19 ms·

Never Pay for Online Dating (2010)

176 points by luu 6y ago

troughway 6y ago
I find it amusing this keeps coming up. Another one: "women rate an incredible 80% of guys as worse-looking than medium" - https://archive.is/ZJymw https://archive.is/ZJymw
- HeyHoJoe 6y ago
  Of course, every woman deserves her top 1% Prince Charming.
  - fortran77 6y ago
    Even though it would get terrible press and PR, a "no surprises" dating site where height and weight and photo are verified would go a long way to solving some of these problems. This way people can swim in their lanes, without wasting other people's time.
    - HeyHoJoe 6y ago
      Wouldn’t help, the same numbers breakdown would occur, people would still be unhappy as a consequence, it would just be more up front. Well, it’s the world people want, hope they like it.
    - tgv 6y ago
      The phrase "swim in their lanes" riles me in this context. While a photo and some basic personal data would help, dating is not an activity where social cooperation between competing parties is needed to ensure a better outcome. And there's no pool attendant either. It's not up to you to decide who gets to date whom.
      - shard 6y ago
        > dating is not an activity where social cooperation between competing parties is needed to ensure a better outcome I'm not sure if I agree. From the perspective of the dating site you'd be right, the longer people are unable to find the kind of relationship that they want, the better it is for their business. However, from the point of view of the people looking for dates, if people are shown little to no profiles where it's highly unlikely that a relationship will happen, and shown mostly profiles where matches are likely, regardless of their stated preferences, and thus response rates and relationship likelihood rises, that seems like it can be a better outcome to me.
        tgv 6y ago
        It's not about that, it's about the phrasing "swim in your lane". That means imposing social rules, and belittling people who behave differently. Taken in extremis, it can be interpreted as: ugly should only date ugly.
        tomp 6y ago
        No, you're misinterpreting it, maybe even projecting your own insecurities. Nobody said you have to date fit / thin people - just that people shouldn't lie / pretend about it. You have a fetish on fatties? Set the weight filter up high. This is clearly superior to the current model, where it's easy for people to lie about weight/age/height/income/... The real criticism of this model is completely different, and much deeper. People don't actually know what they want and who would make them happy, and they often conform / default to social conventions in their public preferences - e.g. maybe you want to filter out 10+ older men because you don't want to go on dates with "creepy" dudes, or you want to filter out fat women because you don't want your friends to judge you - even though in reality, you might actually be happier with those matches, or, more likely, those attributes are often orthogonal to your actual happiness.
  - J-dawg 6y ago
    One of the rather bleak theories that has come out of the Red Pill / men's rights movements is that women develop this sense of entitlement because: 1. Attractive / high value men are happy to sleep with less attractive women they wouldn't consider as 'relationship material'. 2. Women are generally more sexually liberated so there's an increasing chance they will have had several of these encounters, and therefore believe they are entitled to men of the same level (also known as becoming an 'alpha widow'). Like most of these theories it's pretty depressing to contemplate, but I'm yet to see a convincing refutation of it.
    - Foivos 6y ago
      The most depressing outcome of it is that a man will eventually marry a woman who ranks him at the bottom 50% of the people she had a romantic relationship with. I can not tell who is going to be the most miserable in such relationship. My guess is the woman, who will not be able to understand how "she settled like that, since she could do so much better". In the best case scenario, the man will be oblivious of the fact, so probably he will be unaffected.
      - J-dawg 6y ago
        Absolutely, it's a horrible thing to contemplate. As a single man who is not very successful with women, I'm equally afraid of this outcome as I am of being alone forever. Perhaps even more. I would love to find a way of coming to terms with this that doesn't involve adopting the full red pill attitude of "never get married, all women are like that" etc
        Foivos 6y ago
        On the positive side, this probably means that the average man will marry a woman in the top50% of the romantic relationships he has had in the past. So you can focus on that thought. :) Of course, this is possible because the average man will have far fewer relationships than the average woman. So in the end the numbers for this imaginary couple will look like: For the man: He will marry then number 2 mate out of a total of 5. For the woman: She will marry the number 10 mate out of a total of 15. Obviously the numbers are totally made up, but you get the point. So be positive! When you will settle, your mate will probably exceed your expectations. Disclaimer: I am also a man.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  "It was determined that the bottom 80% of men (in terms of attractiveness) are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men." (but the whole post is illuminating [1]) Also, this 8 month old thread [2] is full of excellent context. [1] https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-guys-unless-you-are-really-hot-you-are-probably-better-off-not-wasting-your-2ddf370a6e9a https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-g... (Tinder Experiments II: Guys, unless you are really hot you are probably better off not wasting your time on Tinder — a quantitative socio-economic study) [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22406583 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22406583 (RFC: Let's Disrupt Dating Apps)
  - klodolph 6y ago
    It doesn’t really answer the question of whether Tinder works, it just pushes some numbers around and compares it to an economy, and says that if you think of Tinder as an economy, then the economy would be very unequal. The problem is that the comparison totally falls apart. You are not competing to get the most likes on Tinder, you are just trying to meet someone to form a relationship or make out or whatever. If you’re really interested in comparing Tinder against other avenues for achieving this goal (or whatever goal you have), then you should be looking at something like WAR—wins against replacement. How likely are you to have a positive outcome using Tinder versus using some other site, or trying to meet people in person. If you want to find a place where it’s easy to find someone cute who wants to make out, then the only real answer is to be a gay man (do whatever you need to make that possible), clean yourself up, and move to the city. If you’re interested in a heterosexual relationship, you are simply going to have to deal with the fact that men and women in our culture have, on average, differing preferences when it comes to relationships. If you have typical preferences for a single man in our culture, then they don’t match typical preferences for a single woman in our culture, and if you find a relationship, it will involve some bridging of the gap between your different desires. Tinder doesn’t change that, and neither do any of the other sites.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- munificent 6y ago
  > Another one: "women rate an incredible 80% of guys as worse-looking than medium" - https://archive.is/ZJymw https://archive.is/ZJymw Women rate 80% of online images of men on a dating site as worse-looking than their personal definition of medium. I think it's important to keep in mind that: * There are disparities between gender for how much appearance factors into attractiveness. * The fact that a person is on an online dating site itself sends an attractiveness signal.
  - MaximumYComb 6y ago
    I think I can vouch that women don't factor appearance in as much, at least once they get past 25 years or so. When I was younger I was nearly invisible to women. I ended a LTR of 7 years at 30 and the tables had turned significantly. I'm a similar build to when I was 22, I'm at best average attractiveness, now I'm bald too and yet online dating is like shooting fish in a barrel. I could line up more dates then I actually have free time to go on. I literally spend less than 3 weeks on any dating app as I'll tend to meet someone in that time who I have some sort of casual relationship with for a period of time and I tend to be monogamous even in casual relationships.
    - Swizec 6y ago
      > I'm a similar build to when I was 22 This is an unattainable level of health and fitness for most Americans. Bet you’re way more attractive than you think you are.
      - munificent 6y ago
        Depends on what shape they were in at 22. :) I'm 42 and probably in the best shape of my life. But that's mostly because I spent the first forty years absolutely shunning any form of physical exercise.
- bawolff 6y ago
  Maybe 80% are worse than medium. Presumably the hot dudes aren't the people on online dating sites. (Not to be objectifying, but dating is a bit of a lemons market i imagine)
  - jonathanliu 6y ago
    I heard an interesting theory that you're more likely to go on dates with avoidant personality types. The secure ones are not bouncing in and out of relationships.
    - bawolff 6y ago
      Probably sort of like hiring - everyone always complains most candidates are bad can't even do fizzbuzz, etc- presumably because the good candidates are happily employed.
      - jonathanliu 6y ago
        Yep, and when they're not - they never hit the public markets. They get snapped up on a referral instantly.
    - nradov 6y ago
      Dating is a "market for lemons". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
      - toyg 6y ago
        That's pretty rude. People are single for all sorts of reasons that don't make them "defective".
        AussieWog93 6y ago
        Read the article. "Markets for lemons" contain both "peaches" and "lemons". There are just forces acting on the market to keep the "lemons" there.
- klaudius 6y ago
  Yes. I suggest you read the blog post https://sirtyrionlannister.wordpress.com/2014/03/21/how-the-entire-modern-mating-framework-has-shifted-and-its-evolutionary-consequences/ https://sirtyrionlannister.wordpress.com/2014/03/21/how-the-... . There are other posts there dealing with the importance of male looks in dating.
  - troughway 6y ago
    Why do you suggest we read this particular blog?
    - klaudius 6y ago
      Because it compiles a lot of scientific research and experiments to prove your original point that most males are unattractive and that looks are the main attribute women care about.
- renewiltord 6y ago
  The populations are different, though, right? One could hypothesize that the set of all men in relationships past some age have median attractiveness higher than those who are single. The first set would contribute only to measuring total average. The second set would contribute to total average and also average on dating site. It's also why the median job-seeker in a field is less skilled than the median person in the field of interest: the median person has been evaluated by at least one employer to be sufficiently skilled.
Raphmedia 6y ago
2010 is a very long time ago when it comes to the online dating sphere. I wonder how relevant this article is today.
- compiler-guy 6y ago
  The behavioral patterns haven't really changed, although the sites themselves have.
  - gooberwonder 6y ago
    Sadly, OkCupid resembles the pay sites it describes in this blog post much more now than it resembles the 2010 version of it. The posts on reddit.com/r/okcupid paint a pretty bleak picture of it today.
    - hijinks 6y ago
      that's what happens when match.com buys you
    - astura 6y ago
      It was bought by match.com Which, of course, why this blog post was deleted.
- petr25102018 6y ago
  Very relevant. Hint: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZTIbHIsIYw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZTIbHIsIYw
  - lalwanivikas 6y ago
    This video is extremely accurate. Being an average looking guy is soo depressing.
    - cambalache 6y ago
      Try to be in the bottom 10% of attractiveness.Heavy sigh.
Tomte 6y ago
I love how the first sentence is "Today I'd like to show why the practice of paying for dates on sites like Match.com and eHarmony is fundamentally broken, and broken in ways that most people don't realize." and OKcupid belongs to match.com today.
- Natsu 6y ago
  It got extra famous because of that, of course. I remember the original controversy over that hitting HN, as well as several replays thereof.
- virtualritz 6y ago
  And as soon as they were absorbed that very post disappeared from their blog. That's why you need to use archive.org to look it up.
Lendal 6y ago
Ah, yes. I remember. Ten years ago we worried about trivial things like how honest the dating sites were. In 2020 this story wouldn't raise an eyebrow.
didibus 6y ago
10 years later, and I know quite a few people who met through online dating websites and apps, some even getting married. So maybe the average is bleak, but if it has a good P90 or P95 success rate, it might still be worth the try.
- bawolff 6y ago
  I guess the question is, would those people have otherwise gotten married to somebody (is it a coincidence they met through online dating, or was it the cause of finding someone)
  - decafninja 6y ago
    I think this is important too. There's two kinds of people in the online dating realm. The people who could have gotten dates/married without online dating, but just happen to have used the medium to expand their circle. And the people who would have had difficulty offline, and that difficulty may or may not extend to the online realm too. Everyone I know who've found love online seem to be in the first category. Those that find dating difficult offline don't seem to have significantly better luck online either.
    - TT3351 6y ago
      I find that last statement a little confusing; I have horrendous luck offline and have significantly better luck online. I have never been able to "ask someone out" conventionally in person without making a fool of myself. It's a lot easier for me to take lots of rejection (the price everyone pays for being single and looking) when I'm sitting on the toilet on my phone in the morning than when I'm face to face with the person I'm interested in. Much faster turnover between individual rejections as well. All of the most positive relationships in my life, not just in romance or sex, have been off online dating/hookup sites/apps. Edit: and I never once paid for them
    - didibus 6y ago
      Some of my friends definitely had difficulty dating offline. Nice and shy, might not know what to say in a first date, can seem a bit boring at first, and also just doesn't have a big social circle to meet other people. I feel online dating gave them a chance to meet some other people, pre-meet prior to first date, and than go on a first date, which they'd otherwise wouldn't have been able too. Either from never meeting the person in the first place, never asking to go out on a date, or messing up that date. That's all my personal analysis though, like I have no data here appart from a few people I know and my interpretation.
dheera 6y ago
One of the quirks about online dating products is that unlike almost every other product, success is correlated with how quickly your users delete their accounts. Users sticking around for a long time means you failed horribly at your mission. I'm really not sure how one would create a good revenue model for something like this. Many apps try a subscription-based approach and all I can say is that for someone who is earnestly looking for a partner, an annual subscription is the last thing they want.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  Depends on the product. Tinder is about constantly finding fresh partners.
- thekyle 6y ago
  Maybe the app could partner with restaurants and offer coupons if you book the date through them.
  - dheera 6y ago
    Yeah, I think connecting with the offline world might be the ticket. Also, possibly offline social events for singles, curated to groups of people that are likely compatible? The only thing is events are hard to scale, so you'd want to possibly recruit some your users to host them for you. A lot of single people love hosting events to impress and get to know other singles.
    - thekyle 6y ago
      IMO, this is why the best dating app (pre-covid) was Meetup.com
- invalidOrTaken 6y ago
  >I'm really not sure how one would create a good revenue model for something like this. Marriage is correlated with a lot of measures of societal health---perhaps government grants?
lalwanivikas 6y ago
Does anyone else end up feeling bitter by using these online dating apps? How do you deal with constant rejections, ghosting, not matching with anyone that you like etc.
- 02020202 6y ago
  you, my friend, need to take the red pill.
- HeyHoJoe 6y ago
  Yeah, most men who use them feel this way. I met a guy one time who claimed he had been active on tinder for a year and hadn’t gotten one match. Granted he wasn’t much of a looker but that’s just rough.
  - im3w1l 6y ago
    At that point it sounds like he was shadowbanned? Surely someone must have at least misswiped?
    - toyg 6y ago
      Expectation mismatch is real. Unless you pay so you can see what “lowering your standards” could bring (by looking at people who liked you even though you didn’t like them), you can go ages without ever matching, or matching with dead profiles who will never answer.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  I assume they're at best knowingly designed to be like that. Ignoring that the whole premise probably isn't that healthy, there's a reason why people just do it for an ego trip (predominantly women)
- stared 6y ago
  Well, it is the fate for almost everyone: https://medium.com/@pmigdal/tinder-anecdata-and-sankey-diagrams-c1c0e5dfff18 https://medium.com/@pmigdal/tinder-anecdata-and-sankey-diagr... Even if people get many matches in the first place, the rate of any meaningful interactions is low.
anonu 6y ago
Rate my online dating app idea: There are no profile pictures. However, you do upload pictures of yourself and are asked to rate pictures of others - possibly not in your geographic area. The AI gets a feel for what your preferences are and matches you. Granted - its all a bit superficial that its really just about how you look - but this seems to be the underlying issue with tinder: the benefits accrue to the top percentile "best looking" people. Everyone else gets (unfairly) left in the dust. Thats as far as I got... thoughts?
- ironmagma 6y ago
  I'm not a psychologist, but I'm pretty sure attraction is in the top 2 "need-to-haves" of a relationship. While yes, it's shallow, it's only shallow because we evolved to have this bias in the most primitive parts of our brains, which means it's important to a successful existence.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
    Attraction is not just about appearances though. I don't know if you have ever experienced it, but I can assure you from personal experience it is completely possible to not find someone attractive at first meeting but become attracted to them as you get to know them.
    - ironmagma 6y ago
      That is true; it's also possible to find someone attractive in person but not in a picture, and to draw a contrast, possible to find them attractive at first but then upon meeting them, realize their personality renders them unattractive. I'm not sure what's actionable about any of these facts, though, because the visual part still seems to be the most important to people.
    - decafninja 6y ago
      While true, I feel this is more conducive in unforced, organic encounters. i.e. if you and the other person meet and interact in some other group or activity that has nothing to do with dating. In an online dating situation, you have extremely little to determine what the other person is like, so appearances (photo) becomes significantly more weighted. You look at the photo, find him/her unattractive, and move on. Whereas in a more organic situation, you may find the person unattractive at first meet, but as you interact with them, decide otherwise.
kull 6y ago
Do you remember Dating Ring [1], a startup from gimlet media? That was actually the first time I paid for a dating site. They interviewed me in person and hand picked matches. They actually gave me a few good matches and I ended up dating somebody from their match. I wish they were still around. [1] https://www.datingring.com/ https://www.datingring.com/
- anonu 6y ago
  > I wish they were still around The person you dated or the app?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ogre_codes 6y ago
While I completely agree with their comments about these sites having a vested interest in showing you non-paying users, I have an issue with his conclusion. > From the ad, we can see that just 86,140 of those subscribers get married, a mere 6.2% of the people who paid the company to find them a mate. I know a lot of people who would easily drop $120 for a 6.2% chance of finding a partner in a year. These odds are not horrible.
- kube-system 6y ago
  > I know a lot of people who would easily drop $120 for a 6.2% chance of finding a partner in a year. But are the people who would drop $120 to find a partner the same people who belong to that 6.2%?
- hawkoy 6y ago
  Why not hire a salesman to do the online dating for you until they have managed to get a date offline? I think most people absolutely suck at being original or appealing in texting. Going through tinder or any dating app makes you see the worst of humanity. Scams, lot of them. Catfishers. Kids pulling prank and laughing at desperate middle-aged men. Exaggerations, too high expectations. It makes you compare with others. It makes you desperate. Just avoid it.
  - solveit 6y ago
    You would have to tell your date that the person they were speaking to online was not you. And I don't think that would go over well.
    - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
      Better to be honest about having a representative / mediator than catfishing or pretending to be someone you're not to try and "win" the game, especially if you suck at it. I mean, people don't really know themselves or what they look for, generally speaking. Anyway, matchmakers are not a new concept.
    - laurent92 6y ago
amusesidewinder 6y ago
Look its a brutal truth, but looks matter and paying for a subscription isn't going to make your chances of meeting someone higher. No matter what dating app comes out, it will always be about the top 20% of men getting matches while the rest get almost nothing. Then you go on to say, but wait online dating isn't real life? Or is it? An increasing amount of people are meeting through online dating these days. I'd say it very accurately represents real life, granted personalities may not always be attractive and result in a breakup there is a looks threshold that needs to be met before anything meaningful emerges.
- throwawydedbee 6y ago
  You're not wrong. But I might put that as, "Looks matter to most people, because they haven't yet discovered that looks don't matter, and in fact conventional attractiveness can be a noxious poison.". I met my current (and last) wife on OKCupid. Only messaged two or three women, she the last. We've been married now for four years and get along like two peas in a pod. Luck, I guess. (I certainly had it coming.)
pintxo 6y ago
I am reminded of "Every 11 minutes a single falls in love on Parship" [1] [1] "Alle 11 Minuten verliebt sich ein Single über Parship"
- fxtentacle 6y ago
  What they don't tell you is that it's the same guy falling in love over and over again :p He just happens to have the attention span of a goldfish :)
dang 6y ago
If curious see also 2014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2170998 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2170998 Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1842557 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1842557 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1277626 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1277626
baccheion 6y ago
Sometimes paying seems like a good idea. More exposure on Badoo was lucrative. Same with little features on Tinder and OkCupid at certain points during their development. Most dating sites are a bad deal for males, mainly due to the gender skew. There are at least 2x as many males. The top 20-25% is then enough to gobble up all viable women (top 50%). 1 out of 2 are at least not unattractive, 1 out of 3 are outright attractive, and 1 out of 5 are hot. That is, not even out of attractive males and the women are already gone.
- jfengel 6y ago
  I think you'll find that women of all attractiveness levels are put off by men who outright reject half of all women as "unviable", based solely on their appearance. And that's just one dimension. If you have 2 or 3 other axes where you cut off anybody below the median (intelligence, income, politics, interest, etc.) you're quickly finding yourself looking only at a few percent of the population. And if you have no other metrics other than attractiveness, you'll find that few women wish to date you.
  - baccheion 6y ago
    WTF? Half the pool was considered viable based on swipe percentages. You seem unable to properly comprehend even basics communicated. Further, the most superficial experience highest success. That is, they are most likely to lie. A high percentage of viable matches is uncommon. 1/2 minimally mutually satisfying match * 1/2 at least not unattractive * 1/2 reciprocating attractiveness = 1 out of 8 random pairings find each other minimally mutually satisfying and at least not unattractive (by their own measure of what that is; whether aesthetics, social status, money, etc). Truth.
jjones2 6y ago
If you are a male, online dating will be full of scams and very costly. Men don't always get the better end of things in life, especially in today's screwed up world.
caseysoftware 6y ago
I worked for a dating site a long time ago. The business model seems simple at first glance but the incentives of the customer and business are almost 100% in opposition: https://caseysoftware.com/blog/working-for-a-dating-website https://caseysoftware.com/blog/working-for-a-dating-website
- taigeair 6y ago
  We created a dating app that tries to address this. We leverage an entrance fee to reduce that conflict of interest. Once someone pays the entrance fee, we have little incentive to keep them single and looking. We actually want them to go on dates and make a margin on the dates we book. https://stories.fairytrail.app/reinventing-the-online-dating-business-model-together/ https://stories.fairytrail.app/reinventing-the-online-dating...
  - mandelbrotwurst 6y ago
    Someone who is booking dates through an app is single and looking.
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    If you make a margin on dates you book then isn't your optimal strategy to get people on dates that won't turn into relationships? That way they keep booking dates? The sign up fee makes sense. The per-date margin seems to be diametrically opposed.
    - jaggirs 6y ago
      Still, it is an incentive to create dating opportunities. And what kind of date would not result in a relationship, but make you want to go on another date? It would need to be good and bad at the same time. Maybe a good date with the wrong person.. It sounds really hard to exploit this.
      - dkersten 6y ago
        It incentivises setting up a lot of dates, but with the wrong people.
moron4hire 6y ago
Back years ago, I had tried eHarmony. When this article first came out, I had read it and started tracking my own numbers. It pretty much matched what the article is saying perfectly. It was a long time ago and I certainly don't have the data anymore. IIRC, there used to be a tell on the site where careful inspection of the user's profile page would tell you whether or not they had a full, paid profile (it was something like the background color of one of the fields being slightly different). Once I discounted the unpaid profiles from my numbers, it was actually a pretty high percentage of people that would respond, go through the several layers of canned intro questionaires, a few back-and-forth messages, and finally agreeing to a date. The end result was something like 25% of the people with whom I matched whom also had paying profiles would end up in a date. But if you were just tracking "percentage of 'matches' that lead to dates", it was something like 0.1%. Basically, it boiled down to eHarmony's system giving out less than 1 paying profile per day out of the 5 or 7 or 10 or whatever they gave you. You had to be diligent, working it every day, to get that number above 1 per week. Filter that down to 25%, it was about a date a month. It was exhausting. I had better luck talking to random people at social events. I met a few people through Craigslist by gamifying my posts, stuff like "to prove you're not a bot, you have to decrypt this ROT13 message and copy it in your email to me" [0]. I actually dated a woman for a little while whom I met when she came to my door looking for donations for some charity. But really, getting out of bars and going out to specific social events, getting into a group of people with whom I became friends, and letting them introduce me to women, was the ultimate key to finding my wife of 6 years. [0] Aaaah, Craigslist personals ads. It's all fun and games, until you meet the crazy one who tries to get you into a fight at a biker bar.
CapricornNoble 6y ago
I miss OKCupid's blog. A couple of critiques though: 1. Objectives. The article might be correct if your objective is marriage. If your objective is to schedule as much low-effort sex as possible, or even just juggling multiple long-term relationships, especially if you operate over a wide geographic area......expanding your search online is invaluable. Treat paid sites as just another tool in your harem management toolbox. 2. Stale profiles. This is why I really liked the $COUNTRYNAME_Cupid websites. They take more effort to put a profile together, AND they have a "last logged in" feature, so when you do a profile search "No smokers, no kids, etc..." you don't have to worry about messaging people who haven't touched the site in 9 months, and it's easy to ignore blank profiles. Also, typically women with free accounts will "poke" you or view your profile, and that webpage listing those women is where you start your screening.
- ordinary 6y ago
  > I miss OKCupid's blog. For anyone who might want to re-read them, gwern archived the old OKCupid blog here: https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/okcupid/ https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/okcupid/
- RhodoYolo 6y ago
  Hinge took that niche now though
actuator 6y ago
I think it is irresistible for a dating app to not milk on human vulnerability and emotions. Look at Tinder, the paid plans started out with features like changing location, unlimited likes, more superlikes etc. All of these seem fair as they don't necessarily disadvantage you if you are not paying, your rank in recommended profiles more or less remains the same. I recently saw that Tinder introduced one more tier now where even your likes are boosted if you are in the paid plan. This would make the app kind of useless for anyone who is not paying and is not hot enough to be ranked at top. Sidenote: I wonder why OkCupid deleted their old posts. I loved posts like these and others like Race and reply rate. If it was because of not wanting to offend someone, it is even worse that we are pushing things like these under the rug.
- dvtrn 6y ago
  I wonder why OkCupid deleted their old posts. Popular theory is their acquisition by the same company that owns every other dating site on the planet had something to do with it.
  - vanderZwan 6y ago
    Given that at first they only deleted this blog post and left the rest up, I'm pretty certain that is indeed it.
    - joenot443 6y ago
      They deleted lots of others as well.
      - vanderZwan 6y ago
        Yes, later they did. But at first this one blog post got singled out, immediately after acquisition.
- tasogare 6y ago
  > I wonder why OkCupid deleted their old posts Political correctness. Hopefully there are copies around the web, those posts were very very interesting.
deleted 6y ago
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xenihn 6y ago
I still don't know of any happy long-term couples in my social network who met through OLD. The closest is a friend who is poly, meets all of her partners online, and then has a heavily one-sided poly relationship, since it's much, much harder for the guy to get any side-action. This last guy has made it to two years, which is a record. Online dating is perfect for finding guys like that. The biggest problem with OLD is that nearly everyone actively using it has problems. Problems that need to be addressed with time, effort, therapy, psychiatric counseling, and/or medication. Also potentially surgery, if a pitbull mauled your face as a child or something. Don't feel bad if you aren't finding what you want on OLD, because you don't actually want to date the people who don't want to date you. And they're completely justified in not wanting to date you. You shouldn't want to date yourself either. You're both using dating apps, after all. That means there's lots of room for self-improvement, for everyone involved. Just being on the app is a red flag. If I had to succinctly describe the vast majority of people who aren't using OLD for hookups (without digging into underlying causes), who spend extended periods of time unhappily single, searching in vain for a partner on dating apps: men: too shy women: too picky
- drstewart 6y ago
  Wow, this is a horrible and patronizing worldview
  - xenihn 6y ago
    OLD isn't the world.
kenneth 6y ago
Meeting people in the real world like we have done for millennia is highly underrated. I don't understand the obsession with dating apps. It's a horrible way to meet people. Young people's inability to approach potential partners the old school way has been a boon for those who actually have the balls to do so. I face so little competition these days, it's become real easy to stand out from the pack and get everything I want, more often than not.
- devoloution 6y ago
  What is the old school way? Just a random approach in the streets or in a bar?
  - kenneth 6y ago
    In a non-creepy way. Probably not on the street, but sure anywhere out where people might be social and open to striking up a conversation (bar, restaurant, park, class, whatever). Don't make it an "approach," just strike up a conversation and if you hit it off, connect so you can develop something.
    - tidenly 6y ago
      Maybe this is a generational thing, but outside of clubbing there is basically no situation I'm regularly in where it would not be weird for me to randomly strike up a conversation with a stranger.
      - theonemind 6y ago
        It's probably weird when anybody does it in most of those contexts. Just be attractive and the other party will get over it.
      - mPReDiToR 6y ago
        I'm male, 45, and in the UK. If I'm shopping I'll smile and say "thanks" for any little consideration (moving aside, putting a "between shoppers bar" on the conveyor, holding a door, etc.), and when waiting for something I'll say something "chit chatty" to the person next to me, male or female, old or young. Sometimes it will be met with a conversation, mostly a polite reply but no chat, others will be shocked that a stranger spoke to them. Anything can be used as a conversational gambit. I think "how about dem Yankees?" comes from an old film. The point is that it doesn't cost anything to be rebuffed. Being open, approachable, and friendly is worth learning. Not being creepy, slimy, or a Lounge Lizard helps. Just speak to people.
toyg 6y ago
I bet Bumble is more successful as a social network for women than as a dating app. I’ve not had a single chat on it and I don’t expect to ever get one. But hey, you can swipe right on Sharon Stone and a bunch of hot instagrammers! A man would probably get more value out of an hour on a random onlyfans than a year on Bumble.
- gabereiser 6y ago
  It’s not rocket science to get a response on there. Ditch selfies. Show your best self. Smile. You’ll get a match... Bumble is definitely more popular among my female friends. There are a lot of “fake” profiles too, profiles created with the intention of getting you to follow their Instagram, but there are real profiles out there with real people on the other side. Bumble is one of the many dating apps I tried after my divorce and it’s the one I have the most success with. I’m not a model so Tinder doesn’t work. I’m not interested in diving into another marriage so eharmony and hinge don’t work. I tried the league but I’d rather eat dog shit than listen to a 1%’er cry about money problems. Woman just want dogs. Men just want a woman. Men, get a dog.
  - Fnoord 6y ago
    > Woman just want dogs. Men just want a woman. Men, get a dog. Even if you're a cat person? Doesn't make sense. There must be women who like cats, too. I at least found one. Not within a dating app though. Unless you consider World of Warcraft a dating app, that is.
    - cinquemb 6y ago
      mmorpgs are some of the biggest dating apps in the world
      - Fnoord 6y ago
        Possibly, but I wasn't specifically looking, and she was actually already in a relationship when we met (we started out as friends), and wasn't specifically looking either.
TaylorAlexander 6y ago
Interesting considering OkCupid has recently come out with an even more expensive tier for their app. The best features are now twice as expensive as their “normal” paid plan. Meanwhile they’ve redesigned the app in a way that seems less useful to me. Users always hate app redesigns so maybe it’s just something I need to get used to, but they’ve eliminated the ability to do a custom fine grained search and see a bucket of results. Anyway I was a paying customer until I noticed they came out with even more expensive plans. I don’t want to be nickled and dimed so I’m back on free.
- salamimonger 6y ago
  OkCupid was bought by Match.com
ScottBurson 6y ago
I met my wife online, in 1993. On Usenet. I kid you not: it was in alt.psychology.personality. She was trying to figure out whether she was a Four or a Five on the Enneagram, so I emailed her "Well, do you have a worse problem with depression or paranoia?" Not your usual pick-up line :-)
mantap 6y ago
Paying for dating makes complete sense. Women want to receive less spam. Men want there to be less competition from spammers. By adjusting the price that men have to pay you can solve both of these problems. I used okcupid back in 2010 when this was written. It was a great website for taking quizzes and personality tests but far too noisy to effective for meeting people without becoming a spammer.
- dane-pgp 6y ago
  Spam and fake accounts are the big problems to solve for seemingly all popular sites, and unfortunately they are especially hard to solve in decentralised systems. Do people still remember Geek Code blocks?[0] In theory, all existing online dating services could be replaced by a global decentralised system, where people upload a somewhat standardised dating profile[1] and crawlers would compete to find as many of these as possible and match compatible people. Of course they would also compete in terms of how nicely they presented this data and how easy it was to create a profile. One approach for stopping spam would be to limit the number of messages that each profile (owner) can send per time period. For example, the profile could contain a "send-introductions-to" field, specifying the node that stores their inbox, and a "max-introductions-per-month" field which tells a sending node how many other introductions a user can make while still being allowed to contact them. As usual with federated systems, there is then the problem of nodes deciding which other nodes to federate with, but it should be fairly easy to test if a node is not enforcing spamminess limits. The other problem is stopping people from generating profiles on multiple nodes, which might require either a centralised service or some sort of economic system like "proof of burn"[2], unless email providers were to all start issuing time-limited anonymous tokens. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geek_Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geek_Code [1] I'm imagining using the taxonomy of Wikidata, allowing statements like { "has": "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q202466 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q202466" } [2] https://99bitcoins.com/what-is-proof-of-burn/ https://99bitcoins.com/what-is-proof-of-burn/
martin_a 6y ago
Personal story time! I've tried Parship this year, which is quite "popular" (or at least advertised a lot) in Germany. I'm paying around 50€/month for a membership for one year and have cancelled the membership now. I don't think it's worth it. From the outside, and also at the start, it's very professional. There's a lengthy personal test and everything has some kind of class. They really try not to be some lower-level "fuckbuddy app" or something like that. I liked that image because I'm not looking for something like that and I thought the price would "filter" out all the people who are just in for a quick chance. So I really took my courage and tried to make good first steps with the womens I had high "matching points" with. I read their profiles, tried two write a nice first message, asked questions about what they wrote in their profile, sometimes pointed out similarities. Possibly I'm very clumsy in doing that, but I think very few people are actually "good" in "dating" (probably not those an apps anyway?!?) so I thought it might be good enough. Anxiety and low self-esteem don't really help much either with all of that. Quick note: Parship will not show you an image of the partner right from the start. It's blurred until you approve that your chat partner may see it. I like that because as someone who's probably not that good looking, this somewhat helps putting personality before looks. What I quickly found out is that there are lots of dead profiles. Last activity weeks ago. Nevertheless, parship is happy to recommend those profiles in-app and via mails ("If you find your love today, it might be because of our recommendations" - actual mail title), but messages to those profiles were usually never read. I also found out that women seem to be massively getting spammed. One woman wrote me and told me she'd really love to answer every message but she received over 50 messages in a day, sometimes from guys hundreds of kilometres away, and she would just have to make a cut somewhere. (Obviously she made a cut at/with me.) Not sure if those guys from hundreds of kilometres are actually ready to leave everything behind for da date, seems more like some high-level "fuckbuddyism". Something, that might be related to this, is that women are active on the platform, like "last activity yesterday", but will still not read your messages and not visit your profile. Not sure if they are simply not interested or also overwhelmed. Besides that you have the same problem with premium/non-premium accounts. I've received messages from woman who wrote that they are not able to read any further messages from me, because they have no premium account and are not planning to buy one. As I am somewhat brief in my first message I will obviously not post my postal adress, mail address and mobile phone number. Also rumors are that Parship will ban your account if you do that. Not sure though if it's true. Anyway, I'd find it impolite at least to "spam" somebody with that. From the outside you can not see which accounts are premium and which not. Which means, in my case, that I'm having a good look at the profile, trying to write a good first message and making a good first impression (while fighting hordes of anxiety) only to receive a "nice message, sorry that I've got no premium. bye."-type answer. I asked Parship support about this and obviously it's not planned to mark non-premium accounts as such. Another thing I found "complicated": Parship offers you various different methods of contacting the other person. You can like single entries in their profile, you can simply message them (premium function, I think), you can send "ice breakers" (choose five images, see what the other person chose), you can also "smile" at people (can also add a message here - that's what I'm usually doing) and you can also have video chats (never tried that). This makes using the platform somewhat complicated. Is something better than the other? What should I use for the first contact? Smile only? Should I allow my chat partner to see my image right from the start? Or only after we wrote? What to do with "ice breaker results"? Are two matches good? Bad? Something to talk about? Why would I even video chat through parship and not trough WhatsApp or something else? Who knows? I surely don't. Parship also has a message board for its members. Topics are... well... recurring. "Why does nobody write me back?", "Do you like my pictures?", "How big should my search radius be?". All in all it's a mixture of very old topics, where Parship itself also engaged and tried to help, and mainly dealing with rejection. Not sure if that helps anybody, it just feels like they felt the need to have a message board somewhere back in the past. So, after almost a year, 600€ less in my wallet, lots of times getting turned down I wonder if I should just have invested that money in treating myself with some nice dinners and going to a bar every other week. Maybe I'd have met a woman that way. My expectations, everybody on Parship is really into serious dating, has been disappointed. It's not that it was unbelievable high, but I wonder that it seems to be as low as is. For Parship it's fine I think. There will be the next guy like me who feels like something is missing and that "serious online dating" might be a good way to find what he's looking for. Last words: If you're single woman from Baden-Württemberg (Germany), drop me a comment. I've got two cat and enjoy writing long comments on Hacker News. Maybe we'll fit. :-)
spacebanana7 6y ago
Online dating is incredibly underpriced. This is especially true for zero sum purchases, such as boosts to the top of the profile deck in a given area, where the transaction anxiety felt by most users causes outsized rewards to users who make in app purchases. On Tinder, £2 boosts can elevate an average male profile from 0.5 matches per day to 5-10 matches per 30 minute boost period. Roll this out with a decent conversion funnel and for £100/mo that average male profile will readily get more dates than a reasonable life schedule can accommodate.
- postsantum 6y ago
  I agree. Tinder sells dates at a discounted price, not relationships
hahaiscjaaka 6y ago
Why would anyone pay to meet people if you can just go out to a bar/concert/social activity and meet people for free???

176 points by luu 6y ago

I find it amusing this keeps coming up. Another one: "women rate an incredible 80% of guys as worse-looking than medium" - https://archive.is/ZJymw https://archive.is/ZJymw

HeyHoJoe 6y ago
Of course, every woman deserves her top 1% Prince Charming.
- fortran77 6y ago
  Even though it would get terrible press and PR, a "no surprises" dating site where height and weight and photo are verified would go a long way to solving some of these problems. This way people can swim in their lanes, without wasting other people's time.
  - HeyHoJoe 6y ago
    Wouldn’t help, the same numbers breakdown would occur, people would still be unhappy as a consequence, it would just be more up front. Well, it’s the world people want, hope they like it.
  - tgv 6y ago
    The phrase "swim in their lanes" riles me in this context. While a photo and some basic personal data would help, dating is not an activity where social cooperation between competing parties is needed to ensure a better outcome. And there's no pool attendant either. It's not up to you to decide who gets to date whom.
    - shard 6y ago
      > dating is not an activity where social cooperation between competing parties is needed to ensure a better outcome I'm not sure if I agree. From the perspective of the dating site you'd be right, the longer people are unable to find the kind of relationship that they want, the better it is for their business. However, from the point of view of the people looking for dates, if people are shown little to no profiles where it's highly unlikely that a relationship will happen, and shown mostly profiles where matches are likely, regardless of their stated preferences, and thus response rates and relationship likelihood rises, that seems like it can be a better outcome to me.
      - tgv 6y ago
        It's not about that, it's about the phrasing "swim in your lane". That means imposing social rules, and belittling people who behave differently. Taken in extremis, it can be interpreted as: ugly should only date ugly.
        tomp 6y ago
        No, you're misinterpreting it, maybe even projecting your own insecurities. Nobody said you have to date fit / thin people - just that people shouldn't lie / pretend about it. You have a fetish on fatties? Set the weight filter up high. This is clearly superior to the current model, where it's easy for people to lie about weight/age/height/income/... The real criticism of this model is completely different, and much deeper. People don't actually know what they want and who would make them happy, and they often conform / default to social conventions in their public preferences - e.g. maybe you want to filter out 10+ older men because you don't want to go on dates with "creepy" dudes, or you want to filter out fat women because you don't want your friends to judge you - even though in reality, you might actually be happier with those matches, or, more likely, those attributes are often orthogonal to your actual happiness.
- J-dawg 6y ago
  One of the rather bleak theories that has come out of the Red Pill / men's rights movements is that women develop this sense of entitlement because: 1. Attractive / high value men are happy to sleep with less attractive women they wouldn't consider as 'relationship material'. 2. Women are generally more sexually liberated so there's an increasing chance they will have had several of these encounters, and therefore believe they are entitled to men of the same level (also known as becoming an 'alpha widow'). Like most of these theories it's pretty depressing to contemplate, but I'm yet to see a convincing refutation of it.
  - Foivos 6y ago
    The most depressing outcome of it is that a man will eventually marry a woman who ranks him at the bottom 50% of the people she had a romantic relationship with. I can not tell who is going to be the most miserable in such relationship. My guess is the woman, who will not be able to understand how "she settled like that, since she could do so much better". In the best case scenario, the man will be oblivious of the fact, so probably he will be unaffected.
    - J-dawg 6y ago
      Absolutely, it's a horrible thing to contemplate. As a single man who is not very successful with women, I'm equally afraid of this outcome as I am of being alone forever. Perhaps even more. I would love to find a way of coming to terms with this that doesn't involve adopting the full red pill attitude of "never get married, all women are like that" etc
      - Foivos 6y ago
        On the positive side, this probably means that the average man will marry a woman in the top50% of the romantic relationships he has had in the past. So you can focus on that thought. :) Of course, this is possible because the average man will have far fewer relationships than the average woman. So in the end the numbers for this imaginary couple will look like: For the man: He will marry then number 2 mate out of a total of 5. For the woman: She will marry the number 10 mate out of a total of 15. Obviously the numbers are totally made up, but you get the point. So be positive! When you will settle, your mate will probably exceed your expectations. Disclaimer: I am also a man.
toomuchtodo 6y ago
"It was determined that the bottom 80% of men (in terms of attractiveness) are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men." (but the whole post is illuminating [1]) Also, this 8 month old thread [2] is full of excellent context. [1] https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-guys-unless-you-are-really-hot-you-are-probably-better-off-not-wasting-your-2ddf370a6e9a https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-g... (Tinder Experiments II: Guys, unless you are really hot you are probably better off not wasting your time on Tinder — a quantitative socio-economic study) [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22406583 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22406583 (RFC: Let's Disrupt Dating Apps)
- klodolph 6y ago
  It doesn’t really answer the question of whether Tinder works, it just pushes some numbers around and compares it to an economy, and says that if you think of Tinder as an economy, then the economy would be very unequal. The problem is that the comparison totally falls apart. You are not competing to get the most likes on Tinder, you are just trying to meet someone to form a relationship or make out or whatever. If you’re really interested in comparing Tinder against other avenues for achieving this goal (or whatever goal you have), then you should be looking at something like WAR—wins against replacement. How likely are you to have a positive outcome using Tinder versus using some other site, or trying to meet people in person. If you want to find a place where it’s easy to find someone cute who wants to make out, then the only real answer is to be a gay man (do whatever you need to make that possible), clean yourself up, and move to the city. If you’re interested in a heterosexual relationship, you are simply going to have to deal with the fact that men and women in our culture have, on average, differing preferences when it comes to relationships. If you have typical preferences for a single man in our culture, then they don’t match typical preferences for a single woman in our culture, and if you find a relationship, it will involve some bridging of the gap between your different desires. Tinder doesn’t change that, and neither do any of the other sites.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
munificent 6y ago
> Another one: "women rate an incredible 80% of guys as worse-looking than medium" - https://archive.is/ZJymw https://archive.is/ZJymw Women rate 80% of online images of men on a dating site as worse-looking than their personal definition of medium. I think it's important to keep in mind that: * There are disparities between gender for how much appearance factors into attractiveness. * The fact that a person is on an online dating site itself sends an attractiveness signal.
- MaximumYComb 6y ago
  I think I can vouch that women don't factor appearance in as much, at least once they get past 25 years or so. When I was younger I was nearly invisible to women. I ended a LTR of 7 years at 30 and the tables had turned significantly. I'm a similar build to when I was 22, I'm at best average attractiveness, now I'm bald too and yet online dating is like shooting fish in a barrel. I could line up more dates then I actually have free time to go on. I literally spend less than 3 weeks on any dating app as I'll tend to meet someone in that time who I have some sort of casual relationship with for a period of time and I tend to be monogamous even in casual relationships.
  - Swizec 6y ago
    > I'm a similar build to when I was 22 This is an unattainable level of health and fitness for most Americans. Bet you’re way more attractive than you think you are.
    - munificent 6y ago
      Depends on what shape they were in at 22. :) I'm 42 and probably in the best shape of my life. But that's mostly because I spent the first forty years absolutely shunning any form of physical exercise.
bawolff 6y ago
Maybe 80% are worse than medium. Presumably the hot dudes aren't the people on online dating sites. (Not to be objectifying, but dating is a bit of a lemons market i imagine)
- jonathanliu 6y ago
  I heard an interesting theory that you're more likely to go on dates with avoidant personality types. The secure ones are not bouncing in and out of relationships.
  - bawolff 6y ago
    Probably sort of like hiring - everyone always complains most candidates are bad can't even do fizzbuzz, etc- presumably because the good candidates are happily employed.
    - jonathanliu 6y ago
      Yep, and when they're not - they never hit the public markets. They get snapped up on a referral instantly.
  - nradov 6y ago
    Dating is a "market for lemons". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
    - toyg 6y ago
      That's pretty rude. People are single for all sorts of reasons that don't make them "defective".
      - AussieWog93 6y ago
        Read the article. "Markets for lemons" contain both "peaches" and "lemons". There are just forces acting on the market to keep the "lemons" there.
klaudius 6y ago
Yes. I suggest you read the blog post https://sirtyrionlannister.wordpress.com/2014/03/21/how-the-entire-modern-mating-framework-has-shifted-and-its-evolutionary-consequences/ https://sirtyrionlannister.wordpress.com/2014/03/21/how-the-... . There are other posts there dealing with the importance of male looks in dating.
- troughway 6y ago
  Why do you suggest we read this particular blog?
  - klaudius 6y ago
    Because it compiles a lot of scientific research and experiments to prove your original point that most males are unattractive and that looks are the main attribute women care about.
renewiltord 6y ago
The populations are different, though, right? One could hypothesize that the set of all men in relationships past some age have median attractiveness higher than those who are single. The first set would contribute only to measuring total average. The second set would contribute to total average and also average on dating site. It's also why the median job-seeker in a field is less skilled than the median person in the field of interest: the median person has been evaluated by at least one employer to be sufficiently skilled.

Raphmedia 6y ago

2010 is a very long time ago when it comes to the online dating sphere. I wonder how relevant this article is today.

compiler-guy 6y ago
The behavioral patterns haven't really changed, although the sites themselves have.
- gooberwonder 6y ago
  Sadly, OkCupid resembles the pay sites it describes in this blog post much more now than it resembles the 2010 version of it. The posts on reddit.com/r/okcupid paint a pretty bleak picture of it today.
  - hijinks 6y ago
    that's what happens when match.com buys you
  - astura 6y ago
    It was bought by match.com Which, of course, why this blog post was deleted.
petr25102018 6y ago
Very relevant. Hint: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZTIbHIsIYw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZTIbHIsIYw
- lalwanivikas 6y ago
  This video is extremely accurate. Being an average looking guy is soo depressing.
  - cambalache 6y ago
    Try to be in the bottom 10% of attractiveness.Heavy sigh.

Tomte 6y ago

I love how the first sentence is "Today I'd like to show why the practice of paying for dates on sites like Match.com and eHarmony is fundamentally broken, and broken in ways that most people don't realize." and OKcupid belongs to match.com today.

Natsu 6y ago
It got extra famous because of that, of course. I remember the original controversy over that hitting HN, as well as several replays thereof.
virtualritz 6y ago
And as soon as they were absorbed that very post disappeared from their blog. That's why you need to use archive.org to look it up.

Lendal 6y ago

Ah, yes. I remember. Ten years ago we worried about trivial things like how honest the dating sites were. In 2020 this story wouldn't raise an eyebrow.

didibus 6y ago

10 years later, and I know quite a few people who met through online dating websites and apps, some even getting married. So maybe the average is bleak, but if it has a good P90 or P95 success rate, it might still be worth the try.

bawolff 6y ago
I guess the question is, would those people have otherwise gotten married to somebody (is it a coincidence they met through online dating, or was it the cause of finding someone)
- decafninja 6y ago
  I think this is important too. There's two kinds of people in the online dating realm. The people who could have gotten dates/married without online dating, but just happen to have used the medium to expand their circle. And the people who would have had difficulty offline, and that difficulty may or may not extend to the online realm too. Everyone I know who've found love online seem to be in the first category. Those that find dating difficult offline don't seem to have significantly better luck online either.
  - TT3351 6y ago
    I find that last statement a little confusing; I have horrendous luck offline and have significantly better luck online. I have never been able to "ask someone out" conventionally in person without making a fool of myself. It's a lot easier for me to take lots of rejection (the price everyone pays for being single and looking) when I'm sitting on the toilet on my phone in the morning than when I'm face to face with the person I'm interested in. Much faster turnover between individual rejections as well. All of the most positive relationships in my life, not just in romance or sex, have been off online dating/hookup sites/apps. Edit: and I never once paid for them
  - didibus 6y ago
    Some of my friends definitely had difficulty dating offline. Nice and shy, might not know what to say in a first date, can seem a bit boring at first, and also just doesn't have a big social circle to meet other people. I feel online dating gave them a chance to meet some other people, pre-meet prior to first date, and than go on a first date, which they'd otherwise wouldn't have been able too. Either from never meeting the person in the first place, never asking to go out on a date, or messing up that date. That's all my personal analysis though, like I have no data here appart from a few people I know and my interpretation.

dheera 6y ago

One of the quirks about online dating products is that unlike almost every other product, success is correlated with how quickly your users delete their accounts. Users sticking around for a long time means you failed horribly at your mission. I'm really not sure how one would create a good revenue model for something like this. Many apps try a subscription-based approach and all I can say is that for someone who is earnestly looking for a partner, an annual subscription is the last thing they want.

MattGaiser 6y ago
Depends on the product. Tinder is about constantly finding fresh partners.
thekyle 6y ago
Maybe the app could partner with restaurants and offer coupons if you book the date through them.
- dheera 6y ago
  Yeah, I think connecting with the offline world might be the ticket. Also, possibly offline social events for singles, curated to groups of people that are likely compatible? The only thing is events are hard to scale, so you'd want to possibly recruit some your users to host them for you. A lot of single people love hosting events to impress and get to know other singles.
  - thekyle 6y ago
    IMO, this is why the best dating app (pre-covid) was Meetup.com
invalidOrTaken 6y ago
>I'm really not sure how one would create a good revenue model for something like this. Marriage is correlated with a lot of measures of societal health---perhaps government grants?

lalwanivikas 6y ago

Does anyone else end up feeling bitter by using these online dating apps? How do you deal with constant rejections, ghosting, not matching with anyone that you like etc.

02020202 6y ago
you, my friend, need to take the red pill.
HeyHoJoe 6y ago
Yeah, most men who use them feel this way. I met a guy one time who claimed he had been active on tinder for a year and hadn’t gotten one match. Granted he wasn’t much of a looker but that’s just rough.
- im3w1l 6y ago
  At that point it sounds like he was shadowbanned? Surely someone must have at least misswiped?
  - toyg 6y ago
    Expectation mismatch is real. Unless you pay so you can see what “lowering your standards” could bring (by looking at people who liked you even though you didn’t like them), you can go ages without ever matching, or matching with dead profiles who will never answer.
mhh__ 6y ago
I assume they're at best knowingly designed to be like that. Ignoring that the whole premise probably isn't that healthy, there's a reason why people just do it for an ego trip (predominantly women)
stared 6y ago
Well, it is the fate for almost everyone: https://medium.com/@pmigdal/tinder-anecdata-and-sankey-diagrams-c1c0e5dfff18 https://medium.com/@pmigdal/tinder-anecdata-and-sankey-diagr... Even if people get many matches in the first place, the rate of any meaningful interactions is low.

anonu 6y ago

Rate my online dating app idea: There are no profile pictures. However, you do upload pictures of yourself and are asked to rate pictures of others - possibly not in your geographic area. The AI gets a feel for what your preferences are and matches you. Granted - its all a bit superficial that its really just about how you look - but this seems to be the underlying issue with tinder: the benefits accrue to the top percentile "best looking" people. Everyone else gets (unfairly) left in the dust. Thats as far as I got... thoughts?

ironmagma 6y ago
I'm not a psychologist, but I'm pretty sure attraction is in the top 2 "need-to-haves" of a relationship. While yes, it's shallow, it's only shallow because we evolved to have this bias in the most primitive parts of our brains, which means it's important to a successful existence.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  Attraction is not just about appearances though. I don't know if you have ever experienced it, but I can assure you from personal experience it is completely possible to not find someone attractive at first meeting but become attracted to them as you get to know them.
  - ironmagma 6y ago
    That is true; it's also possible to find someone attractive in person but not in a picture, and to draw a contrast, possible to find them attractive at first but then upon meeting them, realize their personality renders them unattractive. I'm not sure what's actionable about any of these facts, though, because the visual part still seems to be the most important to people.
  - decafninja 6y ago
    While true, I feel this is more conducive in unforced, organic encounters. i.e. if you and the other person meet and interact in some other group or activity that has nothing to do with dating. In an online dating situation, you have extremely little to determine what the other person is like, so appearances (photo) becomes significantly more weighted. You look at the photo, find him/her unattractive, and move on. Whereas in a more organic situation, you may find the person unattractive at first meet, but as you interact with them, decide otherwise.

kull 6y ago

Do you remember Dating Ring [1], a startup from gimlet media? That was actually the first time I paid for a dating site. They interviewed me in person and hand picked matches. They actually gave me a few good matches and I ended up dating somebody from their match. I wish they were still around. [1] https://www.datingring.com/ https://www.datingring.com/

anonu 6y ago
> I wish they were still around The person you dated or the app?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

ogre_codes 6y ago

While I completely agree with their comments about these sites having a vested interest in showing you non-paying users, I have an issue with his conclusion. > From the ad, we can see that just 86,140 of those subscribers get married, a mere 6.2% of the people who paid the company to find them a mate. I know a lot of people who would easily drop $120 for a 6.2% chance of finding a partner in a year. These odds are not horrible.

kube-system 6y ago
> I know a lot of people who would easily drop $120 for a 6.2% chance of finding a partner in a year. But are the people who would drop $120 to find a partner the same people who belong to that 6.2%?
hawkoy 6y ago
Why not hire a salesman to do the online dating for you until they have managed to get a date offline? I think most people absolutely suck at being original or appealing in texting. Going through tinder or any dating app makes you see the worst of humanity. Scams, lot of them. Catfishers. Kids pulling prank and laughing at desperate middle-aged men. Exaggerations, too high expectations. It makes you compare with others. It makes you desperate. Just avoid it.
- solveit 6y ago
  You would have to tell your date that the person they were speaking to online was not you. And I don't think that would go over well.
  - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
    Better to be honest about having a representative / mediator than catfishing or pretending to be someone you're not to try and "win" the game, especially if you suck at it. I mean, people don't really know themselves or what they look for, generally speaking. Anyway, matchmakers are not a new concept.
  - laurent92 6y ago

amusesidewinder 6y ago

Look its a brutal truth, but looks matter and paying for a subscription isn't going to make your chances of meeting someone higher. No matter what dating app comes out, it will always be about the top 20% of men getting matches while the rest get almost nothing. Then you go on to say, but wait online dating isn't real life? Or is it? An increasing amount of people are meeting through online dating these days. I'd say it very accurately represents real life, granted personalities may not always be attractive and result in a breakup there is a looks threshold that needs to be met before anything meaningful emerges.

throwawydedbee 6y ago
You're not wrong. But I might put that as, "Looks matter to most people, because they haven't yet discovered that looks don't matter, and in fact conventional attractiveness can be a noxious poison.". I met my current (and last) wife on OKCupid. Only messaged two or three women, she the last. We've been married now for four years and get along like two peas in a pod. Luck, I guess. (I certainly had it coming.)

pintxo 6y ago

I am reminded of "Every 11 minutes a single falls in love on Parship" [1] [1] "Alle 11 Minuten verliebt sich ein Single über Parship"

fxtentacle 6y ago
What they don't tell you is that it's the same guy falling in love over and over again :p He just happens to have the attention span of a goldfish :)

dang 6y ago

If curious see also 2014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2170998 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2170998 Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1842557 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1842557 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1277626 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1277626

baccheion 6y ago

Sometimes paying seems like a good idea. More exposure on Badoo was lucrative. Same with little features on Tinder and OkCupid at certain points during their development. Most dating sites are a bad deal for males, mainly due to the gender skew. There are at least 2x as many males. The top 20-25% is then enough to gobble up all viable women (top 50%). 1 out of 2 are at least not unattractive, 1 out of 3 are outright attractive, and 1 out of 5 are hot. That is, not even out of attractive males and the women are already gone.

jfengel 6y ago
I think you'll find that women of all attractiveness levels are put off by men who outright reject half of all women as "unviable", based solely on their appearance. And that's just one dimension. If you have 2 or 3 other axes where you cut off anybody below the median (intelligence, income, politics, interest, etc.) you're quickly finding yourself looking only at a few percent of the population. And if you have no other metrics other than attractiveness, you'll find that few women wish to date you.
- baccheion 6y ago
  WTF? Half the pool was considered viable based on swipe percentages. You seem unable to properly comprehend even basics communicated. Further, the most superficial experience highest success. That is, they are most likely to lie. A high percentage of viable matches is uncommon. 1/2 minimally mutually satisfying match * 1/2 at least not unattractive * 1/2 reciprocating attractiveness = 1 out of 8 random pairings find each other minimally mutually satisfying and at least not unattractive (by their own measure of what that is; whether aesthetics, social status, money, etc). Truth.

jjones2 6y ago

If you are a male, online dating will be full of scams and very costly. Men don't always get the better end of things in life, especially in today's screwed up world.

caseysoftware 6y ago

I worked for a dating site a long time ago. The business model seems simple at first glance but the incentives of the customer and business are almost 100% in opposition: https://caseysoftware.com/blog/working-for-a-dating-website https://caseysoftware.com/blog/working-for-a-dating-website

taigeair 6y ago
We created a dating app that tries to address this. We leverage an entrance fee to reduce that conflict of interest. Once someone pays the entrance fee, we have little incentive to keep them single and looking. We actually want them to go on dates and make a margin on the dates we book. https://stories.fairytrail.app/reinventing-the-online-dating-business-model-together/ https://stories.fairytrail.app/reinventing-the-online-dating...
- mandelbrotwurst 6y ago
  Someone who is booking dates through an app is single and looking.
- renewiltord 6y ago
  If you make a margin on dates you book then isn't your optimal strategy to get people on dates that won't turn into relationships? That way they keep booking dates? The sign up fee makes sense. The per-date margin seems to be diametrically opposed.
  - jaggirs 6y ago
    Still, it is an incentive to create dating opportunities. And what kind of date would not result in a relationship, but make you want to go on another date? It would need to be good and bad at the same time. Maybe a good date with the wrong person.. It sounds really hard to exploit this.
    - dkersten 6y ago
      It incentivises setting up a lot of dates, but with the wrong people.

moron4hire 6y ago

Back years ago, I had tried eHarmony. When this article first came out, I had read it and started tracking my own numbers. It pretty much matched what the article is saying perfectly. It was a long time ago and I certainly don't have the data anymore. IIRC, there used to be a tell on the site where careful inspection of the user's profile page would tell you whether or not they had a full, paid profile (it was something like the background color of one of the fields being slightly different). Once I discounted the unpaid profiles from my numbers, it was actually a pretty high percentage of people that would respond, go through the several layers of canned intro questionaires, a few back-and-forth messages, and finally agreeing to a date. The end result was something like 25% of the people with whom I matched whom also had paying profiles would end up in a date. But if you were just tracking "percentage of 'matches' that lead to dates", it was something like 0.1%. Basically, it boiled down to eHarmony's system giving out less than 1 paying profile per day out of the 5 or 7 or 10 or whatever they gave you. You had to be diligent, working it every day, to get that number above 1 per week. Filter that down to 25%, it was about a date a month. It was exhausting. I had better luck talking to random people at social events. I met a few people through Craigslist by gamifying my posts, stuff like "to prove you're not a bot, you have to decrypt this ROT13 message and copy it in your email to me" [0]. I actually dated a woman for a little while whom I met when she came to my door looking for donations for some charity. But really, getting out of bars and going out to specific social events, getting into a group of people with whom I became friends, and letting them introduce me to women, was the ultimate key to finding my wife of 6 years. [0] Aaaah, Craigslist personals ads. It's all fun and games, until you meet the crazy one who tries to get you into a fight at a biker bar.

CapricornNoble 6y ago

I miss OKCupid's blog. A couple of critiques though: 1. Objectives. The article might be correct if your objective is marriage. If your objective is to schedule as much low-effort sex as possible, or even just juggling multiple long-term relationships, especially if you operate over a wide geographic area......expanding your search online is invaluable. Treat paid sites as just another tool in your harem management toolbox. 2. Stale profiles. This is why I really liked the $COUNTRYNAME_Cupid websites. They take more effort to put a profile together, AND they have a "last logged in" feature, so when you do a profile search "No smokers, no kids, etc..." you don't have to worry about messaging people who haven't touched the site in 9 months, and it's easy to ignore blank profiles. Also, typically women with free accounts will "poke" you or view your profile, and that webpage listing those women is where you start your screening.

ordinary 6y ago
> I miss OKCupid's blog. For anyone who might want to re-read them, gwern archived the old OKCupid blog here: https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/okcupid/ https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/okcupid/
RhodoYolo 6y ago
Hinge took that niche now though

actuator 6y ago

I think it is irresistible for a dating app to not milk on human vulnerability and emotions. Look at Tinder, the paid plans started out with features like changing location, unlimited likes, more superlikes etc. All of these seem fair as they don't necessarily disadvantage you if you are not paying, your rank in recommended profiles more or less remains the same. I recently saw that Tinder introduced one more tier now where even your likes are boosted if you are in the paid plan. This would make the app kind of useless for anyone who is not paying and is not hot enough to be ranked at top. Sidenote: I wonder why OkCupid deleted their old posts. I loved posts like these and others like Race and reply rate. If it was because of not wanting to offend someone, it is even worse that we are pushing things like these under the rug.

dvtrn 6y ago
I wonder why OkCupid deleted their old posts. Popular theory is their acquisition by the same company that owns every other dating site on the planet had something to do with it.
- vanderZwan 6y ago
  Given that at first they only deleted this blog post and left the rest up, I'm pretty certain that is indeed it.
  - joenot443 6y ago
    They deleted lots of others as well.
    - vanderZwan 6y ago
      Yes, later they did. But at first this one blog post got singled out, immediately after acquisition.
tasogare 6y ago
> I wonder why OkCupid deleted their old posts Political correctness. Hopefully there are copies around the web, those posts were very very interesting.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

xenihn 6y ago

I still don't know of any happy long-term couples in my social network who met through OLD. The closest is a friend who is poly, meets all of her partners online, and then has a heavily one-sided poly relationship, since it's much, much harder for the guy to get any side-action. This last guy has made it to two years, which is a record. Online dating is perfect for finding guys like that. The biggest problem with OLD is that nearly everyone actively using it has problems. Problems that need to be addressed with time, effort, therapy, psychiatric counseling, and/or medication. Also potentially surgery, if a pitbull mauled your face as a child or something. Don't feel bad if you aren't finding what you want on OLD, because you don't actually want to date the people who don't want to date you. And they're completely justified in not wanting to date you. You shouldn't want to date yourself either. You're both using dating apps, after all. That means there's lots of room for self-improvement, for everyone involved. Just being on the app is a red flag. If I had to succinctly describe the vast majority of people who aren't using OLD for hookups (without digging into underlying causes), who spend extended periods of time unhappily single, searching in vain for a partner on dating apps: men: too shy women: too picky

drstewart 6y ago
Wow, this is a horrible and patronizing worldview
- xenihn 6y ago
  OLD isn't the world.

kenneth 6y ago

Meeting people in the real world like we have done for millennia is highly underrated. I don't understand the obsession with dating apps. It's a horrible way to meet people. Young people's inability to approach potential partners the old school way has been a boon for those who actually have the balls to do so. I face so little competition these days, it's become real easy to stand out from the pack and get everything I want, more often than not.

devoloution 6y ago
What is the old school way? Just a random approach in the streets or in a bar?
- kenneth 6y ago
  In a non-creepy way. Probably not on the street, but sure anywhere out where people might be social and open to striking up a conversation (bar, restaurant, park, class, whatever). Don't make it an "approach," just strike up a conversation and if you hit it off, connect so you can develop something.
  - tidenly 6y ago
    Maybe this is a generational thing, but outside of clubbing there is basically no situation I'm regularly in where it would not be weird for me to randomly strike up a conversation with a stranger.
    - theonemind 6y ago
      It's probably weird when anybody does it in most of those contexts. Just be attractive and the other party will get over it.
    - mPReDiToR 6y ago
      I'm male, 45, and in the UK. If I'm shopping I'll smile and say "thanks" for any little consideration (moving aside, putting a "between shoppers bar" on the conveyor, holding a door, etc.), and when waiting for something I'll say something "chit chatty" to the person next to me, male or female, old or young. Sometimes it will be met with a conversation, mostly a polite reply but no chat, others will be shocked that a stranger spoke to them. Anything can be used as a conversational gambit. I think "how about dem Yankees?" comes from an old film. The point is that it doesn't cost anything to be rebuffed. Being open, approachable, and friendly is worth learning. Not being creepy, slimy, or a Lounge Lizard helps. Just speak to people.

toyg 6y ago

I bet Bumble is more successful as a social network for women than as a dating app. I’ve not had a single chat on it and I don’t expect to ever get one. But hey, you can swipe right on Sharon Stone and a bunch of hot instagrammers! A man would probably get more value out of an hour on a random onlyfans than a year on Bumble.

gabereiser 6y ago
It’s not rocket science to get a response on there. Ditch selfies. Show your best self. Smile. You’ll get a match... Bumble is definitely more popular among my female friends. There are a lot of “fake” profiles too, profiles created with the intention of getting you to follow their Instagram, but there are real profiles out there with real people on the other side. Bumble is one of the many dating apps I tried after my divorce and it’s the one I have the most success with. I’m not a model so Tinder doesn’t work. I’m not interested in diving into another marriage so eharmony and hinge don’t work. I tried the league but I’d rather eat dog shit than listen to a 1%’er cry about money problems. Woman just want dogs. Men just want a woman. Men, get a dog.
- Fnoord 6y ago
  > Woman just want dogs. Men just want a woman. Men, get a dog. Even if you're a cat person? Doesn't make sense. There must be women who like cats, too. I at least found one. Not within a dating app though. Unless you consider World of Warcraft a dating app, that is.
  - cinquemb 6y ago
    mmorpgs are some of the biggest dating apps in the world
    - Fnoord 6y ago
      Possibly, but I wasn't specifically looking, and she was actually already in a relationship when we met (we started out as friends), and wasn't specifically looking either.

TaylorAlexander 6y ago

Interesting considering OkCupid has recently come out with an even more expensive tier for their app. The best features are now twice as expensive as their “normal” paid plan. Meanwhile they’ve redesigned the app in a way that seems less useful to me. Users always hate app redesigns so maybe it’s just something I need to get used to, but they’ve eliminated the ability to do a custom fine grained search and see a bucket of results. Anyway I was a paying customer until I noticed they came out with even more expensive plans. I don’t want to be nickled and dimed so I’m back on free.

salamimonger 6y ago
OkCupid was bought by Match.com

ScottBurson 6y ago

I met my wife online, in 1993. On Usenet. I kid you not: it was in alt.psychology.personality. She was trying to figure out whether she was a Four or a Five on the Enneagram, so I emailed her "Well, do you have a worse problem with depression or paranoia?" Not your usual pick-up line :-)

mantap 6y ago

Paying for dating makes complete sense. Women want to receive less spam. Men want there to be less competition from spammers. By adjusting the price that men have to pay you can solve both of these problems. I used okcupid back in 2010 when this was written. It was a great website for taking quizzes and personality tests but far too noisy to effective for meeting people without becoming a spammer.

dane-pgp 6y ago
Spam and fake accounts are the big problems to solve for seemingly all popular sites, and unfortunately they are especially hard to solve in decentralised systems. Do people still remember Geek Code blocks?[0] In theory, all existing online dating services could be replaced by a global decentralised system, where people upload a somewhat standardised dating profile[1] and crawlers would compete to find as many of these as possible and match compatible people. Of course they would also compete in terms of how nicely they presented this data and how easy it was to create a profile. One approach for stopping spam would be to limit the number of messages that each profile (owner) can send per time period. For example, the profile could contain a "send-introductions-to" field, specifying the node that stores their inbox, and a "max-introductions-per-month" field which tells a sending node how many other introductions a user can make while still being allowed to contact them. As usual with federated systems, there is then the problem of nodes deciding which other nodes to federate with, but it should be fairly easy to test if a node is not enforcing spamminess limits. The other problem is stopping people from generating profiles on multiple nodes, which might require either a centralised service or some sort of economic system like "proof of burn"[2], unless email providers were to all start issuing time-limited anonymous tokens. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geek_Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geek_Code [1] I'm imagining using the taxonomy of Wikidata, allowing statements like { "has": "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q202466 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q202466" } [2] https://99bitcoins.com/what-is-proof-of-burn/ https://99bitcoins.com/what-is-proof-of-burn/

martin_a 6y ago

Personal story time! I've tried Parship this year, which is quite "popular" (or at least advertised a lot) in Germany. I'm paying around 50€/month for a membership for one year and have cancelled the membership now. I don't think it's worth it. From the outside, and also at the start, it's very professional. There's a lengthy personal test and everything has some kind of class. They really try not to be some lower-level "fuckbuddy app" or something like that. I liked that image because I'm not looking for something like that and I thought the price would "filter" out all the people who are just in for a quick chance. So I really took my courage and tried to make good first steps with the womens I had high "matching points" with. I read their profiles, tried two write a nice first message, asked questions about what they wrote in their profile, sometimes pointed out similarities. Possibly I'm very clumsy in doing that, but I think very few people are actually "good" in "dating" (probably not those an apps anyway?!?) so I thought it might be good enough. Anxiety and low self-esteem don't really help much either with all of that. Quick note: Parship will not show you an image of the partner right from the start. It's blurred until you approve that your chat partner may see it. I like that because as someone who's probably not that good looking, this somewhat helps putting personality before looks. What I quickly found out is that there are lots of dead profiles. Last activity weeks ago. Nevertheless, parship is happy to recommend those profiles in-app and via mails ("If you find your love today, it might be because of our recommendations" - actual mail title), but messages to those profiles were usually never read. I also found out that women seem to be massively getting spammed. One woman wrote me and told me she'd really love to answer every message but she received over 50 messages in a day, sometimes from guys hundreds of kilometres away, and she would just have to make a cut somewhere. (Obviously she made a cut at/with me.) Not sure if those guys from hundreds of kilometres are actually ready to leave everything behind for da date, seems more like some high-level "fuckbuddyism". Something, that might be related to this, is that women are active on the platform, like "last activity yesterday", but will still not read your messages and not visit your profile. Not sure if they are simply not interested or also overwhelmed. Besides that you have the same problem with premium/non-premium accounts. I've received messages from woman who wrote that they are not able to read any further messages from me, because they have no premium account and are not planning to buy one. As I am somewhat brief in my first message I will obviously not post my postal adress, mail address and mobile phone number. Also rumors are that Parship will ban your account if you do that. Not sure though if it's true. Anyway, I'd find it impolite at least to "spam" somebody with that. From the outside you can not see which accounts are premium and which not. Which means, in my case, that I'm having a good look at the profile, trying to write a good first message and making a good first impression (while fighting hordes of anxiety) only to receive a "nice message, sorry that I've got no premium. bye."-type answer. I asked Parship support about this and obviously it's not planned to mark non-premium accounts as such. Another thing I found "complicated": Parship offers you various different methods of contacting the other person. You can like single entries in their profile, you can simply message them (premium function, I think), you can send "ice breakers" (choose five images, see what the other person chose), you can also "smile" at people (can also add a message here - that's what I'm usually doing) and you can also have video chats (never tried that). This makes using the platform somewhat complicated. Is something better than the other? What should I use for the first contact? Smile only? Should I allow my chat partner to see my image right from the start? Or only after we wrote? What to do with "ice breaker results"? Are two matches good? Bad? Something to talk about? Why would I even video chat through parship and not trough WhatsApp or something else? Who knows? I surely don't. Parship also has a message board for its members. Topics are... well... recurring. "Why does nobody write me back?", "Do you like my pictures?", "How big should my search radius be?". All in all it's a mixture of very old topics, where Parship itself also engaged and tried to help, and mainly dealing with rejection. Not sure if that helps anybody, it just feels like they felt the need to have a message board somewhere back in the past. So, after almost a year, 600€ less in my wallet, lots of times getting turned down I wonder if I should just have invested that money in treating myself with some nice dinners and going to a bar every other week. Maybe I'd have met a woman that way. My expectations, everybody on Parship is really into serious dating, has been disappointed. It's not that it was unbelievable high, but I wonder that it seems to be as low as is. For Parship it's fine I think. There will be the next guy like me who feels like something is missing and that "serious online dating" might be a good way to find what he's looking for. Last words: If you're single woman from Baden-Württemberg (Germany), drop me a comment. I've got two cat and enjoy writing long comments on Hacker News. Maybe we'll fit. :-)

spacebanana7 6y ago

Online dating is incredibly underpriced. This is especially true for zero sum purchases, such as boosts to the top of the profile deck in a given area, where the transaction anxiety felt by most users causes outsized rewards to users who make in app purchases. On Tinder, £2 boosts can elevate an average male profile from 0.5 matches per day to 5-10 matches per 30 minute boost period. Roll this out with a decent conversion funnel and for £100/mo that average male profile will readily get more dates than a reasonable life schedule can accommodate.

postsantum 6y ago
I agree. Tinder sells dates at a discounted price, not relationships

hahaiscjaaka 6y ago

Why would anyone pay to meet people if you can just go out to a bar/concert/social activity and meet people for free???