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Comment by mcv | Hacker News Reader

Not sure why this is voted down. From my chats with women on dating sites, this is accurate. Most of them were constantly flooded with contentless messages like that, which makes it very hard to get a meaningful conversation.

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.

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> Most of them were constantly flooded with contentless messages like that, which makes it very hard to get a meaningful conversation.

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.

That is true. And I wasn't interested in them. But at least they didn't spam me the way some men apparently spam women with contentless messages.

You really can't see this being down voted for the (all) dudes are pathetic part?;

That "all" is your own addition, not present in the comment I responded to.

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.

Jeez, one usually has to do some bad things IRL to be called shitty spammy and pathetic, apparently all it takes online is saying “hey”. Doesn’t that seem a bit excessive for someone whose crime is not figuring out some rather subtle unwritten, untaught social rules?

If the result is that women end up swamped in these messages, then it is literally spammy. Sending everybody a "Hey" is no different from sending everybody any other sort of message, ad or otherwise, and calling that out is not excessive.

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.

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