4 ms·

What I found interesting is that I (a straight, male) get a far higher match percentage in the D.C. area than in the S.F. Bay Area. This happens every time I tr

What I found interesting is that I (a straight, male) get a far higher match percentage in the D.C. area than in the S.F. Bay Area. This happens every time I travel back to D.C. I imagine that there are a lot of interesting variables that go into this, making this research not applicable for the "real world."

toomim 10y ago
The sex ratio in DC has more females. But also your matches will tend to build up behind the scenes when you are away, as people swipe your now-relocated profile, so when you return, they'll unleash like a torrential orgasm.
ch4s3 10y ago
Maybe you stand out more in D.C. Are you something(professionally) other than a lawyer?
Jtsummers 10y ago
I was traveling a good bit when I gave Tinder a shot (several months). Different cities gave me very different results. Hometown - nothing, not enough users so a lot of bots. Atlanta - tons of responses. LA - not quite as many, I probably didn't look as interesting compared to the other guys on there? Rome - Decent number, better than LA, not as much as Atlanta. Then I met someone and we've been dating for 6 months so hopefully I don't get to test it out much more.
Grishnakh 10y ago
It's well-known that there's very few single women in the Bay Area, whereas DC is the opposite, with a surplus of single women. NYC also has a large surplus of single women, and Seattle has a surplus of single men. Basically, the east coast cities have female surpluses, and the tech-heavy west coast cities have male surpluses.
- cloudjacker 10y ago
  The overlooked thing about this is that these gender surpluses would work for you even better in person. Despite online seemingly covering a larger spectrum of people you wouldn't otherwise meet, in person you can create scenarios with multiple people without competition.
  - Grishnakh 10y ago
    The problem here is that you have to actually have some kind of venue for meeting people in person. Frequently, people turn to online dating precisely because they've exhausted all their usual social circles for prospective partners. I'll use myself as an example: I'm a software engineer (big surprise on this site!), so I don't have any female coworkers who are eligible, I'm not a college student any more, I'm not religious so I don't go to church, I'm not a drinker so hanging out in bars isn't really fun for me, and I don't have any friends left who have single female friends to introduce me to. So that leaves me with things like 1) hobby/social groups on Meetup.com, 2) hanging out in coffee shops, 3) going to bars even though I don't drink and don't like the atmosphere, and 4) online dating. FWIW, I've been doing #1 (I've tried #2 but it has such a terrible success rate in actually meeting anyone I gave up; you'd have to spend a LOT of time to meet just a few people, unless you're in your 20s and in a real hot-spot for this kind of thing, like on a college campus), and not experienced any success there at all: I go to hiking meetup, but it seems most of the women who attend these in this area (and there's a lot, sometimes a 3-1 ratio F:M!) are retirement-age. Sorry, I'm not into dating women old enough to be my mother. Online dating exposes you to people you would never meet in real life; that's why people do it. There's just no way around it. You can talk all you want about how it's better to meet people in person, but our society simply does not have many venues for this any more. In the old days, people met through friends, family, and church. These days, people like us are non-religious, we've moved away from our hometowns and move periodically for work so we don't have many friends to put us in contact with possible partners and family lives too far away. Online dating also lets you filter people out easier: I can look through someone's profile in less than 60 seconds and determine she's not someone I'd be interested in dating for various reasons (religious, extreme or conservative political opinions, etc.), things which aren't immediately obvious if you just walk up to someone in a bar and start chatting, and which may take a long time to find out through normal conversation.
jseliger 10y ago
What I found interesting is that I (a straight, male) get a far higher match percentage in the D.C. area than in the S.F. Bay Area SF has an unusually lopsided gender ratio, with more college-educated men than women, while almost all other major metro areas skew towards having more women than men. Jon Birger's Date-onomics covers this: http://jakeseliger.com/2015/09/19/briefly-noted-date-onomics-how-dating-became-a-lopsided-numbers-game-jon-birger/ http://jakeseliger.com/2015/09/19/briefly-noted-date-onomics..., and I rather liked it.

toomim 10y ago

The sex ratio in DC has more females. But also your matches will tend to build up behind the scenes when you are away, as people swipe your now-relocated profile, so when you return, they'll unleash like a torrential orgasm.

ch4s3 10y ago

Maybe you stand out more in D.C. Are you something(professionally) other than a lawyer?

Jtsummers 10y ago

I was traveling a good bit when I gave Tinder a shot (several months). Different cities gave me very different results. Hometown - nothing, not enough users so a lot of bots. Atlanta - tons of responses. LA - not quite as many, I probably didn't look as interesting compared to the other guys on there? Rome - Decent number, better than LA, not as much as Atlanta. Then I met someone and we've been dating for 6 months so hopefully I don't get to test it out much more.

Grishnakh 10y ago

It's well-known that there's very few single women in the Bay Area, whereas DC is the opposite, with a surplus of single women. NYC also has a large surplus of single women, and Seattle has a surplus of single men. Basically, the east coast cities have female surpluses, and the tech-heavy west coast cities have male surpluses.

cloudjacker 10y ago
The overlooked thing about this is that these gender surpluses would work for you even better in person. Despite online seemingly covering a larger spectrum of people you wouldn't otherwise meet, in person you can create scenarios with multiple people without competition.
- Grishnakh 10y ago
  The problem here is that you have to actually have some kind of venue for meeting people in person. Frequently, people turn to online dating precisely because they've exhausted all their usual social circles for prospective partners. I'll use myself as an example: I'm a software engineer (big surprise on this site!), so I don't have any female coworkers who are eligible, I'm not a college student any more, I'm not religious so I don't go to church, I'm not a drinker so hanging out in bars isn't really fun for me, and I don't have any friends left who have single female friends to introduce me to. So that leaves me with things like 1) hobby/social groups on Meetup.com, 2) hanging out in coffee shops, 3) going to bars even though I don't drink and don't like the atmosphere, and 4) online dating. FWIW, I've been doing #1 (I've tried #2 but it has such a terrible success rate in actually meeting anyone I gave up; you'd have to spend a LOT of time to meet just a few people, unless you're in your 20s and in a real hot-spot for this kind of thing, like on a college campus), and not experienced any success there at all: I go to hiking meetup, but it seems most of the women who attend these in this area (and there's a lot, sometimes a 3-1 ratio F:M!) are retirement-age. Sorry, I'm not into dating women old enough to be my mother. Online dating exposes you to people you would never meet in real life; that's why people do it. There's just no way around it. You can talk all you want about how it's better to meet people in person, but our society simply does not have many venues for this any more. In the old days, people met through friends, family, and church. These days, people like us are non-religious, we've moved away from our hometowns and move periodically for work so we don't have many friends to put us in contact with possible partners and family lives too far away. Online dating also lets you filter people out easier: I can look through someone's profile in less than 60 seconds and determine she's not someone I'd be interested in dating for various reasons (religious, extreme or conservative political opinions, etc.), things which aren't immediately obvious if you just walk up to someone in a bar and start chatting, and which may take a long time to find out through normal conversation.

jseliger 10y ago

What I found interesting is that I (a straight, male) get a far higher match percentage in the D.C. area than in the S.F. Bay Area SF has an unusually lopsided gender ratio, with more college-educated men than women, while almost all other major metro areas skew towards having more women than men. Jon Birger's Date-onomics covers this: http://jakeseliger.com/2015/09/19/briefly-noted-date-onomics-how-dating-became-a-lopsided-numbers-game-jon-birger/ http://jakeseliger.com/2015/09/19/briefly-noted-date-onomics..., and I rather liked it.