10 ms·

People like to rag on dating apps -- they're shallow, promote surface-level judgements / interactions. But I think this is simply mirroring how things works in

by type-r 4y ago

People like to rag on dating apps -- they're shallow, promote surface-level judgements / interactions. But I think this is simply mirroring how things works in the real world (in very early considerations of who to approach). Getting this person out of the app into an in-person conversation should be the goal. A 'date me' profile feels like the opposite -- trying to get a bunch of data on someone before actually interacting with them in person. I think this is completely backwards and we need to lean in far more into IRL experiences.

Eleison23 4y ago
Users of dating apps are often warned that they should do due diligence and use caution when moving from the moderated, patrolled environs of the app into another mode of communication or encounter. Creeps and stalkers will often try to get a woman's contact info (email, phone, GPS) so that they can continue pursuit and evade scrutiny by the dating app's monitors, who are often very good at identifying and banning unscrupulous people who are not in it to win it, so to speak. Of course, yes, a dating app's ultimate goal is meeting in person and striking up a real relationship. But anyone crossing that boundary had better be very sure that they've gotten to know the person and they really can trust that an encounter won't turn into a craigslist murder. Interesting case in point. My erstwhile fiancee and I met on a MMORPG in 2008. She lived in Europe and I live in these United States. She inquired politely of our mutual friends and acquaintances and then promptly booked a flight to visit me. Then she applied firm feminine pressure and caused me to fly to Europe and visit her for a month. As it turns out, I was not ready for the kind of relationship she sought and we flamed out spectacularly. She could not have expected this after how it went on that MMORPG and based on the reputation I had there among the other gamers. But if she'd asked real-world friends... it might've been a different story.
- borissk 4y ago
  >> Of course, yes, a dating app's ultimate goal is meeting in person and striking up a real relationship. How naive :) Dating apps are many billion dollars businesses - users striking up a real relationship are lost customers and profits to them and they optimize their algorithms against it.
  - exitb 4y ago
    Do you have any sources for that? The biggest change that happened in online dating in recent years is that it's been normalized, no longer seen as weird. That surely has something to do with the success its users had and is obviously very profitable for the companies running these services.
    - briga 4y ago
      Think about it, what if Tinder’s algorithm somehow matched everyone directly with their soulmates. How many of those users would be on the app the next day? How many of those would continue paying for the app? Providing this sort of service for free is just bad business sense. A more profitable approach is to hold the best matches out on the user and to promise that if they pay, their odds of finding their soulmate increase. As long as Tinder is a for-profit company accountable to shareholders it will never be in its best interest to provide the best possible matchmaking
      - astrange 4y ago
        That's not a good strategy either if users notice you're doing it, because they just won't use the app. There's better ones: - attract new users; there's new 20 year olds every day. - move into related niches, like finding friends, where it actually is fine to keep using the app after you meet someone. (Or polycules.) - move into cheating, mistresses etc, where people will secretly keep using it and not tell anyone. I think IAC/Match does try the evil way, but that only works as long as you can keep buying out new dating apps. It's not like there's a moat.
        autoexec 4y ago
        > That's not a good strategy either if users notice you're doing it, because they just won't use the app. Users can be informed about all kinds of user-hostile behavior by dating sites/apps and still use them. Turns out companies don't go out of business because of screwing over their customers. Companies have been caught knowingly poisoning their customers and still they've stayed in business and are profitable. Companies often put on a good show in their twitter feed but they don't actually fear customer backlash. If doing something evil is going to make a company money they will do it. We'll bitch about it on social media until we get distracted by something else, but we'll continue to accept their abuses over and over again. We'll even keep paying the company that did it to us. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/08/25/ashley-madison-faked-female-profiles-to-lure-men-in-hacked-data-suggest/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/08... https://money.com/match-com-is-being-sued-for-using-fake-profiles-to-boost-paid-subscriptions/ https://money.com/match-com-is-being-sued-for-using-fake-pro... https://www.denverpost.com/2021/10/21/denver-dating-co-lawsuit/ https://www.denverpost.com/2021/10/21/denver-dating-co-lawsu... https://theblogofdimi.com/meet-guy-behind-dating-sites-fake-profiles/ https://theblogofdimi.com/meet-guy-behind-dating-sites-fake-... https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/scammers-and-spammers-inside-online-datings-sex-bot-con-job-189657/ https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/scammers-a... https://www.cbsnews.com/news/dating-apps-bots-and-fake-profiles-online-cbsn-documentary/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/dating-apps-bots-and-fake-profi... https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2013/11/10/ashley_madison_infidelity_site_sued_by_woman_hired_to_write_up_fake_female_profiles.html https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2013/11/10/ashley_madiso...
- club_tropical 4y ago
  The unironic use of Shakespearean "erstwhile" tripped me up for a minute, was that royal English part of your MMORPG chat game?
  - lupire 4y ago
    As hinted previously, IRL she would have beenn tipped off when he doffed his fedora to m'lady.
- Al-Khwarizmi 4y ago
  > Users of dating apps are often warned that they should do due diligence and use caution when moving from the moderated, patrolled environs of the app into another mode of communication or encounter. > Of course, yes, a dating app's ultimate goal is meeting in person and striking up a real relationship. But anyone crossing that boundary had better be very sure that they've gotten to know the person and they really can trust that an encounter won't turn into a craigslist murder. Too much caution and delaying IRL encounters for too long can be dangerous, though. Disclaimer: I'm married and it's been long since I last was in the dating market, so these are quite old recollections from when Tinder wasn't a thing and people hooked up in ICQ, IRC and the like. This is also purely subjective. I remember many women were extremely cautious, to the point of not dating in person until they had talked to a guy online for literally months, in some extreme cases even years. But the problem is that they talked to these guys without meeting them IRL for so long, that often idealization kicked in very hard. Because they didn't see the guy, they built an extremely rosy mind model of him and then trusted him too much when they finally met, when they shouldn't have. Sometimes they would even fall in love online. Manipulative guys often took advantage of these things: it's easier to get away with all sorts of shady tactics if they can't see you and everything is asynchronous. So my advice as an internet dinosaur would be: sure, don't meet IRL before having at least some nontrivial conversation, and sure, take basic precautions (meet in a busy place, don't go to a total stranger's house, etc.). But don't go overboard postponing meeting in person, thinking that this will let you know the other person better and reduce risk. That can easily backfire. Once you've talked for 3-5 days, I think the risk mostly goes up from there, not down. Perhaps no one is so cautious anymore so this doesn't apply anyway.
- lupire 4y ago
  You got engaged to your stalker and it didn't work out and it surprised her and what is the moral of this story?
godelski 4y ago
I think the issue with dating apps is that it creates the too many choice problem. Relationships, especially starting out, are hard because you have to get over speed bumps. Things that in the rear view mirror look petty and you forget, but in the moment are much more serious. There's also a huge difference in how the genders experience the apps, despite a lot of us pretending it is the same. I heard someone say "men are dying of thirst in a desert. Women are dying of thirst in the ocean. Men look at the women and say 'at least they have water.'" Most women get far more matches (the ocean water) but often they are low quality (salinity), whereas most men have a lack of matches all together. If you're just looking to get laid, then there is definitely a power imbalance (an amplified version of what exists offline) and women "have it easier". But that's not what most people want. They do want deep meaningful connections, and in that respect there's no difference between trying to drink sand and trying to drink sea water. But because we're dying of different things it creates fundamentally different strategies. (one e.g. men being nonselective with swipes but selective with matches vs women being highly selective with swipes[0]) We have fundamentally different experiences on the apps. I don't know a single man who's admitted to sending a dick pic, but every woman I know has received one. It's too easy to paint with a broad brush with the paint of our experiences, especially the bad ones. But I think a major issue of why these apps don't work is that we're so wrapped up in our experiences that we don't recognize those of others (classic human problem: "Everyone thinks like me and shares the same experiences."). It causes us to paint with too wide of a brush when seeking something that is by definition intimate and personal. I think the problem with apps is that it is hard to see the other person as a person. While I don't know if I'd ever do one of these profiles, but the goal seems straight forward: to be seen as a human and an individual. You're not just another box of cereal on the grocery store shelf, but an individual human being. I don't think this is backwards and I think it makes sense why people see this as an alternative. They've felt dehumanized by those apps (men and women in different ways) and want to be seen as a living person. edit: [0], another example is men wanting to meet in person quickly to make the match real vs women often wanting to me more cautious. There are different selective pressures for these things and different societal norms. But it is silly to not attempt to understand the experiences of someone we want to intimately bond with.
- type-r 4y ago
watwut 4y ago
> But I think this is simply mirroring how things works in the real world (in very early considerations of who to approach). Getting this person out of the app into an in-person conversation should be the goal. It definitely was not similar for me. My relationships were in general with people I already knew somehow and seen them interact with others. I would not date someone with only such limited knowledge of. It did not seemed like a good idea.
Philip-J-Fry 4y ago
The issue with dating apps is that your discoverability is locked behind how much you pay. I used to get lots of Tinder matches. Then I went about 2 months of nothing. I felt like it must be holding matches back. So I paid for a Tinder boost, where you become seen by more people for 30 minutes (or so they say). Within a few minutes I had like 2 new matches, within 30 minutes I had 6. Now, if Tinder was doing what they claimed, why aren't they showing me to these people? Why don't they show me to people who have the same interests? Clearly there's more people that would match with me but they can only find them when you pay up money. From a cynical business POV it's in a dating app's best interest to not let you find a relationship and keep you spending money/watching ads. You could say they want you to have a relationship so you spread good words and bring in new users, but all my experiences go against that.
- Phemist 4y ago
  Ages ago (2013/2014?), when I was on tinder, I remember going through some generations of their algorithm. With their algorithm becoming increasingly hostile as the generations passed. Gen N - whenever someone liked YOU, Tinder would immediately bring this person to the front of your like queue. This meant that if you hadn't used the app for say, in a day, then the first X persons presented would be people who liked you and you would get a bunch of matches. Gen N+1 - Gen N was changed, such that maybe you'd get one match if you consistently liked the first 20 or so people in your queue. However, people who liked _you_ were not filtered out by the setting on your distance filter. So, you could set this filter to distance 1 KM, and basically get a list of matches to the forefront again. Gen N+2 - the above hack was fixed, such that these likes would be filtered out as well (bastards). And then it felt like their algorithm became more and more hostile, post-poning presentation of people who liked you more and more. Basically, they really started to gamify the system, so that you would need to get these "power" boosts to get any matches at all apparently? I quit not long after this filter-hack was "fixed", so not sure what happened then.
  - dlg 4y ago
    The change you describe from N+1 to N+2 wasn’t made to defeat your hack. It was made because we got lots of complaints that people thought the filters were buggy/broken when they saw people who didn’t match their filters and because they were seeing irrelevant people, lowering the chance of a match. The set of people who already liked you were being served out of a different service than regular recommendations and it was, iirc, just a Redis list until fixed. (More generally, we never purposely made the recommendation algo worse to increase boosts or because people would only stay if they didn’t meet someone during my era, even if everyone thought that’s we did. I haven’t been involved in several years however.) In any case, sorry!
stared 4y ago
Things IRL work differently. I mean, if you are into picking people at bars just by their looks, then yeah, dating apps go in that line. If you have long conversations with a friend of a friend at a party (or on some special interest groups), then dating apps are nothing like that. OK, maybe OkCupid, but back in the good old days. I often hear from women dating men that they would have swiped left their partner on Tinder.
- nibbleshifter 4y ago
  Almost every partner I have had (including my wife) where duration of relationship exceeded two months, I met IRL by pure chance. Online? Pretty much only ever resulted in a couple of dates with the person, or a one and done hookup. Its anecdotal, and friends have had the opposite experience, so I can't draw much of a conclusion from it besides that I was not suited to online dating.
  - grvdrm 4y ago
    Your experience mirrors mine. My wife and my last serious relationship before - both IRL chance encounter or created through pre-existing friend connections. Some meaningful relationship-ish connections through online dating.
- EveYoung 4y ago
  I think the problem for most people is that we simply don't have many opportunities for these type of interactions at a certain point in life. Also, why do you need to have deep conversations before going out on a date? If there is physical attraction and some shared interests, what's the harm of meeting for some drinks?
  - stared 4y ago
    I don't claim that dating apps are a bad idea - but that they are not optimized for my use case. Why talking first? Well, for me: P(attractive|interesting) >> P(interesting|attractive) and by a few orders of magnitude (1000?). YMMV.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
I have yet to be with someone I had an initial physical attraction to. My current girlfriend didn't appeal to me until we spent some time chatting while hanging out with mutual friends. It's the best relationship I've yet had. Online dating, every time I have tried it, has been such an awful experience that I decided I preferred celibacy. Oh, and it has only got worse as time has gone on. Frankly, I'm amazed our species manages to reproduce under these conditions.
- wruza 4y ago
  Dating and reproduction have different requirements and happen at different periods. It’s like travel and emigration.
nordsieck 4y ago
> A 'date me' profile feels like the opposite -- trying to get a bunch of data on someone before actually interacting with them in person. I think this is completely backwards and we need to lean in far more into IRL experiences. I don't think so at all. The thing about meeting IRL is that you get a ton of context just by how you meet. Where did you meet? How were they dressed? Were they with friends; what are their friends like? And sure, there's a difference between online and IRL. But a big part of that is driven by the inherent structure of online dating. Without any sort of filters, there's nothing to stop extreme "r" style daters from drowning everyone else out.
nonameiguess 4y ago
This is an interesting dichotomy to me. I've been married and not dating for a while now, but back in the 2000-2007 era, I was pretty active on the sites available back then. It was great in the really early days. I was able to meet multiple reasonably well-known television actresses since I lived in LA and the overall pool was still small enough. I didn't even have to contact them. They found me! I always took the approach you're advocating. Get off the site as quickly as possible, ideally only one message, and then meet in person. I didn't see much point in getting to know someone only to find there's no physical chemistry. That worked well in terms of just getting dates. At least back then, plenty of women felt the same way and weren't as overwhelmed by sheer numbers or as cautious, especially at that younger age, being I was still in my early 20s. It's ironic, though, because I did meet my wife on OkCupid (granting she's my third wife, and I met the other two in school), but not in this way. They used to have social features in the pre-Match Group days, including the ability to post a personal journal and follow other people's journals. Before they also introduced discussion forums, this resulted in online communities of people who all followed each other, talking about basic issues of romance, but not necessarily actually dating since this was spread all over the country and even other countries, not local. At the time, I still lived in LA and my now wife lived in New York, so we "knew" other and talked plenty, but never had any plans to meet. I didn't meet her until years later when we both happened to move to Dallas independently. So assuming you're in to win it and not just to hit it, the only real "success" I ever had online dating was someone I didn't meet until six years after our first message exchange. Most of the people I immediately met never went past three dates.
CuriouslyC 4y ago
The problem with dating (both in person and in apps) is that you have this period of bullshit during early interactions. It's worse with dating apps, since you can have old/fake/not representative pictures (as opposed to being overly made up in a dark environment) and it's easier to spin a web of lies when you're not being interrogated face to face. Dating apps are also too much work, it'd be nice if they were fun. My ideal dating app would just let me record short video questions/statements with a filter that makes them somewhat homogenous (no duck face/angle play, background replaced with something generic, etc), then let other people respond with their own similar videos, and an algorithm would order responses based on my past swiping history. This would make it sort of like a tiktok-esque video chat app for single people. If the video questions/responses were ephemeral That would eliminate a lot of the fakeness as well, unless you wanted to get made up for glamour videos every day.
- lupire 4y ago
  > unless you wanted to get made up for glamour videos every day. Which is what most single women do.

by type-r 4y ago

Eleison23 4y ago

Users of dating apps are often warned that they should do due diligence and use caution when moving from the moderated, patrolled environs of the app into another mode of communication or encounter. Creeps and stalkers will often try to get a woman's contact info (email, phone, GPS) so that they can continue pursuit and evade scrutiny by the dating app's monitors, who are often very good at identifying and banning unscrupulous people who are not in it to win it, so to speak. Of course, yes, a dating app's ultimate goal is meeting in person and striking up a real relationship. But anyone crossing that boundary had better be very sure that they've gotten to know the person and they really can trust that an encounter won't turn into a craigslist murder. Interesting case in point. My erstwhile fiancee and I met on a MMORPG in 2008. She lived in Europe and I live in these United States. She inquired politely of our mutual friends and acquaintances and then promptly booked a flight to visit me. Then she applied firm feminine pressure and caused me to fly to Europe and visit her for a month. As it turns out, I was not ready for the kind of relationship she sought and we flamed out spectacularly. She could not have expected this after how it went on that MMORPG and based on the reputation I had there among the other gamers. But if she'd asked real-world friends... it might've been a different story.

borissk 4y ago
>> Of course, yes, a dating app's ultimate goal is meeting in person and striking up a real relationship. How naive :) Dating apps are many billion dollars businesses - users striking up a real relationship are lost customers and profits to them and they optimize their algorithms against it.
- exitb 4y ago
  Do you have any sources for that? The biggest change that happened in online dating in recent years is that it's been normalized, no longer seen as weird. That surely has something to do with the success its users had and is obviously very profitable for the companies running these services.
  - briga 4y ago
    Think about it, what if Tinder’s algorithm somehow matched everyone directly with their soulmates. How many of those users would be on the app the next day? How many of those would continue paying for the app? Providing this sort of service for free is just bad business sense. A more profitable approach is to hold the best matches out on the user and to promise that if they pay, their odds of finding their soulmate increase. As long as Tinder is a for-profit company accountable to shareholders it will never be in its best interest to provide the best possible matchmaking
    - astrange 4y ago
      That's not a good strategy either if users notice you're doing it, because they just won't use the app. There's better ones: - attract new users; there's new 20 year olds every day. - move into related niches, like finding friends, where it actually is fine to keep using the app after you meet someone. (Or polycules.) - move into cheating, mistresses etc, where people will secretly keep using it and not tell anyone. I think IAC/Match does try the evil way, but that only works as long as you can keep buying out new dating apps. It's not like there's a moat.
      - autoexec 4y ago
        > That's not a good strategy either if users notice you're doing it, because they just won't use the app. Users can be informed about all kinds of user-hostile behavior by dating sites/apps and still use them. Turns out companies don't go out of business because of screwing over their customers. Companies have been caught knowingly poisoning their customers and still they've stayed in business and are profitable. Companies often put on a good show in their twitter feed but they don't actually fear customer backlash. If doing something evil is going to make a company money they will do it. We'll bitch about it on social media until we get distracted by something else, but we'll continue to accept their abuses over and over again. We'll even keep paying the company that did it to us. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/08/25/ashley-madison-faked-female-profiles-to-lure-men-in-hacked-data-suggest/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/08... https://money.com/match-com-is-being-sued-for-using-fake-profiles-to-boost-paid-subscriptions/ https://money.com/match-com-is-being-sued-for-using-fake-pro... https://www.denverpost.com/2021/10/21/denver-dating-co-lawsuit/ https://www.denverpost.com/2021/10/21/denver-dating-co-lawsu... https://theblogofdimi.com/meet-guy-behind-dating-sites-fake-profiles/ https://theblogofdimi.com/meet-guy-behind-dating-sites-fake-... https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/scammers-and-spammers-inside-online-datings-sex-bot-con-job-189657/ https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/scammers-a... https://www.cbsnews.com/news/dating-apps-bots-and-fake-profiles-online-cbsn-documentary/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/dating-apps-bots-and-fake-profi... https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2013/11/10/ashley_madison_infidelity_site_sued_by_woman_hired_to_write_up_fake_female_profiles.html https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2013/11/10/ashley_madiso...
club_tropical 4y ago
The unironic use of Shakespearean "erstwhile" tripped me up for a minute, was that royal English part of your MMORPG chat game?
- lupire 4y ago
  As hinted previously, IRL she would have beenn tipped off when he doffed his fedora to m'lady.
Al-Khwarizmi 4y ago
> Users of dating apps are often warned that they should do due diligence and use caution when moving from the moderated, patrolled environs of the app into another mode of communication or encounter. > Of course, yes, a dating app's ultimate goal is meeting in person and striking up a real relationship. But anyone crossing that boundary had better be very sure that they've gotten to know the person and they really can trust that an encounter won't turn into a craigslist murder. Too much caution and delaying IRL encounters for too long can be dangerous, though. Disclaimer: I'm married and it's been long since I last was in the dating market, so these are quite old recollections from when Tinder wasn't a thing and people hooked up in ICQ, IRC and the like. This is also purely subjective. I remember many women were extremely cautious, to the point of not dating in person until they had talked to a guy online for literally months, in some extreme cases even years. But the problem is that they talked to these guys without meeting them IRL for so long, that often idealization kicked in very hard. Because they didn't see the guy, they built an extremely rosy mind model of him and then trusted him too much when they finally met, when they shouldn't have. Sometimes they would even fall in love online. Manipulative guys often took advantage of these things: it's easier to get away with all sorts of shady tactics if they can't see you and everything is asynchronous. So my advice as an internet dinosaur would be: sure, don't meet IRL before having at least some nontrivial conversation, and sure, take basic precautions (meet in a busy place, don't go to a total stranger's house, etc.). But don't go overboard postponing meeting in person, thinking that this will let you know the other person better and reduce risk. That can easily backfire. Once you've talked for 3-5 days, I think the risk mostly goes up from there, not down. Perhaps no one is so cautious anymore so this doesn't apply anyway.
lupire 4y ago
You got engaged to your stalker and it didn't work out and it surprised her and what is the moral of this story?

godelski 4y ago

I think the issue with dating apps is that it creates the too many choice problem. Relationships, especially starting out, are hard because you have to get over speed bumps. Things that in the rear view mirror look petty and you forget, but in the moment are much more serious. There's also a huge difference in how the genders experience the apps, despite a lot of us pretending it is the same. I heard someone say "men are dying of thirst in a desert. Women are dying of thirst in the ocean. Men look at the women and say 'at least they have water.'" Most women get far more matches (the ocean water) but often they are low quality (salinity), whereas most men have a lack of matches all together. If you're just looking to get laid, then there is definitely a power imbalance (an amplified version of what exists offline) and women "have it easier". But that's not what most people want. They do want deep meaningful connections, and in that respect there's no difference between trying to drink sand and trying to drink sea water. But because we're dying of different things it creates fundamentally different strategies. (one e.g. men being nonselective with swipes but selective with matches vs women being highly selective with swipes[0]) We have fundamentally different experiences on the apps. I don't know a single man who's admitted to sending a dick pic, but every woman I know has received one. It's too easy to paint with a broad brush with the paint of our experiences, especially the bad ones. But I think a major issue of why these apps don't work is that we're so wrapped up in our experiences that we don't recognize those of others (classic human problem: "Everyone thinks like me and shares the same experiences."). It causes us to paint with too wide of a brush when seeking something that is by definition intimate and personal. I think the problem with apps is that it is hard to see the other person as a person. While I don't know if I'd ever do one of these profiles, but the goal seems straight forward: to be seen as a human and an individual. You're not just another box of cereal on the grocery store shelf, but an individual human being. I don't think this is backwards and I think it makes sense why people see this as an alternative. They've felt dehumanized by those apps (men and women in different ways) and want to be seen as a living person. edit: [0], another example is men wanting to meet in person quickly to make the match real vs women often wanting to me more cautious. There are different selective pressures for these things and different societal norms. But it is silly to not attempt to understand the experiences of someone we want to intimately bond with.

type-r 4y ago

watwut 4y ago

> But I think this is simply mirroring how things works in the real world (in very early considerations of who to approach). Getting this person out of the app into an in-person conversation should be the goal. It definitely was not similar for me. My relationships were in general with people I already knew somehow and seen them interact with others. I would not date someone with only such limited knowledge of. It did not seemed like a good idea.

Philip-J-Fry 4y ago

The issue with dating apps is that your discoverability is locked behind how much you pay. I used to get lots of Tinder matches. Then I went about 2 months of nothing. I felt like it must be holding matches back. So I paid for a Tinder boost, where you become seen by more people for 30 minutes (or so they say). Within a few minutes I had like 2 new matches, within 30 minutes I had 6. Now, if Tinder was doing what they claimed, why aren't they showing me to these people? Why don't they show me to people who have the same interests? Clearly there's more people that would match with me but they can only find them when you pay up money. From a cynical business POV it's in a dating app's best interest to not let you find a relationship and keep you spending money/watching ads. You could say they want you to have a relationship so you spread good words and bring in new users, but all my experiences go against that.

Phemist 4y ago
Ages ago (2013/2014?), when I was on tinder, I remember going through some generations of their algorithm. With their algorithm becoming increasingly hostile as the generations passed. Gen N - whenever someone liked YOU, Tinder would immediately bring this person to the front of your like queue. This meant that if you hadn't used the app for say, in a day, then the first X persons presented would be people who liked you and you would get a bunch of matches. Gen N+1 - Gen N was changed, such that maybe you'd get one match if you consistently liked the first 20 or so people in your queue. However, people who liked _you_ were not filtered out by the setting on your distance filter. So, you could set this filter to distance 1 KM, and basically get a list of matches to the forefront again. Gen N+2 - the above hack was fixed, such that these likes would be filtered out as well (bastards). And then it felt like their algorithm became more and more hostile, post-poning presentation of people who liked you more and more. Basically, they really started to gamify the system, so that you would need to get these "power" boosts to get any matches at all apparently? I quit not long after this filter-hack was "fixed", so not sure what happened then.
- dlg 4y ago
  The change you describe from N+1 to N+2 wasn’t made to defeat your hack. It was made because we got lots of complaints that people thought the filters were buggy/broken when they saw people who didn’t match their filters and because they were seeing irrelevant people, lowering the chance of a match. The set of people who already liked you were being served out of a different service than regular recommendations and it was, iirc, just a Redis list until fixed. (More generally, we never purposely made the recommendation algo worse to increase boosts or because people would only stay if they didn’t meet someone during my era, even if everyone thought that’s we did. I haven’t been involved in several years however.) In any case, sorry!

stared 4y ago

Things IRL work differently. I mean, if you are into picking people at bars just by their looks, then yeah, dating apps go in that line. If you have long conversations with a friend of a friend at a party (or on some special interest groups), then dating apps are nothing like that. OK, maybe OkCupid, but back in the good old days. I often hear from women dating men that they would have swiped left their partner on Tinder.

nibbleshifter 4y ago
Almost every partner I have had (including my wife) where duration of relationship exceeded two months, I met IRL by pure chance. Online? Pretty much only ever resulted in a couple of dates with the person, or a one and done hookup. Its anecdotal, and friends have had the opposite experience, so I can't draw much of a conclusion from it besides that I was not suited to online dating.
- grvdrm 4y ago
  Your experience mirrors mine. My wife and my last serious relationship before - both IRL chance encounter or created through pre-existing friend connections. Some meaningful relationship-ish connections through online dating.
EveYoung 4y ago
I think the problem for most people is that we simply don't have many opportunities for these type of interactions at a certain point in life. Also, why do you need to have deep conversations before going out on a date? If there is physical attraction and some shared interests, what's the harm of meeting for some drinks?
- stared 4y ago
  I don't claim that dating apps are a bad idea - but that they are not optimized for my use case. Why talking first? Well, for me: P(attractive|interesting) >> P(interesting|attractive) and by a few orders of magnitude (1000?). YMMV.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago

I have yet to be with someone I had an initial physical attraction to. My current girlfriend didn't appeal to me until we spent some time chatting while hanging out with mutual friends. It's the best relationship I've yet had. Online dating, every time I have tried it, has been such an awful experience that I decided I preferred celibacy. Oh, and it has only got worse as time has gone on. Frankly, I'm amazed our species manages to reproduce under these conditions.

wruza 4y ago
Dating and reproduction have different requirements and happen at different periods. It’s like travel and emigration.

nordsieck 4y ago

> A 'date me' profile feels like the opposite -- trying to get a bunch of data on someone before actually interacting with them in person. I think this is completely backwards and we need to lean in far more into IRL experiences. I don't think so at all. The thing about meeting IRL is that you get a ton of context just by how you meet. Where did you meet? How were they dressed? Were they with friends; what are their friends like? And sure, there's a difference between online and IRL. But a big part of that is driven by the inherent structure of online dating. Without any sort of filters, there's nothing to stop extreme "r" style daters from drowning everyone else out.

nonameiguess 4y ago

This is an interesting dichotomy to me. I've been married and not dating for a while now, but back in the 2000-2007 era, I was pretty active on the sites available back then. It was great in the really early days. I was able to meet multiple reasonably well-known television actresses since I lived in LA and the overall pool was still small enough. I didn't even have to contact them. They found me! I always took the approach you're advocating. Get off the site as quickly as possible, ideally only one message, and then meet in person. I didn't see much point in getting to know someone only to find there's no physical chemistry. That worked well in terms of just getting dates. At least back then, plenty of women felt the same way and weren't as overwhelmed by sheer numbers or as cautious, especially at that younger age, being I was still in my early 20s. It's ironic, though, because I did meet my wife on OkCupid (granting she's my third wife, and I met the other two in school), but not in this way. They used to have social features in the pre-Match Group days, including the ability to post a personal journal and follow other people's journals. Before they also introduced discussion forums, this resulted in online communities of people who all followed each other, talking about basic issues of romance, but not necessarily actually dating since this was spread all over the country and even other countries, not local. At the time, I still lived in LA and my now wife lived in New York, so we "knew" other and talked plenty, but never had any plans to meet. I didn't meet her until years later when we both happened to move to Dallas independently. So assuming you're in to win it and not just to hit it, the only real "success" I ever had online dating was someone I didn't meet until six years after our first message exchange. Most of the people I immediately met never went past three dates.

CuriouslyC 4y ago

The problem with dating (both in person and in apps) is that you have this period of bullshit during early interactions. It's worse with dating apps, since you can have old/fake/not representative pictures (as opposed to being overly made up in a dark environment) and it's easier to spin a web of lies when you're not being interrogated face to face. Dating apps are also too much work, it'd be nice if they were fun. My ideal dating app would just let me record short video questions/statements with a filter that makes them somewhat homogenous (no duck face/angle play, background replaced with something generic, etc), then let other people respond with their own similar videos, and an algorithm would order responses based on my past swiping history. This would make it sort of like a tiktok-esque video chat app for single people. If the video questions/responses were ephemeral That would eliminate a lot of the fakeness as well, unless you wanted to get made up for glamour videos every day.

lupire 4y ago
> unless you wanted to get made up for glamour videos every day. Which is what most single women do.