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Comment by Aaargh20318 | Hacker News Reader

Aaargh20318

From the article:

> (…) pictures also give lots of information about important non-superficial things, like your personality, values, social class, and lifestyle.

This is the one thing that puzzles me most about dating apps: where do all these pictures come from? People seem to have pictures of them doing all kinds of activities. When I’m out with friends doing whatever, no one is taking pictures. Even if they did, it’s not like we exchange pictures afterwards.

I genuinely don’t have any pictures of myself.

Are me and my friends weird for not documenting every second of our lives?

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I've been around someone trying to get into dating apps, he just started asking us to "take a picture of him real quick" while we're doing outings with the bois "so I can out it on tinder".

I assume most people are this way, you just have others start taking pictures of the things you normally do (but didnt normally take pictures of) when you feel the need to make/flesh out a profile.

I've asked friends before, but the photos they took were uniformly terrible.

Ask women (ideally an Asian woman) and they will take pictures in the top 10% or better of what an average person can take. The only more reliable group are professional photographers - and consider that zoomers prefer iPhone or even Kodak style of photos vs a Sony or canon ultra realistic style

I would say, instead of "ideally an Asian woman", a millennial woman. Was recently in a tourist spot for a work outing, we asked a random person to take our photo in front of the big monument and the photos were awful, including a finger of the photographer in each photo. This woman was in easily 50+. Gave the phone to a passing millennial aged woman and got 10 well compositioned photos in both landscape and portrait mode.

Where would you place Nikon, Panasonic, and Olympus on the spectrum of Kodak to Sony?

You’re weird. The vast majority of instagram using women take so many photos that the joke is that “the camera eats first”.

I’m actively exhausted when I go out with my partner because I know that I’m going to take lots of photos.

I’d love to be in a world where this is so rare that people can’t even explain where the photos go: but unfortunately I ask the opposite question, which is “where do these people get the time to do literally anything else with how crippling their social media and photography addictions are?”

    > I’m actively exhausted when I go out with my partner because I know that I’m going to take lots of photos.

Did you ever try to push back? Example: Tell her very directly that you want to focus on the experience of a great dinner, not her taking photos for social media. Another idea: Ask her to leave her mobile phone at home when you go to dinner.

> You’re weird. The vast majority of instagram using women take so many photos that the joke is that “the camera eats first”.

I’m not a woman nor do i use instagram or any other kind of social media.

If you think this is weird, then whatever culture you're immersed in, I want no part of it.

> This is the one thing that puzzles me most about dating apps: where do all these pictures come from?

People actually curate the profile and copywrite the text. It’s not real authentic life documented by accident. Once you put your profile there for others to judge you soon figure out that it needs to be manufactured. That’s when you start asking for others to snap a photo while your out doing the thing you maybe wouldn’t even do if it was not for the show.

This. People are taking trips just to collect dating/social profile pictures, it's insane how manufactured successful profiles are.

You only need a few pictures to fill a profile. Taking a few snaps when doing interesting stuff likely spread over months or years isn’t “documenting every second of our lives”.

If I take a picture I’m not in it. If someone else takes a picture they don’t share it with me. How would I get pictures for a profile?

+Fifteen years ago, Facebook was amazing for this: everyone posted all the pictures they took at [event] and tagged everyone who was in them. But, you know... That wasn't as profitable as all the [everything else] they thought up, and they ruined the platform.

Practical suggestion: you can ask. Someone takes a picture with you in it, say "hey, you mind sending me that?" Like lots of social things it's not automatic (which, you know, Facebook was for a few years, and that was nice), and you have to "put yourself out there" a bit. Most people won't say 'no', and the thread with the photo is an opportunity for further interaction, if you want it to be.

Ask your friends for a picture if they take it…

“Hey send me that one.”

“Hey let’s get a selfie.” (Do young people not say this anymore?)

There’s a pretty big range between “I don’t have any pictures of myself” and “documenting every second of our lives.” Most people are somewhere in that range.

You're not weird. I've wondered the same thing myself.

I used to take more pictures of myself on parties and general group events. Now I am less involved so less pictures are taken.

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