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Comment by elorant | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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?

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