Tired of Dating Apps, Some Turn to Google Docs

The other side of that study (The infamous OKcupid one, it seems to be the source of all these) is that once women engage with men, their expectations normalize, and they end up with like rated men.

The core issue is just getting women to engage with realistically viable men. This has never been a (huge) issue ever before because until right now, the only way to meet people was face to face encounters. Nature solved for the problem, and online dating broke it.

> The top 80 percent of women compete for the top 20 percent of men on dating apps

Exactly. Which means 80% of men will have a real issue finding partners (or already are).

Dating apps combined with birth control seem to be taking us away from monogamy and towards polygamy. That top 20% of men has no incentive to want to commit to any one woman, so those women are competing in a mostly fruitless quest that may be fun in the short term, but isn't going anywhere. Then when they do eventually lower their standards in a desperate attempt to marry once they hit the biological-clock wall, they may have a hard time settling and being happy with their choice, because they've used to dating "above their means". That's a good recipe for infidelity and/or divorce. Meanwhile 80% of men are mostly ignored until eventually some desperate woman is willing to lower their standard and settle for them. Modern dating seems insane, I don't see how that's good for either men or women. But what do I know.

Edit: If you disagree, say why.

The big problem is that "dating" apps are currently a mix of people looking for companionships and people just looking for sex - and the most popular ones are optimised for the latter, where matching largely comes down to selecting based on attractiveness of a photo.

The biggest problem is that attractiveness in real life doesn't match one-to-one with attractiveness in a photo. Interests, charisma, sense of humour etc aren't just "personality" attributes independent of attractiveness - they're components of attractiveness when people encounter each other in the real world.

Most people probably don't end up as attractive when you meet them in person as they appeared in their profile picture, because there's not great odds of chemistry when two people match up based on nothing but two photos. That's fine if you're just looking for a hookup, but it results in a frustrating search for a relationship.

Honestly I'd wonder if a downgrade to blind matching based on bio would be more effective. People could still dump each other if they meet and don't find each other attractive, but might match up people who are a great match in the real world if not in gamified dating apps.

Presumably this means that the top 20 percent of men on dating apps (whatever top means) are dating 4 women simultaneously on average right? Sounds complicated.

A dating app is not a delivery service, it’s lead generation. The divide in behavior along the gender line is explained as actors behaving rationally in a free market. If you have many options available to you (and you don’t see who you are competing against), you will naturally only select the top X%. Conversely, if you have a low number of potential matches, you will cast a wider net because your are just trying to maximize options available to you.

In a heterosexual dating scene, there are also safety issues that women face which I am not qualified to comment on, but it should be acknowledged. It is silly to assume that this has no effect on who she chooses to match with. I’m sure there are signals that she recognizes, consciously or otherwise, that influence her decision to swipe right in the first place.

The biggest elephant in the room relates to the fact that people who are objectively poor partners will be overrepresented on these platforms. People who are violent, unstable, hair-triggered, poor communicators, serial liars, or anyone who exhibits anti-social tendencies will likely keep coming back to the app after their previous matches inevitably decide they are undesirable. Because they often lack the introspection to identify that they themselves might be the problem (or are just exceptionally shitty and know this but don’t care), they will continue to poison this market and ruin it for everyone. The app provider doesn’t care to solve this because their job is to serve matches (in fact there exists a perverse incentive to not match people well so they keep coming back, but I have no evidence they are acting on this). This brings up ethical questions if we wanted to de-platform toxic people. Who decides this? Do we survey matches that did not work out and ban them if they meet enough poor feedback? How long do we ban them? Do we weight toxicity ratings given as a function of how toxic the rater has been rated themselves? As callous as it is, I partially understand why dating apps do not tackle this.

Trying to solve a social problem with a technical solution is always doomed to fail, with mate choice about as social of a problem as it gets. At the end of the day, we need to create systems that augment our social capabilities, not replace them. Any technological solution can and will be gamed in both directions where people will inappropriately be labeled as poor partners and people who get labeled that will circumvent the label regardless of whether they deserve it or not. Unless we identify an objectively verifiable, directly measurable, desirable behavior, we can’t possibly solve this with technology alone.

All this is to say that the real solution probably won’t scale, but this means there is likely an opportunity here, as the conventional wisdom states. The problem is the barrier to entry is too high which means more nuanced solutions are likely to be killed before they even get off the ground. I don’t envy those in this business, it really just seems like a losing battle as you grow as a company.

I don't think dating apps make a difference in the grand scheme of things for two reasons: the "top 20%" of men have always had the first pick, and you can still try to find a date the traditional ways.

I put the blame on social media. Getting to know people through a friend was the default and you no longer have to meet in person to do that.

Sanitizing social interactions and activists drumming up social fears for their causes has scared everyone off. The only solution is for more people to ignore it all and get out there in person again. That takes time and the pandemic wasn't enough of a nudge.

> The top 80 percent of women compete for the top 20 percent of men on dating apps

I've seen this type of statement repeated many times, and respectfully I think it's a very broad and oversimplified reduction of such a complex topic.

The source you provided is extremely limited (afaict it's a sample size of 27 in a single app, a very circular definition of attractiveness, obviously not peer reviewed, etc.), but I think even a more reputable source would still have very limited results due to the huge scope of online dating and the highly subjective impressions involved.

I do agree that online dating appears to be superficial and not a great tool for finding meaningful relationships, but I've found that a lot of the discourse surrounding it (regular dating too) seems more based on collective insecurities than solid research.

Maybe there are differences in dating habits that favor some group over another, but a lot of the things I've seen tend to go to towards the idea of female hypergamy (a pillar of 'redpilled' incel ideology) without a lot to back it up.

I'm not saying that this particular study is necessarily wrong, but I'm wary of the biases, unconscious beliefs and assumptions that are usually carried when 'facts' like these are taken at face value.

> The top 80 percent of women compete for the top 20 percent of men on dating apps.

Dating apps already have an inverse 80m/20f skew

What would it look like if it was evened up 50/50 ?

Isn’t that the top 16% of women competing for the top 16% of men ? Eli5

Ah yes, I love a highly optimized relationship where value is one sided

nah. maybe in the sense there are interpersonal skills and human judgements, but otherwise these are wildly different, and with different outcomes.

Perhaps we can use the credit rating agencies to have a dating credit history report along with a financial credit history report.

Combine this with the credit/debit card networks purchase histories, and pay history from The Work Number, and I bet we could come up with a dating score number to match people up.

It sounds something like the stock market to me. I'm not sure what you mean by accountability, do you mean that someone could do a runner after using the service and not pay out.

If you did base it on stocks and shares then that wouldn't happen. I don't personally understand how stocks work, but i recall it was invented by betting on whether ships would return from a dangerous voyage or not, and as a way of spreading the cost and spoils.

Surely it's possible to bet on a relationship in the same way, and those who bet the most accurately would benefit the most. then you look at your odds and check the match out.

> dating apps are killing their industry by being so ineffective

I tried to look this up and was surprised to find that Match group doesn't share their MAU numbers. Probably wouldn't be that meaningful since many people use multiple apps. What I did find though is that they have 16M paying users worldwide, which is fairly close to their all time high, and if you estimate that those users are all men, and only 25% of men pay, and there are equal numbers of men and women across all the apps, then you would have a rough estimate of 128M users worldwide, which sounds about right to me.

Tinder is ok as a hookup app, the problem is that its success there and marketing as a dating app caused it to eat most of the competition, and what competition it didn't eat copied it because of its success despite its format being absolute trash for anything more serious than mr/ms right now.

Where I live, Tinder is mostly millennials looking for long term relationships. I suspect younger people have mostly migrated to social media, I hear a lot about using insta as what is effectively a dating platform, and is certainly a better user experience. The whole dating app experience is pretty awful.

The primary source of members for all the Abrahamic religions are born into it, not converts. Churches, Mosques, Synagogues will continue to exist, as long as they are effective at boosting birth rates for their members, and manage to retain their children to a degree.

Homosexuals are therefore low-revenue customers, because the expected children count (including adoption) is far lower than heterosexual marriages. Churches that prioritize accommodating modern social mores statistically have shriveled massively.

Whether they have 'squandered' anything by sticking to their 'business model' will only become obvious in decades. They don't operate on quarterly targets or even 5 year plans. Judging by fertility rates, highly religious groups still have higher birth rates than secular groups.

A couple things.

I understand what you're saying about the judgement of other members, but I think it's misguided. Many, probably most, people fear judgement of their social groups, but conversely it is social groups that also enable the most powerful and free versions of ourselves when we find the right ones. Which ultimately is to say that when the judgement of the group is good, you are empowered to do things you didn't know were possible. So rather than fear judgement, either intentionally pick the group that will judge you well, or more preferably make the changes in yourself that the groups judgement is incentivizing.

Homophobia isn't the right word. The church isn't afraid of homosexuality. It has beliefs that are inconsistent with homosexuality but it isnt fear as the word falsely implies.

It doesn't, it will still show nagging dialogs to buy "spotlights" and use dark patterns/nudging to get you to spend even more.

Coincidentally, car repair people are trusted maybe a tiny bit more than lawyers. A lot of people in these positions are morally bankrupt and won’t hesitate to rip off grandma to the tune of an order of magnitude

Dating apps fail due to an inherent asymmetry.

A small percentage of the population will attract a large percentage of the dating pool.

A large percentage of the population will attract a small percentage of the dating pool.

The job of a dating app is to give the appearance of progress and engagement to a very wide segment of the market. It sells hope and false positives.

Better? 1) Learn core social skills. Making people feel good about themselves is fundamentally attractive. 2) Upgrade listening skills. People who make others feel heard and understood are very attractive. 3) Do stuff. Fun stuff. Whatever leads to your personal happiness. Happy engaged people are attractive. 4) Stop using dating apps. Suck it up. Face confusion, rejection, and bad choices. Learn what you need to learn. Improve. Wash - rinse - repeat. People who have earned their confidence and skills are very attractive. 5) Learn to laugh at yourself. 6) Have real friends. Do stuff with them. There is a direct relationship between having good friends and feeling good about life. 6.5) Keep social media to a minimum. It sucks your attention and gives you envy.

IIRC early reddit did something similar (although obviously not using LLMs) where they aggregated content from other sites automatically and effectively faked activity to draw in real users.

Charlie Javice knows a guy.

This is the fundamental issue with dating apps. Your life partner is not someone that you interact with through a screen.

All of the attempts to fix this are total bollocks. You can sit on a bus and get more of a signal about whether the man/woman sitting across from you is compatible than you can from an app.