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Comment by sakawa | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to bring back an article, more analytical on this paratox (the title, Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating, speaks a lot), from the old and now dead OkCupid blog. Funnily, this post was deleted just after the acquisition from the Match Group in 2011.

https://web.archive.org/web/20100821041938/http://blog.okcup...

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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33163930

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OkCupid really went to pot after the acquisition. You can't even browse/search any more. It's all Tinder-style matching. Is that what people really want?

Online dating has gotten progressively worse over the past ~10 years. Even Craigslist personals is gone... Where can one meet a weirdo nowadays?

You're in it bro

KiwiFarms, or you could try 4chan, I recommend /b, but I am sure other spots will net you plenty of weirdos.

The actual answer was discord. Most of discords users are on those other websites anyway

Yes, but the discord pool is diluted.

Think about like 100,000,000 tons of 1% acid being discord.

And 10,000 tons of pure acid being the things I mentioned. It is going to be easier to get burned in the places I mentioned.

Discord has much more acid.... but when ya want the good stuff, you have to look to the specialists.

Met my partner in cl personals before it got shut down. Couldn't ask to be with a better person and we only saw each other's pics after writing back and forth for a bit.

Curious if text based dating sites exist any more or even text at first and photos only being shared after writing a while

Feeld

Oh man my comment on how Match group is a gambling app company is up there. I've been online dating for 20 years with pretty decent experiences as a short, ugly man, but now indeed the app/online dating situation is the worst ever. Some of this is probably due to me being older though.

With all due respect here - "20 years of successful online dating" sounds like an oxymoron! Unless you're choosing to date and to not enter into a long term relationship?

Yes? You can be successful (or a failure) at being single, dating, or married. There's not one universally valid approach to relationships.

With all due respect, this seems like a Rorschach test? He didn't say "20 years continuously dating online"? People can date online a bit, get into a relationship for a quite a while, relationship ends, go back to online dating, etc.

This is semantics, but I think the parent's point is: if the relationship ended, was it "successful"? You obviously have different answers (and that's fine!)

If you can consistently eat out at restaurants every night, why settle for Mom’s home cooked meals every night?

Some will see a reason to. Others won’t.

You won’t see many home cooked meal enthusiasts at the restaurant, either way.

Actually this brings up an interesting point: the article implicitly assumes that the winning condition, the optimal outcome, is a long term relationship. But is it? Certainly many rich guys don’t act like that (stay w one person for 50+ years). This is important, because if we don’t have a consensus on what the best outcome is, that would explain why we’re not getting one. There may not be a single optimal outcome for that userbase.

We don't need consensus since consensus is impossible with a large population. You just need a vast majority and the vast majority agree on the winning condition.

The average marriage in the US lasts 8 years.

Isn't this (heavily?) influenced by a small amount of people who marry again and again?

Kind of. The median is apparently 19. Still, if a lifelong marriage is winning at life, we're a society of losers.

That's a big "if" imho. Especially, since there are more than enough instances of unhappy marriages in previous generations. Often people stayed in abusive relationships because divorce was heavily frowned upon.

Thanks. a great article. Over 10 years old and still spicy. Bookmarked for further research.

Oddly, OKCupid came out in our interviews as "one of the better" types of business and produced the most long term matches. Has anyone got some other data sources on quality and satisfaction in dating apps, with some large sample sizes?

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