Online Dating
geohot.github.io
geohot.github.io
- “Reduce competition” by making online dating exclusive to those who can afford $100+/mo
- Obtain potential match’s sexual history prior to conversation to use as a proxy for promiscuity
- See all social media of potential matches
- Ratings hit for people who decide not to meet with you after chatting
- Interface for quantifying the multiple human beings you are talking to as “leads”, CRM style
- Automated reverse image search / face recognition for social media
- Random bonus: ability to filter Instagram messages by male/female??
Leaving aside the basic disrespect for the people on the other end of the chat here, who actually thinks women would participate on a platform where they are being cyberstalked by, and pressured into meeting with, desperate men who are tracking them in a spreadsheet?
There's probably something around two dozen better options where I could "speed date" (talk to/flirt with) a bunch of people who will share some space & time on a sunny Sunday morning.
And since I know people with money, I know that "being able to afford xyz" doesn't mean shit. Even fuck you money doesn't. Sure, some "chicks" roll with it, but I never heard or read words from one of those chicks (traveling, Dubai, family, friends of friends in theater) that resonated with me or made me think: "potentially a good enough Mom."
But then again, a 100 bucks isn't that much for a working, single dude.
The need to know so much about a person before a date is just another sign of subliminal depression, mania and obsession.
Maybe they should start putting dating profiles into captchas or something.
Is this a human? Do you like her looks? Do you like her last tweet? No? Based on our data points, you should. Access denied. Let's try again.
I recommend that "busy"-no-time-people find some way to prime their brain for exploration of humans and characters.
Instead of methodological fault finding you simply make it methodological traits-that-I-like finding.
How does it work? How does _she_ work?
It's not about "rich people must be good" but rather "most poor people are bad"
That made me chuckle and reminded me of how the YouTube algorithm kept recommending that I watch 'Peter Singer - Ordinary People Are Evil for years.
I still haven't watched it but life experience does tell a somewhat fitting story.
That's an interesting pivot.
With this mindset, how do you distinguish settling from a reasonable compromise?
Suppose you wouldn't need to pay more than $100 if you'd find your match and leave platform. Serious goal = serious price. Marriage will cost much more anyway. Marriage with a wrong person will cost 10x again.
- having fun,
- needs,
- desire to gratify received interest,
- desire to return the favor of raising ones attractiveness,
- desire to reward a diverse range of behaviors (some hard-coded into genes as well!)
CAN & often will override anything "fitness", and much more often than not, not only temporary!
I didn't mean literally pay to marry. Let's just say your kids and associated expenses is included in what I meant. Do the math:)
Go read the site and tell me again you still believe they have the “serious goal” of finding you a partner. The first thing I saw on the homepage was “experience hypergamy”. Then a bunch of entries on luxury, spending money, and how everyone on their website is somehow beautiful, successful, and intelligent. All the while using the same two actors for everything. In one of the fake exchanges, one of them (presumably the man, judging from the rest of the copy) invites the other to the Maldives, who immediately agrees.
They’re selling bargain bin fantasies. It’s drivel for men and women who think of themselves as the protagonists of 50 Shades type books.
- men who can't afford that are already scratching the bottom of the barrel on dating sites and feeling like total losers because they have no prospects they're happy with
- most people would show you a picture of their butthole as long as they knew it would be kept confidential if that meant they'd have a better shot at finding what they're after
- information source aggregation, analogous to meeting people in more places than the singles bar
- wasting peoples time is an undesirable trait
- youre using an app to find sex and/or love, the interface changes nothing about this
- the last two are the same as number 2, just analytics for the algorithm.
When you're designing an algorithmic solution to mate pairing, you have to treat it like a meat market and gamify it for best results. And the current incumbents are absolutely doing that, it's just that their interests do not align with their users.
The top 20% most attractive men get 80% of the likes. Men of average attractiveness is out of luck on dating apps and they should not use dating apps.
Average men will swipe right on below average women (and above) - because it's easy and free to shoot your shot.
Therefore, even below average women will get seemingly unlimited likes.
These below average women will then pick and choose likes from the top 20%. These women will also wonder why they can't get these top 20% guys to commit to them or ask them out on a date. It's because these men have many options. These above average men will often only want something casual with below average women.
This is why women will say there are no "good" men on dating apps despite having thousands of likes. Eventually, these women will "settle" for someone less than what they hoped. In reality, these women are just settling for men of equal attractiveness to themselves.
>Imagine a CRM-like interface overlayed on Hinge, Tinder, and Bumble
This is "ideal" but in reality, women have no trouble getting likes on dating apps. Therefore, they won't put much effort into a dating app that creates too much friction. If you make your dating app use a CRM-like interface, you'll have a sausage fest. Hell, most women barely fill out their Hinge, Tinder, Bumble profiles. They do the absolute minimum and they still get thousands of likes. My female friend once experimented by putting up a picture of a shoe as her only dating profile. She still received many likes - some of them paid Super Likes.
Really, no. The paradox of choice is one of the biggest problems with online dating, one of the reasons why it never worked for me, and one of the reasons why it never worked for many people I know. It works for some, that's fine, and it's probably useful in semi-rural areas where meeting people is hard.
> The top 20% most attractive men get 80% of the likes
It's specifically this notion of "top 20%" that is flawed. While online dating is about searching for the "best match", real life is about committing to a person who you seem to get along with, embracing the unknown, and working on it together to make each other the best match for each other. If that work goes well, you end up being the best match for each other, and you don't regret not having swiped 500 more times in search of better.
I am not sure you're disagreeing with grandparent, it seems to me the what they're talking about is about getting that first date, while you're talking about establishing a relation past that.
Well, obviously. Every guy wants a woman who's got some depth to her sole.
this test probably wasn't valid due to the prevalence of foot fetishists. It might be hard to find an object that no one fetishists but one could pick something that isn't related to a common fetish.
I have seen few experiments and it's even more unbalanced, in the order of top 2/3% getting 97% of the likes.
I don't think there is much to fix about online dating anyway personally, there are many different platforms with different focuses and it has worked for lots of people.
Posts like the OP are just incels pushing an agenda.
Online dating makes sense, logically. Absolutely nothing against it - I met my wife on FB of all places.
But in my dating days, I'd met more than one person who was using an app and ghosted a date because I asked them to do something, in person.
If you're tired of getting swiped the wrong way, just do it the old fashioned way.
Absolutely not. If you're looking for a partner in real life, you're working with a small, finite "dating pool" and you calibrate your expectations reasonably. In your office, there might be twenty women you like, five of them may be interested in you. Both sides go through a straightforward process to make up their minds, and that's it. Stuff like the 80% / 20% theory ultimately doesn't matter, because in that small cohort with no gender imbalances, almost every person naturally finds a mate - just not always their first pick.
In contrast, in online dating, you don't have an estimate of the dating pool, and it appears essentially infinite. This encourages two behaviors. First, you're spending very little time on individual profiles, often just swiping left or right in a matter of seconds - so individual decisions are made with much less fidelity. Second, it makes it really hard for both sides to calibrate expectations and to stop looking when they find a match that's good enough. If your date seems to like model trains a bit too much or needs to lose 20 pounds, there is a temptation to keep looking instead of trying to work with that.
In the end, if you go through thousands of profiles, then (a) the results probably won't be any better than with a smaller pool (see: the secretary problem); (b) you will be a lot more miserable for much longer; and (c) the purported "80% / 20%" split actually starts to matter a lot.
I did find that it was a bit better in several aspects.
Whereas on dating apps people will be speaking to many others and so it's much harder to find a long-term relationship.
I think a better solution would be letting people freely talk to eachother by communities / interests. But that is harder to monetise.
And you still have the fundamental issue that there are far more men than women.
Look at Mr. Popularity here.
It's a mindset thing. People start from a place where nobody is worthy, and then actively only notice/seek things that make them more unworthy. As in, people only notice the bad stuff, never the good stuff. You can have 99 points of compatibility but that 1 you're incompatible on tips it over - because you're only looking at that 1, the 99 are invisible.
This pushes them toward casual things much more, and away from commitments (especially in places where it can complicate things, like at work). So only those couples get together at work that already have a very high "cohesion".
If you go to the grocery store or any place with many people you could do the same thing as online.
What is interesting is the sociology of how guys will swipe right basically everyone online and basically no one in person even though the rejection % is going to be astronomically higher online. Rejection online even tends to be more rude. Getting rejected in person is almost always very polite.
What is even more interesting is how there hasn't been an overall adjustment in behavior when swiping right in person is so much more valuable because of the lack of people doing it.
Here's what will happen between men and women of different attractiveness levels (based on my experience and observations):
1. Man (same level of attractiveness) + woman (same level of attractiveness) = potential relationship
2. Man (higher) + woman (lower) = casual sex, situationships
3. Man (lower) + woman (higher) = friendzone, man does stuff for woman without sex
Of course there are outliers. But these are the most likely outcomes.
In physics, there is a concept of the lowest energy state. For example, a ball at the top of the hill wants to release all the energy and rest at the bottom of the hill.
The lowest energy state for a women is #3. The lowest energy state for a man is #2. In other words, a man naturally wants a ton of casual sex, if he can. A woman naturally wants a lot of attention, protection, resources, if she can.
A very attractive man will get a lot of #2. A very attractive woman will get a lot of #3.
On dating apps (and in real life), woman want either #1 or #3 in outcome. Men want either #1 or #2 in outcome.
Eventually, most will settle into #1 after learning where their personal attractiveness level is.
I don’t see this as evolutionary necessity.
Theoretically alpha male could father all the children.
You would need a group of alpha males to guarantee genetic diversity for future generations, or your little society will start having issues with inbreeding and maybe get killed by a rival tribe.
It's hard to say whether that would yield better results over monogamy after several generations. I wonder if this is an experiment evolution already tried over million of years or if it's a novel approach. Prehistoric men being of similar strength and not having tools would make it hard for an elite to get all women without rebellion. Nowadays, with a population which is mostly unarmed, it would be easier.
A woman can have children with as many different men as she likes (or your hypothetical alpha with no allegiance to her) and then use an army of state enforcers to secure a 20% income stream from each one after the relationship dissolves. If the enforcers can't get him to pay, no matter, IRS men with machine guns are sent to collect from everyone.
There's very little incentive compared to say 100 years ago to stay with your partner as a female, with divorce being initiated far more by women who can use this strategy.
Unless you meant alpha male as in furries, in which case furries fathering all the children is an interesting point of view.
Theoretically the goal is to pass on the best set of genes.
Also because predicting the most favored traits one or two generations down the line is difficult. Biologically you want as much genetic diversity as possible to ensure at least some have the right traits to survive the next cataclysmic event.
As a contrived example, if every man only went for women with big breasts that would be a real issue of a couple generations later swimming speed became important for survival
idk. What you are describing here is a pretty specific dynamic created by a specific environment.
I mean.. some things will carry into other contexts but the "game theory" only plays out in an efficient, legible, high velocity context.
When I was in college, most casual hookups started drunkenly at dance bars. Looks played, for sure. But... The guys that shagged for medals were generally the most outgoing guys... the ones that made the most moves.
I might have tried hitting on a random girl once or twice per year. My housemate tried 10 times per week... or more.
Since likes are virtually limitless, it allows the possibility to deceive. Most women on these apps have experienced matching with someone and then realizing he hasn't even read her profile. Many men don't even seem ashamed of deceiving women like this. Women don't want to be used or cheated on, and so many men are signaling that they will do so by starting off with lying to multiple women that they are interested. So of course women know that most likes are actually lies, and so women are very carefully looking for signs that a man isn't playing the field. The men who succeed are those who have profiles that manage to convince women that they will only express interest when it is honest and genuine.
It is almost impossible to fake your personality. The moment you meet person IRL it will become obvious that the fake Mr. Interesting life was created just to get chicks online. Those 20% are interesting, because they’re genuinely interesting IRL, not because “they’ve put effort into their online persona”.
I don't understand why so many people think that those who struggle to date must be not putting effort. Do you really think that in real life effort equals success?
Nearly everyone in this sphere of life is victim to such a fallacy. I know many men who put in high effort and are not rewarded. Meanwhile I’ve seen men who actively sabotage and have women throwing themselves at them.
The world is not fair. It’s so obvious with wealth - why can’t it be obvious with dating?
I don't like how that (decade?-)old OkCupid's blog post's conclusions keeps being thrown out over and over like it is fact and had reliable methodology that makes those findings generalizable. (Assuming that I am right in identifying that statement's provenance.)
I don't think anyone should base their dating strategy, or what it means to date and be in the dating market for them over that conclusion, and should actually come to their own conclusions based on their own experience, even if it might be as dismal as that finding.
Sure it might be secular but it's not scientific.
If you try to level the playing field, women have no reason to comply. They will find another dating app, to use.
> Seeking is one of the only sites to do this right. They claim a ratio of 4 women per 1 man, and they get this by charging men $109/month.
Great. Now you pay a $1200/year to be taken for a ride by gold diggers.
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Online dating is a laughably bad proposition, unless you have just the right characteristics to do well on there: being tall and handsome, and having pictures that show off your privileged life, and all that of course in comparison to your peers.
As hard as it is to initiate conversation offline, especially with the norms of today, it's still much easier for me to, compared to getting a match and then somehow managing to convert that into a date.
EDIT: I'd like to add this analogy. Online dating is like job searching by spamming your resume on LinkedIn. I don't even have a LinkedIn...
Give me a reasonable person, and I will make sure they'll do much better. I've done it for myself. You need to have a hacker mindset when it comes to online dating. Almost no one does. I've done it for my friends as well.
Right on. This dude gets it. You should hold workshops on that and a series of TED talks.
Even then. I still think you would do sub optimally compared to real life. Why would I ever line myself up against a bunch of other men and let women choose the best? That only works well for you if you're naturally popular...
Philosophy and logic is fun. That's what I'd think too.
Empirically this doesn't hold up. Empiricism is a better arbiter of truth (not perfect though). If you don't experiment, then when it comes to dating: thought experiments aren't worth much. It turns out, it's much more complicated than that, as always.
For example, there are aspirational lies. I put on my bio that I meditated for 2 hours per day. This caught the attention of some matches and it wasn't actually the case, it was more like 45 minutes. The thing was, I put it on there to motivate myself to meditate more as before it I only meditated 10 minutes per day. When matches would ask "do you really meditate 2 hours per day?!" I'd tell them the truth. They all thought it was a clever way of creating social accountability and thus wasn't perceived as an ill-intentioned lie. Yet, it did hook some to make a right swipe on my profile. I guess clickbait falls into the same category, meaning that if you somehow satisfyingly deliver on the clickbait then it's fine.
Example 2: my photos were taken meticulously (understatement). When I told them that, all I heard was "but that's what you look like." It took hundreds of pictures to get those ones and they rated the best when asking for tons of feedback. My real genuine photos got no matches, these tailor made photos do. Yep, they look natural, but they're not. And matches didn't care that they didn't look natural as the pictures were delivering its promise: they showed how I looked like in real life. I think many non-photogenic people look more attractive in real life. We mistake that what we see on camera is what someone looks like, it's not the case. A 2D image is not a good substitute for 3D non-still images.
Most men fundamentally misunderstand women's incentives. They present what they think women will find attractive, but from a male perspective, which often misses the mark entirely. I could elaborate for hours on the issues I see in these profiles. Now, whenever I hear a guy claim "dating apps suck, they're a scam," I don't entirely disagree — dating apps are indeed flawed — but I'm immediately curious to see his actual profile.
There's a significant missed opportunity in these apps: they could teach and guide men to build their best profiles, select and eliminate pictures, and suggest concrete improvements. It might sound extreme, but even basic A/B testing can dramatically increase your number of matches, the majority of men will just create their profile in 2 minutes, never touch it again, and wonder why they don't have dozens of girls throwing themselves at yet another guy taking a selfie in his bathroom.
Are you going to share any advice or particulars? I see posts like yours and they are a dime a dozen, but could be summed up by "your profile is bad", but they never offer any concrete advice on improvement.
What are women looking for in these profiles that they can immediately use within less than 1 minute to determine whether it's a good match or not?
Yes and no. It's stupid hard for a guy to know what women are really thinking. I may have success and believe that I have what women want, but still could be very mistaken. I'm regularly surprised at what I see guys get away with once I believe I have it figured out. I'm always having to update my info.
This might be a bit messed up, but I sat with a friend who was talking to men on a dating app. She went through a high volume of guys, and we must have done this for over an hour. So many seemed to be almost illiterate with text or mind-numbingly boring. Many were jerks. Many had such focus on the rational element (talking about marriage, what they are looking for in a relationship) that they seemed to forget there's a human on the other end. Of at least a couple dozen guys, the two my friend ended up enjoying talking to (but still had other issues which turned into a dead-end) were those who came off as being the most normal of the group. Like, they won out by simply having a normal conversation as normal people. That sill gives me limited understanding of what my friend finds attractive, but it was eye-opening.
I heard an interview from a dating app founder a while ago where she had a quote that I'll try to paraphrase: "We're creating an (app|business) where only dissatisfied customers remain and satisfied customers never return."
Obviously dating apps exist and are successful and not everyone who's using a dating app is looking for a long term relationship, but the sentiment remains.
How you would achieve a similar pricing structure in our society I have no idea.
Facebook tried and I think still has a dating feature. I’ve only ever encountered one person who was using it, and his match appeared to me and the guy’s friends to be a scammer who was likely to hit him up for money. If they had launched it before they were so widely distrusted and lost the young audience, it might have worked, and they obviously don’t need it to be profitable on its own, just to give you another incentive to visit Facebook and see ads.
Yelp, Foursquare, or last.fm probably could have offered an opt-in dating feature a decade ago and done well (by the metrics of the day). Letterboxd or a Goodreads-style service could try it, but it seems more risky: I could see people no longer using the service for its original purpose once they matched, because it would feel like updating your dating profile while in a relationship.
>Third, make the app look like a CRM.
>Now you are on to the qualify leads step. If you aren’t agreeing on a time to meet in the first ten messages, this is a dead lead.
What an incredibly ironic piece. Somehow I don't think any technical solution proposed here is going to improve online dating for people who think like this.
As a man in particular it's a numbers game and a huge time sink. Making it a CRM is just layering tools on top to make the process more efficient.
I've heard even women do this, some have a spreadsheet with criteria they will validate during the first date.
I'm of average attractiveness, at best, and had no issue finding genuine matches that led to relationships, the last of which became my wife and love of my life.
Never was there any analytics or numbers game required. I would go so far as to say that if you're matching with so many people without success that you need a spreadsheet, then the problem is internal and no technical solution will help you (which is also how I feel about the author of the linked deranged rant).
Also the author is not deranged, and it's inappropriate to insult someone because they have a different viewpoint from yours.
Filter through:
* 50% bots running cryptocurrency scams = 50% remaining
* 50% OnlyFans / Instagram models seeking likes/subs = 25% remaining
* 50% inactive accounts = 12.5% remaining
* 20% looking for sugardaddies / prostitutes = 10% remaining
* 10% Men categorised incorrectly and blank accounts = 9% remaining
* 75% won't respond (busy with other people, etc.) = 3% remaining
* 60% other issues - smoking, already have children, complicated situations, etc. - 1% remaining
So after you spend days to go through about 100 accounts, you finally get to speak to a real person and be one of the 8 guys she's speaking to.
Isn't this already just the norm in a lot of apps? When your first point seems to be a thing tat this level that people already ambiently know about I'm going to have a hard time imagining that you have done a lot of research into the space.
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Four points points from reading it:
- Coffee Meets Bagel does one of the best things IMO: only showing a limited number of profiles a day. Forces people into a bit more of a "speed dating" mindset rather than an "endless scrolling" mindset. Good for serious people.
- Pairs, a Japanese app, does have a pretty "CRM" vibe, with a lot of filters and a whole list view. Kinda neat, and again a thing with some serious people
- Somebody on twitter said it best: online dating in its current form is so much worse than mixers because in it the most popular people can talk to way more people. At least at a mixer popular people pair off and then other people talk to other people[0]
- And of course, just like meeting people at parties, online dating is its own vibe. It's not _as_ limiting as mixer/club vibes in some sense if you can find the right app with the right kind of people matching your mindset, but it's easy to forget that a loooooot of people are still meeting outside of that space, despite what online people say.
[0] Can no longer find the original tweet, but it was @Ugarles, included the fun bit about how he met his wife at a party, and much later on in the relationship they realized they had matched online and she had decided against it.
>Men pay for access.
This is just a bad idea, men are probably fine with it but no woman wants a man that does this when there are men that don’t need to pay for a dating app. Being forced to pay, indicates only 2 options, either 1 you’re a “loser” not desirable by other females or 2 you’re a “player” who just wants to get on with as many girls as possible. This stigma can reduce if there are say >30-40% of single males on the app, but when starting out it can be a deal breaker for the women on the app.
> Compatibility Questions
The problem is the questions that really matter, most people do not want to share (even after entering a relationship, people don’t share this, much less an online form). George gives an example of this himself, in the body count section, most women won’t be comfortable sharing this. Other examples of potential dealbreakers, how much a man earns? How much do you value your job? How much do you value your family? How do you deal with stress? How responsible are you? Etc etc These are not things people share, some are even hard to articulate but all are important in some form to determine compatibility. People also rarely know what questions actually matter in a relationship, the average guy/girl will focus on stuff that does not matter at all in the long term.
>Design app like CRM
Maybe, some of these up changes are good. They don’t seem very consequential as they are mostly UX changes, some of the review ideas seem bad and will be gamed.
Overall, the only good dating system is a social club / society that brings like minded, compatible people together, preferably has a few people with excellent intuition that actively (but secretly) play the role of a match-maker and facilitates natural social interactions among its members. Something churches used to do in the past to reasonable success. Apparently people are trying to do that with running clubs in the bay. But it’s undeniable that these ancient social structures are disappearing without a better replacement and we’re all the less off for it.
I found that it's better to be more open and transparent. It might hurt the chances, but it filters many people that can't seem to comprehend the life complexity.
Not true! On the surface it makes sense but some people really just value their time and don't want to go mingle with random people indefinitely to find someone. If you move to a new city especially, where are you going to meet singles, even as an attractive guy? Then you have to be talented enough to break the ice.
Let's put it another way. What is your time worth? When you make $100+ per hour with not so much free time, would you pay a little to cut the crap? I wish I could find an affordable matchmaker that was not a scam or working exclusively with rich people.
Specially when the only example for "who is doing it right" is a soft prostitution / openly looking for "sugar daddy" (its the websites own lingo).
What's disheartening are all the comments here talking about how online dating is rotten and terrible (and many comments saying the same modern dating in general). There's some extraordinarily misogynistic comments here.
The dating apps work well and like any method of meeting others, can lead to lasting happy relationships.
If that's not happening for you, is time to look inwards. Like you say, it's not the app.
And you have some data to prove it?
You can also read the bile in the comments here claiming they've had bad experiences with dating apps. They are largely (all?) filled with misogyny and outward condemnation, without any self awareness or insight that maybe the issue isn't the application or culture, but closer to home.
Right.
Maybe. But then again, these apps are designed to extort single and desperate men, and keep them on the platform for as long as possible.
Here's an example from Tinder. They allow you to buy tokens to "boost" your profile. While boosted, you get hundreds of likes in a couple of hours, whereas you usually get a few per week. How does that work exactly? Is your profile not attractive, or are they simply deciding to shadow ban it until you pay up?
Similarly for likes you send. Will the other person even see it? Who knows. But you have better chances they do if you pay for a "super" like.
These apps operate by keeping users in the dark, and giving them the least control over the experience as possible. This is why they have a swipe-based UI instead of allowing you to filter and search. They're borderline scams.
So a fairer app can indeed exist, though whether it could be as lucrative as current apps is debatable. So the incentives aren't there, besides someone who genuinely wants to help people. And this is not a primary goal of any company.
It's supposed to be empowering and also "safer" for women, but as far a I can tell it just feeds more into the unhealthy aspects of online dating that make women entitled and men work hard to be noticed.
They're all pretty shady businesses regardless. I don't think there is really an opportunity for a good mass product in that space.
Speaks volumes.
This leads to a negative correlation between perceived match value and them initiating the convo.
Some (most?) people would go further and reverse the causation, assigning lower values to matches that message first.
So, it's an obvious move to only message the bare minimum 'hi' because any further investment would be a signal that you perceive the match to be unbalanced with your own value being lower, and are trying to compensate for that..
i can understand people’s frustrations with dating. the stakes could not be any higher. if you fail, it is way too easy to take the wrong lessons. i personally failed at this for decades before i figured it out.
a few years ago, i married the most wonderful woman in the world. and yes, i found her on a dating site. (one of dozens i tried over the years.) in my case at least, i made it a lot harder for myself than i had to. based on the comments i see here, i think that applies to a lot of you guys.
hacker news comments are not a great venue for this topic. if any of you find ypurself similarly frustrated, i am willing to try to help. you can find out how to contact me by following the links in my profile.
this is exactly the sort of thing i was talking about, with so many people having the wrong ideas about dating. which i am not going to discuss any further in this site’s comments, truly the worst possible venue for it.
So selecting people by appearance is not dehumanizing, but by “body count” is?
But despite having no trouble with women IRL, I never had much luck online. With hindsight I have realized that I need repeated interaction to detect compatibility and when I was selecting online I was selecting based on compatibility (but being a rubbish judge of it). Plus I suck at texting.
In the end, I married a friend and it’s been fantastic.
The goal of most dating app users is to find somebody and stop using the app. The goal of the app makers is to keep the user on the app for as long as possible, to serve them ads / sell their data / charge them for a subscription. These two stand in direct opposition to each other, and companies optimize for the latter as much as they can. This is the incentive misalignment problem.
After a given app exists for a while, the most desirable users[1] will pair off and leave, while the most undesirable and desperate users will stay. The less attractive you are, the longer you'll be on the app. This means that as time goes on, it's harder and harder for the tide of new users to balance out the growing pile of undesirable matches.
This is what I call the "reverse network effect". It's the opposite of normal network effects, which is what happens with normal social networks and messaging apps. A normal messaging app gets more useful as more people join it.
It's worth noting that apps designed for finding hookups and not finding spouses don't suffer from this problem. The more hookups you find, the more likely it is that you'll want to keep paying for the app, and the more desirable you are, the more hookups you will find.
They're the only group that makes some sense. The very top percentage of men don't need a subscription. The below average men won't stay on the subscription because they still can't get matches. Women don't need a subscription either.
Meanwhile, the above average attractiveness group of men are likely finding enough hookups to justify staying on it.
I would really like him to do these two experiments: change his height on his profile from 5'4" to 6'1", and then if that alone doesn't do it, additionally emphasize his connections, level of fame, financial security etc. in his profile.
Point being that what women are interested in to start with is actually just as shallow as men.
I think he has some good ideas here actually. But ultimately, this stuff is probably being driven by very primitive instincts.
I also think think that if you look at what has been done with artificial muscles such as at Artimus Robotics or various other robotics and 3d printing companies, the potential for incredibly realistic humanoid robots is on the horizon.
I'm imagining in 2035 or at least 20XX the most popular "dating app" is technically a robotics rental company where the robots rent themselves out. Ultimately there will be plenty of really attractive male and female sexbots manufactured, and most people will be happily screwing 10s whenever they want.
The human race may die out because of this. But we won't lack for companionship with incredibly sexy (artificial) models.
I also know he had a (quite attractive) girlfriend circa 2021.
Does anyone remember when Tinder first came out? It was lit. 12 months later, it was not. The season passed. It became a familiar place, with baggage, where all the cool people left.
Solution: make a seasonal dating app that starts in March, and continues until August/September a.k.a cuffing season. Then, close it down until the next year. Each year, or season, it can have a different theme. You purchase a subscription for the whole season, a half year membership.
It starts all over again next year, with a different theme. This keeps the experience fresh, and viral for new people to join. Solves the reverse network effect problem, by creating a new, temporary network effect. It also harnesses natural human seasonal mating cycles in an intuitive way, while keeping everything fresh. The six month break in development allows for new UI and ‘fresh’ experience, like a Fortnite season.
It reminds me of debutantes and the social season of yesteryear.
Though I still dislike any and all online dating
Not the features, the fact that OkCupid was a subculture... and that it had its own cultural norms and features. Att "poly" pretty normative, for example.
I think tinder-era dating needs a bigger intermediate space between "casual" and "serious," especially for the over 30s users.
Anything between "mostly just sex" and "dating to marry" is a hard to negotiate zone rn.
One is overpopulated by men. The other is overpopulated by women. The middle ground is untargetable. It comes with no preexisting expectations.
Maybe we need to bring back "going steady."
The app/site is rotten because they want money, so they are incentivized to make their members as sexually frustrated as possible so that they hand over more dosh.
Because of the first problem, the members are all incentivized to lie. The men lie because they are frustrated that the system isn’t working for them. The women lie by posting unrepresentative photos because they feel the need to compete with everyone else who is doing the same, and the platform is happy with this because they want the most “attractive” members.
When all three groups are dishonest, nothing good can come out of it.
That's my experience anyway, I got married to one of them. I've been on the apps for a few months prior to that in my whole life due to a long-term relationship before that.
It can work. But you gotta be willing to be strategic about it. It helped that I loved strategizing about this.
- some non trivial % of active users are ego tourists.
- ratios matter, and drive obvious behaviours to the detriment of all users
- within a month you've had the same conversation so many times everything blends together and you hate it
- even a great online banter pre meetup means little when IRL it is awkward or slow.
There are flaws beyond that, but I just don't think it is improvable by dehumanising the other parties on the apps more
I've met over 10000 people that were a potential romantic interest. I did this (mostly) during the day by giving them a genuine compliment or asking them a question that I was curious about or by stating an observation that happened in our environment. I'd do my best to mix in playfulness as well. Playfulness is key for me as I tend to take life too seriously.
The reason I found my wife was because I was willing to be fine with 9950 rejections, 45 people it didn't work out with, 2 short relationships and 2 long relationships. It fucking hurted, especially initially since I had really unhelpful beliefs about myself (unlovable, etc. but doomed to try to find love anyway).
The statistics aren't fully accurate, but I'm pretty sure they're around that ballpark (that, or the rejection rate is even higher). The way I circumvented burnout was by playfulness and self-amusement. I knew at least that whatever I was saying that I was entertained/amused/inspired by it. That was a much better mindset to have than thinking whatever I said wasn't good enough from the get go. The first 2 years that I did this (from 17 to 19 years old), I only experienced rejections.
Later in life (30+), I also did online dating. Initially, I got 1 match per month for a few months. Then I put on my hacker mindset to see if I could break the game. It took a few months but I eventually got to 150 matches. That was really a question of "if you're not in the 20%, you gotta be smart."
Whenever I tell my story to people, they look at me and are like "I don't want to put this much conscious effort in it." Sometimes it's for moral reasons (love should just "flow" or "just happen", it's imperative for the romantic realm to not be analyzed etc.). Some can't handle the emotional pain (for me it was brutal too). Some just hate the sheer effort.
But based on what I've seen with friends who are like me: if I didn't put in this effort, it is likely I would've gone nowhere since I have friends a lot like me who didn't put in the effort and they seem to act like a control group in that sense. It is what it is. How badly do you want it? I don't know why, I just knew I wanted it badly.
It is what it is.
Speaking of spending money, even buying dinner for a first date can lead to abuse. Men usually have to take the chance because of customs, but some women are eating out several times per week by scamming men for free stuff.
Instead, how can we make offline dating better?
Why? Because clearly they think there's a problem & business opportunity.
Which are almost always devoid of women, except for some sport ones.
At least that's how I remember it.
On a different note. I'm average looking, of average to short stature and have a decent job but I'm far from rich (but I'm frugal so I look poorer than I am). I haven't for a while but I used Tinder extensively for about two years. I met over ten women and dated for a while two in that period. Without being obsessed with the app.
What I mean is, while the dating app landscape is generally unfair to men (mostly our own fault, most men will "like" everything without even looking) it's not as bad as some incels online would let you believe. And hey, if apps don't work, try the old school method of going out. It really works.
You’ll find those at women forums too. “Manslut”, “manwhore”, etc. And no, it’s completely fine to judge person by amount of partners they’ve had.
That's not a valid reason. For example, "height" is not an incredibly disrespectful metric, just because it is only used to judge men.
Men care about a woman's body count far more than women typically do a man's. Vice versa for height.
But in lieu of that I figure we should make it selfhosted.
- Publicly ran platform reminiscent of fediverse
- External profile verification so each node admin can host their own, I'm from Europe so the idea here is to use eID.
- Money should only be in the form of donations to the node admin, just like fediverse.
- Node admins can decide whether to invite only or let everyone in, users can decide whether to filter certain nodes, or verified profiles for example.
The goal would be that everyone real has a verified profile and a node admin that keeps bots out with their CoC and sign-up rules.
Optimally this should be done ontop of the existing fediverse, to save on runtime costs and leverage the existing profiles.
But seriously, online dating needs to be completely refactored. I've personally given up on it completely and decided to just talk to people IRL. In spite of having had 2 fairly good relationships started through "the apps".
From a software perspective, this does already exist, somewhat: https://github.com/Alovoa/alovoa
It just becomes too complicated to make all end users such stakeholders tied to the operation of the service.
That's why I look towards the fediverse model where competent end users can host nodes that hundreds of other end users can use. End users still become stakeholders by donating to the node admin. And yes I know all about the pitfalls of this method, I hosted a fediverse node since 2017.
For better and for worse I think it's the best model with the lowest barrier of entry and most realistic chance of being implemented today.
If you consider the federated social media model, there is still centralisation in the development of the reference implementation which is pretty hard to remove. This remains the case in mastodon, for instance. In a cooperative model, you lean in to the centralisation and what you gain is democratic oversight.
Having teenagers/young adults handle dating themselves is cruel IMO. I know a lot of people don't like that because they take individual liberty to be some basic axiom but if you stop and think about it this doesn't work.
It sounds as if you are letting an experience with a horrible human being influence your life post-separation. Noone should have such port over you, especiay not narcissists, liers and abusers.
Not dating for a while is actually a healthy response. Work on your self, get your emotional world in order, and you'll become stronger and happier.
There are wonderful people out there, worth sharing your life with. I'm glad I said no to abuse, worked on my shit and and didn't give up.
Geohot to me is one of the most interesting people alive. I remember finding him annoying when he was younger but maybe that says more about me than about him.
He "matured" really well and even though I don't have many parasocial tendencies each time I hear him on Lex I just know that hanging out with him would be guaranteed life-changing fun.
I really wish him well and I hope the world is kind to him because he sure is a special main character in our simulation.
I'm team Geohot. What a guy!
There's nothing mature about the person who wrote the OP. Don't idolise broken people.
Also… with all due respect… he is thousands of times more interesting than both of us in almost any measure.
> He is on his own path and for sure he mature a lot on his own journey.
He's on a bad path and should not be encouraged.
> Also… with all due respect… he is thousands of times more interesting than both of us in almost any measure.
I don't know about you, but my own story is more interesting than developer becomes bitter and disillusioned by the failure of the women of the world to find him as valuable as he finds himself.
There are a few big issues.
1 - Scammers. I’d be surprised if even 1 in 100 female profiles were real. Where maybe 1 in 1000 male profiles were scammers. We had all sorts of ways to detect and ban scammers but it was bad.
2 - Payments are high risk. High chargeback rates, loads of scammer transactions where they’re testing cards, etc. it can be hard even signing up a payment processor.
3 - Less and less people are willing to actually pay for dating services on the web. Especially for that < 30 age range. Tinder / Bumble really dominate that scene.
And if you get into Adult/Casual dating multiply all of the issues x10. And good luck finding a payment processor who isn’t terrible.
I think it's futile trying to "design" any social media, certainly something like dating. Social media is more discovery than a design.
You discover how it works best.
Obviously, "best" is defined as "nerds get more action, less existential angst."
It's a lost battle, if I could go back I'll do what Ronaldo did for his first three children, use surrogate mothers and stay alone.
- males in nature have a duty on that topic, distribute genetic material;
- female in nature have to select the best genetic material they are able to find.
"The best" is a complicated definition that in practice tend to be hormonal, that's why female normally want in person meeting and find "catalogues" not much useful. The females who find catalogues useful might just look at having temporary fun "from a list" or find someone rich to escalate their social position. That's essentially why on-line dating will not work much anyway until we found a way to understand "genetic profiles matches" witch is so far sci-fi.
The rest is just noise, sometime useful indeed especially if we live in spread areas where potential partners are far from us bu all current "matching techniques" can't simply match the most important natural characteristic, hormones.