Comment by bongoman42 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bongoman42 | Hacker News Reader

Interesting data in the article though nothing unexpected for people who follow this space. Some notable points:

> The other thing that interests you is the like ratio, or the openness, among 100 profiles that the user sees, how many of them does he like? (The median for men is 26% and for women is 4%.)

>The like ratio of a girl is almost independent of the profiles she sees. For example, if a girl has a like ratio of 5% and you remove 50% of the profiles, even if you remove only the profiles she will not like, her like ratio will still be 5% (you can do that by removing very unattractive people for a guy that is very attractive, for example). It is funny to observe, but it seems like a girl has internal reasoning on a dating app, and they know they can only like x% of profiles whatever she sees (of course, it doesn't work if you show only ugly people).

And lastly:

>Whats interesting is that the more attractive the guys were ranked by girls the more they were looking for something not serious.

I have a theory for the swiping behavior of women. When they swipe right, it will most likely be a match, and they mentally don't want more than X active conversations at a time. This strikes me as rational and reasonable.

For men, most swipes will not be a match, so less reason to ever think about swiping left to maintain a certain swipe pecentage.

Just a theory!

> they mentally don't want more than X active conversations at a time

This is true. My cap was at 50 conversations at the same time. After that, my brain got fried (male here).

My cap was maybe 5. Seems I have less capacity.

To be fair, I was crazily driven and treated it like a job. Intimacy is crazy important to me

Edit: interesting that I got at least 3 downvotes for that comment. I don't mind, genuinely. It's just interesting. Different world views and all that

People will downvote you for stating a truth they don’t like.

Another theory: when you swipe and don't get a match, that could be considered a rejection and women are worse at handling rejection (probably due to never having to learn to deal with it). Men, on the other hand, have to learn to accept rejection so little is felt when almost all swipes don't match.

Most people (all sexes and genders) are bad at handling rejection, period. It’s why online dating is popular in general—a rejection over a digital medium is a lot less intimidating and less confrontational than the same in person.

The rate and experience of rejection does not seem to be symmetrical across the sexes by a significant degree. Of course nobody likes rejection, but this point doesn’t really advance the discussion.

They were responding to "women are worse at handling rejection", and if they disagree with that (as I do too) then it is advancing the conversation to say so, even though it doesn't advance a part of the conversation that specifically explains dating app use.

Men handle rejection poorly, I’ve seen it, as I’m sure we all have. Weeping, drinking, wallowing in self-pity. It can get bad.

Women handle rejection with anger, resentment, and vitriol towards the rejecting party. So much so that I’ve seen people get married and divorced because the man was basically bullied into sticking around, and she left in the end anyways. Happens all the fucking time.

Women complain about the poor quality of conversations they encounter

We should do a study on that itself, because I think guys are having quality conversations, pulling teeth with an entitled beautiful woman they are prioritizing, and everyone else is waiting for the guy to lead and there is no bandwidth left! so guys spread themselves too thin to procedurally lead every new conversation after accumulating matches

while girls are particular on the matches

“ Women complain about the poor quality of conversations they encounter”

From my experience in online dating there are a lot of women who expect the guy to do everything. He needs to approach and then also carry the conversation. Out of maybe 10 initial messages I received from women there was maybe 1 that was more than “Hi”.

yeah, old Bumble never worked for me. I was attractive enough to be matched with but not prioritized for women to start the conversation.

It was very validating to know that Bumble dropped their one unique value add because women were afraid to approach and werent doing it enough

I can corroborate this.

When I was using dating apps I kept a spreadsheet to track the response to like ratio, and indeed, the amount of women who liked me back in any given month was exactly 5% of those whom I liked.

Much as I wish that ratio was higher, data is data. The Tinder style matchmaking will always bring out this behaviour.

I didn’t run the numbers but I also quickly figured that the only chance to make progress is to like a lot of profiles. For a while i liked only profiles which i thought are a really good fit but got no responses. Turns out spamming works better. Once a woman likes you back, then you can take a closer look.

This one is classic:

> Girls would say, red flag if a guy has shirtless pictures and then liking profiles where guys were shirtless.

This is surprising:

> In our case we had even acquisition in terms of male/female, but the retention of girls is lower than that of men, so you end up with 66% men and 34% women.

2:1 men to woman is a far better ratio than what most people claim (5:1 is usually thrown around with no evidence).

These points will ruffle feathers:

> But I think dating apps can currently be used at each women and men advantage, it is just necessary to have the right strategy:

> For girls you need to lower your standards and force you to go on a date with guys that you dont have the flame for (it is actually very hard to do that for a girl, very very hard)

> For guys, you need to pay a photograph (to get liked) and pay the premium plan (so that your profile is shown to other users). If you think a dating app has no incentive to show paying users to girls, then you didnt read this article ^^

> For girls you need to lower your standards and force you to go on a date with guys that you dont have the flame for (it is actually very hard to do that for a girl, very very hard)

I kind of didn't understand the logic behind how he got there. According to the article women get more matches then they know what to do with. Why would lowering your standards in such an environment be a good strategy?

The article is a bit a of jumble of thoughts, but I believe that advice is aimed at girls who aren't liking and therefore not matching. Some lines that mention this particular grouping:

> Only 50% of girls sent 10 likes in their account lifespan.

> 10% of girls that finish the onboarding never send any pass or like, ...

> We have plenty of girls that can scroll through 300 profiles and not like anyone and deleting their account saying "I dont like anyone" well

Lowering your standards will find guys who aren't just interested in sex. The problem is that most women want the same (small proportion of) men. He said that the more matches a man gets, the more likely he'll just want sex and not a relationship. So you go for the less desired men and you find better quality matches, if you are looking for more than casual relations.

It does seem like there are a lot of hidden assumptions here. Is the man who gets less matches really more likely to want a relationship rather than sex, or is he faking that opinion because he doesn't think he has options and thinks lying will get him more matches.

My assumption would be someone who changes their mind on what they want based on availability of choices would probably not be a good relationship partner.

So would lowering your standards really get you more "quality" matches, or just get people more willing to lie about what they want because they are more desperate?

Presumably, men who get less matches would have more sex when they are in a relationship versus when they are not in one.

You're thinking about it wrong. Any guy you meet who struggles with women is generally going to be looking for a long-term relationship. Starving men don't toss fish back into the water.

>Is the man who gets less matches really more likely to want a relationship rather than sex, or is he faking that opinion because he doesn't think he has options and thinks lying will get him more matches.

I'd say more likely down the line there's not a huge difference between the popular and unpopular men regarding what they aim for but the men who get a ton of matches and gravitate towards a fixed relationship are more likely to be out of the dating market.

It can be explained with simple statistics.

Let's say 50% of men want casual sex, 50% want a stable relationship, regardless of their desirability.

Let's say that the 10% most desirable men get 10 "conclusive" matches a month, the others get 1 per month.

Let's say that for men who are in for casual sex stay on the platform for 1 year, those who are in for a long term relationship stay for as long as they need to.

Let's say that 1 in 10 matches can lead to a long term relationship, if desired.

The result is that on average all men who is in for casual sex will stay for 1 year, attractive men who are in for a long term relationship will be there for 1 month and less attractive men who are in for a long term relationship will be there for 10 months.

So with a 50/50 long-term/casual split, and by taking into account how long they stay you will have:

- 51.2% of less attractive men who want casual sex

- 42.7% of less attractive men who want a long term relationship

- 5.7% of attractive men who want casual sex

- 0.4% of attractive men who want a long term relationship

The result is that if an attractive man is still on the platform, there is 92% chance that he is in for casual sex.

Of course, plenty of assumptions here, but the general idea is that attractive men looking for a long term relationship won't stay long, and those who remain are more likely interested in casual sex, whereas it is more balanced for less attractive men.

Of course, it also works for women.

I think the obvious conclusion to that is that dating apps are only good for hookups, and anyone who wants a real relationship would be best served by going elsewhere where the signal to noise ratio is higher and not skewed in this fashion.

Interestingly though you are basically describing a lemons market. However we don't usually advise people buying used cars to go for the crap-looking car.

Because if you only like the hot guys, you only match with guys that everyone else likes too, and who just want sex.

There is simply no incentive for such behavior. The person always hopes for the best (the hot guy will choose me over all those who like him). And what about the worst case? Sex with hot guys? Sounds like a very solid strategy to me.

Not if their goal is a serious relationship, it's a terrible strategy.

> 2:1 men to woman is a far better ratio than what most people claim (5:1 is usually thrown around with no evidence).

Hah, check out this claim 3 women to every 2 men. Of course there's no mention of what site/app it is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38059778

Reply on news.ycombinator.com