blatantly sociopathic.
A lot of them are pretending like they have some special insight beyond the fact that they a.) are conventionally mostly attractive b.) are at least a tiny bit charismatic c.) had enough self-confidence to try doing literally anything at all.
I hate having to deal with the aftermath of endless men approaching me at random who think "being an asshole" is flirting. It's so annoying.
>even that some forms of PUA are actually blatantly sociopathic.
It of says a lot, and none of it good, that adopting sociopath behaviors and then spray and praying them is an effective way for men to keep the big end of the sales funnel full.
>A lot of them are pretending like they have some special insight beyond the fact that they a.) are conventionally mostly attractive b.) are at least a tiny bit charismatic c.) had enough self-confidence to try doing literally anything at all.
The pool of women that will entertain the idea of sleeping with any given man is small. The pool of men that will sleep with any given women is large. Women don't need to put any effort into identifying this pool. Men do, that's what all this spray and pray PUA crap is about. Men need to identify this pool before expending any filtration effort on other criteria. And at the other end of the funnel pool of women any given man is compatible enough with is large. Women have a much smaller pool of men they're compatible enough with so they try to filter by this first, much to the chagrin of every man who has to deal with it (the same way you're annoyed by getting hit on by men you're not interested in).
Oh, and I hope you noticed the perverse incentive for both men and women to fudge the things that are under their control in order to pass the filter of people who are otherwise out of their league or incompatible...
Thank god I'm not single anymore.
I had a friend who used the "craft" and had enough success with it that he was utterly convinced he could get literally any woman to sleep with him. He failed to notice that all of his "marks" could be grouped into roughly two sets of women:
- Those who were unaware of the game being played. They were highly insecure and not intelligent or not socially aware enough to realize they were being manipulated.
- Those who were aware of the game, and were playing it themselves. They were consciously looking to get laid, and they would sit in judgement of their suitors, sleeping with whoever could navigate their "shit tests" and put on an impressive enough performance. An odd sort of "game recognizes game" fencing match.
Anyway, my point is that some of this stuff really does "work", but it's not nearly as universal as its practitioners like to believe, and the men who practice it are often being gamed themselves. Anyone who is aware of the game (even subconsciously) and not interested in playing it is immune.
I eventually found a gf outside of the apps, entirely by chance. I still do not see how I could’ve found her aside from pure random chance, so unfortunately that doesn’t help you at all.
The trick is to find out where you're likely to meet the types of people you are interested in: interest groups, college campus, gaming Discords, climbing gym, etc. I think in dating, diversification is key, because the types of people you will find in any given environment can be highly autocorrelated in terms of preferences and personality.
The other trick is to actually flirt with people when you like someone. A minority of people might not take it well, but it actually brightens a lot of people's days when done respectfully and it's the only way to have a chance at getting somewhere.
Most social activities that involve strangers are also full of men. This is because most men aren’t interested in going out and meeting new people they have no social connection with. Women go to parties, outings with other friends, etc. Men go to things alone like bars, clubs, gyms, sports, etc. to meet new people and bond with absolutely complete strangers. Most women don’t do this at all.
I realized that increasing the surface area mostly only matters if you’re increasing the surface area of meeting the kind of person you want to date. As a hetero man, I was not doing activities that included many women. But I still don’t know what I could’ve done differently, because doing activities involving women that I don’t enjoy, so that I can be on the lookout for potential dates… doesn’t seem very enjoyable, and also seems a bit creepy. On the other hand, going to activities I don’t enjoy and not looking for dates seems rather pointless.
Well, that and optimize your attractiveness as best you are able. That can take a large variety of forms depending on your target audience and who you want to be personally.
On top of all that, they're all slowly changing to the swipe mechanics of Tinder and the like. Personally I hate that model, but apparently it's "won".
The truth is that most men get nothing from dating services. It’s only the top few percent of men who are getting substantial attention. Even then - of the friends I know who are getting some attention, they say it’s a huge mental drain because they have to be a jester to entertain so many women in order to get anywhere. These are above average men but not very good looking men. The good looking men don’t even have to try - the mental effort is low.
Maybe if we just put up better photos?
However, hot women probably do.
Edit: or at least could, if they wanted to
Personally, I would just like to see a contacts app that doesn't suck, and actually supports having both "companies" AND "people" as contact without treating them exactly the same. If I want to call some hotel or something, why does it have to be "First name: Holiday Inn" in order to even show up correctly...
* https://keepmyfriends.com/ * https://getdex.com/
I haven't used any personally!
Maybe combined with ChatGPT we could even make those automatic getting-back-in-touch messages indistinguishable from the manual ones.
I’ve never heard that idea before and I love it.
So half a bit would be like hearing "Umm..." in response to that same question?
"Is this tree deciduous?" "Yes" - one bit
"Is this tree evergreen?" "Probably" - one bit (they don't know), another bit (their guess)
But I'm way off any formal understanding of this, and it can be rigorously defined.
Meta comment: "half a bit" was clearly a joke, and so was my response; now I'm taking your reply at face value and debating it seriously, while admitting that I haven't got anything close to firm enough ground under me to actually debate it :)
"Umm..." definitely carries some kind of information, but it doesn't actually help answer the question.
Based on the information theoretic definition of entropy we'd need to go from 50:50 to 89% certainty to get half a bit of information, and I'd probably qualify 89% certainty as "probably"
To try to be a little constructive, is a relationship really worth anything if a half-bit is all one can spare for it?
I'm more unsettled by the automation part. At least the half-bit received came from someone who consciously thought about you enough to send it. Once you emulate that part, all you have is a MITM initiating conversations between strangers.
extending this bit further - we might as well reply with chatGPT. then it's chatGPT all the way down, who needs human interaction when we tick the boxes of "I called them" and "I replied"?.. :)
"AI" for the following cases would be beneficial:
Social -> Antisocial
Social <- Antisocial
"AI" for the following cases would be net neutral:
Antisocial -> Antisocial
Antisocial <- Antisocial
And finally "AI" would be inapplicable (since neither party would use it) in the following cases:
Social -> Social
Social <- Social
In this drastically simplified model, there aren't any cases where the existence of a sufficiently competent AI would be detrimental to any party involved, while still providing value for those who choose to use it.
To be pedantic, this is not a single bit of data. This is zero bits attached to an event. The event is not discrete however, so I'm not sure what form of information theory would be appropriate to describe it.
Like if you'd walk on a noisy street, see someone you know, and greet them half-heartedly and wouldn't really mind if they didn't hear you.
Oh man, the thrill of not knowing if this message will actually be sent when I hit the "reply" button!
Problem is there’s a lot of input and upkeep which limits appeal, the most important social data sources (text & phone) are not accessible via api, its a personal tool that you don’t necessarily want to tell others you use which limits distribution & scale, and even after all that in general it’s hard to scale personal authenticity.
I think the problem needs to be approached from a different angle along the lines of a personal assistant rather that an explicit data management tool. And it likely has to come from those with access to privileged social data sources like Apple or Google or Facebook.
We would have continued a while longer but the 08 recession really burnt us. We were raising $$ in the weeks where banks were literally failing. RIP Good Times era. Our iPhone app was just about ready to ship and we were going to start building integrations like email next, but no runway. We had an angel lined up who’d have gotten us about 4-6mo of runway but I didn’t want to burn that relationship in such an uncertain environment, we were all pretty down about prospects then.
Fun fact tho: the app continued to work for years after. FB took a long time to deprecate API and our code was pretty solid.
The goal is to avoid just a dumb timer saying 'its been 4 weeks, why don't you chat with X'. That's how Socialfly worked, and it was pretty high friction in practical use.
Also, want it to be 100% local and privacy first.
But I also want an AI personal assistant to know what to write to everyone, what we last did, what would they be interested in, and so on.
There’s also the problem of entering unflattering details, and subsequently leaking them out.
The search continues.
Great, easy to integrate one service with the APIs of a bunch of others!
> Also, want it to be 100% local and privacy first.
...but in combination? Never going to happen.
Ask yourself: who's signing up for the API keys to enable the client-side service to talk to all these services? Is it the end-user, or is it this software's developer?
If it's the software's developer, then they're effectively leaking all these API keys by embedding them into the software itself — where not just the end users, but anyone else could come along and reuse these keys for anything they like. The service providers will find this out, and block these keys. (No, you can't avoid this by proxying requests to some gateway, operated by the service-provider, that holds the API keys. Then you lose the "local/private" aspect.)
If it's each end-user, then the aggregate traffic from all the instances of this app running at once, will look exactly like a bot that's trying to evade API rate-limits using a "residential proxy cluster" like https://www.zyte.com/smart-proxy-manager/... and so the services will block these keys.
---
Mind you, in theory, you could do this on the OS level, using OS accessibility APIs to effectively "read" the messages off the screen. But 1. is there any third-party ISV — who isn't a certified accessibility-software provider — who you'd trust enough to allow their software the ability to constantly "read" everything on your screen? That includes your passwords, you know! And also, 2., the messages need to be on the screen for accessibility software to read them. An accessibility-API-driven CRM can't load your chat history unless you also grant it the ability to literally take your mouse and scroll through it for you.
Or, alternately, coming at this from the perspective of the Operating System vendor themselves, you could do this "in" the OS, by forcing emails/text/chat message handling to go through system APIs that can see these as special document types, and so do things with them. IIRC there was at least one pre-iPhone mobile OS that did this (BlackBerry OS, maybe?), enabling all of these types of messaging-app traffic to be muxed together into a single first-party app that did indeed manage all conversations with your contacts in a multi-channel way.
Look into it, you might be surprised.
You were very active with this friend for n years and it dropped off. Drop them a line.
Also, that presumes you're on desktop. On mobile, you just can't poke into another app's sandbox/container that way (unless the target app hasn't explicitly granted made some part of its container-filesystem externally accessible; and there's no reason these apps would.) And many people only have a mobile device.
If you're okay with a partial solution, a far easier one would be scraping the data out of the few clients that have web-app versions through browser extensions that read the state out of the page they're running in.
Well, if you are worried about it being cringy, you probably shouldn't watch the 2022 Salesforce Dreamforce (their annual convention). It's cultish and shows the unbelievably arrogant confidence they have in their own importance - along with the most inexplicably childish moments for a professional conference I've ever seen. (Let's put foam rabbit ears on our "co-CEOs" to entertain the "trailblazers" as we gather around a fake wooden stage imitating the outdoors with faux trees, won't that be funny?)
Integrate a scraping and keyword search for public facing social media postings to alert to people in distress, perhaps. Or just a general "you should check on X" feature. Not with automated messaging, that's too much.
This is what social media and messaging apps should innovate on.
But, without VC money, without ads, without feeds drive by algorithms that optimize for engagement. Without dark patterns and antifeatures that make our lives worse. Just a non-profit that churns out open source code and is supported by monthly recurring donations from a % of the userbase.
For a while, I was going to a weekly event where I'd meet people, but I'd never remember their name next time because I'm terrible with names.
So I started jotting down notes after it was over. Like, today I met person X who is really into this one hobby and just moved here from such and such city. And person Y who is looking for a new apartment. And Z who came with Y.
Then before going next time, I'd review the list, and if I saw X, I knew their name and could ask how they're adjusting after their move. Or I could ask Y how the apartment search is going.
At first I thought if people saw this list they might think it was a little weird. And maybe, but I'm OK with it since it's a way of making an effort. As long as it's genuine and your motivations are good, people like that you remembered stuff about them. (I'm not doing it to impress people, etc.)
Anyway, I didn't have a good way to organize it. I stuck it all in a document, which didn't work great.
It is, in other words, the exact opposite of 'spaced repetition', where you want to review right before forgetting to strengthen the memory the most; in this use-case, 'anti-spaced repetition', you want to review only after you've forgotten it. (https://www.gwern.net/Statistical-notes#program-for-non-spac...)
- MonicaHQ (open-source)
- Dex (free version seems good enough for most people, i'm trying this one out rn) getdex.com/
- Custom system in Airtable - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30329475
- Infrequent app - blog post talks more about it, linked in comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33308084
I probably need to point out that I'm not dissing the app. If it succeeds, the creators are obviously filling a need in the market, but confirmation of such a need would indicate dating as I define it is horribly broken
Socializing as a whole is broken, triggered by the disappearance of third places, the dissolution of communities at the altar of the nuclear dual-income family, live-at-work jobs and "hustle culture" (Veblen entrepreneurship), and the unlimited streaming doom-scroll.
With nowhere to go but work and home, good luck finding anyone to date or befriend via a nonexistent organic social network.
While what you are saying is very true, dating so many people at once, plus having dated so many in the past that you need an app to keep track of them all is a whole other level of broken
Pure addiction, like a slot machine. The original purpose all but forgotten.
In the last three years the closest I came to a viable third place was VRChat, it was the best social experience I’ve ever had. I don’t think I need to say much more about that, it speaks for itself.
I agree if it becomes a social norm, but it could also be really helpful for people with certain disabilities or even dementia
As others have said, if you were able to find if Hinge, Bumble, Tinder, Grindr, etc... have open APIs that you could connect to your app? Same goes for things like Eventbrite or Meetup.
"I met so-and-so through (dating app) on (date/time) and we hit it off well. We then met up again via (event app) and continued meeting up regularly, and I was able to keep notes about so-and-so on the app - their favorite bars, foods, music, etc... as they revealed it to me, and the app was able to provide me with info as to when I was last in touch with them, when there's availability at their favorite restaurant, a music act at their favorite bar, etc..."
I'd love to have an app like that in my life.
SMH
Does this integrate directly with the dating services/apps themselves? Seems like a lot of work to plumb in and keep up-to-date the status and latest information on each profile.
Also, if this is a legit service you should be extremely careful how you store all this data. Exposing a bunch of dating profile data via a security breach will land you into hotter water than anything Marc Benioff could throw at you :)
Then for dates in the funnel who told you things like "too busy", "not ready for dating" etc. you could schedule automated messages for things like reminding them to circle back when they're ready, checking if they're available to get on a call to show them new features you've added (as a person), etc.
So, building on your humor, I'd like to suggest a feature/service we can sell to the victcoughother person. When they respond with "too busy" they can also set a flag in the system indicating whether they'd actually like to _not_ hear from the person operating the funnel. We get paid, the vict^H^H^H^Hdate doesn't get hassled in the future, and the person running the dating funnel is none the wiser because our software never notifies them again.
I think I'm ready for an MBA now :)
> Hi (Name), are you getting the best experiences on your dates? We've been chatting for a while, and I wanted to share some news with you before I update everyone else. I've found some new exciting dating spots and you're going to love them! (Insert sales pitch) I'd love the chance to chat about my new dating spots. Shall we arrange a meeting to talk you through possible restaurants, bowling alleys or what movies we can watch together? Let's book a call today and get things started.
Source: https://www.flowrite.com/blog/sales-pitch-email , slightly modified.
No. They're all probably pretty good looking. The problem with the apps is the selection bias exhibited by males and females. If you look at the selection stats for men, you'll see they swipe right for about 80% of women. If you look at the selection stats for women, you'll see they swipe right for about 0.5% of men.
I've no idea why this is the case, but the results have held out over a number releases both private and public.
But the dunking seems to overlook the genuine problems with modern dating that didn't exist in the past. I find that it's very easy to mindlessly swipe a thousand people on an app and suddenly end up with more matches than I have the energy and attention span to process. If there was an easy way to turn this "inbox" (which is really just one step above my Gmail spam folder) into an actionable database, that could have real value in a world where dating happens stochastically through apps.
Separately, it isn't weird at all to keep some sort of track of your dating life. Past generations had the "little black book," basically a romantic rolodex. I've never used one but who's to say I couldn't benefit from a digital version that lives in my phone?
Most of all, a commenter here that is since deleted said something I think is apt: "I think the number one problem with online dating is not managing all the people. It's forcing yourself to keep the number of active pursuits low enough to manage. If you don't kind of commit to seeing if someone is going to pan out, then they won't." This is of course the actual solution to the problem I experience with modern dating. The only downside is that, unlike downloading an app, it requires that I change how I think and behave.
https://www.thekeys.ai/product
not sure about bidirectional data flow though -- maybe you can do that via accessibility interfaces?
Also possible that OSes will offer standard chat UX in the future, making it simpler to hook plugins into conversations -- ios already does this to some extent with imessage plugins, but 'tinder for imessage' is the opposite of 'imessage for tinder' so this is most useless bc of lock-in
This problem is solved in a culture where friends and family suggest matchups. Of course, this requires a decent and somewhat large network in the first place, but each agent is incentivized to show matches that are somewhat in each other’s leagues (for the agent’s reputation), and each single person is incentivized to not burn their reputation in the network so they avoid churning through possible matches in pursuit of a “better” match.
You also get a somewhat reasonable background check via the agent proposing a possible match since they might have a cursory knowledge of the proposed match’s history and family and whatnot.
> Too many requests, please try again after an hour
I’m really out of touch
It seems a personal/portable CRM could be highly useful. The second aspect is the vertical aspect (professional or "personal")
One thing I keep hearing from people that have sold companies, exited etc. is that they are having a hard time operating within their networks without the CRM.
1. The problem of deduplicating contacts is tough (but solvable). If you don't solve it well, then the utility of personal CRM goes wayyyyy down and you're getting notifications about the same people with different email / WhatsApp / Instagram addresses and that gets annoying.
2. People haven't shown a big willingness to pay very much for this (so far), despite everyone saying they want it. So we're left with the open source solutions that don't solve the problems very well.
3. People are SUPER concerned about privacy. See a comment above about someone who wants the system to automatically scan email, etc. and extract contacts, but that it must be 100% local and privacy-centric. You can't have both of those - to intelligently extract contacts without duplicates (and figure out that @mybestie on Instagram == mybestie@gmail.com == my.c.bestie@corporate.com) you need a big database of who's who to match against.
Everything is solvable I think - we're not talking cold fusion here. But it's tougher than it might seem on the surface.
The two commercial tools that come to mind are:
* Dex (https://getdex.com/)
* Clay (https://clay.earth/)
Although neither have really nailed it (yet). Clay is more like a Superhuman-for-Contacts, whereas Dex is really going hard at being a true PRM.
The big open source tool out there is:
* Monica (https://www.monicahq.com/)
Everyone loves the idea of talking to their friends, conceptually. But, given ample time and opportunity, many choose not to keep up with friends. It's almost as if people only "want to want" to keep up with friends, rather than actually want it.
And then there's the empty-database problem. I installed Monica a while back and the first thing it prompted me to do was.....input all my contacts. No Facebook import, no LinkedIn import, etc. Are you kidding me? I'm not rebuilding my friend graph from scratch. So I ditched the tool immediately (note: I haven't looked at it in years so it might have fixed some of those issues in the meantime).
And absolutely yes - there's the actual work of being in touch with people that you can't (or shouldn't, in a non-dystopian world) automate away. I'm sure someone will figure out how to rig up GPT-3 to do that but ughhhh...shiver please don't.
So for a personal CRM to work, you'd need to sort out, at minimum, the monetization piece and the data fidelity piece. If you open source it, you still need to make sure people keep the data up to date and that's actually pretty hard.
Superhuman sold to executives for $30/month - which is a relevant (high) price point.
My understanding is people who want to keep their contacts have 1) a lot of them in the actual inbox 2) have their Linkedin to fall back on 3) can always fall back to exporting all their contacts when they leave.
Apropos of nothing, $30/month/user is roughly the base price of Salesforce, and they have 3 more tiers significantly above that. High for a consumer, but pretty cheap for professional tools, and they don't sell licenses one at a time.
Because spreadsheets and notes are free and good enough.
I used to be a full time shitty cheap car flipper. I used to be single. They're about the same level of communication work. The ROI of a proper CRM isn't there because in both cases your customer is just not that serious about the interaction when they're in the part of the funnel a CRM helps you with and even then it doesn't really help you with the bulk of the customers, it helps you with the long tail. When you're a one man shop squeezing out an extra 1% or whatever a CRM gets you isn't worth the time vs focusing on other areas. (These days I work in a client facing role with a proper ticketing system and integrated CRM so I do have something to compare to.)
My goal is to develop features that also facilitate sharing of activities, upcoming events that I'm attending that I want to share with people I know. Things I want to do, and making that visible to select groups of people.
Hope you'll check out where we're heading https://www.friendapp.com/
I promise you this is real.
Is there a “notes” section so I can jot down details from dates to remember? That part is currently occupying my phone’s notes app.
> P.S. Marc Benioff, please don't sue us. Remember that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
I never realized that my dream job would be so people-oriented. Drop me a line if you're hiring...
In order to be an expert at dating, it's reasonable to assume that you've been on many dates. That pretty much means you actually suck at dating as the very point of dating is to stop dating (for most).
I remember seeing a post on Reddit[1] about ~4 years ago made by the same person who made this[2] post on HN about a year ago.
[1] Does anyone else use salesforce as PRM (Personal Relationship Management) System? https://archive.ph/3mB1U
[2] Show HN: Nat.app, personal CRM that knows who you're losing touch with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30836418
Gardeners like their plants to grow big and healthy. Fishkeepers obsess over the health of their tanks. Musicians want to play more challenging music with better bandmates for bigger audiences on higher profile stages.
So if you were on the receiving end of a date orchestrated by a dating hobbyist, it'd be fun, probably unusual, definitely well organized. There are worse things to experience while dating. And, just maybe, you make a connection and form a relationship. But even the base case isn't _bad_ per se.
> dating hobbyist
Also, your use of hobbyist is so close to being on par (https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=hobbyist).
I have never heard that definition of "hobbyist" before. I don't see how it's even remotely related to what I wrote. But whatever. Get some rest, maybe tomorrow will be a better day for you.
Wow, you even have it running on NA14?
(Also, tried to sign up by calling support but got an endlessly looping `We are experiencing higher than usual call volumes, one of our dating expert associates will be with you "shortly" (but remember that your call _is_ important to us)`
If you need something like this, then it's probably safe to say that dating is not your weak point.
But, just as every multi-millionaire probably has an accountant, because they have more wealth than they can easily manage, so too must the dating conquistadors suffer, I guess.
Remember that person you met that was so good at remembering everything about you? most likely they are just good at journaling.
Also, journaling is a powerful tool.
I also like the "probability" field.
If you don't know SF well, Polk street is one of two frat boy rows.
"Forcible dating"?
You 2, date right now!
COUNT(ROWS(person.gender == Male and person.orientation == Straight)) == 0
Corporations don't like stuff like because they don't want to deal with clients who don't understand the joke being playing with their brand. OP isn't going to be the one who has to do damage control when this blows up and some percentage of people start to to believe it's actual Salesforce behind this product.
My pseudocode:
- Dress up, show up, shut up. Collared shirt, clean jeans. Be on time. Ask person questions, and listen. The bar is incredibly low for men.
- Same bar, same time. xyz @ 7pm. This means a bad one goes to MAYBE 8/830, and you're out. If you're an adult by yourself, this means you have time to run your life when 5 out of 7 days in a week are dates. You can still workout, make a food, clean your place.
- Guy makes the plans, decisiveness puts you head and shoulders over other possibilities. Interest is everything. It's in the delivery: "I know a really great cocktail bar where we can chat more, xyz @ 7pm on wednesday sound good to you?" Don't waste their time, get to the meet!
- Drinks over dinner every time. Mocktails are fine. Activity date is fine too, but remember you don't know each other. If it turns out to be a bust you are now stuck (looking at you dinner!). You can always say: "Hey I'm feeling kind of hungry how about you? I know xyz spot near here we can go for a bite and keep talking..." decisive decisive decisive, yet still asking what they think. Coffee in my area is perceived as you aren't interested, so don't bother. I have also heard reviews that coffee is not a real date, so you may be perceived as low interest.
- Don't play day favorites, just queue em up.
- No more than 1.5w in advance, if they're busy or hesitant just drop them from the queue, and see if they follow up later. Don't go nuts about this, people's interest is everything.
Remember, the purpose of online dating is to MEET IN REAL LIFE, not message for weeks until someone CRACKS. (this is how I formalized it, if you find a new meme friend, idgaf what you do with your life :D )
My findings:
- App signal to noise ratio is: hinge, bumble, tinder, ok cupid, plenty of fish. Hinge was the highest quality matches both in terms of chatting up, and general partner coolness(?). My guess is because the messaging in Hinge forces you to interact meaningfully . Bumble was good, most women I met said they didn't like it because it forced them to engage. Tinder was fine, got picked up a couple of times on that one. Didn't bother with the other two after week one, quality was terrible.
- THE BAR IS INCREDIBLY LOW FOR MEN. If you are employed, and can speak to other people without being an asshole, you are ahead of the game. Don't believe me? Ask your next date what their worst experience is. I assure you it will be 10x worse than yours. Anecdote from my partner: guy: "oh you like dogs? let's go drink in a dog park!". He shows up already drunk, and then BLACKS OUT at the park. She ends up dumping him into a lyft and she goes home. 0/10. Same guy tries to match her 6m later.
- Men think paying for apps is a scam? I paid for the top three, and kept my queue full as long as possible until I found someone I kept around for 3w, then deactivate.
- Aggressively tune your profile. Less is probably more. Details are for the date. No negative things. This is not build-a-bear. You want your profile to INCLUDE, use your swipes to EXCLUDE. You choose who you go on a date with! This means you can exclude people that won't work for you.
- Guys get very uptight about "the algorithm" and will swipe right on everything. Let it work for you, and swipe left on anyone you wouldn't meet up with. Remember, the point is to MEET IN REAL LIFE.
- Dating can be expensive, but it doesn't have to be. You set the budget by where you go. Scale accordingly. You will mess this up once, and then not again.
I had a a total over 60ish dates, three longer term partners (>1m), picked up maybe five times, was a boy toy for a couple people. Overall, fun adventure, happily paired up for 3y now as a result of online dating.
Online dating is different things for different people, but those are my findings and how I approached it. This software sounds cool, I probably would have used it. :)
Sorry for the info dump, but I love hearing stories and helping people with their online profile. I used to be a kind of lightning rod for single dudes at bars and help them sort their profile out while also making friends with them. Two of the four of them got married to people from online dating, one is in a long term still, so I count that as a massive success!
I’m paying $250+/session for a dating coach just for online dating because the bar is so high - even though I’ve done all the usual advice from dating advice places. At this point, I have to spend another $5k on a pro photographer following me around for a few days and taking photos/videos of me at various events/hobbies with friends/animals/etc because that’s the level it is for men who aren’t naturally photogenic/good looking. Same for having the coach actually write out the profile, write comments, etc. I can’t even do it because it requires someone who does this as their full time job in order for an average looking guy to be remotely successful. I wish just liking a person with an average profile that isn’t holding any dead fish was enough but it isn’t. Women want more.
Not even joking. It’s bad for most men - you’re part of an exceptional few because you’re naturally good looking and won’t have to put in anywhere near the effort the rest of us do.
He had a spreadsheet -- called girls.xls -- where he kept track of important details about each woman he went on a date with.
We were sitting around musing about how hard it must be to keep track of the key details given all the dates he was going on, and he let drop that he had a spreadsheet.
He never showed it to anybody and it didn't sound creepy - it was genuinely a tool he used in good faith given the volume of info he was trying to keep track of.
And, he ended up marrying #42.
People are amazed at how great I am at remembering names and details. It's become almost a super-power, it's weird how writing things down can completely change how people perceive you. It's really cool to scroll through the names and see people I met years ago: the cute barista that moved away right after COVID, an old neighbor's boyfriend, a coworker's dog (I extended the list to also include pets). Brings back good memories and often makes me smile.
Yes this actually happened to me.
Beware the tools you create, for the input corpus isn't necessarily valid over time. People change.
That’s probably the extent of what 90% of guys would say about any woman they’re dating.
Is there AI-powered communication as well? The profiles can let AI communicate and receive a message when GPT-3 has determined that an actual date should occur.