39 ms·

Hinge and Its Implementation of the Gale–Shapley algorithm

117 points by kaashmonee 4y ago

armchairhacker 4y ago
Dating apps are so bad, the ratio of men:women matches would impress a red-pilled 4channer. Most men get somewhere like 0-4 matches a week and most women get somewhere like 100-1000. That’s a 25x difference best-case scenario and often it’s over 100x. Which is kind of insane considering there are about 50/50 men to women ratio in real life. People say “the 20% top men get 80% of matches” but it’s worse than that. The 20% top men may get something reasonable like 3-4 matches a day, but your average women is getting something crazy like 1 match every 15 minutes. Because a lot of men like to swipe right on nearly everyone and buy passes which get them unlimited swipes. And most women get extremely choosy and swipe right on only the super handsome nearly-perfect men, but you can’t even blame them when they have literally 1,000 matches. On top of that, the bios suck. Even on Hinge. You can’t base someone off of 6 pictures and 3 quotes. If you’re not judging them on plain attractiveness / photogenics, you’re judging them on one random quote or minor character trait you relate to. Online dating sucks. You’re much better off trying to meet people in real-life situations, where there is a more reasonable ratio of men and women, you can learn more about people then their favorite vacation spots, and the people have a lot more time to learn more about you too. Or, you can try meeting people online but not in a surface-level dating-oriented site. Plenty of people formed couples through discord or their favorite video games. Unfortunately my understanding is that most online places are still male-dominated, but hopefully that’s changing as we are becoming a more tech-oriented and women-inclusive society.
- catsarebetter 4y ago
  Have you read the cold start problem? The online dating marketplaces optimize for women and the men naturally follow. Ie. If there were a bunch of single women in any marketplace, men would naturally flock there, like any social media platforms dms The users for online dating are women, men are the commodity/supply
  - space_fountain 4y ago
    Couldn’t you just as easily have said men are the users (they’re the ones paying usually) and women are the supply?
    - catsarebetter 4y ago
      I could've easily said it but that would've been completely wrong
      - space_fountain 4y ago
        Why? Is it wrong that men are the ones who pay? Edit: like don’t get me wrong, if we’re going to use such cold analogies the companies definitely care about their supply, they need to be able to sell it
      - jakear 4y ago
        Why? In traditional products, the users pay for access to the assets. Dating app men pay for access to dating app women. Women on the other hand are often given perks for free to get them to continue to use the app, making them a cost center the app must finance to maintain.
      - chongli 4y ago
        If men are the ones paying and women getting in for free, this is no different to the nightclub cover charge model. In both cases, men are the real customers (big spenders) and women are the product. It's the same as the social media business. Advertisers are the customers and users are the product.
  - armchairhacker 4y ago
    It's at the point where women don't benefit either though. Getting 1000x matches just leaves most women overwhelmed. Plus a lot of those matches end up being low-quality even despite trying to be picky, because the apps are so surface level. Plenty of men manage to get great pics and quotes but turn out to be complete douches.
- anovikov 4y ago
  But this is natural because men like almost everyone while women like maybe a few men per day. It's not because their ratio is wildly out of balance, here in EU it is close to 50/50 and 60/40 in the U.S. In some countries like Peru, Tinder has considerably more women than men, and yet, men still get very few likes vs women there. It's not about numbers, it's about behaviour. It's never difficult for a woman to get laid vs man.
  - throwawayarnty 4y ago
    It’s not natural because if you go to a bar or other in person event, the dynamics are much less gender-skewed.
    - prawn 4y ago
      Aren't you comparing the ratio of males and females in the bar to the ratio of matches/messages for males and females on the apps? I'd guess males are initiating contact more than females in bars as well, unless things have changed?
      - throwawayarnty 4y ago
        No. I am comparing matches on app with matches at a bar. Both cases would be gender-skewed. But to have the bar scenario be as skewed as the app, one man would go home with all the women in the bar. This is not the case in reality. There are physical limits that prevent skews from being as extreme as in apps.
    - kmonsen 4y ago
      Don’t think that’s true. If the median man and woman went to the bar for the purpose of having sex that night the woman would be way more successful. For most men if they are single and a reasonable attractive woman they have never met before walk up to them on the street and ask if she can sleep with them the man would think of course what is the catch, in the opposite case it would be what a creep. It’s possible this is all cultural/social factors. But they are real.
- baron816 4y ago
  Someone should build an app where women have to create an “application” form, and men have to fill it out. If women are the choosy ones, let them be upfront with their choosiness and adjust the level of friction that men have to go through to contact them.
  - catsarebetter 4y ago
    Great in theory but it's hard to know what you want, kind of like asking a user what to build them
    - andy_ppp 4y ago
      A lot of women do signal what they want in their profiles but in reality matches probably just come down to hot + might not rape me + some kind of funny peacocking confidence thing so in the end this survey won’t matter.
      - catsarebetter 4y ago
        Dude wtf
        ggm 4y ago
        No WTF, if you read any ancilliary info around womens engagement in dating apps this is pretty much it. (not dating, not going to be dating, do read stuff online) If you want to argue otherwise, consider the situational awareness of telling your wing(person) where you're going if not heard from in 24h and why people do this.
        kmonsen 4y ago
        https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yRzs7v0do_Q https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yRzs7v0do_Q
  - subjectsigma 4y ago
    The problem is that this is discrimination, by definition. From my own personal experience, there are plenty of women who have immediately rejected me because I'm 5'11" and not 6'. I'm sure they would love to be able to filter men by height. There's also plenty of people who would like to filter by race. One of these things is socially acceptable but the other isn't. How should the dating apps decide what questions go on the application? They can't, anything more than filtering by gender and there will be some subset of their userbase that they completely alienate. And they need to show growth and profits for investors. Not to mention, you know, the moral implications? (Note that even that doesn't work... I'm not interested in dating trans women or gay men but I see their profiles all the time, because they set their profiles as "women seeking men".)
- subjectsigma 4y ago
  Note that this is inherent to the current dating app models. Everyone I have spoken to who uses dating apps, male or female, intuitively understands this. The best strategy for men is to spam matches and messages as much as possible and hope you grab someone's attention. The best strategy for women is to filter heavily and pick randomly from the ones who get through and hope they aren't a weirdo. But those strategies, while optimal for individuals, make the experience overall disappointing. I wonder if there is a way (in the game theory sense) to craft a strategy that is both optimal for individuals and the community, and then design an app around that.
  - zwaps 4y ago
    Yes there is, and it is quite related to the article. But it is not practical - both men and women should rank their preferences and then an optimal matching can be found. In online dating, I would not expect people to have complete and transitive preferences.
    - astrange 4y ago
      OKCupid used to do that, but when I tried it the 100% match was someone I knew and didn't like because they were too similar to me.
  - swatcoder 4y ago
    > The best strategy for men is to spam matches and messages as much as possible and hope you grab someone's attention. That’s a naive idea that makes it worse for everybody, including yourself. If you’re genuinely looking for attention from anyone that’ll give it to you, you probably want to do some self-reflection. More likely, I hope, you actually do know something about yourself and your tastes and can recognize that you’ll only be a good fit with a tiny fraction of the people on there. If you’re not seeing that tiny fraction on the app or not matching with them, you either need to be patient, figure out ways to improve your profile, or figure out a different way to meet people. Spamming indiscriminately may get you the a few extra internet points, but it doesn’t get you any good matches that you wouldn’t have gotten from being a genuine human person on there. And it’s just makes an already crappy environment even worse.
- mrwh 4y ago
  Dating does suck! Though I'm not sure that dating apps suck more than what they replaced - pubs and bars really. I'm old enough to have dated before apps were the default and it wasn't exactly a less superficial time.
  - xxs 4y ago
    >it wasn't exactly a less superficial time. Bars do work way better due to 'beer goggles' (or cocktails/vodka). Usually there are other activities available, e.g. dancing/snacks
    - robocat 4y ago
      > Bars do work way better Bars are great if you want to meet bargoing people. Personally, it seems more like selecting for an alcoholic, although that might say more about me than the people I meet at bars? I am not sure I would recommend going to bars to find a partner.
      - mariusor 4y ago
        I think that as an average, alcoholics would rather not waste their money paying for alcohol in bars. Drinking cheap is more important than socializing fore people with an actual addiction.
      - xxs 4y ago
        >selecting for an alcoholic That's really stretching it, having any disdain for any alcohol consumption. Having a drink in a bar to decompress after work is hardly being an alcoholic.
        robocat 4y ago
        Settle down - I didn’t disdain - I had hoped the tongue-in-cheek was somewhat obvious. I am talking about my opinion, in my country, at my age, at the bars I go to, for my definition of alcoholic.
    - 4y ago
- bogomipz 4y ago
  >"Most men get somewhere like 0-4 matches a week and most women get somewhere like 100-1000. That’s a 25x difference best-case scenario and often it’s over 100x. Which is kind of insane considering there are about 50/50 men to women ratio in real life." I always suspected something similar. Is this documented anywhere though that I could look? My response to this was to simply get rid of that app and quit. Why would anyone continue putting in the hours a week for something that led to 0-4 matches a week? How is the platform not a total failure based on this? Doesn't everyone of the guys not in that top 20 percentile turn around and tell everyone it is garbage?
  - mrwh 4y ago
    A few matches a week seems... fine though, right? Unless one wants to go on a first date every day of the week, and really who has time for that? If anything, hundreds of low-quality matches (because men just say yes to everyone) seem worse than a few considered ones.
    - mrwh 4y ago
      That said, I have heard that a large percentage of men get zero matches, just none at all. At that point yes it's a poor proposition.
      - DeathArrow 4y ago
        >That said, I have heard that a large percentage of men get zero matches, just none at all. At that point yes it's a poor proposition. I've heard that is true in real life, too. Women have it easier and are more picky.
    - sokoloff 4y ago
      But a match with a new person who is getting hundreds of matches is still not likely to turn into a first date.
      - DeathArrow 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- iepathos 4y ago
  Important to distinguish between matches and likes here. Women get a lot of likes but not 1 match every 15 minutes. Out of the people who like them, the viable matches are far lower than 1 every 15 minutes. Maybe a couple every week are actually decent matches they would like back. I don't find the difference between likes men get and women get surprising at all, it's the same for face to face meetings. Most of the men striking out on dating apps also strike out with face to face meetings probably at a higher rate if they were actually approaching all the random women they "like" at a glance. It isn't the general ratio of men to women that determines the like to match rate here, it's the ratio of desperate and frankly not attractive men to discerning and attractive women.
  - bigfudge 4y ago
    For less confident people IRL, the ability to like with low cost is actually great. I have had dates with people I would probably never have approached in real life and online dating has been a confidence boost generally.
- cehrlich 4y ago
  > Most men get somewhere like 0-4 matches a week and most women get somewhere like 100-1000. That’s a 25x difference best-case scenario and often it’s over 100x. Which is kind of insane considering there are about 50/50 men to women ratio in real life. How is this statistically possible? Women getting way more _likes_ is plausible if men swipe right much more than women do. But each _match_ involves a man and a woman getting a match.
  - rtpg 4y ago
    I'm not sure of that extreme of a ratio, but many of my single women friends will use the app, match with people, and it turns out that loads of the guys are just really useless... so it's not clear whether the matches are actually worthwhile. Imagine a guy with a very interesting profile, who swipes right all the time. People match with him cuz he has the nice profile. Turns out that he sticks around on the platform for a long time. Suddenly this one person is responsible for loads of matches. So if you have these long-term users, they can generate disproportionate amount of matches with themselves, biasing the pool. This could be even more accentuated by Tinder-style algos. Somebody's popular? Of course their profile will show up more often! If you combine this with people on the other side matching pretty conservatively... then suddenly you can have a handful of men receiving the large majority of the focus. Paraphrasing some tweet, at least at parties the most popular guy can only talk to so many people at once!
    - ratww 4y ago
      Yep, exactly. That's what the grandparent post [1] meant with "Because a lot of men like to swipe right on nearly everyone and buy passes which get them unlimited swipes". This is where the majority of Tinder's money is coming from, so I doubt this will be ever be curbed. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31749379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31749379
  - bongoman37 4y ago
  - cthor 4y ago
- bongoman37 4y ago
- abhaynayar 4y ago
  I get four matches a week on average. Converting those matches into dates is the hard part in my opinion. Even when I seem to be connecting and having a good conversation on text, it's always been so difficult to go beyond that. I don't know, I must be doing something wrong I guess. I wonder what the match to date conversion rate is.
  - shnobloos22 4y ago
    - bigfudge 4y ago
      If you mean descending into mysoginist bile and hate, then yes.
      - shnobloos22 4y ago
    - abhaynayar 4y ago
      > these questions Wasn't a question. Learn to read.
  - PJDK 4y ago
    Speaking as someone now married to a woman he met on tinder. I took the view that if I matched with someone and they replied to a message there was a pretty high chance they were interested in a date, so I would generally just ask on the second or third message. Something like Hi, <basic small talk question based on something in the profile>. Hopefully receive a reply with some kind of conversational hook. <reply to the hook, ask a follow up question>. Would you like to meet for a drink sometime this week, would central Gotham work for you? My number is 123556679 Pretty much everyone is on the site to go on real dates, so best to think of the messages as for organising them. Your mileage may vary, but I'd say this led to a date 80% of the time (assuming the match and reply had already happened)
- sytelus 4y ago
  I think you don't understand that you cannot escape the consequences of human mating behavior by making dating online to offline. 80% of women will prefer top 20% of men. You can go to bar and get some beer goggles for a while, but it will wear down eventually. In Western world, 30% of the couples end up in affairs and 50% marriages end up in divorce. Ask why.
  - mxkopy 4y ago
    In nonwestern countries, polygamy is acceptable. I think it's obvious that people have preferences, and will seek partners that match those preferences better. But even if that's true, people have different preferences. People don't adhere to some universal rating system.
  - DeathArrow 4y ago
    >Ask why. Why?
    - jseban 4y ago
      Because of the biological asymmetry between the sexes. A man can have thousands of children, and women can only have a small amount. It's what drives natural selection and evolution of the species. Some part of the men are supposed to get rejected.
      - eftychis 4y ago
        I know this will be hard to swallow for a lot: No polygamy is not stable and that is why it is outlawed in a lot of countries. Consider that men physiologically have a drive to produce wealth and "grow" to attract and sustain a family. (Nations I hear want that.) What do you think throughout history the men that could not find a match did? They joined wars, became vagabonds, thieves, joined piracy or similar and went to forcefully acquire wealth and/or women (and rape). Needless to say a peaceful nation does not want that. Men are going to fight the rejection tooth and nail (a trait evolved in a similar fashion).
        4y ago
- DeathArrow 4y ago
  >Online dating sucks. You’re much better off trying to meet people in real-life situations, where there is a more reasonable ratio of men and women Online dating is a competition like anything else in life. I had some success at online dating and I am not the best looking guy, so it's possible.
- jseban 4y ago
  Dating after the online part also sucks, where you pretend to be so busy that you can only meet once a week and only on weekdays, and you can never answer a message in under 24 hours. Don't really see how two people can start to like each other when it's so standoffish. Who has every hour of their weekend booked? Who doesn't have two minutes to look at their phone in a whole day? It's such bullshit, this game is so exhausting and just zaps out any positive energy you get during a date.
- aqme28 4y ago
  Some dating apps are better than others, and most (but not Tinder) have a mechanism to prevent this kind of thing. Hinge, for example, only shows you a limited set of people per day, and it filters those based on who it thinks you like who also would like you back.
  - itake 4y ago
    How does Hinge correct for the ratio problem? If women can only like a finite number of profiles, doesn't this further restrict the supply of Women Likes?
    - aqme28 4y ago
      It also restricts the number of men likes, which means a more equal number of likes are given out between the sexes. In addition, the limited number forces both sexes to be selective, rather than just the women.
      - itake 4y ago
        > It also restricts the number of men likes, which means a more equal number of likes are given out between the sexes. It is an open secret that dating apps have more men than women.
        aqme28 4y ago
        Sure, but it's still more equal if both sexes send the same number of likes rather than having 2x as many men swipe 10x as many times. And maybe women get more swipes per day, I have no idea.
- jimbob45 4y ago
  >Because a lot of men like to swipe right on nearly everyone and buy passes which get them unlimited swipes I think you're wrong. I've read that the main apps have done some work in the past years to make the "swipe on everything" strategy non-optimal. However, the fact of the matter is that the main apps could have been lying to me and you could be right and I could be wrong. It's so very difficult to draw conclusions from these dating apps when they're effectively black boxes to us common folk. There's definitely a great deal of money and interest that could be had from creating an open-source dating app such that no one would be in the dark on what's being served to whom.
- popularonion 4y ago
  > You’re much better off trying to meet people in real-life situations, where there is a more reasonable ratio of men and women I think is a thought-stopping cliche that sounds right but just isn't true. People went to apps because real life situations have failed them. The hobbies that attract the most young people tend to be the most gender skewed (gaming is a great example).
jimmygrapes 4y ago
Has Hinge avoided the dark patterns of the Match Group and/or Bumble (not sure if they were subsumed yet) in which men are shown "likes" only as bait to purchase a premium product and only rarely show up as potential matches? If so, what is their monetization strategy? It is fairly clear that a successful result in a dating app means at least one less user, polygamy and "ENM" notwithstanding. I believe that some apps have used success and subsequent loss of user as marketing to "prove it works" but I haven't seen that tactic lately. How does Hinge work? Aside and FWIW I just starting using Bumble/Tinder after years of refusing, which came after years of a (disastrous) relationship developed via friend-of-a-friend-of-a-relative and I can't fathom how things work anymore since I don't encounter anybody of the gender I'm into in contexts where it's appropriate to initiate contact. I know the tropes and standard advice (hobbies, church, etc) but it ain't working anymore.
- cbhl 4y ago
  Hinge was acquired by Match Group in June 2018. So, no.
  - jimmygrapes 4y ago
    Well alright then. Guess it's back to pretending I give a shit about yoga and feminist books.
    - carabiner 4y ago
      Performative feminism is eternal.
    - dymk 4y ago
      wonder why you’re single
- Lewton 4y ago
  Hinge does not hide likes like tinder/bumble/etc You get a separate stack where you can see the full profiles of the people who liked or messaged you, the only thing is that you have to react (match, message, or reject)to the top profile in the stack before you can see the next (which you might be able to skip with premium?)
dumpsterdiver 4y ago
Can you imagine what it would have looked like if dating apps existed in the war ravaged nations of Eurasia post World War II? Ladies would have been fighting tooth and nail for a good man, because they were hard to find after the world went to war with itself.
- ddorian43 4y ago
  - Arkhaine_kupo 4y ago
    This is not true, not even remotely
    - ddorian43 4y ago
      Please be more explicit. Do you need to be top 1%? Or?
      - Arkhaine_kupo 4y ago
        > Or? The 5% thing is entirely unsupported by any evidence whatsoever. You can just look outside your window and see the thousands of couples that exist, most of whom do not include a "top 5% man". The theory of hypergamy, and the idea that is so much worse in the digital age, is unsupported by facts. For exampple Tinder has a hidden rating for each person, so lets say you are an average girl and Tinder has rated you as a 5/10. You can probably only see men that Tinder has rated 4-6. Even if you wanted to go for a "top 5%" man, algorithmically he would not even show in your feed. Humans are biologically programmed to find suitable partners, we value many things beyond looks or social status and the basis of relationships is varied, complicated and researched to death. There is no gaggle of desperate women running after a succesful hot man in a suit who keeps denying their advances. This is simply not happening
        shnobloos22 4y ago
catsarebetter 4y ago
I mean, no one's forcing anyone to use dating apps
- hikingsimulator 4y ago
  I agree, but it is a surface level retort still in my opinion. What I find more insidious is the way people on HN deal with such statistics. The HN typical person is a relatively well-off suburban CS employee. The rhetoric on HN when markets are talked about, e.g. the labour market, often revolves around free markets being good -- because it favors this typical HN's user position. They have never experienced any precariousness. Now, comparing dating apps to a market is very slimey, but the analogy work to the extent where the focus is the HN user's expectation and how prevalent the market discourse seems to be here: like the worker offers their labour force to a company, a pretendent offers their social time and skills on a dating app. Except that the HN's user is experiencing the precariousness in the latter -- an unacceptable thing, apparently. Except one is not owed this attention, time or privilege. Thinking the imbalance is unfair is a mark of expected privilege as they have in other space. It's a bit bonkers. Thinking of it -- dating -- as a market is a bad thing, morally, ethically, and psychologically, but it remains the underlying tone I see in this thread.
  - derevaunseraun 4y ago
    > e.g. the labour market, often revolves around free markets being good -- because it favors this typical HN's user position. Care to explain? I'd imagine that something along the lines of unionization wouldn't hurt the salaries of tech workers. > Thinking the imbalance is unfair is a mark of expected privilege as they have in other space I find it interesting to refer to labor exchange value as a "privilege", as if it were something arbitrarily bestowed from some higher authority. Wage is the result of adversarial relationships between demand and supply and not one of some arbitrary authority doling out favors left and right with strings attached
    - bigfudge 4y ago
      > Wage is the result of adversarial relationships between demand and supply and not one of some arbitrary authority doling out favors left and right with strings attached Except there are: - systematic biases in access to the skills needed for this contest - systematic asymmetries of information/social capital/access which skew access to high earning professions - outright discrimination against minority groups and women in payment All of which means current remuneration is in part (not wholly) a reflection of privilege.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
awinter-py 4y ago
I mean 1) 'stable matching' is not how anyone would describe the experience of using IRL meetup apps 2) at best gale-shapley is being used for ranking, not for preference inference; IMO they removed the 'have you met' feature (guessing because users found it invasive and hated it), but would be interesting to use it for scheduling meeting slots, a resource problem more similar to med school matching. The idea of using math to meet a mate goes back at least to kepler https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/05/15/312537965/how-to-marry-the-right-girl-a-mathematical-solution https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/05/15/312537965/h... 3) gale-shapley is old science about how to rank given preferences, but the actual interesting question is how they're detecting preferences. What are the factors? Are some factors excluded? What can hinge (and their cousins at match.com and elsewhere) detect about a person from their profile + interactions? Are they using image analysis / NLP on profiles / chats? (they're definitely not just using the user settings toggles for preferences; at minimum, they must have a global rank for showing popular profiles at the top of the stack. Also it makes sense this stuff is secret, it's a liability landmine)
- ddoolin 4y ago
  I was wondering the same thing re: #3. Some of it is answered in the article but it reads like it was written by a pop-tech blogger and obviously very light on details. I'm not sure where the linked article gets its information, but it seems to suggest that Hinge might be doing some kind of image analysis, maybe: > Your likes also play into it. The more you like certain types of people, the more Hinge learns about your preferences, as founder Justin McLeod told British Vogue: “It gets better and more accurate the more that you reveal your tastes.” It’s kind of like if you look at the past ten people you’ve dated or fancied, you’ll eventually start to see a pattern emerging, so you’ll have more success (in theory) if you start to seek these types of people out. I.e what’s the point in me going for short blondes when I know I’m only really attracted to tall brunettes? The answer is there is no point, and Hinge knows that. And why wouldn't they be? It seems like an incredibly easy target for aligning visual preferences without having to ask.
- senkora 4y ago
  There is still an option to report whether you’ve met, so they may be using that info somehow.

117 points by kaashmonee 4y ago

Dating apps are so bad, the ratio of men:women matches would impress a red-pilled 4channer. Most men get somewhere like 0-4 matches a week and most women get somewhere like 100-1000. That’s a 25x difference best-case scenario and often it’s over 100x. Which is kind of insane considering there are about 50/50 men to women ratio in real life. People say “the 20% top men get 80% of matches” but it’s worse than that. The 20% top men may get something reasonable like 3-4 matches a day, but your average women is getting something crazy like 1 match every 15 minutes. Because a lot of men like to swipe right on nearly everyone and buy passes which get them unlimited swipes. And most women get extremely choosy and swipe right on only the super handsome nearly-perfect men, but you can’t even blame them when they have literally 1,000 matches. On top of that, the bios suck. Even on Hinge. You can’t base someone off of 6 pictures and 3 quotes. If you’re not judging them on plain attractiveness / photogenics, you’re judging them on one random quote or minor character trait you relate to. Online dating sucks. You’re much better off trying to meet people in real-life situations, where there is a more reasonable ratio of men and women, you can learn more about people then their favorite vacation spots, and the people have a lot more time to learn more about you too. Or, you can try meeting people online but not in a surface-level dating-oriented site. Plenty of people formed couples through discord or their favorite video games. Unfortunately my understanding is that most online places are still male-dominated, but hopefully that’s changing as we are becoming a more tech-oriented and women-inclusive society.

catsarebetter 4y ago
Have you read the cold start problem? The online dating marketplaces optimize for women and the men naturally follow. Ie. If there were a bunch of single women in any marketplace, men would naturally flock there, like any social media platforms dms The users for online dating are women, men are the commodity/supply
- space_fountain 4y ago
  Couldn’t you just as easily have said men are the users (they’re the ones paying usually) and women are the supply?
  - catsarebetter 4y ago
    I could've easily said it but that would've been completely wrong
    - space_fountain 4y ago
      Why? Is it wrong that men are the ones who pay? Edit: like don’t get me wrong, if we’re going to use such cold analogies the companies definitely care about their supply, they need to be able to sell it
    - jakear 4y ago
      Why? In traditional products, the users pay for access to the assets. Dating app men pay for access to dating app women. Women on the other hand are often given perks for free to get them to continue to use the app, making them a cost center the app must finance to maintain.
    - chongli 4y ago
      If men are the ones paying and women getting in for free, this is no different to the nightclub cover charge model. In both cases, men are the real customers (big spenders) and women are the product. It's the same as the social media business. Advertisers are the customers and users are the product.
- armchairhacker 4y ago
  It's at the point where women don't benefit either though. Getting 1000x matches just leaves most women overwhelmed. Plus a lot of those matches end up being low-quality even despite trying to be picky, because the apps are so surface level. Plenty of men manage to get great pics and quotes but turn out to be complete douches.
anovikov 4y ago
But this is natural because men like almost everyone while women like maybe a few men per day. It's not because their ratio is wildly out of balance, here in EU it is close to 50/50 and 60/40 in the U.S. In some countries like Peru, Tinder has considerably more women than men, and yet, men still get very few likes vs women there. It's not about numbers, it's about behaviour. It's never difficult for a woman to get laid vs man.
- throwawayarnty 4y ago
  It’s not natural because if you go to a bar or other in person event, the dynamics are much less gender-skewed.
  - prawn 4y ago
    Aren't you comparing the ratio of males and females in the bar to the ratio of matches/messages for males and females on the apps? I'd guess males are initiating contact more than females in bars as well, unless things have changed?
    - throwawayarnty 4y ago
      No. I am comparing matches on app with matches at a bar. Both cases would be gender-skewed. But to have the bar scenario be as skewed as the app, one man would go home with all the women in the bar. This is not the case in reality. There are physical limits that prevent skews from being as extreme as in apps.
  - kmonsen 4y ago
    Don’t think that’s true. If the median man and woman went to the bar for the purpose of having sex that night the woman would be way more successful. For most men if they are single and a reasonable attractive woman they have never met before walk up to them on the street and ask if she can sleep with them the man would think of course what is the catch, in the opposite case it would be what a creep. It’s possible this is all cultural/social factors. But they are real.
baron816 4y ago
Someone should build an app where women have to create an “application” form, and men have to fill it out. If women are the choosy ones, let them be upfront with their choosiness and adjust the level of friction that men have to go through to contact them.
- catsarebetter 4y ago
  Great in theory but it's hard to know what you want, kind of like asking a user what to build them
  - andy_ppp 4y ago
    A lot of women do signal what they want in their profiles but in reality matches probably just come down to hot + might not rape me + some kind of funny peacocking confidence thing so in the end this survey won’t matter.
    - catsarebetter 4y ago
      Dude wtf
      - ggm 4y ago
        No WTF, if you read any ancilliary info around womens engagement in dating apps this is pretty much it. (not dating, not going to be dating, do read stuff online) If you want to argue otherwise, consider the situational awareness of telling your wing(person) where you're going if not heard from in 24h and why people do this.
      - kmonsen 4y ago
        https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yRzs7v0do_Q https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yRzs7v0do_Q
- subjectsigma 4y ago
  The problem is that this is discrimination, by definition. From my own personal experience, there are plenty of women who have immediately rejected me because I'm 5'11" and not 6'. I'm sure they would love to be able to filter men by height. There's also plenty of people who would like to filter by race. One of these things is socially acceptable but the other isn't. How should the dating apps decide what questions go on the application? They can't, anything more than filtering by gender and there will be some subset of their userbase that they completely alienate. And they need to show growth and profits for investors. Not to mention, you know, the moral implications? (Note that even that doesn't work... I'm not interested in dating trans women or gay men but I see their profiles all the time, because they set their profiles as "women seeking men".)
subjectsigma 4y ago
Note that this is inherent to the current dating app models. Everyone I have spoken to who uses dating apps, male or female, intuitively understands this. The best strategy for men is to spam matches and messages as much as possible and hope you grab someone's attention. The best strategy for women is to filter heavily and pick randomly from the ones who get through and hope they aren't a weirdo. But those strategies, while optimal for individuals, make the experience overall disappointing. I wonder if there is a way (in the game theory sense) to craft a strategy that is both optimal for individuals and the community, and then design an app around that.
- zwaps 4y ago
  Yes there is, and it is quite related to the article. But it is not practical - both men and women should rank their preferences and then an optimal matching can be found. In online dating, I would not expect people to have complete and transitive preferences.
  - astrange 4y ago
    OKCupid used to do that, but when I tried it the 100% match was someone I knew and didn't like because they were too similar to me.
- swatcoder 4y ago
  > The best strategy for men is to spam matches and messages as much as possible and hope you grab someone's attention. That’s a naive idea that makes it worse for everybody, including yourself. If you’re genuinely looking for attention from anyone that’ll give it to you, you probably want to do some self-reflection. More likely, I hope, you actually do know something about yourself and your tastes and can recognize that you’ll only be a good fit with a tiny fraction of the people on there. If you’re not seeing that tiny fraction on the app or not matching with them, you either need to be patient, figure out ways to improve your profile, or figure out a different way to meet people. Spamming indiscriminately may get you the a few extra internet points, but it doesn’t get you any good matches that you wouldn’t have gotten from being a genuine human person on there. And it’s just makes an already crappy environment even worse.
mrwh 4y ago
Dating does suck! Though I'm not sure that dating apps suck more than what they replaced - pubs and bars really. I'm old enough to have dated before apps were the default and it wasn't exactly a less superficial time.
- xxs 4y ago
  >it wasn't exactly a less superficial time. Bars do work way better due to 'beer goggles' (or cocktails/vodka). Usually there are other activities available, e.g. dancing/snacks
  - robocat 4y ago
    > Bars do work way better Bars are great if you want to meet bargoing people. Personally, it seems more like selecting for an alcoholic, although that might say more about me than the people I meet at bars? I am not sure I would recommend going to bars to find a partner.
    - mariusor 4y ago
      I think that as an average, alcoholics would rather not waste their money paying for alcohol in bars. Drinking cheap is more important than socializing fore people with an actual addiction.
    - xxs 4y ago
      >selecting for an alcoholic That's really stretching it, having any disdain for any alcohol consumption. Having a drink in a bar to decompress after work is hardly being an alcoholic.
      - robocat 4y ago
        Settle down - I didn’t disdain - I had hoped the tongue-in-cheek was somewhat obvious. I am talking about my opinion, in my country, at my age, at the bars I go to, for my definition of alcoholic.
  - 4y ago
bogomipz 4y ago
>"Most men get somewhere like 0-4 matches a week and most women get somewhere like 100-1000. That’s a 25x difference best-case scenario and often it’s over 100x. Which is kind of insane considering there are about 50/50 men to women ratio in real life." I always suspected something similar. Is this documented anywhere though that I could look? My response to this was to simply get rid of that app and quit. Why would anyone continue putting in the hours a week for something that led to 0-4 matches a week? How is the platform not a total failure based on this? Doesn't everyone of the guys not in that top 20 percentile turn around and tell everyone it is garbage?
- mrwh 4y ago
  A few matches a week seems... fine though, right? Unless one wants to go on a first date every day of the week, and really who has time for that? If anything, hundreds of low-quality matches (because men just say yes to everyone) seem worse than a few considered ones.
  - mrwh 4y ago
    That said, I have heard that a large percentage of men get zero matches, just none at all. At that point yes it's a poor proposition.
    - DeathArrow 4y ago
      >That said, I have heard that a large percentage of men get zero matches, just none at all. At that point yes it's a poor proposition. I've heard that is true in real life, too. Women have it easier and are more picky.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    But a match with a new person who is getting hundreds of matches is still not likely to turn into a first date.
    - DeathArrow 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
iepathos 4y ago
Important to distinguish between matches and likes here. Women get a lot of likes but not 1 match every 15 minutes. Out of the people who like them, the viable matches are far lower than 1 every 15 minutes. Maybe a couple every week are actually decent matches they would like back. I don't find the difference between likes men get and women get surprising at all, it's the same for face to face meetings. Most of the men striking out on dating apps also strike out with face to face meetings probably at a higher rate if they were actually approaching all the random women they "like" at a glance. It isn't the general ratio of men to women that determines the like to match rate here, it's the ratio of desperate and frankly not attractive men to discerning and attractive women.
- bigfudge 4y ago
  For less confident people IRL, the ability to like with low cost is actually great. I have had dates with people I would probably never have approached in real life and online dating has been a confidence boost generally.
cehrlich 4y ago
> Most men get somewhere like 0-4 matches a week and most women get somewhere like 100-1000. That’s a 25x difference best-case scenario and often it’s over 100x. Which is kind of insane considering there are about 50/50 men to women ratio in real life. How is this statistically possible? Women getting way more _likes_ is plausible if men swipe right much more than women do. But each _match_ involves a man and a woman getting a match.
- rtpg 4y ago
  I'm not sure of that extreme of a ratio, but many of my single women friends will use the app, match with people, and it turns out that loads of the guys are just really useless... so it's not clear whether the matches are actually worthwhile. Imagine a guy with a very interesting profile, who swipes right all the time. People match with him cuz he has the nice profile. Turns out that he sticks around on the platform for a long time. Suddenly this one person is responsible for loads of matches. So if you have these long-term users, they can generate disproportionate amount of matches with themselves, biasing the pool. This could be even more accentuated by Tinder-style algos. Somebody's popular? Of course their profile will show up more often! If you combine this with people on the other side matching pretty conservatively... then suddenly you can have a handful of men receiving the large majority of the focus. Paraphrasing some tweet, at least at parties the most popular guy can only talk to so many people at once!
  - ratww 4y ago
    Yep, exactly. That's what the grandparent post [1] meant with "Because a lot of men like to swipe right on nearly everyone and buy passes which get them unlimited swipes". This is where the majority of Tinder's money is coming from, so I doubt this will be ever be curbed. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31749379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31749379
- bongoman37 4y ago
- cthor 4y ago
bongoman37 4y ago
abhaynayar 4y ago
I get four matches a week on average. Converting those matches into dates is the hard part in my opinion. Even when I seem to be connecting and having a good conversation on text, it's always been so difficult to go beyond that. I don't know, I must be doing something wrong I guess. I wonder what the match to date conversion rate is.
- shnobloos22 4y ago
  - bigfudge 4y ago
    If you mean descending into mysoginist bile and hate, then yes.
    - shnobloos22 4y ago
  - abhaynayar 4y ago
    > these questions Wasn't a question. Learn to read.
- PJDK 4y ago
  Speaking as someone now married to a woman he met on tinder. I took the view that if I matched with someone and they replied to a message there was a pretty high chance they were interested in a date, so I would generally just ask on the second or third message. Something like Hi, <basic small talk question based on something in the profile>. Hopefully receive a reply with some kind of conversational hook. <reply to the hook, ask a follow up question>. Would you like to meet for a drink sometime this week, would central Gotham work for you? My number is 123556679 Pretty much everyone is on the site to go on real dates, so best to think of the messages as for organising them. Your mileage may vary, but I'd say this led to a date 80% of the time (assuming the match and reply had already happened)
sytelus 4y ago
I think you don't understand that you cannot escape the consequences of human mating behavior by making dating online to offline. 80% of women will prefer top 20% of men. You can go to bar and get some beer goggles for a while, but it will wear down eventually. In Western world, 30% of the couples end up in affairs and 50% marriages end up in divorce. Ask why.
- mxkopy 4y ago
  In nonwestern countries, polygamy is acceptable. I think it's obvious that people have preferences, and will seek partners that match those preferences better. But even if that's true, people have different preferences. People don't adhere to some universal rating system.
- DeathArrow 4y ago
  >Ask why. Why?
  - jseban 4y ago
    Because of the biological asymmetry between the sexes. A man can have thousands of children, and women can only have a small amount. It's what drives natural selection and evolution of the species. Some part of the men are supposed to get rejected.
    - eftychis 4y ago
      I know this will be hard to swallow for a lot: No polygamy is not stable and that is why it is outlawed in a lot of countries. Consider that men physiologically have a drive to produce wealth and "grow" to attract and sustain a family. (Nations I hear want that.) What do you think throughout history the men that could not find a match did? They joined wars, became vagabonds, thieves, joined piracy or similar and went to forcefully acquire wealth and/or women (and rape). Needless to say a peaceful nation does not want that. Men are going to fight the rejection tooth and nail (a trait evolved in a similar fashion).
      - 4y ago
DeathArrow 4y ago
>Online dating sucks. You’re much better off trying to meet people in real-life situations, where there is a more reasonable ratio of men and women Online dating is a competition like anything else in life. I had some success at online dating and I am not the best looking guy, so it's possible.
jseban 4y ago
Dating after the online part also sucks, where you pretend to be so busy that you can only meet once a week and only on weekdays, and you can never answer a message in under 24 hours. Don't really see how two people can start to like each other when it's so standoffish. Who has every hour of their weekend booked? Who doesn't have two minutes to look at their phone in a whole day? It's such bullshit, this game is so exhausting and just zaps out any positive energy you get during a date.
aqme28 4y ago
Some dating apps are better than others, and most (but not Tinder) have a mechanism to prevent this kind of thing. Hinge, for example, only shows you a limited set of people per day, and it filters those based on who it thinks you like who also would like you back.
- itake 4y ago
  How does Hinge correct for the ratio problem? If women can only like a finite number of profiles, doesn't this further restrict the supply of Women Likes?
  - aqme28 4y ago
    It also restricts the number of men likes, which means a more equal number of likes are given out between the sexes. In addition, the limited number forces both sexes to be selective, rather than just the women.
    - itake 4y ago
      > It also restricts the number of men likes, which means a more equal number of likes are given out between the sexes. It is an open secret that dating apps have more men than women.
      - aqme28 4y ago
        Sure, but it's still more equal if both sexes send the same number of likes rather than having 2x as many men swipe 10x as many times. And maybe women get more swipes per day, I have no idea.
jimbob45 4y ago
>Because a lot of men like to swipe right on nearly everyone and buy passes which get them unlimited swipes I think you're wrong. I've read that the main apps have done some work in the past years to make the "swipe on everything" strategy non-optimal. However, the fact of the matter is that the main apps could have been lying to me and you could be right and I could be wrong. It's so very difficult to draw conclusions from these dating apps when they're effectively black boxes to us common folk. There's definitely a great deal of money and interest that could be had from creating an open-source dating app such that no one would be in the dark on what's being served to whom.
popularonion 4y ago
> You’re much better off trying to meet people in real-life situations, where there is a more reasonable ratio of men and women I think is a thought-stopping cliche that sounds right but just isn't true. People went to apps because real life situations have failed them. The hobbies that attract the most young people tend to be the most gender skewed (gaming is a great example).

jimmygrapes 4y ago

Has Hinge avoided the dark patterns of the Match Group and/or Bumble (not sure if they were subsumed yet) in which men are shown "likes" only as bait to purchase a premium product and only rarely show up as potential matches? If so, what is their monetization strategy? It is fairly clear that a successful result in a dating app means at least one less user, polygamy and "ENM" notwithstanding. I believe that some apps have used success and subsequent loss of user as marketing to "prove it works" but I haven't seen that tactic lately. How does Hinge work? Aside and FWIW I just starting using Bumble/Tinder after years of refusing, which came after years of a (disastrous) relationship developed via friend-of-a-friend-of-a-relative and I can't fathom how things work anymore since I don't encounter anybody of the gender I'm into in contexts where it's appropriate to initiate contact. I know the tropes and standard advice (hobbies, church, etc) but it ain't working anymore.

cbhl 4y ago
Hinge was acquired by Match Group in June 2018. So, no.
- jimmygrapes 4y ago
  Well alright then. Guess it's back to pretending I give a shit about yoga and feminist books.
  - carabiner 4y ago
    Performative feminism is eternal.
  - dymk 4y ago
    wonder why you’re single
Lewton 4y ago
Hinge does not hide likes like tinder/bumble/etc You get a separate stack where you can see the full profiles of the people who liked or messaged you, the only thing is that you have to react (match, message, or reject)to the top profile in the stack before you can see the next (which you might be able to skip with premium?)

dumpsterdiver 4y ago

Can you imagine what it would have looked like if dating apps existed in the war ravaged nations of Eurasia post World War II? Ladies would have been fighting tooth and nail for a good man, because they were hard to find after the world went to war with itself.

ddorian43 4y ago
- Arkhaine_kupo 4y ago
  This is not true, not even remotely
  - ddorian43 4y ago
    Please be more explicit. Do you need to be top 1%? Or?
    - Arkhaine_kupo 4y ago
      > Or? The 5% thing is entirely unsupported by any evidence whatsoever. You can just look outside your window and see the thousands of couples that exist, most of whom do not include a "top 5% man". The theory of hypergamy, and the idea that is so much worse in the digital age, is unsupported by facts. For exampple Tinder has a hidden rating for each person, so lets say you are an average girl and Tinder has rated you as a 5/10. You can probably only see men that Tinder has rated 4-6. Even if you wanted to go for a "top 5%" man, algorithmically he would not even show in your feed. Humans are biologically programmed to find suitable partners, we value many things beyond looks or social status and the basis of relationships is varied, complicated and researched to death. There is no gaggle of desperate women running after a succesful hot man in a suit who keeps denying their advances. This is simply not happening
      - shnobloos22 4y ago

catsarebetter 4y ago

I mean, no one's forcing anyone to use dating apps

hikingsimulator 4y ago
I agree, but it is a surface level retort still in my opinion. What I find more insidious is the way people on HN deal with such statistics. The HN typical person is a relatively well-off suburban CS employee. The rhetoric on HN when markets are talked about, e.g. the labour market, often revolves around free markets being good -- because it favors this typical HN's user position. They have never experienced any precariousness. Now, comparing dating apps to a market is very slimey, but the analogy work to the extent where the focus is the HN user's expectation and how prevalent the market discourse seems to be here: like the worker offers their labour force to a company, a pretendent offers their social time and skills on a dating app. Except that the HN's user is experiencing the precariousness in the latter -- an unacceptable thing, apparently. Except one is not owed this attention, time or privilege. Thinking the imbalance is unfair is a mark of expected privilege as they have in other space. It's a bit bonkers. Thinking of it -- dating -- as a market is a bad thing, morally, ethically, and psychologically, but it remains the underlying tone I see in this thread.
- derevaunseraun 4y ago
  > e.g. the labour market, often revolves around free markets being good -- because it favors this typical HN's user position. Care to explain? I'd imagine that something along the lines of unionization wouldn't hurt the salaries of tech workers. > Thinking the imbalance is unfair is a mark of expected privilege as they have in other space I find it interesting to refer to labor exchange value as a "privilege", as if it were something arbitrarily bestowed from some higher authority. Wage is the result of adversarial relationships between demand and supply and not one of some arbitrary authority doling out favors left and right with strings attached
  - bigfudge 4y ago
    > Wage is the result of adversarial relationships between demand and supply and not one of some arbitrary authority doling out favors left and right with strings attached Except there are: - systematic biases in access to the skills needed for this contest - systematic asymmetries of information/social capital/access which skew access to high earning professions - outright discrimination against minority groups and women in payment All of which means current remuneration is in part (not wholly) a reflection of privilege.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

awinter-py 4y ago

I mean 1) 'stable matching' is not how anyone would describe the experience of using IRL meetup apps 2) at best gale-shapley is being used for ranking, not for preference inference; IMO they removed the 'have you met' feature (guessing because users found it invasive and hated it), but would be interesting to use it for scheduling meeting slots, a resource problem more similar to med school matching. The idea of using math to meet a mate goes back at least to kepler https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/05/15/312537965/how-to-marry-the-right-girl-a-mathematical-solution https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/05/15/312537965/h... 3) gale-shapley is old science about how to rank given preferences, but the actual interesting question is how they're detecting preferences. What are the factors? Are some factors excluded? What can hinge (and their cousins at match.com and elsewhere) detect about a person from their profile + interactions? Are they using image analysis / NLP on profiles / chats? (they're definitely not just using the user settings toggles for preferences; at minimum, they must have a global rank for showing popular profiles at the top of the stack. Also it makes sense this stuff is secret, it's a liability landmine)

ddoolin 4y ago
I was wondering the same thing re: #3. Some of it is answered in the article but it reads like it was written by a pop-tech blogger and obviously very light on details. I'm not sure where the linked article gets its information, but it seems to suggest that Hinge might be doing some kind of image analysis, maybe: > Your likes also play into it. The more you like certain types of people, the more Hinge learns about your preferences, as founder Justin McLeod told British Vogue: “It gets better and more accurate the more that you reveal your tastes.” It’s kind of like if you look at the past ten people you’ve dated or fancied, you’ll eventually start to see a pattern emerging, so you’ll have more success (in theory) if you start to seek these types of people out. I.e what’s the point in me going for short blondes when I know I’m only really attracted to tall brunettes? The answer is there is no point, and Hinge knows that. And why wouldn't they be? It seems like an incredibly easy target for aligning visual preferences without having to ask.
senkora 4y ago
There is still an option to report whether you’ve met, so they may be using that info somehow.