How to Make Online Dating Work | Hacker News Reader

How to Make Online Dating Work

nytimes.com

45 pointstimr46 comments

Some problems aren't really solvable. All you can do is move the suckiness around.

Here's the problem: attraction is highly asymmetric. Many are attracted to few.

Shrink a pool of heterosexual individuals to a pool to 3 men and 3 women -- the outcomes will still be asymmetric, with the majority of participants not getting who they preferred.

No scheme, no twist, no app, no idea can change this, until the cyberpunk vision of affordable beauty is a reality.

...until the cyberpunk vision of affordable beauty is a reality.

That vision is here - it's called eat right, exercise and act like a man/woman.

The outcomes will be asymmetric but the inequality will be lower. The current situation is tall hairy muscular guy dating pretty skinny blonde, while short fat bald guy is lucky to get fat brunette ugly girl. The delta in utility between the latter couple and the former could be massive.

If everyone improved themselves you'd have short bald confident ball of muscle dating hot brunette butterface. Asymmetric, but the delta is pretty small.

> it's called eat right, exercise and act like a man/woman

absolutely. many men have been taught to act like women all their lives, and tacitly encouraged to neglect their physical health and appearance.

much of the male 'self improvement' industry focuses around de-brainwashing men of this ridiculous notion that they should suppress all their masculine traits/desires, and the notion that women are somehow not turned on by masculine physical health/development (muscles, grooming, well-fitting attire). things like facial attractiveness and height are actually secondary to these things in the real world.

money/success can help, but if you're a schlubby fat rich guy, the type of woman you will attract is probably not ideal.

Sure, I agree that individuals can improve their outcomes through looking after themselves -- I already do that and it's made a remarkable difference. It's the advice I give everyone.

The cyberpunk concept went further, though. Cheap, flawless, scarless cosmetic surgery. Tissue remodelling. Gene editing. It was a reflection on the 80s, when cosmetic surgery was in its optimistic dawn.

Taking the short bald confident ball of muscle and turning him into a tall, striking slab of muscle, dating the brunette with cheekbones that could shave wood. A world of meandering, alienated beauties. That's part of what cyberpunk was exploring.

Someone has never heard of chubby chasers XD

Some people actually prefer heavier people. So, no, that doesn't actually solve the problem.

There are WAY more chubby chasers than the media would like to admit. I have many friends that would want nothing to do with a Victoria Secret model.

>act like a man/woman

Meaningless bullshit, the definition of which is often shaped by advertising for the purposes of getting you to buy their stuff to temporarily assuage your insecurities. Just find some genuine interests and a passion or two, even if that means you're a bodybuilder doing crochet.

Everyone physically capable should eat right and exercise though.

If you want a more precise statement, a man should act independent, dominant and strong. A woman should act happy, somewhat submissive, and caring.

Just find some genuine interests and a passion or two...

Ok, Magic the Gathering and Star Trek are my genuine interests and passions. Think that'll work for me?

>Ok, Magic the Gathering and Star Trek are my genuine interests and passions. Think that'll work for me?

Ain't gonna slow you down as long as you follow your first two bits of advice.

Definitely helps to know how to talk about them in a casual conversation without being off-putting.

I met my wife on Match in 2000, we have been together 15 years and have 4 kids.

Online dating was fun, especially if you use a little D.R.Y. and keep a text file of all the things you would say over and over again. It becomes very easy to 'mail merge' the best response to the ad you are looking at while still sounding original.

Fun times, it was great to meet all sorts of women every week. I am still friends with a 5 of them today. For me, the internet enabled me to meet 100x more women that I would find interesting than otherwise.

I used the exact opposite approach with online dating. I would write whatever comes into my head with zero filtering. I didn't care if I got laid or not. I just wanted to have fun.

My brain is better at coming up with quips than I realized. Once the mental barriers were gone, I discovered a new ability to make people laugh

I find it much easier to be funny IRL. Introductions look so templated and difficult to get right.

Also my friend noticed something about 90s - it was much nicer to start talking with a person before seeing their entire life summarised, categorised and carefully documented in picture feed.

I am married and one thing I hear from many of single Male friends is that, dating is expensive. I am talking from a narrow PoV of Manhattan, NYC.

A significant majority of dates end up by the man picking up the tab for a dinner / drinks. This normally runs to $100 a night, if not more.

If the social custom of having to meet in a nice, but not necessarily swanky place, takes a back seat, and if both pitch in for a reasonable meal, I think more relationships will flourish.

There's no science of attraction, once you realize that the whole thing is easier. Who "rocks your world" will be defined by a very complex and impossible to control set of interactions.

Remember both sides (you and the other) like to have a fantasy to invest in. Leave room for the fantasy, be a little daring and a little assertive, do not self sabotage, emphasize your value as a mate so that your partner will be able to emphasize it to themselves and their friends. Hopefully you will see something in your counterpart, if you do, don't go out of your way to snuff it out - instead invest in it - what's wrong with focusing on his/her eyes and not her ears?

On the other hand, neither side likes a jerk, don't be horrid, don't be rude, be kind, be sensible, be gentle.

Don't quite be yourself, but mostly be yourself. Be the self you wish you were - the movie version of yourself crossed with your mothers version of yourself.

Then - see what happens.

I have experiences and opinions on this but to keep it short:

It should really be split into several phases:

1) Take away profiles, pictures, zodiac signs, advanced algorithms and just put some basic constraints and have a blind chatroulette type system. Algorithms could be used for matching people like determining if they both like the same movies or something. It might be good to give them a mutual topic to talk about (same school, movies, games etc) - otherwise every chat will start with "what is your favorite movie?"

2) Then let them decide if they want to share more information like sharing their profile, pictures, zodiac signs.

3) If they still want to continue - have each independently check boxes of if they want to see a movie and/or dinner and what movie/restaurant they would be interested in (also include possible locations) and figure out a mutual date based on those selections.

Much better than a cold approach and you know instantly that you are talking with somebody on the other end (verification might be an interesting feature).

That would be fine for men, but women would just be flooded. They already get thousands of messages on dating apps. They aren't going to go for something that doesn't let them weed people out without a conversation first. That just doesn't scale.

Genetically men have evolved to get as many women pregnant as possible, women have evolved to be picky and decide which is best to spend 9 months having the baby of. You aren't going to get a successful dating site only appealing to men like your design where everyone is forced to have a conversation before they can be picky.

> That would be fine for men, but women would just be flooded.

Can you explain what you mean by that - chatroulette style is that you randomly are paired with one other person. And once the chat ends you have to click a button to be paired again. The way I would see is that individuals would login and click "pair me" and it would search pair with one and only one other person (I think I would even go so far as to restrict them to one conversation).

I suppose someone might not be paired with someone for some time but that is the "risk" I suppose. Perhaps a timeout could help or a notification saying "people are online that match what you are looking for".

I heavily agree with this post. People believe that pictures and zodiac matter more than they actually do. Not sure if I agree with your #3 though, seems like it is automating too much

I only say that because I find it difficult to find a place between me and the other person. Like for example last time I went out on a date I choose a theatre that was between us - but she wanted to go to one that was like an hour away from her (about the same distance for me).

The location selection would help with I guess "reading their mind" of what the other person wants to do. My personality is really open to almost anything - but I don't know what their favorite restaurants are when we start actually planning a date.

It could even be as simple as listing out popular restaurants in the area such as Chili's, TGI Fridays etc (arguably the food at those places aren't the best - but it's usually has plenty of people there, has light, and can have a conversation).

Step 1: be attractive.

Step 2: don't be unattractive

Or just pretend to be attractive. People seem to like being fooled (we often fool ourselves to feel good, see self-serving bias) so why not?

MySpace angle, check.

Step 3: Avoid profiles of other attractive people. Those are most likely fake.

In my limited experience (been on the internet about a month), this is totally backwards. The 7-9s have all been exactly as advertised, it's the 5s and 6s who were actually 3-4s with clever angles and ancient pics. If there is no bikini or crop top in the pics, don't bother.

I feel bad for the real 5-6s, it's quite a lemon market out there for them.

I wonder how many of the couples that "met online" actually met on a dating site/app. It sounds rather native to reduce the discussion to these. People that use these are probably a self-selecting group that's not representative of the whole population. Pretty much everybody I know that met someone online [in a romantic context] was through regular social sites (facebooks, instagrams, tumblrs etc).

This article reads a lot different if you look at the authors first.

Aziz Ansari wrote this? What doesn't that guy do?

A strange game.

The only winning move

is not to play.

;)

Do not go on a date with anyone with the on-line handle "Kobayashi Maru".

Or Lennay Kekua for that matter

The main problem of online dating is that men usually are looking for sex while women for long-term relationships. Add to that the fact that in most dating sites the analogy of men to women is at least 3 to 1 and you realize pretty soon that it's a lose-lose game for most people.

> The main problem of online dating is that men usually are looking for sex while women for long-term relationships.

I don't think this is the actual problem. I believe it's often a problem that people either don't know what they want, or they are willing to accept less in the short term than what they want in the long term (which leads to terrible relationships more often than not).

There are also plenty of people, both male and female, who just want short term sex but firmly believe that they should throw up a charade in order to get it.

> The main problem of online dating is that men usually are looking for sex while women for long-term relationships

this is an out-dated, stale, and dare i say sexist interpretation of modern gender relations.

there are lots and lots of men looking for relationships and completely failing to even get a date, much less get laid. there are also plenty of women who just want to hook up with hot caddish guys and have no interest in a LTR any time soon.

you don't need to look any further than tinder or reddit to find plenty of examples of both.

> Add to that the fact that in most dating sites the analogy of men to women is at least 3 to 1

I've never actually seen this proven. Did you scrape profiles? OkC staff have repeatedly claimed that the ratio is around 50/50 for major metro areas:

http://cdn.okcimg.com/blog/older_lover/Age-Distribution-With...

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-male-female-ratio-on-big-f...

Heads up I'm not familiar with these kind of sites. But to quote the Adultfriender hack article of last month:

Among the 26,939 users with a UK email address, for example, there are just 1,596 who identified as female: a ratio of one woman to every 16 men.[1]

[1] http://www.channel4.com/news/adult-friendfinder-dating-hack-...

Well AFF is unique in that it's explicitly a hookup site, and that might naturally skew men. I'm not sure an even gender balance would even help anything. With 1,000 men and 1,000 women, you'd still have the most attractive women flooded with messages.

Any evidence that the "men looking for sex / women for LTR" hypothesis, to the extent it is true, is more prevalent in online dating, as opposed to dating in general? I think it mostly comes down to anonymity and low cost of rejection. Men online are just less embarrassed to express thoughts and desires that they wouldn't to a dating prospect that is, say, friend of a friend due to the increased social cost of coming off as a creep.

I have to say that, as a man, 0 investment in the interaction from the start is the only real way to play the game. The chances of any given person getting back to me on tinder is so low that I actively try to avoid reading profiles and getting interested before swiping right. Even after a 'successful' match the chances of meeting up in real life are so slim that it just feels like a game. "I don't know this person, we'll probably never meet so I've got nothing to lose".

Social networks are important to making a dating system work. Facebook is the most successful dating app in the world by far.

> 0 investment in the interaction from the start is the only real way to play the game.

even after you start dating, if you emotionally invest yourself in any one person too fast, it's extremely unattractive.

Isn't this the problem of dating in general?

I have a humble idea not tried yet in match making, no profiles, no personality tests, just one simple fact I won't disclose. I don't need money, I can do it all myself, what I need is users.

How do I get users once my MVP is ready?

Perhaps a cofounder expert in marketing is the right solution?

You may not want to believe it but getting users is 90% of what it takes to succeed with dating apps. It's much more severe than any other types of services out there due to the nature of what it does. To succeed you should either have: 1. a plan to succeed at getting critical mass of users; 2. a plan to make it work even with a small set of users. If your clever idea doesn't involve any of those, you will fall into the trap of what tons of other unsuccessful dating app entrepreneurs fall into

If you need users, then you do need money. The online dating app scene is insanely competitive. The last one to go naturally viral was Tinder, but the odds of duplicating that success are infinitesimal.

Tinder didn't go viral naturally, it was pure hustle

Sure, money for marketing is needed, plenty of it. I meant for development, you know, funding.

The odds are not infinitesimal. Matchmaking is like a fad, you can come up with ideas every year and people will flock to your site, because not all of them work. Of course you have to break the profile/test mentality and try new venues.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com