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Comment by aaronbrethorst | Hacker News Reader

    does dating company/apps actually solve
    any problem that people are having?

Yes. Meeting people you're potentially compatible with. I met my current girlfriend on OKCupid a couple months ago. I'm in my early 30s, never married, and have an increasingly stringent set of requirements for a potential mate[1]. Meeting people I find interesting is challenging.

[1] Half-jokingly, you could summarize this as a rabidly liberal ivy-educated tenure-track professor, as those are the people with whom I've had the most chemistry.

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My experience showed that online dating still is a numbers game.

Even with OKCupid. Women get >10 messages a day and men maybe 10 a year if it's a good year.

I think Tinder is the most innovative one in this sector, because it acknowledges the number-game thing and doesn't bother with unneeded fluff.

Tinder brings to the mainstream what the gay population had since 2002 [1].

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20020903191409/http://www.adam4a...

Edit: changed to reflect actual date of a4a going live.

Probably merits a NSFW.

This is exactly it. It's fundamentally a numbers game, and then there's a lot of romanticizing from people who prefer to believe otherwise.

That, and Tinder understands that people prefer being shallow. So it optimizes for that.

Yes.

But I think Tinder could be optimized for real (long-term?) dating.

I mean 90% of the women on Tinder have nice pictures. But My experience has shown that I have a specific taste, that doesn't have much to do with looks. So if I first choose by photo and later by, lets say, character similarities, Tinder is wasting my time.

Something like the matching of OKCupid would be nice. So I don't "like" 90% of the women there just to find out that only 5% of them were what I wanted.

Attempting to do so creates a system that incentivizes dishonesty and spamming. It's what happened to OKCupid.

Plus, as OKCupid demonstrated pretty well, people really choose almost entirely based on photos. Add in decision paralysis and an overwhelming number of choices, and optimizing around anything but incredible shallowness starts to seem silly.

Incidentally, I've tried a series of other dating sites that try to optimize around different things. In general, the userbases are quite small.

Sure, I wouldn't choose people with "bad" photos, but as I said, the amount of women with good photos is much much bigger than the amount of women with a good match.

I've seen all the Tinder-Swipe Apps, because of this. "Just swipe all women in your area right and choose afterwards"

At the end you sit there and have to talk with 20 women just to find out that only 1-2 of them don't think you're a weirdo. :D

That's much better than the alternative scenario. There, you talk to five women just to find out that all of them think you're a creeper weirdo.

They didn't think I was creepy, just weird :( ;)

I didn't have the impression that people I talked to cheated on the OKCupid questions.

But I had the impression that most questions are irrelevant.

Totally agree. What I found to be most effective with OKC was spending the money on A-list status and only messaging women who favorited my profile (or liked, or whatever the terminology is). The response rate I saw was well above 50%.

Spending money on A-list isn't even really necessary -- OKC bumps those who have liked you to the top of your "Quickmatch" queue -- from which you can like them back (or not) and discover if you are a match.

Huh, interesting. Thanks for the info. Hopefully I never need it :)

It seems to be an engagement issue. Populations that don't message or participate or show interest should be encouraged to in some way - like "your profile will only be viewable for x number of days unless you start messaging other people"

Unengaged users are an immensely valuable asset. Show a guy that there are three thousand women in his city, and he'll be very interested. Show him that only three of them have logged in in the past week, and he'll be a lot less interested.

Rabidly liberal = professes to care a lot about the poor and disadvantaged, but finds the prospect of sleeping with one of them unthinkable.

Please don't make acerbic swipes at other users. If there's a general point you want to make about dating and social class, that's easy enough to formulate without being snarky or personal.

I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to say, but it sounds kind of like an unnecessary personal attack.

How is it a personal attack if he likes their 'rabid liberality' (to paraphrase Seinfeld)?

It's not really a personal attack. Many people wish to date only within or above their social class. I'm just questioning whether this attitude is compatible with being "rabidly liberal".

(Unless what you're saying is that while you personally are not rabidly liberal, you want to date someone who is.)

I'm still not clear on what your original reply to me was supposed to mean, except that you seem to be making some unfounded assumptions about someone (or two people) you don't know.

I'm just going with what your post says. Your criteria, even making allowances for half-exaggeration, clearly rule out anyone who is poor or disadvantaged as a potential partner. And although you don't explicitly say that you regard yourself as rabidly liberal, it's reasonable to assume that you do given that you want to date someone who is. (But of course, you may be a conservative who wants to date a liberal, in which case, feel free to correct me.)

> even making allowances for half-exaggeration

You might want to loosen that allowance a little bit. I'm sure they meant "intelligent", not literally a professor.

I was going more with the "Ivy-eaducated" part, but sure, if none of that was meant at all literally, then my point doesn't apply.

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