Thanks for this detailed post.
While I think most are aware of the broad situation, it's impressive to read it all laid out like that. And whenever the author tried to make a statement about guys, the gist of it was "we don't know, it doesn't matter, boys will stick around". Made me chuckle.
Retention is a terrible metric for a dating app. The "perfect" dating app would have a 0% retention rate since the first person you meet would be your "ideal partner".
It's tantamount to measuring a hospital's performance by it's retention rate.
That's not a business model. Creating opportunities to mate, not to therapy. ;)
Managed Dissatisfaction, FOMO, Abundance: And the users want it. That's what the data shows. Proof: essentially, every app is a dating app covered up as "social features."
> I don't think retention is a good metric for a dating app, unfortunately that's how VC evaluate performance of B2C apps. When we think about dating it is more about quality than quantity.
Funny thing is that when dating apps used to be "browse profiles, send message", nobody had to debate inner workings. Users could self select people of interest, send them a message directly, and know there'd be a very good chance that their profile/message would at least be seen.
Issue today is that apps control visibility, both in terms of profiles and likes. I've tried Hinge a few times. Did like a 4 month initial stint that had me consistently matching/meeting very attractive women (ones in the standouts section), tried it again a year later under a paid plan and had one mediocre match in 2 weeks (same photos and profile).
Skimmed the article so maybe this was addressed, but there's dark patterns happening on these apps, or faulty algos, or both.
I really dread the idea of having social media algorithms decide who gets to talk to who. This "browse profiles, send message" actually how I met my first boyfriend on /soc/!
> I really dread the idea of having social media algorithms decide who gets to talk to who.
We're getting there, whether that's dating apps controlling your stack of faces one at a time, or even seemingly innocuous things like this site's opaque comment ranking system.
I think Hinge was better when it was new. Probably people who try a new, non-sleazy dating app early on are more serious about meeting someone and more active, so you get more and better matches.
One problem I’ve realized lately is that a lot of people are on dating apps because they feel like they have to be to meet someone, but they don’t actually enjoy chatting online and may not even be very good at it. Apps probably have a stage when they have a high percentage of “online” people who are just better at texting and, for better at worse, on their phones more.
Hinge has a great user interface undermined by the theme of deep intentional relationships
A lot of people join specific dating apps by the theme
So you get a large percent there just because of the pacing and look, and then a large percent of actual dates that are like “wait I thought casual hookups werent part of this app”
Why do you say so? IMO Hinge obscures all the relevant details of a persons profile into the tiny, horizontal scrolling thing. Age, location, family plans, etc. all crammed in here, and then the best real estate dedicated to stupid prompts that are almost invariably “I go crazy for… amazing food!” “One thing you should know about me… My ig @hotgirl”
The past you mention was awful for women, because social dynamics meant their profiles were being hit with a constant DDOS. That in turn made demographics very skewed, which made the problem worse.
In fact I'd say being able to balance this gender imbalance is THE issue to solve for modern apps. Everything including monetization models is built around that.
My best dating apps lately have been Trader Joe's and Ducky's Car Wash.
I wear aloha shirts every day, and nearly every time I go to TJ's, someone asks me where they can find a particular item. It may be a guy or a gal, but I am always happy to help a neighbor find what they need.
That is not the reason I wear aloha shirts. I just love these shirts! Every spring I get the Cooke Street shirts at Costco, one of each new pattern.
One time at the Menlo Park Trader Joe's I was talking with the guy restocking the freezer section. He said, "Nice aloha shirt! I bet people sometimes think you work here."
Sure enough, a minute later a young lady walked up to me and asked if we had organic bread. I walked her over to the bread section and pointed out the organic breads.
Later I caught up with the freezer guy again and told him "you were right!"
Ducky's, for those unfamiliar, is a car wash with several locations on the SF Peninsula. Even if you just get an exterior wash, after you go through the tunnel they hand dry your car.
There is a waiting area outside with a dozen chairs, and it takes 5-10 minutes before your car is ready.
And you never know who you might run into there!
The key to this, of course, is to be outgoing and friendly, and open to surprises.
Interesting data in the article though nothing unexpected for people who follow this space. Some notable points:
> The other thing that interests you is the like ratio, or the openness, among 100 profiles that the user sees, how many of them does he like? (The median for men is 26% and for women is 4%.)
>The like ratio of a girl is almost independent of the profiles she sees. For example, if a girl has a like ratio of 5% and you remove 50% of the profiles, even if you remove only the profiles she will not like, her like ratio will still be 5% (you can do that by removing very unattractive people for a guy that is very attractive, for example). It is funny to observe, but it seems like a girl has internal reasoning on a dating app, and they know they can only like x% of profiles whatever she sees (of course, it doesn't work if you show only ugly people).
And lastly:
>Whats interesting is that the more attractive the guys were ranked by girls the more they were looking for something not serious.
I have a theory for the swiping behavior of women. When they swipe right, it will most likely be a match, and they mentally don't want more than X active conversations at a time. This strikes me as rational and reasonable.
For men, most swipes will not be a match, so less reason to ever think about swiping left to maintain a certain swipe pecentage.
Women complain about the poor quality of conversations they encounter
We should do a study on that itself, because I think guys are having quality conversations, pulling teeth with an entitled beautiful woman they are prioritizing, and everyone else is waiting for the guy to lead and there is no bandwidth left! so guys spread themselves too thin to procedurally lead every new conversation after accumulating matches
Another theory: when you swipe and don't get a match, that could be considered a rejection and women are worse at handling rejection (probably due to never having to learn to deal with it). Men, on the other hand, have to learn to accept rejection so little is felt when almost all swipes don't match.
Most people (all sexes and genders) are bad at handling rejection, period. It’s why online dating is popular in general—a rejection over a digital medium is a lot less intimidating and less confrontational than the same in person.
You are spewing politically-correct BS, in saying "...Most people (all sexes and genders) are bad at handling rejection, period.".
Women are worse at handling rejection, hands down - it's a gendered-thing, not the same across genders.
For instance, in terms of relationships in real life (since we're discussing dating), most women do not approach men first; men are usually first to be rejected. Some women even shame men for supposedly being scared to approach them, instead of they themselves making the move first. There are so many videos showing how infantile and childish women become when they are rejected; especially the more beautiful they are.
Men are taught early to accept rejection as a natural part of life; there are of course men who react poorly when being rejected, but in comparison (since the thread is talking about women accepting rejection)? Women are definitely poorer in handling rejection.
The rate and experience of rejection does not seem to be symmetrical across the sexes by a significant degree. Of course nobody likes rejection, but this point doesn’t really advance the discussion.
They were responding to "women are worse at handling rejection", and if they disagree with that (as I do too) then it is advancing the conversation to say so, even though it doesn't advance a part of the conversation that specifically explains dating app use.
When I was using dating apps I kept a spreadsheet to track the response to like ratio, and indeed, the amount of women who liked me back in any given month was exactly 5% of those whom I liked.
Much as I wish that ratio was higher, data is data. The Tinder style matchmaking will always bring out this behaviour.
I didn’t run the numbers but I also quickly figured that the only chance to make progress is to like a lot of profiles. For a while i liked only profiles which i thought are a really good fit but got no responses. Turns out spamming works better. Once a woman likes you back, then you can take a closer look.
> Girls would say, red flag if a guy has shirtless pictures and then liking profiles where guys were shirtless.
This is surprising:
> In our case we had even acquisition in terms of male/female, but the retention of girls is lower than that of men, so you end up with 66% men and 34% women.
2:1 men to woman is a far better ratio than what most people claim (5:1 is usually thrown around with no evidence).
These points will ruffle feathers:
> But I think dating apps can currently be used at each women and men advantage, it is just necessary to have the right strategy:
> For girls you need to lower your standards and force you to go on a date with guys that you dont have the flame for (it is actually very hard to do that for a girl, very very hard)
> For guys, you need to pay a photograph (to get liked) and pay the premium plan (so that your profile is shown to other users). If you think a dating app has no incentive to show paying users to girls, then you didnt read this article ^^
> For girls you need to lower your standards and force you to go on a date with guys that you dont have the flame for (it is actually very hard to do that for a girl, very very hard)
I kind of didn't understand the logic behind how he got there. According to the article women get more matches then they know what to do with. Why would lowering your standards in such an environment be a good strategy?
The article is a bit a of jumble of thoughts, but I believe that advice is aimed at girls who aren't liking and therefore not matching. Some lines that mention this particular grouping:
> Only 50% of girls sent 10 likes in their account lifespan.
> 10% of girls that finish the onboarding never send any pass or like, ...
> We have plenty of girls that can scroll through 300 profiles and not like anyone and deleting their account saying "I dont like anyone" well
There is simply no incentive for such behavior. The person always hopes for the best (the hot guy will choose me over all those who like him). And what about the worst case? Sex with hot guys? Sounds like a very solid strategy to me.
Lowering your standards will find guys who aren't just interested in sex. The problem is that most women want the same (small proportion of) men. He said that the more matches a man gets, the more likely he'll just want sex and not a relationship. So you go for the less desired men and you find better quality matches, if you are looking for more than casual relations.
It does seem like there are a lot of hidden assumptions here. Is the man who gets less matches really more likely to want a relationship rather than sex, or is he faking that opinion because he doesn't think he has options and thinks lying will get him more matches.
My assumption would be someone who changes their mind on what they want based on availability of choices would probably not be a good relationship partner.
So would lowering your standards really get you more "quality" matches, or just get people more willing to lie about what they want because they are more desperate?
You're thinking about it wrong. Any guy you meet who struggles with women is generally going to be looking for a long-term relationship. Starving men don't toss fish back into the water.
>Is the man who gets less matches really more likely to want a relationship rather than sex, or is he faking that opinion because he doesn't think he has options and thinks lying will get him more matches.
I'd say more likely down the line there's not a huge difference between the popular and unpopular men regarding what they aim for but the men who get a ton of matches and gravitate towards a fixed relationship are more likely to be out of the dating market.
I daydreamed a dating app once where all the matching was done by tween girls at pyjama parties, and everyone signing up had to abide by the matches provided. I reckon the young ladies would have a very high hit rate of who was meant to be with who.
And while I’m here, OKCupid when it existed as mostly a website around 2013 was probably the best actual dating app and attempt to provide a decent enough platform for people to express themselves, and the question answering section where it would then deliver a compatibility rating was really good. But then the churn and being bought by Match completely killed it. OKC was the first dating platform that seemed like it was genuinely designed to work.
That makes me think of the in-person introductions my older friends have tried to arrange for me. It was a thoughtful gesture but really not a lot of consideration of what I would consider attractive.
This was over 10 years ago, but iirc the primary demographic was what you might expect: 20s to mid-30s living in urban areas, skewing lower on that spectrum.
Our data was almost identical to the article, showing the same imbalances.
The qualities that women find attractive in men cannot be captured in a static profile on a website ... plus most of the men in that site are there because they don't have those qualities.
Let's just say that if you can open your mouth enough to say hi to a woman without hesitation, you are completely wasting your time on dating sites.
Swamped is on point. I watched my roommate-now-girlfriend get over 1,000 likes in no time at all (I can't remember well but certainly on the order of hours, not days). It was in a populated, well-off area, but still. When you see something like that, it puts a lot of this whole thing into perspective.
> These days, saying hi seems to be risky for more reasons than rejection. Maybe more so if you’re not good looking. Hence the apps
Its actually not, and that so many guys believe that just leaves the field unguarded
What women say online about not wanting to be approached practically anywhere is a vocal minority, and other women don't even see these conversations
Positive interactions with men are not even categorized as the ones that annoyed them, despite the interaction being the exact same. so it remains up to you to figure out where you are on that totem pole
That used to be true in the pre-Tinder age. Tinder and other mobile dating apps have somehow normalized dating among both the highly social and the good looking.
I can only speak about my personal experience (and this was also in the pre-tinder times and on OKCupid, so generally a more nerdy than average demo), but I had the experience that even if one isn’t top-looking, women were generally impressed if you could string whole sentences together and showed reading comprehension of their profile. That seems like a very, very low standard, but from what I was told, that filtered out a lot of people.
There's definitely something going on there that needs review or explanation.
If it's not an error, perhaps it involves something where once your profile approaches certain cutoffs for liked/viewed ratio, the system changes how (and to whom) it presents your profile... Except the higher and lower outliers are not always adjacent either.
I'm even more convinced now that online dating has reached a local optima, but eventually someone is going to find a solution that is less shallow and predatory and blow it out of the water.
Living by yourself is becoming increasingly regular and marriage is sharply declining amongst people who didn’t attend college. I don’t think software is gonna fix this.
I’m more cynical. Dating apps are easy, and entertaining. Finding a good person to spend your life (or a prolonged period) with is hard. I’m not sure there is an external solution to this in the world we live in - it’s like getting fit. People need to suck it up and put in the work if they want results.
Yeah I just mentioned this in a different comment. OKC stunned me when it came out because it seemed so interesting and effective. I met my ex-wife on there! Ha.
> To me, if you are a guy on a dating app and your pictures are not taken by a professional photographer then you are losing your time, and if you are paying you are also throwing your money.
Don't do this.
You need good pictures that convey attractiveness (looks, as well as personality). Using professional photos conveys neediness & a level of desperation hidden under a shell of an ego the shot tries to portray. So you end up relying on looks with a handicap. A good looking person doesnt need professional shots to show that.
Sure, if you currently have mirror selfies, professional shots are better. Otherwise - if you are not a model who has magazine-published shots you're including in your profile, then don't go use or pay for professional shots. Figure out how to take canned shots on your own or pay a photographer for canned real shots (nothing highly edited).
But you absolutely should have someone who knows how to make you look as good as possible in a natural environment.
You should also have a woman friend critically evaluate your profile. (If you don't have a friend you trust, you should first make sure you can make trusted friends with women who will tell you the truth.)
My experience was different, it was more than a few years ago, but when I used it professional photo won by long shot. At the time there was an algorithm that would put your best picture first depending on like/dislike ratio. Some things I thought is that firstly no one knows you took those for this specific use case, they don't even assume that. Second is that it still indicates status in a sense that you had the money to spare to do it, the thought and time to go for it and possibly a good reason out of the app of needing that professional photo for some purpose. I didn't have mirror selfies, I thought I had what I consider well balanced set of photos showing different activities, etc.
There's the "Sears" kind of photo where somebody unskilled works a camera installed in a studio which is not too expensive.
There's something a step up from that (maybe $100) where a pro photographer does the same thing.
I do environmental portraits, often with a 90mm or 135mm prime, sometimes with a wide zoom. Sometimes I discover places where I can get a great photograph of anybody in terms of lighting and background. It can be really special if you get a photo of somebody in an environment that's special to them but I don't think that's what you want for a dating site. But one of my generic environment shots would really be a winner, and I can shoot one in ten minutes inclusive of the walk to and from my office.
I'm not good at the people part of it. Some people photograph really well always (the alumni relations guy from my school, a disabled friend who might be high-functioning autistic) other people (me, my wife, my son) just don't. I can get a good photograph of somebody like that despite themselves but I have to try many sessions.
I've been doing sports photography seriously for about two years, lately I've come to see it as "people photography" and realized I do better if I think about it in terms of "getting pictures that make the players look great" as opposed to "following the ball". I am doing a volunteer gig that I'm treating as an audition for paying work and I'm planning to get a bunch of portraits out of it, so far as the technical stuff I went to the arena with my neurodivergent friend and used him as a stand-in. Now that I think about it I have two weeks to do something about the people side.
>> To me, if you are a guy on a dating app and your pictures are not taken by a professional photographer then you are losing your time, and if you are paying you are also throwing your money.
> Don't do this.
> pay a photographer for canned real shots (nothing highly edited).
So, instead of having my pictures taken by a professional photographer, you recommend that I pay a professional photographer to take my pictures?
I've heard of irrational bias against the passive voice, but this is extreme even in that genre.
English doesn't seem to be their first language. My interpretation of what they were saying is that if you don't have pro photos you are wasting your time, along with any money given to the app (not the photographer, who you didn't pay anyway)
> Using professional photos conveys neediness & a level of desperation.
Instinctively, I agree with you, but might this actually not be true anymore? I've noticed how "accepted" it is to share lots of selfies today, while before that used to be very obvious signs for self-absorbed/narcissistic/superficial/etc people, so I'm wondering if maybe we're both wrong thinking this today.
Maybe like how selfies became part of the modern social interaction, getting professional photographs for dating services might be entering the same phase too?
If a woman is using professional shots? Or a male? Either way -
For an attractive person: not much impact, though I think there is still a bit of a handicap depending on the type of person they are trying to attract and how much confidence plays into a valued trait for the other person. The same goes for how much of it seems ego-driven vs genuine.
For the average person: I mean you're simply limiting your pool. And potentially attracting personalities that look to exploit emotionally vulnerable people (the type willing to drop a lot of money on a photoshoot in hopes of getting more dates). As opposed to attracting the people they want to be dating.
I should say my advice is for younger adults. Im sure the dynamics of 45yo+ dating is much different.
This is where I say your pool becomes limited. You need potential-matches who (1) not only seek "serious" partners, but (2) are emotionally more receptive to the photos. I would suggest the latter as actually adding more pressure vs receptiveness...
I think there is a paradox of "seriousness" converting to less success on apps - even with both sides having mutual interests. Declaring your seriousness sets a very early expectation FOR STRANGERS. When Im connecting with a woman who has "life partner only" on her profile... I feel pressured, regardless of attraction. Even when I (and literally 99% of the world) desire that type of human connection.
This is why natural occurrences in person are touted for.
This is why rising kink apps are seeing success as well as a bit of a revival with tinder (here is all of me, no expectations, if you like it - cool, lets see where it goes)
What you really want is candid pictures taken in good light with an 85mm lens. I had a few like that taken by friends and they were successful. Paying someone to take plandid pictures seems lame, but if you don't have a friend with a good camera then what are you going to do?
I don't think it says that. I think it confirms that they are extremely picky and that these apps amplify that, making things worse for everyone except the apps... which is the point, to make money, not hook people up with healthy lasting relationships. This is yet another externality of capitalism.
I paid for a lifetime membership to Bumble premium a couple years ago, but as I noticed matches/likes declining for no apparent reason, I made a 2nd account with different credentials, paid for a week of premium, and had a bunch of matches (exact same profile as my other account).
From my anecdotal experience, they have some algorithm that leads to diminishing returns in order to keep extracting money for boosts or whatever.
I'm a digital nomad and changing locations frequently, so I have actually tried this A/B test a couple times when arriving in a brand new city. Same results.
The author pointed out in the article that users who join are shown to users who have been on the platform the longest and are thus more likely to provide likes because they are more desperate.
My anecdotal user-end data-science-ish story about dating apps:
A few years back I was single and on Hinge a fair amount. If you used Hinge back then, you'll remember some key differences between the platform and other dating apps: 1) when you "like"'d someone, you'd have to comment on a specific part of their profile (a photo, a prompt answer, etc), 2) these likes showed up in their inbox, independent of whether they liked you or not (as in, you didn't have to like each other mutually; the other end decided whether to reply or ignore after delivery), and 3) there was limit per day, you could like/message 8 profiles per day, no more. On average, swiping through my 8 per day, I'd generally get 1-2 new replies, which turned roughly into 3-4 first dates per month.
One of the key elements is that the inbox was time-ordered: the most recent like you received was at the top. There was discussion on the Hinge subreddit about how girls would typically only click through the top few items in their inbox daily, and if you were lower down, you were doomed to drown under the mountain of new message they're getting on top. So I figured I'd solve for "what is the optimal time of day to be blasting out my likes to ensure I end up higher in the inbox?"
You can probably see where this is going: I requested a GDPR data export, which happened to have all my conversations, time-stamped. Crunching through in Python there was something in the data I didn't really expect.. a disproportionate number of first-replies (replies to my initial like/message, that is) were around the 2-3pm bucket. Not what I would've expected (don't these people work?) but fair enough, I started doing all my swiping in those hours instead of in the evening as I usually did.
And it worked. Good god did it work. I consistently started getting replies to 70-80% of my initial messages (from the ~10% before). I was drowning in conversations to the point where I wouldn't swipe at all for days for fear of yet another conversation to manage. Within a few months I ended up meeting my current girlfriend and haven't been back on since, but it was surprising how well something simple like time-of-day affected my reply rate.
They do! 2-3 p.m. is around the time people get fidgety at work and start looking at the clock, checking their phones, and such. They are no longer at lunch. Whatever busywork they had to rush through in the morning is done.
That's similar to getting votes on HN, it's mostly about appearing near the top of the comments, and that has mostly to so with getting in relatively early.
You also need to be reasonably good at commenting (ie, don't be ugly).
I never talked to any of the girls about this. Pretty obviously "I analyzed the data from hundreds of conversations to optimize..." is not a good look.
I'm pretty confident though that it's just the after-lunch doldrums and people just.. sit around swiping at work? Best guess anyway
My guess is that time would be the first little work-break from the post-lunch session. About an hour after lunch and you take a little break pause so you swipe on Hinge to see if you got any matches.
Yea, hacker mindset is what I applied with Tinder. It worked wonders, went from 1 to 100 matches per month. I feel like having a hacker mindset with dating in general works wonders. Oh, and not having social anxiety of course.
I get it man. A part of me feels the same way. The practical part of me however decided just to get on with it
Online dating is toxic, and I fought it back with toxic and somehow through all of that I found my dream wife and I tol her all about what I did. She agreed that what I did was toxic, but that there's a "the means justify the end" ethics at play since we found each other
With that said: I don't think the dating scene should work this way. It's too much based on being photogenic and having beautiful looks. And this comes from someone who knows the ins and outs of training charisma and finding a potential partner that way (still possible but not in the initial steps of online dating)
Turns out even highly motivated professionals don't understand that correlation is not causality:
> For girls, it is the number of likes sent; the number of likes received has no impact on retention, maybe a little bit but less than 1%. The number of likes sent has a huge impact; a user that liked no profile in her 100 first scrolls has a d30 of 12%, and 19% for girls that like 10 profiles and 16% for girls that liked 5 profiles. The d1 retention is almost 100% correlated to a girl sending 5 likes to active guys in the first 24 hours (the real thing is to get a match, but it is easy to get a match when a girl sends 5 likes). So to have the perfect d1 retention for girls, the only thing you should focus on is to get them to send 5 likes. And you have about 100 scrolls to do so.
If you read the article, it is very clear that the author understands that this correlation is not causation. He points out numerous times that the thing which causes girls to send likes is that their feed contains attractive men.
Retention is at odds with the goals of the users of dating apps. I wonder if there’s a more aligned system that charges for premium features when there’s inactivity. Or you can only use the app’s premium features again after some period of inactivity if you pay
Inactivity serving as a potential signal that you found a match, or you’re no longer in the market. Although the incentive system would have to ensure the app isn’t aligned to make the experience so annoying you stop using it either
I worked in this space briefly. This is a really good article in line with the conclusion of the OK Cupid! team which were scrubbed from their web site but are in this book:
If you're a guy and you want to depress yourself, find a female friend who is signed to a dating app and see all the likes and messages she gets. When I was in this space, an attractive woman was getting on the order of 1000 messages a day. 95% of those messages were one-worders, "hi", "wassup". Basically a total tsunami of garbage.
LLMs are going to change this space enormously as they are going to act as your agent to talk to the other person's agent. The world of online dating is going to be horrible.
I already know people who have dozens of verified female dating app profiles staffed by LLMs and overseas operators that they use to trick men into clicking links to generate revenue.
The OK Cupid blog was on my mind as I read it as well.
The thing interesting about that blog was — if I remember it correctly — they posted results of initiations by men and women. That suggested there was kind of an optimal strategy for men and women, in that there was kind of mismatching going on in terms of who reached out to who.
IIRC, they were suggesting that it was good for women to reach out to very attractive men, because men in general were not getting contacted, including attractive men, but were responsive to being contacted, and a woman could take advantage of that, even if they were less attractive themselves. Men in contrast would do better to reach out to women who were slightly less attractive, because most of mens' attention collectively was focused on a very small group of very attractive women, and the women who were less attractive, even slightly so, were getting contacted much less often.
Typing this out I think the distributions were very different from in the current article, but also I think they were analyzing different things. In that they were looking at actual initiations, and in this they're looking at likes. Also this article breaks things down a bit more in terms of goals in using the app, which plays into things as well in a big way.
The complexity of it all increases quite a bit very rapidly.
There are a lot of dating apps out there with very different audiences. I think the mistake made here is generalizing the conclusions for all these apps. Women date differently than men. And not always with men. Or only with certain types of men.
> The likelihood to like and exchange inside homosexual groups is much higher than in heterosexual ones.
> The like ratio of a girl is almost independent of the profiles she sees. For example, if a girl has a like ratio of 5% and you remove 50% of the profiles, even if you remove only the profiles she will not like, her like ratio will still be 5%
These two statements sound like they would be at odds. It seems either the first statement is incorrect or women on dating apps are more choosy when it comes to men only. I’d be curious how the stats play out on lesbian dating apps
Only at odds if you assume the behavior is gendered and not a response or effect of the dating community in general - homosexual sub communities could have lots of community effects that change this up, just like heterosexual communities differ.
Another assumption that doesn't really work is that there must be equal numbers of male and female homosexual groups.
Assuming that male and female behavior doesn't change regardless of the partner they're seeking, it will still be true that the more groups are gay, the higher the acceptance rate will be, and it will also be true that gays are more interested in forming these groups than lesbians are.
This is such a detailed article but it's giving me weird vibes.
For instance there are all these drops to near-zero in the histograms at .28, .46, .56 for no clear reason, and the article doesn't even consider that noteworthy.
The "Men Like ratio (y) vs ratio (x)" has an inexplicable wall around .33 which I could only explain with some sort of product limitation maybe? But I really wish it was explained what artifacts the product introduces.
Since there's a spike followed by a drop, it seems like some of the data points are "misattributed" to the neighboring bucket.
Since it happens at the same place in each graph (eg a spike at 0.28-0.29, followed by a drop at 0.29-0.30) I wonder if it's some kind of number-theoretic effect from the fact it's actually a ratio of integers. For example, with less than 20 views there's no way to get to the 0.29-0.30 bucket, but 4 ways to get into the 0.28-0.29 bucket. Hmm.
Definitely points to some rounding error, aliasing in the data. It would be fixed by making the buckets larger. No reason for the buckets to be that small.
They know what you like, but that doesn't mean they will show you those profiles. Their goal is to maximize revenue, not maximize users finding good matches.
And at some places like Hinge, they'll identify your type so well that your "standouts" page (the one you have to pay to message people on) will be composed of 100% people you would probably like to speak to while your free feed will just be composed of people you have no interest in talking to!
I also had that reaction, but I kept reading and it was worth it. They mean it in a very narrow sense, and talk about the nuances and challenges of practical recommendation for much of the rest of the article.
I disagree. "The algorithm" is understood by everyone in 2025 to be a more-or-less perfect attention hoarder. TikTok, Insta, YouTube, etc. have proven they can definitely surface the content that users will like. I see no reason why profiles would be different.
They know what you like, but remember they want to make money. You finding success means you are probably less likely to get desperate and pay for premium options on their app. They drip feed you as little success as possible to still keep you on the app, but make you desperate.
It sucks, but a dating app doesn't want you successful, they want you to use their app for as long as possible.
> most guys don't open the profiles of a girl, and girls open much more often but more for discarding a user than for looking for more information
this is a factor of why it is a loosing strategy to do dinner, drinks and coffee dates
first the user experience is an arduous interview that is reliant on a “spark” that leaves too much to chance
secondly, the ask is for somewhere you can hear each other, “get to know each other”, and have one foot out the door easily to leave
on the woman’s side…. its the same as this article is saying: for disqualifying, not qualifying.
for the guys side, whatever your goal is, would be accomplished by disregarding the woman’s preference. in reality, she likely did go on a more elaborate and rambunctious date, generated endorphins (the spark), got more intimate than her risk models dictate, and then realized she didn't know the guy.
if you want any of that to happen, be like the other guy
it is optimal to be like the 5% guy that is closing with women. if you cannot replicate that on dating apps, you may be able to with other in person approaches and date ideas
(1) I used to make those kind of non-informative scatter plots with xvgr when I was a grad student, this package does a great job for those kind of cases
even if you don't use it you can copy its patterns to make designs that work
(2) An obvious commercial offering for guys is a photography package. About 20 years ago I went to the biggest photog in my town and my publisher paid $100 for a headshot that was just a junior photog in the studio. If you were a bride you would get premium hair and makeup to go with your photography, even if you were appearing on TV you would probably get a little hair and makeup help.
(3) With the right choice architecture you could control things such as "the percentage of people that you like" or "the number of likes that you receive". For instance if you were going just on looks it would be easy to show people a stack of 10 photos and have them sort them in attractiveness; you could also show pairs of profiles and pick an ELO for each one. If you look at it as a relative ranking process you can peel off whatever percentage off the top that you want.
An obvious objection is that given such a choice the "hot" people will be the only ones that get chosen but a counter to that is that you can put an upper limit on how many "likes" somebody gets by not showing them to people.
This contradicts some things he says later on about things that help the apps retain people, but from the viewpoint of making an app that "works", girls who are looking for commitment really aren't benefiting from seeing profiles from hot guys who get a lot of attention and provide nothing but casual sex.
> from the viewpoint of making an app that "works", girls who are looking for commitment really aren't benefiting from seeing profiles from hot guys who get a lot of attention and provide nothing but casual sex.
Well, sure, but you can lead a horse to water... . The less hot guys might be better options for those girls, but are they going to swipe on them? If you stop showing them the hot guys, will they stick around for the less hot guys or just switch to a different app?
yes and no. I've been to a few countries where beautiful women are everywhere and being pretty doesnt afford you as many advantages as it does in america. If you come in with education, a sense of integrity and can carry a conversation, girls can and do get competitive with each other for your attention.
> You would need to be a pro at user interviews to really get interesting feedback. (Well maybe this is the norm in B2C but at the end of the day user interviews were of no help).
This shouldn’t be surprising. Interviewing humans is a skill. Doing so in a product context, and learning useful things from it, is not easy.
I hope they don’t approach other things this way. “You’d need to be a professional plumber to stop water leaking out of this. Maybe that’s the norm but at the end of the day plumbing was no help.”
Market research and observational/UX research are not the same. Market research looks for trends in bulk; UX research looks for individual actions and preferences. The difference is important, and it’s lost on the article’s author.
In UX research you don’t ask people what they want or what they like, you (e.g.) put them in front of software/prototypes, give them tasks, and watch them work. What you learn in this context is _why_ people do things; it’s hard to get that from metrics.
You also don’t get new product ideas from customers. There are aphorisms 100 hundred years old about that which everyone should know: “If I asked my customers what they wanted they would have said, ‘A faster horse.’”
The advice to boys/girls felt very real. And also, objectively not equal.
Girl: lower your standards.
Boy: pay a photographer to look nicer.
This double disadvantages women as I see it: Their standards are held to be unrealistic (downpoint) and they have to incur the dissatisfaction of beleiving it, and acting on it to lower their expectations. AND Boys are expected to glam up and project a demonstrably less real state of themselves, to get over this bar. So women have to accept lies, and tolerate reality.
(63, in a longterm 40y relationship, not using the apps and not judging individuals here)
If the advice had been "Boys: lower your standards, girls: pay a photographer" I wonder if you'd have said "guys just get to be dawgs, women have to spend money to beautify themselves".
I very much might have. Everyone brings their own bias to the table.
But, remember the asymmetry in this space is large. The asymmetry of risk, of expectations, of outcome. It doesn't go to what you project as a hypothetical, it goes to the one I responded to. If you can show me a dating app with the right dynamics to demand the response you hypothesized, we can see how the numbers pan out. The one we have, it's the other direction of bias in expectation and behaviour.
Ask yourself why the asymmetry in hinge/bumble about who initiates contact exist.
With no intent of doxxing your bio page here says you're a social scientist. I'd welcome an understanding of if the current praxis in your field suggests the kind of cultural bias I projected isn't widespread, and if your field views this as "anti men" because I certainly didn't mean it to be, I simply think there is an inherent asymmetry to who has to act, and how they act, in the recommendations from this author in this space, which appears backed by data.
My view is it's mostly human nature not cultural bias. Sex differences in mating are cross-cultural (Donald Buss has done a lot on this). Whether either side can be said to be "disadvantaged" is a bit of a hard one. Compared to what hypothetical, and what's the measure of disadvantage? Having to hire a photographer seems like a bigger disadvantage than just lowering your standards: it costs money.
> Having to hire a photographer seems like a bigger disadvantage than just lowering your standards: it costs money.
The opportunity cost of entering a relationship with someone lower in your ranking system is to forego a relationship with someone higher in that system down the line. It makes sense to err on the side of picky if there's a tangible 'gain' to it, purely strategically speaking.
Yes, I also thought that. But once you've hooked your fish, the investment paid off. It feels like money trumps all other cost/benefit choices because it has strict numerics and orders linearly. "Lower your expectations $4.99" doesn't compute. "Take this temu boyfriend, the Amazon boyfriend is out of stock"
"blame" and "wrong" being words you brought to the table not I. So, in agreeing the bias exists, I don't cast the same emphasis as you in the situation. I see this as women demonstrably are being asked to accept lower standards than endogenously they seem as a set to believe in. To me thats a net cost on women, against their own beliefs. To you, they are to "blame" and they are "wrong"
I did say disadvantage. I own that word here. In fact, the situation disadvantages men just as much: either project an unrealistic version of yourself or be cast aside. But, thats the singular burden on men, because Women are being advised both to accept "less" and to believe the best they see, which is an artifact of professional portraiture. I've seen myself in candid shots and in pro shots and the pro shots are not me: I don't usually wear a shirt without food stains, and like George washington I am careful about my smile.
The data here falls in line with the infamous OKcupid study (which got cancelled and taken down because men and women are identical, donchaknow?)
The takeaway is that humans best date by meeting people in person through mutual acquaintances.
Without the forced direct social interaction, women are only interested in the top 10% of guys, and guys are just aimlessly running at anything that moves regardless of their actual interest (i.e. liking and seeking sex from women they have no real interest in dating). Guys end up with no likes and no dates and women end up with mountains of disingenuous likes and dates with disingenuous men.
It does imply a potentially interesting algorithm though:
Show all of the women to all of the men. From this you get numbers on which women are the most highly rated. Then, show women a) men who are at the same percentile as them or below and b) the smaller number of men who have already liked them.
The result is that 60th percentile women end up primarily liking 60th percentile men and so on, because they're the highest rated men they're typically shown, and they're going to pick the top 5% of whatever distribution you show them.
Then you end up with good matches, instead of having all the women match only with the 95th percentile players who don't want a serious relationship.
This only works in a vacuum. In the real world women will just close your app and open the one that has hot guys. I do wonder what would happen if you told people their own ranking and the ranking of their recommendations plainly though.
The only way to find out if it will show them hot guys is by using it for a while, at which point they'll already have liked some normal guys. Who then reply to them and aren't all pickup artists and make them want to keep using this app instead of the one that only matches them with polygamous himbos.
won't work. many women won't end up liking anyone. And like he said, the most expensive thing to acquire is women. You have to be able to give women their "dream man" to retain them.
And in apps, much much much more so than in real life, they will mostly all choose the same dream man.
showing a 60 percentile woman, men that around 60 percentile is a sure way to drive women away from your app
The implication being that the 60th percentile women who don't like 60th percentile men would have liked 95th percentile men. But that's useless, because finding matches for those men was never your problem to begin with. And those men are also going to match with 95th percentile women and then choose them over the 60th percentile women anyway unless they're only looking for a hookup, so you're neither solving any problem for the platform nor any problem for the women.
> You have to be able to give women their "dream man" to retain them.
That's just a charade. The 60th percentile women on average can't actually land the 95th percentile men, but if you show them all the 95th percentile men then it reduces the rate at which they like the men they could actually land, which frustrates both the men and the women, because they're both looking for real matches that could actually go somewhere.
> showing a 60 percentile woman, men that around 60 percentile is a sure way to drive women away from your app
If you show them 95th percentile men then they like them but so do most other women, and then the men in that group will either not reply to most of them or will reply to all of them intending to ghost them after having sex or cheat on them, which... is a sure way to drive women away from your app.
> And those men are also going to match with 95th percentile women and then choose them over the 60th percentile women anyway unless they're only looking for a hookup
That’s exactly what happens. Those guys have plenty of hookup opportunities, and the women have the mirage of being able to get any guy, just for some reason all these jerks only want sex, but somehow someday one will stick
Which is why you need to take away the mirage so they stop chasing it and go find actual water.
Having them leave the app isn't any worse than having them never like anyone they could actually land. Having the ones with impossible standards go malign your competitors could even be to your advantage, because then the competing apps get a higher proportion of the women who never reply, whereas the thing you need to make your app work is to have the women who do reply.
Yeah I guess. If we could get Trump to nuke Tinder or something I don’t know that I’d loudly oppose it. It would be better for all of us for that mirage to go away, but the fact is women choose it. They do land the guy occasionally. Only it turns into a situationship, hot-cold, disappearing and coming back later, the illusion of him just slipping through her grasp (even if there was no chance at a real relationship from the start). I’ve watched as female friends have gone through it over and over. You wanna say something, but at the same time, we all have our delusions, and it’s especially hard to be real with yourself when an addictive slot machine makes money from your remaining deluded.
Being shown to people who don't like you causes you to move down. Being liked causes you to move up. Apply the relevant statistical math to apply a slightly stronger signal when the like is from someone who themselves is higher rated.
The okcupid labs reports are still available through archive if you're interested. I don't have the links handy at the moment (they're on an old laptop I think), but if you know what you're looking for, you can probably find it by searching with site:reddit.com/r/okupid or "OKCupid study" site:reddit.com , grabbing the URL, then plugging into archive.org
the implication is that they have a lot of water but it's unpalatable or toxic most of the time and needs filtering I think - easy matches but most of them bad?
Agree. People are addicted to the dopamine hit of matches and message pings. I'm a pretty good judge now of whether someone is just bored at working passing time on the apps or whether they're serious about meeting. Oh and all the time wasters get really shirty if you call them out on it, so I stopped doing that long ago
He ends with a very interesting proposition to "fix" dating apps:
> To me, the next revolution is really concepts that will make you meet other people without having much information about them. As a user, you will trust the algorithm to match you with the right people. And these concepts will be paying only
> So to summarize, a concept where users pay and commit that they will meet people without knowing them before. So yes, it will take a few dates to really find someone that you like, but so is going every day in dating apps and meeting people that you don't like either.
This is very close to the Dutch app Breeze: https://breeze.social/. There's no chatting in the app. It's focused on meeting people as soon as possible. People pre-pay for dates (covers drinks) and the app partners with venues to check on the couples (they know their names). People who cancel dates get a badge on their profile saying that they have canceled. Ghosters get banned.
Breeze arguably is even more superficial than other apps. You don’t get the chance to talk or anything. You have to show up and make it work.
For most women, you’re only going to do that with a guy you’re 100% physically attracted to from the get go.
I wouldn’t recommend Breeze to any men who aren’t above average in looks. It will also quickly stop showing you people when you’re getting rejected a lot. An interesting aspect of the app. At least you’ll know where you stand after about a week or two. (Getting only 3 options a day says that it thinks you’re not going to ever get a match)
Breeze is in NYC now. So, it’s making way into the US slowly.
Yes, and give them meaningful titles too. I think sometimes "men" means "performance of male profiles" and at other times it means "behavior of male users"? It's not really clear.
This data looks interesting but I'm not really sure what I'm looking at.
I'm not going to go into details as I don't want to create a throwaway account for HN, but I can attribute a lot of people's feelings in dating apps to a few things. I got an email from Bumble a few years ago that said I was in the top x percent of people swiped on.
If you try to brute force stats your way to dating apps, you will fail.... to some extent.
A lot of this comes down to looks that you can control, and looks that you cannot control. Some people are born better looking than others and when you spend less than a second filtering people, the first factor you use is looks. That said, not everyone is looking for the same qualities so ymmv, but better looking people find dating apps much easier.
Throwing money at apps works. I'm not going to go into details because my opinion is not based on anything other than my opinion, but I found that the more I spent on the apps, the more dates I would get.
Modern dating when compared to traditional dating offline is not even the same thing. Ghosting and talking romantically to multiple people is normal. You can't let yourself get emotionally attached to anyone until you actually know them or expect anything from them.
I've heard horror stories from both men and women from online dating, and I've only had great exeriences from it. Some people find me attractive, and at the time I was very active and fit, so I usually got past the swipe test. I'm honest with myself and ok with my flaws. I'm also comfortable in social situations which helps me talk to new people.
I think crunching the numbers in this style only looks at a binary 'reality' of dating apps and not what you can do to help yourself and other factors that can lead you to what you ultimately want from partnership, or relationships or physical comfort or whatever else lead you to online dating.
And statistically, if you are short, you have absolutely no chance on dating apps I assume.
I am short. I have never been on a dating app. The first time I was single as an adult out of college was between 1996-2002 so they weren’t really a thing and the second time I was single between 2006-2011 and wasn’t looking at dating anyone.
>I've heard horror stories from both men and women from online dating, and I've only had great exeriences from it. Some people find me attractive, and at the time I was very active and fit, so I usually got past the swipe test.
How old are you / how long ago was this? I've been active on-and-off on the apps for the past year; and once you are over the hump of getting consistent matches I feel like the apps create poor behavior that really isn't measured by these companies.
I think being stuck in "situationships" is something that doesn't come out of the data but is caused by dating apps. It's very hard for me to get people to commit (or worse, just give me a hard no), which led me to casting a wider net. Potential partners are reluctant to tell me "I don't like you", and will either ghost or just keep playing along because it's something to do. I started to adjust my behavior by dating multiple people at a time - this eased the sting of wasting time on someone but then I became less sure if I wanted to commit to someone (e.g. I need a date to event X, I'll give Alice 2 weeks, and she doesn't respond so I ask Bobette day of, which pisses Bobette off because she feels like a second option).
I've also had issues where women rarely advertise upfront what they want is a hookup (for obvious reasons), but then I spend 2-3 weeks courting a woman who doesn't have the guts to tell me she didn't see a future with me.
If your goal is a long term relationship, even if you get matches, it's still a mess and I feel the whole rating curve distracts from that.
When everyone is dating everyone else, this essentially creates a tragedy of the common where no one wants to commit because they see better options always, but ironically, no one person will find their best option and have that best option also find them as the best option too.
6 out of 10 male here (on looks), if that. Got about 300 matches, because I understand social systems and have a hacker mindset. Ultimately, met my wife after 30 dates. Didn't expect that.
> Throwing money at apps works. I'm not going to go into details because my opinion is not based on anything other than my opinion, but I found that the more I spent on the apps, the more dates I would get.
I've experienced that too.
> Modern dating when compared to traditional dating offline is not even the same thing. Ghosting and talking romantically to multiple people is normal. You can't let yourself get emotionally attached to anyone until you actually know them or expect anything from them.
Number of people I'm interested * Number of people who respond
(1 / 60) * (1 / 60) = 3600 people to get one match.
Times 300 = 1.08 million profiles I'd have to view.
Maybe you like 1 of 6? (is it that high, for most people I don' think so). And you manage to get a response from 1 of 10 (because I'd expect the other side to also be at best 1 of 6 + less likely to respond)
So, that's basically saying you went through a minimum of 18k profiles to get your 300 matches.
Did you get 300 matches or is that just a statement that you did well and the numbers aren't actual numbers?
> (1 / 60) * (1 / 60) = 3600 people to get one match.
What are those numbers? According to the article, those numbers should be (1 / 4) * (1 / 25) if we use the median man randomly matching with the median woman, respectively.
Those numbers will trend much higher, if both of them are attractive, of course. In the long tails plottet for the article, there are still quite a number of men 1 out of 3 woman will like, and there's plenty of woman 9 out of 10 men will like.
I'm pretty sure the first four graphs alone already prove that dating apps don't work.
Dating apps are supposed to match people, but desire to match up is very lopsided towards one gender, with the other gender having very little desire to match up.
Having unrealistic expectations is one thing. Being the monkey paw that fulfills those wishes is on a wholly different level.
> It is possible for someone to reach out to anyone and get an answer, and discussion can be interesting from the start (at least as much as in real life)
> Your looks, how you behave, the tone of your voice,... reflect what you look like in real life
> It is easier to meet new people than attending local events
> I don't think it can
Well, as long as the metrics app builders are optimizing for are "retention" and "monetization", like this post obsesses over, and the people building the apps continue to refer to women as "girls", like they've never had a relationship with an adult woman, then I agree, dating apps are going to continue their process of enshittification.
Dating apps are scams. The developer is out to make money, which happens through subscription renewals. Profile visibility means nothing. Messages mean nothing. You can send message after message after message, but unless you have spent enough money or are onenof the lucky ones that the system allows through, your profile is not shown to anyone but bots.
Want to test this? Remove your image from your profiles on social media and remove your last name (i use my middle name as my surname on facebook). The key is to remove your profile image. Set your privacy to maximum, so other images of you cannot be searched. Try talking with someone. With no way to profile you, the chat bots used by the dating apps cannot have a "conversation." You will never be matched, conversations will hit walls and go in circles or you get ghosted because the chat bot has no data to use.
After your first renewal - after you have spent more money - then you may actually get to talk to a real person.
Anecdotal, but more than enough data to disprove your point, over the last 8 years I've used multiple dating apps, never paid a dime, and have been on somewhere around 400 first dates.
I'd also add that my match rate with bots or scammers is very low, certainly under 10%.
> More than 50% of men just never receive a like, and never means maybe 2 or 3 likes in the lifespan of several weeks
As someone in that more than 50%, it’s very annoying to constantly get told to get on the apps to meet women. I’m surrounded by men in the top 20% because I’m affluent, well educated, and spend a lot of time at the gym. Sadly, I’m just around these people and wasn’t born into the same kind of family. I’m an outsider. I was born poor and ugly. I’ve solved the poor thing but being ugly is incurable. I’m going to Beverley hills next week and getting more surgery to try to alleviate the ugliness but it’s pathetic what a man in his mid-30’s has to do now to even get a single like back on his profile.
Women don’t need men anymore in the developed world. Men are luxury goods and women are completely happy to live without. A man isn’t needed but merely wanted and only wanted if he fits a very particular set of criteria.
> Women don’t need men anymore in the developed world. Men are luxury goods and women are completely happy to live without. A man isn’t needed but merely wanted and only wanted if he fits a very particular set of criteria.
I’m not accusing you of being an incel (I’m really not trying to be sarcastic). But this has some real incel vibes.
Are you a 2 only trying to date 10s?
And I am not looking down from you from on high. I’m not wealthy. I’m doing okay. I’m definitely not tall. In my younger dating days I was in great shape (a part time fitness instructor) and if I weren’t out there as one of the few straight men without any feminine tendencies (is that a PC thing to say?) in a industry mostly with women and gay men, I wouldn’t have fared as well.
But I wasn’t 5 foot 4 trying to step to a 5 foot 10 supermodel.
They probably are literally involuntarily celibate.
Women in the west are choosing, quite reasonably, to hook up with the top 20% of men and ignore the rest. I'm not saying that as a blame thing - I don't blame them, I might make the same choice in their position. But the result is that the bottom 80% of men have practically no options - and no, lowering their standards doesn't help, it's not a problem of having potential partners they don't want, it's a problem of not having potential partners at all. I wish we could at least be honest about this rather than victim-blaming.
Yes I know that not all women are heterosexual. But I also didn’t include women who are in a heterosexual relationship but are not living with someone.
It’s statistically impossible for only 20% of the men to be in a relationship or having sex.
> 61% of women in the US are married or cohabitating and that doesn’t include those who are dating.
> It’s statistically impossible for only 20% of the men to be in a relationship or having sex.
That's a backward-looking number though. Look at how fast the lines on your link's graph are dropping, and what that implies the rate might be among the newest cohorts.
> Among those ages 25 to 54, 59% of Black adults were unpartnered in 2019. This is higher than the shares among Hispanic (38%), White (33%) and Asian (29%) adults.
Many people don’t want to get married until they are financially stable.
(On a side note: I had no idea that there was such a disparity between Black weslth and White wealth and I’m Black).
Ignoring race, but males aren’t doing as well financially as in the past and they may have something to do with them dating less and getting married less often.
While the previous commenter's numbers are exaggerated, the data from articles like this (and a decade ago, from okcupid), consistently shows stark asymmetry between the dating preferences of men and women - to the disadvantage of men in the "bottom" 50%. Before marrying, most of those 61% of women dated other men, and likely with a strong skew towards the top 20% as claimed.
I finally get a chance to pull this obscure study out of my back pocket. It supports your thesis. I’m short by the way and married for the first time at 28 and the second time at 38 (still married). Short men are never in the top 20%.
Tall men were found to marry sooner in life, but were more at risk for divorce later on, as shorter men had more stable marriages. However, researchers note that the link between short men and stable marriages could be because they chose to marry later (or didn't have the option until later).
Tall men were also more likely to marry women closer to their age, and who were better-educated.
> Women in the west are choosing, quite reasonably, to hook up with the top 20% of men and ignore the rest.
Ive been living abroad the past few years and it was night and day. in america, intimacy was a rare thing. outside the country, I've had zero issues finding partners who I find extremely attractive. Some of my well meaning friends back home warn me that they are "only interested in money" but I've never spent more than a meal at a decently priced restaurant for two. My current gf is significantly hotter than women who reject me back in the states and the only expensive thing about her is her love of instax photography. (that film ain't cheap, learn from me and do not get one of those cameras for your gf)
TLDR: if western women arent' interested in you, do everything you can to be able to sustainably live outside the bubble.
Ugly by most standards is simply not being desired by anyone. You don't have to be an acid victim like two-face to be ugly. I'd say someone is definitely ugly if you swipe on a few hundred average looking people and get zero matches back.
> if you swipe on a few hundred average looking people and get zero matches back. That's ugly.
What's ugly is using an anemometer to measure a distance. I mean, using number of matches in a dating app, to measure uglyness. Dating apps are products designed by psychologist and built by engineers to generate frustration and make people pay, not to serve as a measurement stick of the average person's attractiveness.
Dating apps are utterly broken. Don't do that to yourself, or to anyone.
Meeting women in the Real World through common acquaintances. That's where the moat is.
Do you think if a non-profit open source dating app existed, with a sizable userbase, results would be different for the average guy?
People are quick to blame the greedy for profit business model, and I'm sure that has something to do with it, but with women swiping left on 95% of profiles (according to the article) it's hard to imagine designing a dating app that changes the math meaningfully. No matter the business model, you're not likely to turn that 95% into 75% or 50%.
I don't think so, because there are more factors. For example, that women are extremely much more picky in apps than in real life. That's something that a FOSS product wouldn't solve, because it's a behavioral thing.
Let’s say that you meet a few hundred average women in real life and none express physical attraction to you. I’d say you’re still ugly.
Meeting single women in real life through acquaintances is pretty uncommon. Most of the women I meet through friends aren’t single. For good reason, most men burn their bridges with eligible women and most women have no interest in showing you to their friends.
The only person who ever introduced me to any women was a very kind gay man and it was abnormal even for him. He really reached for me but both women rejected on the spot due to their lack of physical attraction.
Can confirm from personal experience. Do not even think of installing Tinder as a male with intention not to pay. Tinder with platinum is frustrating enough for a male. In revenge, every relationship initiated with gold and platinum I threw out to the bin after some sex.
The article says it all: paying is the losing strategy.
> Likes received [by men] have a positive impact, but it is very light, which is a good thing from a monetization standpoint (you can make guys pay and not show them to anyone; they will keep paying, just a bit less than if they received likes. [...])
I can confirm. Payed once for a whole year, and got absolutely buried. Went from a decent rate of interactions to 2~3 likes (not matches) per week. And after the premium period ended, exactly on that same day, the previous rate of likes was restored! That's how I know they were intentionally not showing my profile around to other users.
Taking revenge on other users because of the predatory design of a dating app is, sincerely, disingenuous, childish and even irresponsible. Just stop using the bad product and try to cultivate real connections with people out there.
I think we’re going through a cultural shift. Looks is becoming the most important thing across the board. Most people won’t meet your partner but they’ll see them on social media. You need someone you feel proud about and secure of. On top of this, women are becoming more superficial than in previous years due to relationships being luxuries.
If a man was a solid laborer, upstanding citizen, and otherwise a dedicated family man - he would’ve done alright in certain periods of our history. But now, that’s not really that attractive. Women are much more susceptible to shifting societal trends. You can see this around the world. As women become more online, marriage rates plummet.
We’re moving further and further away from meeting your partners in real life. It’s going to be an uncommon way to meet in the future and what we will find isn’t that everyone just meets online - it’s that most people refuse to be together overall.
Charity as in you think people who make less money than you are beneath you?
Exploitation as in you providing more in terms of finances is them exploiting you?
You may want to consider finding a therapist that you enjoy working with.
You are never going to find a woman that makes an IT level salary that'll have children with somebody that has below average genetics - that's absolutely insane.
Almost all men (except you, apparently) don't care what a woman does for a living. So you're below average looking, you don't like your job, you think society is shit, you're picky, you have money but you are unwilling to be generous - help me help you - what qualities is a man or woman is supposed to be impressed with? Your squat and bench press numbers?
I’ve experimented with both. Neither really values where you come from and what you’ve accomplished. What they care about is what you’re going to do for them.
In my case, I just happen to care about what they’ll do back because I’m not interested in super imbalanced relationships.
I think most people feel entitled to a romantic relationship in their life, and they're going to do whatever they need to do to attain that, regardless of whether or not you think it's "entitled".
You're not entitled to a relationship is the fact of the matter. It should be treated with respect and not as something you are owed.
You know why? Because the man or woman on the other end of it is a person with a whole lived experience, feelings and capacity for love. They deserve better than some bitter resentment at never getting something you were "owed by destiny".
I think pretty much everyone deserves to be in a relationship for the same reason I think everyone deserves to learn how to ride a bicycle, or read a book, or learn to swim or have a friend or get a job. It is simply an experience that I think everyone should experience at least once in their life.
People aren't entitled to a relationship? In what sense? Legally? sure. The fact of the matter is that on a basic level, most people expect to find love in their life. And whatever institution that interrupts most people from achieving normal life goals like having a decent-paying job and having a normal relationship will either be torn down or will tear down society with it, whether it's AI automation of jobs or dating apps or whatever.
I am also a human being with an entire lived experience, and I am done with people like you belittling me. I have my own goals, and I am going to achieve them regardless of what people like you think. Is that entitled? So what? A lot of my difficulty in dating has been building my confidence and overcoming this notion that I don't deserve anything instilled in me by people like you.
I am not resentful or bitter, but I am angry at people like you for misrepresenting my beliefs and presenting your own perspective as "fact", when in fact you are the minority. Most people do feel entitled to a relationship, whether or not they say so.
People say this to feel better about the situation with zero regard for the insidious societal issues it causes. It's absolutely true but it's basically never productive to make a point of it. For your own good and the good of society, develop more helpful insights or don't say anything at all.
Going through life with basically zero romantic opportunities will completely fucking fry the brain of an average human. Sex, romance, etc. are a top psychological priority to ensure the continuation of the species and most people on this planet are hardwired to be in pain in the absence of it. With some luck, people hurting like that hold on to some hope of things changing for them and it provides enough motivation to break even on societal contribution.
If they give up hope, our society is structured in a way that doesn't give them any reason to play by the rules any more. If you're holding down a good job, blow your money on stupid shit; you have no wife to disappoint and no kids feed. If your hobbies consist of jacking off and playing video games (these are super easy, so you should definitely consider them) just half-ass whatever job lets you squeak by on rent if you're not fortunate enough to crash at your parents' place indefinitely. Get super into drugs, you're not really hurting anybody but yourself. Your friends might think you're a fuckup, but they're busy with their family and don't have a lot of free time to spend with you, so you don't have to be ashamed of your situation all that often. 30+ years of no responsibilities other than don't die (and even that part is kind of optional). Gonzo lifestyle. It's all yours, baby. It's lit.
There are people out there that are just plain bitter, unstable, unable to be reasonably loved, and maybe even ugly to boot. There's not much to be done about that. That being said, in the modern era, it is very possible (maybe even easy) for good people to never form any romantic relationship that would tie them into productive society, and turn into burnouts with apathetic, bitter worldviews. "You aren't owed anything and you got what was coming" is not encouraging in the slightest.
What I hate about Tinder is that it has become the only way to find woman for sex and for relationship, even if with miserable probabilities. Even in my tiny non English speaking country. The man has to pay for the app. Women ending up on Tinder loathe how despicable the app is ("looking for a pearl in this cesspool", "don't believe I ended up here" etc.) while somehow don't notice that they make this place this way.
While men having to pay is potentially no fun, I think it is definitely men that “make this place this way”. Men act entitled to whatever woman they find attractive. They accordingly act aggressively, don’t respect boundaries both on and offline, and frequently lie about themselves and their intentions to get the girl. Men should take a note from women and be more picky before they pursue (and stop when told no).
As a bi person who's currently a man, but considering transition, I can't help but wonder if maybe all the bi guys are just... picking up and leaving to become bi gals :P
I think nonbinary people are the most likely to be attracted to many genders.
And women are more likely to be attracted to many genders.
Men are more likely to be attracted to just men (and perhaps nonbinary people) or to just women (and perhaps nonbinary people)
But I think this is due to social conditioning more than something like biological predisposition. Social attitudes on men and masculinity are not very encouraging of same-sex attraction, it's very common for men to get lumped into "gay" or straight". Whereas I think women and non-binary people are more often encouraged to explore queer sexuality or even expected to (well, I suppose gender-queer people by definition have queer sexuality also). Men are also more conditioned to be more competitive in general, and to view other men as sexual/romantic competition.
I'm a man who's a little bit queer, and many of my friends are queer, so my experience is likely influenced by my crowd, but I know many more gender-queer, nonbinary, gender-fluid, and gender-nonconforming people than I know trans-men and trans-women. The AMAB people I know who aren't gay men, and have nevertheless recognized some degree of attraction to men, very often are not male-identified. But I think it's much more common for them to be gender-queer than to be women. But again, this may coincide with me knowing more NB people than binary trans people in general.
For AMAB people who acknowledge their attraction to men (but are not gay men), I do think this awareness of a sexual identity that, in men, is less socially encouraged/understood often leads to questioning the value of identification as a man entirely (especially since the male identity has so much baggage already).
I've been surprised by how differently people experience desire after transitioning. I've seen every possible combination of sexual-orientation switching in trans people. If there's a general direction, I'd say that people are more likely to be bi/pan after transitioning. IMO, transitioning is already taboo, it's not that much scarier to explore being attracted to a wider group of people.
It tracks, actually. Men tend to pick a sexual orientation and be disgusted by the other sexual orientation[0]. Women are a lot more hetero- (and homo-) flexible.
[0] It works both ways! A guy once told me and my wife that we made a cute couple despite how disgusting heterosexuality really was. And I was like... okay, thanks?
Not completely true. Most men are not disgusted by a lesbian couple. I don’t mean just men that fetishize about it. But many are disgusted or at least discomforted by seeing gay men being romantic.
Thought experiment: if a wife in a heterosexual marriage told her husband that she previously had relationships with women, I know many men (including me) who would just shrug and move on and not really think about it.
On the other hand, a man couldn’t just tell his wife most of the time that he slept with men before
It's tantamount to measuring a hospital's performance by it's retention rate.
Managed Dissatisfaction, FOMO, Abundance: And the users want it. That's what the data shows. Proof: essentially, every app is a dating app covered up as "social features."
Apple just entered the dating app market.
> I don't think retention is a good metric for a dating app, unfortunately that's how VC evaluate performance of B2C apps. When we think about dating it is more about quality than quantity.
Issue today is that apps control visibility, both in terms of profiles and likes. I've tried Hinge a few times. Did like a 4 month initial stint that had me consistently matching/meeting very attractive women (ones in the standouts section), tried it again a year later under a paid plan and had one mediocre match in 2 weeks (same photos and profile).
Skimmed the article so maybe this was addressed, but there's dark patterns happening on these apps, or faulty algos, or both.
We're getting there, whether that's dating apps controlling your stack of faces one at a time, or even seemingly innocuous things like this site's opaque comment ranking system.
These things happen by inches.
One problem I’ve realized lately is that a lot of people are on dating apps because they feel like they have to be to meet someone, but they don’t actually enjoy chatting online and may not even be very good at it. Apps probably have a stage when they have a high percentage of “online” people who are just better at texting and, for better at worse, on their phones more.
A lot of people join specific dating apps by the theme
So you get a large percent there just because of the pacing and look, and then a large percent of actual dates that are like “wait I thought casual hookups werent part of this app”
Why do you say so? IMO Hinge obscures all the relevant details of a persons profile into the tiny, horizontal scrolling thing. Age, location, family plans, etc. all crammed in here, and then the best real estate dedicated to stupid prompts that are almost invariably “I go crazy for… amazing food!” “One thing you should know about me… My ig @hotgirl”
In fact I'd say being able to balance this gender imbalance is THE issue to solve for modern apps. Everything including monetization models is built around that.
I wear aloha shirts every day, and nearly every time I go to TJ's, someone asks me where they can find a particular item. It may be a guy or a gal, but I am always happy to help a neighbor find what they need.
That is not the reason I wear aloha shirts. I just love these shirts! Every spring I get the Cooke Street shirts at Costco, one of each new pattern.
One time at the Menlo Park Trader Joe's I was talking with the guy restocking the freezer section. He said, "Nice aloha shirt! I bet people sometimes think you work here."
Sure enough, a minute later a young lady walked up to me and asked if we had organic bread. I walked her over to the bread section and pointed out the organic breads.
Later I caught up with the freezer guy again and told him "you were right!"
Ducky's, for those unfamiliar, is a car wash with several locations on the SF Peninsula. Even if you just get an exterior wash, after you go through the tunnel they hand dry your car.
There is a waiting area outside with a dozen chairs, and it takes 5-10 minutes before your car is ready.
And you never know who you might run into there!
The key to this, of course, is to be outgoing and friendly, and open to surprises.
> The other thing that interests you is the like ratio, or the openness, among 100 profiles that the user sees, how many of them does he like? (The median for men is 26% and for women is 4%.)
>The like ratio of a girl is almost independent of the profiles she sees. For example, if a girl has a like ratio of 5% and you remove 50% of the profiles, even if you remove only the profiles she will not like, her like ratio will still be 5% (you can do that by removing very unattractive people for a guy that is very attractive, for example). It is funny to observe, but it seems like a girl has internal reasoning on a dating app, and they know they can only like x% of profiles whatever she sees (of course, it doesn't work if you show only ugly people).
And lastly:
>Whats interesting is that the more attractive the guys were ranked by girls the more they were looking for something not serious.
For men, most swipes will not be a match, so less reason to ever think about swiping left to maintain a certain swipe pecentage.
Just a theory!
We should do a study on that itself, because I think guys are having quality conversations, pulling teeth with an entitled beautiful woman they are prioritizing, and everyone else is waiting for the guy to lead and there is no bandwidth left! so guys spread themselves too thin to procedurally lead every new conversation after accumulating matches
while girls are particular on the matches
Women are worse at handling rejection, hands down - it's a gendered-thing, not the same across genders.
For instance, in terms of relationships in real life (since we're discussing dating), most women do not approach men first; men are usually first to be rejected. Some women even shame men for supposedly being scared to approach them, instead of they themselves making the move first. There are so many videos showing how infantile and childish women become when they are rejected; especially the more beautiful they are.
Men are taught early to accept rejection as a natural part of life; there are of course men who react poorly when being rejected, but in comparison (since the thread is talking about women accepting rejection)? Women are definitely poorer in handling rejection.
This is true. My cap was at 50 conversations at the same time. After that, my brain got fried (male here).
When I was using dating apps I kept a spreadsheet to track the response to like ratio, and indeed, the amount of women who liked me back in any given month was exactly 5% of those whom I liked.
Much as I wish that ratio was higher, data is data. The Tinder style matchmaking will always bring out this behaviour.
> Girls would say, red flag if a guy has shirtless pictures and then liking profiles where guys were shirtless.
This is surprising:
> In our case we had even acquisition in terms of male/female, but the retention of girls is lower than that of men, so you end up with 66% men and 34% women.
2:1 men to woman is a far better ratio than what most people claim (5:1 is usually thrown around with no evidence).
These points will ruffle feathers:
> But I think dating apps can currently be used at each women and men advantage, it is just necessary to have the right strategy:
> For girls you need to lower your standards and force you to go on a date with guys that you dont have the flame for (it is actually very hard to do that for a girl, very very hard)
> For guys, you need to pay a photograph (to get liked) and pay the premium plan (so that your profile is shown to other users). If you think a dating app has no incentive to show paying users to girls, then you didnt read this article ^^
I kind of didn't understand the logic behind how he got there. According to the article women get more matches then they know what to do with. Why would lowering your standards in such an environment be a good strategy?
> Only 50% of girls sent 10 likes in their account lifespan.
> 10% of girls that finish the onboarding never send any pass or like, ...
> We have plenty of girls that can scroll through 300 profiles and not like anyone and deleting their account saying "I dont like anyone" well
My assumption would be someone who changes their mind on what they want based on availability of choices would probably not be a good relationship partner.
So would lowering your standards really get you more "quality" matches, or just get people more willing to lie about what they want because they are more desperate?
I'd say more likely down the line there's not a huge difference between the popular and unpopular men regarding what they aim for but the men who get a ton of matches and gravitate towards a fixed relationship are more likely to be out of the dating market.
Our "twist" was that anyone could be a matchmaker, pairing other people (in addition to our recommendation engine).
An interesting thing happened: lot's of people just like using dating apps in a voyeuristic way, with no intention of dating.
Tinder eventually launched this feature, but it fell flat.
I still think there's merit to human-based recs over "AI" matchmakers.
And while I’m here, OKCupid when it existed as mostly a website around 2013 was probably the best actual dating app and attempt to provide a decent enough platform for people to express themselves, and the question answering section where it would then deliver a compatibility rating was really good. But then the churn and being bought by Match completely killed it. OKC was the first dating platform that seemed like it was genuinely designed to work.
The article is really good on the product decisions but light on what kind of life and situation these users have.
Our data was almost identical to the article, showing the same imbalances.
Let's just say that if you can open your mouth enough to say hi to a woman without hesitation, you are completely wasting your time on dating sites.
These days, saying hi seems to be risky for more reasons than rejection. Maybe more so if you’re not good looking. Hence the apps
However I believe it also boils down to personality traits too.
Saying "Hi" isn't enough. One needs to be creative to stand out from the field. Women get absolutely swamped on the apps.
Its actually not, and that so many guys believe that just leaves the field unguarded
What women say online about not wanting to be approached practically anywhere is a vocal minority, and other women don't even see these conversations
Positive interactions with men are not even categorized as the ones that annoyed them, despite the interaction being the exact same. so it remains up to you to figure out where you are on that totem pole
My guess is that there's some rounding or floating point shannanigans going on.
Yes this is what I have to contribute to the conversation, I cannot speak to the dating dynamics as I am an unexpert on that subject
If it's not an error, perhaps it involves something where once your profile approaches certain cutoffs for liked/viewed ratio, the system changes how (and to whom) it presents your profile... Except the higher and lower outliers are not always adjacent either.
I'm even more convinced now that online dating has reached a local optima, but eventually someone is going to find a solution that is less shallow and predatory and blow it out of the water.
Optima for “stable-relationship-forming app” are yet to be discovered — and also, I think, to really be sought at all
Half the user base are patsies is basically the fundamental design.
Don't do this.
You need good pictures that convey attractiveness (looks, as well as personality). Using professional photos conveys neediness & a level of desperation hidden under a shell of an ego the shot tries to portray. So you end up relying on looks with a handicap. A good looking person doesnt need professional shots to show that.
Sure, if you currently have mirror selfies, professional shots are better. Otherwise - if you are not a model who has magazine-published shots you're including in your profile, then don't go use or pay for professional shots. Figure out how to take canned shots on your own or pay a photographer for canned real shots (nothing highly edited).
But you absolutely should have someone who knows how to make you look as good as possible in a natural environment.
You should also have a woman friend critically evaluate your profile. (If you don't have a friend you trust, you should first make sure you can make trusted friends with women who will tell you the truth.)
There's the "Sears" kind of photo where somebody unskilled works a camera installed in a studio which is not too expensive.
There's something a step up from that (maybe $100) where a pro photographer does the same thing.
I do environmental portraits, often with a 90mm or 135mm prime, sometimes with a wide zoom. Sometimes I discover places where I can get a great photograph of anybody in terms of lighting and background. It can be really special if you get a photo of somebody in an environment that's special to them but I don't think that's what you want for a dating site. But one of my generic environment shots would really be a winner, and I can shoot one in ten minutes inclusive of the walk to and from my office.
I'm not good at the people part of it. Some people photograph really well always (the alumni relations guy from my school, a disabled friend who might be high-functioning autistic) other people (me, my wife, my son) just don't. I can get a good photograph of somebody like that despite themselves but I have to try many sessions.
I've been doing sports photography seriously for about two years, lately I've come to see it as "people photography" and realized I do better if I think about it in terms of "getting pictures that make the players look great" as opposed to "following the ball". I am doing a volunteer gig that I'm treating as an audition for paying work and I'm planning to get a bunch of portraits out of it, so far as the technical stuff I went to the arena with my neurodivergent friend and used him as a stand-in. Now that I think about it I have two weeks to do something about the people side.
> Don't do this.
> pay a photographer for canned real shots (nothing highly edited).
So, instead of having my pictures taken by a professional photographer, you recommend that I pay a professional photographer to take my pictures?
I've heard of irrational bias against the passive voice, but this is extreme even in that genre.
Instinctively, I agree with you, but might this actually not be true anymore? I've noticed how "accepted" it is to share lots of selfies today, while before that used to be very obvious signs for self-absorbed/narcissistic/superficial/etc people, so I'm wondering if maybe we're both wrong thinking this today.
Maybe like how selfies became part of the modern social interaction, getting professional photographs for dating services might be entering the same phase too?
- A mirror selfie of a man smiling
- A professional photo of the same man posing with a confident look (confidence is highly conflicted here imo)
Intuitively I don't think it's about norms vs general laws of attraction.
In your experience, to what extent would displaying these qualities negatively impact a woman on a dating app?
For an attractive person: not much impact, though I think there is still a bit of a handicap depending on the type of person they are trying to attract and how much confidence plays into a valued trait for the other person. The same goes for how much of it seems ego-driven vs genuine.
For the average person: I mean you're simply limiting your pool. And potentially attracting personalities that look to exploit emotionally vulnerable people (the type willing to drop a lot of money on a photoshoot in hopes of getting more dates). As opposed to attracting the people they want to be dating.
This is where I say your pool becomes limited. You need potential-matches who (1) not only seek "serious" partners, but (2) are emotionally more receptive to the photos. I would suggest the latter as actually adding more pressure vs receptiveness...
I think there is a paradox of "seriousness" converting to less success on apps - even with both sides having mutual interests. Declaring your seriousness sets a very early expectation FOR STRANGERS. When Im connecting with a woman who has "life partner only" on her profile... I feel pressured, regardless of attraction. Even when I (and literally 99% of the world) desire that type of human connection.
This is why natural occurrences in person are touted for.
This is why rising kink apps are seeing success as well as a bit of a revival with tinder (here is all of me, no expectations, if you like it - cool, lets see where it goes)
Women go on app when they feel a bit sad, when they need to feel a bit better.
People want to stay single. Introversion is on the rise.
From my anecdotal experience, they have some algorithm that leads to diminishing returns in order to keep extracting money for boosts or whatever.
A few years back I was single and on Hinge a fair amount. If you used Hinge back then, you'll remember some key differences between the platform and other dating apps: 1) when you "like"'d someone, you'd have to comment on a specific part of their profile (a photo, a prompt answer, etc), 2) these likes showed up in their inbox, independent of whether they liked you or not (as in, you didn't have to like each other mutually; the other end decided whether to reply or ignore after delivery), and 3) there was limit per day, you could like/message 8 profiles per day, no more. On average, swiping through my 8 per day, I'd generally get 1-2 new replies, which turned roughly into 3-4 first dates per month.
One of the key elements is that the inbox was time-ordered: the most recent like you received was at the top. There was discussion on the Hinge subreddit about how girls would typically only click through the top few items in their inbox daily, and if you were lower down, you were doomed to drown under the mountain of new message they're getting on top. So I figured I'd solve for "what is the optimal time of day to be blasting out my likes to ensure I end up higher in the inbox?"
You can probably see where this is going: I requested a GDPR data export, which happened to have all my conversations, time-stamped. Crunching through in Python there was something in the data I didn't really expect.. a disproportionate number of first-replies (replies to my initial like/message, that is) were around the 2-3pm bucket. Not what I would've expected (don't these people work?) but fair enough, I started doing all my swiping in those hours instead of in the evening as I usually did.
And it worked. Good god did it work. I consistently started getting replies to 70-80% of my initial messages (from the ~10% before). I was drowning in conversations to the point where I wouldn't swipe at all for days for fear of yet another conversation to manage. Within a few months I ended up meeting my current girlfriend and haven't been back on since, but it was surprising how well something simple like time-of-day affected my reply rate.
They do! 2-3 p.m. is around the time people get fidgety at work and start looking at the clock, checking their phones, and such. They are no longer at lunch. Whatever busywork they had to rush through in the morning is done.
You also need to be reasonably good at commenting (ie, don't be ugly).
I'm pretty confident though that it's just the after-lunch doldrums and people just.. sit around swiping at work? Best guess anyway
I would imagine there are huge differences between let's say 20,25,30 and 35+.
Did you happen to group by age bucket ?!
Highly recommended.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJod9kRYyao
It took a long time to not have that.
edit: Sorry for the inflammatory language. Not one of my finer moments.
Online dating is toxic, and I fought it back with toxic and somehow through all of that I found my dream wife and I tol her all about what I did. She agreed that what I did was toxic, but that there's a "the means justify the end" ethics at play since we found each other
With that said: I don't think the dating scene should work this way. It's too much based on being photogenic and having beautiful looks. And this comes from someone who knows the ins and outs of training charisma and finding a potential partner that way (still possible but not in the initial steps of online dating)
Just leave the app if you don't want to participate
Guys have to behave like attractive women do, which is discerning and the opposite of how guys use the apps, OP’s article gives the rubric
> For girls, it is the number of likes sent; the number of likes received has no impact on retention, maybe a little bit but less than 1%. The number of likes sent has a huge impact; a user that liked no profile in her 100 first scrolls has a d30 of 12%, and 19% for girls that like 10 profiles and 16% for girls that liked 5 profiles. The d1 retention is almost 100% correlated to a girl sending 5 likes to active guys in the first 24 hours (the real thing is to get a match, but it is easy to get a match when a girl sends 5 likes). So to have the perfect d1 retention for girls, the only thing you should focus on is to get them to send 5 likes. And you have about 100 scrolls to do so.
Inactivity serving as a potential signal that you found a match, or you’re no longer in the market. Although the incentive system would have to ensure the app isn’t aligned to make the experience so annoying you stop using it either
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dataclysm
If you're a guy and you want to depress yourself, find a female friend who is signed to a dating app and see all the likes and messages she gets. When I was in this space, an attractive woman was getting on the order of 1000 messages a day. 95% of those messages were one-worders, "hi", "wassup". Basically a total tsunami of garbage.
LLMs are going to change this space enormously as they are going to act as your agent to talk to the other person's agent. The world of online dating is going to be horrible.
I already know people who have dozens of verified female dating app profiles staffed by LLMs and overseas operators that they use to trick men into clicking links to generate revenue.
Enshittification all round.
The thing interesting about that blog was — if I remember it correctly — they posted results of initiations by men and women. That suggested there was kind of an optimal strategy for men and women, in that there was kind of mismatching going on in terms of who reached out to who.
IIRC, they were suggesting that it was good for women to reach out to very attractive men, because men in general were not getting contacted, including attractive men, but were responsive to being contacted, and a woman could take advantage of that, even if they were less attractive themselves. Men in contrast would do better to reach out to women who were slightly less attractive, because most of mens' attention collectively was focused on a very small group of very attractive women, and the women who were less attractive, even slightly so, were getting contacted much less often.
Typing this out I think the distributions were very different from in the current article, but also I think they were analyzing different things. In that they were looking at actual initiations, and in this they're looking at likes. Also this article breaks things down a bit more in terms of goals in using the app, which plays into things as well in a big way.
The complexity of it all increases quite a bit very rapidly.
> The like ratio of a girl is almost independent of the profiles she sees. For example, if a girl has a like ratio of 5% and you remove 50% of the profiles, even if you remove only the profiles she will not like, her like ratio will still be 5%
These two statements sound like they would be at odds. It seems either the first statement is incorrect or women on dating apps are more choosy when it comes to men only. I’d be curious how the stats play out on lesbian dating apps
Assuming that male and female behavior doesn't change regardless of the partner they're seeking, it will still be true that the more groups are gay, the higher the acceptance rate will be, and it will also be true that gays are more interested in forming these groups than lesbians are.
For instance there are all these drops to near-zero in the histograms at .28, .46, .56 for no clear reason, and the article doesn't even consider that noteworthy.
The "Men Like ratio (y) vs ratio (x)" has an inexplicable wall around .33 which I could only explain with some sort of product limitation maybe? But I really wish it was explained what artifacts the product introduces.
Since it happens at the same place in each graph (eg a spike at 0.28-0.29, followed by a drop at 0.29-0.30) I wonder if it's some kind of number-theoretic effect from the fact it's actually a ratio of integers. For example, with less than 20 views there's no way to get to the 0.29-0.30 bucket, but 4 ways to get into the 0.28-0.29 bucket. Hmm.
Also notable that 0.56 is exactly twice 0.28.
It’s hard to take the rest of the article seriously after reading this!
It sucks, but a dating app doesn't want you successful, they want you to use their app for as long as possible.
Brutal.
this is a factor of why it is a loosing strategy to do dinner, drinks and coffee dates
first the user experience is an arduous interview that is reliant on a “spark” that leaves too much to chance
secondly, the ask is for somewhere you can hear each other, “get to know each other”, and have one foot out the door easily to leave
on the woman’s side…. its the same as this article is saying: for disqualifying, not qualifying.
for the guys side, whatever your goal is, would be accomplished by disregarding the woman’s preference. in reality, she likely did go on a more elaborate and rambunctious date, generated endorphins (the spark), got more intimate than her risk models dictate, and then realized she didn't know the guy.
if you want any of that to happen, be like the other guy
it is optimal to be like the 5% guy that is closing with women. if you cannot replicate that on dating apps, you may be able to with other in person approaches and date ideas
Which naturally results in celebrities and models getting blocked from signing up periodically.
(1) I used to make those kind of non-informative scatter plots with xvgr when I was a grad student, this package does a great job for those kind of cases
https://seaborn.pydata.org/generated/seaborn.relplot.html
even if you don't use it you can copy its patterns to make designs that work
(2) An obvious commercial offering for guys is a photography package. About 20 years ago I went to the biggest photog in my town and my publisher paid $100 for a headshot that was just a junior photog in the studio. If you were a bride you would get premium hair and makeup to go with your photography, even if you were appearing on TV you would probably get a little hair and makeup help.
(3) With the right choice architecture you could control things such as "the percentage of people that you like" or "the number of likes that you receive". For instance if you were going just on looks it would be easy to show people a stack of 10 photos and have them sort them in attractiveness; you could also show pairs of profiles and pick an ELO for each one. If you look at it as a relative ranking process you can peel off whatever percentage off the top that you want.
An obvious objection is that given such a choice the "hot" people will be the only ones that get chosen but a counter to that is that you can put an upper limit on how many "likes" somebody gets by not showing them to people.
This contradicts some things he says later on about things that help the apps retain people, but from the viewpoint of making an app that "works", girls who are looking for commitment really aren't benefiting from seeing profiles from hot guys who get a lot of attention and provide nothing but casual sex.
Well, sure, but you can lead a horse to water... . The less hot guys might be better options for those girls, but are they going to swipe on them? If you stop showing them the hot guys, will they stick around for the less hot guys or just switch to a different app?
Sounds like this article is just astroturfing with some tech data.
This shouldn’t be surprising. Interviewing humans is a skill. Doing so in a product context, and learning useful things from it, is not easy.
I hope they don’t approach other things this way. “You’d need to be a professional plumber to stop water leaking out of this. Maybe that’s the norm but at the end of the day plumbing was no help.”
In UX research you don’t ask people what they want or what they like, you (e.g.) put them in front of software/prototypes, give them tasks, and watch them work. What you learn in this context is _why_ people do things; it’s hard to get that from metrics.
You also don’t get new product ideas from customers. There are aphorisms 100 hundred years old about that which everyone should know: “If I asked my customers what they wanted they would have said, ‘A faster horse.’”
> they are used to receiving a lot of likes, so you have to show them they get liked
They hate that, most girls registering on Tinder get 1000 likes in a week.
> Dating fatigue is bullshit
See last point
> Having a profile doesn't impact the app experience
That's what changed the game, nobody bothers on Tinder because it's not mandatory whereas it works very well on Hinge.
Girl: lower your standards.
Boy: pay a photographer to look nicer.
This double disadvantages women as I see it: Their standards are held to be unrealistic (downpoint) and they have to incur the dissatisfaction of beleiving it, and acting on it to lower their expectations. AND Boys are expected to glam up and project a demonstrably less real state of themselves, to get over this bar. So women have to accept lies, and tolerate reality.
(63, in a longterm 40y relationship, not using the apps and not judging individuals here)
But, remember the asymmetry in this space is large. The asymmetry of risk, of expectations, of outcome. It doesn't go to what you project as a hypothetical, it goes to the one I responded to. If you can show me a dating app with the right dynamics to demand the response you hypothesized, we can see how the numbers pan out. The one we have, it's the other direction of bias in expectation and behaviour.
Ask yourself why the asymmetry in hinge/bumble about who initiates contact exist.
With no intent of doxxing your bio page here says you're a social scientist. I'd welcome an understanding of if the current praxis in your field suggests the kind of cultural bias I projected isn't widespread, and if your field views this as "anti men" because I certainly didn't mean it to be, I simply think there is an inherent asymmetry to who has to act, and how they act, in the recommendations from this author in this space, which appears backed by data.
The opportunity cost of entering a relationship with someone lower in your ranking system is to forego a relationship with someone higher in that system down the line. It makes sense to err on the side of picky if there's a tangible 'gain' to it, purely strategically speaking.
> This double disadvantages ..women?
Sorry, I don't follow you.
Especially since women's unrealistic judgement is to blame. Women are, objectively, rating men all wrong:
https://www.stevestewartwilliams.com/p/how-men-and-women-rat...
(I just pulled the first article that has the famous Okcupid graph.)
I did say disadvantage. I own that word here. In fact, the situation disadvantages men just as much: either project an unrealistic version of yourself or be cast aside. But, thats the singular burden on men, because Women are being advised both to accept "less" and to believe the best they see, which is an artifact of professional portraiture. I've seen myself in candid shots and in pro shots and the pro shots are not me: I don't usually wear a shirt without food stains, and like George washington I am careful about my smile.
The takeaway is that humans best date by meeting people in person through mutual acquaintances.
Without the forced direct social interaction, women are only interested in the top 10% of guys, and guys are just aimlessly running at anything that moves regardless of their actual interest (i.e. liking and seeking sex from women they have no real interest in dating). Guys end up with no likes and no dates and women end up with mountains of disingenuous likes and dates with disingenuous men.
Show all of the women to all of the men. From this you get numbers on which women are the most highly rated. Then, show women a) men who are at the same percentile as them or below and b) the smaller number of men who have already liked them.
The result is that 60th percentile women end up primarily liking 60th percentile men and so on, because they're the highest rated men they're typically shown, and they're going to pick the top 5% of whatever distribution you show them.
Then you end up with good matches, instead of having all the women match only with the 95th percentile players who don't want a serious relationship.
showing a 60 percentile woman, men that around 60 percentile is a sure way to drive women away from your app
The implication being that the 60th percentile women who don't like 60th percentile men would have liked 95th percentile men. But that's useless, because finding matches for those men was never your problem to begin with. And those men are also going to match with 95th percentile women and then choose them over the 60th percentile women anyway unless they're only looking for a hookup, so you're neither solving any problem for the platform nor any problem for the women.
> You have to be able to give women their "dream man" to retain them.
That's just a charade. The 60th percentile women on average can't actually land the 95th percentile men, but if you show them all the 95th percentile men then it reduces the rate at which they like the men they could actually land, which frustrates both the men and the women, because they're both looking for real matches that could actually go somewhere.
> showing a 60 percentile woman, men that around 60 percentile is a sure way to drive women away from your app
If you show them 95th percentile men then they like them but so do most other women, and then the men in that group will either not reply to most of them or will reply to all of them intending to ghost them after having sex or cheat on them, which... is a sure way to drive women away from your app.
That’s exactly what happens. Those guys have plenty of hookup opportunities, and the women have the mirage of being able to get any guy, just for some reason all these jerks only want sex, but somehow someday one will stick
Having them leave the app isn't any worse than having them never like anyone they could actually land. Having the ones with impossible standards go malign your competitors could even be to your advantage, because then the competing apps get a higher proportion of the women who never reply, whereas the thing you need to make your app work is to have the women who do reply.
Not sure which of these you meant, but here's links for those who haven't read them:
The one blog post that got removed when match-dot-com (InterActiveCorp) bought OKC in 2011-Feb:
https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/okcupid/whyyoushouldneverpa...
The other OKC data analysis posts (archive link to 2011-Jan):
https://web.archive.org/web/20110126012317/http://blog.okcup...
(not my analogy, but IMO very succinct)
"Insane from frustration" explains, rather than contradicts, "unpalatable" and "toxic".
> To me, the next revolution is really concepts that will make you meet other people without having much information about them. As a user, you will trust the algorithm to match you with the right people. And these concepts will be paying only
> So to summarize, a concept where users pay and commit that they will meet people without knowing them before. So yes, it will take a few dates to really find someone that you like, but so is going every day in dating apps and meeting people that you don't like either.
This is very close to the Dutch app Breeze: https://breeze.social/. There's no chatting in the app. It's focused on meeting people as soon as possible. People pre-pay for dates (covers drinks) and the app partners with venues to check on the couples (they know their names). People who cancel dates get a badge on their profile saying that they have canceled. Ghosters get banned.
For most women, you’re only going to do that with a guy you’re 100% physically attracted to from the get go.
I wouldn’t recommend Breeze to any men who aren’t above average in looks. It will also quickly stop showing you people when you’re getting rejected a lot. An interesting aspect of the app. At least you’ll know where you stand after about a week or two. (Getting only 3 options a day says that it thinks you’re not going to ever get a match)
Breeze is in NYC now. So, it’s making way into the US slowly.
This data looks interesting but I'm not really sure what I'm looking at.
If you try to brute force stats your way to dating apps, you will fail.... to some extent.
A lot of this comes down to looks that you can control, and looks that you cannot control. Some people are born better looking than others and when you spend less than a second filtering people, the first factor you use is looks. That said, not everyone is looking for the same qualities so ymmv, but better looking people find dating apps much easier.
Throwing money at apps works. I'm not going to go into details because my opinion is not based on anything other than my opinion, but I found that the more I spent on the apps, the more dates I would get.
Modern dating when compared to traditional dating offline is not even the same thing. Ghosting and talking romantically to multiple people is normal. You can't let yourself get emotionally attached to anyone until you actually know them or expect anything from them.
I've heard horror stories from both men and women from online dating, and I've only had great exeriences from it. Some people find me attractive, and at the time I was very active and fit, so I usually got past the swipe test. I'm honest with myself and ok with my flaws. I'm also comfortable in social situations which helps me talk to new people.
I think crunching the numbers in this style only looks at a binary 'reality' of dating apps and not what you can do to help yourself and other factors that can lead you to what you ultimately want from partnership, or relationships or physical comfort or whatever else lead you to online dating.
I am short. I have never been on a dating app. The first time I was single as an adult out of college was between 1996-2002 so they weren’t really a thing and the second time I was single between 2006-2011 and wasn’t looking at dating anyone.
How old are you / how long ago was this? I've been active on-and-off on the apps for the past year; and once you are over the hump of getting consistent matches I feel like the apps create poor behavior that really isn't measured by these companies.
I think being stuck in "situationships" is something that doesn't come out of the data but is caused by dating apps. It's very hard for me to get people to commit (or worse, just give me a hard no), which led me to casting a wider net. Potential partners are reluctant to tell me "I don't like you", and will either ghost or just keep playing along because it's something to do. I started to adjust my behavior by dating multiple people at a time - this eased the sting of wasting time on someone but then I became less sure if I wanted to commit to someone (e.g. I need a date to event X, I'll give Alice 2 weeks, and she doesn't respond so I ask Bobette day of, which pisses Bobette off because she feels like a second option).
I've also had issues where women rarely advertise upfront what they want is a hookup (for obvious reasons), but then I spend 2-3 weeks courting a woman who doesn't have the guts to tell me she didn't see a future with me.
If your goal is a long term relationship, even if you get matches, it's still a mess and I feel the whole rating curve distracts from that.
Was this humble brag relevant to the rest of your point?
> Throwing money at apps works. I'm not going to go into details because my opinion is not based on anything other than my opinion, but I found that the more I spent on the apps, the more dates I would get.
I've experienced that too.
> Modern dating when compared to traditional dating offline is not even the same thing. Ghosting and talking romantically to multiple people is normal. You can't let yourself get emotionally attached to anyone until you actually know them or expect anything from them.
Similar experience.
Number of people I'm interested * Number of people who respond
(1 / 60) * (1 / 60) = 3600 people to get one match.
Times 300 = 1.08 million profiles I'd have to view.
Maybe you like 1 of 6? (is it that high, for most people I don' think so). And you manage to get a response from 1 of 10 (because I'd expect the other side to also be at best 1 of 6 + less likely to respond)
So, that's basically saying you went through a minimum of 18k profiles to get your 300 matches.
Did you get 300 matches or is that just a statement that you did well and the numbers aren't actual numbers?
What are those numbers? According to the article, those numbers should be (1 / 4) * (1 / 25) if we use the median man randomly matching with the median woman, respectively.
Those numbers will trend much higher, if both of them are attractive, of course. In the long tails plottet for the article, there are still quite a number of men 1 out of 3 woman will like, and there's plenty of woman 9 out of 10 men will like.
Dating apps are supposed to match people, but desire to match up is very lopsided towards one gender, with the other gender having very little desire to match up.
Having unrealistic expectations is one thing. Being the monkey paw that fulfills those wishes is on a wholly different level.
What does ELO stand for?
> What I meant by "fixed", is an app where:
> It is possible for someone to reach out to anyone and get an answer, and discussion can be interesting from the start (at least as much as in real life)
> Your looks, how you behave, the tone of your voice,... reflect what you look like in real life
> It is easier to meet new people than attending local events
> I don't think it can
Well, as long as the metrics app builders are optimizing for are "retention" and "monetization", like this post obsesses over, and the people building the apps continue to refer to women as "girls", like they've never had a relationship with an adult woman, then I agree, dating apps are going to continue their process of enshittification.
Want to test this? Remove your image from your profiles on social media and remove your last name (i use my middle name as my surname on facebook). The key is to remove your profile image. Set your privacy to maximum, so other images of you cannot be searched. Try talking with someone. With no way to profile you, the chat bots used by the dating apps cannot have a "conversation." You will never be matched, conversations will hit walls and go in circles or you get ghosted because the chat bot has no data to use.
After your first renewal - after you have spent more money - then you may actually get to talk to a real person.
No. Never again.
Anecdotal, but more than enough data to disprove your point, over the last 8 years I've used multiple dating apps, never paid a dime, and have been on somewhere around 400 first dates.
I'd also add that my match rate with bots or scammers is very low, certainly under 10%.
simplest CRUD.
issue is either we are ugly or dark patterns make dating sites unusable.
As someone in that more than 50%, it’s very annoying to constantly get told to get on the apps to meet women. I’m surrounded by men in the top 20% because I’m affluent, well educated, and spend a lot of time at the gym. Sadly, I’m just around these people and wasn’t born into the same kind of family. I’m an outsider. I was born poor and ugly. I’ve solved the poor thing but being ugly is incurable. I’m going to Beverley hills next week and getting more surgery to try to alleviate the ugliness but it’s pathetic what a man in his mid-30’s has to do now to even get a single like back on his profile.
Women don’t need men anymore in the developed world. Men are luxury goods and women are completely happy to live without. A man isn’t needed but merely wanted and only wanted if he fits a very particular set of criteria.
I’m not accusing you of being an incel (I’m really not trying to be sarcastic). But this has some real incel vibes.
Are you a 2 only trying to date 10s?
And I am not looking down from you from on high. I’m not wealthy. I’m doing okay. I’m definitely not tall. In my younger dating days I was in great shape (a part time fitness instructor) and if I weren’t out there as one of the few straight men without any feminine tendencies (is that a PC thing to say?) in a industry mostly with women and gay men, I wouldn’t have fared as well.
But I wasn’t 5 foot 4 trying to step to a 5 foot 10 supermodel.
Women in the west are choosing, quite reasonably, to hook up with the top 20% of men and ignore the rest. I'm not saying that as a blame thing - I don't blame them, I might make the same choice in their position. But the result is that the bottom 80% of men have practically no options - and no, lowering their standards doesn't help, it's not a problem of having potential partners they don't want, it's a problem of not having potential partners at all. I wish we could at least be honest about this rather than victim-blaming.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/10/05/rising-...
Yes I know that not all women are heterosexual. But I also didn’t include women who are in a heterosexual relationship but are not living with someone.
It’s statistically impossible for only 20% of the men to be in a relationship or having sex.
> It’s statistically impossible for only 20% of the men to be in a relationship or having sex.
That's a backward-looking number though. Look at how fast the lines on your link's graph are dropping, and what that implies the rate might be among the newest cohorts.
From my original citation:
> Among those ages 25 to 54, 59% of Black adults were unpartnered in 2019. This is higher than the shares among Hispanic (38%), White (33%) and Asian (29%) adults.
https://www.pewresearch.org/2023/12/04/wealth-gaps-across-ra...
Many people don’t want to get married until they are financially stable.
(On a side note: I had no idea that there was such a disparity between Black weslth and White wealth and I’m Black).
Ignoring race, but males aren’t doing as well financially as in the past and they may have something to do with them dating less and getting married less often.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/link-between-mens-height-divo...
Tall men were found to marry sooner in life, but were more at risk for divorce later on, as shorter men had more stable marriages. However, researchers note that the link between short men and stable marriages could be because they chose to marry later (or didn't have the option until later). Tall men were also more likely to marry women closer to their age, and who were better-educated.
Ive been living abroad the past few years and it was night and day. in america, intimacy was a rare thing. outside the country, I've had zero issues finding partners who I find extremely attractive. Some of my well meaning friends back home warn me that they are "only interested in money" but I've never spent more than a meal at a decently priced restaurant for two. My current gf is significantly hotter than women who reject me back in the states and the only expensive thing about her is her love of instax photography. (that film ain't cheap, learn from me and do not get one of those cameras for your gf)
TLDR: if western women arent' interested in you, do everything you can to be able to sustainably live outside the bubble.
That's ugly.
What's ugly is using an anemometer to measure a distance. I mean, using number of matches in a dating app, to measure uglyness. Dating apps are products designed by psychologist and built by engineers to generate frustration and make people pay, not to serve as a measurement stick of the average person's attractiveness.
Dating apps are utterly broken. Don't do that to yourself, or to anyone.
Meeting women in the Real World through common acquaintances. That's where the moat is.
People are quick to blame the greedy for profit business model, and I'm sure that has something to do with it, but with women swiping left on 95% of profiles (according to the article) it's hard to imagine designing a dating app that changes the math meaningfully. No matter the business model, you're not likely to turn that 95% into 75% or 50%.
Meeting single women in real life through acquaintances is pretty uncommon. Most of the women I meet through friends aren’t single. For good reason, most men burn their bridges with eligible women and most women have no interest in showing you to their friends.
The only person who ever introduced me to any women was a very kind gay man and it was abnormal even for him. He really reached for me but both women rejected on the spot due to their lack of physical attraction.
> Likes received [by men] have a positive impact, but it is very light, which is a good thing from a monetization standpoint (you can make guys pay and not show them to anyone; they will keep paying, just a bit less than if they received likes. [...])
I can confirm. Payed once for a whole year, and got absolutely buried. Went from a decent rate of interactions to 2~3 likes (not matches) per week. And after the premium period ended, exactly on that same day, the previous rate of likes was restored! That's how I know they were intentionally not showing my profile around to other users.
Taking revenge on other users because of the predatory design of a dating app is, sincerely, disingenuous, childish and even irresponsible. Just stop using the bad product and try to cultivate real connections with people out there.
If a man was a solid laborer, upstanding citizen, and otherwise a dedicated family man - he would’ve done alright in certain periods of our history. But now, that’s not really that attractive. Women are much more susceptible to shifting societal trends. You can see this around the world. As women become more online, marriage rates plummet.
We’re moving further and further away from meeting your partners in real life. It’s going to be an uncommon way to meet in the future and what we will find isn’t that everyone just meets online - it’s that most people refuse to be together overall.
Exploitation as in you providing more in terms of finances is them exploiting you?
You may want to consider finding a therapist that you enjoy working with.
You are never going to find a woman that makes an IT level salary that'll have children with somebody that has below average genetics - that's absolutely insane.
Almost all men (except you, apparently) don't care what a woman does for a living. So you're below average looking, you don't like your job, you think society is shit, you're picky, you have money but you are unwilling to be generous - help me help you - what qualities is a man or woman is supposed to be impressed with? Your squat and bench press numbers?
In my case, I just happen to care about what they’ll do back because I’m not interested in super imbalanced relationships.
edit: This was harsh and inaccurate. I apologize.
You know why? Because the man or woman on the other end of it is a person with a whole lived experience, feelings and capacity for love. They deserve better than some bitter resentment at never getting something you were "owed by destiny".
People aren't entitled to a relationship? In what sense? Legally? sure. The fact of the matter is that on a basic level, most people expect to find love in their life. And whatever institution that interrupts most people from achieving normal life goals like having a decent-paying job and having a normal relationship will either be torn down or will tear down society with it, whether it's AI automation of jobs or dating apps or whatever.
I am also a human being with an entire lived experience, and I am done with people like you belittling me. I have my own goals, and I am going to achieve them regardless of what people like you think. Is that entitled? So what? A lot of my difficulty in dating has been building my confidence and overcoming this notion that I don't deserve anything instilled in me by people like you.
I am not resentful or bitter, but I am angry at people like you for misrepresenting my beliefs and presenting your own perspective as "fact", when in fact you are the minority. Most people do feel entitled to a relationship, whether or not they say so.
Going through life with basically zero romantic opportunities will completely fucking fry the brain of an average human. Sex, romance, etc. are a top psychological priority to ensure the continuation of the species and most people on this planet are hardwired to be in pain in the absence of it. With some luck, people hurting like that hold on to some hope of things changing for them and it provides enough motivation to break even on societal contribution.
If they give up hope, our society is structured in a way that doesn't give them any reason to play by the rules any more. If you're holding down a good job, blow your money on stupid shit; you have no wife to disappoint and no kids feed. If your hobbies consist of jacking off and playing video games (these are super easy, so you should definitely consider them) just half-ass whatever job lets you squeak by on rent if you're not fortunate enough to crash at your parents' place indefinitely. Get super into drugs, you're not really hurting anybody but yourself. Your friends might think you're a fuckup, but they're busy with their family and don't have a lot of free time to spend with you, so you don't have to be ashamed of your situation all that often. 30+ years of no responsibilities other than don't die (and even that part is kind of optional). Gonzo lifestyle. It's all yours, baby. It's lit.
There are people out there that are just plain bitter, unstable, unable to be reasonably loved, and maybe even ugly to boot. There's not much to be done about that. That being said, in the modern era, it is very possible (maybe even easy) for good people to never form any romantic relationship that would tie them into productive society, and turn into burnouts with apathetic, bitter worldviews. "You aren't owed anything and you got what was coming" is not encouraging in the slightest.
Going to save it to my google docs so I never lose it.
> Among guys: 7% homo, 92% hetero and almost none were interested in both genders
That's insane.
And women are more likely to be attracted to many genders.
Men are more likely to be attracted to just men (and perhaps nonbinary people) or to just women (and perhaps nonbinary people)
But I think this is due to social conditioning more than something like biological predisposition. Social attitudes on men and masculinity are not very encouraging of same-sex attraction, it's very common for men to get lumped into "gay" or straight". Whereas I think women and non-binary people are more often encouraged to explore queer sexuality or even expected to (well, I suppose gender-queer people by definition have queer sexuality also). Men are also more conditioned to be more competitive in general, and to view other men as sexual/romantic competition.
I'm a man who's a little bit queer, and many of my friends are queer, so my experience is likely influenced by my crowd, but I know many more gender-queer, nonbinary, gender-fluid, and gender-nonconforming people than I know trans-men and trans-women. The AMAB people I know who aren't gay men, and have nevertheless recognized some degree of attraction to men, very often are not male-identified. But I think it's much more common for them to be gender-queer than to be women. But again, this may coincide with me knowing more NB people than binary trans people in general.
For AMAB people who acknowledge their attraction to men (but are not gay men), I do think this awareness of a sexual identity that, in men, is less socially encouraged/understood often leads to questioning the value of identification as a man entirely (especially since the male identity has so much baggage already).
[0] It works both ways! A guy once told me and my wife that we made a cute couple despite how disgusting heterosexuality really was. And I was like... okay, thanks?
Thought experiment: if a wife in a heterosexual marriage told her husband that she previously had relationships with women, I know many men (including me) who would just shrug and move on and not really think about it.
On the other hand, a man couldn’t just tell his wife most of the time that he slept with men before