5 ms·

> Apps are more transparent and equitable with how they expose profiles to other users. Don't bias toward highly liked people to increase perceived "quality" an

> Apps are more transparent and equitable with how they expose profiles to other users. Don't bias toward highly liked people to increase perceived "quality" and shadow-hide show profiles that aren't liked often (and then ask them to pay lol). Show people more randomly, to better represent the true cross section of people on the app. This won't work; if you do this, you'll expose that the average online dating user is... well, average. There's a bit of kayfabe going on; users want to think the other users of online dating are 8+/10, sexy, flirty, fun, and desirable singles. Unfortunately, 69% of Americans are overweight and 36% are obese. If profiles users see weren't heavily weighted toward highly-rated ones, the perception of online dating would immediately change from "online dating is fine, a bunch of attractive people are using this" to "online dating is only for the ugly and desperate"; the article points out that this is the way Gen Z perceives online dating already. Dating apps really struggle to keep the most desirable, because those are the ones least likely to need it. Yet they're also the most important for a dating app to have. As fewer desirable people use it, the less perceived legitimacy it has, which results in fewer people using it, particularly the desirable ones. I suspect dating apps are experiencing this death spiral now.

jessriedel 3y ago
> "online dating is only for the ugly and desperate"; the article points out that this is the way Gen Z perceives online dating already. The article notes that Gen Z usage of dating apps is down, but it's not clear to me it's because they think it's low status. (Polo is unpopular, but it's high status.) Do you have more info on why Gen Z isn't using dating apps? It being low status is certainly possible, but lower over all interest in romance is too; Gen Z is famously having less sex. I followed the "failing to woo Generation Z" link, and just got this PDF, which didn't help much: https://www.generationlab.org/_files/ugd/b2ee84_c2430c8256ff4de09da688999acd4f74.pdf https://www.generationlab.org/_files/ugd/b2ee84_c2430c8256ff... (College students are using dating apps less than post-college 20-somethings, but I think that's always been true.)
- zarzavat 3y ago
  When people say Gen Z are they talking about Gen Z in America or Gen Z on Earth? I notice many qualities ascribed to Gen Z seem to be completely alien to Gen Z where I live which makes me suspect that these qualities are simply random variation and correlation hunting, and not inherent to that cohort’s formative experiences (smartphones, covid, etc).
  - jessriedel 3y ago
    Most of this discussion is about America, I think.
- morbicer 3y ago
  I think it's pretty simple - Gen Z are young and have better opportunity to date IRL. They are surrounded by many peers, have more free time and friend circles are still strong. As people grow older, they have more obligations, they sometimes move away from where they were raised thus breaking away from friends, they generally hang out in less homogenous age bracket. I bet Gen Z will get on dating apps in their 30s.
  - jessriedel 3y ago
    I believe the claim is that Gen Z uses dating apps less when controlling for age than their predecessors. (I don't have the data to tell whether that's true.)
atleastoptimal 3y ago
That's true. The sad reality about dating is that, for 99% percent of people, the partner that would be ideal for their tastes is "out of their league" so to speak. Humans have dealt with this reality of dating acting somewhat like a marketplace via mores of commitment, dating within social classes, condemnation of promiscuity, etc., but the human nature is still there. 10's want 10's, but 5's don't want other 5's, they also want 10's. The strategy most dating apps use has been to keep people in a perpetual cycle of heightened seeming possibility. You see the young, cool, attractive people, and perhaps one out of 100 times you'll strike out, and the unlimited options keep you feeling that such an opportunity could happen infinitely. For average hetero dudes, this obsession will drive purchasing premium, paying for swipes and super likes, etc. I know it's controversial but I do believe that robotic/AI partners is the "ideal world" solution to this. You get someone who fulfills all your physical needs so you don't have to play the roulette in real life, or string along someone in your league because you believe you could get someone out of it. I'm sure in the future we'll see them similar to how we see sex toys today.
- intrasight 3y ago
  A better, and tried and true solution, is ... Alcohol. Helping ugly people reproduce for 10,000 years.
  - Sai_ 3y ago
    Funnier cos alcohol as a beverage is a solution in the chemical sense.
  - The_Colonel 3y ago
    Drinking alcohol at home doesn't help. It's likely the going out (and then drink alcohol) which helps. And people nowadays don't go out a lot.
- throw310822 3y ago
  Strange analysis. Considering that what people want from dating apps is sex and partners, and that both are easier to obtain from people of matching attractiveness. As a former dating app user, the possibility is something I never cared about: I cared about a date, there is a marketplace and- while I will try to find someone acceptable- certainly I'm not wasting my time chasing people out of my league. That produces just waste of time and money, rejection and frustration. I would rather say something different: dating apps have zero interest in making you find a partner- this means for them simply losing a customer. They would rather keep you in a cycle with some intermittent reward but preferably without losing you. Finally there is an huge difference between different classes of users: at the very minimum by gender, attractiveness and purpose. Casual sex is a totally different use case than looking for a partner; high attractiveness allows using the app intermittently for immediate reward, while average people need to put much more effort and entirely different mode of use. But despite all this complexity, apps have converged to a single hyper-simplistic model that optimizes maybe intake of new 20 year old users but works much worse than it could for most people.
sweetro17 3y ago
I see your point here - and I do agree, from experience, people sometimes express a desire for a bit of reality distortion in dating (we often heard that they want the experience to feel more like 'fate' or 'chance' than overly engineered). That said, I don't fully agree with the idea that there's a uniform concept of x/10 scale for daters and that they uniformly will balk at those below that uniform rating and therefore the only way forward is boosting those based on their global like %. And some data backs this up. The oft-cited OkCupid Dataclysm book talks about variance (e.g. lots of people like / lots of people dislike), explaining variance is meaningfully more important to messaging and engagement than raw like %. Additionally, on the point of weight / body type, we found that a little under half of daters (and > 50% of women interested in men) do not report body type to be a significant factor in their decision making. So it is a meaningful factor, but for about 1/2 of daters it isn't. The point I'm trying to drive here is, while there is for sure data and intuition that points to what you're describing, there are others that point to other ways that people perceive the quality and likelihood of finding a partner on an app that may work as well, if not better, while not relying on a need to as heavily hack perception.
- nradov 3y ago
  Body type is a significant factor for way more than 50%. People lie on surveys because they feel guilty for being superficial.
  - throwaway290 3y ago
    > Body type is a significant factor for way more than 50%. People lie on surveys because they feel guilty for being superficial. I think you are extrapolating your own view. You have no way of knowing what they feel and even for an educated guess you do not know which country/social class/occupation those users tend to be from in the app being discussed.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - PoignardAzur 3y ago
watwut 3y ago
Average American is not ugly and I mean it 100% seriously. Moreover, average American is as ugly offline as online.
realusername 3y ago
> There's a bit of kayfabe going on; users want to think the other users of online dating are 8+/10, sexy, flirty, fun, and desirable singles. I'd go a bit further than that, people are explicitly looking for that different reality when opening the app. That's one of the reasons of getting the app to them, getting better matches than in the reality. I don't think it's a solvable problem, online dating is just full of paradox, the paradox highlighted in the article is real but this is another one on top of that.

jessriedel 3y ago

> "online dating is only for the ugly and desperate"; the article points out that this is the way Gen Z perceives online dating already. The article notes that Gen Z usage of dating apps is down, but it's not clear to me it's because they think it's low status. (Polo is unpopular, but it's high status.) Do you have more info on why Gen Z isn't using dating apps? It being low status is certainly possible, but lower over all interest in romance is too; Gen Z is famously having less sex. I followed the "failing to woo Generation Z" link, and just got this PDF, which didn't help much: https://www.generationlab.org/_files/ugd/b2ee84_c2430c8256ff4de09da688999acd4f74.pdf https://www.generationlab.org/_files/ugd/b2ee84_c2430c8256ff... (College students are using dating apps less than post-college 20-somethings, but I think that's always been true.)

zarzavat 3y ago
When people say Gen Z are they talking about Gen Z in America or Gen Z on Earth? I notice many qualities ascribed to Gen Z seem to be completely alien to Gen Z where I live which makes me suspect that these qualities are simply random variation and correlation hunting, and not inherent to that cohort’s formative experiences (smartphones, covid, etc).
- jessriedel 3y ago
  Most of this discussion is about America, I think.
morbicer 3y ago
I think it's pretty simple - Gen Z are young and have better opportunity to date IRL. They are surrounded by many peers, have more free time and friend circles are still strong. As people grow older, they have more obligations, they sometimes move away from where they were raised thus breaking away from friends, they generally hang out in less homogenous age bracket. I bet Gen Z will get on dating apps in their 30s.
- jessriedel 3y ago
  I believe the claim is that Gen Z uses dating apps less when controlling for age than their predecessors. (I don't have the data to tell whether that's true.)

atleastoptimal 3y ago

That's true. The sad reality about dating is that, for 99% percent of people, the partner that would be ideal for their tastes is "out of their league" so to speak. Humans have dealt with this reality of dating acting somewhat like a marketplace via mores of commitment, dating within social classes, condemnation of promiscuity, etc., but the human nature is still there. 10's want 10's, but 5's don't want other 5's, they also want 10's. The strategy most dating apps use has been to keep people in a perpetual cycle of heightened seeming possibility. You see the young, cool, attractive people, and perhaps one out of 100 times you'll strike out, and the unlimited options keep you feeling that such an opportunity could happen infinitely. For average hetero dudes, this obsession will drive purchasing premium, paying for swipes and super likes, etc. I know it's controversial but I do believe that robotic/AI partners is the "ideal world" solution to this. You get someone who fulfills all your physical needs so you don't have to play the roulette in real life, or string along someone in your league because you believe you could get someone out of it. I'm sure in the future we'll see them similar to how we see sex toys today.

intrasight 3y ago
A better, and tried and true solution, is ... Alcohol. Helping ugly people reproduce for 10,000 years.
- Sai_ 3y ago
  Funnier cos alcohol as a beverage is a solution in the chemical sense.
- The_Colonel 3y ago
  Drinking alcohol at home doesn't help. It's likely the going out (and then drink alcohol) which helps. And people nowadays don't go out a lot.
throw310822 3y ago
Strange analysis. Considering that what people want from dating apps is sex and partners, and that both are easier to obtain from people of matching attractiveness. As a former dating app user, the possibility is something I never cared about: I cared about a date, there is a marketplace and- while I will try to find someone acceptable- certainly I'm not wasting my time chasing people out of my league. That produces just waste of time and money, rejection and frustration. I would rather say something different: dating apps have zero interest in making you find a partner- this means for them simply losing a customer. They would rather keep you in a cycle with some intermittent reward but preferably without losing you. Finally there is an huge difference between different classes of users: at the very minimum by gender, attractiveness and purpose. Casual sex is a totally different use case than looking for a partner; high attractiveness allows using the app intermittently for immediate reward, while average people need to put much more effort and entirely different mode of use. But despite all this complexity, apps have converged to a single hyper-simplistic model that optimizes maybe intake of new 20 year old users but works much worse than it could for most people.

sweetro17 3y ago

I see your point here - and I do agree, from experience, people sometimes express a desire for a bit of reality distortion in dating (we often heard that they want the experience to feel more like 'fate' or 'chance' than overly engineered). That said, I don't fully agree with the idea that there's a uniform concept of x/10 scale for daters and that they uniformly will balk at those below that uniform rating and therefore the only way forward is boosting those based on their global like %. And some data backs this up. The oft-cited OkCupid Dataclysm book talks about variance (e.g. lots of people like / lots of people dislike), explaining variance is meaningfully more important to messaging and engagement than raw like %. Additionally, on the point of weight / body type, we found that a little under half of daters (and > 50% of women interested in men) do not report body type to be a significant factor in their decision making. So it is a meaningful factor, but for about 1/2 of daters it isn't. The point I'm trying to drive here is, while there is for sure data and intuition that points to what you're describing, there are others that point to other ways that people perceive the quality and likelihood of finding a partner on an app that may work as well, if not better, while not relying on a need to as heavily hack perception.

nradov 3y ago
Body type is a significant factor for way more than 50%. People lie on surveys because they feel guilty for being superficial.
- throwaway290 3y ago
  > Body type is a significant factor for way more than 50%. People lie on surveys because they feel guilty for being superficial. I think you are extrapolating your own view. You have no way of knowing what they feel and even for an educated guess you do not know which country/social class/occupation those users tend to be from in the app being discussed.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - PoignardAzur 3y ago

watwut 3y ago

Average American is not ugly and I mean it 100% seriously. Moreover, average American is as ugly offline as online.

realusername 3y ago

> There's a bit of kayfabe going on; users want to think the other users of online dating are 8+/10, sexy, flirty, fun, and desirable singles. I'd go a bit further than that, people are explicitly looking for that different reality when opening the app. That's one of the reasons of getting the app to them, getting better matches than in the reality. I don't think it's a solvable problem, online dating is just full of paradox, the paradox highlighted in the article is real but this is another one on top of that.