23 ms·

It's not just the dating apps. Things that require low effort are usually low quality. There is nothing wrong with deciding some part of your life will be fil

It's not just the dating apps. Things that require low effort are usually low quality. There is nothing wrong with deciding some part of your life will be filled with low quality things. We can't make efforts on every single parts of our life. But if you do this for entertainment, and dating, and food, and the rest, your life is filled with bland yogurt. Netflix is no substitution for a hobby. Ready-made meals are no substitution from cooking vegetables. Chats are no substitution for IRL human interactions. It's crazy we even have to say it, it should be obvious. I guess it shows how much humans are biased toward quick rewards. It's very hard to say no in a world of abundance of those.

OfSanguineFire 3y ago
Grindr requires extremely little effort to use, but so many gay men report great satisfaction from it. If the dating apps used by the heterosexual masses spark a significantly higher level of disappointment and frustration, then there must be some explanation for that other than “low effort”.
- Gigachad 3y ago
  It’s a low effort app for low effort sex. Expecting to build a long term relationship on an app is not typically going to work out.
  - progne 3y ago
    If you're expecting computer assistance at building a long term relationship, rather than just an assist in meeting people, it's probably not going to work out.
    - BiteCode_dev 3y ago
      Meeting with very specific expectations, I might add. My gay friends using grinder don't expect it to be full-filling, they expect it to be pleasurable. Pleasure is nice, but it doesn't sustain happiness. And intense pleasures that are easy to have regularly mess up with your dopamine system. It's fine if you only have one part of your life like this. The rest balance it out. And we all need fun. E.G: one of my friends is deeply involved in teaching kids, another one is a very dedicated doctor, and so forth. In that case it's healthy.
      - kredd 3y ago
        I was on board with your reasoning, but the end tail is just gatekeeping happiness. People have been satisfied with “simple pleasures” that made them happy throughout centuries. It’s close to saying “you’re not listening to the right kind of music, listening to rock is unhealthy!”. I do agree with you that when people use apps, they should set correct expectations. I think it’s the unmet expectations that are causing problems.
        robertlagrant 3y ago
        > but the end tail is just gatekeeping happiness How can this be gatekeeping? It's a conversation. Saying "repeated shallow dopamine hits will make it harder for you to build long term joy" isn't stopping anyone from doing anything. It's just a proposition. > People have been satisfied with “simple pleasures” that made them happy throughout centuries I don't think this is really...anything. Wisdom tends towards building for the long term and delayed gratification, not short termism at the expense of the long term. Being happy at seeing a beautiful sunset is at the expense of nothing, which is the difference being proposed.
        lazide 3y ago
        They’re referring to the hedonic treadmill, which is a thing. Heroin feels really good, which is why it’s dangerous. Because it feels too good, for what it actually does to you, and that’s a trap for a decent percentage of the population.
        BiteCode_dev 3y ago
        Not, it's not about the nature of pleasure. Netflix in itself is not a problem. Filling your life with it is. Which is easy to do because it's intense dopamine effects for little effort.
        johnnyanmac 3y ago
        Some simple pleasures are fine. Your entire life being nothing but simple pleasures (simple job, simple hobby, simple diet, simple goals etc.) makes you a simple person. I feel like thars why some people turn to making a family. Raising kids is never simple and it's not as easy to back out as trying a new hobby. Then again, divorces are through the roof as well, so maybe that is also failing at large.
  - poisonborz 3y ago
    > Expecting to build a long term relationship on an app What? All of these apps exist merely to organise the first meeting. Those users will not interact with each other on the platform after that.
  - userinanother 3y ago
    It’s actually a high effort app trying to pass as a low effort app. The worst of both worlds
- loveparade 3y ago
  I mean, it's pretty obvious isn't it? The ratio on most dating apps is 10-100x more men then women, a large fraction of fake profiles and scams, and the companies pushing predatory monetization hacks as a result of all that.
  - trident5000 3y ago
    "predatory monetization" Yeah...the goal of these dating apps is not to have you happily be in a relationship and stop paying them money.
    - dylan604 3y ago
      Every thing is a SaaS mentality. Dating apps need you to forever be dating to keep you paying.Pharmaceuticals don't want cures, but forever treatments. We have pretty much completely moved to a rent seeking society
      - trident5000 3y ago
        Absolutely. Its probably time the govt steps in and shifts patent law to favor cures over treatments. There will be incredible resistance to this from lobbyists though. Other thing they need to do is eliminate the requirement that all new treatments reviewed by the FDA meet the requirement of a "disease". Theres a lot of things people want out of lets say gene therapy that is not strictly a disease but benefits your health in the end. And I dont know why cosmetic or enhancing treatments should not be considered as well. They need to loosen up. FDA approval for (gene therapy for instance) is taking something like 15 years to get approved. And only their narrow definition of whats necessary for the public is even considered. This is an absurd situation. Govt red tape is literally killing us.
      - c0pium 3y ago
        > Pharmaceuticals don't want cures, but forever treatments You don’t have to look very hard to realize this trope is totally wrong, just google “vaccine”.
- BiteCode_dev 3y ago
  True. Hence the "usually". I put very little effort in my sleep and have a very good one. Some things are just good and cheap. It's nice. Unfortunately, that never characterized heterosexual courting, eating healthy food while working full time or finding meaning in your life. Most people struggle with those. Also note reporting satisfaction with something can just validate the pleasure it brings to you. I'm personally satisfied with Netflix. But you can't fill your life with such things and expect happiness.
  - bobmaxup 3y ago
    How can something be obvious and also nuanced?
    - BiteCode_dev 3y ago
      The sky is obviously blue, but there are a lot of shades of blue in it. And clouds. And it changes at night and during sunset. Etc.
      - bobmaxup 3y ago
        Okay, but in plain language, it wouldn't really make sense to say something is obvious and then to say there are many exceptions, no?
        BiteCode_dev 3y ago
        Obvious doesn't exist. Everything is learned. Obvious just means "given our context, we don't expect to require much complex thinking to get to that conclusion". It's just another convention. Given our context of most of us having eyes and color receptors calibrated in a similar fashion, I expect most people will see the sky blue. Of course if you dig deeper, it opens the discussions to nuances. It's the same here. Nothing wrong with that.
        besse 3y ago
- swagempire 3y ago
  The explanation is obvious here and the very existential crux of heterosexual dating.
- reureu 3y ago
  As a gay man, I hate grindr and many of my friends do too. We still may use it because it's ubiquitous, honest to a fault, and it's easy to confuse solutions to horniness with solutions to loneliness. But I know it often takes a toll on self-esteem, particularly in areas where you don't match the dominant "type" (e.g., a nerdy guy living in LA or OC). There aren't better options and many of the guys on hinge or tinder are also on grindr -- so, I think grindr gets used often despite it not really delivering on the users' hopes. So, I wouldn't confuse use with satisfaction, and I'd really love to see data on how many gay men actually are satisfied with grindr.
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    I'm in the kinky community and I visit gay clubs sometimes because they have way bigger and better venues (their community is just a lot bigger) and often have all-orientations nights and many popular gay themes overlap strongly with ours (eg submission, pet play, leather) But one thing I notice is that there's a subset of the gay community that seems shallow and very physical in their sexuality. When you speak of 'satisfaction' in this sense it seems to be purely the physical side and nothing else counts. For me that doesn't work at all. Good for them of course (and I do really think they are truly fulfilled by this so power to them!). But it's a phenomenon that seems pretty unique, I have not heard of this in the lesbian scene for example (my friends are very diverse and open about their sexuality) Of course this subset is highly represented in those clubs and on Grindr because that is where they find their partners easily. In these clubs I don't feel so comfortable because they take consent for granted while in the kinky community we always confirm consent before doing anything. Even as much as touching someone's arm. But I also know a lot of gay people that are more sensual and careful like me. You just don't find them much in those places because they are similarly put off by the attitudes.
    - reureu 3y ago
      I think you're totally right, and I think that's the tragedy of apps like grindr. I was on gay websites as a teenager in the late 90s/early 00s, and it was only tech savvy guys. You could chat with someone for weeks without exchanging photos. The horny, shallow guys somewhat weeded themselves out because there wasn't a large enough population to sustain that. But as the internet became more popular, dating sites became more mainstream, and then the location-based ones matured, it almost became a race to the bottom (so to speak). If someone is horny right now, why chat with person A (with a text-based profile) when person B has photos? Why chat with person B when person C has shirtless photos? Why chat with person C when person D sends dick pics right away? Why chat with person D when person E sends dick pics and will drive to your house in 10 minutes? So a subset of users start pushing this towards being hyper efficiency, but that comes at the expense of the other subset of users who don't necessarily want that. My experience has been you can't ever escape that. That mentality has permeated the system, and now we're conditioned to "meet up within 3 messages", "send pics in first message", "no fats, no fems, no flakes", etc. And if you don't like that and want something slower then you get told "it's just grindr, what do you expect?" (which eventually morphs into "it's just tinder what do you expect?", "it's just hinge, what do you expect?"). But even the people saying "it's just grindr" also complain that after they have sex, they just feel lonely again and that they feel trapped or addicted to grindr. Obviously I'm painting with really broad strokes. Some people do find relationships on grindr. Some people are satisfied with their interactions. But, I think like the original article describes, it feels soul destroying. And by the time you're in your 30s, I think a lot of gay men realize that easy sex doesn't necessarily mean good sex and it often doesn't mean feeling satisfied or content afterwards. But it's difficult when you have a heterogenous population, with a vocal faction of the population that keeps pushing the limits of efficiency, and the rest of the population is just sorta dragged along.
- jeegsy 3y ago
  Well, clearly, the groups want very different things
- photochemsyn 3y ago
  My conspiratorial (*completely evidence-free as far as I know) theory on hookup apps is that they're secretly backed by the major pharmaceutical manufacturers of various STD treatments. The numbers are interesting: there are about 32,000 new HIV cases in the USA each year, and the per-month cost of ongoing anti-retroviral therapy is estimated at $1,800 - $4,500. This works out to a gross cost of ~ $0.7 billion to $1.7 billion - and it's cumulative, year after year. as HIV patients need this treatment for the rest of their lives. Given profit margins of 10-15% in pharma at least, this is a huge cash cow for the industry. (Also explains the reluctance to invest in seeking a permanent cure for the disease that would allow patients to terminate their therapy). Now, would a profit-hungry industry deliberately encourage reckless sex practices in order to grow demand for their product, year after year? It might bear some investigation.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    Can you not just trace the investments and find out either way?
  - eru 3y ago
    From what I've heard, The better anti-HIV drugs we have these days actually decrease your viral load so much that you can not infect other people. (Please correct me, if I am wrong.) From the perspective of your theory, that would seem counterproductive. As a greedy pharma company you'd want people to take a drug that makes them feel good while they are on it, be no permanent cure, _and_ still allow them to spread the condition.
  - c0pium 3y ago
    Moderna is in trials with an HIV vaccine based on mRNA tech. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36454825/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36454825/ https://www.clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT05854381 https://www.clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT05854381
  - Levitz 3y ago
    Given the rates of transmission, Grindr would be the obvious choice, yet the app is pretty damn responsible around the issue. You can list your STD status, whether you take pre exposition meds and when you last checked yourself for STDs.
- lazide 3y ago
  Heterosexual women and men have fundamentally different biological incentives. Gay men don’t.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    The "biological incentives" of being gay (or bi, or ace, or aro, or child-free-by-choice, or (hetero) butt stuff and blowjobs, or all the other things from the a-z of human relationships that aren't pro-reproduction) were still an open question last I heard.
    - 4gotunameagain 3y ago
      not really. it is well known in non politically influenced circles that hormonal exposure in the uterus is a great predictor of sexuality and behaviour.
      - ben_w 3y ago
        The causal mechanism isn't the same thing as "why hasn't evolution selected against this"[0] and neither is the same thing as subjective incentives. [0] one suggestion is the "gay uncle hypothesis" which posits that people who themselves do not have children may nonetheless increase the prevalence of their family's genes in future generations by providing resources (e.g., food, supervision, defense, shelter) to the offspring of their closest relatives; this hypothesis seems to be consistent with the evidence without being sufficient on its own.
        lazide 3y ago
        Near as I can tell, it’s also evolutionary advantageous to have significant ‘randomness’ as far as traits across a population. Especially for humans due to the extreme variation in environmental conditions and stresses we end up producing for ourselves. Being a hero by jumping on a grenade is a pretty terrible survival trait for an individual for instance, but essential for the group to have at least one in any decent sized population. All the non-grenade-coverers will strongly support such folks, as long as it doesn’t hurt their own survival chances somehow. So if we look at individual tendencies as coming more from die rolls than anything else, with a wide distribution, a lot of outlier behavior makes a lot of sense. A hardcore survivalist most of the time is going to be selected against, for instance, for many reasons when things are going well. They’re dumping all their stats points in the wrong categories! But any population that doesn’t have at least a few is going to completely disappear on those rare long tail events (an actual nuclear war?). And if those survivalists are actually capable, they get the benefit of ‘seeding’ the next generation without any competition! Long odds, but potential huge payoff biologically.
- xwdv 3y ago
  If there was an app where I could quickly hook up with a woman just for some physical satisfaction as easily as men do on Grindr I’d be pretty satisfied too. Low effort sex should be more readily available so that people don’t have to pollute serious dating apps looking for it.
  - swagasaurus-rex 3y ago
    These apps exist, but you’re paying for an escort
    - xwdv 3y ago
      I wouldn’t mind paying for an escort, but it feels like such a gray market and I don’t know how to navigate it. I’d really like some kind of Uber Eats type thing where I can make an appointment with someone and have them come over for an hour and then just be on their way. No BS.
      - ambicapter 3y ago
        That sounds exactly like an escort with a fancy app.
        xwdv 3y ago
        How else is one supposed to find an escort? People are always saying “just hire an escort” casually like if this was some common knowledge. Plus maybe you don’t need an escort if you are a match with someone else looking for the same thing as you.
        dehrmann 3y ago
        Feels like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UifycM6lBvQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UifycM6lBvQ
        johnnyanmac 3y ago
        >How else is one supposed to find an escort? strip clubs I imagine. They can't legally say they have escorts, but it's an entire scene. Like any other tribal knowledge, you need to know the edge cases and know the right people. And/or be rich. You can't just google this kinda stuff, you gotta get out to your town and dig (well... you kind of can. But you don't want to take the risk asking for certain Craigslist ads on this stuff). Or you can go to Vegas where prostitution isn't illegal.
- Der_Einzige 3y ago
  You know why this is. Gay men are far more promiscuous than straight women are.
  - polartx 3y ago
    Or they’re just less affected by the public’s perception of their promiscuity
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      Idk about less affected. Especially these days where trying to call a woman that is almost as bad as sexual assault in many's eyes. Gay stuff is just more underground. You're never going to just walk into a gay club, for instance. Nor wander into an LGBT meetup by surprise.
- Redoubts 3y ago
  > so many gay men report great satisfaction from it. Yeah man, love this app, who wouldn't... https://imgur.com/a/Ff0qaPn https://imgur.com/a/Ff0qaPn
  - Levitz 3y ago
    How is that the app's fault? Are those conditions created by grindr? People have preferences, disclosing them as soon as possible saves everybody's time. There might very well be a problem in the gay community in this regard, but if so it runs way deeper, this would happen with or without grindr.
  - fennecbutt 3y ago
    As a gay dude myself, idt this is too bad. He's just listing preferences, he's not being offensive about it. If what he listed is wrong, then is it wrong for me to be gay because I'm being sexist by excluding women? I actually prefer people list their preferences up front, that way that's no disappointment later. For example, I can think a straight guy is cute, but I'm not personally attracted to straight guys, I find it unattractive, because I know they're not interested (in addition to hetero culture, chest beating etc that is just gross). Easier for someone to say "not into short guys" up front cause then I just skip over them rather than interact and have awkwardness later on.
    - Redoubts 3y ago
      > He's just listing preferences to be clear, there are multiple examples here of varying politeness.
- ssnistfajen 3y ago
  If you've actually interacted with gay men in general you'll also find out the vast majority also have negative experiences with Grindr. It still falls within the "low effort = low quality" equation. Or you can just read the reviews on App Store / Google Play and see for yourself.
- fennecbutt 3y ago
  I hate grindr because I can't filter to introverted geeks like I am. The geek section has been taken over by self described "nerds" aka jocks who live in the gym but have an xbox to play fifa. Ugh.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    response bias at work. If you let people describe themselves they will lie to become whatever they feel gets them the most success.
dangus 3y ago
An alternative read on your idea is more of an elitist view of how we spend our free time. You’re basically judging the quality of what people choose to do. I’m allowed to just exist and be happy with it. Perhaps I don’t need a hobby to keep me happy. Perhaps my favorite thing to do is watch Netflix with my family. Who are you to judge? It really has nothing to do with the low quality of dating apps, that can be blamed squarely on Match.com’s monopolistic anti-competitive tactics.
- BiteCode_dev 3y ago
  I wish it were true, but no. Unless you are Jesus or Buddha, there are things that will very likely make you unhappy. e.g: eating a lot of crappy food and spending a lot of time watching tv shows are one of them. It diminishes your health, put your dopamine system in shamble and bring no meaning in your life. It's very rare people are happy in those conditions. Again there is nothing wrong about enjoying those activities and indulging in them. The point is it's unlikely you can fill your life with it and end up satisfied.
  - dangus 3y ago
    I wish your comment were true, but no. I’m right and you’re wrong. The happiness police has determined that you are the one who is unhappy.
    - BiteCode_dev 3y ago
      It's one of the rare instance where biology, sociology, philosophy and religion kinda agree. You can share your own opinion as usual, but it's going to be a hard sale. It's not about forcing the idea on you, rather it's reporting what a lot of humanity have found to be true on the long run.
  - lazide 3y ago
    Is someone forcing anyone to sit down and do those things? Could they go for a walk instead?
wiseowise 3y ago
> Ready-made meals are no substitution from cooking vegetables. Yes, they are.
- _gabe_ 3y ago
  I can’t believe this is getting downvoted. I wonder how many people who downvoted cook for themselves 100% of the time. I’ve never met anybody that does that. Usually you trade cooking nights with a spouse or roommate. You occasionally go out for a nice meal. You use preprepared ingredients. Is a ready made meal from a spouse worse than a meal cooked by yourself? Is a frozen store bought dinner worse than a pre-cooked meal that you personally cooked and froze? Is a meal made by a chef at a nice restaurant worse because you didn’t cook it yourself? This standard is ridiculous. It’s especially funny to me, because there’s a running joke in my family that a meal cooked by somebody else always tastes better than when you cook it yourself.
  - userinanother 3y ago
    It is damn near impossible to buy high quality frozen food. It’s like they is no market for it. If it’s frozen it’s made with the shittiest low quality low effort process. I know high quality food can be frozen because I make it all the time but I can’t buy it
  - crooked-v 3y ago
    For me the one thing that I can get out of a self-cooked meal that I can't out of anything premade is good browned onions. Something about preservation processes inevitably turns them unappealing in a way I haven't particularly noticed with other veggies in pre-made meals (at least the reasonably high-quality ones, like Saffron Road).
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    >I wonder how many people who downvoted cook for themselves 100% of the time. I think we're missing the forest for the trees here. it's not about cooking, it's about making sure your whole life isn't "ready-made meals". Put the metaphor into every other aspect of life. We will all take shortcuts somewhere, but shortcuts imply a destination. if your destination is just more McDonalds, I think we are missing something vital to out lives. >a meal cooked by somebody else always tastes better than when you cook it yourself. the "joke" implied intimacy in said meal. It's not the meal, it's who made it for you. coporate billionaire food chain pumping out "burgers" cooked by minimum wage workers with no upward mobility is about as distant as you can get.
sebastianconcpt 3y ago
Convenience (instant reward) is to humans, what light is to bugs.
- BiteCode_dev 3y ago
  That's a very poignant analogy. Especially since we all looked down on bugs for being so stupid to die burnt on a lamp.
  - sebastianconcpt 3y ago
    Precisely. That's why "a good life" is better understood as a long term optimization of the game of games. Reminding that capacity for delayed gratification is a predictor of success as it can provide better overall balance in that game of all games when compared with optimal instant gratification only.
- ulrikrasmussen 3y ago
  I love this analogy. Not only is it a good analogy, the underlying mechanisms causing bugs to be drawn to light and humans to be drawn to instant gratification are both results of our biology and evolution through thousands of years of life before modern civilization, and both can have really devastating outcomes in modern society.
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
    My understanding is that bugs are not actually drawn to light, but rather attempt to fly at a fixed angle to light, roughly perpendicular to it. When the light is the Moon, that keeps them flying in more or less a straight line. But when the light is close to them, they turn to keep the light at that fixed angle and consequently spiral in towards it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transverse_orientation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transverse_orientation
helf 3y ago
[dead]
ekianjo 3y ago
> Chats are no substitution for IRL human interactions. Careful... are you going to suggest next that Remote work is no substitution for office work?
- supertofu 3y ago
  In-person interaction fulfills our innate biological desire for community. Remote work is just a means of earning income. You are comparing apples to oranges by assuming there is some relation between online chatting and remote working.
  - ekianjo 3y ago
    I dont need to meet coworkers every day to have meaningful biological relationships and communities. Companies need you, its not about you needing company.
- BiteCode_dev 3y ago
  That's a "Behold a man" kinda problem, isn't it?
- MobiusHorizons 3y ago
  That is the exact assertion for exactly the same reasons. Remote work may work for you (much like chatting) but you are giving up a lot of communication richness in the process. Working from home has very real trade offs that may work for you and your team, but it is no substitute for working and especially meeting in person. It primarily impacts communication efficacy, which for many larger teams is already the limiting factor.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - zlg_codes 3y ago
    Yeah, communication is so much better with Dale's after lunch Cheeto breath to go with your stand-up meeting before going back to your soulless cubicle. /s You're describing the way normies work, and that's greta but not everyone is NT.
fullshark 3y ago
Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death
- claytongulick 3y ago
  Or take a Holiday in Cambodia
wkat4242 3y ago
> Chats are no substitution for IRL human interactions. I agree with everything except this. There's people I've had a deep relationship with online and when I met them in person there was nothing. Really weird. There is actually so much subliminal communication in chats just like in real personal interaction. It just takes a lot of experience to pick up on it. And getting to that point with someone is certainly not quick or low effort :)
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  People are catfishing you whether they intend to or not. Everybody has max confidence online.
- Aerbil313 3y ago
  > There's people I've had a deep relationship with online and when I met them in person there was nothing. I can't help but feel there's a serious issue somewhere in the reality described in this sentence.
  - saltcured 3y ago
    I agree with other comments that it can be easy to conflate the actual person on the other side of text with the imagined person. But, there are also other possibilities to consider too. I am speaking generally here, not assuming we know the background of that once sentence. Overall, a person's identity is not so clear cut as we like to think. Whether in text or in person, people are often performing and wearing some kind of mask rather than exposing their "true" selves. (And, one might ponder whether a true self really exists separate from these layered behaviors.) For one reason or another, some folks may have more modes than others or switch more easily by different nuances of context. A romantic idealist might think of a text-first relationship as somehow meeting the true person. They might even believe that they've found a soul-mate and invest in ideas like "beauty is the person inside". That they are more advanced and would not judge a book by its cover. But to meet in real life, they eventually will discover how they respond to the outsides too. The face, the voice, the body, the pheromones, the posture and mannerisms. Finding incompatibilities at this level can create a strong cognitive dissonance. But also, people sometimes compartmentalize aspects of their personality and behavior. They might be dedicated to their real-life relationship but almost put on an alternate ego as an escape. They behave like a different person in this other (possibly secret) mode. Someone meeting this alt-person could be in for a rough ride if they do not understand that it will always be a background "fun" mode for the other party, not something they would prioritize or allow to supplant their primary lifestyle. And finally, some might find control or security in an alternative context. Whether virtual chat or just some other space compartmentalized from real life, they may find it easier to escape boundaries of their primary social personality. They might bypass shyness or anxiety or repression expected by their social circle. But in a crossover setting, they might involuntarily shut down, to the bewilderment of someone who knew them in their escapist space.
dotnet00 3y ago
Be careful not to suffer vertigo from the dizzying heights of that horse you're on.
low_tech_love 3y ago
IMHO There are two main problems with social media (and by consequence dating apps) that makes it work very well for a few people but make all the rest suffer miserably: the first is that it flattens things into one dimension, making it look like a single ranking; the second is that it induces a fake “tabula rasa” feeling, as if everyone had the same opportunities simply because everyone is in the same platform. Both of these things are fundamentally wrong: human beings are multidimensional and there are myriad ways for a person to “shine” other than looks (and different people will perceive you and your multiple characteristics also in totally different ways); and just because someone else succeeded (or failed) by doing something that doesn’t mean you can reproduce the same results. Human society is amazing and social media is a horribly inaccurate “digital twin”.
GuB-42 3y ago
I don't understand this idea of engineers and tech people glorifying effort. The whole point of engineering is about efficiency, like making a bridge that holds while using the minimum amount of work and materials. A bridge using more materials is not necessarily a better bridge. You can often make things better by putting in more effort but it may also be counter productive, sometimes the easy solution is the best. Some ready to eat food may be better than what you can cook yourself, even some reputable chefs admit it and the efforts they save on these parts let them focus on the parts where they can make a difference.
- uoaei 3y ago
  Do you shove everyone into such tiny, restrictive boxes? Romantic partners certainly don't like being told what they should or shouldn't be and do.
  - moffkalast 3y ago
    Did the poster above you edit their comment? Asking because your reply is a complete non sequitur.
    - uoaei 3y ago
      Doesn't look like it, and it's not an irrelevant response at all. They generalized across an entire group of people "engineers and tech people" all but insisting that they should value "efficiency" over "effort". I am responding to the generalization and the forced assignment of values for those people (me included) prioritizing certain values over others (I don't). In general such an attitude of "shoulds" goes hand-in-hand with a lack of respect for others expressing complexity, subtlety, nuance, and especially agency in such matters. And also encourages race-to-the-bottom behaviors not just economically but also in social dynamics. It's an antisocial attitude and especially romantic partners lose interest very quickly when people act this way. Source: I was like this once and see it in many techies I know socially. It's a mental shortcut that is common in social settings where techies dominate.
- lvass 3y ago
closeparen 3y ago
I’ve never understood how asking out strangers in bars or on the street is supposed to yield high quality matches. Developing crushes on people you actually know in your social scenes is more reasonable. That’s probably the ideal scenario if it turns out to be mutual. But it’s human nature that the vast majority of the time it will be one-sided on the guy’s part. So you’ve got to somehow maintain a social scene with enough single women to make even one match plausible for you, while those women are constantly inundated with unwanted attention and feelings from the guys in the group, without the group either splintering or developing social norms that prohibit romantic overtures. That’s asking for some incredibly robust social technology in an era where we should be grateful that any kind of IRL social scene even exists.
- caeril 3y ago
  > Developing crushes on people you actually know in your social scenes is more reasonable You are absolutely correct here, but the primary problem with this is that a combination of sexual harassment statutes, #metoo movements, and generalized "women don't ever want to be approached" zeitgeist has closed this avenue off. This avenue is generally still available if you follow the two rules, but if you do not, it's over for you. Church is probably the only exception to this, but with drastically increasing secularization of society, good luck with that.
  - kjellsbells 3y ago
    > a combination of sexual harassment statutes, #metoo movements, and generalized "women don't ever want to be approached" zeitgeist has closed this avenue off. Wait, what? This reads like the classic boomer complaint that is hard to get to know women when you can't slap their ass in the office any more. "No one can take a joke any more, etc etc" Women are not a monolithic voting bloc. Some will respond to approaches that repel or bore others. The only way to know is to get to know them as people first and potential romantic partners second. This is why a social scene, or in some cultures, extended clan gatherings, is so important: you see someone in a relaxed setting and can make some assessment of their personality and values. This also means that it takes time. I don't want to say that we should all go back to the weird heteronormative 1950s, but using as many social networks as possible, including unusual ones, is essential. As an older dude who has seen the games that young men play at work, I understand that the hormonal drive for guys is absolutely saturating, but you will fail and fail again if you think that #metoo stops you. If it did, you were misbehaving to start with.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
atleastoptimal 3y ago
That "usually" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. My best relationships are ones that have felt effortless from the start. The ones where I had to put in more effort to make the connection work ended up not being as good. In fact, I spent too long trying to "fix" the mediocre relationships because I was hung up on the same cognitive bias you're espousing: that quality comes out of effort. In fact the effort indicated that the match wasn't right. It was a hint that our libidos and psyches weren't meant to be forced together. Simplistic models of the world, like assuming effort = quality, are the mainstays of hackernews/engineering minds because of our need to quantify everything into the most generally applicable predictable patterns. When those patterns don't line up, one has to reckon that making armchair declarations about the world is as prone to cognitive biases as the "wrong" mentalities those declarations eschew. Isn't the entire point of technological progress offloading the high effort of all the needs and wants of life from humans to machines? Why have technology if it can't make things easier?
- scarmig 3y ago
  > My best relationships are ones that have felt effortless from the start. The ones where I had to put in more effort to make the connection work ended up not being as good. I can't emphasize how much this rings true to me. I struggled in dating: I spent far too much energy both trying both to find someone and in making relationships work once I found one. I was always told that a good relationship means putting in effort, and so I always constantly put 100% of my energy into it. Naturally, that left me burnt out and resentful when my partners would be putting in next to nothing. Of course, a relationship does require some effort, but I suspect most men struggling to find a satisfying one are putting in far too much effort into it. So long as you have the basics down, it's mostly luck. This can be depressing when you do already have the basics down and still aren't having any success, but the reality is effort in relationships has steeply decreasing marginal returns. It's better to put your energies into things that actually benefit you and let luck and time do their work.
  - atleastoptimal 3y ago
    > Of course, a relationship does require some effort Which is true, and true for most things. Here's my "Being There" analogy: If you aim to grow a garden, not watering, tilling, weeding or caring for it at all could have mixed results. A moderate amount of effort and you have a bountiful harvest. If you're putting extensive effort, and nothing is growing, it means the conditions aren't right for what you are doing. The seeds are bad, the soil is bad, the climate may not be right. You aren't going to win any favors from the universe forcing a good outcome out of bad conditions. The effort you put in is meaningless. The sweet spot lies in a moderate amount of effort, but only contingent on cycles of positive feedback that justify that effort. Human beings have evolved to respond to those feedback cycles with dopamine precisely because it naturally encourages more effort. There are some things of course you can't rely on that paradigm (like you can't build half a semiconductor factory and expect it to produce half as many chips), but in those areas where instincts are insufficient, one shouldn't go on hunches or pithy aphorisms: there has to be scientific thinking behind the effort you put in or you're just flailing blindly against the universe.
31337Logic 3y ago
Comment of the Year, right here. Thank you.
leventonportera 3y ago
This is exactly on point, but it has nothing to do with dating apps. The article claims dating apps are "soul-destorying" yet the first example it gives is of a woman solidly into her menopause who gave up on dating apps because she likes clubbing and one night stands instead of relationships. There are low effort dating apps to get laid. To get laid, people don't want to put in a lot of effort. To get laid with a young guy, gramma Does have to put in a lot of effort, and it probably helps if her young lay is flipped out on E at an illegal underground club in London, as opposed to sitting in an office on his break between presentations. My wife and I met on a paid dating app. It took me a day's worth of hours to fill in my profile, and what my requirements are. For my match, I defined education level, minimal number of fluent languages and what they are, age requirements by race (some age faster, some slower), political views, religion, even the types of makeup they usually wear (none in my preference). I got about 20 matches per week, and could only write my matches. There was no swipe, no "like" button. Only a text box. I went on a date with a phd student in english lit. I went on a date with a french-american doctor chick who graduated Stanford with an MD at 22. I messaged about 2 girls per week and always got conversation going, usually mutually deciding not to meet. I got messaged by about 2 girls per week, and always replied. I went on one date per week for 2 months and met my wife who speaks 4 languages, has a master's, and is 7 years younger than me. We did have some incompatible things, which were flagged in the match profile, but we decided those could be worked on and got married 6 years ago, 6 months after we met. The only photo she had on the app was the one she took for her passport. But on this app I used, you would not only have to pay $25/month, it would be next to impossible to get a piece of ass and you'd have to invest hours in text and phone conversations before you met. There are different tools for different things. This absolute crap article points out that you can't win a formula1 race in a uhaul, and calls automobiles bad. And it's blatantly obvious in their very first menopausal opening paragraph. The article is the bad app here, and that type of "reporting" is what is "soul-destroying" our society. Shame on them.
jl2718 3y ago
> Netflix is no substitution for a hobby. Maybe, but to the brain engaged in the activity, watching movies or playing video games is much better than a hobby. Real life is only exciting about 1% of the time for anybody. Curated entertainment cuts out most of the boring stuff. Consider this: physiologically, the person watching the biography is probably living a more exciting life than the person who it’s about.
kirso 3y ago
I recently made a comment on min-maxing as societies cancer these days. Searching for silver bullets in life, business, health, finance rarely yields long-term compounding gains. We were all conditioned to buy courses to learn programming in 5 minutes, yet we are bound to be disappointed. We eventually learn though, with more frequent feedback loop and fails.
huytersd 3y ago
I agree with the rest of it but banging some chick I’ve met on tinder is no different than chatting up someone at a bar or at a party. Honestly for this one thing the chase doesn’t do much for me, in this space it’s all about the end results.
tangjurine 3y ago
Running water is no substitute for walking miles to the nearest well
_8j50 3y ago
> Netflix is no substitution for a hobby. Ready-made meals are no substitution from cooking vegetables. Chats are no substitution for IRL human interactions Hard disagree. A habbit you enjoy doing repeatedly is a hobby, Netflix or just staring at cable tv qualifies. Ready made meals can contain veggies, frozen veggies in a bag are plenty healthy and popular. But even if you were right, people live long and healthy lives eating mostly fast food with small portions and working out. I don't really care about Chatbots but IRL human interactions are terrible unless you are the right type of person in the right type of place, online interactions with people like the one we are having now is in my opinion a higher quality interaction than IRL, sort of like writing letters in the olden days, we take our time and compose our thoughts and communicate better.

OfSanguineFire 3y ago

Grindr requires extremely little effort to use, but so many gay men report great satisfaction from it. If the dating apps used by the heterosexual masses spark a significantly higher level of disappointment and frustration, then there must be some explanation for that other than “low effort”.

Gigachad 3y ago
It’s a low effort app for low effort sex. Expecting to build a long term relationship on an app is not typically going to work out.
- progne 3y ago
  If you're expecting computer assistance at building a long term relationship, rather than just an assist in meeting people, it's probably not going to work out.
  - BiteCode_dev 3y ago
    Meeting with very specific expectations, I might add. My gay friends using grinder don't expect it to be full-filling, they expect it to be pleasurable. Pleasure is nice, but it doesn't sustain happiness. And intense pleasures that are easy to have regularly mess up with your dopamine system. It's fine if you only have one part of your life like this. The rest balance it out. And we all need fun. E.G: one of my friends is deeply involved in teaching kids, another one is a very dedicated doctor, and so forth. In that case it's healthy.
    - kredd 3y ago
      I was on board with your reasoning, but the end tail is just gatekeeping happiness. People have been satisfied with “simple pleasures” that made them happy throughout centuries. It’s close to saying “you’re not listening to the right kind of music, listening to rock is unhealthy!”. I do agree with you that when people use apps, they should set correct expectations. I think it’s the unmet expectations that are causing problems.
      - robertlagrant 3y ago
        > but the end tail is just gatekeeping happiness How can this be gatekeeping? It's a conversation. Saying "repeated shallow dopamine hits will make it harder for you to build long term joy" isn't stopping anyone from doing anything. It's just a proposition. > People have been satisfied with “simple pleasures” that made them happy throughout centuries I don't think this is really...anything. Wisdom tends towards building for the long term and delayed gratification, not short termism at the expense of the long term. Being happy at seeing a beautiful sunset is at the expense of nothing, which is the difference being proposed.
      - lazide 3y ago
        They’re referring to the hedonic treadmill, which is a thing. Heroin feels really good, which is why it’s dangerous. Because it feels too good, for what it actually does to you, and that’s a trap for a decent percentage of the population.
      - BiteCode_dev 3y ago
        Not, it's not about the nature of pleasure. Netflix in itself is not a problem. Filling your life with it is. Which is easy to do because it's intense dopamine effects for little effort.
      - johnnyanmac 3y ago
        Some simple pleasures are fine. Your entire life being nothing but simple pleasures (simple job, simple hobby, simple diet, simple goals etc.) makes you a simple person. I feel like thars why some people turn to making a family. Raising kids is never simple and it's not as easy to back out as trying a new hobby. Then again, divorces are through the roof as well, so maybe that is also failing at large.
- poisonborz 3y ago
  > Expecting to build a long term relationship on an app What? All of these apps exist merely to organise the first meeting. Those users will not interact with each other on the platform after that.
- userinanother 3y ago
  It’s actually a high effort app trying to pass as a low effort app. The worst of both worlds
loveparade 3y ago
I mean, it's pretty obvious isn't it? The ratio on most dating apps is 10-100x more men then women, a large fraction of fake profiles and scams, and the companies pushing predatory monetization hacks as a result of all that.
- trident5000 3y ago
  "predatory monetization" Yeah...the goal of these dating apps is not to have you happily be in a relationship and stop paying them money.
  - dylan604 3y ago
    Every thing is a SaaS mentality. Dating apps need you to forever be dating to keep you paying.Pharmaceuticals don't want cures, but forever treatments. We have pretty much completely moved to a rent seeking society
    - trident5000 3y ago
      Absolutely. Its probably time the govt steps in and shifts patent law to favor cures over treatments. There will be incredible resistance to this from lobbyists though. Other thing they need to do is eliminate the requirement that all new treatments reviewed by the FDA meet the requirement of a "disease". Theres a lot of things people want out of lets say gene therapy that is not strictly a disease but benefits your health in the end. And I dont know why cosmetic or enhancing treatments should not be considered as well. They need to loosen up. FDA approval for (gene therapy for instance) is taking something like 15 years to get approved. And only their narrow definition of whats necessary for the public is even considered. This is an absurd situation. Govt red tape is literally killing us.
    - c0pium 3y ago
      > Pharmaceuticals don't want cures, but forever treatments You don’t have to look very hard to realize this trope is totally wrong, just google “vaccine”.
BiteCode_dev 3y ago
True. Hence the "usually". I put very little effort in my sleep and have a very good one. Some things are just good and cheap. It's nice. Unfortunately, that never characterized heterosexual courting, eating healthy food while working full time or finding meaning in your life. Most people struggle with those. Also note reporting satisfaction with something can just validate the pleasure it brings to you. I'm personally satisfied with Netflix. But you can't fill your life with such things and expect happiness.
- bobmaxup 3y ago
  How can something be obvious and also nuanced?
  - BiteCode_dev 3y ago
    The sky is obviously blue, but there are a lot of shades of blue in it. And clouds. And it changes at night and during sunset. Etc.
    - bobmaxup 3y ago
      Okay, but in plain language, it wouldn't really make sense to say something is obvious and then to say there are many exceptions, no?
      - BiteCode_dev 3y ago
        Obvious doesn't exist. Everything is learned. Obvious just means "given our context, we don't expect to require much complex thinking to get to that conclusion". It's just another convention. Given our context of most of us having eyes and color receptors calibrated in a similar fashion, I expect most people will see the sky blue. Of course if you dig deeper, it opens the discussions to nuances. It's the same here. Nothing wrong with that.
        besse 3y ago
swagempire 3y ago
The explanation is obvious here and the very existential crux of heterosexual dating.
reureu 3y ago
As a gay man, I hate grindr and many of my friends do too. We still may use it because it's ubiquitous, honest to a fault, and it's easy to confuse solutions to horniness with solutions to loneliness. But I know it often takes a toll on self-esteem, particularly in areas where you don't match the dominant "type" (e.g., a nerdy guy living in LA or OC). There aren't better options and many of the guys on hinge or tinder are also on grindr -- so, I think grindr gets used often despite it not really delivering on the users' hopes. So, I wouldn't confuse use with satisfaction, and I'd really love to see data on how many gay men actually are satisfied with grindr.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  I'm in the kinky community and I visit gay clubs sometimes because they have way bigger and better venues (their community is just a lot bigger) and often have all-orientations nights and many popular gay themes overlap strongly with ours (eg submission, pet play, leather) But one thing I notice is that there's a subset of the gay community that seems shallow and very physical in their sexuality. When you speak of 'satisfaction' in this sense it seems to be purely the physical side and nothing else counts. For me that doesn't work at all. Good for them of course (and I do really think they are truly fulfilled by this so power to them!). But it's a phenomenon that seems pretty unique, I have not heard of this in the lesbian scene for example (my friends are very diverse and open about their sexuality) Of course this subset is highly represented in those clubs and on Grindr because that is where they find their partners easily. In these clubs I don't feel so comfortable because they take consent for granted while in the kinky community we always confirm consent before doing anything. Even as much as touching someone's arm. But I also know a lot of gay people that are more sensual and careful like me. You just don't find them much in those places because they are similarly put off by the attitudes.
  - reureu 3y ago
    I think you're totally right, and I think that's the tragedy of apps like grindr. I was on gay websites as a teenager in the late 90s/early 00s, and it was only tech savvy guys. You could chat with someone for weeks without exchanging photos. The horny, shallow guys somewhat weeded themselves out because there wasn't a large enough population to sustain that. But as the internet became more popular, dating sites became more mainstream, and then the location-based ones matured, it almost became a race to the bottom (so to speak). If someone is horny right now, why chat with person A (with a text-based profile) when person B has photos? Why chat with person B when person C has shirtless photos? Why chat with person C when person D sends dick pics right away? Why chat with person D when person E sends dick pics and will drive to your house in 10 minutes? So a subset of users start pushing this towards being hyper efficiency, but that comes at the expense of the other subset of users who don't necessarily want that. My experience has been you can't ever escape that. That mentality has permeated the system, and now we're conditioned to "meet up within 3 messages", "send pics in first message", "no fats, no fems, no flakes", etc. And if you don't like that and want something slower then you get told "it's just grindr, what do you expect?" (which eventually morphs into "it's just tinder what do you expect?", "it's just hinge, what do you expect?"). But even the people saying "it's just grindr" also complain that after they have sex, they just feel lonely again and that they feel trapped or addicted to grindr. Obviously I'm painting with really broad strokes. Some people do find relationships on grindr. Some people are satisfied with their interactions. But, I think like the original article describes, it feels soul destroying. And by the time you're in your 30s, I think a lot of gay men realize that easy sex doesn't necessarily mean good sex and it often doesn't mean feeling satisfied or content afterwards. But it's difficult when you have a heterogenous population, with a vocal faction of the population that keeps pushing the limits of efficiency, and the rest of the population is just sorta dragged along.
jeegsy 3y ago
Well, clearly, the groups want very different things
photochemsyn 3y ago
My conspiratorial (*completely evidence-free as far as I know) theory on hookup apps is that they're secretly backed by the major pharmaceutical manufacturers of various STD treatments. The numbers are interesting: there are about 32,000 new HIV cases in the USA each year, and the per-month cost of ongoing anti-retroviral therapy is estimated at $1,800 - $4,500. This works out to a gross cost of ~ $0.7 billion to $1.7 billion - and it's cumulative, year after year. as HIV patients need this treatment for the rest of their lives. Given profit margins of 10-15% in pharma at least, this is a huge cash cow for the industry. (Also explains the reluctance to invest in seeking a permanent cure for the disease that would allow patients to terminate their therapy). Now, would a profit-hungry industry deliberately encourage reckless sex practices in order to grow demand for their product, year after year? It might bear some investigation.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  Can you not just trace the investments and find out either way?
- eru 3y ago
  From what I've heard, The better anti-HIV drugs we have these days actually decrease your viral load so much that you can not infect other people. (Please correct me, if I am wrong.) From the perspective of your theory, that would seem counterproductive. As a greedy pharma company you'd want people to take a drug that makes them feel good while they are on it, be no permanent cure, _and_ still allow them to spread the condition.
- c0pium 3y ago
  Moderna is in trials with an HIV vaccine based on mRNA tech. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36454825/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36454825/ https://www.clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT05854381 https://www.clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT05854381
- Levitz 3y ago
  Given the rates of transmission, Grindr would be the obvious choice, yet the app is pretty damn responsible around the issue. You can list your STD status, whether you take pre exposition meds and when you last checked yourself for STDs.
lazide 3y ago
Heterosexual women and men have fundamentally different biological incentives. Gay men don’t.
- ben_w 3y ago
  The "biological incentives" of being gay (or bi, or ace, or aro, or child-free-by-choice, or (hetero) butt stuff and blowjobs, or all the other things from the a-z of human relationships that aren't pro-reproduction) were still an open question last I heard.
  - 4gotunameagain 3y ago
    not really. it is well known in non politically influenced circles that hormonal exposure in the uterus is a great predictor of sexuality and behaviour.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      The causal mechanism isn't the same thing as "why hasn't evolution selected against this"[0] and neither is the same thing as subjective incentives. [0] one suggestion is the "gay uncle hypothesis" which posits that people who themselves do not have children may nonetheless increase the prevalence of their family's genes in future generations by providing resources (e.g., food, supervision, defense, shelter) to the offspring of their closest relatives; this hypothesis seems to be consistent with the evidence without being sufficient on its own.
      - lazide 3y ago
        Near as I can tell, it’s also evolutionary advantageous to have significant ‘randomness’ as far as traits across a population. Especially for humans due to the extreme variation in environmental conditions and stresses we end up producing for ourselves. Being a hero by jumping on a grenade is a pretty terrible survival trait for an individual for instance, but essential for the group to have at least one in any decent sized population. All the non-grenade-coverers will strongly support such folks, as long as it doesn’t hurt their own survival chances somehow. So if we look at individual tendencies as coming more from die rolls than anything else, with a wide distribution, a lot of outlier behavior makes a lot of sense. A hardcore survivalist most of the time is going to be selected against, for instance, for many reasons when things are going well. They’re dumping all their stats points in the wrong categories! But any population that doesn’t have at least a few is going to completely disappear on those rare long tail events (an actual nuclear war?). And if those survivalists are actually capable, they get the benefit of ‘seeding’ the next generation without any competition! Long odds, but potential huge payoff biologically.
xwdv 3y ago
If there was an app where I could quickly hook up with a woman just for some physical satisfaction as easily as men do on Grindr I’d be pretty satisfied too. Low effort sex should be more readily available so that people don’t have to pollute serious dating apps looking for it.
- swagasaurus-rex 3y ago
  These apps exist, but you’re paying for an escort
  - xwdv 3y ago
    I wouldn’t mind paying for an escort, but it feels like such a gray market and I don’t know how to navigate it. I’d really like some kind of Uber Eats type thing where I can make an appointment with someone and have them come over for an hour and then just be on their way. No BS.
    - ambicapter 3y ago
      That sounds exactly like an escort with a fancy app.
      - xwdv 3y ago
        How else is one supposed to find an escort? People are always saying “just hire an escort” casually like if this was some common knowledge. Plus maybe you don’t need an escort if you are a match with someone else looking for the same thing as you.
        dehrmann 3y ago
        Feels like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UifycM6lBvQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UifycM6lBvQ
        johnnyanmac 3y ago
        >How else is one supposed to find an escort? strip clubs I imagine. They can't legally say they have escorts, but it's an entire scene. Like any other tribal knowledge, you need to know the edge cases and know the right people. And/or be rich. You can't just google this kinda stuff, you gotta get out to your town and dig (well... you kind of can. But you don't want to take the risk asking for certain Craigslist ads on this stuff). Or you can go to Vegas where prostitution isn't illegal.
Der_Einzige 3y ago
You know why this is. Gay men are far more promiscuous than straight women are.
- polartx 3y ago
  Or they’re just less affected by the public’s perception of their promiscuity
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    Idk about less affected. Especially these days where trying to call a woman that is almost as bad as sexual assault in many's eyes. Gay stuff is just more underground. You're never going to just walk into a gay club, for instance. Nor wander into an LGBT meetup by surprise.
Redoubts 3y ago
> so many gay men report great satisfaction from it. Yeah man, love this app, who wouldn't... https://imgur.com/a/Ff0qaPn https://imgur.com/a/Ff0qaPn
- Levitz 3y ago
  How is that the app's fault? Are those conditions created by grindr? People have preferences, disclosing them as soon as possible saves everybody's time. There might very well be a problem in the gay community in this regard, but if so it runs way deeper, this would happen with or without grindr.
- fennecbutt 3y ago
  As a gay dude myself, idt this is too bad. He's just listing preferences, he's not being offensive about it. If what he listed is wrong, then is it wrong for me to be gay because I'm being sexist by excluding women? I actually prefer people list their preferences up front, that way that's no disappointment later. For example, I can think a straight guy is cute, but I'm not personally attracted to straight guys, I find it unattractive, because I know they're not interested (in addition to hetero culture, chest beating etc that is just gross). Easier for someone to say "not into short guys" up front cause then I just skip over them rather than interact and have awkwardness later on.
  - Redoubts 3y ago
    > He's just listing preferences to be clear, there are multiple examples here of varying politeness.
ssnistfajen 3y ago
If you've actually interacted with gay men in general you'll also find out the vast majority also have negative experiences with Grindr. It still falls within the "low effort = low quality" equation. Or you can just read the reviews on App Store / Google Play and see for yourself.
fennecbutt 3y ago
I hate grindr because I can't filter to introverted geeks like I am. The geek section has been taken over by self described "nerds" aka jocks who live in the gym but have an xbox to play fifa. Ugh.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  response bias at work. If you let people describe themselves they will lie to become whatever they feel gets them the most success.

dangus 3y ago

An alternative read on your idea is more of an elitist view of how we spend our free time. You’re basically judging the quality of what people choose to do. I’m allowed to just exist and be happy with it. Perhaps I don’t need a hobby to keep me happy. Perhaps my favorite thing to do is watch Netflix with my family. Who are you to judge? It really has nothing to do with the low quality of dating apps, that can be blamed squarely on Match.com’s monopolistic anti-competitive tactics.

BiteCode_dev 3y ago
I wish it were true, but no. Unless you are Jesus or Buddha, there are things that will very likely make you unhappy. e.g: eating a lot of crappy food and spending a lot of time watching tv shows are one of them. It diminishes your health, put your dopamine system in shamble and bring no meaning in your life. It's very rare people are happy in those conditions. Again there is nothing wrong about enjoying those activities and indulging in them. The point is it's unlikely you can fill your life with it and end up satisfied.
- dangus 3y ago
  I wish your comment were true, but no. I’m right and you’re wrong. The happiness police has determined that you are the one who is unhappy.
  - BiteCode_dev 3y ago
    It's one of the rare instance where biology, sociology, philosophy and religion kinda agree. You can share your own opinion as usual, but it's going to be a hard sale. It's not about forcing the idea on you, rather it's reporting what a lot of humanity have found to be true on the long run.
- lazide 3y ago
  Is someone forcing anyone to sit down and do those things? Could they go for a walk instead?

wiseowise 3y ago

> Ready-made meals are no substitution from cooking vegetables. Yes, they are.

_gabe_ 3y ago
I can’t believe this is getting downvoted. I wonder how many people who downvoted cook for themselves 100% of the time. I’ve never met anybody that does that. Usually you trade cooking nights with a spouse or roommate. You occasionally go out for a nice meal. You use preprepared ingredients. Is a ready made meal from a spouse worse than a meal cooked by yourself? Is a frozen store bought dinner worse than a pre-cooked meal that you personally cooked and froze? Is a meal made by a chef at a nice restaurant worse because you didn’t cook it yourself? This standard is ridiculous. It’s especially funny to me, because there’s a running joke in my family that a meal cooked by somebody else always tastes better than when you cook it yourself.
- userinanother 3y ago
  It is damn near impossible to buy high quality frozen food. It’s like they is no market for it. If it’s frozen it’s made with the shittiest low quality low effort process. I know high quality food can be frozen because I make it all the time but I can’t buy it
- crooked-v 3y ago
  For me the one thing that I can get out of a self-cooked meal that I can't out of anything premade is good browned onions. Something about preservation processes inevitably turns them unappealing in a way I haven't particularly noticed with other veggies in pre-made meals (at least the reasonably high-quality ones, like Saffron Road).
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  >I wonder how many people who downvoted cook for themselves 100% of the time. I think we're missing the forest for the trees here. it's not about cooking, it's about making sure your whole life isn't "ready-made meals". Put the metaphor into every other aspect of life. We will all take shortcuts somewhere, but shortcuts imply a destination. if your destination is just more McDonalds, I think we are missing something vital to out lives. >a meal cooked by somebody else always tastes better than when you cook it yourself. the "joke" implied intimacy in said meal. It's not the meal, it's who made it for you. coporate billionaire food chain pumping out "burgers" cooked by minimum wage workers with no upward mobility is about as distant as you can get.

sebastianconcpt 3y ago

Convenience (instant reward) is to humans, what light is to bugs.

BiteCode_dev 3y ago
That's a very poignant analogy. Especially since we all looked down on bugs for being so stupid to die burnt on a lamp.
- sebastianconcpt 3y ago
  Precisely. That's why "a good life" is better understood as a long term optimization of the game of games. Reminding that capacity for delayed gratification is a predictor of success as it can provide better overall balance in that game of all games when compared with optimal instant gratification only.
ulrikrasmussen 3y ago
I love this analogy. Not only is it a good analogy, the underlying mechanisms causing bugs to be drawn to light and humans to be drawn to instant gratification are both results of our biology and evolution through thousands of years of life before modern civilization, and both can have really devastating outcomes in modern society.
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  My understanding is that bugs are not actually drawn to light, but rather attempt to fly at a fixed angle to light, roughly perpendicular to it. When the light is the Moon, that keeps them flying in more or less a straight line. But when the light is close to them, they turn to keep the light at that fixed angle and consequently spiral in towards it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transverse_orientation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transverse_orientation

helf 3y ago

[dead]

ekianjo 3y ago

> Chats are no substitution for IRL human interactions. Careful... are you going to suggest next that Remote work is no substitution for office work?

supertofu 3y ago
In-person interaction fulfills our innate biological desire for community. Remote work is just a means of earning income. You are comparing apples to oranges by assuming there is some relation between online chatting and remote working.
- ekianjo 3y ago
  I dont need to meet coworkers every day to have meaningful biological relationships and communities. Companies need you, its not about you needing company.
BiteCode_dev 3y ago
That's a "Behold a man" kinda problem, isn't it?
MobiusHorizons 3y ago
That is the exact assertion for exactly the same reasons. Remote work may work for you (much like chatting) but you are giving up a lot of communication richness in the process. Working from home has very real trade offs that may work for you and your team, but it is no substitute for working and especially meeting in person. It primarily impacts communication efficacy, which for many larger teams is already the limiting factor.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- zlg_codes 3y ago
  Yeah, communication is so much better with Dale's after lunch Cheeto breath to go with your stand-up meeting before going back to your soulless cubicle. /s You're describing the way normies work, and that's greta but not everyone is NT.

fullshark 3y ago

Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death

claytongulick 3y ago
Or take a Holiday in Cambodia

wkat4242 3y ago

> Chats are no substitution for IRL human interactions. I agree with everything except this. There's people I've had a deep relationship with online and when I met them in person there was nothing. Really weird. There is actually so much subliminal communication in chats just like in real personal interaction. It just takes a lot of experience to pick up on it. And getting to that point with someone is certainly not quick or low effort :)

jncfhnb 3y ago
People are catfishing you whether they intend to or not. Everybody has max confidence online.
Aerbil313 3y ago
> There's people I've had a deep relationship with online and when I met them in person there was nothing. I can't help but feel there's a serious issue somewhere in the reality described in this sentence.
- saltcured 3y ago
  I agree with other comments that it can be easy to conflate the actual person on the other side of text with the imagined person. But, there are also other possibilities to consider too. I am speaking generally here, not assuming we know the background of that once sentence. Overall, a person's identity is not so clear cut as we like to think. Whether in text or in person, people are often performing and wearing some kind of mask rather than exposing their "true" selves. (And, one might ponder whether a true self really exists separate from these layered behaviors.) For one reason or another, some folks may have more modes than others or switch more easily by different nuances of context. A romantic idealist might think of a text-first relationship as somehow meeting the true person. They might even believe that they've found a soul-mate and invest in ideas like "beauty is the person inside". That they are more advanced and would not judge a book by its cover. But to meet in real life, they eventually will discover how they respond to the outsides too. The face, the voice, the body, the pheromones, the posture and mannerisms. Finding incompatibilities at this level can create a strong cognitive dissonance. But also, people sometimes compartmentalize aspects of their personality and behavior. They might be dedicated to their real-life relationship but almost put on an alternate ego as an escape. They behave like a different person in this other (possibly secret) mode. Someone meeting this alt-person could be in for a rough ride if they do not understand that it will always be a background "fun" mode for the other party, not something they would prioritize or allow to supplant their primary lifestyle. And finally, some might find control or security in an alternative context. Whether virtual chat or just some other space compartmentalized from real life, they may find it easier to escape boundaries of their primary social personality. They might bypass shyness or anxiety or repression expected by their social circle. But in a crossover setting, they might involuntarily shut down, to the bewilderment of someone who knew them in their escapist space.

dotnet00 3y ago

Be careful not to suffer vertigo from the dizzying heights of that horse you're on.

low_tech_love 3y ago

IMHO There are two main problems with social media (and by consequence dating apps) that makes it work very well for a few people but make all the rest suffer miserably: the first is that it flattens things into one dimension, making it look like a single ranking; the second is that it induces a fake “tabula rasa” feeling, as if everyone had the same opportunities simply because everyone is in the same platform. Both of these things are fundamentally wrong: human beings are multidimensional and there are myriad ways for a person to “shine” other than looks (and different people will perceive you and your multiple characteristics also in totally different ways); and just because someone else succeeded (or failed) by doing something that doesn’t mean you can reproduce the same results. Human society is amazing and social media is a horribly inaccurate “digital twin”.

GuB-42 3y ago

I don't understand this idea of engineers and tech people glorifying effort. The whole point of engineering is about efficiency, like making a bridge that holds while using the minimum amount of work and materials. A bridge using more materials is not necessarily a better bridge. You can often make things better by putting in more effort but it may also be counter productive, sometimes the easy solution is the best. Some ready to eat food may be better than what you can cook yourself, even some reputable chefs admit it and the efforts they save on these parts let them focus on the parts where they can make a difference.

uoaei 3y ago
Do you shove everyone into such tiny, restrictive boxes? Romantic partners certainly don't like being told what they should or shouldn't be and do.
- moffkalast 3y ago
  Did the poster above you edit their comment? Asking because your reply is a complete non sequitur.
  - uoaei 3y ago
    Doesn't look like it, and it's not an irrelevant response at all. They generalized across an entire group of people "engineers and tech people" all but insisting that they should value "efficiency" over "effort". I am responding to the generalization and the forced assignment of values for those people (me included) prioritizing certain values over others (I don't). In general such an attitude of "shoulds" goes hand-in-hand with a lack of respect for others expressing complexity, subtlety, nuance, and especially agency in such matters. And also encourages race-to-the-bottom behaviors not just economically but also in social dynamics. It's an antisocial attitude and especially romantic partners lose interest very quickly when people act this way. Source: I was like this once and see it in many techies I know socially. It's a mental shortcut that is common in social settings where techies dominate.
lvass 3y ago

closeparen 3y ago

I’ve never understood how asking out strangers in bars or on the street is supposed to yield high quality matches. Developing crushes on people you actually know in your social scenes is more reasonable. That’s probably the ideal scenario if it turns out to be mutual. But it’s human nature that the vast majority of the time it will be one-sided on the guy’s part. So you’ve got to somehow maintain a social scene with enough single women to make even one match plausible for you, while those women are constantly inundated with unwanted attention and feelings from the guys in the group, without the group either splintering or developing social norms that prohibit romantic overtures. That’s asking for some incredibly robust social technology in an era where we should be grateful that any kind of IRL social scene even exists.

caeril 3y ago
> Developing crushes on people you actually know in your social scenes is more reasonable You are absolutely correct here, but the primary problem with this is that a combination of sexual harassment statutes, #metoo movements, and generalized "women don't ever want to be approached" zeitgeist has closed this avenue off. This avenue is generally still available if you follow the two rules, but if you do not, it's over for you. Church is probably the only exception to this, but with drastically increasing secularization of society, good luck with that.
- kjellsbells 3y ago
  > a combination of sexual harassment statutes, #metoo movements, and generalized "women don't ever want to be approached" zeitgeist has closed this avenue off. Wait, what? This reads like the classic boomer complaint that is hard to get to know women when you can't slap their ass in the office any more. "No one can take a joke any more, etc etc" Women are not a monolithic voting bloc. Some will respond to approaches that repel or bore others. The only way to know is to get to know them as people first and potential romantic partners second. This is why a social scene, or in some cultures, extended clan gatherings, is so important: you see someone in a relaxed setting and can make some assessment of their personality and values. This also means that it takes time. I don't want to say that we should all go back to the weird heteronormative 1950s, but using as many social networks as possible, including unusual ones, is essential. As an older dude who has seen the games that young men play at work, I understand that the hormonal drive for guys is absolutely saturating, but you will fail and fail again if you think that #metoo stops you. If it did, you were misbehaving to start with.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

atleastoptimal 3y ago

That "usually" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. My best relationships are ones that have felt effortless from the start. The ones where I had to put in more effort to make the connection work ended up not being as good. In fact, I spent too long trying to "fix" the mediocre relationships because I was hung up on the same cognitive bias you're espousing: that quality comes out of effort. In fact the effort indicated that the match wasn't right. It was a hint that our libidos and psyches weren't meant to be forced together. Simplistic models of the world, like assuming effort = quality, are the mainstays of hackernews/engineering minds because of our need to quantify everything into the most generally applicable predictable patterns. When those patterns don't line up, one has to reckon that making armchair declarations about the world is as prone to cognitive biases as the "wrong" mentalities those declarations eschew. Isn't the entire point of technological progress offloading the high effort of all the needs and wants of life from humans to machines? Why have technology if it can't make things easier?

scarmig 3y ago
> My best relationships are ones that have felt effortless from the start. The ones where I had to put in more effort to make the connection work ended up not being as good. I can't emphasize how much this rings true to me. I struggled in dating: I spent far too much energy both trying both to find someone and in making relationships work once I found one. I was always told that a good relationship means putting in effort, and so I always constantly put 100% of my energy into it. Naturally, that left me burnt out and resentful when my partners would be putting in next to nothing. Of course, a relationship does require some effort, but I suspect most men struggling to find a satisfying one are putting in far too much effort into it. So long as you have the basics down, it's mostly luck. This can be depressing when you do already have the basics down and still aren't having any success, but the reality is effort in relationships has steeply decreasing marginal returns. It's better to put your energies into things that actually benefit you and let luck and time do their work.
- atleastoptimal 3y ago
  > Of course, a relationship does require some effort Which is true, and true for most things. Here's my "Being There" analogy: If you aim to grow a garden, not watering, tilling, weeding or caring for it at all could have mixed results. A moderate amount of effort and you have a bountiful harvest. If you're putting extensive effort, and nothing is growing, it means the conditions aren't right for what you are doing. The seeds are bad, the soil is bad, the climate may not be right. You aren't going to win any favors from the universe forcing a good outcome out of bad conditions. The effort you put in is meaningless. The sweet spot lies in a moderate amount of effort, but only contingent on cycles of positive feedback that justify that effort. Human beings have evolved to respond to those feedback cycles with dopamine precisely because it naturally encourages more effort. There are some things of course you can't rely on that paradigm (like you can't build half a semiconductor factory and expect it to produce half as many chips), but in those areas where instincts are insufficient, one shouldn't go on hunches or pithy aphorisms: there has to be scientific thinking behind the effort you put in or you're just flailing blindly against the universe.

31337Logic 3y ago

Comment of the Year, right here. Thank you.

leventonportera 3y ago

This is exactly on point, but it has nothing to do with dating apps. The article claims dating apps are "soul-destorying" yet the first example it gives is of a woman solidly into her menopause who gave up on dating apps because she likes clubbing and one night stands instead of relationships. There are low effort dating apps to get laid. To get laid, people don't want to put in a lot of effort. To get laid with a young guy, gramma Does have to put in a lot of effort, and it probably helps if her young lay is flipped out on E at an illegal underground club in London, as opposed to sitting in an office on his break between presentations. My wife and I met on a paid dating app. It took me a day's worth of hours to fill in my profile, and what my requirements are. For my match, I defined education level, minimal number of fluent languages and what they are, age requirements by race (some age faster, some slower), political views, religion, even the types of makeup they usually wear (none in my preference). I got about 20 matches per week, and could only write my matches. There was no swipe, no "like" button. Only a text box. I went on a date with a phd student in english lit. I went on a date with a french-american doctor chick who graduated Stanford with an MD at 22. I messaged about 2 girls per week and always got conversation going, usually mutually deciding not to meet. I got messaged by about 2 girls per week, and always replied. I went on one date per week for 2 months and met my wife who speaks 4 languages, has a master's, and is 7 years younger than me. We did have some incompatible things, which were flagged in the match profile, but we decided those could be worked on and got married 6 years ago, 6 months after we met. The only photo she had on the app was the one she took for her passport. But on this app I used, you would not only have to pay $25/month, it would be next to impossible to get a piece of ass and you'd have to invest hours in text and phone conversations before you met. There are different tools for different things. This absolute crap article points out that you can't win a formula1 race in a uhaul, and calls automobiles bad. And it's blatantly obvious in their very first menopausal opening paragraph. The article is the bad app here, and that type of "reporting" is what is "soul-destroying" our society. Shame on them.

jl2718 3y ago

> Netflix is no substitution for a hobby. Maybe, but to the brain engaged in the activity, watching movies or playing video games is much better than a hobby. Real life is only exciting about 1% of the time for anybody. Curated entertainment cuts out most of the boring stuff. Consider this: physiologically, the person watching the biography is probably living a more exciting life than the person who it’s about.

kirso 3y ago

I recently made a comment on min-maxing as societies cancer these days. Searching for silver bullets in life, business, health, finance rarely yields long-term compounding gains. We were all conditioned to buy courses to learn programming in 5 minutes, yet we are bound to be disappointed. We eventually learn though, with more frequent feedback loop and fails.

huytersd 3y ago

I agree with the rest of it but banging some chick I’ve met on tinder is no different than chatting up someone at a bar or at a party. Honestly for this one thing the chase doesn’t do much for me, in this space it’s all about the end results.

tangjurine 3y ago

Running water is no substitute for walking miles to the nearest well

_8j50 3y ago

> Netflix is no substitution for a hobby. Ready-made meals are no substitution from cooking vegetables. Chats are no substitution for IRL human interactions Hard disagree. A habbit you enjoy doing repeatedly is a hobby, Netflix or just staring at cable tv qualifies. Ready made meals can contain veggies, frozen veggies in a bag are plenty healthy and popular. But even if you were right, people live long and healthy lives eating mostly fast food with small portions and working out. I don't really care about Chatbots but IRL human interactions are terrible unless you are the right type of person in the right type of place, online interactions with people like the one we are having now is in my opinion a higher quality interaction than IRL, sort of like writing letters in the olden days, we take our time and compose our thoughts and communicate better.