I never sent a "hey" or wink in my life. This is not some unreasonable bar. Every time I see my female friends inboxes I gag all over agaon. Dudes are pathetic.
1) Is photos are _way_ more important and the first message doesn't really affect the reply rate
2) It's a way to filter out recipients who think they are too good for hey or not going to reply anyway (window shopping or whatever they call it)
>Dudes are pathetic
That was subtle. I recognized the irony only upon looking at your username ;)
My expectation when sending a "hey" is not a "yes, i want to marry", it's another low-effort "hi :)" or something like that. This has its meanings of its own, by providing answers to the two questions above. It says that she has ideally given your profile a second look and does indeed want to have a conversation with you, on that app.
Yes, after the "hey" I had people tell me that they don't like talking on the app but you should follow them on instagram (likely they won't respond to you there either), or offered me various paid services. Writing "hey" provides a great filter for me, too. And yes, I was actually able to start meaningful conversations after the first "hey" warm-up.
The problem on dating apps is that with many profiles, you cannot start any conversation specific to those profiles due to them not revealing anything about themselves in the profile. Even if a woman reveals a little bit about herself in the pictures or in the bio, she will probably receive whatever specific-to-her starter you can think of in 20 different variations. Yes, you were not the only one who saw the famous monument in the background that she's been to. Yes, you were not the only one to notice that she likes avocado toast. She is literally talking with dozens of other people who also only saw that monument picture and the avocado toast line.
I was about to write something about everybody’s time on this planet being limited and how there’s actually a human being on the other side of that chat window. But… an appeal to human decency feels pretty pointless here.
Though there's an important distinction between writing a message and real-time chat. "Hey" may be perfectly fine for a chat, but not for an email or similar type of direct message. I tend towards the latter.
And even then, "hey" is a correct way of starting a conversation. Sure it can be improved, using something about their profile works better.
Though to be honest, women who start with the "entertain me" mentality, that's a good hint that she's not going to work out.
There are such women of course, but this tiny trivial level of effort and sincerity is not that.
This is exactly what I mean by pathetic.
So if anything, they had to step up and entertain me fist, since they had to even have anything remotely interesting in their profile to talk about like that. And yes I did the same in mine.
Though you then risk get an "ok" back because that wasn't "cool enough"
So you're free to do better then, the bots will appreciate it as well
That may be why some men do it, but that doesn't counter an observation that better results can be acheived by using that behavior as a strong negative signal.
> And even then, "hey" is a correct way of starting a conversation
In a zero-latency medium with non-verbal side channels, like face-to-face oral conversation, sure. In text media, even where I know I want yo interact with someone, I find it annoying.
Mind you, my experience is all way pre-tinder. I've never been on Tinder, and things may work differently there, because if I understand correctly, you first need both people to already be interested in each other before you can send messages, and the messages are explicitly chat, so there a "Hey" might work. But on many traditional dating sites (many of which are scams now), you search profiles and send a message before you have a match, leading many women to get inundated with low-effort "Hey" messages from men with seemingly no content or personality at all.
Maybe the Tinder approach is better.
Note that it was a man saying it. And I, also a man, agree: men who just send "Hey" to all women they can find are pathetic. It's a shitty, spammy way to behave on a dating site. It helps nobody.
We used to all fight against spammers like the Spam King, because everybody suffered equally from that flood of unwanted messages. But because these minor spam lords only target women, it seems lots of men think it's not really a problem. If the people suffering from it think it's a problem, then it's a problem. And as far as I can tell, a lot of women on such dating sites do consider this a problem.
From my dating-app days, a lot of women profiles were also contentless: A few pretty pics, and a catchline they (more frequent than not) copied from somewhere else.
You couldn't really start a meaningful conversation, if you tried. After matching, "hey" or some BS comeback to their catchline is often the best you can do without coming out as unpleasantly inquisitive.