Hacker News Reader

Comment by raisedbyninjas | Hacker News Reader

Anybody else remember the data blog posts? Those were interesting and satisfying. It was another confirmation that I'd found the right dating site and probably a like-minded userbase.

View on HN

I fondly remember the one that showed men's rating of women approaching almost a perfect normal distribution, and then the men messaging mostly the hot ones anyway, whereas the women rated most men as ugly and then sloping downward toward very few as good looking, kind of like an exponential distribution, but that they also messaged the men almost exactly in tandem - uglier getting the most, with a steady drop as men's ranking rose.

This is basically the foundation of modern, online dating -- aka red pill. Roughly, the top 20% of men get 80% of the attention from women. (I'm pretty sure that figure comes from Tinder data.) It makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, but is brutal in the real world. What do you do if you are average (or less) in looks and income (potential)? Prepare for a lonely existance.

There's a lot about redpill culture that is inexcusably execrable, but it does offer a true and practical answer to the question you have posed: do everything in your power to make yourself more attractive. Work out, get a good haircut, improve your wardrobe, develop your career, improve your social/conversation skills, have interesting hobbies. Become the best version of yourself and you will get more attention from others.

Isn’t the parent comment saying the opposite of this? That despite rating most men as ugly, it didn’t affect their messaging behavior nearly as much?

No, they are saying a bit tangential things.

Tinder's data shows "chance of approach", which is brutal for men who are not too good looking.

IIRC, OkCupid's data shows a bit different thing. The distribution of ratings determines chance of messages/likes - the larger stddev the better chances. IIRC, the most messaged men were ones with ratings characterized by bimodal distribution. Therefore, the most messaged men were not the ones with highest visual rating. I do not recall the distribution of messages, so can't comment much on that.

Just read the original article[0]. I apologize if I misstated anything in it.

[0]http://web.archive.org/web/20100725135309/http://blog.okcupi...

You’re being downvoted, but that’s pretty well supported with data. In fact it’s more skewed than 20/80. Closer to 10/90.

They're being downvoted because the very comment they're replying to contradicts it: "but that they also messaged the men almost exactly in tandem - uglier getting the most, with a steady drop as men's ranking rose.

OKCupid's own data showed that women rate men is ugly but message them anyway.

>What do you do if you are average (or less) in looks and income (potential)? Prepare for a lonely existance.

You try to improve these things. Going to the gym etc, or focusing on one's career is a start.

Nope, not really, not only it makes zero sense from evolutionary perspective (especially that of humans), but it also is very specific to one specific platform, and very much determined on the way it is structured and its target audience, business model, etc.

Online dating is skewed because you have no way to know what someone is really like. All you get is a picture (which may have been photoshopped), and profile data (they might be lieing. If you do date someone you want them to look good because at least if the night was a bust you got to look at someone hot.

That data had poor epistemology, and was only really true if you're only looking at cishet monogamous men and cishet monogamous women.

I remember reading that analysis at the time and thinking it was flawed.

What it didn't seem to account for was if you rated someone high enough (I can't remember if it required 4 or 5 stars), OKCupid would notify the person in question that you had done so. If you didn't want these notifications being fired off you had to adjust your ratings accordingly - now 3 stars is the highest rating you are going to give.

I think the stats really just ended up reflecting that men were generally more comfortable having their ratings broadcast than women were.

Particularly the one that was a tare-down of why paid dating sites like match.com where a mug's game for almost everyone. That somehow went AWOL fairly soon after the match.com take-over…

This one, Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating:

http://web.archive.org/web/20100725135309/http://blog.okcupi...

Very much sounds like the one. Can't double-check ATM as network I'm on blocks archive.org.

This was a good one [0]:

> When men message women, women tend to respond most often to men around their own ages. But when women message men, they’re actually more likely to get a response from younger men than they are from older ones. A 40-year-old woman will have better luck messaging a 25-year-old man than a 55-year-old one, according to the data. And a 30-year-old man is more likely to respond to a message from a 50-year-old woman than a message from any other age group. When women make the first move, the age gap dating norm is reversed.

[0] https://theblog.okcupid.com/undressed-whats-the-deal-with-th...

Information has gotten harder and harder to come by as the Internet has matured. Think how much Tinder, Twitter, and Hinge know about human flirting and attraction. I believe it's just too black pilled to see the light of day.

The main effect of those data posts seems to have been to cause people to spread a lot of misinfo like "women aren't attracted to 80% of men".

(What they actually said was that women rate men much lower than men rate women, but the women still respond the same way despite rating them lower, so it doesn't mean anything.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com