It’s not by choice that they are not in the dating market. Nobody buys what they have to offer.

I believe you are conflating "being in the market" with "not being successful in the market".

You said they're not in the market ("totally removed"). If they're not in the market, attempting to make a sale, the odds of ever making sale are zero.

If you're in the market, and nobody is buying, you need to improve your product or target other potential customers. If this was about software or other such, everyone would be all over it with great ideas and helpful comments and suggestions for improvement and so on, but because this is about men having trouble finding a girlfriend, they blame the market and stop trying.

It's possible that any given person can, as you say, work harder and achieve success in dating, and that it is impossible for everyone to do it because of structural reasons.

For example, if there are 800 million men in your country and 700 million women, "try harder" will only work for 700 million men and will never work for the other 100 million (assuming they want long-term monogamous marriages etc.)

SF isn't China/India but even in SF there is enough structural imbalance that "work harder" won't be enough to help 10s of thousands of young men.

Right, but with humans, the only viable option to fulfill this proposition is a positional arms race of plastic surgery. Innovation in a market is usually good and has brought huge benefits; you can't really "improve" your looks after possibly weight loss and personal care without a doctor. Of course you can usually improve yourself, but dating apps usually mean judgement by attractiveness. It's basically the difference between actual product innovation and better advertising, to use your analogy. You'll just get huge spikes in chin implants and steroids, and everyone will be worse.

I disagree. There is a huge section of the market that is not simply chasing the most physically attractive purchase possible. It is also the case that, despite the suspiciously homoerotic incel obsession with looking like "Chad" (cf. chin implant hypothesis), there's more to being attractive than looking like Chad and there's by no means only one measure of it.

Of course that's true, but a move towards platforms like tinder leads to increased reliance on physical attractiveness. The portion of the market which is focused on attractiveness seems to be shrinking as time goes on.

> you can't really "improve" your looks after possibly weight loss and personal care without a doctor.

An appropriate hair cut (which might be going totally bald for some people) is a big deal. This also involves facial hair. Clothes are another easy and very effective thing to change. Eyeglasses. And all these things have to work together.