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> One: present yourself exactly as you are. In fact, the fewer men you appeal to, the better. Two: be picky. Give almost no one a chance. Isn't this literally

• Brian_K_White 4y ago
  I never sent a "hey" or wink in my life. This is not some unreasonable bar. Every time I see my female friends inboxes I gag all over agaon. Dudes are pathetic.
  • raverbashing 4y ago
    Men send "Hey" to weed the bots and fake profiles. It's that simple And even then, "hey" is a correct way of starting a conversation. Sure it can be improved, using something about their profile works better. Though to be honest, women who start with the "entertain me" mentality, that's a good hint that she's not going to work out.
    • Brian_K_White 4y ago
      The fact that anyone tries to call this "entertain me" proves my point. There are such women of course, but this tiny trivial level of effort and sincerity is not that. This is exactly what I mean by pathetic.
    • petodo 4y ago
      Wouldnt be easier just send message "Hi, I'm sending this message to check whether this profile is bot or fake profile, if it ain't please respond that you are INSERT FUNNY REMARK, thanks." if you really use this message for such purpose and then you can just copypaste it.
      • Brian_K_White 4y ago
        Having read their profile, I usually already have something pretty much effortless to say, like "I googled up that that black gold finishing technique you mentioned and it's fascinating. I never even heard of that." So if anything, they had to step up and entertain me fist, since they had to even have anything remotely interesting in their profile to talk about like that. And yes I did the same in mine.
        • raverbashing 4y ago
          Yes, if they have such information on their profile then it's a great way to start your first message. Which is a good start, I mean, a lot of women don't even think to identify themselves in pictures with their friends. Though you then risk get an "ok" back because that wasn't "cool enough" So you're free to do better then, the bots will appreciate it as well
      • m000 4y ago
        A CAPTCHA sounds exactly what a man-bot would send as a first message, to weed-out its peer woman-bots.
    • dragonwriter 4y ago
      > Men send "Hey" to weed the bots and fake profiles. It's that simple That may be why some men do it, but that doesn't counter an observation that better results can be acheived by using that behavior as a strong negative signal. > And even then, "hey" is a correct way of starting a conversation In a zero-latency medium with non-verbal side channels, like face-to-face oral conversation, sure. In text media, even where I know I want yo interact with someone, I find it annoying.
  • postsantum 4y ago
    When I was using Tinder, I went from hey to elaborate openers and then back to hey. There are two reasons to it 1) Is photos are _way_ more important and the first message doesn't really affect the reply rate 2) It's a way to filter out recipients who think they are too good for hey or not going to reply anyway (window shopping or whatever they call it) >Dudes are pathetic That was subtle. I recognized the irony only upon looking at your username ;)
    • est31 4y ago
      Yeah "hey" might just be a single word but it carries a lot of meaning: it asks for "are you really interested in a conversation with me, then please reply with a 'hey' of your own". It also says "I have time now to have a conversation, and I do want to have it. Want to chat right now?". It provides a baseline from which one can base how quickly someone is responding, which can be used to judge interest from the other party. My expectation when sending a "hey" is not a "yes, i want to marry", it's another low-effort "hi :)" or something like that. This has its meanings of its own, by providing answers to the two questions above. It says that she has ideally given your profile a second look and does indeed want to have a conversation with you, on that app. Yes, after the "hey" I had people tell me that they don't like talking on the app but you should follow them on instagram (likely they won't respond to you there either), or offered me various paid services. Writing "hey" provides a great filter for me, too. And yes, I was actually able to start meaningful conversations after the first "hey" warm-up. The problem on dating apps is that with many profiles, you cannot start any conversation specific to those profiles due to them not revealing anything about themselves in the profile. Even if a woman reveals a little bit about herself in the pictures or in the bio, she will probably receive whatever specific-to-her starter you can think of in 20 different variations. Yes, you were not the only one who saw the famous monument in the background that she's been to. Yes, you were not the only one to notice that she likes avocado toast. She is literally talking with dozens of other people who also only saw that monument picture and the avocado toast line.
      • postsantum 4y ago
        I feel like noticing avocado toast is not a big deal. It's just a way to show you are not a weirdo, a sanity test. You are not offering to fuck right now and you can undestand some basic laws of conversation - a date material!
  • bjornsing 4y ago
    > Every time I see my female friends inboxes I gag all over agaon. Dudes are pathetic. I was about to write something about everybody’s time on this planet being limited and how there’s actually a human being on the other side of that chat window. But… an appeal to human decency feels pretty pointless here.
    • Brian_K_White 4y ago
      Tell me more about the human decency of saying nothing at all to someone end expecting anything at all from them.
      • TrickyRick 4y ago
        Ah you mean like most women who never write the first message to anyone?
        • Brian_K_White 4y ago
          Yes equally as bad.
        • mcv 4y ago
          Maybe the women who never write the first message and the men who write "hey" to everybody deserve each other. Though there's an important distinction between writing a message and real-time chat. "Hey" may be perfectly fine for a chat, but not for an email or similar type of direct message. I tend towards the latter.
      • dmn322 4y ago
        Real conversations with real strangers are tit for tat. Going overboard coming up with a bunch of catchy bs is not helpful in finding real people. The one thing that got me from almost no dates to dates all the time was just going places myself first instead of just asking girls. So instead of asking girls on a hike I’d tell them, hey I’m going on a hike want to go? And if they said no, i asked other girls and if they all said no, i went alone. The next time i had more girls wanting to hang out than i could. But the step before that was to change my mentality from one of trying to get laid to one of empathy. If i had as many options as those girls do, i would flake out too… there would be a lot of girls i want to go out with who seem cool but I’d have to prioritize them. And with limited information, that prioritization is never going to be perfect and it would make me sad to constantly have to hurt girls who are perfectly nice. But i would also have to develop a thick skin about it. Kind of like homeless people asking for money. So i started being way more understanding about them being flakey. I also realized women are skiddish. They never know what they’re going to get. So I’d try to be as wysiwyg as possible. I stopped trying to have sex on the first date, it’s too hard to get to know people, too complicated. And the people going around intensely doing hookup culture are just a subset of bratty rich kids who aren’t interested in finding or being good partners. I started trying to form genuine connections. That got me some nice convos but still didn’t work to get me dates until I did the first thing. Then i has more dates than i could handle. None of it was out of my comfort zone. None of it involved a lot of effort. It was ultimately literally just empathy.
  • dmn322 4y ago
    I said hey all the time when I was on the apps. It’s a perfectly normal way to start a conversation with a stranger in any other context, and plenty of girls don’t mind. There’s like an 80% chance of rejection anyway, I’m not coming up with some sales pitch just to get a slightly better response rate from ditzy self centered sociopaths whose idea of a man is a husk of a person just desperately performing gender roles.
  • mcv 4y ago
    Not sure why this is voted down. From my chats with women on dating sites, this is accurate. Most of them were constantly flooded with contentless messages like that, which makes it very hard to get a meaningful conversation. Mind you, my experience is all way pre-tinder. I've never been on Tinder, and things may work differently there, because if I understand correctly, you first need both people to already be interested in each other before you can send messages, and the messages are explicitly chat, so there a "Hey" might work. But on many traditional dating sites (many of which are scams now), you search profiles and send a message before you have a match, leading many women to get inundated with low-effort "Hey" messages from men with seemingly no content or personality at all. Maybe the Tinder approach is better.
    • djmips 4y ago
      You really can't see this being down voted for the (all) dudes are pathetic part?;
      • mcv 4y ago
        That "all" is your own addition, not present in the comment I responded to. Note that it was a man saying it. And I, also a man, agree: men who just send "Hey" to all women they can find are pathetic. It's a shitty, spammy way to behave on a dating site. It helps nobody.
        • dandelany 4y ago
          Jeez, one usually has to do some bad things IRL to be called shitty spammy and pathetic, apparently all it takes online is saying “hey”. Doesn’t that seem a bit excessive for someone whose crime is not figuring out some rather subtle unwritten, untaught social rules?
          • mcv 4y ago
            If the result is that women end up swamped in these messages, then it is literally spammy. Sending everybody a "Hey" is no different from sending everybody any other sort of message, ad or otherwise, and calling that out is not excessive. We used to all fight against spammers like the Spam King, because everybody suffered equally from that flood of unwanted messages. But because these minor spam lords only target women, it seems lots of men think it's not really a problem. If the people suffering from it think it's a problem, then it's a problem. And as far as I can tell, a lot of women on such dating sites do consider this a problem.
• jeltz 4y ago
  From my experience from using Tinder: no, most women try to appeal as broadly as possible and have low effort profiles and make low effort in general. It is possible that men are the same but I do not date men. And I get the same impression as she gets about men: that they are lazy and not interested in dating. > I wonder if she's ever actually sent a message to someone else. This entitlement of "entertain me peasant" is one of the reasons why I deleted these apps. Aren't you basically agree with her then? That once she moved away from a generic bland profile to actually putting some effort into it she got more success? I am not sure I agree with her advice about being picky though, if you actually make a profile which appeals to the kind of people you want to meet I am not sure you have to be that picky.
  • mcv 4y ago
    Exactly. Of course you shouldn't be so picky that no mortal is going to meet your unrealistic standards, but you should definitely be picky enough to separate the wheat from the chaff. Appealing to everybody when you're really just looking for one person means you're taking on a lot of pointless work. Let people select themselves: make sure your profile is specifically about you, and not some generic person of your gender. Don't be afraid to be off-putting to people you don't want to date. Don't claim to love partying if you don't. If you've got a weird hobby that would put a lot of people off but that you want your match to accept, definitely put it in. If you're looking for a long term relationship, put it in. Some people just aren't interested in that stuff, so why waste time on trying to date them? And as far as I'm concerned, this goes equally for both men and women. From my chats with women on dating sites, the behaviour of a lot of men is totally irrational to me: they just message every woman. Lots of women are inundated by messages from men who didn't even read their profile. This makes the dating experience for women extremely frustrating, as there's piles and piles of crap to wade through. So they end up ignoring most messages, which makes the experience also frustrating for men. My advice to women on dating sites is to just ignore the flood of incoming messages from men you didn't contact, and instead look for interesting profiles and contacting them. I think that massively improves the experience for both men and women.
    • distant_hat 4y ago
• bjornsing 4y ago
  > I wonder if she's ever actually sent a message to someone else. This entitlement of "entertain me peasant" is one of the reasons why I deleted these apps. I could not agree more. It’s a bit disheartening to see somebody think through online dating to this extent, write an article about it and not realize this. Before giving up on these apps I actually tried what happens to be the OP’s main recommendation: I wrote in my profile “If you are not interested in a friendly respectful chat starting with a simple ‘Hi’ please swipe no”. Unsurprisingly it didn’t work…
  • ildon 4y ago
    The story with my wife and partner for > 9 yrs started with a simple hi, in person. All that can I say about this is that the selection criteria works both ways. If a person is not willing to give a chance to another person simply based on the first word that comes out of their mouth/keyboard, perhaps it's them that don't deserve a chance
    • bradlys 4y ago
      Dating apps are not real life.
      • dragonwriter 4y ago
        Particularly, in person meeting is biased by lots of subtle filters (some of which correlate with compatibility) that matching on a dating app, especially with profiles on either side consciously designed to maximize matches, lacks.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • hanifc 4y ago
    > Before giving up on these apps I actually tried what happens to be the OP’s main recommendation: I wrote in my profile “If you are not interested in a friendly respectful chat starting with a simple ‘Hi’ please swipe no”. Unsurprisingly it didn’t work… I find that it's better to mention what you do want rather than what you don't want. People seem to respond better to positivity than negativity.
• mcv 4y ago
  It's not about entertaining, it's about finding someone who is right for you. And I can confirm that this works both ways. I've always known that most women aren't the right person for me. I don't just want some random woman, I want someone who understands me and who I can understand. I met my wife online. I forgot what I wrote in my profile, but it was probably slightly funny and self-deprecating, and honest about being a nerd. It had a photo of me in front of the gate of Timbuctoo. My wife recognised it and wrote a message where she referenced Ouagadougou, the capital of neighbouring Burkina Faso. Most Dutch women would completely lack that sort of knowledge, so that immediately drew me in. She's smart, sensible, not a nerd, but gets along great with nerds (one of her best friends was a nerd in denial). I really do not understand men who just send a "Hey" to every woman they see. Have some standards. And some personality.
  • jeltz 4y ago
    > I really do not understand men who just send a "Hey" to every woman they see. Have some standards. And some personality. I cannot say I understand it but many women on Tinder are the same. Zero personality.
• dragonwriter 4y ago
  > Isn't this literally what already occurs? It’s the exact opposite if the direction of change fron people’s normal inclinations the typical advice goes for improving results. But most people are selective enough naturally (and rightfully so) that, yes, even aoplying the typical advice to try to filter out as few people as possible either with the profile or with how they react to others profile or contacts, they are still filtering out the vast majority of the space. > This entitlement of "entertain me peasant" is one of the reasons why I deleted these apps. Wanting to eliminate as much as possible of the dating space with incompatible goals or personality is not “entitlement”, Your attitude, that you are somehow owed people not respecting themselves enough to do that, is.
• onetimeusename 4y ago
  > I wonder if she's ever actually sent a message to someone else I use different dating apps and regularly come across women with copypasted bios or also who just say "hey" if they initiate (usually they don't). I see other women complain about those same behaviors in their bios. I don't know what to say about that besides that she shouldn't speak for others but a lot of people who do things like that are potentially scammers also. I think women should be aware that dating apps are not easier for men and actually probably harder. Men face scammers and people who put low effort in too and maybe just saying hey worked for them before.