3 ms·

I've done the whole bars and night clubs thing pretty actively in my mid to late 20s. My issue has always been that your ability to be selective in that kind of

I've done the whole bars and night clubs thing pretty actively in my mid to late 20s. My issue has always been that your ability to be selective in that kind of environment only extends to the looks. Also I don't drink and have a very consistent sleeping schedule, so prowling bars for women until 3 in the morning has lost a lot of its appeal when I spend the rest of the weekend feeling like shit. Online you get to learn a bit more about them before you invest your time: do they have similar values, similar interests, compatible lifestyles and socio economics? Not all of it is written as text, a lot of it can be easily inferred from the photos, which is why Instagram is so popular these days in online dating as a lifestyle resume. Yes, it's heavily edited to show the best parts, like a resume, but you can still draw some conclusions from it. Like with hiring for your company, the mode you do it, the better you are at guesstimating what that person is like from their profiles. Several hundred first dates and your model gets trained with a lot of data.

thanatropism 8y ago
Eh. There's a lot to be said about actually meeting people. When I went out I wasn't looking for a perfect match, I was looking for fun. I eventually married because I kept having fun with the one person. We're polar opposites in personality and to some limited extent in values, but it just works well. There's also a lot about attraction and compatibility that's not only nonverbal but inarticulable. "Chemistry", goes the analogy. The club environment is stacked in favor of the attractive, but chemistry usually wins the day.
- BadassFractal 8y ago
  Definitely, agreed. That's why the online phase of dating IMO should last as little as possible: you want to get to that in-person stage to validate the chemistry, which is one of the biggest drop-offs in the funnel.
  - thanatropism 8y ago
    Stop using marketing jargon to describe your love+sex life, you'll start soon believing it.
tokyodude 8y ago
Unfortunately people don't actually put more info or good pictures. 20-30% of profiles say nothing. Just pictures. In Japan where the Japanese culturally hate putting up pictures of themselves online around 10-15% of profiles don't even have a picture of themselves. (on FB where the goal is not dating it's more like 95% don't have a picture of themselves) And then 90-95% of all profiles say the same things. "I like yoga, shopping, dinning out, movies, travel". I know this probably is somewhat less in other cultures. Certainly I seen no profiles with no picture in the USA but I still see 80% or so of profiles with no useful info in them, just generics. Not suggesting a bar is better. I'd love to find and/or develop a better system that some how encourages better matches
wwweston 8y ago
> that your ability to be selective in that kind of environment only extends to the looks. Which, as the non-photo portion of the prevailing Swipe-To-Date format shrinks, increasingly describes the problem with dating apps. Similar problem with Instagram. The interesting thing is that the success of these apps/media suggests they are how people engage and apparently behave as if they actually want, regardless of whether they might theorize something else would be better in some way.
dsfyu404ed 8y ago
Bars/clubs are optimized for making people go home with a hole for their peg or peg to fill their hole. There's a lot of bad matches but if you test drive enough pegs/holes eventually you find one that belongs to someone you are compatible with. It's the Red Army circa 1945 approach to dating. Throw enough bodies at the problem and eventually one of them will be the one that solves it. If you want to make fewer higher quality matches don't go to a bar.

thanatropism 8y ago

Eh. There's a lot to be said about actually meeting people. When I went out I wasn't looking for a perfect match, I was looking for fun. I eventually married because I kept having fun with the one person. We're polar opposites in personality and to some limited extent in values, but it just works well. There's also a lot about attraction and compatibility that's not only nonverbal but inarticulable. "Chemistry", goes the analogy. The club environment is stacked in favor of the attractive, but chemistry usually wins the day.

BadassFractal 8y ago
Definitely, agreed. That's why the online phase of dating IMO should last as little as possible: you want to get to that in-person stage to validate the chemistry, which is one of the biggest drop-offs in the funnel.
- thanatropism 8y ago
  Stop using marketing jargon to describe your love+sex life, you'll start soon believing it.

tokyodude 8y ago

Unfortunately people don't actually put more info or good pictures. 20-30% of profiles say nothing. Just pictures. In Japan where the Japanese culturally hate putting up pictures of themselves online around 10-15% of profiles don't even have a picture of themselves. (on FB where the goal is not dating it's more like 95% don't have a picture of themselves) And then 90-95% of all profiles say the same things. "I like yoga, shopping, dinning out, movies, travel". I know this probably is somewhat less in other cultures. Certainly I seen no profiles with no picture in the USA but I still see 80% or so of profiles with no useful info in them, just generics. Not suggesting a bar is better. I'd love to find and/or develop a better system that some how encourages better matches

wwweston 8y ago

> that your ability to be selective in that kind of environment only extends to the looks. Which, as the non-photo portion of the prevailing Swipe-To-Date format shrinks, increasingly describes the problem with dating apps. Similar problem with Instagram. The interesting thing is that the success of these apps/media suggests they are how people engage and apparently behave as if they actually want, regardless of whether they might theorize something else would be better in some way.

dsfyu404ed 8y ago

Bars/clubs are optimized for making people go home with a hole for their peg or peg to fill their hole. There's a lot of bad matches but if you test drive enough pegs/holes eventually you find one that belongs to someone you are compatible with. It's the Red Army circa 1945 approach to dating. Throw enough bodies at the problem and eventually one of them will be the one that solves it. If you want to make fewer higher quality matches don't go to a bar.