9 ms·

Tired of Dating Apps, Some Turn to Google Docs

55 points by mistersquid 3y ago

Krastan 3y ago
https://archive.is/YJFD2 https://archive.is/YJFD2
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
skyfaller 3y ago
This sort of long-form writing is what attracted me to OkCupid once upon a time, before it was bought out by Match.com and gradually enshittified. I feel like there is a niche for dating people who like long-form reading and writing still, instead of the swipe left and right on one picture format popularized by Tinder. Potential problems: - Launching a dating app from scratch; where do you get your first users if you're ethical and refuse to fake users? (If you're not ethical, people could just use existing unethical dating sites with fake users.) - Keeping the business from being bought out by Match.com and enshittified, just like its predecessors - Developing a business model that doesn't incentivize unethical behavior, as OkCupid famously pointed out before it was bought out: https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/okcupid/whyyoushouldneverpayforonlinedating.html https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/okcupid/whyyoushouldneverpa... I'm probably posting on the wrong forum, but I don't think VC-backed startups can solve this problem. You need maybe a worker-owned co-op, or an open source non-profit like Mastodon, to have any hope of resisting the pressures of capitalism that ultimately ruin all these sites.
- andrewflnr 3y ago
  Or user-owned.
  - JennyWeston 3y ago
    Dating apps fail due to an inherent asymmetry. A small percentage of the population will attract a large percentage of the dating pool. A large percentage of the population will attract a small percentage of the dating pool. The job of a dating app is to give the appearance of progress and engagement to a very wide segment of the market. It sells hope and false positives. Better? 1) Learn core social skills. Making people feel good about themselves is fundamentally attractive. 2) Upgrade listening skills. People who make others feel heard and understood are very attractive. 3) Do stuff. Fun stuff. Whatever leads to your personal happiness. Happy engaged people are attractive. 4) Stop using dating apps. Suck it up. Face confusion, rejection, and bad choices. Learn what you need to learn. Improve. Wash - rinse - repeat. People who have earned their confidence and skills are very attractive. 5) Learn to laugh at yourself. 6) Have real friends. Do stuff with them. There is a direct relationship between having good friends and feeling good about life. 6.5) Keep social media to a minimum. It sucks your attention and gives you envy.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- sokoloff 3y ago
  If you could solve only the first one, you're well on your way to building a company to sell to match.com.
- sharikous 3y ago
  I have no doubt that any platform will be enshittified or disappear eventually, but eventually we all will be dead. The question should be how to launch a dating app in 2023 that won't suck for at least a decade.
- mysterydip 3y ago
  I wonder if there's people out there banking on using LLMs to "seed" startups with realistic-enough fake users to get the network effect bootstrapped to draw in actual users.
  - dotnet00 3y ago
    IIRC early reddit did something similar (although obviously not using LLMs) where they aggregated content from other sites automatically and effectively faked activity to draw in real users.
  - i_am_jl 3y ago
    Charlie Javice knows a guy.
- unsupp0rted 3y ago
  This was true of me in my 20s, but with experience I realized: 1. Ain't nobody (i.e. me) got time for that 2. There's no correlation between multiple flowery paragraphs trying to sound witty and quirky about oneself and the chemistry you get after sitting across a table IRL for 30 ~ 90 seconds All the paragraphs and "FAQs about me" just aren't worth it: for me, or for potential matches of mine > She added that she was undoubtedly a cat in a previous life, “just one of those weirdo bodega ones that like people.” This is the nonsense I'm talking about. Paragraphs and paragraphs of it.
  - throwaway22032 3y ago
    This is the fundamental issue with dating apps. Your life partner is not someone that you interact with through a screen. All of the attempts to fix this are total bollocks. You can sit on a bus and get more of a signal about whether the man/woman sitting across from you is compatible than you can from an app.
- LapsangGuzzler 3y ago
  I think intentional in-person speed dating beats the hell out of dating apps all day. IMO some things will never be improved through appification and dating is one of them.
adrianhon 3y ago
NYT fact checkers clearly need their coffee today as the docs they featured are from Notion, not Google Docs
- colingoodman 3y ago
  The photos they featured are Notion, but if you look at the "Date Me Directory" they linked it appears to be mostly Google Docs. The author certainly could have been more specific.
- bckr 3y ago
  I wonder if their average reader would know what Notion is. I’ve definitely seen romance Docs before.
anonylizard 3y ago
Dating apps don't work because the business model doesn't make sense. All apps rely on repeat business, yet here repeat business depends on failed relationships. It is theoretically possible to make 'repeat business' on long-term reputation attracting new customers, similar to how schools and universities can thrive despite only ever serving a customer once. However, how often will someone need to introduce others to a dating app? A multi-year timeline for word-of-mouth is probably too much for a VC funded app. There exists dating businesses that can profit from long-term relationships, its called Church (Marry at a church = lifetime donor + children likely become members too), hence churches are far more optimized and effective at building long term relationships than apps could possibly be.
- Workaccount2 3y ago
  On the flipside, dating apps are killing their industry by being so ineffective. It's seems much more desirable for people to have a good experience. Also many people are not looking to get married at 20. They likely have a decade of messing around before getting off the apps for good.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - Invictus0 3y ago
    > dating apps are killing their industry by being so ineffective I tried to look this up and was surprised to find that Match group doesn't share their MAU numbers. Probably wouldn't be that meaningful since many people use multiple apps. What I did find though is that they have 16M paying users worldwide, which is fairly close to their all time high, and if you estimate that those users are all men, and only 25% of men pay, and there are equal numbers of men and women across all the apps, then you would have a rough estimate of 128M users worldwide, which sounds about right to me.
    - red-iron-pine 3y ago
      these numbers must be taken with a grain of salt given the rampant amount of bots / onlyfans / spam users. only person i know who used the tind estimated that 90% of his likes were people asking for money, redirections to their insta, or just straight up fake likes from the app to keep him using premium. FWIW he got a girlfrend through it, tho -- meeting them for a dinner thing this weekend
Cymrukicks 3y ago
Modern dating apps are terrible because they have taken all the mechanics used in the gambling industry and use that to fleece users. I hope this generation makes a conscious decision to go backwards in the search for love. Love isn't convenient and its not supposed to be.
Workaccount2 3y ago
I have an idea for an app that I will never realize so I'll throw it out in the air: Make an app where you make a relatively extensive profile, put up a bounty for a match, and then crowdsource the matching. So the app experience would be mainly trying to match other people based on their looks and profile. When a relationship (or whatever goal) is made, people will payout their bounty. Or they can tip and the like for dates, good matches, etc. The biggest killer of dating apps is the disparity between mens extreme thirst and women's extreme reservation. Both need a reality check and I think others doing the matching would provide it. Edit: Also, augmenting this system with AI/LLMs/transformers would make it enormously powerful. It's basically an AI matching framework.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  The top 80 percent of women compete for the top 20 percent of men on dating apps. The optimization is for physical attraction, which is orthogonal to what makes a long term sustainable relationship (emotional health, mutual respect and trust, etc). I don't believe an app will fix this people problem. You can't Uber or Doordash a great partner, but that is the expectation that has been built. Citations: https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-guys-unless-you-are-really-hot-you-are-probably-better-off-not-wasting-your-2ddf370a6e9a https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-g... | https://archive.is/JSFXx https://archive.is/JSFXx https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33585033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33585033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25062789 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25062789 | Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25055501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25055501 (Never Pay for Online Dating (2010)) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22406583 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22406583 (RFC: Let's Disrupt Dating Apps (2020))
  - Workaccount2 3y ago
    The other side of that study (The infamous OKcupid one, it seems to be the source of all these) is that once women engage with men, their expectations normalize, and they end up with like rated men. The core issue is just getting women to engage with realistically viable men. This has never been a (huge) issue ever before because until right now, the only way to meet people was face to face encounters. Nature solved for the problem, and online dating broke it.
sydbarrett74 3y ago
Dating apps rely on a variable-interval schedule of rewards (think slot machines). Dating sites don't sell matches. They sell the /hope/ or /anticipation/ of matches. Very rarely, two people do match up and form a successful relationship. It truly is a lottery. Lottos want people to keep buying tickets. If the vast majority of people won substantial prizes, hardly anyone would play anymore. They'd simply take their winnings and ride off into the sunset.
gesaint 3y ago
[dead]
littlecranky67 3y ago
> After going through a breakup last year, Connie Li, a software engineer, rejoined the dating apps, ready to dip her toe in the water again. But many of the men who reached out to her seemed to just want something casual, so she tried something new. That is the problem right there. Most dating apps nowadays allow you to set filters for dating preferences (long-term partner, casual, hookups etc.). I asume that the pool of candidates that she faced with that filter turned on and who wanted truly long-term commitments didn't fit her expectations or taste/preferences. Creating google docs profiles won't solve the underlying issue - majority of men mostly looking for casual hookups or outright lying about their intensions (faking long-term interest to get some quick bedroom action).
- hbn 3y ago
  I'm pretty sure they charge to use filters like that anyway. And the subscriptions are absurdly expensive these days.
throwaway22032 3y ago
The issue with dating apps is that they optimize on entirely the wrong factors. What matters in a relationship is trust, safety, reliability, shared goals and vision, etc. Yes, some level of physical attraction is useful and necessary, sex is important, but it doesn't make sense to optimize 90% on that trait. The only way to figure this stuff out is to meet as soon as possible and "clock" the other person. Not only that, but the target market of dating apps are overwhelmingly biased towards short-term hedonism anyway. Tinder are currently running a marketing campaign that is entirely focused on queer dating (not LGB, more like the rainbow gender stuff), which is both a tiny fraction of the market, and also unlikely to be something that will actually result in life-long relationships. It seems bizarre for them to focus so heavily on this group until you realise that, as others have posted, people who aren't ready to settle down are the most profitable group.
karaterobot 3y ago
> “I’ve literally never in my life gone to a bar to meet a stranger,” he said. “I just can’t even imagine it.” Most NYT pieces like this have a snarky comment that sums up the writer's opinion about the supposed trend they're observing. I thought this one was pretty good. On the whole, I'd rather they only covered stories they thought were important, but it's also good to have a laugh.
aalimov_ 3y ago
Imo what dating apps are missing is the ability to meet a friend of a friend, or a friend of a friend of a friend. If that was offered it could be easier to meet and also get along with the people you do meet because there is already a mutual friend there which might mean similar interests or maybe compatible personalities…
- hbn 3y ago
  I think even more importantly, having a mutual friend could be a vouch for character. Facebook could have done something like this if they got into the dating game before all the young people left/stopped making accounts.
- arp242 3y ago
  Bumble has this, in addition to their dating. My experience as a guy is that it's mostly gay guys looking for dickpics/hookups/whatnot, at least, that was the case in my area at the time a few years back. I did just so happen to randomly meet someone a few weeks ago who said she had pretty good success with it. So YMMV I guess.
hbn 3y ago
Dating apps are so, so bad now. Not that they were great before, but I think people actually took Tinder somewhat seriously as a place to get to know people for the first couple years. Now it's just become an ever-more expensive game that preys on how imbalanced dating is between men and women that I believe is due to these apps and the internet in general (I'm sure there's other issues for gay people but I'm talking about the use case I'm familiar with). The gender ratio is like 1:10, so even non-conventionally attractive women can get on there and get a few dozen matches in a day (if not 99+ if you're even moderately attractive), and any guy who isn't in the top 1% of looks/money/clout/influence is lucky to get a few matches per day. So the men are making any desperate attempt to stand out from the crowd of other men they're competing with for women's attention, meanwhile every day I see viral tweets of women screenshotting and posting men's "cringe" Tinder openings, telling them to try harder. I don't think a lot of women even realize what dating apps are like from the other side, because I've heard plenty of instances where a girl helps her guy friend make a dating profile thinking she can help him get setup on a date, and are baffled when they can't get him matches or conversations with anyone. And one thing that's not obvious unless you do your research, is if you're getting swiped right or matched with frequently enough, the Tinder algorithm will just stop showing you to people with no indication you're essentially shadowbanned. Supposedly you can reset the algorithm every few months by deleting your account and recreating it, but apparently if you do this too many times you'll get permanently shadowbanned and won't be able to use Tinder unless you get a new phone number. And considering Match.com owns Tinder and every other major dating website/app, I wouldn't be surprised if they'd use a shared list of the "unlovables." It really feels like it's cranked to 11 a system where men have to desperately try and stand out amongst a ginormous crowd of other men, and women have to sort through this ginormous crowd of men who may or may not be genuine, not wanting to "settle" because there might be a better one in there somewhere. It's clearly not working anyone, and dating is just so exhausting because of it.
johnea 3y ago
So, IRL is just out of the question?
WelcomeShorty 3y ago
I never got the whole dating app buzz but have found speed dating to be the absolute best way to meet people who want to meet people. You meet physically, get to hear, see and smell each other, interact face to face and have an easy exit. No filters, no yester year pictures, no catchy phrases except for those you've mastered. Met some very nice people for some very fun times (not just sex).

55 points by mistersquid 3y ago

Krastan 3y ago

https://archive.is/YJFD2 https://archive.is/YJFD2

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

skyfaller 3y ago

This sort of long-form writing is what attracted me to OkCupid once upon a time, before it was bought out by Match.com and gradually enshittified. I feel like there is a niche for dating people who like long-form reading and writing still, instead of the swipe left and right on one picture format popularized by Tinder. Potential problems: - Launching a dating app from scratch; where do you get your first users if you're ethical and refuse to fake users? (If you're not ethical, people could just use existing unethical dating sites with fake users.) - Keeping the business from being bought out by Match.com and enshittified, just like its predecessors - Developing a business model that doesn't incentivize unethical behavior, as OkCupid famously pointed out before it was bought out: https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/okcupid/whyyoushouldneverpayforonlinedating.html https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/okcupid/whyyoushouldneverpa... I'm probably posting on the wrong forum, but I don't think VC-backed startups can solve this problem. You need maybe a worker-owned co-op, or an open source non-profit like Mastodon, to have any hope of resisting the pressures of capitalism that ultimately ruin all these sites.

andrewflnr 3y ago
Or user-owned.
- JennyWeston 3y ago
  Dating apps fail due to an inherent asymmetry. A small percentage of the population will attract a large percentage of the dating pool. A large percentage of the population will attract a small percentage of the dating pool. The job of a dating app is to give the appearance of progress and engagement to a very wide segment of the market. It sells hope and false positives. Better? 1) Learn core social skills. Making people feel good about themselves is fundamentally attractive. 2) Upgrade listening skills. People who make others feel heard and understood are very attractive. 3) Do stuff. Fun stuff. Whatever leads to your personal happiness. Happy engaged people are attractive. 4) Stop using dating apps. Suck it up. Face confusion, rejection, and bad choices. Learn what you need to learn. Improve. Wash - rinse - repeat. People who have earned their confidence and skills are very attractive. 5) Learn to laugh at yourself. 6) Have real friends. Do stuff with them. There is a direct relationship between having good friends and feeling good about life. 6.5) Keep social media to a minimum. It sucks your attention and gives you envy.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
sokoloff 3y ago
If you could solve only the first one, you're well on your way to building a company to sell to match.com.
sharikous 3y ago
I have no doubt that any platform will be enshittified or disappear eventually, but eventually we all will be dead. The question should be how to launch a dating app in 2023 that won't suck for at least a decade.
mysterydip 3y ago
I wonder if there's people out there banking on using LLMs to "seed" startups with realistic-enough fake users to get the network effect bootstrapped to draw in actual users.
- dotnet00 3y ago
  IIRC early reddit did something similar (although obviously not using LLMs) where they aggregated content from other sites automatically and effectively faked activity to draw in real users.
- i_am_jl 3y ago
  Charlie Javice knows a guy.
unsupp0rted 3y ago
This was true of me in my 20s, but with experience I realized: 1. Ain't nobody (i.e. me) got time for that 2. There's no correlation between multiple flowery paragraphs trying to sound witty and quirky about oneself and the chemistry you get after sitting across a table IRL for 30 ~ 90 seconds All the paragraphs and "FAQs about me" just aren't worth it: for me, or for potential matches of mine > She added that she was undoubtedly a cat in a previous life, “just one of those weirdo bodega ones that like people.” This is the nonsense I'm talking about. Paragraphs and paragraphs of it.
- throwaway22032 3y ago
  This is the fundamental issue with dating apps. Your life partner is not someone that you interact with through a screen. All of the attempts to fix this are total bollocks. You can sit on a bus and get more of a signal about whether the man/woman sitting across from you is compatible than you can from an app.
LapsangGuzzler 3y ago
I think intentional in-person speed dating beats the hell out of dating apps all day. IMO some things will never be improved through appification and dating is one of them.

adrianhon 3y ago

NYT fact checkers clearly need their coffee today as the docs they featured are from Notion, not Google Docs

colingoodman 3y ago
The photos they featured are Notion, but if you look at the "Date Me Directory" they linked it appears to be mostly Google Docs. The author certainly could have been more specific.
bckr 3y ago
I wonder if their average reader would know what Notion is. I’ve definitely seen romance Docs before.

anonylizard 3y ago

Dating apps don't work because the business model doesn't make sense. All apps rely on repeat business, yet here repeat business depends on failed relationships. It is theoretically possible to make 'repeat business' on long-term reputation attracting new customers, similar to how schools and universities can thrive despite only ever serving a customer once. However, how often will someone need to introduce others to a dating app? A multi-year timeline for word-of-mouth is probably too much for a VC funded app. There exists dating businesses that can profit from long-term relationships, its called Church (Marry at a church = lifetime donor + children likely become members too), hence churches are far more optimized and effective at building long term relationships than apps could possibly be.

Workaccount2 3y ago
On the flipside, dating apps are killing their industry by being so ineffective. It's seems much more desirable for people to have a good experience. Also many people are not looking to get married at 20. They likely have a decade of messing around before getting off the apps for good.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Invictus0 3y ago
  > dating apps are killing their industry by being so ineffective I tried to look this up and was surprised to find that Match group doesn't share their MAU numbers. Probably wouldn't be that meaningful since many people use multiple apps. What I did find though is that they have 16M paying users worldwide, which is fairly close to their all time high, and if you estimate that those users are all men, and only 25% of men pay, and there are equal numbers of men and women across all the apps, then you would have a rough estimate of 128M users worldwide, which sounds about right to me.
  - red-iron-pine 3y ago
    these numbers must be taken with a grain of salt given the rampant amount of bots / onlyfans / spam users. only person i know who used the tind estimated that 90% of his likes were people asking for money, redirections to their insta, or just straight up fake likes from the app to keep him using premium. FWIW he got a girlfrend through it, tho -- meeting them for a dinner thing this weekend

Cymrukicks 3y ago

Modern dating apps are terrible because they have taken all the mechanics used in the gambling industry and use that to fleece users. I hope this generation makes a conscious decision to go backwards in the search for love. Love isn't convenient and its not supposed to be.

Workaccount2 3y ago

I have an idea for an app that I will never realize so I'll throw it out in the air: Make an app where you make a relatively extensive profile, put up a bounty for a match, and then crowdsource the matching. So the app experience would be mainly trying to match other people based on their looks and profile. When a relationship (or whatever goal) is made, people will payout their bounty. Or they can tip and the like for dates, good matches, etc. The biggest killer of dating apps is the disparity between mens extreme thirst and women's extreme reservation. Both need a reality check and I think others doing the matching would provide it. Edit: Also, augmenting this system with AI/LLMs/transformers would make it enormously powerful. It's basically an AI matching framework.

toomuchtodo 3y ago
The top 80 percent of women compete for the top 20 percent of men on dating apps. The optimization is for physical attraction, which is orthogonal to what makes a long term sustainable relationship (emotional health, mutual respect and trust, etc). I don't believe an app will fix this people problem. You can't Uber or Doordash a great partner, but that is the expectation that has been built. Citations: https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-guys-unless-you-are-really-hot-you-are-probably-better-off-not-wasting-your-2ddf370a6e9a https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-g... | https://archive.is/JSFXx https://archive.is/JSFXx https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33585033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33585033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25062789 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25062789 | Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25055501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25055501 (Never Pay for Online Dating (2010)) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22406583 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22406583 (RFC: Let's Disrupt Dating Apps (2020))
- Workaccount2 3y ago
  The other side of that study (The infamous OKcupid one, it seems to be the source of all these) is that once women engage with men, their expectations normalize, and they end up with like rated men. The core issue is just getting women to engage with realistically viable men. This has never been a (huge) issue ever before because until right now, the only way to meet people was face to face encounters. Nature solved for the problem, and online dating broke it.

sydbarrett74 3y ago

Dating apps rely on a variable-interval schedule of rewards (think slot machines). Dating sites don't sell matches. They sell the /hope/ or /anticipation/ of matches. Very rarely, two people do match up and form a successful relationship. It truly is a lottery. Lottos want people to keep buying tickets. If the vast majority of people won substantial prizes, hardly anyone would play anymore. They'd simply take their winnings and ride off into the sunset.

gesaint 3y ago

[dead]

littlecranky67 3y ago

> After going through a breakup last year, Connie Li, a software engineer, rejoined the dating apps, ready to dip her toe in the water again. But many of the men who reached out to her seemed to just want something casual, so she tried something new. That is the problem right there. Most dating apps nowadays allow you to set filters for dating preferences (long-term partner, casual, hookups etc.). I asume that the pool of candidates that she faced with that filter turned on and who wanted truly long-term commitments didn't fit her expectations or taste/preferences. Creating google docs profiles won't solve the underlying issue - majority of men mostly looking for casual hookups or outright lying about their intensions (faking long-term interest to get some quick bedroom action).

hbn 3y ago
I'm pretty sure they charge to use filters like that anyway. And the subscriptions are absurdly expensive these days.

throwaway22032 3y ago

The issue with dating apps is that they optimize on entirely the wrong factors. What matters in a relationship is trust, safety, reliability, shared goals and vision, etc. Yes, some level of physical attraction is useful and necessary, sex is important, but it doesn't make sense to optimize 90% on that trait. The only way to figure this stuff out is to meet as soon as possible and "clock" the other person. Not only that, but the target market of dating apps are overwhelmingly biased towards short-term hedonism anyway. Tinder are currently running a marketing campaign that is entirely focused on queer dating (not LGB, more like the rainbow gender stuff), which is both a tiny fraction of the market, and also unlikely to be something that will actually result in life-long relationships. It seems bizarre for them to focus so heavily on this group until you realise that, as others have posted, people who aren't ready to settle down are the most profitable group.

karaterobot 3y ago

> “I’ve literally never in my life gone to a bar to meet a stranger,” he said. “I just can’t even imagine it.” Most NYT pieces like this have a snarky comment that sums up the writer's opinion about the supposed trend they're observing. I thought this one was pretty good. On the whole, I'd rather they only covered stories they thought were important, but it's also good to have a laugh.

aalimov_ 3y ago

Imo what dating apps are missing is the ability to meet a friend of a friend, or a friend of a friend of a friend. If that was offered it could be easier to meet and also get along with the people you do meet because there is already a mutual friend there which might mean similar interests or maybe compatible personalities…

hbn 3y ago
I think even more importantly, having a mutual friend could be a vouch for character. Facebook could have done something like this if they got into the dating game before all the young people left/stopped making accounts.
arp242 3y ago
Bumble has this, in addition to their dating. My experience as a guy is that it's mostly gay guys looking for dickpics/hookups/whatnot, at least, that was the case in my area at the time a few years back. I did just so happen to randomly meet someone a few weeks ago who said she had pretty good success with it. So YMMV I guess.

hbn 3y ago

Dating apps are so, so bad now. Not that they were great before, but I think people actually took Tinder somewhat seriously as a place to get to know people for the first couple years. Now it's just become an ever-more expensive game that preys on how imbalanced dating is between men and women that I believe is due to these apps and the internet in general (I'm sure there's other issues for gay people but I'm talking about the use case I'm familiar with). The gender ratio is like 1:10, so even non-conventionally attractive women can get on there and get a few dozen matches in a day (if not 99+ if you're even moderately attractive), and any guy who isn't in the top 1% of looks/money/clout/influence is lucky to get a few matches per day. So the men are making any desperate attempt to stand out from the crowd of other men they're competing with for women's attention, meanwhile every day I see viral tweets of women screenshotting and posting men's "cringe" Tinder openings, telling them to try harder. I don't think a lot of women even realize what dating apps are like from the other side, because I've heard plenty of instances where a girl helps her guy friend make a dating profile thinking she can help him get setup on a date, and are baffled when they can't get him matches or conversations with anyone. And one thing that's not obvious unless you do your research, is if you're getting swiped right or matched with frequently enough, the Tinder algorithm will just stop showing you to people with no indication you're essentially shadowbanned. Supposedly you can reset the algorithm every few months by deleting your account and recreating it, but apparently if you do this too many times you'll get permanently shadowbanned and won't be able to use Tinder unless you get a new phone number. And considering Match.com owns Tinder and every other major dating website/app, I wouldn't be surprised if they'd use a shared list of the "unlovables." It really feels like it's cranked to 11 a system where men have to desperately try and stand out amongst a ginormous crowd of other men, and women have to sort through this ginormous crowd of men who may or may not be genuine, not wanting to "settle" because there might be a better one in there somewhere. It's clearly not working anyone, and dating is just so exhausting because of it.

johnea 3y ago

So, IRL is just out of the question?

WelcomeShorty 3y ago

I never got the whole dating app buzz but have found speed dating to be the absolute best way to meet people who want to meet people. You meet physically, get to hear, see and smell each other, interact face to face and have an easy exit. No filters, no yester year pictures, no catchy phrases except for those you've mastered. Met some very nice people for some very fun times (not just sex).