7 ms·

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 wit

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".)
- daseiner1 4y ago
  on hinge, at least when i last used it, i (a man) could filter by both height and race
  - subjectsigma 4y ago
    Huh, I don't see that on the Android version. Maybe it is a premium feature? Also - doesn't that seem shallow?
    - daseiner1 4y ago
      hmmm yeah i was paying for premium for a month or two so you’re probably right. and yes, it’s incredibly shallow - it’s online dating after all :) For what it’s worth I filtered on neither of those dimensions - I get few enough matches as-is. I will say that I got far far more dates from Hinge than every other service combined, primarily (I think) because I could actually flex my “soft skills” by replying to prompts and photos with a bit of wit. My looks alone aren’t going to make me stand out in the deluge of dudes. Additionally, Hinge is/was much better at dynamically showing me women that were actually likely to be compatible with me.
    - throwaway675309 4y ago
jimmygrapes 4y ago
Wouldn't that just exacerbate the existing issues? Women already have the choice of applicants despite being roughly half the global population. Wouldn't it make more sense to make it harder for women to find a match based on their very specific requirements shown only to those who are seeking those particular traits so as to reduce the glut of inconsiderate matches the women receive?
astrange 4y ago
This is Bumble, men can't send the first message on it. It's only app I've heard of coworkers getting relationships from. (Last time I tried it, every woman on Tinder in SV was a young extremely poor French au pair.)
- mkmk3 4y ago
  Just to check, did you mean to say Tinder here?
  - astrange 4y ago
    I sure did. Don’t ask me why, I’m not a French au pair.
- mhh__ 4y ago
  The first message on bumble is usually just a prompt for the bloke to start speaking. That being said things are probably better with the age of the users.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- petesergeant 4y ago
  > This is Bumble, men can't send the first message on it Right, but almost every female-initiated conversation I ever had on Bumble was "hi" or an emoji, and then a wait for the man to drive the conversation. It's a marketing gimmick rather than something that in any way changes the dynamic compared to Tinder, where I also found that I (the man) had to initiate the conversation. The best thing about Bumble when I last used it was it was a small-enough pool that you could browse everyone, so when you opened it up and started swiping you were interacting with people who'd newly joined (or newly re-opened their account), and were a little less jaded / over the whole thing.
mhh__ 4y ago
For an individual woman they might have the luxury of being able to do this but it doesn't really scale because (the subtext is) that the men who would need this (versus the body-carousel you get on tinder) have the issue that most of the women who could actually articulate an interesting questionaire aren't dating online IME. Also women do already do this in a sense on tinder - "Don't swipe if you're under six foot, here are my red flags, guys with hayfever aren't real men" blah blah. I also think the whole idea of a romantic checklist is very narrow minded. Inferring people's beliefs from their actions would be interesting but just letting people basically only pick and extremely specific type of person seems like a route to nothing good socially.
neilv 4y ago
OkCupid effectively used to do this, multiple ways. Before it turned into a blatant photo gallery (to maximize revenue from straight men paying for advantage, I suspect). One of the ways was that OkCupid let anyone add their own multi-choice (plus optional freeform) questions, to the database from which people would answer. You could rate what each answer meant to you, and you could (IIRC) make answering a particular question mandatory before messaging you. Good for litmus tests.
- bigfudge 4y ago
  It still does this and I like it. I do worry that the answer to the brexit question (good/bad?) is perhaps too diagnostic for me, but much better than cliched bios that all read the same. I wonder though if there is room for a. It’s transparent not for profit dating app? It feels like the incentives currently are misaligned with either individuals or societal benefit. All the apps seem to be optimism for engagement and stickyness rather than well considered matches and good conversation. Even the fact that the chat functions in these apps are so bad belies this… it doesn’t really reward them for you to meet and stop using the app!
  - tsss 4y ago
    The only country I could see doing this successfully is China. They're the only ones with enough foresight and competency to do something like this. Of course, it will probably also be super totalitarian with an algorithm that penalizes political dissent, doesn't allow participation of gay people, etc.
    - TheCoelacanth 4y ago
      They could do the not-for-profit part. I seriously doubt the "transparent" part.
  - DeathArrow 4y ago
    >the brexit question (good/bad?) is perhaps too diagnostic for me Let me guess, saying that brexit is good is bad.
denton-scratch 4y ago
The problem with algorithmic dating is that people don't know what they want. I evidently don't, at any rate; I've mostly ended up with partners that initially seemed to be pretty unpromising material. They only began to appeal to me as I got to know them. I'd never have met them if I'd pre-filtered through an application form. Sure, smoking/non-smoking; perhaps dietary preferences; education; location. But I, a veggie, used to cook for a carnivorous family, for example. If I were preparing an application form consisting only of dealbreakers, I doubt it would have more than a couple of questions.
- Melatonic 4y ago
  I think this is the biggest factor for me in not liking online dating. It lets people filter TOO MUCH for shit they THINK they want. In real life people tend to branch out more
tsss 4y ago
Tinder is that form, because 98% of it is the picture.
DeathArrow 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. No need for a form. Women subconsciously select a partner for the ability to produce healthy and successful offspring and taking care of them and her.
jseban 4y ago
It would make sense to just not allow men to swipe first at all, it was an obvious improvement when they only let the women start conversations. I think the issue is it will lower engagement.

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".)

daseiner1 4y ago
on hinge, at least when i last used it, i (a man) could filter by both height and race
- subjectsigma 4y ago
  Huh, I don't see that on the Android version. Maybe it is a premium feature? Also - doesn't that seem shallow?
  - daseiner1 4y ago
    hmmm yeah i was paying for premium for a month or two so you’re probably right. and yes, it’s incredibly shallow - it’s online dating after all :) For what it’s worth I filtered on neither of those dimensions - I get few enough matches as-is. I will say that I got far far more dates from Hinge than every other service combined, primarily (I think) because I could actually flex my “soft skills” by replying to prompts and photos with a bit of wit. My looks alone aren’t going to make me stand out in the deluge of dudes. Additionally, Hinge is/was much better at dynamically showing me women that were actually likely to be compatible with me.
  - throwaway675309 4y ago

jimmygrapes 4y ago

Wouldn't that just exacerbate the existing issues? Women already have the choice of applicants despite being roughly half the global population. Wouldn't it make more sense to make it harder for women to find a match based on their very specific requirements shown only to those who are seeking those particular traits so as to reduce the glut of inconsiderate matches the women receive?

astrange 4y ago

This is Bumble, men can't send the first message on it. It's only app I've heard of coworkers getting relationships from. (Last time I tried it, every woman on Tinder in SV was a young extremely poor French au pair.)

mkmk3 4y ago
Just to check, did you mean to say Tinder here?
- astrange 4y ago
  I sure did. Don’t ask me why, I’m not a French au pair.
mhh__ 4y ago
The first message on bumble is usually just a prompt for the bloke to start speaking. That being said things are probably better with the age of the users.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
petesergeant 4y ago
> This is Bumble, men can't send the first message on it Right, but almost every female-initiated conversation I ever had on Bumble was "hi" or an emoji, and then a wait for the man to drive the conversation. It's a marketing gimmick rather than something that in any way changes the dynamic compared to Tinder, where I also found that I (the man) had to initiate the conversation. The best thing about Bumble when I last used it was it was a small-enough pool that you could browse everyone, so when you opened it up and started swiping you were interacting with people who'd newly joined (or newly re-opened their account), and were a little less jaded / over the whole thing.

mhh__ 4y ago

For an individual woman they might have the luxury of being able to do this but it doesn't really scale because (the subtext is) that the men who would need this (versus the body-carousel you get on tinder) have the issue that most of the women who could actually articulate an interesting questionaire aren't dating online IME. Also women do already do this in a sense on tinder - "Don't swipe if you're under six foot, here are my red flags, guys with hayfever aren't real men" blah blah. I also think the whole idea of a romantic checklist is very narrow minded. Inferring people's beliefs from their actions would be interesting but just letting people basically only pick and extremely specific type of person seems like a route to nothing good socially.

neilv 4y ago

OkCupid effectively used to do this, multiple ways. Before it turned into a blatant photo gallery (to maximize revenue from straight men paying for advantage, I suspect). One of the ways was that OkCupid let anyone add their own multi-choice (plus optional freeform) questions, to the database from which people would answer. You could rate what each answer meant to you, and you could (IIRC) make answering a particular question mandatory before messaging you. Good for litmus tests.

bigfudge 4y ago
It still does this and I like it. I do worry that the answer to the brexit question (good/bad?) is perhaps too diagnostic for me, but much better than cliched bios that all read the same. I wonder though if there is room for a. It’s transparent not for profit dating app? It feels like the incentives currently are misaligned with either individuals or societal benefit. All the apps seem to be optimism for engagement and stickyness rather than well considered matches and good conversation. Even the fact that the chat functions in these apps are so bad belies this… it doesn’t really reward them for you to meet and stop using the app!
- tsss 4y ago
  The only country I could see doing this successfully is China. They're the only ones with enough foresight and competency to do something like this. Of course, it will probably also be super totalitarian with an algorithm that penalizes political dissent, doesn't allow participation of gay people, etc.
  - TheCoelacanth 4y ago
    They could do the not-for-profit part. I seriously doubt the "transparent" part.
- DeathArrow 4y ago
  >the brexit question (good/bad?) is perhaps too diagnostic for me Let me guess, saying that brexit is good is bad.

denton-scratch 4y ago

The problem with algorithmic dating is that people don't know what they want. I evidently don't, at any rate; I've mostly ended up with partners that initially seemed to be pretty unpromising material. They only began to appeal to me as I got to know them. I'd never have met them if I'd pre-filtered through an application form. Sure, smoking/non-smoking; perhaps dietary preferences; education; location. But I, a veggie, used to cook for a carnivorous family, for example. If I were preparing an application form consisting only of dealbreakers, I doubt it would have more than a couple of questions.

Melatonic 4y ago
I think this is the biggest factor for me in not liking online dating. It lets people filter TOO MUCH for shit they THINK they want. In real life people tend to branch out more

tsss 4y ago

Tinder is that form, because 98% of it is the picture.

DeathArrow 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. No need for a form. Women subconsciously select a partner for the ability to produce healthy and successful offspring and taking care of them and her.

jseban 4y ago

It would make sense to just not allow men to swipe first at all, it was an obvious improvement when they only let the women start conversations. I think the issue is it will lower engagement.