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Online daters are less open-minded than their filters suggest
- Overtonwindow 4y agoOnline dating is the myth of unlimited choice. Why settle for anyone, why look at a profile, when you can just swipe after .4 seconds of looking at photo? There are so many choices there is just no need to waste time when you can just..keep..swiping.
- zinclozenge 4y agoIt also turns out, a lot fewer people are as into hiking as they claim on their profile.
- waboremo 4y agoYes exactly, By including [hobby] here, you're able to weed out people you won't connect with for other reasons. Going back to hiking as an example, you can weed out unfit people without having to actively filter them out, as they'll see your profile and your like of "hiking" and self select out. People do this with a lot of things on their profile, they don't seriously care about whatever that thing is just what it represents.
- havermeyer 4y agoThat would also be interesting to analyze: which de facto attributes do people add because they think they're needed to pass an initial screening?
- thephyber 4y agoI’ve seen profiles which mention: - God/faith in the first line of profile - credit score - homeowner status - have a job/career - vaccine status - political party (and demands for the partner’s party affiliation) - FlatEartherism and other outlier conspiracy theories - the “three sixes club” - Dan Savage’s “GGG”
- agentdrtran 4y agoit's used as a proxy for fitness.
- giraffe_lady 4y agoIt's used as a proxy for "thin and not disabled."
- wing-_-nuts 4y agoAs someone with a disability, this tracks lol. I don't outright disclose my disability on my profile (saved for dms, as some people can be creepy), but I say my idea of 'hiking' is more like a casual stroll in the local botanical gardens.
- AllegedAlec 4y agoAnd people are not allowed to pick their partner based on that?
- agentdrtran 4y agothey are, but I think it's interesting how people feel the need to hide this. it's not like only skinny people can go hiking.
- giraffe_lady 4y agoI'm describing a behavior not trying to be the partnership police.
- tekla 4y agoImagine my surprise when 98% of all people I've ever seen claim to like hiking meant at most a hour or two walk up a hill, versus something that could take over a day with several thousand foot elevation changes. Really soured me on that category.
- midoridensha 4y agoAnything over a day is not "hiking", that's "backpacking", as another poster said. There's a reason that outdoor boots are divided into "hiking boots" and "backpacking boots". The two are significantly different.
- dotancohen 4y agoHonestly, I love hiking. My family does maybe a dozen or so hikes per year - and every hike is under six hours, often under four. Perhaps we need a different word for the two activities.
- sixstringtheory 4y agoI would say what you do is hiking and anything that takes over a day is “backpacking”. Then you can get into “urban” vs “backcountry”/“remote”/“wilderness”.
- akiselev 4y agoIf it takes over a day then its backpacking, not hiking. At least that's how I and most people colloquially understand the two.
- Nifty3929 4y agohttps://m.xkcd.com/120/ https://m.xkcd.com/120/
- hn_throwaway_99 4y agoMy favorite Grindr profile text that I once saw was "Y'all can't possibly be into hiking as much as you say you are."
- version_five 4y agoMy takeaway is that many people would rather decide themselves than set a blanket policy, even if results are similar. I feel this way about most consumer searching- say a real estate search: you may have a good idea of the location and specs of the house you're looking for, but much better to set wider filters just in case something interesting comes along that's out of spec in some way. Even if effectively you only consider the ones that would have made it through a tighter filter. I'm not at all surprised this is true for online dating as well.
- TechBro8615 4y agoYeah, you don't want to miss that Short King with the Lambo.
- giraffe_lady 4y agoThe real reason to filter out short men is they tend to have exactly this sort of complex about it. It's the king part not the lambo you don't want to miss.
- TechBro8615 4y agoThat's what I would expect a giraffe lady to say :)
- giraffe_lady 4y agoha true good point
- mastersummoner 4y agoI can't believe how well you were set up for this one, haha.
- TechBro8615 4y agoFWIW, as someone 5'8", I also filter out women who are taller than me. So I don't hold any grudges against women who filter out men who are shorter than them. And I think "giraffe ladies" actually have it equally as bad as short kings. Most men don't want to date someone taller than them. I think what some men find annoying is when short women filter out men under some arbitrary height. But personally I don't really care, that's their right to do (newsflash: people have preferences), and the better looking they are, the more of a reason they have to do it anyway. Also, not all dating apps require you to list your height, so you can omit it from your bio at the risk of a disappointed look upon first meet, but that's up to you to make up for with confidence.
- havermeyer 4y agohttp://archive.today/W0LzA http://archive.today/W0LzA
- zzzeek 4y agonext up, water is wet
- Spooky23 4y agoThese things are difficult because people are difficult. My sister is a tall (6’) woman. It’s really difficult. Shorter men find her intimidating, assholes consider her fat, and insecure 6-6’4” guys get weird about heels and other things. Men and women are picky about different things. I’m a guy and am really tall, and didn’t really care about height of a partner. Other attributes mattered more or less to me. These things are some combo of hardwired instincts, social pressures/norms, and personal preferences. I’m glad that I missed modern online dating though.
- bloodyplonker22 4y agoThe first chart in the article is very hard to understand with the extremely ambiguous language.
- drabbiticus 4y agoYeah, it took me a bit too. You have to look at it on the Economist and not the archive.vn mirror. Y axis is Height (or whatever you've set in the "Show by drop down" and X axis is the title of the graph, "Share of possible matches removed via filters, %". Hover over a point and the graph becomes much easier to understand. E.g. one point shows > Hispanic men, 25-29 years old, 6'0"-6'1". Filtered out by 9% of possible matches Each of the circles represents a group that is defined by a permutation of Race/Gender/Age/Height. I think size of circle represents size of that population in the dataset. In the case of my example, the circle for "Hispanic men, 25-20 years old, 6ft-6ft1in" was small, so there probably aren't many men fitting that specific combination in the data set. You also see intuitively that the circles for men 5'5" or shorter are small and the circles for women 6'0" or taller are smaller, corresponding to our intuitions that men that short or women that tall are less common in the overall population.
- drabbiticus 4y agoMy apologies, this was a misquote. Actually instead of saying "Filtered out by 9%", the article says "Filtered out 9%". So Hispanic men in this age and height bracket created height filters that reduced the size of the overall candidates available to them by 9% of the population. It is NOT that they are rejected by 9% of the population.
- nickthegreek 4y agoThere is always a trope that if a man's online dating profile says 6"+, he is 5'10". As an extremely short dude (5'3"), I was always super up front about my height. I'd rather not waste the time with someone who isn't attracted to someone so short. I've always had a smaller dating pool than those around me, but it hasn't stopped me from finding meaningful romantic relationships. I am just thankfully that I am funny.
- klodolph 4y agoWhat’s fun is getting the perspective from a 5'10" woman who uses dating apps. Average woman in the US is 5'4", and if a guy pads their 5'9" to 6'0", she might not notice unless she is specifically paying attention. However, to the 5'10" woman, there’s a big perceptual difference between talking to someone who’s 2" taller than you and someone who is 1" shorter than you, and it’s not something you even pretend to not notice. (I was a bit shocked to learn that some 5'9" men had the audacity to put 6'0" on dating profiles. Like, 5'9" is average. It’s not even short, to begin with.)
- RyJones 4y agoI always had a picture of me in front of a gas station exit door, showing me standing on the floor, not wearing a big hat, obviously taller than the 6' mark on the door.
- jedberg 4y agoI find this mental image hilarious. Thank you.
- alistairSH 4y agoMy dating life predates online apps, but when I met my wife, I told her I was 5'8" (in-person, so it's not like I could really lie). Anyways, I might just be 5'8" with cowboy boots and perfect posture (and these days, I'm secure enough to admit I'm just 5'7"). She wasted no time in calling me on it. She's 5'4", so average height for a woman. We still joke about it today (20 years after that first date). But, wow, the audacity to claim a 3"+ difference? That's ballsy.
- SamuelAdams 4y agoI wonder if apps could be updated to show filters as a percentage of excluded matches. So if you filter age to say, 20-30 years old, it would say “hey this excludes 43% of users on this app”. Then maybe have a total exclusion percentage for all filters on the app. So it at least raises awareness to users that maybe their struggle with getting matches is related to their settings rather than some other attribute.
- grey-area 4y agoThey could show a histogram to do this.
- barrysteve 4y agoWhen you're at the buffet, disapproval and pickiness is cheap and easy.
- EarthLaunch 4y agoContrasting online dating with my imagination of "village dating": In a setting with a small selection, I find I naturally look for qualities - things I like about someone I'm around. If someone has a couple of nice qualities, that's enough to enjoy their company. In a setting with a large selection, I try to narrow the difficulty of the choice by looking for disqualifiers - things I don't like about people. I wonder how this relates to happiness.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- drabbiticus 4y ago> Users deploy racial filters sparingly. For example, black women pass through 36% of other users’ filters, compared with 44% for women of other races. This gap is similar to the effect of one inch of height for men. However, just 24% of black women are liked as prospects, versus 37% for non-black women—an impact as great as 11 inches of male height. I need to figure out if this dataset is available somewhere for analysis because an equivalence of 11 inches of height is somewhat shocking to me. It's a much bigger effect size than I expected, but maybe that just means I have to update my worldview. It may also have to do with the demographics of the daters interested in women using the League app. Also, if I'm reading the first graph correctly, the penalty at the filtering stage for being a women 5'6"-5'7" or taller is worse than being a man between 5'2" - 5'3". Just not what I expected.
- drabbiticus 4y agoPosted this in reply to a different comment, but wanted to post it here too for visibility. Please let me know if you disagree with my interpretation of how to read the data from the graphs. ___ You have to look at it on the Economist and not the archive.vn mirror. Y axis is Height (or whatever you've set in the "Show by drop down" and X axis is the title of the graph, "Share of possible matches removed via filters, %". Hover over a point and the graph becomes much easier to understand. E.g. one point shows > Hispanic men, 25-29 years old, 6'0"-6'1". Filtered out by 9% of possible matches Each of the circles represents a group that is defined by a permutation of Race/Gender/Age/Height. I think size of circle represents size of that population in the dataset. In the case of my example, the circle for "Hispanic men, 25-20 years old, 6ft-6ft1in" was small, so there probably aren't many men fitting that specific combination in the data set. You also see intuitively that the circles for men 5'5" or shorter are small and the circles for women 6'0" or taller are smaller, corresponding to our intuitions that men that short or women that tall are less common in the overall population.
- drabbiticus 4y agoHuh. Messing with the first graph again. Change the "Show by" filter and make sure the second option changes to the corresponding Age/Height/Race filter Observations ============ 1. First option Age: If you are 29 or younger, you are more likely to be filtered out if you are a man than a woman. If you are 30 or older, you are more likely to be filtered out if you are a woman than a man. This corresponds to my expectations. 2. First option Height: Similar, with the cutoff being 5'5" or 5'6". This roughly makes sense I guess, but I would have thought that women 5'8"-5'9" would be less prone to being filtered out on the first pass. 3. First option Race: For every race but one, you are more likely to be filtered out as a woman than as a man. This was surprising to me. Unsurprising is that the one category this flips is Asian - Asian women are less likely to be filtered out, Asian men are more likely to be filtered out. "Everyone" is open to dating White, Other, Hispanic, None Given, with relative penalties for being Black, Indian, Asian. [edited for clarity and to better reflect the graphs I was looking at]
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y agoOnline dating is incredibly superficial by design, so it is no wonder that those who use it do so in superficial ways. Even with the best of intentions the platform itself will push them in that direction. I've long since sworn them off. Like social media, they present a case for being useful but to the extent they were it is greatly outpaced by the damage they do to people and society.
- monksy 4y agoOnline dating is hard. One hand you have the: Standards and practices of the site you have their standards of your preferences. I.e. Don't like trans people and have bad/ignorant opinions or stances about them? You could get easily removed and restricted from the site. (That is not my stance.. but it causes people to hide what their preferences are and it causes you bad experiences with people who you don't click with) In Chicago and a trumper? You're going to have a bad time stating your preference/likewise for the opposite in the biblebelt. Another: You have encourage groups of people who put little effort or intent in maintaining a profile Another: You have to know what your audience who you don't know yet wants and how they want to be approached. Another: Scammers not taken care of quickly. Online dating is a garbage place.
- mjevans 4y ago(self) introspection is also hard. An end user may not even consciously know they have a filter, nor the relative weight of that filter (people are often analog, outside of extreme subjects). The site might not even capture a variable that's important. E.G. it isn't mandatory to answer if someone enjoys kelp basket weaving; which might be someone's favorite hobby. However that's extremely niche and people in the data set would probably outright skip over that question entirely as well as related questions that might composite towards a value in that field. Or maybe it's like gardening but there's so much ambiguity about the scale and seriousness that asking a question doesn't provide good results outside of an interactive conversation.
- monksy 4y agoI would love to date someone that was enthusastic about kelp basket weaving. That's a major positive compared to someone that "is a pam looking for her sam" or whatever that guys name is.
- tomp 4y agoI don't understand what's bad/wrong with filtering out trans people (except that it's contra the mainstream woke agenda). What if you're dating to have (biological) kids?
- rohan_ 4y agoAnecdotally I've found the opposite. Whenever I see a couple that didn't meet on dating apps, I ask the woman if she would have swiped right on the man if she _did_ see him on an app, she always says "no". It seems women are way less picky when meeting in-person.
- m348e912 4y agoThis is absolutely true, but the woman also doesn't have to sift through 100's of potential suiters in real life also. You have touched on one the biggest issues with online dating, woman getting overwhelmed with matches resulting in having to be picky about things that perhaps they would be less concerned with if they met in real life. I've read stories about how some woman have unenthusiastically swiped right on a guy based on their profile, but after meeting they ended up hitting off. The next successful iteration of a dating app is either none at all or one that figures out how to detoxify the online dating process.
- cmh89 4y agoOnline dating de-contextualizes people and no amount of filtering can change that. When you meet people IRL you have some context for them and want they like to do. For example, I met my wife as she was the roommate of a new male friend I'd made. Because of our shared friend, I was pretty confident when she said she liked biking or hiking, that it was at the same level I did, because that's something that friend group was in to.
- bombcar 4y ago"Real life" provides tons of "gatekeeping" of all sorts, the online systems have to (badly) replicated it on some small number of inputs. (example: if you meet someone at a college, you ALREADY have tons in common simply from the fact that you're at the same college, and colleges also incidentally filter for a bunch of other things, too)
- FalconSensei 4y agoexactly! Also: in real life, you don't have to ask someone's height/weight because well... you are already seeing them and finding them attractive or not
- michaelteter 4y agoAt the risk of stepping into a minefield, I would suggest that this article implies that racial differences are "simple" (such as primarily about appearance (and color of skin)). In reality, racial or social/cultural differences involve many attributes which group together. For example, some racial groups may be much more family oriented, rarely gathering or moving about without multiple family members. One might be open to the idea of dating someone from a very different background (or "race" (skin color)), but that person may also still be selecting for potential partners who they think will live a similar life. No matter what supposed race, the environment and background one grows up in tends to shape behavior and mentality. And beyond initial outward appearance, these behaviors may be obvious and visible. And when such a behavior is very different from your own, you may choose to pass on that person based on what you believe will be behavioral differences. So you may be open to dating someone of that "race", but you may want someone who is still more similar in lifestyle and thinking. These are interesting things to think about, but it's all just a distraction from the bigger issue. The bigger issue is that dating sites, or any type of intentional dating search, is probably a wrong approach to finding a partner or mate. In normal life, especially before the internet, people would go places somewhat regularly - the same grocery store, a particular church, an office, or some recurring social activity. In the normal course of their routine, they would see some of the same people frequently. And perhaps they would have a conversation with some of them; and some subset would be fascinating or attractive. Maybe they would find friends, and maybe some of those friends would become closer and additional feelings would develop. But with intentional dating, especially with sites like OkCupid (which initially was much better than it is today), you might be tempted to believe you had found the perfect match! The other person was attractive, and they had answered so many questions with almost identical answers to you that they _must_ be the perfect person for you. That sets up an incredibly high expectation. In reality, there is more that matters... and some of what matters is not visible for some time. Instead of a cautious courting process (aka old school going out, the step before "dating"), two people think they are a good match and want to race toward the goal. Unfortunately, it is possible to both be so fixated on the apparent perfection of the match that much time passes before there is a realization that neither truly knows or understands the other. Maybe AI can help here :P. I joke, but at this point I think it might be as or more effective than current online dating in terms of finding a good partner for a given goal. And still, it would be worse than the organic process that existed for 99.999% of human existence.
- JoeAltmaier 4y agoWhen folks on Steam (bear with me) post a game for sale, they can tag it with keywords to help you find a game you like. But most folks have an 'exclusion list' instead - I don't want side-scrollers for instance. So game publishers have learned to tag the absolute minimum. Because every further tag reduces the eyeballs your game gets under.
- ipnon 4y agoThis is the fundamental difference between active search and happenstance. The first starts with a practically infinite set that must be whittled down, the second an empty set that requires some effort to make additions. Outside of traditional matchmaking human courtship used the second for all of history until a decade or so ago!
- thephyber 4y agoIn my dating app experience, I noticed I didn’t trust the null matching for filter fields. Also, when I exhausted my search results in a metro region of 5million+ in a few weeks, I didn’t trust that the filters were working the way I wanted. Agree that some profiles filled out the absolute minimum, but I quickly noticed that they weren’t active (or matching with me) and wouldn’t have made good dates anyway.
- athrowaway1324 4y ago[flagged]
- noslenwerdna 4y agoEveryone has preferences for all kinds of reasons. Some people don't like bald guys or short guys or whatever. Are you saying folks should be pressured to date someone they don't find attractive?
- athrowaway1324 4y ago> Are you saying folks should be pressured to date someone they don't find attractive? No I am not. What I am saying is that these preferences are merely places in U.S. society where discrimination objectively occurs, and sometimes people seem not to be cognizant of that.
- the_af 4y agoI think I understand what you are saying, but I must ask: who is not cognizant that wanting/rejecting sexual or romantic partners is an act of discrimination? Some people like to pretend that looks don't matter, but even they discriminate by something, be it looks, or status, or cultural background, or shared interests. Otherwise the next random person to come along would be as good as anyone as a dating or sex partner.
- athrowaway1324 4y ago> who is not cognizant that wanting/rejecting sexual or romantic partners is an act of discrimination? The commenter above, who said "older ladies need to show some youthfulness" and "they seem like they have one foot in the grave to me" could have been a bit more cognizant.
- snozolli 4y agoThe commenter who said "older ladies need to show some youthfulness" and "they seem like they have one foot in the grave to me" could have been a bit more cognizant. You're misrepresenting what he wrote.
- bena 4y agoI think it's partly because we believe our ideals to be who we are and not what we aspire to. If you set your filter to 5'0", you can say you consider shorter people. And you can say it's for some other reason that you don't date them. As you obviously don't mind, because you don't filter them out explicitly. But it's odd that nobody under 5'6" fits any of your other criteria. We want to be seen as people who are non-biased, non-discriminatory, and all that. However, when there are real consequences, we tend to reveal ourselves.
- tssva 4y agoThe data comes from The League app which actively promotes itself to those you have been told they are too picky or have too high of standards. Generalizing online daters based upon data from The League might not be appropriate.
- drabbiticus 4y agoIt's a fair point and I hadn't seen anything about League before this article. I explore some observations based on manipulating the graphs down thread in the comments, and make a similar point that observations which are surprising may be more reflective of the population using the app specifically. Having said that, a quick google for any comparable data set doesn't seem available. So while the limitations are important to keep in mind, for now, this is the only data set that I'm aware of. My approach is to take it with a grain of salt, but not to completely ignore it.
- motohagiography 4y agoThe strategy described in the article is basically to be liberal in what you accept but conservative in what you choose. Stated preferences are what someone wants you to think-they-think. They are incredibly misleading. As someone who tends to be both an acquired taste and a revealed preference, dating sites and apps are a waste of time and probably deeply psychologically harmful. Slot machines that pay out in coins are heavily regulated because they are considered socially harmful, but ones that pay out in dates are somehow empowering. If I didn't know better I'd say they were a conspiracy of pet food manufacturers. I actually think that the straight dating pool over about the age of 30 is not large at all, and that the advertising style of the apps hampers any instinctual "stopping problem" sorting, where you really just become addicted to the potential like a slot machine. I'd even argue that fake profiles on dating sites that create opportunity costs against finding a real partner sabotoge individuals reproductive opportunities and will be remembered as being on the wrong side of history.
- mrguyorama 4y agoOne thing it seems always goes unsaid about online dating is that women HAVE to be extremely picky, because a huge proportion of them have experienced sexual assault or rape from a date met on these platforms. Even when they haven't personally experienced it, they know people who have. Match Group is notoriously bad at doing ANYTHING about sex criminals on their platforms https://www.propublica.org/article/addressing-rape-in-four-minutes-or-less-dating-app-reps-left-unprepared-to-respond-to-assault-victims https://www.propublica.org/article/addressing-rape-in-four-m...
- jfoiawjf 4y ago[dead]
- monksy 4y ago> She reported the events to the police, which didn’t lead to criminal charges. You can report anything to the police. The fact that it didn't lead to charges is suspicious. How do you as a company take a random person's words who makes a severe accusation against another indiviudal that isn't backed up with another authority?
- mrguyorama 4y agoThe vast majority of sexual assaults and rapes don't lead to any case at all, because prosecutors don't like to take hard-to-win cases to court and a sexual assault or rape case is pretty much impossible to convict. Criminal conviction requires "beyond a preponderance of a doubt", and how in the holy hell are you ever supposed to meet that with "he didn't stop when I told him to" and "she said yes"? It's basically a contract disagreement but there's no physical contract and no evidence of things that happened. It usually means a victim cannot get justice unless the people involved are stupid or willing to bypass the accused constitutional right to a fair and legit trial.
- hn_throwaway_99 4y agoWhile I agree with your sentiment, I'm not sure how "being picky in order to avoid sexual assault" aligns with minimum height requirements. If anything, it would imply the opposite.
- psychphysic 4y agoNot surprising. I suppose not using the filter gives a chance for someone very special to slip through. Even if that never happens in practice. I'm shocked that for women being black reduces match potential similar to nearly a foot of height in men! Wowza. Height is such an intense, open, discriminator for men (as judged by women). How tall are you can easily be in the first 3 questions a woman asks.
- snozolli 4y agoThe OkCupid blog from before 2011, when Match bought them, was great: https://web.archive.org/web/20110113034228/http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/why-you-should-never-pay-for-online-dating/ https://web.archive.org/web/20110113034228/http://blog.okcup... The original nerds who started the site did a bunch of data analysis. Summary: men wildly outnumber women, women feel overwhelmed, men inevitably become desperate, and stated preferences don't reflect actual evidence at all. For example, I recall them saying that women would say they would never date a guy who posted a shirtless photo, but every shirtless-photo-posting guy who looked even slightly decent got way more matches. Also, the data on racial preference was pretty sad.
- samtho 4y agoWhen I’m looking for cars to buy on fb market or Craigslist, I use very general terms and never the feature filters like transmission, drive train, body style, even fuel type. So many people enter the wrong thing (it doesn’t matter if is done knowingly or on purpose because the result is the same), or don’t enter any information at all and it is unclear if the search function will include null fields (usually it does not). Instead, I browse the list and now that Facebook curates it via some opaque algorithm, it is unclear if I get to see the “full list”. I would guess people on dating sites are using the same logic. If I can’t trust the filters, just give me everything and I’ll sort from there. When the stakes are as high as finding a life-parter, or even someone you can trust to be intimate with, the cost of a missed opportunity is just too high.