25 ms·

Impersonators who are paid to flirt on dating apps

371 points by imartin2k 9y ago

laurieg 9y ago
It is very informative to make a an online dating profile of the opposite gender. I'm a man, but when I made an account on tinder with a female friend's pictures I was blown away by just how radically different the experience was. Almost every person would match with me. Everyone would message me straight away. If I didn't reply most would message again in a few hours. A few would get very angry/upset that I didn't reply. I think Tinder is a real stroke of genius. All users, men and women, get given the same interface and the same choices. But of course things are not really equal. Men shotgun and women pick and choose. Tinder has essentially made Bumble, but they have plausible deniability. No need to enforce any rules about women messaging first when that emerges naturally.
- zitterbewegung 9y ago
  To be honest I think this is true of dating sites in General.
  - cblock811 9y ago
    It sounds accurate for Grindr, Scruff and Hornet in the world of gay 'dating' apps as well.
    - throwaway_234 9y ago
      All dating should be like gay apps/dating... theres always someone wanting to talk to you, trade pics and try to hook up with you. At least if you have a nice body, decent face and are 20 to 40... unfortunately being white might help too. Str8 dating app scams barely exist on gay/bi apps. There's no need for it due to how men are. Horny and looking 24/7.
      - walrus01 9y ago
        traditional fraudsters, however, know no sexual orientation boundaries: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/grindr-fraudster-arrested-in-burnaby-1.4631351 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/grindr-frauds...
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - noobermin 9y ago
        Is this really true? I find in my own experience that men want sex more than women is a stereotype of sorts. That women are more selective than men is a distinct observation but I'm not so sure how true that is either and how much of it is merely due to traditional gender roles.
        jessriedel 9y ago
        The evidence of a stronger male sex drive is overwhelming. ”The sex drive refers to the strength of sexual motivation. Across many different studies and measures, men have been shown to have more frequent and more intense sexual desires than women, as reflected in spontaneous thoughts about sex, frequency and variety of sexual fantasies, desired frequency of intercourse, desired number of partners, masturbation, liking for various sexual practices, willingness to forego sex, initiating versus refusing sex, making sacrifices for sex, and other measures. No contrary findings (indicating stronger sexual motivation among women) were found. Hence we conclude that the male sex drive is stronger than the female sex drive. The gender difference in sex drive should not be generalized to other constructs such as sexual or orgasmic capacity, enjoyment of sex, or extrinsically motivated sex." http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1207/S15327957PSPR0503_5 http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1207/S15327957PSPR050...
        humanrebar 9y ago
        We need new studies on the subject, but in the context of internet pornography. Given pornography consumption, are there changes in the relative sex drives of men and women?
    - exelius 9y ago
      And I’ve made more friends than dates with Her, so I guess the stereotypes hold true for lesbian apps as well.
      - throwaway_234 9y ago
        Making friends or long term friends with benefits on Grindr or Scruff is a joke. We are all distracted by something new and shinier. So it's a joke for building anymore then a sex buddy relationship where you see each other every month or so for a release. Though that might be different for the really good looking to hot guys.
        nookoking 9y ago
        It's not.
        pimeys 9y ago
        Uh. Maybe I'm then the exception that makes the rule... Four years now together and it just gets better every year. I may just have been very lucky.
    - tgb 9y ago
      Can you elaborate? My reading of the top comment is about how tinder has radically different experiences for men as for women. What is the similar dynamic on gay dating apps?
      - ddingus 9y ago
        Seconded. Interesting discussion.
      - throwaway_234 9y ago
        Just read the article and LoL there's zero effort on bi/gay hook up apps... just post the hottest pic of your 20 to 40 (maybe on up to 50)yourself .. face or body pic and boom filter through to find the ones your into. Another interesting thing you can become old news(after months of having the same picture in your town) yet if you travel 10 to 20 miles down the road your new hot news and the instant gratification of lots of prospects continues. Hiring a ghost writer to do the work on a bi/gay hook up is laughable. Though wow str8 app dating has gotten so hard guys are hiring ghost writers and fakes of himself to chat up/seal a date. WOW thats ridiculous lets kill these apps and meet the old fashion way!!!
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- tanbog 9y ago
  This paper does some interesting work to try and unpack why that is the case: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1607.01952.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1607.01952.pdf
- nikanj 9y ago
  Bumble is an interesting platform. The promise is that women have to message first, luring in men who are frustrated with lack of replies, and women who are frustrated with endless spam. From what I’ve heard from my friends, 99% of first messages on Bumble are ”hi” or a single emoji, kicking the ball straight back on the men’s side of the field. I wish dating as a research subject wasn’t so wrapped in weird MRA activism and other politics, there’s a lot of fascinating phenomenoma to be observed.
  - temp-dude-87844 9y ago
    Even with the immediate passing of control, the premise still works, because women perform the first pass of filtering, giving them an opportunity to preemptively reject the most undesirable of the pool before they have a chance to reach out. It's also an effective tool to fight the sheer volume of spam. The same kind of invitation plays out in real life with eye contact and body language.
    - jessriedel 9y ago
      Tinder and Bumble (and Coffee Meets Bagel, the League, etc.) have each party approve the other. The only major thing that distinguishes Bumble from Tinder is the female-message first policy, which is often side-stepped as described above.
      - philwelch 9y ago
        Saying "hi" is still a stronger signal than swiping right.
        Kalium 9y ago
        I can see why you would think that. Based on my experiences actually using both Tinder and Bumble, it's possible that your experiences might differ significantly from mine.
      - purerandomness 9y ago
- aphextron 9y ago
  I worked for $large_dating_site for a number of years. The real genius of Tinder was giving women the power. We came to the same realization as well: that no matter how bad you make the user experience for men, they will use the app endlessly if real women are there. Online dating business models are exclusively based around enticing men with sex, and giving women the power to choose precisely who they want.
  - hsljekskfh 9y ago
    it sounds like you drank a lot of coffee and ate a lot of bagels at your last job?
  - baron816 9y ago
    What I’ve long wondered is how women react in the real world now that they have all the power on dating apps. Why would they try to find a date in any other way? There were a few articles that came out a few years ago arguing that, no, dating apps were terrible for women because it makes men even more noncommittal with such easy access to dates. My hypothesis was that the women they interviewed for those pieces were all going after the same small group of elite men. Thus, ~3% of the whole male population is sleeping around with ~20% of the female population. Makes me wonder if polygamy is the natural course of things.
    - chillacy 9y ago
      That's historically the case: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/sep/24/women-men-dna-human-gene-pool https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/sep/24/women-men-dn... The other implication of polygamy is that a lot of men simply didn't have a chance to pass on their genes at all.
      - paulddraper 9y ago
        Related to this, as a bit of cause and a bit of effect, is that std deviation intelligence/posperity/success is significantly wider for males. Mentally ill people and geniuses are overwhelmingly male.
- Throwaway198724 9y ago
  When I was using dating sites, I did the same on OkCupid, and signed up a fake account with the photos of a woman that was slightly above average in appearance. I was curious to see how many messages I would receive, but more importantly, the type and quality of those messages. I thought that would give me a better idea of how to write my own messages (e.g. if 90% of messages were asking the same question, I didn't want to also be asking that same boring question). The first day I was surprised at the amount of messages I received. I think it was at least 10 in a few hours. However, it quickly faded, and after a few days, I was lucky to receive one message a day. That gave me a little confidence, knowing after the first day, the average woman was not receiving hundreds of daily messages. Similar to what you said, a few people would get angry if I didn't reply. A third of the messages hinted at sex, thinking they were being clever with winky emojis. In the end, on my real profile, I think I was decent with messaging. I sent out 200 messages on OkCupid (I focused on roughly the top 10% of profiles over a large radius), and had over 50% of those turn into conversations. My first messages were always similar. I would write one or two sentences that joked about something in their profile and asked a simple question. The idea was it needed to show I read their profile, it needed to make an attempt at being funny, and most importantly, it needed to be easy to reply to within a few seconds. When you write long messages with complicated questions, people don't want to invest the time in a reply, so they'll respond "tomorrow", which never happens. The other thing I did was almost always message women that were online at that moment, and I tried to turn the messages into a real-time conversation with instant replies. As a simple example, let's say a woman's profile said she liked the Fast & Furious movies. I would write a first message saying, "If you had to choose between me and Vin Diesel, who would you rather date?". There's a high chance she would respond saying the obvious, "Vin Diesel :P", and then I would reply, "Would it change your mind if I said I had 100% more hair than Vin Diesel, and I go for ice cream on first dates?". These type of messages are very easy to reply to, innocent, and people can be creative and fun with their responses. In that example, I'm even hinting at a date, and it doesn't seem pushy. In this case I would then keep writing playful messages and then ask her to meet up for the ice cream like I originally suggested.
  - EGreg 9y ago
    You guys are good. But I have a suggestion. Have your friend reach out first and say he knows someone she will really click with. If she doesn’t go for it, THEN you reach out. Dating as it stands is only a recent phenomenon. It is far better when three people with different preferences keep the others in mind when out dating. Far better to do introductions than always be out for yourself.
- swyx 9y ago
  threads like these make me despair about ever dating ever again. as a society we should be concerned about what tinder and bumble are doing to us, but -no one- has the power to stop it because it appeals to such base instincts.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    What are they doing to us?
    - dvtrn 9y ago
      https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/01/the-many-problems-with-online-datings-radical-efficiency/266796/ https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/01/the-many-p... ...is a source I often point to when I'm personally lamenting how weirdly...impersonal dating seems to have become.
  - welly 9y ago
    I met my girlfriend on Bumble. We have a great relationship, now almost a year in. Bumble, Tinder etc. are only tools, it's how we use them and plenty of us are quite capable of using them in a "moral" and savoury way. So it's "doing" nothing to many of us.
    - swyx 9y ago
      in the same way that soda and junk food is readily available and is causing an obesity crisis. if "plenty of you" are quite capable of eating well despite that, it still is a problem. Have empathy for problems that you don't personally have.
  - mrguyorama 9y ago
    As a single guy who has little interaction with women, it terrifies me. It's pretty much the only way I'll ever meet someone, but it doesn't fucking work for me.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 9y ago
- alexashka 9y ago
  Real stroke of genius would be making prostitution legal, and family a big deal. It'd solve men's natural urges, and women's constant insecurity that they're going to be abandoned, once they get wrinkles. It'd remove so much undisclosed resentment and tension within families and society. It'd free up people involved in billions upon billions of dollars worth of industry, to do something useful, instead of preying on people's monkey-brain urges and insecurities. I'm a dreamer, maaan.
  - tomcooks 9y ago
    You mean something like southern Europe 40 years ago. Wasn't that ideal, for what concerned family and societal tensions.
    - ulkram 9y ago
      could you clarify your point. I'm interested, but this is all I could find: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_Europe
      - tomcooks 9y ago
        While prostitution was seldom legal in the catholic belt (unlike in countries north of the Austrian border), brothels played an important role in male culture as much as family. Men would usually lose their virginity with professionals, often as part of the "man-making" ritual happening during conscription (e.g. money received from the Army as a refund for the expenses to reach the conscription offices to get the first medical evaluation, often in the regional capital far away from home, would be spent on booze, cigarettes and hookers). For what concerns Italy, maybe Tinto Brass' "Paprika" and other of his movies are a good NSFW primer on this specific subject.
  - toomanybeersies 9y ago
    Prostitution is legal in New Zealand and we have exactly the same problems with dating culture that people have been commenting about here.
- mirimir 9y ago
  I'm reminded of RFJason's Craigslist experiment. He posted responses and images. Much hilarity ensued. Until he was sued by a guy in Illinois, and lost ~$75K.
- Double_a_92 9y ago
  > Men shotgun and women pick and choose. The problem is that that is a vicious cycle. The more men shotgun the more women have to be picky. So nobody answers and man have to write to even more women... Usually this get's "fixed" by limiting the amount of messages men can send. But that doesn't really work. There should be a system that "punishes" women for being picky and men for being desperate. Maybe publicly show the ratio of received/sent messages, or so?
  - heartbreak 9y ago
    > There should be a system that "punishes" women for being picky I don’t want to misinterpret you, so is this what you meant to write?
    - Double_a_92 9y ago
      Yes, but that's why punish is in " ". There's an obvious imbalance in pickyness between the genders. So counter-weight that somehow. It should encourage being picky for men, and discourage it for women.
      - eigenstuff 9y ago
        As a woman, what if I know what I want, it's hard to find in my area, and I have to dig through a lot of noise to find it? Should I then just right swipe on a bunch of dudes I'm not interested in, leading them on and wasting everybody's time, just so I can keep using the app? This is absurd.
        Double_a_92 9y ago
        Yeah you're right... We can't really make people not picky. So we have to limit something for men, because it's easier to become picky. What if you could sort people by the ratio of messages to answers? E.g. as a man you would show up more easily in results if you don't shotgun. And as a woman you will stay more hidden if your postbox is already overflowing. However I strongly assume that most women on those site just are picky. Looking for something they can't find in real life... So the system is just broken anyway, at least for "normal" men.
- amelius 9y ago
  > when I made an account on tinder with a female friend's pictures I was blown away by just how radically different the experience was You should try dressing up as a woman and walking down a random street. I bet it's a totally different experience as well.
- sli 9y ago
  > It is very informative to make a an online dating profile of the opposite gender. I'm a man, but when I made an account on tinder with a female friend's pictures I was blown away by just how radically different the experience was. It sounds like I'm joking, but if you're a moderately attractive male in a smaller city, a Grindr account will give you a very similar experience. Within an hour I had quite a surprising number of, let's say, risque images sent to me. Nowhere near the same number of weird or inappropriate messages, though. Some of them were pretty blunt, but nothing I didn't mostly expect, and nothing like the awful things I sometimes see being said to women on the internet.
- freeflight 9y ago
  > It is very informative to make a an online dating profile of the opposite gender. Don't even need a whole profile, as a teen in the 90's I'd regularly mess around with different names on an online chat system, didn't even have user profiles back then. Just the name alone would make a major difference how interactions with people went. Barely anybody was interested in talking to "RandomMaleName", but once you logged in as "Tina21" everybody would be all over you and if you played it right, they'd tell you all kinds of personal details about themselves, while I only revealed made up information about a fake persona. Juvenile me would get an extra kick out of hosing all those guys asking Tina21 for sexting/phone number for phone sex, I'd start sexting with them and after a certain point just write them really weird, off turning stuff, usually ending the whole interaction by notifying them that they tried to jerk off to a 15-year-old dude. To this day I'm not sure if that was a good thing to do or a bad thing? I guess, at least I taught a couple of people a valuable lesson about the Internet and anonymity.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
flamtap 9y ago
Sexism aside, the morality of this service is interesting. What if this service was involved in a match, and some time later the couple married?
- DoctorOetker 9y ago
  simply keep up the appearance that everything was "sincere" from the get go?
  - ggm 9y ago
    Ah yes, because relationships founded on white lies are the best ones.
    - DoctorOetker 9y ago
      oh I see! you are right, I thought we were only talking about extramarital marriages...
partycoder 9y ago
This should be considered fraud.
- saryant 9y ago
  .
  - partycoder 9y ago
    Except that some dating apps have micropayments in them. e.g: they sell you the ability to bump you in search results. Keeping you engaged with fake activity to increase the chances of becoming a paying user seems very questionable.
throwaway_234 9y ago
I guess unless your good looking to hot as a guy Tinder is crickets as girls filter you out. I'm bi so i use all apps .. i sure as hell wish Tinder was like Grindr and Scruff are for me. Open either app and have tons of messages .. pick and choose who you want to chat with and boom you have a collection of potential guys to meet up with for fun when the mood hits you. I guess that's what its like for average to good looking to hot women ... have a collection of guys to pick, choose and chat. Guess it's the Same for good looking to hot str8 guys. Not surprised about paid dating apps and their fake news scams. Match.com suddenly sends you a ton of winks and messages just as your subscription is about to expire yet there all fake or paid impersonators. Not sure how that is legal?
- noobermin 9y ago
  Even if it is legal is definitely not moral.
  - throwaway_234 9y ago
    Well it's the Internet where half to more of what we read and experience is made up crap to make someone else and their buddies rich.
- kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
  > Guess it's the Same for good looking to hot str8 guys. Unless you don't meet the minimum height requirement. That's more important than looks.
  - legionof7 9y ago
    I honestly feel that IRL, height is less important than a lot of people think. I'm a 5'5 man.
    - chrischen 9y ago
      It is ultimately superficial once someone knows more about you, but that doesn't stop people from setting it as their pre-filter before they see what they truly want. You ask people to improve the carriage, they'll tell you to make a faster horse. If you ask a woman what they want, they'll tell you tall dark and handsome.
sp527 9y ago
The most important takeaway from this article is that knowing how to flirt IRL is a bigger competitive advantage than ever.
neves 9y ago
If I create a dating app I'd use the VC money to contract some sex professionals to create a great atmosphere.
noobermin 9y ago
The resemblance to the career of the lead character from Her is undeniable.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y ago
> As we grow accustomed to foisting more and more complicated emotional tasks onto digital butlers, we lose our ability to tolerate inelegance or find value in social failure. Moments of awkwardness and heartbreak are an inevitable part of the dating experience, and they are essential in our evolution into mature adults. That is a very recent, Western view of finding a partner. For much of history, and even now in large parts of the world, a person's family had/has the job of finding a suitable match often with the aid of "professional" matchmakers. I wonder what percentage of people who grew up in this current Western model of individuals dating and finding partners would trade it for the other model if they could?
- noobermin 9y ago
  This is not like courtship or arranged marriages. In what you call "much of history" it was done openly and it was clear that you were arranging a marriage for you son or daughter or what have you. This is more covert and deceitful.
- magduf 9y ago
  The main problem with the non-Western version (epitomized probably by how it's done in India) is that it enforces a very high degree of social conformity: everyone must have the same relationship model, and the same life goals (monogamous marriage, children, etc.), with very little room for variation. It's impossible I think to say either one is "better", unless you can specify what exactly your goal as a society is. If your goal is a very stable society with everyone following the traditional monogamous marriage + kids path, and minimizing divorce, it seems that the Indian way probably produces better results. If you desire more freedom as an individual, it doesn't.
andrewfromx 9y ago
it's like that scene from the movie Hurt Locker https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1OOI6m4b7c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1OOI6m4b7c where he's trying to decide which cereal from so many choices. Old fashion family arranged marriages make so much sense to me now. JUST PICK SOMEONE!
6cd6beb 9y ago
I figured something like this would exist, but I don't think it's very useful. I've walked the dark path of trying to implement "pickup artist" material(can't imagine that'll be received well), and I can say that: A) an objective approach works (if you're humble and willing to recognize/adjust for failure) B) there's a torrent of snake oil out there C) you learn a lot when you try this stuff. A lot. A lot of that material is laughably bad, but the general formula of "know your value, be confident and unapologetic about what you want, be ready to accept 'no' quickly and gracefully" is the buried gold. Maybe it's just me but grinding through failure after failure after failure taught me those things. You can't buy them, and if you don't have them, it shows in your behavior. You can't have someone Cyrano de Bergerac your way into a date by behaving that way, because in the end the girl shows up and meets you. Furthermore, the proposition that this is a service for people who don't have time to send messages in these apps doesn't hold water. Not having the time to respond promptly is an asset. Bailing on some conversations is an asset. You're a busy man with a lot going on, not a desperate man glued to every prospect. That's my two cents.
- hsljekskfh 9y ago
  lot going on here, i’ll stay positive... i have heard pua stuff can be good but is mixed in with lots of bad. i think the issue is that there’s no alternative really, or i can’t think of one at least. TBH there’s probably a market for “nice guys who want a gf” but i can already see dozens of problems with that branding.
- hackits 9y ago
  Here is my two cents. A) Is superior in every way. Now let me fill in the gaps a little bit and maybe some-one else will find this information useful. First step is to look yourself in the mirror and ask yourself `do` you find yourself physically attractive? Do you have good posture, Do you have a low 10%-16% body fat percentage? Are you dressed to impress or just dress just it over with? If you answered no, then 10000% work on those aspects of yourself first before wasting time with dating apps and also meeting people in person. For the remainder or if you're curious keep reading. You're going to have to come to the realization there are going to be certain percentage of women out there who want to have sex with you. You're going to appeal to a group of women, Hispanic, Greek, Asian, Caucasian, Indian and age groups. How are you going to find this out? You're going to put yourself out there and be judged by women. It sux's, you're going to get some women who're going to receptive to you and there are some women who literally will run away from your approach to them. Though that is going to be the only way you're going to find out what type of Women are attracted to your personality and your appearance. Finally, forget dating app's. Unless you're the top 5% tall guy with a six pack and a fantastic smile you're wasting your time and money. Time that is better spent approaching women and learning.
mathgenius 9y ago
I can see the evolution of this: ripe for machine learning disruption. Then in a few years all we have are AI bots chatting each other up, and then informing us who we are to mate.
- Casseres 9y ago
  You might like the TV series Black Mirror. Especially Season 4 Episode 4.
  - sanderjd 9y ago
    One of my favorite episodes of the whole run, actually.
- alex7o 9y ago
  What they are doing doesn't even require ai, you can just look for the keywords and output the given phrases. But yes generally Ai can probably get you better results than humans can, it can probably give us some insights about dating.
minikomi 9y ago
This is a major part of the Japanese "dating app" experience - they're known as "Sakura"; same as the offline version of people who are paid to, for example, play pachinko and win or stand in line excitedly to buy something. Most Japanese dating apps also don't have a free mode, and require you to use coins or some such token to message or even view profiles. They use Sakura to run down your coins, and then message you saying they want to meet up -- "Message me back! Let's make plans!". Rinse and repeat.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
wpietri 9y ago
I don't even get this. If you don't have time to date, how would you have time for a relationship?
- laurieg 9y ago
  "I don't have time to do x" is almost always code for "I have other things that I want to do more than x" So it sounds like these people would make time to go on dates, or have a romantic partner, but they find online dating tedious so they pay to have someone do it for them.
  - wpietri 9y ago
    I definitely agree the surface excuse is a lie. But in this case, I think it's insane. It reduces to, "I don't want to spend getting to know a person I might spend the rest of my life with, so I'm going to jump right to paying somebody to lie to them." It's contradictory, at least for a real relationship. I think what it really means is, "I want a woman in the same way I want a new car: as enjoyable, status-enhancing property. But they insist on talking. So fuck that."
    - JoshCole 9y ago
      It's not a lie. You're just distorting the idiom.
- JoshCole 9y ago
  I think your confusion comes because online dating isn't dating. A date takes potentially a couple of hours at max. Online dating refers to the process of searching for someone to date via the internet. A date can take an hour or two. Looking for a date online can take hundreds of hours without any results save for a few catfish scams.
  - wpietri 9y ago
    I think you've confused "going on date" with "dating". The process called "dating" has always included the initial part of sorting through possible prospects to go on a date with. Online dating is more efficient than what went before. The process has also included getting-to-know-you conversation and trust-building, neither of which this impersonation accomplishes. A date does take a couple of hours max. But if it works, it blossoms into a relationship, which takes significant time. And that same sort of significant time can be applied to dating.
bandito11 9y ago
Am I supposed to be utterly shocked this happens?
siliconc0w 9y ago
Standard 'its a three legged stool' spiel. Photos, profile, and messaging. Really messaging is the easiest part. Here is a high-conversion-rate formula: 0) playful message about profile/photo 1) flirt for one or two exchanges 2) pivot to drinks. I like the highly elaborate, "Sounds like something we could take about over drinks, are you free this week?" Photos are probably the easiest way to stand out. Most guys seem to just do the 'house selfie in a t-shirt' thing. If you try a bit harder and maybe hire a friend for a sunny afternoon with a few changes of clothes to take some creative pictures you can generally do better than 99% percent of guys in your 'range'. This is to say if you're a 7, you gotta date <=7s. This, like the speed of light, seems to be a hard constant of the universe.
- icebraining 9y ago
  If you're a 7 dating a 5, didn't the 5 break the constant? Reminds me of this story: One day in September, in a conference room populated with about 25 members of the Mac team, Steve [Jobs] was lecturing on how to hire. "A players hire A players," he said. "B players hire C players. Do you get it?" Apparently not. Somebody in the back of the room raised his hand and asked, "so how do you hire more B players?" https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=How_to_Hire_Insanely_Great_Employees.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...
  - siliconc0w 9y ago
    Like the speed of light, reference frames matter. The 5 convinced you they were a >=7.
Liron 9y ago
Founder of Relationship Hero (YC S17) here. We also help with online-dating messages, but we'll help you to improve your own communication skills. Text flirting seems like such a trivial thing, but getting better at it can be life-changing, because it ultimately leads to better relationships.
topranks 9y ago
New Turing test-like challenge... Build an AI to automate this process using the same guidelines.
chrischen 9y ago
Honestly if you're lazy enough to rely on the superficialness of online dating apps like Tinder, you're already in a gray area. If you're judging people purely by looks (which would be an inefficiency since in real life in person looks aren't as important), then someone else is justified in re-balancing that inefficiency by doing something like hiring a text writer.
- kowdermeister 9y ago
  > looks aren't as important That's not true for the majority. Looks are the first signal you notice of the other person. Unless you are after poets, artists or other people whose work reach other people without "the looks" then I don't see how - even subconsciously - it's not important. Pics are furthermore do indicate personality. I agree that Tinder is an industrial scale meat grinder, but the advantage is that wide exposure is better for your chances. It's like saying HI to a tons of people on the street you otherwise wouldn't meet.
  - magduf 9y ago
    The thing about Tinder that sucks is that you don't get a very good idea about a person from it, because all you get is a few pictures and if you're lucky, a very short free-form text session where hopefully they wrote something substantive about themselves. However, the thing that makes Tinder great (and also Bumble, though I haven't tried that one yet) is that both parties must "like" each other for any messaging to occur. This still isn't the norm on "traditional" dating sites, for some reason. The traditional sites are bad for men, because they're encouraged to put forth a lot of effort to write meaningful messages to women, but almost all the effort is simply wasted because most of them go to women that have no interest in those men, and the man has no way of knowing this. Tinder/Bumble fix this by forcing the woman to "like" a man's profile first, before he wastes any time and effort writing her a message. It also helps women by massively reducing the amount of unwanted messages they receive from men: if they get unwanted messages, it's partly their fault (and entirely under their control) for "liking" those men, and encourages them to be more selective with their right-swipes (so maybe they'll come up with some strategies for avoiding creeps, such as only right-swiping people with something meaningful written in their profile, and not just guys with gym selfies and backwards ball caps).
golergka 9y ago
> This messaging “blast” technique may appear lucrative compared to the average neighborhood yenta, but it has occurred to me that good matchmaking may not be in the company’s financial interest. When a client pairs up, they leave the service. This is only true if client is looking for a long-term monogamous relationship.
fimdomeio 9y ago
I'm pretty sure we're very close to getting a I'll Have Sex For You As A Service. I love how the article tries to show the moral dilemas but I see none... you're getting paid to impersonate someone else in a kind of interpersonal relationship. That is just plain awful, I don't see how a dilemma can exist there.
factsaresacred 9y ago
His blog may not be to everyone's taste, but the writer 'Delicious Tacos' pioneered this with OK Cupid years ago. On his blog he shares his online dating exploits along with some nice openers ("You are attractive, and I want to go out with you. Basically" being one that I stole and overused). Anyway, all that online dating made him horribly cynical. But damn if it doesn't make for good writing: > If she doesn’t give the number, if she ignores your request and tries to continue the conversation– it’s dead. Maybe means no. Hesitation means no. I’ve had a few exceptions. But frankly, if a woman wants to make you work for it, it’s an insult. And all online conversation is just a chance to f%ck up. The point of OKCupid is that we are dehumanized slabs of f%ckmeat and there are a million of us. No individual matters. Move on. For more: https://delicioustacos.com/2014/08/04/okcupid-starter-kit-copy-this-and-tell-me-what-happens/ https://delicioustacos.com/2014/08/04/okcupid-starter-kit-co...
- noir_lord 9y ago
  I heard the horror stories about online dating however my experience as a man was nothing but positive. I got responses maybe half the time and a date (coffee, nothing involving alcohol) maybe a third - I probably messaged 15 women over a year. Two proper relationships and one that is two years old in July and I plan to spend the rest of my life in. I did not use the shotgun approach, I excluded any woman who didn't fill her profile in with information (if they don't tell you about themselves how the hell do you know if you have anything potentially in common), excluded ones with terrible spelling and grammar (I'm not Chaucer but again it shows effort) and then only replied to ones where we had at least some interests in common (the two relationships where cycling and heavy metal respectively). I wasn't looking for one night stands, didn't push for dates, asked questions relevant to their interests and discussed mine. And it was all fine. My current partner showed me her messages after we'd been dating for a while and it was just a sea of "hey Babi, want sum fuck?", I mean she speaks three languages and has a degree in finance that approach was never going to open a conversation. My bar was "if I didn't find this person attractive would I want to be friends with them?" If the answer wasn't yes then it was a pass. I wasn't on there just for sex, if that was the goal I can just go out on the piss on a Saturday night. I also avoided tinder like the plague, it's just too shallow (for me), I did like OKC though (where I met my current partner).
chatmasta 9y ago
About eight years ago I knew a teenager making over $100k a month sending dating site affiliate offers through Chatroulette. He had a bot that setup a fake stream and then pushed the affiliate links in the chat. This is not new. Back then it was affectionately called “e-whoring.”
- walrus01 9y ago
  The new thing with this is hiring offshored clickfarm workers (basically the same recruit pool of people who would be farming gold in WoW for $1.25/hour in a developing nation, or working in an IRS-scam call center), who multitask and use a set of pre-prepared scripts and their own customizations to have a few lines of back and forth chat with the (mostly male) rubes, then send them an affiliate link to get them to click on. This has the advantage of putting a human in the loop to solve captchas, and enough randomness from the human's behavior that the bot-like behavior is not immediately apparent.
spodek 9y ago
HN being mostly male and as a guy, I've seen this discussion on the frustrations of online dating and how the system evolves many times. Are there similar threads in mostly female communities to see their perspective?
- pc86 9y ago
  Any mostly female community on the internet inevitably gets overrun with men trying to provide their perspective. /r/twoxchromosomes on Reddit is now 75-80% male in the comments, or more.
  - spodek 9y ago
    Sounds like the boy scouts in real life. It seems to happen in both directions.
mynegation 9y ago
Shameless plug for a friend who described the experience of having virtual dating assistants in a book: "Dating Vandalized". https://www.amazon.ca/Dating-Vandalized-Katerina-Lyadova-ebook/dp/B071YKY2PV/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1524832672&sr=8-3&keywords=lyadova https://www.amazon.ca/Dating-Vandalized-Katerina-Lyadova-ebo...
vinceguidry 9y ago
I wonder if dating is one of the few arenas of human life in which tools and services to make it easier create invariably bad ethics. When you boil it all down, mating is an adversarial process dressed up as a cooperative one, making deception the order of the day. Tools and services, even with the best of intentions, wind up only serving those deceptive purposes. In my own life, despite being an uber-introverted nerd, I've gravitated towards just the normal way of finding people I'm interested in in person and just asking them out. The advantage of this is feedback is much easier to intuit when the person you're asking out is right there in front of you. I don't really see the point anymore in spending large amounts of time and effort to optimize a algorithmic online search pattern when daily life in a city gives one all the bandwidth one could ever need to find someone.
walrus01 9y ago
If you really want to see something weird (from an American perspective) take a look at "matrimonial" websites such as shaadi.com , and Indian dating apps. The selection criteria for ethnic groups and religions! In the North American melting pot it's crude and racist to put blunt preferences in a dating ad, in India (and Pakistan, and Bangaldesh) apparently it's the norm.
- jasode 9y ago
  >In the North American melting pot it's crude and racist to put blunt preferences in a dating ad, Is that really true? I've never heard of the common phrase "swf looking for swm"[1] -- being called out in mainstream circles as racist. Unlike employment or assigning bus seats in Alabama, the domain of romance was given the latitude for racial preferences without being demonized as "racism". [1] https://www.google.com/search?q="swf+looking+for+swm" https://www.google.com/search?q="swf+looking+for+swm"
  - walrus01 9y ago
    in south asia it's much more specific, because there is the unspoken requirement that whoever they match with has to be of suitable ethnic group, religion, caste, etc to be acceptable to the parents. also language, because between the three largest south asian countries there's something like 25 languages spoken...
- throw0984320 9y ago
  I don't see what's wrong in being upfront about what you want and facilitating that. It keeps the process simple and works as a pretty good initial filter. While you're talking about the melting pot in the western world, it just so happens that eventually most whites end up with just whites, and blacks just blacks. Most beautiful women end up with rich men, and religious people end up with religious people. Long term "melting pot" relationships aren't as common as you think. If sexual selection eventually filters all but those common traits, why not be blunt about them? E.g., while the Indian dating sites you talk about bluntly list salary, western sites use complicated proxies (like interests == international tourism, or your profile photo with a tesla you own). That dating has to be complicated and subtle and what you need has to only be "hinted" isn't any better than being blunt about what you're looking for, and being blunt about what value you think you'll provide to the other. At the least, you'll have saved time and heartbreaks.
2474 9y ago
Hold on... So there are companies out there that you can pay to do your flirting for you? I don't know what this says about us as people, but damn... that's so sad.
lolc 9y ago
This is how it will end: https://www.oglaf.com/performance-anxiety/ https://www.oglaf.com/performance-anxiety/ Not safe for work obviously. And at least they're honest.
chmaynard 9y ago
This just confirms my strong distrust of online messaging with a stranger. Life is short. If you can't agree to meet me for coffee and conversation in a neutral location, I'm not interested.
twothamendment 9y ago
Back in the chat room days, I jumped into one that I knew was frequented by a male coworker. I'm male, but picked a female name and started to chat with him. Since we were local he suggested meeting up. That would have been a bit awkward, so I gave him the address to my friend's all girls apartment and the name of her roommate. She ended up marrying the stranger who showed up unannounced at her door.
- Karrot_Kream 9y ago
  Now that's a hell of a story! We're you invited to the wedding?
  - twothamendment 9y ago
    Yes, and they made me stand up when they told the story.
misterbowfinger 9y ago
Oh my lord, these comments are really surfacing the number of incels and MRA's on hacker news. Wow. When I hear criticisms of the tech community being so bro-y and full of insecure dudes, I tend to rebuff them because I don't personally see it as much. But man, that behavior is coming out in full force on this post.
- forgottenpass 9y ago
  How lackadaisical has stereotyping gotten that that there is any overlap between the sets {incels, MRAs} and {bros}? Aren't they mutually exclusive by definition? Or does "bro" now mean "any men I don't like"?
sorokod 9y ago
If you squint just a bit, these impersonators look a lot like headhunters / recruitment agents.

371 points by imartin2k 9y ago

It is very informative to make a an online dating profile of the opposite gender. I'm a man, but when I made an account on tinder with a female friend's pictures I was blown away by just how radically different the experience was. Almost every person would match with me. Everyone would message me straight away. If I didn't reply most would message again in a few hours. A few would get very angry/upset that I didn't reply. I think Tinder is a real stroke of genius. All users, men and women, get given the same interface and the same choices. But of course things are not really equal. Men shotgun and women pick and choose. Tinder has essentially made Bumble, but they have plausible deniability. No need to enforce any rules about women messaging first when that emerges naturally.

zitterbewegung 9y ago
To be honest I think this is true of dating sites in General.
- cblock811 9y ago
  It sounds accurate for Grindr, Scruff and Hornet in the world of gay 'dating' apps as well.
  - throwaway_234 9y ago
    All dating should be like gay apps/dating... theres always someone wanting to talk to you, trade pics and try to hook up with you. At least if you have a nice body, decent face and are 20 to 40... unfortunately being white might help too. Str8 dating app scams barely exist on gay/bi apps. There's no need for it due to how men are. Horny and looking 24/7.
    - walrus01 9y ago
      traditional fraudsters, however, know no sexual orientation boundaries: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/grindr-fraudster-arrested-in-burnaby-1.4631351 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/grindr-frauds...
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - noobermin 9y ago
      Is this really true? I find in my own experience that men want sex more than women is a stereotype of sorts. That women are more selective than men is a distinct observation but I'm not so sure how true that is either and how much of it is merely due to traditional gender roles.
      - jessriedel 9y ago
        The evidence of a stronger male sex drive is overwhelming. ”The sex drive refers to the strength of sexual motivation. Across many different studies and measures, men have been shown to have more frequent and more intense sexual desires than women, as reflected in spontaneous thoughts about sex, frequency and variety of sexual fantasies, desired frequency of intercourse, desired number of partners, masturbation, liking for various sexual practices, willingness to forego sex, initiating versus refusing sex, making sacrifices for sex, and other measures. No contrary findings (indicating stronger sexual motivation among women) were found. Hence we conclude that the male sex drive is stronger than the female sex drive. The gender difference in sex drive should not be generalized to other constructs such as sexual or orgasmic capacity, enjoyment of sex, or extrinsically motivated sex." http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1207/S15327957PSPR0503_5 http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1207/S15327957PSPR050...
        humanrebar 9y ago
        We need new studies on the subject, but in the context of internet pornography. Given pornography consumption, are there changes in the relative sex drives of men and women?
  - exelius 9y ago
    And I’ve made more friends than dates with Her, so I guess the stereotypes hold true for lesbian apps as well.
    - throwaway_234 9y ago
      Making friends or long term friends with benefits on Grindr or Scruff is a joke. We are all distracted by something new and shinier. So it's a joke for building anymore then a sex buddy relationship where you see each other every month or so for a release. Though that might be different for the really good looking to hot guys.
      - nookoking 9y ago
        It's not.
      - pimeys 9y ago
        Uh. Maybe I'm then the exception that makes the rule... Four years now together and it just gets better every year. I may just have been very lucky.
  - tgb 9y ago
    Can you elaborate? My reading of the top comment is about how tinder has radically different experiences for men as for women. What is the similar dynamic on gay dating apps?
    - ddingus 9y ago
      Seconded. Interesting discussion.
    - throwaway_234 9y ago
      Just read the article and LoL there's zero effort on bi/gay hook up apps... just post the hottest pic of your 20 to 40 (maybe on up to 50)yourself .. face or body pic and boom filter through to find the ones your into. Another interesting thing you can become old news(after months of having the same picture in your town) yet if you travel 10 to 20 miles down the road your new hot news and the instant gratification of lots of prospects continues. Hiring a ghost writer to do the work on a bi/gay hook up is laughable. Though wow str8 app dating has gotten so hard guys are hiring ghost writers and fakes of himself to chat up/seal a date. WOW thats ridiculous lets kill these apps and meet the old fashion way!!!
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
tanbog 9y ago
This paper does some interesting work to try and unpack why that is the case: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1607.01952.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1607.01952.pdf
nikanj 9y ago
Bumble is an interesting platform. The promise is that women have to message first, luring in men who are frustrated with lack of replies, and women who are frustrated with endless spam. From what I’ve heard from my friends, 99% of first messages on Bumble are ”hi” or a single emoji, kicking the ball straight back on the men’s side of the field. I wish dating as a research subject wasn’t so wrapped in weird MRA activism and other politics, there’s a lot of fascinating phenomenoma to be observed.
- temp-dude-87844 9y ago
  Even with the immediate passing of control, the premise still works, because women perform the first pass of filtering, giving them an opportunity to preemptively reject the most undesirable of the pool before they have a chance to reach out. It's also an effective tool to fight the sheer volume of spam. The same kind of invitation plays out in real life with eye contact and body language.
  - jessriedel 9y ago
    Tinder and Bumble (and Coffee Meets Bagel, the League, etc.) have each party approve the other. The only major thing that distinguishes Bumble from Tinder is the female-message first policy, which is often side-stepped as described above.
    - philwelch 9y ago
      Saying "hi" is still a stronger signal than swiping right.
      - Kalium 9y ago
        I can see why you would think that. Based on my experiences actually using both Tinder and Bumble, it's possible that your experiences might differ significantly from mine.
    - purerandomness 9y ago
aphextron 9y ago
I worked for $large_dating_site for a number of years. The real genius of Tinder was giving women the power. We came to the same realization as well: that no matter how bad you make the user experience for men, they will use the app endlessly if real women are there. Online dating business models are exclusively based around enticing men with sex, and giving women the power to choose precisely who they want.
- hsljekskfh 9y ago
  it sounds like you drank a lot of coffee and ate a lot of bagels at your last job?
- baron816 9y ago
  What I’ve long wondered is how women react in the real world now that they have all the power on dating apps. Why would they try to find a date in any other way? There were a few articles that came out a few years ago arguing that, no, dating apps were terrible for women because it makes men even more noncommittal with such easy access to dates. My hypothesis was that the women they interviewed for those pieces were all going after the same small group of elite men. Thus, ~3% of the whole male population is sleeping around with ~20% of the female population. Makes me wonder if polygamy is the natural course of things.
  - chillacy 9y ago
    That's historically the case: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/sep/24/women-men-dna-human-gene-pool https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/sep/24/women-men-dn... The other implication of polygamy is that a lot of men simply didn't have a chance to pass on their genes at all.
    - paulddraper 9y ago
      Related to this, as a bit of cause and a bit of effect, is that std deviation intelligence/posperity/success is significantly wider for males. Mentally ill people and geniuses are overwhelmingly male.
Throwaway198724 9y ago
When I was using dating sites, I did the same on OkCupid, and signed up a fake account with the photos of a woman that was slightly above average in appearance. I was curious to see how many messages I would receive, but more importantly, the type and quality of those messages. I thought that would give me a better idea of how to write my own messages (e.g. if 90% of messages were asking the same question, I didn't want to also be asking that same boring question). The first day I was surprised at the amount of messages I received. I think it was at least 10 in a few hours. However, it quickly faded, and after a few days, I was lucky to receive one message a day. That gave me a little confidence, knowing after the first day, the average woman was not receiving hundreds of daily messages. Similar to what you said, a few people would get angry if I didn't reply. A third of the messages hinted at sex, thinking they were being clever with winky emojis. In the end, on my real profile, I think I was decent with messaging. I sent out 200 messages on OkCupid (I focused on roughly the top 10% of profiles over a large radius), and had over 50% of those turn into conversations. My first messages were always similar. I would write one or two sentences that joked about something in their profile and asked a simple question. The idea was it needed to show I read their profile, it needed to make an attempt at being funny, and most importantly, it needed to be easy to reply to within a few seconds. When you write long messages with complicated questions, people don't want to invest the time in a reply, so they'll respond "tomorrow", which never happens. The other thing I did was almost always message women that were online at that moment, and I tried to turn the messages into a real-time conversation with instant replies. As a simple example, let's say a woman's profile said she liked the Fast & Furious movies. I would write a first message saying, "If you had to choose between me and Vin Diesel, who would you rather date?". There's a high chance she would respond saying the obvious, "Vin Diesel :P", and then I would reply, "Would it change your mind if I said I had 100% more hair than Vin Diesel, and I go for ice cream on first dates?". These type of messages are very easy to reply to, innocent, and people can be creative and fun with their responses. In that example, I'm even hinting at a date, and it doesn't seem pushy. In this case I would then keep writing playful messages and then ask her to meet up for the ice cream like I originally suggested.
- EGreg 9y ago
  You guys are good. But I have a suggestion. Have your friend reach out first and say he knows someone she will really click with. If she doesn’t go for it, THEN you reach out. Dating as it stands is only a recent phenomenon. It is far better when three people with different preferences keep the others in mind when out dating. Far better to do introductions than always be out for yourself.
swyx 9y ago
threads like these make me despair about ever dating ever again. as a society we should be concerned about what tinder and bumble are doing to us, but -no one- has the power to stop it because it appeals to such base instincts.
- icebraining 9y ago
  What are they doing to us?
  - dvtrn 9y ago
    https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/01/the-many-problems-with-online-datings-radical-efficiency/266796/ https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/01/the-many-p... ...is a source I often point to when I'm personally lamenting how weirdly...impersonal dating seems to have become.
- welly 9y ago
  I met my girlfriend on Bumble. We have a great relationship, now almost a year in. Bumble, Tinder etc. are only tools, it's how we use them and plenty of us are quite capable of using them in a "moral" and savoury way. So it's "doing" nothing to many of us.
  - swyx 9y ago
    in the same way that soda and junk food is readily available and is causing an obesity crisis. if "plenty of you" are quite capable of eating well despite that, it still is a problem. Have empathy for problems that you don't personally have.
- mrguyorama 9y ago
  As a single guy who has little interaction with women, it terrifies me. It's pretty much the only way I'll ever meet someone, but it doesn't fucking work for me.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 9y ago
alexashka 9y ago
Real stroke of genius would be making prostitution legal, and family a big deal. It'd solve men's natural urges, and women's constant insecurity that they're going to be abandoned, once they get wrinkles. It'd remove so much undisclosed resentment and tension within families and society. It'd free up people involved in billions upon billions of dollars worth of industry, to do something useful, instead of preying on people's monkey-brain urges and insecurities. I'm a dreamer, maaan.
- tomcooks 9y ago
  You mean something like southern Europe 40 years ago. Wasn't that ideal, for what concerned family and societal tensions.
  - ulkram 9y ago
    could you clarify your point. I'm interested, but this is all I could find: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_Europe
    - tomcooks 9y ago
      While prostitution was seldom legal in the catholic belt (unlike in countries north of the Austrian border), brothels played an important role in male culture as much as family. Men would usually lose their virginity with professionals, often as part of the "man-making" ritual happening during conscription (e.g. money received from the Army as a refund for the expenses to reach the conscription offices to get the first medical evaluation, often in the regional capital far away from home, would be spent on booze, cigarettes and hookers). For what concerns Italy, maybe Tinto Brass' "Paprika" and other of his movies are a good NSFW primer on this specific subject.
- toomanybeersies 9y ago
  Prostitution is legal in New Zealand and we have exactly the same problems with dating culture that people have been commenting about here.
mirimir 9y ago
I'm reminded of RFJason's Craigslist experiment. He posted responses and images. Much hilarity ensued. Until he was sued by a guy in Illinois, and lost ~$75K.
Double_a_92 9y ago
> Men shotgun and women pick and choose. The problem is that that is a vicious cycle. The more men shotgun the more women have to be picky. So nobody answers and man have to write to even more women... Usually this get's "fixed" by limiting the amount of messages men can send. But that doesn't really work. There should be a system that "punishes" women for being picky and men for being desperate. Maybe publicly show the ratio of received/sent messages, or so?
- heartbreak 9y ago
  > There should be a system that "punishes" women for being picky I don’t want to misinterpret you, so is this what you meant to write?
  - Double_a_92 9y ago
    Yes, but that's why punish is in " ". There's an obvious imbalance in pickyness between the genders. So counter-weight that somehow. It should encourage being picky for men, and discourage it for women.
    - eigenstuff 9y ago
      As a woman, what if I know what I want, it's hard to find in my area, and I have to dig through a lot of noise to find it? Should I then just right swipe on a bunch of dudes I'm not interested in, leading them on and wasting everybody's time, just so I can keep using the app? This is absurd.
      - Double_a_92 9y ago
        Yeah you're right... We can't really make people not picky. So we have to limit something for men, because it's easier to become picky. What if you could sort people by the ratio of messages to answers? E.g. as a man you would show up more easily in results if you don't shotgun. And as a woman you will stay more hidden if your postbox is already overflowing. However I strongly assume that most women on those site just are picky. Looking for something they can't find in real life... So the system is just broken anyway, at least for "normal" men.
amelius 9y ago
> when I made an account on tinder with a female friend's pictures I was blown away by just how radically different the experience was You should try dressing up as a woman and walking down a random street. I bet it's a totally different experience as well.
sli 9y ago
> It is very informative to make a an online dating profile of the opposite gender. I'm a man, but when I made an account on tinder with a female friend's pictures I was blown away by just how radically different the experience was. It sounds like I'm joking, but if you're a moderately attractive male in a smaller city, a Grindr account will give you a very similar experience. Within an hour I had quite a surprising number of, let's say, risque images sent to me. Nowhere near the same number of weird or inappropriate messages, though. Some of them were pretty blunt, but nothing I didn't mostly expect, and nothing like the awful things I sometimes see being said to women on the internet.
freeflight 9y ago
> It is very informative to make a an online dating profile of the opposite gender. Don't even need a whole profile, as a teen in the 90's I'd regularly mess around with different names on an online chat system, didn't even have user profiles back then. Just the name alone would make a major difference how interactions with people went. Barely anybody was interested in talking to "RandomMaleName", but once you logged in as "Tina21" everybody would be all over you and if you played it right, they'd tell you all kinds of personal details about themselves, while I only revealed made up information about a fake persona. Juvenile me would get an extra kick out of hosing all those guys asking Tina21 for sexting/phone number for phone sex, I'd start sexting with them and after a certain point just write them really weird, off turning stuff, usually ending the whole interaction by notifying them that they tried to jerk off to a 15-year-old dude. To this day I'm not sure if that was a good thing to do or a bad thing? I guess, at least I taught a couple of people a valuable lesson about the Internet and anonymity.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

flamtap 9y ago

Sexism aside, the morality of this service is interesting. What if this service was involved in a match, and some time later the couple married?

DoctorOetker 9y ago
simply keep up the appearance that everything was "sincere" from the get go?
- ggm 9y ago
  Ah yes, because relationships founded on white lies are the best ones.
  - DoctorOetker 9y ago
    oh I see! you are right, I thought we were only talking about extramarital marriages...

partycoder 9y ago

This should be considered fraud.

saryant 9y ago
.
- partycoder 9y ago
  Except that some dating apps have micropayments in them. e.g: they sell you the ability to bump you in search results. Keeping you engaged with fake activity to increase the chances of becoming a paying user seems very questionable.

throwaway_234 9y ago

I guess unless your good looking to hot as a guy Tinder is crickets as girls filter you out. I'm bi so i use all apps .. i sure as hell wish Tinder was like Grindr and Scruff are for me. Open either app and have tons of messages .. pick and choose who you want to chat with and boom you have a collection of potential guys to meet up with for fun when the mood hits you. I guess that's what its like for average to good looking to hot women ... have a collection of guys to pick, choose and chat. Guess it's the Same for good looking to hot str8 guys. Not surprised about paid dating apps and their fake news scams. Match.com suddenly sends you a ton of winks and messages just as your subscription is about to expire yet there all fake or paid impersonators. Not sure how that is legal?

noobermin 9y ago
Even if it is legal is definitely not moral.
- throwaway_234 9y ago
  Well it's the Internet where half to more of what we read and experience is made up crap to make someone else and their buddies rich.
kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
> Guess it's the Same for good looking to hot str8 guys. Unless you don't meet the minimum height requirement. That's more important than looks.
- legionof7 9y ago
  I honestly feel that IRL, height is less important than a lot of people think. I'm a 5'5 man.
  - chrischen 9y ago
    It is ultimately superficial once someone knows more about you, but that doesn't stop people from setting it as their pre-filter before they see what they truly want. You ask people to improve the carriage, they'll tell you to make a faster horse. If you ask a woman what they want, they'll tell you tall dark and handsome.

sp527 9y ago

The most important takeaway from this article is that knowing how to flirt IRL is a bigger competitive advantage than ever.

neves 9y ago

If I create a dating app I'd use the VC money to contract some sex professionals to create a great atmosphere.

noobermin 9y ago

The resemblance to the career of the lead character from Her is undeniable.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y ago

> As we grow accustomed to foisting more and more complicated emotional tasks onto digital butlers, we lose our ability to tolerate inelegance or find value in social failure. Moments of awkwardness and heartbreak are an inevitable part of the dating experience, and they are essential in our evolution into mature adults. That is a very recent, Western view of finding a partner. For much of history, and even now in large parts of the world, a person's family had/has the job of finding a suitable match often with the aid of "professional" matchmakers. I wonder what percentage of people who grew up in this current Western model of individuals dating and finding partners would trade it for the other model if they could?

noobermin 9y ago
This is not like courtship or arranged marriages. In what you call "much of history" it was done openly and it was clear that you were arranging a marriage for you son or daughter or what have you. This is more covert and deceitful.
magduf 9y ago
The main problem with the non-Western version (epitomized probably by how it's done in India) is that it enforces a very high degree of social conformity: everyone must have the same relationship model, and the same life goals (monogamous marriage, children, etc.), with very little room for variation. It's impossible I think to say either one is "better", unless you can specify what exactly your goal as a society is. If your goal is a very stable society with everyone following the traditional monogamous marriage + kids path, and minimizing divorce, it seems that the Indian way probably produces better results. If you desire more freedom as an individual, it doesn't.

andrewfromx 9y ago

it's like that scene from the movie Hurt Locker https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1OOI6m4b7c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1OOI6m4b7c where he's trying to decide which cereal from so many choices. Old fashion family arranged marriages make so much sense to me now. JUST PICK SOMEONE!

6cd6beb 9y ago

I figured something like this would exist, but I don't think it's very useful. I've walked the dark path of trying to implement "pickup artist" material(can't imagine that'll be received well), and I can say that: A) an objective approach works (if you're humble and willing to recognize/adjust for failure) B) there's a torrent of snake oil out there C) you learn a lot when you try this stuff. A lot. A lot of that material is laughably bad, but the general formula of "know your value, be confident and unapologetic about what you want, be ready to accept 'no' quickly and gracefully" is the buried gold. Maybe it's just me but grinding through failure after failure after failure taught me those things. You can't buy them, and if you don't have them, it shows in your behavior. You can't have someone Cyrano de Bergerac your way into a date by behaving that way, because in the end the girl shows up and meets you. Furthermore, the proposition that this is a service for people who don't have time to send messages in these apps doesn't hold water. Not having the time to respond promptly is an asset. Bailing on some conversations is an asset. You're a busy man with a lot going on, not a desperate man glued to every prospect. That's my two cents.

hsljekskfh 9y ago
lot going on here, i’ll stay positive... i have heard pua stuff can be good but is mixed in with lots of bad. i think the issue is that there’s no alternative really, or i can’t think of one at least. TBH there’s probably a market for “nice guys who want a gf” but i can already see dozens of problems with that branding.
hackits 9y ago
Here is my two cents. A) Is superior in every way. Now let me fill in the gaps a little bit and maybe some-one else will find this information useful. First step is to look yourself in the mirror and ask yourself `do` you find yourself physically attractive? Do you have good posture, Do you have a low 10%-16% body fat percentage? Are you dressed to impress or just dress just it over with? If you answered no, then 10000% work on those aspects of yourself first before wasting time with dating apps and also meeting people in person. For the remainder or if you're curious keep reading. You're going to have to come to the realization there are going to be certain percentage of women out there who want to have sex with you. You're going to appeal to a group of women, Hispanic, Greek, Asian, Caucasian, Indian and age groups. How are you going to find this out? You're going to put yourself out there and be judged by women. It sux's, you're going to get some women who're going to receptive to you and there are some women who literally will run away from your approach to them. Though that is going to be the only way you're going to find out what type of Women are attracted to your personality and your appearance. Finally, forget dating app's. Unless you're the top 5% tall guy with a six pack and a fantastic smile you're wasting your time and money. Time that is better spent approaching women and learning.

mathgenius 9y ago

I can see the evolution of this: ripe for machine learning disruption. Then in a few years all we have are AI bots chatting each other up, and then informing us who we are to mate.

Casseres 9y ago
You might like the TV series Black Mirror. Especially Season 4 Episode 4.
- sanderjd 9y ago
  One of my favorite episodes of the whole run, actually.
alex7o 9y ago
What they are doing doesn't even require ai, you can just look for the keywords and output the given phrases. But yes generally Ai can probably get you better results than humans can, it can probably give us some insights about dating.

minikomi 9y ago

This is a major part of the Japanese "dating app" experience - they're known as "Sakura"; same as the offline version of people who are paid to, for example, play pachinko and win or stand in line excitedly to buy something. Most Japanese dating apps also don't have a free mode, and require you to use coins or some such token to message or even view profiles. They use Sakura to run down your coins, and then message you saying they want to meet up -- "Message me back! Let's make plans!". Rinse and repeat.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

wpietri 9y ago

I don't even get this. If you don't have time to date, how would you have time for a relationship?

laurieg 9y ago
"I don't have time to do x" is almost always code for "I have other things that I want to do more than x" So it sounds like these people would make time to go on dates, or have a romantic partner, but they find online dating tedious so they pay to have someone do it for them.
- wpietri 9y ago
  I definitely agree the surface excuse is a lie. But in this case, I think it's insane. It reduces to, "I don't want to spend getting to know a person I might spend the rest of my life with, so I'm going to jump right to paying somebody to lie to them." It's contradictory, at least for a real relationship. I think what it really means is, "I want a woman in the same way I want a new car: as enjoyable, status-enhancing property. But they insist on talking. So fuck that."
  - JoshCole 9y ago
    It's not a lie. You're just distorting the idiom.
JoshCole 9y ago
I think your confusion comes because online dating isn't dating. A date takes potentially a couple of hours at max. Online dating refers to the process of searching for someone to date via the internet. A date can take an hour or two. Looking for a date online can take hundreds of hours without any results save for a few catfish scams.
- wpietri 9y ago
  I think you've confused "going on date" with "dating". The process called "dating" has always included the initial part of sorting through possible prospects to go on a date with. Online dating is more efficient than what went before. The process has also included getting-to-know-you conversation and trust-building, neither of which this impersonation accomplishes. A date does take a couple of hours max. But if it works, it blossoms into a relationship, which takes significant time. And that same sort of significant time can be applied to dating.

bandito11 9y ago

Am I supposed to be utterly shocked this happens?

siliconc0w 9y ago

Standard 'its a three legged stool' spiel. Photos, profile, and messaging. Really messaging is the easiest part. Here is a high-conversion-rate formula: 0) playful message about profile/photo 1) flirt for one or two exchanges 2) pivot to drinks. I like the highly elaborate, "Sounds like something we could take about over drinks, are you free this week?" Photos are probably the easiest way to stand out. Most guys seem to just do the 'house selfie in a t-shirt' thing. If you try a bit harder and maybe hire a friend for a sunny afternoon with a few changes of clothes to take some creative pictures you can generally do better than 99% percent of guys in your 'range'. This is to say if you're a 7, you gotta date <=7s. This, like the speed of light, seems to be a hard constant of the universe.

icebraining 9y ago
If you're a 7 dating a 5, didn't the 5 break the constant? Reminds me of this story: One day in September, in a conference room populated with about 25 members of the Mac team, Steve [Jobs] was lecturing on how to hire. "A players hire A players," he said. "B players hire C players. Do you get it?" Apparently not. Somebody in the back of the room raised his hand and asked, "so how do you hire more B players?" https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=How_to_Hire_Insanely_Great_Employees.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...
- siliconc0w 9y ago
  Like the speed of light, reference frames matter. The 5 convinced you they were a >=7.

Liron 9y ago

Founder of Relationship Hero (YC S17) here. We also help with online-dating messages, but we'll help you to improve your own communication skills. Text flirting seems like such a trivial thing, but getting better at it can be life-changing, because it ultimately leads to better relationships.

topranks 9y ago

New Turing test-like challenge... Build an AI to automate this process using the same guidelines.

chrischen 9y ago

Honestly if you're lazy enough to rely on the superficialness of online dating apps like Tinder, you're already in a gray area. If you're judging people purely by looks (which would be an inefficiency since in real life in person looks aren't as important), then someone else is justified in re-balancing that inefficiency by doing something like hiring a text writer.

kowdermeister 9y ago
> looks aren't as important That's not true for the majority. Looks are the first signal you notice of the other person. Unless you are after poets, artists or other people whose work reach other people without "the looks" then I don't see how - even subconsciously - it's not important. Pics are furthermore do indicate personality. I agree that Tinder is an industrial scale meat grinder, but the advantage is that wide exposure is better for your chances. It's like saying HI to a tons of people on the street you otherwise wouldn't meet.
- magduf 9y ago
  The thing about Tinder that sucks is that you don't get a very good idea about a person from it, because all you get is a few pictures and if you're lucky, a very short free-form text session where hopefully they wrote something substantive about themselves. However, the thing that makes Tinder great (and also Bumble, though I haven't tried that one yet) is that both parties must "like" each other for any messaging to occur. This still isn't the norm on "traditional" dating sites, for some reason. The traditional sites are bad for men, because they're encouraged to put forth a lot of effort to write meaningful messages to women, but almost all the effort is simply wasted because most of them go to women that have no interest in those men, and the man has no way of knowing this. Tinder/Bumble fix this by forcing the woman to "like" a man's profile first, before he wastes any time and effort writing her a message. It also helps women by massively reducing the amount of unwanted messages they receive from men: if they get unwanted messages, it's partly their fault (and entirely under their control) for "liking" those men, and encourages them to be more selective with their right-swipes (so maybe they'll come up with some strategies for avoiding creeps, such as only right-swiping people with something meaningful written in their profile, and not just guys with gym selfies and backwards ball caps).

golergka 9y ago

> This messaging “blast” technique may appear lucrative compared to the average neighborhood yenta, but it has occurred to me that good matchmaking may not be in the company’s financial interest. When a client pairs up, they leave the service. This is only true if client is looking for a long-term monogamous relationship.

fimdomeio 9y ago

I'm pretty sure we're very close to getting a I'll Have Sex For You As A Service. I love how the article tries to show the moral dilemas but I see none... you're getting paid to impersonate someone else in a kind of interpersonal relationship. That is just plain awful, I don't see how a dilemma can exist there.

factsaresacred 9y ago

His blog may not be to everyone's taste, but the writer 'Delicious Tacos' pioneered this with OK Cupid years ago. On his blog he shares his online dating exploits along with some nice openers ("You are attractive, and I want to go out with you. Basically" being one that I stole and overused). Anyway, all that online dating made him horribly cynical. But damn if it doesn't make for good writing: > If she doesn’t give the number, if she ignores your request and tries to continue the conversation– it’s dead. Maybe means no. Hesitation means no. I’ve had a few exceptions. But frankly, if a woman wants to make you work for it, it’s an insult. And all online conversation is just a chance to f%ck up. The point of OKCupid is that we are dehumanized slabs of f%ckmeat and there are a million of us. No individual matters. Move on. For more: https://delicioustacos.com/2014/08/04/okcupid-starter-kit-copy-this-and-tell-me-what-happens/ https://delicioustacos.com/2014/08/04/okcupid-starter-kit-co...

noir_lord 9y ago
I heard the horror stories about online dating however my experience as a man was nothing but positive. I got responses maybe half the time and a date (coffee, nothing involving alcohol) maybe a third - I probably messaged 15 women over a year. Two proper relationships and one that is two years old in July and I plan to spend the rest of my life in. I did not use the shotgun approach, I excluded any woman who didn't fill her profile in with information (if they don't tell you about themselves how the hell do you know if you have anything potentially in common), excluded ones with terrible spelling and grammar (I'm not Chaucer but again it shows effort) and then only replied to ones where we had at least some interests in common (the two relationships where cycling and heavy metal respectively). I wasn't looking for one night stands, didn't push for dates, asked questions relevant to their interests and discussed mine. And it was all fine. My current partner showed me her messages after we'd been dating for a while and it was just a sea of "hey Babi, want sum fuck?", I mean she speaks three languages and has a degree in finance that approach was never going to open a conversation. My bar was "if I didn't find this person attractive would I want to be friends with them?" If the answer wasn't yes then it was a pass. I wasn't on there just for sex, if that was the goal I can just go out on the piss on a Saturday night. I also avoided tinder like the plague, it's just too shallow (for me), I did like OKC though (where I met my current partner).

chatmasta 9y ago

About eight years ago I knew a teenager making over $100k a month sending dating site affiliate offers through Chatroulette. He had a bot that setup a fake stream and then pushed the affiliate links in the chat. This is not new. Back then it was affectionately called “e-whoring.”

walrus01 9y ago
The new thing with this is hiring offshored clickfarm workers (basically the same recruit pool of people who would be farming gold in WoW for $1.25/hour in a developing nation, or working in an IRS-scam call center), who multitask and use a set of pre-prepared scripts and their own customizations to have a few lines of back and forth chat with the (mostly male) rubes, then send them an affiliate link to get them to click on. This has the advantage of putting a human in the loop to solve captchas, and enough randomness from the human's behavior that the bot-like behavior is not immediately apparent.

spodek 9y ago

HN being mostly male and as a guy, I've seen this discussion on the frustrations of online dating and how the system evolves many times. Are there similar threads in mostly female communities to see their perspective?

pc86 9y ago
Any mostly female community on the internet inevitably gets overrun with men trying to provide their perspective. /r/twoxchromosomes on Reddit is now 75-80% male in the comments, or more.
- spodek 9y ago
  Sounds like the boy scouts in real life. It seems to happen in both directions.

mynegation 9y ago

Shameless plug for a friend who described the experience of having virtual dating assistants in a book: "Dating Vandalized". https://www.amazon.ca/Dating-Vandalized-Katerina-Lyadova-ebook/dp/B071YKY2PV/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1524832672&sr=8-3&keywords=lyadova https://www.amazon.ca/Dating-Vandalized-Katerina-Lyadova-ebo...

vinceguidry 9y ago

I wonder if dating is one of the few arenas of human life in which tools and services to make it easier create invariably bad ethics. When you boil it all down, mating is an adversarial process dressed up as a cooperative one, making deception the order of the day. Tools and services, even with the best of intentions, wind up only serving those deceptive purposes. In my own life, despite being an uber-introverted nerd, I've gravitated towards just the normal way of finding people I'm interested in in person and just asking them out. The advantage of this is feedback is much easier to intuit when the person you're asking out is right there in front of you. I don't really see the point anymore in spending large amounts of time and effort to optimize a algorithmic online search pattern when daily life in a city gives one all the bandwidth one could ever need to find someone.

walrus01 9y ago

If you really want to see something weird (from an American perspective) take a look at "matrimonial" websites such as shaadi.com , and Indian dating apps. The selection criteria for ethnic groups and religions! In the North American melting pot it's crude and racist to put blunt preferences in a dating ad, in India (and Pakistan, and Bangaldesh) apparently it's the norm.

jasode 9y ago
>In the North American melting pot it's crude and racist to put blunt preferences in a dating ad, Is that really true? I've never heard of the common phrase "swf looking for swm"[1] -- being called out in mainstream circles as racist. Unlike employment or assigning bus seats in Alabama, the domain of romance was given the latitude for racial preferences without being demonized as "racism". [1] https://www.google.com/search?q="swf+looking+for+swm" https://www.google.com/search?q="swf+looking+for+swm"
- walrus01 9y ago
  in south asia it's much more specific, because there is the unspoken requirement that whoever they match with has to be of suitable ethnic group, religion, caste, etc to be acceptable to the parents. also language, because between the three largest south asian countries there's something like 25 languages spoken...
throw0984320 9y ago
I don't see what's wrong in being upfront about what you want and facilitating that. It keeps the process simple and works as a pretty good initial filter. While you're talking about the melting pot in the western world, it just so happens that eventually most whites end up with just whites, and blacks just blacks. Most beautiful women end up with rich men, and religious people end up with religious people. Long term "melting pot" relationships aren't as common as you think. If sexual selection eventually filters all but those common traits, why not be blunt about them? E.g., while the Indian dating sites you talk about bluntly list salary, western sites use complicated proxies (like interests == international tourism, or your profile photo with a tesla you own). That dating has to be complicated and subtle and what you need has to only be "hinted" isn't any better than being blunt about what you're looking for, and being blunt about what value you think you'll provide to the other. At the least, you'll have saved time and heartbreaks.

2474 9y ago

Hold on... So there are companies out there that you can pay to do your flirting for you? I don't know what this says about us as people, but damn... that's so sad.

lolc 9y ago

This is how it will end: https://www.oglaf.com/performance-anxiety/ https://www.oglaf.com/performance-anxiety/ Not safe for work obviously. And at least they're honest.

chmaynard 9y ago

This just confirms my strong distrust of online messaging with a stranger. Life is short. If you can't agree to meet me for coffee and conversation in a neutral location, I'm not interested.

twothamendment 9y ago

Back in the chat room days, I jumped into one that I knew was frequented by a male coworker. I'm male, but picked a female name and started to chat with him. Since we were local he suggested meeting up. That would have been a bit awkward, so I gave him the address to my friend's all girls apartment and the name of her roommate. She ended up marrying the stranger who showed up unannounced at her door.

Karrot_Kream 9y ago
Now that's a hell of a story! We're you invited to the wedding?
- twothamendment 9y ago
  Yes, and they made me stand up when they told the story.

misterbowfinger 9y ago

Oh my lord, these comments are really surfacing the number of incels and MRA's on hacker news. Wow. When I hear criticisms of the tech community being so bro-y and full of insecure dudes, I tend to rebuff them because I don't personally see it as much. But man, that behavior is coming out in full force on this post.

forgottenpass 9y ago
How lackadaisical has stereotyping gotten that that there is any overlap between the sets {incels, MRAs} and {bros}? Aren't they mutually exclusive by definition? Or does "bro" now mean "any men I don't like"?

sorokod 9y ago

If you squint just a bit, these impersonators look a lot like headhunters / recruitment agents.