4 ms·

> Also, adult dating and meeting people for the post-college working professionals, has largely moved from clubs/bars/the office to online dating apps, or lonel

> Also, adult dating and meeting people for the post-college working professionals, has largely moved from clubs/bars/the office to online dating apps, or lonely depression in your apartment, eating or drinking your feelings away, for those without success in the WFH, remote-everything, online dating world. Especially with the lockdowns. And those "dating" apps can hardly be called dating apps in most cases. They're designed to mess with the underlying sexual dynamic of men and women. If they were meant for romance, they'd have more mechanisms in place to help strangers actually date and get to know each other. Instead, they're a meat market, and the sad thing is more and more people are growing up in a world where they know no different. If you think about it, dating apps have no incentive to try and get people to actually meet in real life. Not only does that raise the potential for liability, but that means fewer eyeballs on their product at any given time. Tinder knows very well that their product is selling attention to women and the promise of sex to countless men they know have next to zero chance based on their looks alone. As OK Cupid was losing its position as a dating app, I remember them putting out an advertising campaign featuring the initialism "DTF", which tells you all you need to know. They might even still be doing it, for all I know. I remember it from billboards and posters in Santa Monica. > I don't think tech or porn is the main culprit. It's that people now have way more entertainment options other than sex. Of course, a lot for those entertainment options are being driven by tech. I don't buy this one bit. The number of entertainment options is correlative, but who has demonstrated that it's causative? Yes, there is a chance that the proliferation of entertainment options is the primary cause, but unless a double-blind study has or will be done to test whether the sex drive is actually in competition with entertainment, I have very sincere doubts. Furthermore, the porn industry is in no way declining. If people were losing an instinctive interest in sex, why would they be watching porn? What if people actually want sex, but they are too ill equipped to obtain it IRL? And we haven't even brought up declining androgen levels in males. Sex isn't going out of fashion. If anything, we are hypersexualized. The goal of sex isn't merely to propagate genes, but to propagate selected genes. Our current environment allows us to select our mates to such an extent that even more people are seleced out of the gene pool for a variety of reasons. Either we're perpetually thinking we can do better, or that we're never good enough or are too ugly, or are totally clueless because Boomer and Gen X parenting have been a disaster.

api 4y ago
Dating apps have no incentive to encourage long term relationships, because if you are in a long term relationship you are far less likely to use a dating app. Given the prevalence of dark pattern research to maximize "engagement" in the social media space, I would not be surprised if the most successful dating apps are actively optimized to encourage a meat market dynamic because it maximizes engagement with the app. This is analogous to how regular social networks actively encourage unreasonable maximally-controversial discourse because it maximizes engagement, to the detriment of rational discussion of social and political issues. If people can reach a solution to issues like tradition vs. personal freedom, abortion, guns, etc., then they might spend less time on social media debating them and trolling and fighting about them and social media engagement might decline. As far as porn goes, it's absolutely a substitute for sex for some people. It's less fulfilling but it's enough to get off and have the desire go away and it requires far less effort. Another thing about porn I haven't seen mentioned much in this thread is how unrealistic it is and how people raised with a lot of porn probably have really unrealistic ideas about what sex is like. If they try to literally act out porn in the bedroom with their partner, it's likely not to go that well. In some cases they might go right for things many partners won't be interested in or would only be interested in after establishing a lot of trust and a real relationship.
- ravenstine 4y ago
  > Dating apps have no incentive to encourage long term relationships Yes. This is absolutely a fundamental problem not just with dating apps but with any business whose employees and/or customers have surpassed Dunbar's number. It's not so much a problem of money or capitalism as it is with the dehumanization of financial transaction. > As far as porn goes, it's absolutely a substitute for sex for some people. It's less fulfilling but it's enough to get off and have the desire go away and it requires far less effort. It is a substitute as far as it can surpass the cost/benefit of meatspace. If too many people are ill prepared to be self-reliant adults and attract the other sex, and thereby unable to be sufficiently attracted or aroused by their peers, then porn completely makes sense. The proliferation of isolation only further encourages porn use, as it does with any form of escapism. But this is coming from the standpoint that I have which is that far too many adults from my generation onward are objectively less self-reliant and have more pathologies than their proximal ancestors. Not everyone agrees with this, but I know enough Millennials and have enough Gen Z and Alpha family members that my experience is informing me that said generations aren't destined for greater success than the previous. My point being that I think if more people were socially functional and able to make themselves attracted to whichever sex(es) they are attracted to, porn might not be quite as normalized as it currently is. (it would still be normalized by virtue of the internet) > Another thing about porn I haven't seen mentioned much in this thread is how unrealistic it is and how people raised with a lot of porn probably have really unrealistic ideas about what sex is like. If they try to literally act out porn in the bedroom with their partner, it's likely not to go that well. In some cases they might go right for things many partners won't be interested in or would only be interested in after establishing a lot of trust and a real relationship. I generally agree... it can set people up to have expectations that lead to disappointment and even personal failure that leads to poor self esteem, animosity, and lack of fulfillment. I almost want sex-ed classes to find a way to teach about this, but that's a whole can of worms that I ultimately think would backfire and be a bad idea. My intentions are good, though. :) However, I don't entirely agree with the use of the word "unrealistic." Putting aside the theatrics in porn, telling people that porn is unrealistic can give them the impression that their particular sexual interests are abnormal and can't be lived out in real life with consensual partners, which is by no means true. I'm not sure I know what the best alternative is, but there's got to be some way to communicate that. It's actually a very nuanced point of discussion, I think. > If they try to literally act out porn in the bedroom with their partner, it's likely not to go that well. In some cases they might go right for things many partners won't be interested in or would only be interested in after establishing a lot of trust and a real relationship. Yes. I think this is where parents (and unfortunately probably teachers of some kind) are going to have to grow the cajones to actually talk about these issues with their kids at an appropriate age. We can't pretend like we live in a world where young people can't watch explicit material online instantly and for free. The "birds and the bees" doesn't cut it anymore. On a related note, I've found it interesting that apparently girls get way more sexual education from their mothers than boys do from their dads. My dad tried... not well, but he tried. And it was way too late. I already knew what he was trying to say by tip-toeing around the words. Most of the men I know have told me their fathers didn't tell them anything about sex or girls at all. The most advice my best friend got from his dad was to "wear a condom."

api 4y ago

Dating apps have no incentive to encourage long term relationships, because if you are in a long term relationship you are far less likely to use a dating app. Given the prevalence of dark pattern research to maximize "engagement" in the social media space, I would not be surprised if the most successful dating apps are actively optimized to encourage a meat market dynamic because it maximizes engagement with the app. This is analogous to how regular social networks actively encourage unreasonable maximally-controversial discourse because it maximizes engagement, to the detriment of rational discussion of social and political issues. If people can reach a solution to issues like tradition vs. personal freedom, abortion, guns, etc., then they might spend less time on social media debating them and trolling and fighting about them and social media engagement might decline. As far as porn goes, it's absolutely a substitute for sex for some people. It's less fulfilling but it's enough to get off and have the desire go away and it requires far less effort. Another thing about porn I haven't seen mentioned much in this thread is how unrealistic it is and how people raised with a lot of porn probably have really unrealistic ideas about what sex is like. If they try to literally act out porn in the bedroom with their partner, it's likely not to go that well. In some cases they might go right for things many partners won't be interested in or would only be interested in after establishing a lot of trust and a real relationship.

ravenstine 4y ago
> Dating apps have no incentive to encourage long term relationships Yes. This is absolutely a fundamental problem not just with dating apps but with any business whose employees and/or customers have surpassed Dunbar's number. It's not so much a problem of money or capitalism as it is with the dehumanization of financial transaction. > As far as porn goes, it's absolutely a substitute for sex for some people. It's less fulfilling but it's enough to get off and have the desire go away and it requires far less effort. It is a substitute as far as it can surpass the cost/benefit of meatspace. If too many people are ill prepared to be self-reliant adults and attract the other sex, and thereby unable to be sufficiently attracted or aroused by their peers, then porn completely makes sense. The proliferation of isolation only further encourages porn use, as it does with any form of escapism. But this is coming from the standpoint that I have which is that far too many adults from my generation onward are objectively less self-reliant and have more pathologies than their proximal ancestors. Not everyone agrees with this, but I know enough Millennials and have enough Gen Z and Alpha family members that my experience is informing me that said generations aren't destined for greater success than the previous. My point being that I think if more people were socially functional and able to make themselves attracted to whichever sex(es) they are attracted to, porn might not be quite as normalized as it currently is. (it would still be normalized by virtue of the internet) > Another thing about porn I haven't seen mentioned much in this thread is how unrealistic it is and how people raised with a lot of porn probably have really unrealistic ideas about what sex is like. If they try to literally act out porn in the bedroom with their partner, it's likely not to go that well. In some cases they might go right for things many partners won't be interested in or would only be interested in after establishing a lot of trust and a real relationship. I generally agree... it can set people up to have expectations that lead to disappointment and even personal failure that leads to poor self esteem, animosity, and lack of fulfillment. I almost want sex-ed classes to find a way to teach about this, but that's a whole can of worms that I ultimately think would backfire and be a bad idea. My intentions are good, though. :) However, I don't entirely agree with the use of the word "unrealistic." Putting aside the theatrics in porn, telling people that porn is unrealistic can give them the impression that their particular sexual interests are abnormal and can't be lived out in real life with consensual partners, which is by no means true. I'm not sure I know what the best alternative is, but there's got to be some way to communicate that. It's actually a very nuanced point of discussion, I think. > If they try to literally act out porn in the bedroom with their partner, it's likely not to go that well. In some cases they might go right for things many partners won't be interested in or would only be interested in after establishing a lot of trust and a real relationship. Yes. I think this is where parents (and unfortunately probably teachers of some kind) are going to have to grow the cajones to actually talk about these issues with their kids at an appropriate age. We can't pretend like we live in a world where young people can't watch explicit material online instantly and for free. The "birds and the bees" doesn't cut it anymore. On a related note, I've found it interesting that apparently girls get way more sexual education from their mothers than boys do from their dads. My dad tried... not well, but he tried. And it was way too late. I already knew what he was trying to say by tip-toeing around the words. Most of the men I know have told me their fathers didn't tell them anything about sex or girls at all. The most advice my best friend got from his dad was to "wear a condom."