E.g. at one point I spoke to a woman who told me she'd out of curiosity paid for a month of Tinder's premium sub to see how many had swiped right on her, and her queue was over 3000. She wasn't swiping much. The queue was basically perpetually growing, and the odds for any of the men swiping was accordingly low and dropping. Which was good for Tinder of course - a larger pool of people for men to swipe and get frustrated over lack of responses from, until some proportion pay.
If you're not dependent on frustrating your users into wanting to pay for priority, or getting people off the service because they've found someone is in fact your goal, it's trivial to fix this issue (and many others): Stop showing a profile when the queue gets too deep.
Same thing with not showing inactive profiles. Or actually trying to match profiles of people who are likely to match up (again there's a perverse incentive: you want to match up profiles that one side will like, but not match up profiles where both sides are interested too often; rack up the swipes but not the connections...)
That's the long way of saying I agree, and to get out some of the frustration from past years of using them (hopefully never again...). There are truly few types of services where the interests of users and commercial operators are so totally misaligned.
- we get paid for date $1
- we get paid for second date $10
- we get paid for proposal $100
- we get paid for marriage $1000
- we pay for divorce $1500
- we get paid for first child $500
- we get paid for second child $1000
- we get paid for nth child $2000 * (n - 2)
If you couple up with someone you are evaluated in a compatibility period to which if you argue you get given a child, if you argue again, you get given a second child haha.
> She wasn't swiping much.
Dating is brutal.
Online dating seems like it perhaps speed-runs that a bit, but I don’t think it dramatically changes the essence.
> Dating is brutal.
Women demonstrate incredibly different behaviour when "selecting mates" when comparing (1) familiar settings, like work, school, church/temple, friend/activity/hobby groups vs (2) unfamiliar settings, like bars, clubs, public places, and online dating. For (1), they find many more men attractive because they can evaluate them on more than looks. For (2), they can only evaluate on looks. If you ask women to rate strangers based only upon looks, they will rank only 20% as attractive. That is what makes online dating so awful for average men.
When young (average looking) guys tell me about their awful/non-existent dating lives at the office, I always recommend that they try approaching women in public more often. Ignore the shit you see on social media where the fake #MeToo women come on to put guys on full blast for approaching. Don't worry about them. They are awful people, and you don't want them. Yes, you will get rejected a lot (maybe 5-10% hit rate), but it is way better than online dating apps. You can approach in supermarkets, stores, cafes, festivals/concerts, gym, parks, etc. That way, plenty of other people are around, and she won't feel unsafe. And start by approaching ugos/low-mids. You only need to get their socials or chat app. Even if you have no serious interest in that woman, you can practice chatting with her. Once you build some confidence, approach average looking women. Eventually, you will find success. As long as you dress average/OK, groom (comb/style hair, etc.) and don't smell bad, they won't put you on full blast if she is not interested. She will politely decline, or give socials, but never reply to chats.
Please don't read this post as an attack on women. It is an attack on our current ecosystem of online dating apps.
What? Dating been brutal and unforgiving for as long as I've been alive, but I wouldn't say I'm old (between 30 - 40). it was definitely harsh before the apps and had the exact same "everyone wants to date beautiful people, no one wants to date ugly people" "problem" that exists today, not sure what makes you say it's any different than today.
> Please don't read this post as an attack on women
I don't read your comment as an "attack" on anything, women or dating apps. But things like "women can only evaluate based on looks in bars, clubs, public spaces, etc" is wildly out of touch with reality, and makes your comment rightly seem out of touch rather than an attack on anything at all.
then, you are entering a place with loud music - how else apart from looks are you judging to speak some words to?
You're telling men to use "conventionally" unattractive women as target practice, implying they will be more receptive to attention, presumably due to a general lack of it. Then your advice is to leave these women behind once you've gotten what you needed, and to then seek women more attractive to you.
This is a perverse way to approach people.
Just wait until you hear what women actually say amongst themselves, this dudes comments will sound like Sunday school talk.
> Just wait until you hear what women actually say amongst themselves
1. You assumed without asking that I was male. This indicates an inherent bias on how you perceive and interact with others.
2. You assume I have a nascent understanding of how women think and feel, compared to yourself, who must be an expert on women.
3. You group all women into a single monolithic group with shared motivation and behaviors. This is textbook prejudice and misogyny.
4. You claim that women are even more misandrist than men are misogynist, implying a justification for OP's and your own misogynistic perspective. In actuality, you're only further expressing the depths of your own misogynistic attitude towards women.
5. You claim to know what they say amongst themselves while implying I don't have the same knowledge; Are you a woman? Or do you have hidden cameras on women? How else could you have possibly ordained this forbidden knowledge?
5. My partner, a woman, does not think or act the way you described. She does not engage in overt misandry with her friends.
6. I have encountered plenty of extremely misogynistic and legitimately creepy/abusive attitudes towards women at "Sunday school" and while receiving religious education. Every one of the many dozens of churches I've been to have had extreme misogynistic undertones, and often brazen overtones. If you are trying to establish a basis for what isn't misogyny, you couldn't have picked a worse target.
7. "But I'm not the only one who does it" has never, ever, ever been an excuse for prejudice.
8. Dating "marketplace"? What are you even talking about? Apps? Websites? Dating in general? I am not conventionally attractive by modern society's standards, I'm overweight, and outspoken. I have not had issues finding or attracting women. Determining long-term compatibility is much more difficult, but a lack of vanity or a misogynistic outlook was never the problem.
My advice? Touch grass, ask a woman what she actually thinks, and listen. You clearly are not currently in a position to give others advice on women; you are in need of advice.
Males are so used to holding all the cards and having everyone do their bidding that women having self-agency and making decisions feel like emasculating humiliations and an attack on the bases of masculinity.
They won't listen because they know what's at stake.
Of course I know them. It's me! (joshing)
Don't take it as an attack on you, by the way. But we have to recognize one of the biggest roots of the problems facing the world today.
Every time I go online I try to remind myself that the majority of comments are coming from bots. The men in my life don't talk this way.
And where is this sentiment that women will only look at the same 5% coming from? One woman's 5% is going to look very different from another woman's 5%. Go outside and don't interact with just women, but a variety of people and a variety of different couples to see what normal relationships look like.
It seems in these conversations that the main concern for men is attracting women, but going by the way they talk about them, it doesn't sound like they respect them as fellow human beings. Some of the concerns women have during dating are: are they safe to be around (read: am I walking into a situation where I am going to get raped), am I going to be called a slut or a whore if I do x y and z? (Am I going to be called a slut if I don't?) It's what the internet talks about, and what media and your family will constantly warn you to be on the alert for.
You will be shocked, if you talk with men who are really able to analze their traits and talk openly about it, how SIMILAR and shared these are :-)
Men are quite simple on some layer. Especially this dating layer. Even if some claim not being part of these "mind & traits behaviour", nonetheless they mainly think the same.
You might be interested to know that "this is the way things are" is not a valid excuse for perpetuating learned prejudice. I in fact take issue with some of the collective behavior of both men and women. Shocking, right?
Men around the world are functioning the same way,esp. on some levels like dating. Like it or not :-)
Once a girlfriend "invited" me to those conversation by giving some examples, so ..yeeessss. :-D
Going out and desensitising yourself to anxiety over approaching strangers by talking to people without the intent or expectation of it going anywhere is the less offensive version, and one that works, without any need to rank people by appearance to do it.
I dunno, this seems to be interpreting the comment in the worst way possible. Like, assuming bad faith.
The comment above suggested that guys approach less-attractive women until they "build some confidence". This is not about the woman's receptivity to attention, this is about the guy's confidence or lack thereof. It makes sense: when confidence is worse, the conversation is more awkward and stilted, and that awkwardness is more likely to reinforce the idea that talking to strangers is a waste of time.
The charitable interpretation would be this: that you practice talking to strangers in scenarios that feel safe. Gradually, work up towards your goal - making new friends, talking to people you want to date, etc.
As I pointed out in another comment, he could've just argued for approaching people without expectations and intending it to go anywhere and suggested that a way of doing that is to approach people you're not attracted to.
In other words, make it about your intent and preference rather than about ranking women by appearance.
I met my girlfriend at a coffeeshop. I was a regular and just actively friendly to everyone. Our first date felt more like a second because we already had multiple conversations.
Men have a much greater emphasis on physical attraction than women which is why women need a much higher level of physical attraction when only using that. But building community lets us show off our other qualities which women put a much greater emphasis on.
The PUA scene was about gamifying or exploiting dating - hacking how you go about it for your own gains (getting laid)
Approaching women in public with good intentions and to feel more comfortable talking to women is not PUA. It’s one of the suggested things to do, but I think intentions matter a lot.
After Neil Strauss "The Game" almost destroyed several of the early exploitative PUA companies, many of them survived by refocusing on "softer", more self-improvement focused material. You'd find "old school" PUA companies like Real Social Dynamic[1] suddenly pushing exercise, meditation, and other self-improvement focused programs alongside their old routine-based pickup bullshit.
The comment above fits into that era, I think - on one hand there's language that fit right into some of that eras PUA mindset, on the other hand it's mostly arguing for the "softer" self-improvement stuff.
I agree with you that the intentions matter a lot, though. But I think the comment above would've gone down a lot better if worded differently...
[1] RSD later totally imploded after a campaign targeting one of their trainers - Julien Blanc, who pushed the exploitative angle to dizzying new heights.
Don't like redpill? Make it stop working.
Redpill is ‘working’ as it always has, as an obvious red flag
https://theweek.com/culture-life/the-gender-education-gap-is...
https://www.the-independent.com/us/money/dating-struggles-wo...
https://edworkingpapers.com/sites/default/files/ai25-1199.pd...
https://mindingthecampus.org/2025/10/23/college-students-in-...
I think whatever website you’re getting this jargon from is hurting you
This is reality they're talking about, outside of work and home. Your inability to accept this doesn't make these trends any less observable.
It's not evenly distributed, for sure, but the stats say that almost every women get 1 or more interested men, while only about 5% of men get 1 or more interested women.
Seems to track that way in RL too, not just online dating, so yeah, I agree that online dating tends to speedrun to the conclusion.
I have been through a couple of online dating and personality usually came first, so by the time appearance was revealed, we already could not care much. She was not my type, I was not her type, but that affected nothing.
The reason it did not work out is financial and logistics (different country, I have MS, I am heavily dependent on healthcare, and so forth), not because of any moral failing or what have you.
You should try AFK dating sometime, it's even worse! Out of all the women I've met, only 0.00000001218% been interested enough to date and marry me, and I didn't even touch any of the apps! Brutal.
Sampling bias. How many did you ask?
And so while we can't fix that, guys can certainly improve their chances of being in that 5%. The thing is, what a picture shows on an online dating profile really is a lot down to you, irrespective of your actual appearance.
But men have a horrible ability to select pictures that are either incredibly low effort and poor quality, or the type of pictures that men would find other men cool in, rather than what will attract women, before even considering how you compete on actual appearance. When I spent some time figuring out my profiles back in the day, my match rate went up by a large factor.
That 5% is static - individual guys can improve their chances of being in the 5%, but that pushes out others already in the 5%.
IOW, if women are only looking at the top 5% of men, there's very little you can do to make them look at the top 50% of men.
And that was exactly my point. You can punch far above your metaphorical weight very easily because most guys hardly tries.
> IOW, if women are only looking at the top 5% of men, there's very little you can do to make them look at the top 50% of men.
I didn't come even close to suggesting otherwise.
Like? I haven't tried online dating in a long time, but all guys I knew had normal profiles and rarely got any matches let alone dates.
>most guys hardly tries
That's irrelevant. Women on dating apps are still only going to interact with the top guys that are above their league, let's say a 9/10. Whether there's more who don't even try, doesn't help you at all. Like if you now try and you go from a 4/10 to a 6/10, you're still below the 9/10 throeshold the top guys have set the bar at. Women don';t choose on statistical distribution, thinking that there's only a handful of guys at the top so they'll have to lower the bar to find a mate, meaning you'll have a chance by going to a 6/10.
"Normal profiles" for men typically means hardly trying. It means poorly lit pictures. It means bad angles. Often it means things that instantly puts most of the women off, like shirtless pics [1], and poorly written profiles.
I've never had any problems getting matches and dates, but I did have to work for it. That meant ensuring I had good quality pictures, and ensuring my profile matched what women on the given site that I might want to date said the were looking for.
I went from rarely if every getting matches and dates to getting a steady stream of them not by magically getting better looking, but by improving my profile.
Just fixing the writing multiplied the number of dates I got by a decent factor.
> That's irrelevant. Women on dating apps are still only going to interact with the top guys that are above their league, let's say a 9/10. Whether there's more who don't even try, doesn't help you at all.
The point is that those "9/10"'s also mostly don't try (I'd argue most 9/10's aren't on the dating sites, so really you're competing against "dating site 9/10's" who are mostly going to be relatively regular guys who know how to pick a good photo)
[1] Shirtless pics works if you're built - it worked for me after I'd spent 10 years in the gym powerlifting, it did nothing before that - and are posting on a hookup focused site like Tinder, and have a profile written to focus on giving off that vibe. It does not work well on a more "serious" dating site even if you're seriously muscular. But still if you look at the guys profiles, you'll still see a steady stream of them. Most men going on dating sites really ought to take a look at the competition, and then do pretty much the opposite of what most guys are doing.
"6 feet, 6 inches, 6 figures", "ewww he's got an ANDROID? ick!" - Eugenicists.
https://www.npr.org/2024/03/28/1241473453/why-green-text-bub...
https://leafandcore.com/2019/08/24/green-bubbles-are-a-turn-...
https://mindingthecampus.org/2025/05/01/30876/
https://blog.seeking.com/the-green-bubble-deal-breaker
https://gizmodo.com/im-buying-an-iphone-because-im-ashamed-o...
https://thetab.com/2026/02/27/expert-reveals-shocking-reason...
None of those things are why you can’t get a date.
> Thanks "AWFUL" (Affluent White Female Urban Liberal) women!
This is though.
It's perfectly valid for women to want men who are willing to put in more effort than the barest minimum.
When everyone invests equally in getting to the top 5%, because of how competitive it is, then it results in people maintaining their same spots as before on the leaderboard.
Also you can't improve things like height which is one of the most important things women care about.
>there's very little you can do to make them look at the top 50% of men
Historically it's been solved using religion and families enforcing monogamy in society, like in the past 2000 years of human history, to ensure most men and women get to find a pair to make a family and giving them a relatively equal opportunity/stake in the future of society as an incentive to help maintain and defend it.
Without these traditional enforcement mechanisms, I guess we can explain them the math that if they wish to find happiness and not die alone surrounded by cats, then they can't all share the same top 5% of men, and so will need to settle for a realistic man in the same league as them, instead of waiting for gigachad because their biological hypergamy instincts tells them to.
Yes, but everyone isn't doing that. You'd think men would, but I suggest you ask around some women on their experience of the quality of mens dating dating profiles.
Let me tell you, women are waiting with bated breath to hear you explain this to them.
Last I checked, most western societies don’t allow polygamy and most people still prefer monogamy. You don’t have to explain anything to anyone, women get it. They are just happier living by themselves than surrounded by dudes who make condescending remarks about them dying surrounded by cats. I guess maybe we can explain that to men.
Oh no, how will we ever deal without billions upon billions of abusers and molesters.
Why makes you think that? It seems much more likely to me that women are selecting whatever profiles that interest them, which would be >5% if potential matches made better profiles. I've seen the women experience of dating apps from women friends, and indeed men profile quality is abysmal (my bisexual and lesbian friends seem to swipe on a much higher proportion of women profiles FWIW), to the point that 5% even seems pretty high once you also take into account personal preferences.
6/10 would get a response and some, dates.
The apps make it so there's no conversation and it's all about your profile.
Way more difficult to get noticed.
But my point was that most men are doing such a shit job at presenting themselves on their profiles that it isn't that difficult to massively improve your odds by making a profile that is better than average.
Spending more than 5 minutes ensuring you have a profile picture that is decently lit, taken from an angle that present you well, and that you look like you're capable of taking care of yourself is a good start, but judging from conversations with a lot of women while I was dating, that is a high bar to clear for most guys on dating sites.
90% of the guys had a photo of them with their pickup truck, a pic of them drinking heavily, and a pic of them giving the middle finger.
Not in a particularly redneck or rural area either. Lowest effort possible.
It is still effort if you make a decent profile on places like Tinder, because Tinder is very much intentionally trying to frustrate you to make you pay, but even just having a female friend you could ask to help pick a photo that won't actively repel every woman that ever sees your profile ups your chances so much...
Men need an equivalent to political lesbianism.
Gay men have excellent marriage/partnersahip statistics. They stay together, they don't (or tolerate/accept) "cheating", very low physical abuse, very happy/satisfying relationships etc statistics.
Lesbian women have literally the opposite. The memes about domestic violence and other serious problems among lesbian communities would be funny if they weren't so true.
When I see these sad "women are from Venus, men from Mars" style of comments, all I can feel is that this is a sad truth of the universe.
The men who enjoy showing off pictures of their fishing/hunting haul. The men who use android phones, the men who want to show themselves topless (even in contexts where this makes sense). These man are not "low quality" or even "less desirable" partners in any objective sense because their photography choices are not amicable to women's desires. Women account for like 80% of consumer spending and advertising/marketing folks know some extremely uncomfortable truths about group-think/hive-mind mentality among women. These men should celebrate that they are showing their authentic selves, not the contorted version they have to repeatedly summon to satisfy foids.
Basically, men should actively be proud of our achievements, and any who can ignore societies intense biphobia should lean into the masculine side of their desires, as their relationship satisfaction will likely go significantly up.
What.
Have you ever met a gay male? Maybe even talked to him?
Gay males are still males at the end of the day so they always land themselves in the most damaging relationships possible. Males already cause tons of harm by themselves, so sum them together and you get a truly dreary mess.
There's a reason there are so many gay males who are so homophobic they make Evangelicals seem like a Pride Parade Organizing Committee.
I was like that. I simply managed to realize that the problem wasn't homosexuality, but rather that it's always been males.
Dating males in general is a form of self-harm if I'm being honest with you. I'm bisexual and I do still feel attracted to males but I am at a good enough spot that I don't want to hurt myself that way.
They are not objectively "low quality", but they are objectively less desirable to women if women find them less desirable for it.
You can enjoy leaning into those things all you want, but you are not owed anything from women. They have no obligation to look past how you present yourself. And so if how you present yourself reduces their interest in you, that is on you. If you're fine with that, then by all means go ahead.
For my part, it was a very small sacrifice to spend a couple of hours figuring out which parts of my personality women actually finds attractive, and how to signal that with my pictures and profile text.
It’s whiplash for a lot of guys, and that’s if you’re even savvy enough to clock it.
I don’t think it needs to be any more of a brutal realization than say the existence of say Santa, and yet here we are.
We need to do better about teaching our kids.
I think this line of conversation is a red-herring.
The real problem we have to talk about is the oversupply and surplus of useless and harmful males in the world today.
There simply are way too many males in the world for us to handle appropriately.
Its non better than saying 1% of women are actual people. The same bigotry.
[edit] mixed up Plenty of Fish with OKCupid
That's okay - keeping track of all the sites Match Group have bought and trashed is difficult.
The great thing was that it was self-selecting -- the less compatible types answered very few questions and stumbled over anything involving basic general knowledge, logic or ethics. The compatible ones added thoughtful or witty freeform comments to their answers. You could essentially clear all the usual first-few-dates compatibility dances just by running through people's answers.
I met many wonderful people via that site, and I never went on a bad date with OKC; we always had heaps to talk about. I thankfully found my perfect match for all time via OKC nine years ago, just before match.com ripped up the matching algorithm and the questions and destroyed the site entirely.
It is not a good business model to match people well, and match.com clearly knows that.
Na,this should be true for both brands these days?
Of the two, Bumble seems to be the slightly less evil one (fun tidbit: Bumble at least used to value a lifetime premium subscription at roughly the same amount as 6 individual months subscription, which tells us something about the expected lifetime value of their users...), but their both of course profiting wildly of exploitative practices.
To run a business you either need to show ads, have everyone pay, or have a freemium model where it can be used for free but some portion of users pay.
It’s easy to imagine making a better service by removing all of the parts that fit what I just described. I could make a better Instagram if it didn’t show any ads and was free for everyone. I don’t think my developers or hosting providers would want to work for free though.
The reason dating apps have this freemium model is because building a large pool of users is important to their success. Most people will not pay for an app if a free alternative exists. Most people hate ads. So the product which wins will always be the one lets people get started without paying, bringing in the largest dating pool.
There have been many dating app businesses that tried models where everyone pays the same flat fee. Most either converted to freemium or disappeared. There are still some niche social apps that use their expense and difficulty of getting an invite as a selling point, but they target very niche audiences because they’ll never be mainstream.
Your friend just discovered one of the harder realities of dating apps: Your odds of getting a response from an individual profile is very low. Swiping on a lot of profiles is necessary. For people who get easily frustrated by these odds and who get angry at having to pay for anything they’re going to be generally very frustrated with the apps in general.
Dating apps are one of the most poignant examples of a service that provides a lot of value relative to alternatives (you’ll spend more on a single drink at a bar or even on transport to a restaurant to meet someone) yet the nominal charge still makes users scoff. It’s hard to sell apps to consumers.
Now that it's a much bigger business, it makes it much more difficult to actually meet someone.
None of the women I met on these sites worked out long-term. I met my wife through a meetup group where we were friends for a few years first.
I don't think I can accept the idea that having a larger population of users makes it less likely for people to find matches.
As for ads being such a big problem, I'm not convinced - we've had several reasonably successful dating sites that did well with ads instead of or in addition to freemium.
The biggest challenge to that model flourishing is that Match Group tends to buy them and start locking away the features and pushing more towards the subscriptions. E.g. Plenty of Fish was mostly ad funded until Match Group bought them, OkCupid more mixed, but then Match Group bought them.
I'm not blaming the founders of those. If I started a site like that and Match Group offered to throw money at me, I'd probably sell too, knowing I'd gotten their attention and they'd probably do their best to clobber me if not.
You will get more limited growth if ad funded compared to what you can squeeze out of maximally frustrated men. And as a result you'll be a more attractive acquisition target for Match Group to snatch up at a bargain knowing they can drive up margins by enshittifying you, and you'll have lower margins to fight them with if you don't sell.
True, but there are still alternatives.
This would be niche, but a self-hosted solution could be made for the more technically minded to use and network. The dating-net. Where efficiency and getting off the app are the priority. no profit seeking, no ads, no perverse incentives.
Of course, a lack of a match is not the only thing that prevents people from having kids, but I'm curious what the impact of an optimal matching service would be on fertility rates.
edit: I think governments might do well to provide funding for dating apps (whether privately or publicly owned) based on how many matches from the app actually lead to children. Completely flip the classical incentives on their head. Should be easy enough to ask if newborns were a product of a participating app as part of the birth certification process.
What size of population are you considering for this hypothetical nation?
And which nations are scaled to a few billion people?
And they all date? Every single one of them? The married couples? The children and the elderly?
India is a billion plus people. Google says that the dating app user base is 100mn, which is much lower than the total number of people who would use a government match making app.
That’s why the question regarding scale. That assumption makes a 10 person firm for a nation viable or impossible.
That's 1000 times smaller than your "few billion" scale, before you remove those already in partnerships or those who don't want to.
> You could make an app for a whole country with a company of less than 10 people.
Perhaps you could do it for Singapore, I’d love to know how those 10 people would be split across functions, and how they would handle the fraud and safety issues that crop up.
the government can switch up the incentives and for example make payment contingent on people actually using the platform as well as opening the tender to startup teams (usually they are locked out).
I honestly think that labeling corruption as corruption and a popular sentiment towards slamming a few people in jail for it would go a long way towards fixing these problems.
Instead even among the general public the sentiment is "government is just incompetent" which helps soften the reaction to it and thus indirectly encourages it to get worse.
There's no shortage of countries around the world that have dug themselves a corruption hole they struggle to get out of. It's easier to fix it starting from here than there but we don't want to end up there.
The modern trend of most families with 0-2 kids isn’t sustainable. We don’t need to go back to 5+ being the norm but a self stable society needs to be able to offset non parents thus requiring 3+ children families to be quite common.
Which, in times of working from home, means 4 bedrooms, 2 offices, 1 living room.
Ideally with walls not built from paper mache, so that they can actually be used for encapsulation of different requirements.
If we want them to have 3+ children, we need to reduce these sources of friction of doing so.
So that does sound like it is very much an issue. To someone, anyway. I don't really care. I have no horse in this race.
__
To cover the expected pedantic reply:
Of course technically it's everyone's problem. But just because it technically affects you doesn't mean that you have to emotionally involve yourself in stupid online discussions that don't comprehend systemic views and mistake them for personal whining.
"Just stop preferring that"? Good luck enforcing that.
I guess this will work for something like 10-20%? Maybe? (Speaking from a very german cultural background)
Even then, it would not solve any problems here, really.
On one hand, all of this is understandable, but on the other hand these policies do indeed raise the cost of having children.
Fuck that.
Why do you need an entire room each for an office? I work in a corner of a bedroom, and have previously had a desk in a living room. I know lots of people who do the same. I know few families where both parents work from home. Where more than one person works from home they can share an office.
If people work from home to a large extent, less office space is required, so the cost of land should go down. It does not because most people are not working from home.
No one said that one cannot make do. One can always make do.
That's a lot of bodies.
Exact times do vary by country, but female 'emancipation' is largely starting around WWI, whereas the middle class lifestyle you're suggesting doesn't arise until after WWII.
Lots of people don't want kids these days relative to 50 years ago, but even among those who do, they're delaying the process, often to the point where it becomes less ideal due to age. Many people who wanted kids when they were younger end up not having them as a result (and many who want them haven't had them yet).
Having a partner (or partners) to do it with is a significant factor for many, among other factors like concerns about affording food and housing for oneself, let alone for additional dependants.
As a worse case example, you could succeed by matching people least likely to abort, but most likely to have multiple partners.
Even without my personal experience being used, we see the outcomes and decisions made by dating firms.
Firms have to satisfy their investors/shareholders.
Maybe they should have a Rebound app as well.
Or at least to start practicing how to make babies.
I give it about a month before they start gaming the algorithm to pair people who are likely to be on government benefits with people who can support them.
You make $150k, congratulations all your matches are McDonalds crew members.
You make $200k, the same but now they're all mentally ill because the algorithm deems you capable of supporting thyat too.
This is the primary worry with governments getting involved with dating apps, is it not?
Many of our countries are just one election cycle away from the politicians mandating that the official government dating app only incentivise Anglo-Saxon baby-making...
<insert bad faith comment about how it's ok because they're not literally sterilizing anyone and you can opt out of you want>
(bonus points if it's from an account that has a bunch of comments whining about interface defaults and algorithmic nudges matter in technical contexts)
the major> No, I figure if the Marines wanted me to have a wife they would have issue'd me one!
-Major Payne
edit: isn't a government run dating site like a more gentle handmaid's tale basically?
Keep supply of women high because men will pay anything for a chance?
I am very curious how this will be changed in this government platform. Maybe it won't LOL
On the other side you got a fresh supply on both sides from kids growing up to be adults and from adults divorcing and even if your matchmaking is perfect and divorce culturally shamed against, people still die which leaves widow(er)s behind, of whom a certain amount will want a new relationship.
Dating apps are a race to the bottom. They're collecting a tax on the lonely and desperate of dwindling populations. Ironically it's not sustainable over the long term.
The entire idea of just wanting MRR and be done with it is a huge, huge part why the world is so screwed. So much of the economy is just devolved into rich people seeking rents.
> Keep supply of women high because men will pay anything for a chance?
Grindr has a different fix.
But on the other hand, if it appears "too limited" because the most desirable people disappear off quickly because of a successful match, maybe they'll still struggle to keep the users coming back to it even if they're actually doing a better job at matching people up...
Really depends whether the track record (assuming its good) becomes known enough to people, I'd guess.
Tinder side-stepped this issue when they changed to be a hookup site. The downside, of course, is you end up with a bunch of one-night stands instead of stable families producing babies.
If you do a bad job - all the people see it as desparate, and leave, and you need to find new people to join
It's a high churn environment so there's no real way to make money from... er... bums on seats.. so there's no real choice but to make some sort of barrier forcing people to spend money
Spending a couple decades with the government putting it's thumb on the scale trying to get people who score high on government metrics to pair up with other people who score high on government metrics seems like a great way to start a civil war a couple generations down the line.
But I'm sure the marriages will be stable all the way there so there's that.