8 ms·

Online Dating

96 points by dangtony98 2y ago

pogue 2y ago
The article has some interesting points but what's the context? Who wrote this & why? It also needs more references for some of the claims made, but it's someone's opinion -- I get it.
- chmod775 2y ago
  Who? George Hotz is well known in the hacker scene, but there's no reason they'd be an authority or more knowledgeable on this than anyone else. Why? Because clearly they think there's a problem & business opportunity.
- ein0p 2y ago
  This is by Geohot, a nerd extraordinaire who gained notoriety after jailbreaking PS3. Eccentric AF, almost unhinged. No filter. Tinder ain’t gonna help someone like that. Getting out more would.
  - BoingBoomTschak 2y ago
    "Nerds extraordinaire" have a big population of introverts who dislike shallow socialization (bars, night clubs, festivals, etc...) but instead focus on hobby or activity dedicated clubs. Which are almost always devoid of women, except for some sport ones.
  - renewiltord 2y ago
    Also founder of Comma.ai
  - dauertewigkeit 2y ago
    He's got more than enough fame that a lot of girls would find him attractive. He even knows how to market himself, but maybe not to girls. IDK. But Tinder wouldn't be the optimal strategy, unless maybe he was doing it on the Stanford campus...
  - coldblues 2y ago
    He has a girlfriend. You can see her in some of his streams.
  - fortyseven 2y ago
    He also threw himself on Musk's dick to work for nothing to "fix" some Twitter issue that he thought for sure would be easy to fix. But it wasn't. And I'm not sure how long it was until he left. At least that's how I remember it.
aurareturn 2y ago
Online dating is just manifest of what happens in real life. The top 20% most attractive men get 80% of the likes. Men of average attractiveness is out of luck on dating apps and they should not use dating apps. Average men will swipe right on below average women (and above) - because it's easy and free to shoot your shot. Therefore, even below average women will get seemingly unlimited likes. These below average women will then pick and choose likes from the top 20%. These women will also wonder why they can't get these top 20% guys to commit to them or ask them out on a date. It's because these men have many options. These above average men will often only want something casual with below average women. This is why women will say there are no "good" men on dating apps despite having thousands of likes. Eventually, these women will "settle" for someone less than what they hoped. In reality, these women are just settling for men of equal attractiveness to themselves. >Imagine a CRM-like interface overlayed on Hinge, Tinder, and Bumble This is "ideal" but in reality, women have no trouble getting likes on dating apps. Therefore, they won't put much effort into a dating app that creates too much friction. If you make your dating app use a CRM-like interface, you'll have a sausage fest. Hell, most women barely fill out their Hinge, Tinder, Bumble profiles. They do the absolute minimum and they still get thousands of likes. My female friend once experimented by putting up a picture of a shoe as her only dating profile. She still received many likes - some of them paid Super Likes.
- dheera 2y ago
  > Online dating is just manifest of what happens in real life. Really, no. The paradox of choice is one of the biggest problems with online dating, one of the reasons why it never worked for me, and one of the reasons why it never worked for many people I know. It works for some, that's fine, and it's probably useful in semi-rural areas where meeting people is hard. > The top 20% most attractive men get 80% of the likes It's specifically this notion of "top 20%" that is flawed. While online dating is about searching for the "best match", real life is about committing to a person who you seem to get along with, embracing the unknown, and working on it together to make each other the best match for each other. If that work goes well, you end up being the best match for each other, and you don't regret not having swiped 500 more times in search of better.
vasco 2y ago
The first question kind of gives away the whole thing. Man signs up to dating app, man isn't successful despite being successful at other stuff. Man blames the app. It's probably not the app. Specially when the only example for "who is doing it right" is a soft prostitution / openly looking for "sugar daddy" (its the websites own lingo).
- closewith 2y ago
  Yes, this is exactly right. What's disheartening are all the comments here talking about how online dating is rotten and terrible (and many comments saying the same modern dating in general). There's some extraordinarily misogynistic comments here. The dating apps work well and like any method of meeting others, can lead to lasting happy relationships. If that's not happening for you, is time to look inwards. Like you say, it's not the app.
  - wiseowise 2y ago
    > The dating apps work well And you have some data to prove it?
    - closewith 2y ago
      The data seems quite positive: https://www.forbes.com/health/dating/dating-statistics/ https://www.forbes.com/health/dating/dating-statistics/ You can also read the bile in the comments here claiming they've had bad experiences with dating apps. They are largely (all?) filled with misogyny and outward condemnation, without any self awareness or insight that maybe the issue isn't the application or culture, but closer to home.
      - wiseowise 2y ago
        > A survey from OnePoll/Forbes Health conducted in August 2023 polled 5,000 U.S. respondents who have actively dated in the last five years Right.
      - imtringued 2y ago
sashank_1509 2y ago
This is what happens when you take an engineer mindset to complex social interactions and try to see if you can engineer your way out of it. For the ML Engineer out there, this is like trying symbolic AI for natural language understanding, it will keep creating weird edge cases that humans will exploit and make the dating app useless. >Men pay for access. This is just a bad idea, men are probably fine with it but no woman wants a man that does this when there are men that don’t need to pay for a dating app. Being forced to pay, indicates only 2 options, either 1 you’re a “loser” not desirable by other females or 2 you’re a “player” who just wants to get on with as many girls as possible. This stigma can reduce if there are say >30-40% of single males on the app, but when starting out it can be a deal breaker for the women on the app. > Compatibility Questions The problem is the questions that really matter, most people do not want to share (even after entering a relationship, people don’t share this, much less an online form). George gives an example of this himself, in the body count section, most women won’t be comfortable sharing this. Other examples of potential dealbreakers, how much a man earns? How much do you value your job? How much do you value your family? How do you deal with stress? How responsible are you? Etc etc These are not things people share, some are even hard to articulate but all are important in some form to determine compatibility. People also rarely know what questions actually matter in a relationship, the average guy/girl will focus on stuff that does not matter at all in the long term. >Design app like CRM Maybe, some of these up changes are good. They don’t seem very consequential as they are mostly UX changes, some of the review ideas seem bad and will be gamed. Overall, the only good dating system is a social club / society that brings like minded, compatible people together, preferably has a few people with excellent intuition that actively (but secretly) play the role of a match-maker and facilitates natural social interactions among its members. Something churches used to do in the past to reasonable success. Apparently people are trying to do that with running clubs in the bay. But it’s undeniable that these ancient social structures are disappearing without a better replacement and we’re all the less off for it.
- yard2010 2y ago
  It sounds like the problem is inherent - people are lying about themselves, about their lifestyle, about who they really are, mostly online but the same in real life. I found that it's better to be more open and transparent. It might hurt the chances, but it filters many people that can't seem to comprehend the life complexity.
000ooo000 2y ago
>Online Dating. Is anyone having a good experience with this? >Third, make the app look like a CRM. >Now you are on to the qualify leads step. If you aren’t agreeing on a time to meet in the first ten messages, this is a dead lead. What an incredibly ironic piece. Somehow I don't think any technical solution proposed here is going to improve online dating for people who think like this.
- mgaunard 2y ago
  If you don't think like this you can't possibly be successful on these apps. As a man in particular it's a numbers game and a huge time sink. Making it a CRM is just layering tools on top to make the process more efficient. I've heard even women do this, some have a spreadsheet with criteria they will validate during the first date.
  - closewith 2y ago
    No, you're just wrong. I'm of average attractiveness, at best, and had no issue finding genuine matches that led to relationships, the last of which became my wife and love of my life. Never was there any analytics or numbers game required. I would go so far as to say that if you're matching with so many people without success that you need a spreadsheet, then the problem is internal and no technical solution will help you (which is also how I feel about the author of the linked deranged rant).
    - saulpw 2y ago
      How long ago was your dating experience?
      - closewith 2y ago
        2022.
    - mgaunard 2y ago
      I've used the apps extensively, and I know that it mostly led to meaningless short-term relationships, and that I only eventually found someone I genuinely connected with due to perseverance and luck. Also the author is not deranged, and it's inappropriate to insult someone because they have a different viewpoint from yours.
BoingBoomTschak 2y ago
Just give me a website made for the few millenials seeking marriage (almost all of them are too expensive relative to their low population and aimed at seniors). Mandatory visible body count would be a nice feature.
- peteforde 2y ago
  Any paragraph containing "mandatory visible body count" is just satire, whether you realize it or not.
- jokethrowaway 2y ago
  You'll get grifters looking to extract money from you via crappy divorce laws. And even worse, likely get your kids custody while you get a weekend sometime. It's a lost battle, if I could go back I'll do what Ronaldo did for his first three children, use surrogate mothers and stay alone.
zarzavat 2y ago
The problem with online dating is that the whole system is rotten. The app/site is rotten because they want money, so they are incentivized to make their members as sexually frustrated as possible so that they hand over more dosh. Because of the first problem, the members are all incentivized to lie. The men lie because they are frustrated that the system isn’t working for them. The women lie by posting unrepresentative photos because they feel the need to compete with everyone else who is doing the same, and the platform is happy with this because they want the most “attractive” members. When all three groups are dishonest, nothing good can come out of it.
- mettamage 2y ago
  You're forgetting that in this day and age there are still people who've never done online dating because they're coming out of a long-term relationship. These people are still honest in their first few weeks. When they find the right person, they'll get off the app as soon as possible. That's my experience anyway, I got married to one of them. I've been on the apps for a few months prior to that in my whole life due to a long-term relationship before that. It can work. But you gotta be willing to be strategic about it. It helped that I loved strategizing about this.
renewiltord 2y ago
I know people with success with online dating and it’s the number one way for people to meet their partners nowadays. But despite having no trouble with women IRL, I never had much luck online. With hindsight I have realized that I need repeated interaction to detect compatibility and when I was selecting online I was selecting based on compatibility (but being a rubbish judge of it). Plus I suck at texting. In the end, I married a friend and it’s been fantastic.
abetusk 2y ago
I don't think dating apps are going to get much better than they are. To me, trying to make a dating app that solves the problems this article and others talk about is a "cursed problem". I heard an interview from a dating app founder a while ago where she had a quote that I'll try to paraphrase: "We're creating an (app|business) where only dissatisfied customers remain and satisfied customers never return." Obviously dating apps exist and are successful and not everyone who's using a dating app is looking for a long term relationship, but the sentiment remains.
- gampleman 2y ago
  If you were running a dating app in a more traditional society the obvious solution would be to charge a substantial fee at the wedding if both newly weds were members of the app say in the past 5 years. How you would achieve a similar pricing structure in our society I have no idea.
- smelendez 2y ago
  It could work tied to some other service although it’s not clear to me what that would be at the moment. Newspapers used to run personal ads, and Craigslist even ran them for free. It wouldn’t surprise me if they actually benefitted from people matching, because you’d be predisposed to buy or at least respond to classified ads for other purposes in the future. Facebook tried and I think still has a dating feature. I’ve only ever encountered one person who was using it, and his match appeared to me and the guy’s friends to be a scammer who was likely to hit him up for money. If they had launched it before they were so widely distrusted and lost the young audience, it might have worked, and they obviously don’t need it to be profitable on its own, just to give you another incentive to visit Facebook and see ads. Yelp, Foursquare, or last.fm probably could have offered an opt-in dating feature a decade ago and done well (by the metrics of the day). Letterboxd or a Goodreads-style service could try it, but it seems more risky: I could see people no longer using the service for its original purpose once they matched, because it would feel like updating your dating profile while in a relationship.
Euphorbium 2y ago
You need to topple capitalism to have any “innovation” in this space, as match.com monopoly will just gobble up any competitor.
Cloudef 2y ago
Honestly I've kinda given up on dating. My ex was doing sugar daddying and had other boyfriends behind my back. The world is too crazy for relationships right now. You have to hope you are lucky and found the one while you were still young.
- katzinsky 2y ago
  My parents tried to set me up with their friend's kids from church when I was young. I feel like a moron for resisting that. Having teenagers/young adults handle dating themselves is cruel IMO. I know a lot of people don't like that because they take individual liberty to be some basic axiom but if you stop and think about it this doesn't work.
  - Cloudef 2y ago
    Having circle where you already know people gives some reassurance for sure.
- mettamage 2y ago
  For me, it took about 3 full-time years of self-development to get good at it.
- Aeolos 2y ago
  Forgive me if I'm reaching, but as a fellow survivor I would highly recommend seeking therapy, my friend. It sounds as if you are letting an experience with a horrible human being influence your life post-separation. Noone should have such port over you, especiay not narcissists, liers and abusers. Not dating for a while is actually a healthy response. Work on your self, get your emotional world in order, and you'll become stronger and happier. There are wonderful people out there, worth sharing your life with. I'm glad I said no to abuse, worked on my shit and and didn't give up.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
mgaunard 2y ago
There are many dating apps that explicitly cater to women and give them special rights. Bumble is the most popular one. I remember an old one which was set up like a store, where women got to "shop" around to "adopt" a man. It's supposed to be empowering and also "safer" for women, but as far a I can tell it just feeds more into the unhealthy aspects of online dating that make women entitled and men work hard to be noticed. They're all pretty shady businesses regardless. I don't think there is really an opportunity for a good mass product in that space.
- smelendez 2y ago
  Bumble’s feature where women must send the first message is pretty brilliant. Women feel more in control, but they also have more of an incentive to swipe yes on men, since they can change their mind later without even having to read a message, which mean men get more likes even if they ultimately don’t lead to anything.
  - dabinat 2y ago
    Bumble is slowly in the process of walking it back. They recently introduced “opening moves” (a proposed opening question which I’ve found most people ignore), which allows men to message first. They’ve also said they’re considering letting men message first app-wide in future.
  - mgaunard 2y ago
    I believe 95% of the first messages that women send on Bumble is "Hi". Speaks volumes.
    - 05 2y ago
      Of all your matches, those with lower than average attractiveness are more likely to message you first (on apps where women aren't always required to message first). This leads to a negative correlation between perceived match value and them initiating the convo. Some (most?) people would go further and reverse the causation, assigning lower values to matches that message first. So, it's an obvious move to only message the bare minimum 'hi' because any further investment would be a signal that you perceive the match to be unbalanced with your own value being lower, and are trying to compensate for that..
superfist 2y ago
This is such naive take. Only way to increase positive dating experience (for some men outside top 10%) is to include verified tax returns in dating apps.
make3 2y ago
women who are comfortable with/not grossed by an app like seeking will be terrible I think, comfortable with being a product/ service that men have to pay for, would not want to date men who would have to do something like that without themselves wanting a kind of pay to play relationship
lsy 2y ago
I am more than a little discomfited by what the author seems to want here: - “Reduce competition” by making online dating exclusive to those who can afford $100+/mo - Obtain potential match’s sexual history prior to conversation to use as a proxy for promiscuity - See all social media of potential matches - Ratings hit for people who decide not to meet with you after chatting - Interface for quantifying the multiple human beings you are talking to as “leads”, CRM style - Automated reverse image search / face recognition for social media - Random bonus: ability to filter Instagram messages by male/female?? Leaving aside the basic disrespect for the people on the other end of the chat here, who actually thinks women would participate on a platform where they are being cyberstalked by, and pressured into meeting with, desperate men who are tracking them in a spreadsheet?
- amriksohata 2y ago
  worrying. the data suggests 80% of the women are in contact with 20% of the men. so the weighting on these apps is not reflective of the real world.
  - imtringued 2y ago
    There are four times more men than women on the apps. The moment a women sorts by almost any criteria, 80% of the men will be filtered out purely because of that.
  - poloniculmov 2y ago
    what data? I've only heard this from the "manosphere".
    - Gigachad 2y ago
      OkCupid posted some stats in a blog post years ago which was pretty enlightening. They since deleted it, and I don’t think any dating company would dare make a similar post with the data they have these days.
- ziggyzecat 2y ago
rtpg 2y ago
> Charge men money per month. Only men. Every club promoter understands this. You don’t want your club to be a sausage fest, similarly, you don’t want your dating app to be a sausage fest. Isn't this already just the norm in a lot of apps? When your first point seems to be a thing tat this level that people already ambiently know about I'm going to have a hard time imagining that you have done a lot of research into the space. ---- Four points points from reading it: - Coffee Meets Bagel does one of the best things IMO: only showing a limited number of profiles a day. Forces people into a bit more of a "speed dating" mindset rather than an "endless scrolling" mindset. Good for serious people. - Pairs, a Japanese app, does have a pretty "CRM" vibe, with a lot of filters and a whole list view. Kinda neat, and again a thing with some serious people - Somebody on twitter said it best: online dating in its current form is so much worse than mixers because in it the most popular people can talk to way more people. At least at a mixer popular people pair off and then other people talk to other people[0] - And of course, just like meeting people at parties, online dating is its own vibe. It's not _as_ limiting as mixer/club vibes in some sense if you can find the right app with the right kind of people matching your mindset, but it's easy to forget that a loooooot of people are still meeting outside of that space, despite what online people say. [0] Can no longer find the original tweet, but it was @Ugarles, included the fun bit about how he met his wife at a party, and much later on in the relationship they realized they had matched online and she had decided against it.
jdmoreira 2y ago
Not really related to the post in itself but to its author. Geohot to me is one of the most interesting people alive. I remember finding him annoying when he was younger but maybe that says more about me than about him. He "matured" really well and even though I don't have many parasocial tendencies each time I hear him on Lex I just know that hanging out with him would be guaranteed life-changing fun. I really wish him well and I hope the world is kind to him because he sure is a special main character in our simulation. I'm team Geohot. What a guy!
- closewith 2y ago
  > He "matured" really well and even though I don't have many parasocial tendencies each time I hear him on Lex I just know that hanging out with him would be guaranteed life-changing fun There's nothing mature about the person who wrote the OP. Don't idolise broken people.
  - jdmoreira 2y ago
    That's just your opinion. It doesn't take a genius to figure out he is neurodivergent. He is on his own path and for sure he mature a lot on his own journey. Also… with all due respect… he is thousands of times more interesting than both of us in almost any measure.
    - closewith 2y ago
      Neurodivergence isn't an excuse for the content of this article. > He is on his own path and for sure he mature a lot on his own journey. He's on a bad path and should not be encouraged. > Also… with all due respect… he is thousands of times more interesting than both of us in almost any measure. I don't know about you, but my own story is more interesting than developer becomes bitter and disillusioned by the failure of the women of the world to find him as valuable as he finds himself.
- wiseowise 2y ago
  You won’t find hot women on HN, George, stop it.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
GardenLetter27 2y ago
The average dating app experience: Filter through: * 50% bots running cryptocurrency scams = 50% remaining * 50% OnlyFans / Instagram models seeking likes/subs = 25% remaining * 50% inactive accounts = 12.5% remaining * 20% looking for sugardaddies / prostitutes = 10% remaining * 10% Men categorised incorrectly and blank accounts = 9% remaining * 75% won't respond (busy with other people, etc.) = 3% remaining * 60% other issues - smoking, already have children, complicated situations, etc. - 1% remaining So after you spend days to go through about 100 accounts, you finally get to speak to a real person and be one of the 8 guys she's speaking to.
allenbrunson 2y ago
personally, i would never use a dating site built by a guy who uses terms like “body count.” you cannot expect to have a decent relationship with someone if you are dehumanizing them from the start. i can understand people’s frustrations with dating. the stakes could not be any higher. if you fail, it is way too easy to take the wrong lessons. i personally failed at this for decades before i figured it out. a few years ago, i married the most wonderful woman in the world. and yes, i found her on a dating site. (one of dozens i tried over the years.) in my case at least, i made it a lot harder for myself than i had to. based on the comments i see here, i think that applies to a lot of you guys. hacker news comments are not a great venue for this topic. if any of you find ypurself similarly frustrated, i am willing to try to help. you can find out how to contact me by following the links in my profile.
- dauertewigkeit 2y ago
  There is really nothing wrong with thinking about your partner's "body count". It's just taboo, because like literally every other mating metric we use, it is trying to assess the value of another human being. But is "body count" more offensive than "height" or "weight", or "college degree"? All are saying the same thing, "if you aren't at least X, you're not worth enough for me to give you a chance". And now you can retort, "but body count shouldn't matter at all, because...". Well you can literally try to protest against every other mating metric as well. I don't see the difference. Why is it valid for a person to say, "I don't find him attractive because his eyes are 2mm too far apart". But invalid to say, "I don't find him attractive, because he's been too promiscuous in the past". Both are valid and people crying about it should get over themselves. As far as mating metrics go it is far from the most unjust.
  - allenbrunson 2y ago
    “body count” is not really offensive, more like irrelevant. it makes about as much sense to take that into account as how many people someone has ever talked to. i can’t attribute “body count” to anything but prudishness. this is exactly the sort of thing i was talking about, with so many people having the wrong ideas about dating. which i am not going to discuss any further in this site’s comments, truly the worst possible venue for it.
dauertewigkeit 2y ago
You cannot "fix it". You either do well or don't on such a platform. It's like being a terrible dancer, and going to a dance party expecting to pick up girls. You won't make a good impression because you don't "vibe" in that environment. If you try to level the playing field, women have no reason to comply. They will find another dating app, to use. > Seeking is one of the only sites to do this right. They claim a ratio of 4 women per 1 man, and they get this by charging men $109/month. Great. Now you pay a $1200/year to be taken for a ride by gold diggers. ---------------- Online dating is a laughably bad proposition, unless you have just the right characteristics to do well on there: being tall and handsome, and having pictures that show off your privileged life, and all that of course in comparison to your peers. As hard as it is to initiate conversation offline, especially with the norms of today, it's still much easier for me to, compared to getting a match and then somehow managing to convert that into a date. EDIT: I'd like to add this analogy. Online dating is like job searching by spamming your resume on LinkedIn. I don't even have a LinkedIn...
- mettamage 2y ago
  > You cannot "fix it". You either do well or don't on such a platform. Give me a reasonable person, and I will make sure they'll do much better. I've done it for myself. You need to have a hacker mindset when it comes to online dating. Almost no one does. I've done it for my friends as well.
  - ziggyzecat 2y ago
    > You need to have a hacker mindset when it comes to online dating. Right on. This dude gets it. You should hold workshops on that and a series of TED talks.
  - dauertewigkeit 2y ago
    I can believe that if you craft the profile to the point where it's basically a bunch of lies, you can do well. I don't see the point of going through that much effort, however. Because, (and this is maybe because I'm long term minded), your lies will all unravel when you actually meet the person and start a relationship with them. Even then. I still think you would do sub optimally compared to real life. Why would I ever line myself up against a bunch of other men and let women choose the best? That only works well for you if you're naturally popular...
kkfx 2y ago
A marginal observation: - males in nature have a duty on that topic, distribute genetic material; - female in nature have to select the best genetic material they are able to find. "The best" is a complicated definition that in practice tend to be hormonal, that's why female normally want in person meeting and find "catalogues" not much useful. The females who find catalogues useful might just look at having temporary fun "from a list" or find someone rich to escalate their social position. That's essentially why on-line dating will not work much anyway until we found a way to understand "genetic profiles matches" witch is so far sci-fi. The rest is just noise, sometime useful indeed especially if we live in spread areas where potential partners are far from us bu all current "matching techniques" can't simply match the most important natural characteristic, hormones.
katzinsky 2y ago
Anything involving computers is probably going to make the situation worse. Not because of anything intrinsic to computers but because there's been a strong pattern over the past 60 years where people (especially in developed countries) reach for computers when there's some underlying cultural problem.
throwaway290 2y ago
I would pay $110 per month for a service that could say with 99% accuracy whether some person I vibe with IRL is on dating sites.
- mettamage 2y ago
  I needed to approach 1000 potential romantic interests IRL to find anyone that I felt I vibed with. I later realized that some of them are on dating sites.
  - throwaway290 2y ago
    If you don't care if a person is on dating sites, then you don't care
mettamage 2y ago
For me personally, it's about meeting as many people and being the best version of yourself. When you do those things, then you gotta find a person you match well with. I've met over 10000 people that were a potential romantic interest. I did this (mostly) during the day by giving them a genuine compliment or asking them a question that I was curious about or by stating an observation that happened in our environment. I'd do my best to mix in playfulness as well. Playfulness is key for me as I tend to take life too seriously. The reason I found my wife was because I was willing to be fine with 9950 rejections, 45 people it didn't work out with, 2 short relationships and 2 long relationships. It fucking hurted, especially initially since I had really unhelpful beliefs about myself (unlovable, etc. but doomed to try to find love anyway). The statistics aren't fully accurate, but I'm pretty sure they're around that ballpark (that, or the rejection rate is even higher). The way I circumvented burnout was by playfulness and self-amusement. I knew at least that whatever I was saying that I was entertained/amused/inspired by it. That was a much better mindset to have than thinking whatever I said wasn't good enough from the get go. The first 2 years that I did this (from 17 to 19 years old), I only experienced rejections. Later in life (30+), I also did online dating. Initially, I got 1 match per month for a few months. Then I put on my hacker mindset to see if I could break the game. It took a few months but I eventually got to 150 matches. That was really a question of "if you're not in the 20%, you gotta be smart." Whenever I tell my story to people, they look at me and are like "I don't want to put this much conscious effort in it." Sometimes it's for moral reasons (love should just "flow" or "just happen", it's imperative for the romantic realm to not be analyzed etc.). Some can't handle the emotional pain (for me it was brutal too). Some just hate the sheer effort. But based on what I've seen with friends who are like me: if I didn't put in this effort, it is likely I would've gone nowhere since I have friends a lot like me who didn't put in the effort and they seem to act like a control group in that sense. It is what it is. How badly do you want it? I don't know why, I just knew I wanted it badly. It is what it is.
- Tepix 2y ago
  10000 meetings, that's 5.5 years of 5 meetings every single day.
  - 2y ago
INTPenis 2y ago
I've been thinking a lot of this too and my plan is completely different. The main problem is profit. We need to eliminate the for-profit dating apps. In a perfect world there would be a state run dating platform that would focus on equity. But in lieu of that I figure we should make it selfhosted. - Publicly ran platform reminiscent of fediverse - External profile verification so each node admin can host their own, I'm from Europe so the idea here is to use eID. - Money should only be in the form of donations to the node admin, just like fediverse. - Node admins can decide whether to invite only or let everyone in, users can decide whether to filter certain nodes, or verified profiles for example. The goal would be that everyone real has a verified profile and a node admin that keeps bots out with their CoC and sign-up rules. Optimally this should be done ontop of the existing fediverse, to save on runtime costs and leverage the existing profiles. But seriously, online dating needs to be completely refactored. I've personally given up on it completely and decided to just talk to people IRL. In spite of having had 2 fairly good relationships started through "the apps".
- hkt 2y ago
  Self hosting and federation might be a poor substitute for a cooperative approach: daters are natural stakeholders in the platform, so should be allowed to run it democratically, as per other dating apps. This removes the technological barriers to both use and implementation and allows for a pretty simple service that can focus on what it will inevitably need instead of being bogged down with voluntarism and distributed protocols, namely, growth of user base. From a software perspective, this does already exist, somewhat: https://github.com/Alovoa/alovoa https://github.com/Alovoa/alovoa
  - INTPenis 2y ago
    But how are end users stakeholders? It's a nice thought but at the end of the day the platform will use a lot of resources. Regardless of where the resources are, compute, storage, bandwidth. Who's paying for it? Do you mean end users being stakeholders in the style of IPFS? It just becomes too complicated to make all end users such stakeholders tied to the operation of the service. That's why I look towards the fediverse model where competent end users can host nodes that hundreds of other end users can use. End users still become stakeholders by donating to the node admin. And yes I know all about the pitfalls of this method, I hosted a fediverse node since 2017. For better and for worse I think it's the best model with the lowest barrier of entry and most realistic chance of being implemented today.
nakeru 2y ago
Weird, incel vibes from this post. "Body count" is incredibly disrespectful, amongst other things because it seems to only be used with women. Also, browsing the website I found that this person believes an Elon Musk monarchy would be great. On a different note. I'm average looking, of average to short stature and have a decent job but I'm far from rich (but I'm frugal so I look poorer than I am). I haven't for a while but I used Tinder extensively for about two years. I met over ten women and dated for a while two in that period. Without being obsessed with the app. What I mean is, while the dating app landscape is generally unfair to men (mostly our own fault, most men will "like" everything without even looking) it's not as bad as some incels online would let you believe. And hey, if apps don't work, try the old school method of going out. It really works.
- wiseowise 2y ago
  > Weird, incel vibes from this post. "Body count" is incredibly disrespectful, amongst other things because it seems to only be used with women. You’ll find those at women forums too. “Manslut”, “manwhore”, etc. And no, it’s completely fine to judge person by amount of partners they’ve had.
- Hedder 2y ago
  >"Body count" is incredibly disrespectful, amongst other things because it seems to only be used with women That's not a valid reason. For example, "height" is not an incredibly disrespectful metric, just because it is only used to judge men. Men care about a woman's body count far more than women typically do a man's. Vice versa for height.
miki123211 2y ago
Online dating is fundamentally a hard problem because there's both incentive misalignment and reverse network effects. The goal of most dating app users is to find somebody and stop using the app. The goal of the app makers is to keep the user on the app for as long as possible, to serve them ads / sell their data / charge them for a subscription. These two stand in direct opposition to each other, and companies optimize for the latter as much as they can. This is the incentive misalignment problem. After a given app exists for a while, the most desirable users[1] will pair off and leave, while the most undesirable and desperate users will stay. The less attractive you are, the longer you'll be on the app. This means that as time goes on, it's harder and harder for the tide of new users to balance out the growing pile of undesirable matches. This is what I call the "reverse network effect". It's the opposite of normal network effects, which is what happens with normal social networks and messaging apps. A normal messaging app gets more useful as more people join it. It's worth noting that apps designed for finding hookups and not finding spouses don't suffer from this problem. The more hookups you find, the more likely it is that you'll want to keep paying for the app, and the more desirable you are, the more hookups you will find.
- aurareturn 2y ago
  That's why I suspect that the vast majority of paying users on non-hookup-only dating apps are men who are above average in attractiveness. They're the only group that makes some sense. The very top percentage of men don't need a subscription. The below average men won't stay on the subscription because they still can't get matches. Women don't need a subscription either. Meanwhile, the above average attractiveness group of men are likely finding enough hookups to justify staying on it.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
ilaksh 2y ago
George Hotz, a relatively famous and presumably financially secure, charismatic, and still somewhat youthful man, has just about admitted that he does not have success on dating apps. I would really like him to do these two experiments: change his height on his profile from 5'4" to 6'1", and then if that alone doesn't do it, additionally emphasize his connections, level of fame, financial security etc. in his profile. Point being that what women are interested in to start with is actually just as shallow as men. I think he has some good ideas here actually. But ultimately, this stuff is probably being driven by very primitive instincts. I also think think that if you look at what has been done with artificial muscles such as at Artimus Robotics or various other robotics and 3d printing companies, the potential for incredibly realistic humanoid robots is on the horizon. I'm imagining in 2035 or at least 20XX the most popular "dating app" is technically a robotics rental company where the robots rent themselves out. Ultimately there will be plenty of really attractive male and female sexbots manufactured, and most people will be happily screwing 10s whenever they want. The human race may die out because of this. But we won't lack for companionship with incredibly sexy (artificial) models.
- bsaul 2y ago
  5’4 on a dating app excludes you from 99.9% of the women selection. You won’t even appear on their app.
- jdmoreira 2y ago
  Curiously enough George admitted he would date a robot AI on his last Lex interview, which I highly recommend because he is so wholesome. I also know he had a (quite attractive) girlfriend circa 2021.
netcan 2y ago
"geohotz fixes dating" is a wonderful meme. Let's keep it. I think it's futile trying to "design" any social media, certainly something like dating. Social media is more discovery than a design. You discover how it works best. Obviously, "best" is defined as "nerds get more action, less existential angst."
switch007 2y ago
Just reject the entire idea of online dating. It's awful. We've done that experiment, let's not flog a dead horse. Instead, how can we make offline dating better?
- mikhael28 2y ago
  Be the change you want to see.
mikhael28 2y ago
Why hasn’t anyone thought about making dating apps seasonal? The problem with all dating apps, is that after a certain point they become a cesspool of the dissatisfied customers who never paired off. Does anyone remember when Tinder first came out? It was lit. 12 months later, it was not. The season passed. It became a familiar place, with baggage, where all the cool people left. Solution: make a seasonal dating app that starts in March, and continues until August/September a.k.a cuffing season. Then, close it down until the next year. Each year, or season, it can have a different theme. You purchase a subscription for the whole season, a half year membership. It starts all over again next year, with a different theme. This keeps the experience fresh, and viral for new people to join. Solves the reverse network effect problem, by creating a new, temporary network effect. It also harnesses natural human seasonal mating cycles in an intuitive way, while keeping everything fresh. The six month break in development allows for new UI and ‘fresh’ experience, like a Fortnite season.
- switch007 2y ago
  This isn't such a crazy idea. It reminds me of debutantes and the social season of yesteryear. Though I still dislike any and all online dating
netcan 2y ago
Imo to make any sort of intentional impact, a good approach would be to replicate OkCupid's mid-2000s. Not the features, the fact that OkCupid was a subculture... and that it had its own cultural norms and features. Att "poly" pretty normative, for example. I think tinder-era dating needs a bigger intermediate space between "casual" and "serious," especially for the over 30s users. Anything between "mostly just sex" and "dating to marry" is a hard to negotiate zone rn. One is overpopulated by men. The other is overpopulated by women. The middle ground is untargetable. It comes with no preexisting expectations. Maybe we need to bring back "going steady."
Ntrails 2y ago
My views: - some non trivial % of active users are ego tourists. - ratios matter, and drive obvious behaviours to the detriment of all users - within a month you've had the same conversation so many times everything blends together and you hate it - even a great online banter pre meetup means little when IRL it is awkward or slow. There are flaws beyond that, but I just don't think it is improvable by dehumanising the other parties on the apps more
Zealotux 2y ago
I've had reasonable success with dating apps, meeting both my girlfriend and my previous one through Bumble. I'm likely part of the so-called "lucky 20%" of men with most matches. While this may sound like I'm bragging (I am), I've also seen the other side of Bumble when my female friends allowed me a peek, and it's eye-opening. The majority of men are simply terrible at marketing themselves. Most men fundamentally misunderstand women's incentives. They present what they think women will find attractive, but from a male perspective, which often misses the mark entirely. I could elaborate for hours on the issues I see in these profiles. Now, whenever I hear a guy claim "dating apps suck, they're a scam," I don't entirely disagree — dating apps are indeed flawed — but I'm immediately curious to see his actual profile. There's a significant missed opportunity in these apps: they could teach and guide men to build their best profiles, select and eliminate pictures, and suggest concrete improvements. It might sound extreme, but even basic A/B testing can dramatically increase your number of matches, the majority of men will just create their profile in 2 minutes, never touch it again, and wonder why they don't have dozens of girls throwing themselves at yet another guy taking a selfie in his bathroom.
- antisthenes 2y ago
  > They present what they think women will find attractive, but from a male perspective, which often misses the mark entirely. Are you going to share any advice or particulars? I see posts like yours and they are a dime a dozen, but could be summed up by "your profile is bad", but they never offer any concrete advice on improvement. What are women looking for in these profiles that they can immediately use within less than 1 minute to determine whether it's a good match or not?
  - hanifc 2y ago
    Try to look at your profile dispassionately. Would you be interested in meeting this person? Does it look like they’re a generally pleasant person to be around? Do they have hobbies? The questions you ask are really determined by what you’re ultimately looking for or find attractive, so my questions might not match yours.
- gexla 2y ago
deleted 2y ago
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wakawaka28 2y ago
Various dating sites have tried to get only guys to pay before, sometimes $50 per month recurring plus expensive microtransactions. But it looks like the site they suggested is for executive types only. I could afford $100 per month for a decent dating site if there was such a thing, but stupid high spending on the dates themselves is asking to be used. I guess a guy spending that kind of money ought to know better but we all know that most of them won't know better. Speaking of spending money, even buying dinner for a first date can lead to abuse. Men usually have to take the chance because of customs, but some women are eating out several times per week by scamming men for free stuff.
ElCapitanMarkla 2y ago
Until last year I spent 10 years working for a large dating company with millions of members. There are a few big issues. 1 - Scammers. I’d be surprised if even 1 in 100 female profiles were real. Where maybe 1 in 1000 male profiles were scammers. We had all sorts of ways to detect and ban scammers but it was bad. 2 - Payments are high risk. High chargeback rates, loads of scammer transactions where they’re testing cards, etc. it can be hard even signing up a payment processor. 3 - Less and less people are willing to actually pay for dating services on the web. Especially for that < 30 age range. Tinder / Bumble really dominate that scene. And if you get into Adult/Casual dating multiply all of the issues x10. And good luck finding a payment processor who isn’t terrible.

96 points by dangtony98 2y ago

The article has some interesting points but what's the context? Who wrote this & why? It also needs more references for some of the claims made, but it's someone's opinion -- I get it.

chmod775 2y ago
Who? George Hotz is well known in the hacker scene, but there's no reason they'd be an authority or more knowledgeable on this than anyone else. Why? Because clearly they think there's a problem & business opportunity.
ein0p 2y ago
This is by Geohot, a nerd extraordinaire who gained notoriety after jailbreaking PS3. Eccentric AF, almost unhinged. No filter. Tinder ain’t gonna help someone like that. Getting out more would.
- BoingBoomTschak 2y ago
  "Nerds extraordinaire" have a big population of introverts who dislike shallow socialization (bars, night clubs, festivals, etc...) but instead focus on hobby or activity dedicated clubs. Which are almost always devoid of women, except for some sport ones.
- renewiltord 2y ago
  Also founder of Comma.ai
- dauertewigkeit 2y ago
  He's got more than enough fame that a lot of girls would find him attractive. He even knows how to market himself, but maybe not to girls. IDK. But Tinder wouldn't be the optimal strategy, unless maybe he was doing it on the Stanford campus...
- coldblues 2y ago
  He has a girlfriend. You can see her in some of his streams.
- fortyseven 2y ago
  He also threw himself on Musk's dick to work for nothing to "fix" some Twitter issue that he thought for sure would be easy to fix. But it wasn't. And I'm not sure how long it was until he left. At least that's how I remember it.

aurareturn 2y ago

Online dating is just manifest of what happens in real life. The top 20% most attractive men get 80% of the likes. Men of average attractiveness is out of luck on dating apps and they should not use dating apps. Average men will swipe right on below average women (and above) - because it's easy and free to shoot your shot. Therefore, even below average women will get seemingly unlimited likes. These below average women will then pick and choose likes from the top 20%. These women will also wonder why they can't get these top 20% guys to commit to them or ask them out on a date. It's because these men have many options. These above average men will often only want something casual with below average women. This is why women will say there are no "good" men on dating apps despite having thousands of likes. Eventually, these women will "settle" for someone less than what they hoped. In reality, these women are just settling for men of equal attractiveness to themselves. >Imagine a CRM-like interface overlayed on Hinge, Tinder, and Bumble This is "ideal" but in reality, women have no trouble getting likes on dating apps. Therefore, they won't put much effort into a dating app that creates too much friction. If you make your dating app use a CRM-like interface, you'll have a sausage fest. Hell, most women barely fill out their Hinge, Tinder, Bumble profiles. They do the absolute minimum and they still get thousands of likes. My female friend once experimented by putting up a picture of a shoe as her only dating profile. She still received many likes - some of them paid Super Likes.

dheera 2y ago
> Online dating is just manifest of what happens in real life. Really, no. The paradox of choice is one of the biggest problems with online dating, one of the reasons why it never worked for me, and one of the reasons why it never worked for many people I know. It works for some, that's fine, and it's probably useful in semi-rural areas where meeting people is hard. > The top 20% most attractive men get 80% of the likes It's specifically this notion of "top 20%" that is flawed. While online dating is about searching for the "best match", real life is about committing to a person who you seem to get along with, embracing the unknown, and working on it together to make each other the best match for each other. If that work goes well, you end up being the best match for each other, and you don't regret not having swiped 500 more times in search of better.

vasco 2y ago

The first question kind of gives away the whole thing. Man signs up to dating app, man isn't successful despite being successful at other stuff. Man blames the app. It's probably not the app. Specially when the only example for "who is doing it right" is a soft prostitution / openly looking for "sugar daddy" (its the websites own lingo).

closewith 2y ago
Yes, this is exactly right. What's disheartening are all the comments here talking about how online dating is rotten and terrible (and many comments saying the same modern dating in general). There's some extraordinarily misogynistic comments here. The dating apps work well and like any method of meeting others, can lead to lasting happy relationships. If that's not happening for you, is time to look inwards. Like you say, it's not the app.
- wiseowise 2y ago
  > The dating apps work well And you have some data to prove it?
  - closewith 2y ago
    The data seems quite positive: https://www.forbes.com/health/dating/dating-statistics/ https://www.forbes.com/health/dating/dating-statistics/ You can also read the bile in the comments here claiming they've had bad experiences with dating apps. They are largely (all?) filled with misogyny and outward condemnation, without any self awareness or insight that maybe the issue isn't the application or culture, but closer to home.
    - wiseowise 2y ago
      > A survey from OnePoll/Forbes Health conducted in August 2023 polled 5,000 U.S. respondents who have actively dated in the last five years Right.
    - imtringued 2y ago

sashank_1509 2y ago

This is what happens when you take an engineer mindset to complex social interactions and try to see if you can engineer your way out of it. For the ML Engineer out there, this is like trying symbolic AI for natural language understanding, it will keep creating weird edge cases that humans will exploit and make the dating app useless. >Men pay for access. This is just a bad idea, men are probably fine with it but no woman wants a man that does this when there are men that don’t need to pay for a dating app. Being forced to pay, indicates only 2 options, either 1 you’re a “loser” not desirable by other females or 2 you’re a “player” who just wants to get on with as many girls as possible. This stigma can reduce if there are say >30-40% of single males on the app, but when starting out it can be a deal breaker for the women on the app. > Compatibility Questions The problem is the questions that really matter, most people do not want to share (even after entering a relationship, people don’t share this, much less an online form). George gives an example of this himself, in the body count section, most women won’t be comfortable sharing this. Other examples of potential dealbreakers, how much a man earns? How much do you value your job? How much do you value your family? How do you deal with stress? How responsible are you? Etc etc These are not things people share, some are even hard to articulate but all are important in some form to determine compatibility. People also rarely know what questions actually matter in a relationship, the average guy/girl will focus on stuff that does not matter at all in the long term. >Design app like CRM Maybe, some of these up changes are good. They don’t seem very consequential as they are mostly UX changes, some of the review ideas seem bad and will be gamed. Overall, the only good dating system is a social club / society that brings like minded, compatible people together, preferably has a few people with excellent intuition that actively (but secretly) play the role of a match-maker and facilitates natural social interactions among its members. Something churches used to do in the past to reasonable success. Apparently people are trying to do that with running clubs in the bay. But it’s undeniable that these ancient social structures are disappearing without a better replacement and we’re all the less off for it.

yard2010 2y ago
It sounds like the problem is inherent - people are lying about themselves, about their lifestyle, about who they really are, mostly online but the same in real life. I found that it's better to be more open and transparent. It might hurt the chances, but it filters many people that can't seem to comprehend the life complexity.

000ooo000 2y ago

>Online Dating. Is anyone having a good experience with this? >Third, make the app look like a CRM. >Now you are on to the qualify leads step. If you aren’t agreeing on a time to meet in the first ten messages, this is a dead lead. What an incredibly ironic piece. Somehow I don't think any technical solution proposed here is going to improve online dating for people who think like this.

mgaunard 2y ago
If you don't think like this you can't possibly be successful on these apps. As a man in particular it's a numbers game and a huge time sink. Making it a CRM is just layering tools on top to make the process more efficient. I've heard even women do this, some have a spreadsheet with criteria they will validate during the first date.
- closewith 2y ago
  No, you're just wrong. I'm of average attractiveness, at best, and had no issue finding genuine matches that led to relationships, the last of which became my wife and love of my life. Never was there any analytics or numbers game required. I would go so far as to say that if you're matching with so many people without success that you need a spreadsheet, then the problem is internal and no technical solution will help you (which is also how I feel about the author of the linked deranged rant).
  - saulpw 2y ago
    How long ago was your dating experience?
    - closewith 2y ago
      2022.
  - mgaunard 2y ago
    I've used the apps extensively, and I know that it mostly led to meaningless short-term relationships, and that I only eventually found someone I genuinely connected with due to perseverance and luck. Also the author is not deranged, and it's inappropriate to insult someone because they have a different viewpoint from yours.

BoingBoomTschak 2y ago

Just give me a website made for the few millenials seeking marriage (almost all of them are too expensive relative to their low population and aimed at seniors). Mandatory visible body count would be a nice feature.

peteforde 2y ago
Any paragraph containing "mandatory visible body count" is just satire, whether you realize it or not.
jokethrowaway 2y ago
You'll get grifters looking to extract money from you via crappy divorce laws. And even worse, likely get your kids custody while you get a weekend sometime. It's a lost battle, if I could go back I'll do what Ronaldo did for his first three children, use surrogate mothers and stay alone.

zarzavat 2y ago

The problem with online dating is that the whole system is rotten. The app/site is rotten because they want money, so they are incentivized to make their members as sexually frustrated as possible so that they hand over more dosh. Because of the first problem, the members are all incentivized to lie. The men lie because they are frustrated that the system isn’t working for them. The women lie by posting unrepresentative photos because they feel the need to compete with everyone else who is doing the same, and the platform is happy with this because they want the most “attractive” members. When all three groups are dishonest, nothing good can come out of it.

mettamage 2y ago
You're forgetting that in this day and age there are still people who've never done online dating because they're coming out of a long-term relationship. These people are still honest in their first few weeks. When they find the right person, they'll get off the app as soon as possible. That's my experience anyway, I got married to one of them. I've been on the apps for a few months prior to that in my whole life due to a long-term relationship before that. It can work. But you gotta be willing to be strategic about it. It helped that I loved strategizing about this.

renewiltord 2y ago

I know people with success with online dating and it’s the number one way for people to meet their partners nowadays. But despite having no trouble with women IRL, I never had much luck online. With hindsight I have realized that I need repeated interaction to detect compatibility and when I was selecting online I was selecting based on compatibility (but being a rubbish judge of it). Plus I suck at texting. In the end, I married a friend and it’s been fantastic.

abetusk 2y ago

I don't think dating apps are going to get much better than they are. To me, trying to make a dating app that solves the problems this article and others talk about is a "cursed problem". I heard an interview from a dating app founder a while ago where she had a quote that I'll try to paraphrase: "We're creating an (app|business) where only dissatisfied customers remain and satisfied customers never return." Obviously dating apps exist and are successful and not everyone who's using a dating app is looking for a long term relationship, but the sentiment remains.

gampleman 2y ago
If you were running a dating app in a more traditional society the obvious solution would be to charge a substantial fee at the wedding if both newly weds were members of the app say in the past 5 years. How you would achieve a similar pricing structure in our society I have no idea.
smelendez 2y ago
It could work tied to some other service although it’s not clear to me what that would be at the moment. Newspapers used to run personal ads, and Craigslist even ran them for free. It wouldn’t surprise me if they actually benefitted from people matching, because you’d be predisposed to buy or at least respond to classified ads for other purposes in the future. Facebook tried and I think still has a dating feature. I’ve only ever encountered one person who was using it, and his match appeared to me and the guy’s friends to be a scammer who was likely to hit him up for money. If they had launched it before they were so widely distrusted and lost the young audience, it might have worked, and they obviously don’t need it to be profitable on its own, just to give you another incentive to visit Facebook and see ads. Yelp, Foursquare, or last.fm probably could have offered an opt-in dating feature a decade ago and done well (by the metrics of the day). Letterboxd or a Goodreads-style service could try it, but it seems more risky: I could see people no longer using the service for its original purpose once they matched, because it would feel like updating your dating profile while in a relationship.

Euphorbium 2y ago

You need to topple capitalism to have any “innovation” in this space, as match.com monopoly will just gobble up any competitor.

Cloudef 2y ago

Honestly I've kinda given up on dating. My ex was doing sugar daddying and had other boyfriends behind my back. The world is too crazy for relationships right now. You have to hope you are lucky and found the one while you were still young.

katzinsky 2y ago
My parents tried to set me up with their friend's kids from church when I was young. I feel like a moron for resisting that. Having teenagers/young adults handle dating themselves is cruel IMO. I know a lot of people don't like that because they take individual liberty to be some basic axiom but if you stop and think about it this doesn't work.
- Cloudef 2y ago
  Having circle where you already know people gives some reassurance for sure.
mettamage 2y ago
For me, it took about 3 full-time years of self-development to get good at it.
Aeolos 2y ago
Forgive me if I'm reaching, but as a fellow survivor I would highly recommend seeking therapy, my friend. It sounds as if you are letting an experience with a horrible human being influence your life post-separation. Noone should have such port over you, especiay not narcissists, liers and abusers. Not dating for a while is actually a healthy response. Work on your self, get your emotional world in order, and you'll become stronger and happier. There are wonderful people out there, worth sharing your life with. I'm glad I said no to abuse, worked on my shit and and didn't give up.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

mgaunard 2y ago

There are many dating apps that explicitly cater to women and give them special rights. Bumble is the most popular one. I remember an old one which was set up like a store, where women got to "shop" around to "adopt" a man. It's supposed to be empowering and also "safer" for women, but as far a I can tell it just feeds more into the unhealthy aspects of online dating that make women entitled and men work hard to be noticed. They're all pretty shady businesses regardless. I don't think there is really an opportunity for a good mass product in that space.

smelendez 2y ago
Bumble’s feature where women must send the first message is pretty brilliant. Women feel more in control, but they also have more of an incentive to swipe yes on men, since they can change their mind later without even having to read a message, which mean men get more likes even if they ultimately don’t lead to anything.
- dabinat 2y ago
  Bumble is slowly in the process of walking it back. They recently introduced “opening moves” (a proposed opening question which I’ve found most people ignore), which allows men to message first. They’ve also said they’re considering letting men message first app-wide in future.
- mgaunard 2y ago
  I believe 95% of the first messages that women send on Bumble is "Hi". Speaks volumes.
  - 05 2y ago
    Of all your matches, those with lower than average attractiveness are more likely to message you first (on apps where women aren't always required to message first). This leads to a negative correlation between perceived match value and them initiating the convo. Some (most?) people would go further and reverse the causation, assigning lower values to matches that message first. So, it's an obvious move to only message the bare minimum 'hi' because any further investment would be a signal that you perceive the match to be unbalanced with your own value being lower, and are trying to compensate for that..

superfist 2y ago

This is such naive take. Only way to increase positive dating experience (for some men outside top 10%) is to include verified tax returns in dating apps.

make3 2y ago

women who are comfortable with/not grossed by an app like seeking will be terrible I think, comfortable with being a product/ service that men have to pay for, would not want to date men who would have to do something like that without themselves wanting a kind of pay to play relationship

lsy 2y ago

I am more than a little discomfited by what the author seems to want here: - “Reduce competition” by making online dating exclusive to those who can afford $100+/mo - Obtain potential match’s sexual history prior to conversation to use as a proxy for promiscuity - See all social media of potential matches - Ratings hit for people who decide not to meet with you after chatting - Interface for quantifying the multiple human beings you are talking to as “leads”, CRM style - Automated reverse image search / face recognition for social media - Random bonus: ability to filter Instagram messages by male/female?? Leaving aside the basic disrespect for the people on the other end of the chat here, who actually thinks women would participate on a platform where they are being cyberstalked by, and pressured into meeting with, desperate men who are tracking them in a spreadsheet?

amriksohata 2y ago
worrying. the data suggests 80% of the women are in contact with 20% of the men. so the weighting on these apps is not reflective of the real world.
- imtringued 2y ago
  There are four times more men than women on the apps. The moment a women sorts by almost any criteria, 80% of the men will be filtered out purely because of that.
- poloniculmov 2y ago
  what data? I've only heard this from the "manosphere".
  - Gigachad 2y ago
    OkCupid posted some stats in a blog post years ago which was pretty enlightening. They since deleted it, and I don’t think any dating company would dare make a similar post with the data they have these days.
ziggyzecat 2y ago

rtpg 2y ago

> Charge men money per month. Only men. Every club promoter understands this. You don’t want your club to be a sausage fest, similarly, you don’t want your dating app to be a sausage fest. Isn't this already just the norm in a lot of apps? When your first point seems to be a thing tat this level that people already ambiently know about I'm going to have a hard time imagining that you have done a lot of research into the space. ---- Four points points from reading it: - Coffee Meets Bagel does one of the best things IMO: only showing a limited number of profiles a day. Forces people into a bit more of a "speed dating" mindset rather than an "endless scrolling" mindset. Good for serious people. - Pairs, a Japanese app, does have a pretty "CRM" vibe, with a lot of filters and a whole list view. Kinda neat, and again a thing with some serious people - Somebody on twitter said it best: online dating in its current form is so much worse than mixers because in it the most popular people can talk to way more people. At least at a mixer popular people pair off and then other people talk to other people[0] - And of course, just like meeting people at parties, online dating is its own vibe. It's not _as_ limiting as mixer/club vibes in some sense if you can find the right app with the right kind of people matching your mindset, but it's easy to forget that a loooooot of people are still meeting outside of that space, despite what online people say. [0] Can no longer find the original tweet, but it was @Ugarles, included the fun bit about how he met his wife at a party, and much later on in the relationship they realized they had matched online and she had decided against it.

jdmoreira 2y ago

Not really related to the post in itself but to its author. Geohot to me is one of the most interesting people alive. I remember finding him annoying when he was younger but maybe that says more about me than about him. He "matured" really well and even though I don't have many parasocial tendencies each time I hear him on Lex I just know that hanging out with him would be guaranteed life-changing fun. I really wish him well and I hope the world is kind to him because he sure is a special main character in our simulation. I'm team Geohot. What a guy!

closewith 2y ago
> He "matured" really well and even though I don't have many parasocial tendencies each time I hear him on Lex I just know that hanging out with him would be guaranteed life-changing fun There's nothing mature about the person who wrote the OP. Don't idolise broken people.
- jdmoreira 2y ago
  That's just your opinion. It doesn't take a genius to figure out he is neurodivergent. He is on his own path and for sure he mature a lot on his own journey. Also… with all due respect… he is thousands of times more interesting than both of us in almost any measure.
  - closewith 2y ago
    Neurodivergence isn't an excuse for the content of this article. > He is on his own path and for sure he mature a lot on his own journey. He's on a bad path and should not be encouraged. > Also… with all due respect… he is thousands of times more interesting than both of us in almost any measure. I don't know about you, but my own story is more interesting than developer becomes bitter and disillusioned by the failure of the women of the world to find him as valuable as he finds himself.
wiseowise 2y ago
You won’t find hot women on HN, George, stop it.

deleted 2y ago

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GardenLetter27 2y ago

The average dating app experience: Filter through: * 50% bots running cryptocurrency scams = 50% remaining * 50% OnlyFans / Instagram models seeking likes/subs = 25% remaining * 50% inactive accounts = 12.5% remaining * 20% looking for sugardaddies / prostitutes = 10% remaining * 10% Men categorised incorrectly and blank accounts = 9% remaining * 75% won't respond (busy with other people, etc.) = 3% remaining * 60% other issues - smoking, already have children, complicated situations, etc. - 1% remaining So after you spend days to go through about 100 accounts, you finally get to speak to a real person and be one of the 8 guys she's speaking to.

allenbrunson 2y ago

personally, i would never use a dating site built by a guy who uses terms like “body count.” you cannot expect to have a decent relationship with someone if you are dehumanizing them from the start. i can understand people’s frustrations with dating. the stakes could not be any higher. if you fail, it is way too easy to take the wrong lessons. i personally failed at this for decades before i figured it out. a few years ago, i married the most wonderful woman in the world. and yes, i found her on a dating site. (one of dozens i tried over the years.) in my case at least, i made it a lot harder for myself than i had to. based on the comments i see here, i think that applies to a lot of you guys. hacker news comments are not a great venue for this topic. if any of you find ypurself similarly frustrated, i am willing to try to help. you can find out how to contact me by following the links in my profile.

dauertewigkeit 2y ago
There is really nothing wrong with thinking about your partner's "body count". It's just taboo, because like literally every other mating metric we use, it is trying to assess the value of another human being. But is "body count" more offensive than "height" or "weight", or "college degree"? All are saying the same thing, "if you aren't at least X, you're not worth enough for me to give you a chance". And now you can retort, "but body count shouldn't matter at all, because...". Well you can literally try to protest against every other mating metric as well. I don't see the difference. Why is it valid for a person to say, "I don't find him attractive because his eyes are 2mm too far apart". But invalid to say, "I don't find him attractive, because he's been too promiscuous in the past". Both are valid and people crying about it should get over themselves. As far as mating metrics go it is far from the most unjust.
- allenbrunson 2y ago
  “body count” is not really offensive, more like irrelevant. it makes about as much sense to take that into account as how many people someone has ever talked to. i can’t attribute “body count” to anything but prudishness. this is exactly the sort of thing i was talking about, with so many people having the wrong ideas about dating. which i am not going to discuss any further in this site’s comments, truly the worst possible venue for it.

dauertewigkeit 2y ago

You cannot "fix it". You either do well or don't on such a platform. It's like being a terrible dancer, and going to a dance party expecting to pick up girls. You won't make a good impression because you don't "vibe" in that environment. If you try to level the playing field, women have no reason to comply. They will find another dating app, to use. > Seeking is one of the only sites to do this right. They claim a ratio of 4 women per 1 man, and they get this by charging men $109/month. Great. Now you pay a $1200/year to be taken for a ride by gold diggers. ---------------- Online dating is a laughably bad proposition, unless you have just the right characteristics to do well on there: being tall and handsome, and having pictures that show off your privileged life, and all that of course in comparison to your peers. As hard as it is to initiate conversation offline, especially with the norms of today, it's still much easier for me to, compared to getting a match and then somehow managing to convert that into a date. EDIT: I'd like to add this analogy. Online dating is like job searching by spamming your resume on LinkedIn. I don't even have a LinkedIn...

mettamage 2y ago
> You cannot "fix it". You either do well or don't on such a platform. Give me a reasonable person, and I will make sure they'll do much better. I've done it for myself. You need to have a hacker mindset when it comes to online dating. Almost no one does. I've done it for my friends as well.
- ziggyzecat 2y ago
  > You need to have a hacker mindset when it comes to online dating. Right on. This dude gets it. You should hold workshops on that and a series of TED talks.
- dauertewigkeit 2y ago
  I can believe that if you craft the profile to the point where it's basically a bunch of lies, you can do well. I don't see the point of going through that much effort, however. Because, (and this is maybe because I'm long term minded), your lies will all unravel when you actually meet the person and start a relationship with them. Even then. I still think you would do sub optimally compared to real life. Why would I ever line myself up against a bunch of other men and let women choose the best? That only works well for you if you're naturally popular...

kkfx 2y ago

A marginal observation: - males in nature have a duty on that topic, distribute genetic material; - female in nature have to select the best genetic material they are able to find. "The best" is a complicated definition that in practice tend to be hormonal, that's why female normally want in person meeting and find "catalogues" not much useful. The females who find catalogues useful might just look at having temporary fun "from a list" or find someone rich to escalate their social position. That's essentially why on-line dating will not work much anyway until we found a way to understand "genetic profiles matches" witch is so far sci-fi. The rest is just noise, sometime useful indeed especially if we live in spread areas where potential partners are far from us bu all current "matching techniques" can't simply match the most important natural characteristic, hormones.

katzinsky 2y ago

Anything involving computers is probably going to make the situation worse. Not because of anything intrinsic to computers but because there's been a strong pattern over the past 60 years where people (especially in developed countries) reach for computers when there's some underlying cultural problem.

throwaway290 2y ago

I would pay $110 per month for a service that could say with 99% accuracy whether some person I vibe with IRL is on dating sites.

mettamage 2y ago
I needed to approach 1000 potential romantic interests IRL to find anyone that I felt I vibed with. I later realized that some of them are on dating sites.
- throwaway290 2y ago
  If you don't care if a person is on dating sites, then you don't care

mettamage 2y ago

For me personally, it's about meeting as many people and being the best version of yourself. When you do those things, then you gotta find a person you match well with. I've met over 10000 people that were a potential romantic interest. I did this (mostly) during the day by giving them a genuine compliment or asking them a question that I was curious about or by stating an observation that happened in our environment. I'd do my best to mix in playfulness as well. Playfulness is key for me as I tend to take life too seriously. The reason I found my wife was because I was willing to be fine with 9950 rejections, 45 people it didn't work out with, 2 short relationships and 2 long relationships. It fucking hurted, especially initially since I had really unhelpful beliefs about myself (unlovable, etc. but doomed to try to find love anyway). The statistics aren't fully accurate, but I'm pretty sure they're around that ballpark (that, or the rejection rate is even higher). The way I circumvented burnout was by playfulness and self-amusement. I knew at least that whatever I was saying that I was entertained/amused/inspired by it. That was a much better mindset to have than thinking whatever I said wasn't good enough from the get go. The first 2 years that I did this (from 17 to 19 years old), I only experienced rejections. Later in life (30+), I also did online dating. Initially, I got 1 match per month for a few months. Then I put on my hacker mindset to see if I could break the game. It took a few months but I eventually got to 150 matches. That was really a question of "if you're not in the 20%, you gotta be smart." Whenever I tell my story to people, they look at me and are like "I don't want to put this much conscious effort in it." Sometimes it's for moral reasons (love should just "flow" or "just happen", it's imperative for the romantic realm to not be analyzed etc.). Some can't handle the emotional pain (for me it was brutal too). Some just hate the sheer effort. But based on what I've seen with friends who are like me: if I didn't put in this effort, it is likely I would've gone nowhere since I have friends a lot like me who didn't put in the effort and they seem to act like a control group in that sense. It is what it is. How badly do you want it? I don't know why, I just knew I wanted it badly. It is what it is.

Tepix 2y ago
10000 meetings, that's 5.5 years of 5 meetings every single day.
- 2y ago

INTPenis 2y ago

I've been thinking a lot of this too and my plan is completely different. The main problem is profit. We need to eliminate the for-profit dating apps. In a perfect world there would be a state run dating platform that would focus on equity. But in lieu of that I figure we should make it selfhosted. - Publicly ran platform reminiscent of fediverse - External profile verification so each node admin can host their own, I'm from Europe so the idea here is to use eID. - Money should only be in the form of donations to the node admin, just like fediverse. - Node admins can decide whether to invite only or let everyone in, users can decide whether to filter certain nodes, or verified profiles for example. The goal would be that everyone real has a verified profile and a node admin that keeps bots out with their CoC and sign-up rules. Optimally this should be done ontop of the existing fediverse, to save on runtime costs and leverage the existing profiles. But seriously, online dating needs to be completely refactored. I've personally given up on it completely and decided to just talk to people IRL. In spite of having had 2 fairly good relationships started through "the apps".

hkt 2y ago
Self hosting and federation might be a poor substitute for a cooperative approach: daters are natural stakeholders in the platform, so should be allowed to run it democratically, as per other dating apps. This removes the technological barriers to both use and implementation and allows for a pretty simple service that can focus on what it will inevitably need instead of being bogged down with voluntarism and distributed protocols, namely, growth of user base. From a software perspective, this does already exist, somewhat: https://github.com/Alovoa/alovoa https://github.com/Alovoa/alovoa
- INTPenis 2y ago
  But how are end users stakeholders? It's a nice thought but at the end of the day the platform will use a lot of resources. Regardless of where the resources are, compute, storage, bandwidth. Who's paying for it? Do you mean end users being stakeholders in the style of IPFS? It just becomes too complicated to make all end users such stakeholders tied to the operation of the service. That's why I look towards the fediverse model where competent end users can host nodes that hundreds of other end users can use. End users still become stakeholders by donating to the node admin. And yes I know all about the pitfalls of this method, I hosted a fediverse node since 2017. For better and for worse I think it's the best model with the lowest barrier of entry and most realistic chance of being implemented today.

nakeru 2y ago

Weird, incel vibes from this post. "Body count" is incredibly disrespectful, amongst other things because it seems to only be used with women. Also, browsing the website I found that this person believes an Elon Musk monarchy would be great. On a different note. I'm average looking, of average to short stature and have a decent job but I'm far from rich (but I'm frugal so I look poorer than I am). I haven't for a while but I used Tinder extensively for about two years. I met over ten women and dated for a while two in that period. Without being obsessed with the app. What I mean is, while the dating app landscape is generally unfair to men (mostly our own fault, most men will "like" everything without even looking) it's not as bad as some incels online would let you believe. And hey, if apps don't work, try the old school method of going out. It really works.

wiseowise 2y ago
> Weird, incel vibes from this post. "Body count" is incredibly disrespectful, amongst other things because it seems to only be used with women. You’ll find those at women forums too. “Manslut”, “manwhore”, etc. And no, it’s completely fine to judge person by amount of partners they’ve had.
Hedder 2y ago
>"Body count" is incredibly disrespectful, amongst other things because it seems to only be used with women That's not a valid reason. For example, "height" is not an incredibly disrespectful metric, just because it is only used to judge men. Men care about a woman's body count far more than women typically do a man's. Vice versa for height.

miki123211 2y ago

Online dating is fundamentally a hard problem because there's both incentive misalignment and reverse network effects. The goal of most dating app users is to find somebody and stop using the app. The goal of the app makers is to keep the user on the app for as long as possible, to serve them ads / sell their data / charge them for a subscription. These two stand in direct opposition to each other, and companies optimize for the latter as much as they can. This is the incentive misalignment problem. After a given app exists for a while, the most desirable users[1] will pair off and leave, while the most undesirable and desperate users will stay. The less attractive you are, the longer you'll be on the app. This means that as time goes on, it's harder and harder for the tide of new users to balance out the growing pile of undesirable matches. This is what I call the "reverse network effect". It's the opposite of normal network effects, which is what happens with normal social networks and messaging apps. A normal messaging app gets more useful as more people join it. It's worth noting that apps designed for finding hookups and not finding spouses don't suffer from this problem. The more hookups you find, the more likely it is that you'll want to keep paying for the app, and the more desirable you are, the more hookups you will find.

aurareturn 2y ago
That's why I suspect that the vast majority of paying users on non-hookup-only dating apps are men who are above average in attractiveness. They're the only group that makes some sense. The very top percentage of men don't need a subscription. The below average men won't stay on the subscription because they still can't get matches. Women don't need a subscription either. Meanwhile, the above average attractiveness group of men are likely finding enough hookups to justify staying on it.
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ilaksh 2y ago

George Hotz, a relatively famous and presumably financially secure, charismatic, and still somewhat youthful man, has just about admitted that he does not have success on dating apps. I would really like him to do these two experiments: change his height on his profile from 5'4" to 6'1", and then if that alone doesn't do it, additionally emphasize his connections, level of fame, financial security etc. in his profile. Point being that what women are interested in to start with is actually just as shallow as men. I think he has some good ideas here actually. But ultimately, this stuff is probably being driven by very primitive instincts. I also think think that if you look at what has been done with artificial muscles such as at Artimus Robotics or various other robotics and 3d printing companies, the potential for incredibly realistic humanoid robots is on the horizon. I'm imagining in 2035 or at least 20XX the most popular "dating app" is technically a robotics rental company where the robots rent themselves out. Ultimately there will be plenty of really attractive male and female sexbots manufactured, and most people will be happily screwing 10s whenever they want. The human race may die out because of this. But we won't lack for companionship with incredibly sexy (artificial) models.

bsaul 2y ago
5’4 on a dating app excludes you from 99.9% of the women selection. You won’t even appear on their app.
jdmoreira 2y ago
Curiously enough George admitted he would date a robot AI on his last Lex interview, which I highly recommend because he is so wholesome. I also know he had a (quite attractive) girlfriend circa 2021.

netcan 2y ago

"geohotz fixes dating" is a wonderful meme. Let's keep it. I think it's futile trying to "design" any social media, certainly something like dating. Social media is more discovery than a design. You discover how it works best. Obviously, "best" is defined as "nerds get more action, less existential angst."

switch007 2y ago

Just reject the entire idea of online dating. It's awful. We've done that experiment, let's not flog a dead horse. Instead, how can we make offline dating better?

mikhael28 2y ago
Be the change you want to see.

mikhael28 2y ago

Why hasn’t anyone thought about making dating apps seasonal? The problem with all dating apps, is that after a certain point they become a cesspool of the dissatisfied customers who never paired off. Does anyone remember when Tinder first came out? It was lit. 12 months later, it was not. The season passed. It became a familiar place, with baggage, where all the cool people left. Solution: make a seasonal dating app that starts in March, and continues until August/September a.k.a cuffing season. Then, close it down until the next year. Each year, or season, it can have a different theme. You purchase a subscription for the whole season, a half year membership. It starts all over again next year, with a different theme. This keeps the experience fresh, and viral for new people to join. Solves the reverse network effect problem, by creating a new, temporary network effect. It also harnesses natural human seasonal mating cycles in an intuitive way, while keeping everything fresh. The six month break in development allows for new UI and ‘fresh’ experience, like a Fortnite season.

switch007 2y ago
This isn't such a crazy idea. It reminds me of debutantes and the social season of yesteryear. Though I still dislike any and all online dating

netcan 2y ago

Imo to make any sort of intentional impact, a good approach would be to replicate OkCupid's mid-2000s. Not the features, the fact that OkCupid was a subculture... and that it had its own cultural norms and features. Att "poly" pretty normative, for example. I think tinder-era dating needs a bigger intermediate space between "casual" and "serious," especially for the over 30s users. Anything between "mostly just sex" and "dating to marry" is a hard to negotiate zone rn. One is overpopulated by men. The other is overpopulated by women. The middle ground is untargetable. It comes with no preexisting expectations. Maybe we need to bring back "going steady."

Ntrails 2y ago

My views: - some non trivial % of active users are ego tourists. - ratios matter, and drive obvious behaviours to the detriment of all users - within a month you've had the same conversation so many times everything blends together and you hate it - even a great online banter pre meetup means little when IRL it is awkward or slow. There are flaws beyond that, but I just don't think it is improvable by dehumanising the other parties on the apps more

Zealotux 2y ago

I've had reasonable success with dating apps, meeting both my girlfriend and my previous one through Bumble. I'm likely part of the so-called "lucky 20%" of men with most matches. While this may sound like I'm bragging (I am), I've also seen the other side of Bumble when my female friends allowed me a peek, and it's eye-opening. The majority of men are simply terrible at marketing themselves. Most men fundamentally misunderstand women's incentives. They present what they think women will find attractive, but from a male perspective, which often misses the mark entirely. I could elaborate for hours on the issues I see in these profiles. Now, whenever I hear a guy claim "dating apps suck, they're a scam," I don't entirely disagree — dating apps are indeed flawed — but I'm immediately curious to see his actual profile. There's a significant missed opportunity in these apps: they could teach and guide men to build their best profiles, select and eliminate pictures, and suggest concrete improvements. It might sound extreme, but even basic A/B testing can dramatically increase your number of matches, the majority of men will just create their profile in 2 minutes, never touch it again, and wonder why they don't have dozens of girls throwing themselves at yet another guy taking a selfie in his bathroom.

antisthenes 2y ago
> They present what they think women will find attractive, but from a male perspective, which often misses the mark entirely. Are you going to share any advice or particulars? I see posts like yours and they are a dime a dozen, but could be summed up by "your profile is bad", but they never offer any concrete advice on improvement. What are women looking for in these profiles that they can immediately use within less than 1 minute to determine whether it's a good match or not?
- hanifc 2y ago
  Try to look at your profile dispassionately. Would you be interested in meeting this person? Does it look like they’re a generally pleasant person to be around? Do they have hobbies? The questions you ask are really determined by what you’re ultimately looking for or find attractive, so my questions might not match yours.
gexla 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

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wakawaka28 2y ago

Various dating sites have tried to get only guys to pay before, sometimes $50 per month recurring plus expensive microtransactions. But it looks like the site they suggested is for executive types only. I could afford $100 per month for a decent dating site if there was such a thing, but stupid high spending on the dates themselves is asking to be used. I guess a guy spending that kind of money ought to know better but we all know that most of them won't know better. Speaking of spending money, even buying dinner for a first date can lead to abuse. Men usually have to take the chance because of customs, but some women are eating out several times per week by scamming men for free stuff.

ElCapitanMarkla 2y ago

Until last year I spent 10 years working for a large dating company with millions of members. There are a few big issues. 1 - Scammers. I’d be surprised if even 1 in 100 female profiles were real. Where maybe 1 in 1000 male profiles were scammers. We had all sorts of ways to detect and ban scammers but it was bad. 2 - Payments are high risk. High chargeback rates, loads of scammer transactions where they’re testing cards, etc. it can be hard even signing up a payment processor. 3 - Less and less people are willing to actually pay for dating services on the web. Especially for that < 30 age range. Tinder / Bumble really dominate that scene. And if you get into Adult/Casual dating multiply all of the issues x10. And good luck finding a payment processor who isn’t terrible.