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> Dating apps just make it easy to connect with potential matches (relative to not having dating app burnouts) I don't know what's the universal experience reg

> Dating apps just make it easy to connect with potential matches (relative to not having dating app burnouts) I don't know what's the universal experience regarding this, but for me and other people I know, males are extreme disadvantage in the context of dating apps; this applies also to the app that supposedly reverses the roles. I have the suspicion that the elephant is the room is that for men, online dating takes many, many hours (I can't quantify, but an hour a day or so, seems the minimum to me) of effort, often for nothing (I definitely know at least one man who's able to game the system, but he's an exception). This is definitely a recipe for burnout, and it's very specific to online dating . If one wants to find potential mates, any organized activity (sports, etc. - Meetup is perfect) will do; the effort to talk to a potential partner, in that case, is virtually zero.

brianwawok 4y ago
From what I can tell, the dating apps are really really good for "good" looking men, and very bad for average to bad looking men. lucky for me I suppose I got married before dating apps became a thing..
- bckr 4y ago
  N=1 my friend did very well on Tinder as what I would consider below average in looks.
  - spookybones 4y ago
    How tall is he?
    - bckr 4y ago
      Average height. Grad student with minimal income living at home.
- causi 4y ago
  That correlates with the data Okcupid published a while back where women rated 80% of men as below-average.
  - lvass 4y ago
    I'm trying to picture a distribution where this holds true and holy crap, dating apps should display a "Abandon all hope ye who enter here" warning to every man who falls below or near median ELO scores.
    - spywaregorilla 4y ago
      I wonder though, what kind of distribution heterosexual men would provide if scrolling through registered as a woman. My guess? Pretty similar. A lot of guys, especially younger guys, just don't have a good idea of self presentation, chasing images that are very unappealing to a lot of women. Either lacking self confidence or just filling their profile with red flags.
      - confidantlake 4y ago
        Not like women's profile's are on average much better. They are simply much more in demand.
        spywaregorilla 4y ago
        It's still a relevant question. The narrative so many men champion is that women are too picky and it's not fair. If men would be equally picky trying to find worthy men on these platforms, it's a very different story.
  - kibwen 4y ago
    That's somewhat misleading. Here's the original post: https://web.archive.org/web/20091121080804/http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/2009/11/17/your-looks-and-online-dating/ https://web.archive.org/web/20091121080804/http://blog.okcup... It says that women rate most men as less attractive than average, yes. But then women are quite willing to message men who are rated as less attractive than average. Meanwhile, the men rank attractiveness on a shockingly mathematical-looking curve. However, at the same time, men overwhelmingly refuse to message any but the most attractive of women. Thus, if you're an average-looking man, your odds of getting messages are actually greater than they are for an average-looking woman.
- joking 4y ago
  really good for those good looking men, who happen to don't want nothing serious, and then the women get burned of being dumped after a couple of nights. There's really aa difference between what men and women expect, and also between what they say and what they do. I'm pretty honest when I talk with someone, something serious and compromises are not on my horizon, a lot of women discard me when I say that, and I'm ok with it, but sometimes I continue talking with them, and they told me how many man lie saying that they want something just to get on the their bed sheets and they disappear after that. Overall, I found some great people and nice aquitances, but the time I had spent is not despreciable.
ealexhudson 4y ago
I think the problems are different. Men have a lot of trouble getting matches sure, and they think they have a rough time because of it. Women get matches, but the majority of the interest is low quality / aggressive / inappropriate and they spend a lot of time filtering, blacklisting, and otherwise getting burned out. Women spend as much time, if not more, wading through dross trying to find good matches: and are also at a significant safety disadvantage in the process. The net result is that neither men or women match easily, in many cases it's a tragedy of the commons. Even on the "app that reverses the roles" it's difficult to match to likely partners for either gender.
- sweezyjeezy 4y ago
  "Women spend as much time, if not more" - I think the ratio of men:women is about 2:1 on most apps, but I would imagine it takes men more than 2x the time to wade through profiles and send a message, than to read that message and move on (even if the message is low-effort). So I'm not sure I can believe that women spend as much time, and certainly the effort spent on the app per date will be much higher for men, not least because of the gender ratio.
  - kibwen 4y ago
    The ratio is more like 4:1. And women receive such an overwhelming amount of low-quality messages that there's no point in crafting a high-effort message, as it will just be buried by spam in their inboxes.
    - thot_experiment 4y ago
      Don't worry. I, an engineer, have the solution. We simply make a dating app with at least regex support for message filtering, you get to shoot yr shot and get immediate feedback in the form of being auto-blocked if you didn't make it past the filter. Just thinking about it makes me want to start dating again, it'd be like ad-block but for crypto bros.
      - 4y ago
bergenty 4y ago
For me it’s the opposite, when I get a match on a dating app my intentions are clear to the woman so it’s easy for me to go straight in flirting/being romantic etc. In a neutral setting you first have to direct the conversation away from the neutral towards the romantic and then go from there. Much harder and more time intensive.
Mordisquitos 4y ago
What you're saying about the male disadvantage is indeed one, if not the most, important immediate cause of this burnout. However, I take a more systemic view. I think that the main problem is this: Dating apps, as for-profit publicly-traded enterprises, have no incentive to work on fixing the problem To put it bluntly, a large pool of men who struggle to get a date (an event that may even result in losing them as customers) and who feel the need to "pay to win" are the goose that lays the golden eggs for Tinder and the like. The only way out of this would be for a non-profit fully-FOSS dating platform to be created that considers satisfying its users dating objectives its one and only priority, rather than seeing them as a source of income. Make matching more likely by applying two-way filters in the swipe queue, discourage pointless accumulation of matches by clout-chasers and attention junkies, refuse any gamification, don't offer any feature for money but encourage donation on successful connection, and make "engagement" a negative KPI—the KPI should be how many users successfully connect to another and stop using the app, and how quickly they achieve it in terms of app usage. Of course, setting up something like this would require significant effort and "investment" with no hope of profit. It's in my bucket list of plans on how to become a millionaire (from billionaire, that is).
- david38 4y ago
  This has literally been a major function of the church and other neighborhood organizations and activities.
nradov 4y ago
Organized activities can be a good way to meet people, but don't be that creepy guy in a sports league or hobby group who is constantly hitting on all the women. It just wrecks the activity for everyone, and discourages women from showing up at all. Context matters.
noobker 4y ago
> any organized activity (sports, etc. - Meetup is perfect) will do Please don't come to my clubs looking to get laid -- parasitic mentality.
- mellosouls 4y ago
  There's absolutely nothing wrong with going to Meetup for social networking, that's the whole point of it. "Getting laid" is an indirect outcome for people with better social networks, there is no need to shame people for trying to improve their outcomes in that regard.
  - musingsole 4y ago
    Indirect outcome -- come off it. Creating a Meetup group that filters all the horny trolls out of it is such a hassle. If a workplace can be toppled by one errant affair, small club groups can implode off the wrong wink. Idiots trying to use my Meetup groups as a stand-in for dates suck all the air out of the room.
    - mellosouls 4y ago
      What sucks all the air out is people demanding perfectly normal social behaviour be banned for puritanical and controlling reasons. To be clear, I'm not implying that's your motivation but just as there are bad extremes in the behaviour of some attendees and organisers, so are there extremes in the gatekeeping and sensitivity of others. Both are regrettable.
      - musingsole 4y ago
        > To be clear, I'm not implying that's your motivation Then why say it? Comes across to me like a "no offense but..." Well, offense taken. I'm not puritanical and neither are the clubs I was referring to. However, American culture is so puritanical that they can't even think straight about sex -- can't even talk about and don't know how to get it. And so idiots (all of them) end up at my tabletop clubs, my hiking clubs, my movie clubs, my woodworking clubs, and then chase someone's butt the whole time. That makes it really uncomfortable for everyone else and also usually uncomfortable for whoever's butt is being chased. And then a club has to spend social energy creating a Code of Conduct and wondering who will enforce it. Horndogs need not apply.
russellbeattie 4y ago
Women have no idea what a "super swipe" is, or that it costs $2 every time you use one to try to get their attention. Being in the Bay Area, which is famously hard for men to find matches, without using any of the paid boosts, I'll never get a match. The apps are literally designed to extract money from desperate men. Tinder specifically should be sued out of existence. It ignores location, will happily tell you your boost has been a "success" without a single match or you'll get a couple from 7,000 miles away. It's outright fraud.

brianwawok 4y ago

From what I can tell, the dating apps are really really good for "good" looking men, and very bad for average to bad looking men. lucky for me I suppose I got married before dating apps became a thing..

bckr 4y ago
N=1 my friend did very well on Tinder as what I would consider below average in looks.
- spookybones 4y ago
  How tall is he?
  - bckr 4y ago
    Average height. Grad student with minimal income living at home.
causi 4y ago
That correlates with the data Okcupid published a while back where women rated 80% of men as below-average.
- lvass 4y ago
  I'm trying to picture a distribution where this holds true and holy crap, dating apps should display a "Abandon all hope ye who enter here" warning to every man who falls below or near median ELO scores.
  - spywaregorilla 4y ago
    I wonder though, what kind of distribution heterosexual men would provide if scrolling through registered as a woman. My guess? Pretty similar. A lot of guys, especially younger guys, just don't have a good idea of self presentation, chasing images that are very unappealing to a lot of women. Either lacking self confidence or just filling their profile with red flags.
    - confidantlake 4y ago
      Not like women's profile's are on average much better. They are simply much more in demand.
      - spywaregorilla 4y ago
        It's still a relevant question. The narrative so many men champion is that women are too picky and it's not fair. If men would be equally picky trying to find worthy men on these platforms, it's a very different story.
- kibwen 4y ago
  That's somewhat misleading. Here's the original post: https://web.archive.org/web/20091121080804/http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/2009/11/17/your-looks-and-online-dating/ https://web.archive.org/web/20091121080804/http://blog.okcup... It says that women rate most men as less attractive than average, yes. But then women are quite willing to message men who are rated as less attractive than average. Meanwhile, the men rank attractiveness on a shockingly mathematical-looking curve. However, at the same time, men overwhelmingly refuse to message any but the most attractive of women. Thus, if you're an average-looking man, your odds of getting messages are actually greater than they are for an average-looking woman.
joking 4y ago
really good for those good looking men, who happen to don't want nothing serious, and then the women get burned of being dumped after a couple of nights. There's really aa difference between what men and women expect, and also between what they say and what they do. I'm pretty honest when I talk with someone, something serious and compromises are not on my horizon, a lot of women discard me when I say that, and I'm ok with it, but sometimes I continue talking with them, and they told me how many man lie saying that they want something just to get on the their bed sheets and they disappear after that. Overall, I found some great people and nice aquitances, but the time I had spent is not despreciable.

ealexhudson 4y ago

I think the problems are different. Men have a lot of trouble getting matches sure, and they think they have a rough time because of it. Women get matches, but the majority of the interest is low quality / aggressive / inappropriate and they spend a lot of time filtering, blacklisting, and otherwise getting burned out. Women spend as much time, if not more, wading through dross trying to find good matches: and are also at a significant safety disadvantage in the process. The net result is that neither men or women match easily, in many cases it's a tragedy of the commons. Even on the "app that reverses the roles" it's difficult to match to likely partners for either gender.

sweezyjeezy 4y ago
"Women spend as much time, if not more" - I think the ratio of men:women is about 2:1 on most apps, but I would imagine it takes men more than 2x the time to wade through profiles and send a message, than to read that message and move on (even if the message is low-effort). So I'm not sure I can believe that women spend as much time, and certainly the effort spent on the app per date will be much higher for men, not least because of the gender ratio.
- kibwen 4y ago
  The ratio is more like 4:1. And women receive such an overwhelming amount of low-quality messages that there's no point in crafting a high-effort message, as it will just be buried by spam in their inboxes.
  - thot_experiment 4y ago
    Don't worry. I, an engineer, have the solution. We simply make a dating app with at least regex support for message filtering, you get to shoot yr shot and get immediate feedback in the form of being auto-blocked if you didn't make it past the filter. Just thinking about it makes me want to start dating again, it'd be like ad-block but for crypto bros.
    - 4y ago

bergenty 4y ago

For me it’s the opposite, when I get a match on a dating app my intentions are clear to the woman so it’s easy for me to go straight in flirting/being romantic etc. In a neutral setting you first have to direct the conversation away from the neutral towards the romantic and then go from there. Much harder and more time intensive.

Mordisquitos 4y ago

What you're saying about the male disadvantage is indeed one, if not the most, important immediate cause of this burnout. However, I take a more systemic view. I think that the main problem is this: Dating apps, as for-profit publicly-traded enterprises, have no incentive to work on fixing the problem To put it bluntly, a large pool of men who struggle to get a date (an event that may even result in losing them as customers) and who feel the need to "pay to win" are the goose that lays the golden eggs for Tinder and the like. The only way out of this would be for a non-profit fully-FOSS dating platform to be created that considers satisfying its users dating objectives its one and only priority, rather than seeing them as a source of income. Make matching more likely by applying two-way filters in the swipe queue, discourage pointless accumulation of matches by clout-chasers and attention junkies, refuse any gamification, don't offer any feature for money but encourage donation on successful connection, and make "engagement" a negative KPI—the KPI should be how many users successfully connect to another and stop using the app, and how quickly they achieve it in terms of app usage. Of course, setting up something like this would require significant effort and "investment" with no hope of profit. It's in my bucket list of plans on how to become a millionaire (from billionaire, that is).

david38 4y ago
This has literally been a major function of the church and other neighborhood organizations and activities.

nradov 4y ago

Organized activities can be a good way to meet people, but don't be that creepy guy in a sports league or hobby group who is constantly hitting on all the women. It just wrecks the activity for everyone, and discourages women from showing up at all. Context matters.

noobker 4y ago

> any organized activity (sports, etc. - Meetup is perfect) will do Please don't come to my clubs looking to get laid -- parasitic mentality.

mellosouls 4y ago
There's absolutely nothing wrong with going to Meetup for social networking, that's the whole point of it. "Getting laid" is an indirect outcome for people with better social networks, there is no need to shame people for trying to improve their outcomes in that regard.
- musingsole 4y ago
  Indirect outcome -- come off it. Creating a Meetup group that filters all the horny trolls out of it is such a hassle. If a workplace can be toppled by one errant affair, small club groups can implode off the wrong wink. Idiots trying to use my Meetup groups as a stand-in for dates suck all the air out of the room.
  - mellosouls 4y ago
    What sucks all the air out is people demanding perfectly normal social behaviour be banned for puritanical and controlling reasons. To be clear, I'm not implying that's your motivation but just as there are bad extremes in the behaviour of some attendees and organisers, so are there extremes in the gatekeeping and sensitivity of others. Both are regrettable.
    - musingsole 4y ago
      > To be clear, I'm not implying that's your motivation Then why say it? Comes across to me like a "no offense but..." Well, offense taken. I'm not puritanical and neither are the clubs I was referring to. However, American culture is so puritanical that they can't even think straight about sex -- can't even talk about and don't know how to get it. And so idiots (all of them) end up at my tabletop clubs, my hiking clubs, my movie clubs, my woodworking clubs, and then chase someone's butt the whole time. That makes it really uncomfortable for everyone else and also usually uncomfortable for whoever's butt is being chased. And then a club has to spend social energy creating a Code of Conduct and wondering who will enforce it. Horndogs need not apply.

russellbeattie 4y ago

Women have no idea what a "super swipe" is, or that it costs $2 every time you use one to try to get their attention. Being in the Bay Area, which is famously hard for men to find matches, without using any of the paid boosts, I'll never get a match. The apps are literally designed to extract money from desperate men. Tinder specifically should be sued out of existence. It ignores location, will happily tell you your boost has been a "success" without a single match or you'll get a couple from 7,000 miles away. It's outright fraud.