Comment by dauertewigkeit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dauertewigkeit | Hacker News Reader

You cannot "fix it". You either do well or don't on such a platform. It's like being a terrible dancer, and going to a dance party expecting to pick up girls. You won't make a good impression because you don't "vibe" in that environment.

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...

> You cannot "fix it". You either do well or don't on such a platform.

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.

> You need to have a hacker mindset when it comes to online dating.

Right on. This dude gets it. You should hold workshops on that and a series of TED talks.

I can believe that if you craft the profile to the point where it's basically a bunch of lies, you can do well. I don't see the point of going through that much effort, however. Because, (and this is maybe because I'm long term minded), your lies will all unravel when you actually meet the person and start a relationship with them.

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...

> Your lies will all unravel.

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.

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