It's an unpleasant and politically incorrect idea that despite clearly being the experience of most normal men you talk to about these things, is probably career-damaging to academics who would research it honestly so you see it backed up in that regard either by amateur blogs or very cautiously worded "respectable" research.
Think of harems in the old days and alpha males in some species in the animal kingdom.
Tinder and the like (so the theory goes) apply a massive magnifier affect to the natural tendency of "elite" men to clear up.
Side note: the tactics of average men mentioned elsewhere in these comments such as swiping on everything, and similar techniques are effects of this phenomenon, not the cause.
https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2017/12/19/the-...
The rest of the world should worry, too. There are countless examples throughout history where wars have been started to put a lid on internal unrest. What's more, unmarried men are inevitably the ones sent to fight, so it's a solution that kills (pun intended) two birds with one stone.
Maybe a better question is: why are there so many more men than women on dating services? The ratio seems completely out of whack. It's not like there are 10 boys born per every girl, so somewhere along the way the women are filtering out. Perhaps women prefer face to face interaction?
These studies seem to be focused on a symptom instead of the cause.
Yes, that's the entire point of the original question and my response.
These comments are regarding mainstream dating platforms where male to female participation is reasonably balanced (or at least not exponentially imbalanced as you seem to believe). That massive imbalance is present in the matching.
One answer can be found in census data. The number of childless male adults is almost twice of that of female adults, but the desire to have children has been found to be identical among women and men.
What's certainly clear, and the data released by OKCupid bears out, that mean invariably send messages to women much younger, while women are more likely to message someone closer to their age.
Maybe the real advice to men is to pursue women closer to their age and leave the 20 somethings alone.
The Pareto principle pops up in so many places, I don't think you can justify an arbitrary interpretation about harems and alphas on top of the principle. We don't know why the power law keeps popping up in earthquakes, mass of stars, size of trees in a forest and a whole slew of natural phenomena. When we finally understand what natural force is shaping these distributions, it'll stop being a nice fairy story which contributes to other stories.
I wasn't around in the 60s, but the cynic in me suspects that even within hippie circles the 80/20 rule was still in effect in the dating game. Because the same thing is happening today within progressive/SJW circles - the "male feminist" types tend to proceed directly to the friendzone, regardless of the claimed preferences of progressive women.
The culture permeates every level. The "alpha male" culture benefited most men in 2015-2016, even if they didn't capitalize on pointless sex. The free love movement expanded it's own movement into most parts of the culture. These patterns aren't 'optional forces' that only the rich have enough spare time to participate in.
The culture force of elitism is the current phase and idolizing the rich is eternal in america.
There's a bigger picture than the current myth.
Clearly that sort of behavior is just further feeding into the dynamic.
Women getting flooded with bad matches hurts everyone.
Says who? The men who do best with women are the most physically attractive. No other demographic does better. You can have $10M in the bank and still not elicit the same kind of attraction as the stereotypical tall, dark and handsome white man.
Yes, basically massive "wealth inequality" among men as expressed by Gini coefficient: https://qz.com/1051462/these-statistics-show-why-its-so-hard...
The key factor is that dating app userbases are often 80% to 90% men. Couple this with the inequality others point to, and you get a very toxic outcome. Most women are absolutely overwhelmed, and most men are starving for crumbs of attention.
The experiences are so wildly different as to be unimaginable to most people. So people don't develop strong empathy for their counterparts.
Outside them the problems aren't quite as bad.
I don't understand what you're confused about.
Men swipe on a large proportion of women.
Women swipe on a small proportion of men.
So most women's swipes will be reciprocated, most men's won't be.
Not sure why you can't see how it would work?
It might be interesting to run a dating service that limited signups to an even gender ratio. Or at least didn't let the imbalance grow more than a modest amount. Of course then most men would complain that they can't even sign up. You'd have to be very aggressive about culling idle accounts.
In fact, rather than hard-coding those rate limits (or generating them algorithmically from the gender distribution of accounts) it might be viable to let each user decide on the limit themselves. It may not be a good idea to show users the specific rate limit that another user has chosen, though, as that number might give all sorts of weird signalling about how "desirable" they consider themselves to be.
For the men who were using the apps (and talking about it) in my social circle it doesn't seem like it improved much from this side of the gender divide. YMMV of course.
In any case, if the supermodels can set this spamminess/selectiveness parameter for themselves, they can tune it to a value where they don't get clobbered (unless they like the validation of being clobbered).
I never used matches. I assume this is some variation on the "like" or "swipe-right" system. Women get bombarded with these. Conversely, women don't a high ratio of high quality messages.
I maybe looked at the compatibility score if it's there (e.g. OKCupid), read through the profiles, and if there was enough to grab my interest I'd write a message that at least makes some reference to what's mentioned in their profile. I got a response 8-9/10 times. Personally I think I look average enough and don't have amazing conversation skills, I just put in the work to send thoughtful messages.
As to why the match system doesn't work, the sheer amount of noise in online dating (and over-representation of men, I think) is such that these "match" systems amount to glancing through a ton of pictures and picking the best-looking ones. Particularly since profiles are best fairly compact, and don't tell you a ton about a person at the onset. You're a complete stranger to women on these platforms, with 0 trust value to your name, and so actually having a meaningful interaction is a great way to expedite that trust. You won't get there with "hey babe", "nice pic", "nice outfit", "nice smile". I mean, maybe you can if you're one of the fortunate few to cut through the noise and get someone's interest on the strength of your "playboy" looking mug. But most likely, it's a weak approach.
EDIT: worth taking a good picture of yourself. Get a second opinion on it.
Wow, this 1000%. Every time I hear a guy complaining about how bad their online dating experience is I ask to see their pictures. It's almost always cringeworthy what they selected.
Another underlying problem is that people who aren't of above average attractiveness don't like having their photo taken. Then they have less pictures to select from and end up settling for some really awful ones.
As parent poster stated, please get feedback from multiple people on your photos, particularly people of the gender you're targeting. You will most likely be surprised at their feedback.
How often are you having these conversations?
Dating apps have all converged on being swipe-to-match based. Generally you cannot just try to send a message to start a conversation anymore. The option of sending a thoughtful message to get a conversation started is just gone.
It's really not hard to look up. See here: https://help.okcupid.com/article/40-how-to-send-an-introduct...
The only thing that's changed since I used it is they want you to hit "like" on their profile before you send a message. That's not an impediment. The option to send messages is not gone. Use it.
This means that there at best only a 1-10% chance of a woman even seeing a quality message directed at her, given the sheer volume of garbage being directed at them.
It's the same reason why you don't notice the genuinely good deals in the massive amounts of advertisements you're bombarded with every day. The sheer volume of noise just makes the whole system far more useless than you would expect.
I imagine a scenario that could happen frequently is that man new to online dating signs up, initially puts good effort into messaging select women he finds attractive, gets ignored a gazillion times, then throws in the towel and starts shotgunning. Or gives up on online dating altogether.
Different use cases.
Men are there to find a date. They mostly fail because the vast majority of women are not looking for a date.
Reapply whats happening to real life. Vast majority of women don't engage men on online dating. That's the same offline. Women can find their dates through their social circles; social circles tend to be small compared to online dating but does the job.
Million $ question, what is online dating for women? It's about self-esteem or new choices. Say she's in a relationship with a guy and it's not exactly working out. Well she can join online dating and look at the options.
There's a break point around age 25-30 though. That's the age where women lose the driver seat in dating and men get the seat. Yet women don't know it or something. This creates a divide that really confuses women, they've enjoyed their control. They still see tons of connections. Surely they are still driving? nope.
This is what leads to historic low marriage, fertility, and birth rate.
So bumble was created to reverse it. women have to make the first move. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bumble_(app)
Everyone knows how that's going. Badly.
The natural inclination based on this alone would be to be picky.
This will then set up other second order and third order effects.
Average looking and better women seem to get huge amounts of matches: if you're better than average this can be hundreds per day in a big city.
Going by my own experience and friends experiences, as a guy, even if you're better than average looks with a good job, nice photos etc, are lucky to get a handful of matches per week.
So what I don't understand then is if all these women are getting huge amounts of matches, how can men be getting less matches? Is it literally only the top 0.1% of men that are getting the majority of the matches?
i.e. are women who are say 7-8/10 on the looks scale only matching with guys who are 9.5/10 on the looks scale, so guys who are 7-8/10 getting zero matches?