[1] https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-g... (Tinder Experiments II: Guys, unless you are really hot you are probably better off not wasting your time on Tinder — a quantitative socio-economic study)

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22406583 (RFC: Let's Disrupt Dating Apps)

The problem is that the comparison totally falls apart. You are not competing to get the most likes on Tinder, you are just trying to meet someone to form a relationship or make out or whatever. If you’re really interested in comparing Tinder against other avenues for achieving this goal (or whatever goal you have), then you should be looking at something like WAR—wins against replacement. How likely are you to have a positive outcome using Tinder versus using some other site, or trying to meet people in person.

If you want to find a place where it’s easy to find someone cute who wants to make out, then the only real answer is to be a gay man (do whatever you need to make that possible), clean yourself up, and move to the city.

If you’re interested in a heterosexual relationship, you are simply going to have to deal with the fact that men and women in our culture have, on average, differing preferences when it comes to relationships. If you have typical preferences for a single man in our culture, then they don’t match typical preferences for a single woman in our culture, and if you find a relationship, it will involve some bridging of the gap between your different desires. Tinder doesn’t change that, and neither do any of the other sites.

Being happy in a relationship is not about somehow managing to trick someone into being with you, nor is it about somehow lifting yourself up to the standards of masculinity / femininity you see in media.

—Olaf, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVCCYAYr-24

I’m not a therapist or relationship counselor. I really only have my opinions and personal experiences to share.

Women rate 80% of online images of men on a dating site as worse-looking than their personal definition of medium.

I think it's important to keep in mind that:

* There are disparities between gender for how much appearance factors into attractiveness.

* The fact that a person is on an online dating site itself sends an attractiveness signal.

This is an unattainable level of health and fitness for most Americans. Bet you’re way more attractive than you think you are.

I'm 42 and probably in the best shape of my life. But that's mostly because I spent the first forty years absolutely shunning any form of physical exercise.

It's also why the median job-seeker in a field is less skilled than the median person in the field of interest: the median person has been evaluated by at least one employer to be sufficiently skilled.

Presumably the hot dudes aren't the people on online dating sites. (Not to be objectifying, but dating is a bit of a lemons market i imagine)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

1. Attractive / high value men are happy to sleep with less attractive women they wouldn't consider as 'relationship material'.

2. Women are generally more sexually liberated so there's an increasing chance they will have had several of these encounters, and therefore believe they are entitled to men of the same level (also known as becoming an 'alpha widow').

Like most of these theories it's pretty depressing to contemplate, but I'm yet to see a convincing refutation of it.

I can not tell who is going to be the most miserable in such relationship. My guess is the woman, who will not be able to understand how "she settled like that, since she could do so much better". In the best case scenario, the man will be oblivious of the fact, so probably he will be unaffected.

I would love to find a way of coming to terms with this that doesn't involve adopting the full red pill attitude of "never get married, all women are like that" etc

Of course, this is possible because the average man will have far fewer relationships than the average woman. So in the end the numbers for this imaginary couple will look like:

For the man: He will marry then number 2 mate out of a total of 5.

For the woman: She will marry the number 10 mate out of a total of 15.

Obviously the numbers are totally made up, but you get the point.

So be positive! When you will settle, your mate will probably exceed your expectations.

Disclaimer: I am also a man.

Best is to find your own self esteem. Whoever gets your company and attention is lucky, because you chose to give it to them and no one else...

It’s just you in the Boltzmann brain... no one else means anything. Also the universe is big, really big. And the block universe is here all at once. You can’t really change anything... we don’t know anything. What were we talking about again ?

I'm not sure if I agree. From the perspective of the dating site you'd be right, the longer people are unable to find the kind of relationship that they want, the better it is for their business. However, from the point of view of the people looking for dates, if people are shown little to no profiles where it's highly unlikely that a relationship will happen, and shown mostly profiles where matches are likely, regardless of their stated preferences, and thus response rates and relationship likelihood rises, that seems like it can be a better outcome to me.

The real criticism of this model is completely different, and much deeper. People don't actually know what they want and who would make them happy, and they often conform / default to social conventions in their public preferences - e.g. maybe you want to filter out 10+ older men because you don't want to go on dates with "creepy" dudes, or you want to filter out fat women because you don't want your friends to judge you - even though in reality, you might actually be happier with those matches, or, more likely, those attributes are often orthogonal to your actual happiness.