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Can someone explain the seeming asymmetry between men's and women's experiences in online dating? Average looking and better women seem to get huge amounts of

Can someone explain the seeming asymmetry between men's and women's experiences in online dating? Average looking and better women seem to get huge amounts of matches: if you're better than average this can be hundreds per day in a big city. Going by my own experience and friends experiences, as a guy, even if you're better than average looks with a good job, nice photos etc, are lucky to get a handful of matches per week. So what I don't understand then is if all these women are getting huge amounts of matches, how can men be getting less matches? Is it literally only the top 0.1% of men that are getting the majority of the matches? i.e. are women who are say 7-8/10 on the looks scale only matching with guys who are 9.5/10 on the looks scale, so guys who are 7-8/10 getting zero matches?

carabiner 6y ago
> So what I don't understand then is if all these women are getting huge amounts of matches, how can men be getting less matches? Is it literally only the top 0.1% of men that are getting the majority of the matches? Yes, basically massive "wealth inequality" among men as expressed by Gini coefficient: https://qz.com/1051462/these-statistics-show-why-its-so-hard-to-be-an-average-man-on-dating-apps/ https://qz.com/1051462/these-statistics-show-why-its-so-hard...
throwaway39938 6y ago
> So what I don't understand then is if all these women are getting huge amounts of matches, how can men be getting less matches? I don't understand what you're confused about. Men swipe on a large proportion of women. Women swipe on a small proportion of men. So most women's swipes will be reciprocated, most men's won't be. Not sure why you can't see how it would work?
- jandrese 6y ago
  More to the point I think the population of men on those services grossly outweighs the population of women. The women have to be selective because they don't have time to engage with each of the hundreds of responses they get. It might be interesting to run a dating service that limited signups to an even gender ratio. Or at least didn't let the imbalance grow more than a modest amount. Of course then most men would complain that they can't even sign up. You'd have to be very aggressive about culling idle accounts.
  - dane-pgp 6y ago
    Alternatively, the site could limit the number of introductions that users could send per month. For example, if there were 10 men for every 1 woman, but men could only contact one woman per month (but women could contact a new man every day), women might be willing to give those introductions more consideration. In fact, rather than hard-coding those rate limits (or generating them algorithmically from the gender distribution of accounts) it might be viable to let each user decide on the limit themselves. It may not be a good idea to show users the specific rate limit that another user has chosen, though, as that number might give all sorts of weird signalling about how "desirable" they consider themselves to be.
    - jandrese 6y ago
      Maybe, but I think that would result in the supermodel looking ones still getting clobbered with requests while the majority of women get nothing.
      - thekyle 6y ago
        Right, but isn't that the current situation for men?
      - dane-pgp 6y ago
        If men had the choice of messaging one supermodel-looking woman per month (with no guarantee of a reply) or, say, four better-than-average-looking women, I think eventually they would learn to be more realistic in who they approach. In any case, if the supermodels can set this spamminess/selectiveness parameter for themselves, they can tune it to a value where they don't get clobbered (unless they like the validation of being clobbered).
    - M2Ys4U 6y ago
      Bumble's whole premise is that (for heterosexual matches at least) women must send the first message. For the men who were using the apps (and talking about it) in my social circle it doesn't seem like it improved much from this side of the gender divide. YMMV of course.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
wolco2 6y ago
Women don't use dating apps as much because they can't vet the candidate through social circles first. Men don't understand socially matching are more important compared to looks within a few points.
- thisisnico 6y ago
  Some of the absolute BEST women to date (Personality, Character, Career, Family, Attractiveness) that I know, always typically prefer dating through social circles. Almost all of the women I know, especially women that are extremely attractive, with average or below average attractive partners, are through social circles. A friend of a friend. These are men that typically receive near zero likes on online dating platforms, yet, in the real world, can do extremely well with women because of their character (Charming, Funny) etc. This I know Anecdotally of course.
  - aspaceman 6y ago
    Yeah this is a good point. All these comments about dating sites are true, and they really suck. Which is a great reason to get off dating sites if you can. They make every problem with dating much worse. Outside them the problems aren't quite as bad.
  - the_only_law 6y ago
    I think this, in part explains why some people find “real life” as despairing as online. I haven’t had a “social circle since HS”.
Apes 6y ago
There are so many men who employ a strategy of just bombarding every single woman on the platform. This results in women getting dozens to hundreds of extremely low quality matches for every quality match. If this somehow doesn't cause the woman to just give up immediately, then she's at most going to only look at most at a dozen or so of those matches before she gives up, and they're almost all going to all be garbage. This means that there at best only a 1-10% chance of a woman even seeing a quality message directed at her, given the sheer volume of garbage being directed at them. It's the same reason why you don't notice the genuinely good deals in the massive amounts of advertisements you're bombarded with every day. The sheer volume of noise just makes the whole system far more useless than you would expect.
- meiraleal 6y ago
  The point in discussion is what is a quality message? And what is considered garbage? While men think they are unattractive when they don't get matches in dating apps, women think they mencare unattractive when they can't match the best looking guys in the app.
  - decafninja 6y ago
    Do most women on online dating sites care about the quality of a message? And even if they do, how much quality does a man need to invest in drafting a message before he hits the point of diminishing returns? I imagine a scenario that could happen frequently is that man new to online dating signs up, initially puts good effort into messaging select women he finds attractive, gets ignored a gazillion times, then throws in the towel and starts shotgunning. Or gives up on online dating altogether.
mellosouls 6y ago
Yes, it's long been known in scurrilous "manosphere" sections of the internet that "80% of the women go for 20% of the men" on dating apps (the 80/20 rule is an oft-quoted one but intended probably more as illustrative than researched). It's an unpleasant and politically incorrect idea that despite clearly being the experience of most normal men you talk to about these things, is probably career-damaging to academics who would research it honestly so you see it backed up in that regard either by amateur blogs or very cautiously worded "respectable" research. Think of harems in the old days and alpha males in some species in the animal kingdom. Tinder and the like (so the theory goes) apply a massive magnifier affect to the natural tendency of "elite" men to clear up. Side note: the tactics of average men mentioned elsewhere in these comments such as swiping on everything, and similar techniques are effects of this phenomenon, not the cause.
- amelius 6y ago
  I think the main problem is that the prime selection criterion for most women is not looks. For women, online dating has a rather small signal to noise ratio. So then they are left with choosing the top % based on looks.
  - lumberjack 6y ago
    >I think the main problem is that the prime selection criterion for most women is not looks. Says who? The men who do best with women are the most physically attractive. No other demographic does better. You can have $10M in the bank and still not elicit the same kind of attraction as the stereotypical tall, dark and handsome white man.
- jandrese 6y ago
  It seems natural that the women would be highly selective as they have a huge number of potential matches to sift through before choosing. Maybe a better question is: why are there so many more men than women on dating services? The ratio seems completely out of whack. It's not like there are 10 boys born per every girl, so somewhere along the way the women are filtering out. Perhaps women prefer face to face interaction? These studies seem to be focused on a symptom instead of the cause.
11thEarlOfMar 6y ago
Thanks to evolution, it's in the psyche of both men and women that the men compete with each other for the attention of the women. This plays out in the dating forum, both online and offline. The author understood this, apparently explicitly, and took the time to successfully craft a 'Very, very creative' initial message to the most attractive account he could find in 3 minutes.
- jvsg 6y ago
  a.k.a the tinder jesters. I think it takes loosing a big dump of self esteem to "compete" for attention in this way.
slothtrop 6y ago
I met my now-wife through online dating, and used online dating over a year. I'll share my experience before my theory. I never used matches. I assume this is some variation on the "like" or "swipe-right" system. Women get bombarded with these. Conversely, women don't a high ratio of high quality messages. I maybe looked at the compatibility score if it's there (e.g. OKCupid), read through the profiles, and if there was enough to grab my interest I'd write a message that at least makes some reference to what's mentioned in their profile. I got a response 8-9/10 times. Personally I think I look average enough and don't have amazing conversation skills, I just put in the work to send thoughtful messages. As to why the match system doesn't work, the sheer amount of noise in online dating (and over-representation of men, I think) is such that these "match" systems amount to glancing through a ton of pictures and picking the best-looking ones. Particularly since profiles are best fairly compact, and don't tell you a ton about a person at the onset. You're a complete stranger to women on these platforms, with 0 trust value to your name, and so actually having a meaningful interaction is a great way to expedite that trust. You won't get there with "hey babe", "nice pic", "nice outfit", "nice smile". I mean, maybe you can if you're one of the fortunate few to cut through the noise and get someone's interest on the strength of your "playboy" looking mug. But most likely, it's a weak approach. EDIT: worth taking a good picture of yourself. Get a second opinion on it.
- tdfx 6y ago
  > worth taking a good picture of yourself. Get a second opinion on it. Wow, this 1000%. Every time I hear a guy complaining about how bad their online dating experience is I ask to see their pictures. It's almost always cringeworthy what they selected. Another underlying problem is that people who aren't of above average attractiveness don't like having their photo taken. Then they have less pictures to select from and end up settling for some really awful ones. As parent poster stated, please get feedback from multiple people on your photos, particularly people of the gender you're targeting. You will most likely be surprised at their feedback.
  - everdrive 6y ago
    >Every time I hear a guy complaining about how bad their online dating experience is I ask to see their pictures. How often are you having these conversations?
everdrive 6y ago
Men and women don't have equivalent interest. Women are really only interested in men that are well above average.
- tdfx 6y ago
  I don't think that's necessarily true. The economics of online dating seem fairly straightforward. Given a pool of men that are willing to speak to them, women will focus their attention on the highest value men in that pool. Unfortunately for men, other men set their "value floor" for women well below their estimation of themselves, leading average men to entertain conversations with below average women, whereas below average women are still only interested in engaging with average or higher men.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Kalium 6y ago
> Can someone explain the seeming asymmetry between men's and women's experiences in online dating? The key factor is that dating app userbases are often 80% to 90% men. Couple this with the inequality others point to, and you get a very toxic outcome. Most women are absolutely overwhelmed, and most men are starving for crumbs of attention. The experiences are so wildly different as to be unimaginable to most people. So people don't develop strong empathy for their counterparts.
intended 6y ago
Men swipe more = Women get far more choices. The natural inclination based on this alone would be to be picky. This will then set up other second order and third order effects.
jl2718 6y ago
Because the active users are almost all male.
sleepysysadmin 6y ago
>Can someone explain the seeming asymmetry between men's and women's experiences in online dating? Different use cases. Men are there to find a date. They mostly fail because the vast majority of women are not looking for a date. Reapply whats happening to real life. Vast majority of women don't engage men on online dating. That's the same offline. Women can find their dates through their social circles; social circles tend to be small compared to online dating but does the job. Million $ question, what is online dating for women? It's about self-esteem or new choices. Say she's in a relationship with a guy and it's not exactly working out. Well she can join online dating and look at the options. There's a break point around age 25-30 though. That's the age where women lose the driver seat in dating and men get the seat. Yet women don't know it or something. This creates a divide that really confuses women, they've enjoyed their control. They still see tons of connections. Surely they are still driving? nope. This is what leads to historic low marriage, fertility, and birth rate. So bumble was created to reverse it. women have to make the first move. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bumble_(app) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bumble_(app) Everyone knows how that's going. Badly.

carabiner 6y ago

> So what I don't understand then is if all these women are getting huge amounts of matches, how can men be getting less matches? Is it literally only the top 0.1% of men that are getting the majority of the matches? Yes, basically massive "wealth inequality" among men as expressed by Gini coefficient: https://qz.com/1051462/these-statistics-show-why-its-so-hard-to-be-an-average-man-on-dating-apps/ https://qz.com/1051462/these-statistics-show-why-its-so-hard...

throwaway39938 6y ago

> So what I don't understand then is if all these women are getting huge amounts of matches, how can men be getting less matches? I don't understand what you're confused about. Men swipe on a large proportion of women. Women swipe on a small proportion of men. So most women's swipes will be reciprocated, most men's won't be. Not sure why you can't see how it would work?

jandrese 6y ago
More to the point I think the population of men on those services grossly outweighs the population of women. The women have to be selective because they don't have time to engage with each of the hundreds of responses they get. It might be interesting to run a dating service that limited signups to an even gender ratio. Or at least didn't let the imbalance grow more than a modest amount. Of course then most men would complain that they can't even sign up. You'd have to be very aggressive about culling idle accounts.
- dane-pgp 6y ago
  Alternatively, the site could limit the number of introductions that users could send per month. For example, if there were 10 men for every 1 woman, but men could only contact one woman per month (but women could contact a new man every day), women might be willing to give those introductions more consideration. In fact, rather than hard-coding those rate limits (or generating them algorithmically from the gender distribution of accounts) it might be viable to let each user decide on the limit themselves. It may not be a good idea to show users the specific rate limit that another user has chosen, though, as that number might give all sorts of weird signalling about how "desirable" they consider themselves to be.
  - jandrese 6y ago
    Maybe, but I think that would result in the supermodel looking ones still getting clobbered with requests while the majority of women get nothing.
    - thekyle 6y ago
      Right, but isn't that the current situation for men?
    - dane-pgp 6y ago
      If men had the choice of messaging one supermodel-looking woman per month (with no guarantee of a reply) or, say, four better-than-average-looking women, I think eventually they would learn to be more realistic in who they approach. In any case, if the supermodels can set this spamminess/selectiveness parameter for themselves, they can tune it to a value where they don't get clobbered (unless they like the validation of being clobbered).
  - M2Ys4U 6y ago
    Bumble's whole premise is that (for heterosexual matches at least) women must send the first message. For the men who were using the apps (and talking about it) in my social circle it doesn't seem like it improved much from this side of the gender divide. YMMV of course.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

wolco2 6y ago

Women don't use dating apps as much because they can't vet the candidate through social circles first. Men don't understand socially matching are more important compared to looks within a few points.

thisisnico 6y ago
Some of the absolute BEST women to date (Personality, Character, Career, Family, Attractiveness) that I know, always typically prefer dating through social circles. Almost all of the women I know, especially women that are extremely attractive, with average or below average attractive partners, are through social circles. A friend of a friend. These are men that typically receive near zero likes on online dating platforms, yet, in the real world, can do extremely well with women because of their character (Charming, Funny) etc. This I know Anecdotally of course.
- aspaceman 6y ago
  Yeah this is a good point. All these comments about dating sites are true, and they really suck. Which is a great reason to get off dating sites if you can. They make every problem with dating much worse. Outside them the problems aren't quite as bad.
- the_only_law 6y ago
  I think this, in part explains why some people find “real life” as despairing as online. I haven’t had a “social circle since HS”.

Apes 6y ago

There are so many men who employ a strategy of just bombarding every single woman on the platform. This results in women getting dozens to hundreds of extremely low quality matches for every quality match. If this somehow doesn't cause the woman to just give up immediately, then she's at most going to only look at most at a dozen or so of those matches before she gives up, and they're almost all going to all be garbage. This means that there at best only a 1-10% chance of a woman even seeing a quality message directed at her, given the sheer volume of garbage being directed at them. It's the same reason why you don't notice the genuinely good deals in the massive amounts of advertisements you're bombarded with every day. The sheer volume of noise just makes the whole system far more useless than you would expect.

meiraleal 6y ago
The point in discussion is what is a quality message? And what is considered garbage? While men think they are unattractive when they don't get matches in dating apps, women think they mencare unattractive when they can't match the best looking guys in the app.
- decafninja 6y ago
  Do most women on online dating sites care about the quality of a message? And even if they do, how much quality does a man need to invest in drafting a message before he hits the point of diminishing returns? I imagine a scenario that could happen frequently is that man new to online dating signs up, initially puts good effort into messaging select women he finds attractive, gets ignored a gazillion times, then throws in the towel and starts shotgunning. Or gives up on online dating altogether.

mellosouls 6y ago

Yes, it's long been known in scurrilous "manosphere" sections of the internet that "80% of the women go for 20% of the men" on dating apps (the 80/20 rule is an oft-quoted one but intended probably more as illustrative than researched). It's an unpleasant and politically incorrect idea that despite clearly being the experience of most normal men you talk to about these things, is probably career-damaging to academics who would research it honestly so you see it backed up in that regard either by amateur blogs or very cautiously worded "respectable" research. Think of harems in the old days and alpha males in some species in the animal kingdom. Tinder and the like (so the theory goes) apply a massive magnifier affect to the natural tendency of "elite" men to clear up. Side note: the tactics of average men mentioned elsewhere in these comments such as swiping on everything, and similar techniques are effects of this phenomenon, not the cause.

amelius 6y ago
I think the main problem is that the prime selection criterion for most women is not looks. For women, online dating has a rather small signal to noise ratio. So then they are left with choosing the top % based on looks.
- lumberjack 6y ago
  >I think the main problem is that the prime selection criterion for most women is not looks. Says who? The men who do best with women are the most physically attractive. No other demographic does better. You can have $10M in the bank and still not elicit the same kind of attraction as the stereotypical tall, dark and handsome white man.
jandrese 6y ago
It seems natural that the women would be highly selective as they have a huge number of potential matches to sift through before choosing. Maybe a better question is: why are there so many more men than women on dating services? The ratio seems completely out of whack. It's not like there are 10 boys born per every girl, so somewhere along the way the women are filtering out. Perhaps women prefer face to face interaction? These studies seem to be focused on a symptom instead of the cause.

11thEarlOfMar 6y ago

Thanks to evolution, it's in the psyche of both men and women that the men compete with each other for the attention of the women. This plays out in the dating forum, both online and offline. The author understood this, apparently explicitly, and took the time to successfully craft a 'Very, very creative' initial message to the most attractive account he could find in 3 minutes.

jvsg 6y ago
a.k.a the tinder jesters. I think it takes loosing a big dump of self esteem to "compete" for attention in this way.

slothtrop 6y ago

I met my now-wife through online dating, and used online dating over a year. I'll share my experience before my theory. I never used matches. I assume this is some variation on the "like" or "swipe-right" system. Women get bombarded with these. Conversely, women don't a high ratio of high quality messages. I maybe looked at the compatibility score if it's there (e.g. OKCupid), read through the profiles, and if there was enough to grab my interest I'd write a message that at least makes some reference to what's mentioned in their profile. I got a response 8-9/10 times. Personally I think I look average enough and don't have amazing conversation skills, I just put in the work to send thoughtful messages. As to why the match system doesn't work, the sheer amount of noise in online dating (and over-representation of men, I think) is such that these "match" systems amount to glancing through a ton of pictures and picking the best-looking ones. Particularly since profiles are best fairly compact, and don't tell you a ton about a person at the onset. You're a complete stranger to women on these platforms, with 0 trust value to your name, and so actually having a meaningful interaction is a great way to expedite that trust. You won't get there with "hey babe", "nice pic", "nice outfit", "nice smile". I mean, maybe you can if you're one of the fortunate few to cut through the noise and get someone's interest on the strength of your "playboy" looking mug. But most likely, it's a weak approach. EDIT: worth taking a good picture of yourself. Get a second opinion on it.

tdfx 6y ago
> worth taking a good picture of yourself. Get a second opinion on it. Wow, this 1000%. Every time I hear a guy complaining about how bad their online dating experience is I ask to see their pictures. It's almost always cringeworthy what they selected. Another underlying problem is that people who aren't of above average attractiveness don't like having their photo taken. Then they have less pictures to select from and end up settling for some really awful ones. As parent poster stated, please get feedback from multiple people on your photos, particularly people of the gender you're targeting. You will most likely be surprised at their feedback.
- everdrive 6y ago
  >Every time I hear a guy complaining about how bad their online dating experience is I ask to see their pictures. How often are you having these conversations?

everdrive 6y ago

Men and women don't have equivalent interest. Women are really only interested in men that are well above average.

tdfx 6y ago
I don't think that's necessarily true. The economics of online dating seem fairly straightforward. Given a pool of men that are willing to speak to them, women will focus their attention on the highest value men in that pool. Unfortunately for men, other men set their "value floor" for women well below their estimation of themselves, leading average men to entertain conversations with below average women, whereas below average women are still only interested in engaging with average or higher men.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Kalium 6y ago

> Can someone explain the seeming asymmetry between men's and women's experiences in online dating? The key factor is that dating app userbases are often 80% to 90% men. Couple this with the inequality others point to, and you get a very toxic outcome. Most women are absolutely overwhelmed, and most men are starving for crumbs of attention. The experiences are so wildly different as to be unimaginable to most people. So people don't develop strong empathy for their counterparts.

intended 6y ago

Men swipe more = Women get far more choices. The natural inclination based on this alone would be to be picky. This will then set up other second order and third order effects.

jl2718 6y ago

Because the active users are almost all male.

sleepysysadmin 6y ago

>Can someone explain the seeming asymmetry between men's and women's experiences in online dating? Different use cases. Men are there to find a date. They mostly fail because the vast majority of women are not looking for a date. Reapply whats happening to real life. Vast majority of women don't engage men on online dating. That's the same offline. Women can find their dates through their social circles; social circles tend to be small compared to online dating but does the job. Million $ question, what is online dating for women? It's about self-esteem or new choices. Say she's in a relationship with a guy and it's not exactly working out. Well she can join online dating and look at the options. There's a break point around age 25-30 though. That's the age where women lose the driver seat in dating and men get the seat. Yet women don't know it or something. This creates a divide that really confuses women, they've enjoyed their control. They still see tons of connections. Surely they are still driving? nope. This is what leads to historic low marriage, fertility, and birth rate. So bumble was created to reverse it. women have to make the first move. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bumble_(app) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bumble_(app) Everyone knows how that's going. Badly.