Men and women experience dating sites very differently. Women get annoyed/numbed being bombarded with low-effort pings. Men get annoyed with low response ratio. This causes a negative feedback loop. And dating sites earn more money by not quite solving their client's problem. Though I got dates and two relationships out of dating sites, their dishonesty/manipulation was apparent to me.

Yes, match.com has been sued by the FTC for all their fake crap and still they are doing it, especially when your profile is about to expire. A few days from that date you will all the sudden get attractive women that never bothered with you previously. These are fake accounts to get you to re-up your membership and again/even after being sued by the FTC are pulling this crap!

Yup. Nearly 20 years ago one of my friends was paid to create profiles on a dating site, and then even to respond a couple of times before ghosting people.

Facebook has been doing that to me for years. It’s tough with women because I sometimes click the bait when I think it might be someone I know who got married.

> women

Except for Black women in the US. Together with Asian men (especially from India), they have a really, really tough time. There are a number of peer reviewed studies on the matter, it seems to be a stable pattern.

I don't know if OKCupid's old metrics have been peer reviewed but black and Indian men, at least on that platform-at the time of writing-didn't even get a 20% response rate. Literally every other demographic exceeded 20%.

https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/okcupid/howyourraceaff... (archived copy of the 2009 blog post)

This though isn't as clear cut as it seems. Need to normalize for born in America and just got here a year ago. Rudder doesn't normalize the data.

Have there actually been peer reviewed studies, as the OKcupid blog post isn't even normalized for race.

I recently read a book which explores these patterns using real data: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21480734-dataclysm

I'm thinking the problem is local fragmented markets. If people could date across longer distances, then I think the preference would be averaged out a lot better. For example, in the USA, Asian might not be viewed as highly but in Australia, they might be.

Creating accounts to break HN's guidelines with will eventually get your main account banned as well, so please don't do that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The OKCupid data science team released some interesting data on this stuff a long time ago (but still interesting and relevant) that backs up your experience that Asian males have it tough. You have to head to the archives to find the articles - "How your race affects the messages you get": https://web.archive.org/web/20140728212935/http://blog.okcup...

The data was so interesting that they removed most posts related to race from their blog. I genuinely still wonder why.

Because humans today, especially the cyber-anglosphere, have a lot of issues about race and its often easier to avoid talking about it than to risk offending one group or another.

Match.com bought OKC and cleaned up the PR to remove unhappy thoughts.

It's bad for business if anyone knows the truth.

There's a pretty good book by one of the OKC founders that goes into a lot of this data.

https://www.amazon.com/Dataclysm-Identity-What-Online-Offlin...

There's a bunch of good graphs and analysis in there (which matched my anecdotal experience of online dating).

The takeaway for me - if you're a man looking for a woman and you're not in the top 5% of attractiveness for men (really top 2%) then online dating is a waste of your time and you're better off doing pretty much anything else. This is doubly true in skewed dating markets like the bay area (less so in favorable markets like NYC, DC).

There's a lot of 'what you can't say' [0] in that book, sexual selection is skewed in lots of ways people pretend it isn't. I think it'd be better to acknowledge some of these things and consider it in an intellectual way - not so you can leverage it in some sleazy/misogynistic pick-up-artist way, but because understanding how it works helps you know how to behave/show confidence etc. Helps for the aspie-er among us where this doesn't come naturally (and is more important for men seeking women where for better or worse we have to be the ones to figure it out [1]).

On a somewhat related note, this Ted Chiang short story explores some of this and is just generally great: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:vSPLnv...

[0]: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7QZnwKqopo

OkCupid themselves have written about it. Asian males are hit the hardest by the asymmetry of interest.

Here it is: https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/okcupid/raceandattract...

I believe the blog was taken down, but there are a few copies of it online, and the author (Christian Rudder) published "Dataclysm", which contains many of the same insights.

Should take findings with grain of salt. I asked Rudder at a conference if he normalized the results, he said he did not on that blog post. Didn't account for education level, kids, etc. Which may (or may not) had an effect on the results.

I’m sure Asians had the highest education and lowest number of kids and previous marriages, so if anything, normalized data would show Asian males are completely screwed. Normalized height would be interesting, and could explain some of the bias.

Normalizing the data might indeed show that Asian males do even "worse" in online dating. But how dismissive Rudder was of the need to normalize that data was surprising and a bit disturbing as some many people take what is presented as fact and possibly draw incorrect conclusions. I would not be surprised if normalizing for height did account for some of it, but the data should be available so outside people can run their own tests. (and half jokingly, as someone who wears glasses, normalizing for that as well).

As for education and kids, I can see how that can explain the difference between Asian women and Black women's response rate. But again, need a real examination of the data.

It is a very touchy subject, which is unfortunately plagued by both uninformed people and also those who just want to cause pain to to others.

That sounds exploitable, in an arbitrage kind of way. If I were single, female, non-asian, and wanting to attract a guy who was above my level socially or financially, my best bet might be to go for asian males.

That's a very male way of looking at it; the proportion of women who would think like that is vanishingly small.

That happens, and is so few and far between that most of the other males would not notice.

The woman interested in doing that also has men of other races to choose from and the same preferential hierarchy plays out, let alone the numbers.

If I'm a woman who's a 6, and I'm trying to get a man who's an 8, why do I care if the other males notice?

And, sure I have other races to choose from, but if I do, I'm going to get a man who's a 6.

If there was an objective score for attractiveness then women would rate men of the same race +1 higher than the objective rating. There are probably more men of the preferred race at 7 than there are men at 8 for all races.

I don't know what point you are trying to make. I said everything that was relevant.

If your numbering system introduced only now in this reply is regarding physical attractiveness, then women don't have this issue in their own race.

The point is that this doesn't help asian men because it barely makes a dent in the pool of asian men that would ever be exposed to a women with this predilection, as her pool is so much larger and also includes asian men. Even if her pool only included asian men in this strategy, from the perspective of the men, nothing has changed because the odds they will be exposed to it are slim.

My reply is only about the men's UX, not your "arbitrage" from the woman's UX.

If you look at it only from the man's perspective, then it may not make much difference. If you look at it from the woman's, though, it may make a difference to her.

If you can't look at it from her point of view, I don't know how to make my statements make any sense to you.

The answer is yes, her pool is broader. Maybe if you keep repeating it non-asian women will start matching with you.

I'm not asian. I'm married, and happily, so don't think I'm saying this because it affects me one way or the other.

I'm not sure what the problem is, but we seem to continually be talking past each other. I'm tired of it, so I'm out.

I think you’re out of touch then. I see what perspective you are trying to make happen, its not very relevant. The answer was “yes”, three times now. You are trying to make this other Hallmark fanfiction happen thats just isn't the worth entertaining.

>why do I care if the other males notice

This is how I can tell you're not a woman.

The usual direction of arbitrage is for old white men with some money to pick up poor young south-east Asian brides.

For women, finding someone who wants to marry for citizenship that also likes them is probably the best bet.

Statistics on interracial marriage on wikipedia:

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

Indian Americans are an exception to this asymmetry according to wikipedia.

OkCupid had a handful of really interesting blog posts back in the day using data from their service.

Being an Asian American male myself, my friends and I had similar experiences. Asian males have it rough on dating apps. I really think the reduction to text and photos emphasizes racial disadvantages in the dating market, at least in the USA. I had a lot better luck abroad.

I've had a related experience. Ethnically, it's hard to place me by looks, and I get an ok number of matches. However, once I've started chatting with women, some 2 dozen times I've gotten ghosted IMMEDIATELY when they find out where my family is from (it's a country that doesn't get much positive press).

I don't think it's a reflection on women, specifically. I think it's more an indication of how strongly cultural biases are ingrained in all of us.

I do find it interesting that intentional UX choices like allowing people to filter others out by race go pretty much unchallenged in the straight community.

For comparison, Grindr used to allow filtering out other people based on race, but as a result of people pointing out that it not only recognized existing racial biases but also reinforced them, they removed that feature, and connections became more equitable across different racial groups.

On the other hand, straight dating apps don't really seem to care about this. Sometimes companies even gaslight about it--"we put in this filter to allow for people to search for people with a shared background!"--even though these filters are overwhelmingly used to filter out non-whites (except for the occasional white male user filtering exclusively for Asian women).

So what? Attraction isn't a choice. Removing the filter just lets you avoid facing an uncomfortable truth about the world and dating.

The fact that dating and matching patterns actually did change indicates that this isn't about attraction but UX choices that encourage thoughtless biases. Yes, of course Asian men would still have worse outcomes, but those outcomes would be those determined by actual patterns of attraction and not exacerbated by app design. And if someone has to swipe left an extra 10% of the time because they absolutely can't stand Asian guys... I mean, so be it. No one's entitled access to a particular filter.

For point of comparison, most heterosexual dating apps steadfastly refuse to add weight filters, despite them being the most demanded filters (aside from height). Why? Usually there are excuses about how it's impossible to implement or that the people who want weight filters are confused about what they want, but somehow LGBT dating apps all are able to add weight filters without any difficulty or controversy. Why weight filters are considered an undesirable feature in heterosexual dating apps is left as an exercise to the reader.

And dating apps could, in principle, tell the people who want race filters to pound sand just as much as they tell the people who want weight filters to pound sand. The fact that they don't is a political choice.

> Why weight filters are considered an undesirable feature in heterosexual dating apps is left as an exercise to the reader.

I don't get it, why is that?

Straight dating apps suffer from a relative lack of women to men. On net, women dislike being subject to weight filters more than they like the ability to apply them. Not having weight filters results in attracting and retaining more women to your platform, which means more male users and more revenue.

An example of this in action is Hinge. They require users to include height in their bios (and always show it on profiles), but don't have a field for weight.

It's funny how height (a trait which we have very little control over) gets the green card for filtering but weight (a trait we very much have control over) is deemed too offensive to ask for.

I think it's because we know that our weight is completely up to us and that a failure of keeping the weight that is desirable to others is a failure of ourselves. It's a thing we deep down know is our own fault and it scares us. As for height, it's not my fault I'm short or tall, if you don't like it, meh, I didn't screw up or anything.

Is it market dynamics in action? Someone above said that women hate the idea of having a weight filter, and they tend to have the power on the market here (because they are more "in demand"). I know many men hate being subjected to a height filter, but they tend to have less power on the market (because most are a dime a dozen).

Yep. Most intrinsic theories of "why not have a weight filter" fail because they can't explain the many online dating sites (primarily LGBT) that do offer a weight filter, because it's very obviously a major factor in attraction that's easily quantifiable. The theory that the available filters are driven by which market participants have market power, on the other hand, does.

Perhaps not coincidentally, initial attraction is also a poor predictor of long-term relationship success, which most people want eventually.

This is absolutely right, and is not being highlighted enough in these threads. Outside of the dating sites, the numbers and the reality is not so bad. People fall in love with personalities, and personalities are presented to people longitudinally. In other words, it takes months to really get to know someone's personality. They can become attractive in ways that a dating profile would never show.

Dating apps have artificially forced people into making superficial choices.

I actually am looking into some really interesting data about match rate between different personality types and it seems like people with compatible with personalities match at a higher rate. Not sure about long term success but it's pretty crazy that I'm seeing that in match rate.

Well that would be making perfect sense. Once initial attraction wears off (and it always will), what remains is personality. The bigger the difference, the more conflicts. Whoever came up with 'opposites attract' didn't do a followup after couple of years.

I'm a cofounder of a dating app and we actually resisted letting people filter for race. Not sure about the impact on metrics but it is our current position. We let people filter on nationality instead because that speaks to the person's values and world views. We also let people filter based on personality and language.

It's been interesting and fun trying to fix what's wrong with online dating. The big thing being the misalignment of interest. https://www.fairytrail.app/reinventing-the-online-dating-bus...

It seems to me that not being able to filter people for things like race is an antipattern designed to increase engagement. IE waste my time trying to find what I want. Unless you're willing to not optimize your income, I doubt you'll be able to solve online dating.

Isn't "solv[ing] online dating" a business antipattern?

Yes, exactly. :)

> The big thing being the misalignment of interest.

Could you elaborate what you mean by this?

I'm currently out of the market, but your app looks more interesting than the typical one. Best of luck with it!

To state the obvious, I know some of us white folks have despicable views on race. But, surely we’re not the only people using the race filters on dating apps. Maybe in the most innocent of ways as a proxy for cultural values but it’s used by non-whites too.

Anecdotal, but I have a decent number of (East) Asian female + other ethnicity male couples in my social circle. But only one (East) Asian male + white female couple.

I'm wondering if the advent of things like BTS will alter dynamics, as quite a few non-Asian women seem to go crazy over K-pop boyband idols. Then again, I'm pretty sure if you're ridiculously good looking, extremely fit, and hugely successful like a boyband idol singer, you're likely to do well on the dating scene regardless of ethnicity.

From what I heard while living in Asia, some of the boyband idols used drugs to rape girls because they were super frustrated about their regular dating success. So apparently, even being rich and good looking is not enough.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/nov/29/k-pop-stars-ja...

I don't think the Burning Sun scandal implies anything about male idols success (or lack of) in the dating market. It's more about them abusing their power/influence/wealth if anything.

The dynamics of dating in Asia amongst native population Asians is a whole different story than that experienced by Asian-Americans in the US (or other Western countries). The demographics there are largely homogenous and expectations by far are that you're most likely going to date and marry someone of your own ethnicity.

If you're a Korean man in Korea, you're probably not at any disadvantage on the domestic dating scene because of your ethnicity, you probably have close to zero expectation that you'll be dating someone who is not Korean, or at least not Asian.

I'm pretty sure rich and famous men do that outside of Asia too. They're not doing it because they can't find women who would sleep with them.

> Well after 5 years of using it I can say that I have had zero White/Black/Latino women ever chat with me.

This must be a horrible experience. This seems like a good reason to stop using the website or app and maybe to write to the developers about why they're losing you.

> To be honest, it completely changed my perspective of women altogether.

Not sure if that was the intention, but it sounds like you're changing how you see all women. However your experience comes from women whose profile you liked, who do online dating via a given app.

Do you think this is something the app developers can fix?

Technically it’s their app and they’re providing bad user experience to that particular user.

The interactions in the app are likely very structured (maybe viewing profiles in a specific context). I’d guess experimenting with a different form could change how users interact.

Obviously we can’t change things like an individual’s attraction and that’s not the focus. App devs sould act on larger patterns, i.e. if the app devs receive a significant number of reports that their users are feeling excluded, they should go to work. Maybe change something small and see if it helps.

Wow, we are blaming app developers for a lack of success in dating. Ok maybe it has an effect, but I can think of a ton of other things that would be worth addressing fist.

> I can think of a ton of other things that would be worth addressing fist.

Could you elaborate?

Dress well, have good fitting clothes. Look groomed and clean. Stand with a decent posture. Try to say something interesting in your profile. Look as if you have your life in order. Look as if you have interests, especially one that might be interesting to a potential partner.

I have no reason to suspect that the user is not doing the above.

And from the point of devs it doesn't matter. As I wrote earlier, I believe devs (or maybe product owners) should act if they receive a sufficient number of reports like this.

Sexual marketplaces have different set of parameters. Whatever the popular media says women are attracted by high social status male. Higher social status can be taller/muscular men, richer men, famous men or men with many girlfriends(proxy for higher status).

I don't know how many signals for higher social status your profile ticks. But in my opinion improving any one of the signals can improve dating outcome.

Maybe you came across as someone who, just for instance, might put the details of women you like into a spreadsheet. That is very unnerving.

So is your argument that asian women are into that kind of thing but it is anathema to white, black, and latino women?

There's a certain subset of people who prefer to only date within their race. That can seriously shrink the candidate pool, and might make a woman give someone the benefit of the doubt.

Is this the highest ranked comment in this thread because GP is a weirdo or because his experience rings true to many other people reading the comments?

(or, hilariously, both)

Frankly I wondered if it was a reference to the infamous "Anon puts all the m'ladies into a spreadsheet" screenshot.

That’s happening but your ranking in the app can be manipulated and this can change your matches.

Without manipulating your ranking you are not being shown at all to those other women.

They never see your profiles.

The apps are just as much to blame as the cultural preferences. (The cultural preferences distort what ‘attractiveness’ is and influence your ranking, and for you this also dilutes the potential of interest in your profile, so of the people less likely to be looking for you only a few of them see you and reject, the others never saw you to consider.)

As you can distort this ranking (literally just act like you think a hot girl would act on a dating app, ignoring everyone that matches them for a few weeks, and also selectively swiping to try matching someone), you should redirect that energy towards the apps more so than the women.

Guys and unattractive women get frustrated and end up swiping more and entertaining what they can get - casting a larger net. This puts them all in the same bucket and why you see more of each other, and people looking specifically for your attributes, ie. same race. It is aiming to mirror the physical world but has flaws because it lacks inputs available in the physical world.

Topics like this are like minefields, especially online, but I had to comment just to say that sucks and I hope it changes.

For what it's worth, outside of dating apps, I see men of all backgrounds (including Asian men) have success with women of other backgrounds if they look after themselves, are confident, friendly, put themselves out there and take initiative. Those things are required for men of any background I guess, and men of some backgrounds definitely have to get it right more than others, and even when they do, their odds can still be worse, but still.

The dance scene is a good example, it has lots of interracial couples of all flavors. If you're interested in meeting more Latino and Afro women, check out some Latin and Afro dance classes and it won't take long before you get to know a bunch. (I appreciate there's an ongoing global pandemic, jussayin', I'm sure there are other examples like that)

Just a completely useless anecdote from a stranger online ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Good God nephew, delete this.

Ironically IIUC replying to comments destroys the author’s ability to delete them.

Crud, that’s news to me. OTOH couldn’t really happen to a nicer guy.

What are you talking about?

True love.

What is the evolutionary benefit of the 'Asian look'? If women are inclined to choose other looks how can it be that men with Asian features have obviously been chosen for thousands of years?

Well, the East-Asian variant of the EDAR gene seems to have been strongly selected for: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/15/science/studying-recent-h...

Like most genes, it affects all sorts of systems at once, so pinning down which of its changes from the ancestral type are most responsible for the selection is a very difficult problem. Empirically it has clearly been a successful variant, though.

I don't think it's obvious that those men were chosen for thousands of years. In those long-gone societies, did the women really get to pick men based on looks? Maybe they didn't get to pick at all, or maybe they picked based on survival resources.

In most cases, it isn't even possible for male looks and female looks to be separately selected. That can only happen if a sex-specific gene promoter is in front of the gene. Most traits are selected without regard to sex.

So if selection by looks is mostly a matter of men choosing women, traits that create attractive women will spread through the population even if those traits are also changing male appearance in ways that women dislike.

Isn’t it blatantly obvious? For thousands of years women could only pick from one of a few guys in her village, if she could pick at all. Now a woman can download an app and swipe through hundreds of men in minutes. That allows her to pick what she wants.

Asian men do the worst of any group. I would chalk it up to ambiguity of cultural compatibility. But as with all these posts, it's hard to say anything without being able to see your profile.

You say > I have progressive and liberal values

but also say

> it completely changed my perspective of women altogether.

which, granted, may be justified by your experiences but off the bat this is giving me a set of weird assumptions.

Sociological point aside, you might do better to improve other aspects of your life before reaching some fixed "perspective of women".

Dating's not easy, but it gets much easier if you improve your life holistically (and especially the things you are weakest in). Photos are poor quality? Dress like a slob? Overweight? Aren't witty? These are all things that can be improved with effort, even if it is challenging to do so.

It's really easy to come up with some explanation for a lack of dating success, especially a generalized fatalistic thesis from a limited data sample; it's much more difficult to take some time to figure out why you're unsuccessful, and then put in the work to fix it.

My 2c. Good luck

Sure but it's going to be 10x harder and still not be as successful as people who were just born with attractive genes and did nothing.

"people who were just born with attractive genes"

Have you ever met someone who seemed naturally good looking? Usually they care a lot about clothes, accessories, and are passionate about style and appearance. One guy I know always enjoys going "thrifting" at secondhand stores, and is incredibly enthusiastic and helpful if you go with him. So his success is related as much to work as it is to luck.

There's a lot that goes into being attractive in the same way there's a lot that goes into being "smart" (e.g. someone with a phd may be born smart but they worked incredibly hard to earn that phd).

People are and can be naturally good looking. Many override average/mediocre genetics with makeup, money, status, gym time, etc. Unless extremely disfigured by genes, being appealing (enough) is a matter of time and effort.

All things considered, dating is easy for women.