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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 pictur

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 8y ago
To be honest I think this is true of dating sites in General.
- cblock811 8y ago
  It sounds accurate for Grindr, Scruff and Hornet in the world of gay 'dating' apps as well.
  - throwaway_234 8y 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 8y 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 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - noobermin 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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?
        throw2016 8y ago
        This kind of research depends on some degree of frankness that may not always be available due to social stereotypes, religious stereotypes and other traditional 'purity' and shaming constraints operating on women. It would be healthier to assume both sexes have fully functioning sex drives, perhaps stronger in some individuals and discard the outdated notion that women are not as 'interested' in sex or need to be 'persuaded'. These outdated notions introduce some problematic concepts, reinforce traditional gender roles and taint a mutually beneficial activity into an unhealthy construct of 'giving' and 'taking'. There are differences. Testosterone makes makes men more aggressive and this may well show in all range of behaviors including sexual but must be tempered with the fact that human beings do have control. Men are also unlikely to be turned on by social status but many women respond to both physicality and things like status which complicates attractiveness and drive.
    - matte_black 8y ago
      What I don’t understand is why so many people (at least women anyway) come to dating apps and declare they are just “looking for friends”. Is this really a thing or is it code for something else? Who is really so oblivious to think that looking for friends of the opposite sex on a dating app where people are there for more than just friendship is a good idea? I would never go on a dating app to find platonic friends. That is exactly the last place I would go.
      - laurieg 8y ago
        Some people are using "just looking for friends" as a filter. They want the person who talks to them to be ok with being friends first before they switch to being romantic. There is often an element of self-deception too. "I'm not the sort of person who would use a dating app, I don't need it" You see a lot of "I'm just trying out this app to kill time" people too. Other people use it as a built-in refusal. They can say "Sorry, I'm just looking for friends" when they are asked on a date by someone they aren't interested in. When someone more appealing asks them out no one will complain that they aren't following their "just friends" rule. Dating is full of interesting meta-behaviour like this.
        nojvek 8y ago
        Just friends == polite way of ‘not interested’
      - alexashka 8y ago
        They're looking for attention, while protecting their ego in case anyone asks why they were on there - 'oh I was just bored, haha'.
        cgag 8y ago
        I think purity is more fitting than ego.
      - 55555 8y ago
        "Just looking for friends" is BS 100% of the time and "No one night stands" is BS 90% of the time. This comes from my personal experience. It's plausible deniability for the girl so if her friends see her on Tinder she doesn't get slut-shamed (Tinder has a bad rep).
  - exelius 8y 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 8y 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 8y ago
        It's not.
      - pimeys 8y 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 8y 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 8y ago
      Seconded. Interesting discussion.
    - throwaway_234 8y 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 8y ago
[deleted]
tanbog 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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 8y ago
      Saying "hi" is still a stronger signal than swiping right.
      - Kalium 8y 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 8y ago
aphextron 8y 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 8y ago
  it sounds like you drank a lot of coffee and ate a lot of bagels at your last job?
- baron816 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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 8y ago
  What are they doing to us?
  - dvtrn 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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 8y ago
alexashka 8y 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 8y ago
  You mean something like southern Europe 40 years ago. Wasn't that ideal, for what concerned family and societal tensions.
  - ulkram 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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.

zitterbewegung 8y ago

To be honest I think this is true of dating sites in General.

cblock811 8y ago
It sounds accurate for Grindr, Scruff and Hornet in the world of gay 'dating' apps as well.
- throwaway_234 8y 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 8y 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 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - noobermin 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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?
      - throw2016 8y ago
        This kind of research depends on some degree of frankness that may not always be available due to social stereotypes, religious stereotypes and other traditional 'purity' and shaming constraints operating on women. It would be healthier to assume both sexes have fully functioning sex drives, perhaps stronger in some individuals and discard the outdated notion that women are not as 'interested' in sex or need to be 'persuaded'. These outdated notions introduce some problematic concepts, reinforce traditional gender roles and taint a mutually beneficial activity into an unhealthy construct of 'giving' and 'taking'. There are differences. Testosterone makes makes men more aggressive and this may well show in all range of behaviors including sexual but must be tempered with the fact that human beings do have control. Men are also unlikely to be turned on by social status but many women respond to both physicality and things like status which complicates attractiveness and drive.
  - matte_black 8y ago
    What I don’t understand is why so many people (at least women anyway) come to dating apps and declare they are just “looking for friends”. Is this really a thing or is it code for something else? Who is really so oblivious to think that looking for friends of the opposite sex on a dating app where people are there for more than just friendship is a good idea? I would never go on a dating app to find platonic friends. That is exactly the last place I would go.
    - laurieg 8y ago
      Some people are using "just looking for friends" as a filter. They want the person who talks to them to be ok with being friends first before they switch to being romantic. There is often an element of self-deception too. "I'm not the sort of person who would use a dating app, I don't need it" You see a lot of "I'm just trying out this app to kill time" people too. Other people use it as a built-in refusal. They can say "Sorry, I'm just looking for friends" when they are asked on a date by someone they aren't interested in. When someone more appealing asks them out no one will complain that they aren't following their "just friends" rule. Dating is full of interesting meta-behaviour like this.
      - nojvek 8y ago
        Just friends == polite way of ‘not interested’
    - alexashka 8y ago
      They're looking for attention, while protecting their ego in case anyone asks why they were on there - 'oh I was just bored, haha'.
      - cgag 8y ago
        I think purity is more fitting than ego.
    - 55555 8y ago
      "Just looking for friends" is BS 100% of the time and "No one night stands" is BS 90% of the time. This comes from my personal experience. It's plausible deniability for the girl so if her friends see her on Tinder she doesn't get slut-shamed (Tinder has a bad rep).
- exelius 8y 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 8y 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 8y ago
      It's not.
    - pimeys 8y 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 8y 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 8y ago
    Seconded. Interesting discussion.
  - throwaway_234 8y 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 8y ago

[deleted]

tanbog 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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 8y ago
    Saying "hi" is still a stronger signal than swiping right.
    - Kalium 8y 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 8y ago

aphextron 8y 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 8y ago
it sounds like you drank a lot of coffee and ate a lot of bagels at your last job?
baron816 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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 8y ago
What are they doing to us?
- dvtrn 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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 8y ago

alexashka 8y 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 8y ago
You mean something like southern Europe 40 years ago. Wasn't that ideal, for what concerned family and societal tensions.
- ulkram 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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.