The takeaway for me is profile pictures, physical appearance and class/status signifiers (vacations, hobbies, nice things in/around the picture) were all that mattered and if someone was sold on that all you really had to do was not get in your own way by saying something stupid.

To use a property analogy: if I am not the highest offer on a house, I probably won't get it. Doesn't matter if I have a trust fund or work for minimum wage (effort put into the offer) my offer wasn't accepted.

Similarly if I'm the seller, I can decide "No, actually I don't want to sell my house to BlackRock, I'd rather sell it to this young family" and that's entirely my choice. This choice might leave money on the table, but at least I get the warm fuzzy feels inside for doing what I think is best.

What you describe sounds like you want some kind of "thank you for putting in some effort" but you decide the amount of effort to invest, the other party owes you nothing.

It's hard to say which is worse: the messages that say that they haven't put any thought into you at all, or the messages that say they have exactly one thought about you -- and everybody else.

Everybody gets poor payoff percentages. You play if you think the game is worth the candle.

While if a guy wants a proper conversation... get lucky punk?

I'm told it's different in other places but I suspect that has more to do with the men than the women.

You're saying the "it's not hard" situation is similarly demoralizing to what women face? Sure I guess.

But BitwiseFool was describing a situation where it's extremely hard to get a reply, and that is much more demoralizing because there's no easy fix.

My suspicion is that I worked to make myself interesting, and worth conversing with. And I see a lot of comments here that betray a deep distrust of women, with a ton of stereotyping and lack of empathy. I hear tons of complaints from women about men's profiles, and it never has to do with looks or money.

I've sometimes thought of opening a dating profile consultancy. I may be completely off base, but I believe that in a lot of cases, men can do better without changing jobs or their appearance. And my first piece of free advice is that if you're blaming women, women aren't going to like you.

In what sort of ways are you “ interesting”? Genuinely curious. FWIW most advice I’ve seen regarding advice for dating profiles (particularly for guys) involves removing anything that might signify personality and to make it as formulaic as possible. Your pictures all have to be the right things, the profile description can’t be too short or too long, and can only say certain things, etc. I think on these sort of apps it’s almost seen as positive to be as basic as possible. Even I find myself suspicious of profiles that say to much or try to stand out now.

The other piece of advice I see almost always has to do with quality of pictures, which is understandable, but let’s be real, if I had the kind of life where I was happy all the time, doing cool things and taking pictures with friends, I probably wouldn’t need to be on this app ;)

So many women I've met complain that they start the date with "so tell me about yourself" and get, "uh I dunno. I like to play video games." (Not that there's anything wrong with video games but at least have some stories to tell. Maybe she'll also play. Jackpot. Unless you start telling her she's not a real games.)

I do lots of things. I act, i juggle, i run marathons. The tricky part is phrasing it in a way that doesn't come off as "I'm too cool an expect you to shut up and listen."

That is of course just what works for me, and for the kind of women I like. (Talking about dating sites is a really easy topic of conversation on a first date, so I hear a lot.)

If they're telling you to be dull, maybe that works for other men with other women. But to me it sounds like a recipe for a boring date.

I try to go in with the attitude that if we do nothing more than spend a few minutes chatting nicely over coffee, it will have been fun and worth my time. That kind of attitude seems best for making myself seem worthwhile and fun, so that she wants more.

If someone told you they were having a hard time buying a house and all their offers were silently rejected replying "The sellers owe you nothing" might be true, but it is beside the point.

No, that's an aberration perpetrated by software. The same problem has manifested in interviewing. Maybe you're thinking of "nobody owes you sex" instead?

If you greet a person in real life or over a call and they intentionally ignore you, they are being rude. Obviously, if you're being rude first, that's different. They can say "hey" back, or "sorry, I'm not interested" or "kind of busy right now, can we pick this up later?" There are plenty of options.

I understand that the way these apps are set up, responding like this isn't a winning strategy. Despite what the Internet would have you believe, there is a minimum social bar when there's a human on the other end of a comm channel.

(Looking for hookups on apps is, I imagine, an entirely different ballgame, and I have no idea what works or doesn't work there.)

Now? I just gave up. I have better things to do then spend hundreds of hours without a single conversation going anywhere. Online dating is a useless black hole.

Towards the end of my time on OkCupid (where I met my wife!), I wanted to only compose five messages per day. I did this to reduce my time on the platform. (Online dating services are masters of dark patterns and addicting behaviors.) However, even though those messages were short, since they were bespoke to the profiles I was looking at, those messages took time to write.

I found myself in this predicament where I burned too much time looking at profiles of attractive women with bland (to me) profiles. So, I thought "what if I hid the photos and focused on profiles I thought were interesting?"

Three things happened when I did that:

1. Writing short, but targeted, messages became a LOT easier because I was focusing on connecting with people I probably wanted to spend more time with,

2. Since I never "saw" who I was messaging when I wrote those messages, me never getting a response from them hurt way less (since I never met them to begin with!), and

3. When I un-hid the photos of the women who responded to me, _they were still attractive!_ As it happens, I learned that I'm attracted to smart, pretty women with personalities.

I suppose this won't work for people who want to do the nasty with as many hot people as they can find. There were, like men, smart, attractive women who didn't know how to craft an online dating profile and got filtered out from this approach.

What I do know is that my response and date rate went WAY up after hiding photos and responding to interesting profiles, and my mental health towards online dating improved significantly.