More Orwellian still, they edited articles that contained data inconvenient to the politically correct narrative and elite ideology.

Edit: Here's an example.

“I’m bisexual.” REALITY: 80% of self-identified bisexuals are only interested in one gender.

https://web.archive.org/web/20170307114207/https://theblog.o...

That's not a subjective claim. It's literally based on revealed preferences. Match removed that section and updated the article with "This post has was originally published in 2010 and has since been updated to reflect OkCupid’s current values."

I don't see how the bisexual statistic is politically incorrect.

It makes sense, considering the self-professed "bisexuals" I've known, which are well known as well in liberal-leaning circles:

1. Young women who pretend to be Bi to get more attention from Men

2. People who pretend to be Bi to avoid having to completely come out of the closet

There's actually a saying in the gay community for the latter, "Bi now, gay later!"

> There's actually a saying in the gay community for the latter, "Bi now, gay later!"

I think by gay community you meant asshole gay people, I've been waiting for a very long while now to turn gay (I'm a bisexual dude).

> I don't see how the bisexual statistic is politically incorrect.

Not politically incorrect, just deeply ignorant.

OK this just feels like this topic is an excuse for you to trot out tired tropes about bi people while scare-quoting the word to delegitimize the orientation.

What you're doing is called bi erasure. It happens from straight and gay people. Bi doesn't necessarily mean attraction or experience is exactly equally split. For some people it is, for some people it isn't. Some people may change how they self describe. None of that means people aren't legitimately bi.

I am not trying to de-legitimize anything. Nothing I said changes (or can change) your truth.

My post was based on what I've been told by both Gay and Bi people (the latter, several Bi people I knew complained about the first item with the young women). So if Straight and Gay people can participate in Bi Erasure, so too can Bi people I suppose.

I feel like that sort of expression encourages biphobia; even if 'genuine' (whatever that means) bi people are rare, an expression like "Bi now, gay later" perfectly plays into long lasting tropes such as bisexuality being "just a phase", something which bisexuals such as myself have spent a long time trying to overcome.

To add on that, studies like the ones mentioned only reveal so much; there are a few good reasons why one might only search for one gender or the other online and in a particular place.

I know some bi people who seem to switch their main preference every few years. That could also look like this.

And as for the second, that may not be a conscious decision, right? People discover more about their own orientation over time.

I think it's better labeled "heteroflexible", or engaging in physical contact/sex with a same-sex person (for the dopamine), but have no "romantic" attraction to same-sex people.

There are plenty of bisexual people I know that have open arrangements who are in relationships with a partner of one sex and are only permitted by that partner to date people of another sex by that partner (because fear of competition/jealousy reasons).

Some people only want romantic relationships with a partner of one sex while hookups with another. Some people have bi-cycles. Some people are attracted to a person of their own gender 80% of the time and another 20% of the time.

Many bi people aren't out or completely honesty with their dating history because they have to put up with the insecurities and stereotypes trotted out by the chronically ignorant from both straight and gay communities. The lack of support and understanding is one of the reasons why rates of depression and anxiety are higher for bisexual people. Imagine being questioned about your preferences and asked to make a choice by a group of people that were held to a similar level of cultural-interrogation by heterosexuals. Bisexuals are a minority of a minority, however, I am glad the attitude of thinking bisexuality is secretly indecisiveness is dying off.

Ugh, can we please stop with these damaging stereotypes about bi people?

There are plenty of acceptable ways to be bisexual, and while some people might fit the boxes you described, there are lots who don't.

These antiquated views are a large part of why, as a bisexual man, I mostly keep that to myself. Coming out is a big deal with a significant amount of associated emotional stress, doubly so when others try to rationalize how you're not a "real" bisexual ("you've only dated women, how can you be bi!?" or "oh you just like fooling around with dudes, you're not really bi" etc).

When I was young (teens to early 20s) I self identified as gay. And I can remember not being very convinced by the existence of genuinely bi people.

Then I fell in love with a woman, still happily monogamously married to after many years.

These days I would self identify as human. But I guess you could call me bi: I still find attractive men attractive.

I'm not sure what I would seek these days if I were single.

Whats inconvinient to the pollitically correct narrative is people with 0 scientific literacy making bold claims about society based on surveys on extremely sampled social studies.

Doing a study on how "dateable" black women are based on a specific dating app in 2010 is like making claims on everyones eating habits based on a survey on a Burger king drive through. It will probably not be a very good survey.

They also took down the whole blog, people only remember the weird survey because it was an incel talking point seconds after it came out, specially in black pill groups arguing that giving up was the only alternative because OkCupid had "proved" that love was impossible for some and hypergamy or some other nonsense.

Would it be ok if they warned that it's just for entertainment?

I enjoy reading these types of articles, and in my next project, I was planning to do something similar.

> Would it be ok if they warned that it's just for entertainment?

I mean they were always ok, but the problem is presenting some silly fun data analysis as "science".

If you counted how many people have red hats in your way to work and publish it as a blog it can be fun. If suddenly far right groups start making posts about how your red hat stats correlate with immigration and theft statistics then your post is not the problem, but there is a problem.

same with the OkCupid blog. I have 0 issue with their work (albeit they could show their work cause a lot looked incredibly amateurish), but the talking points that came from it are still being repeatedly wrongly 10 years later and did real damage.

"presenting some silly fun data analysis as "science""

Their silly data analysis had a sample that was probably orders of magnitude larger than any cohort an university paper could dream of getting their hands on, but yeah, it was just a silly fun data analysis.

> Their silly data analysis had a sample that was probably orders of magnitude larger than any cohort an university paper could dream of getting their hands on

and yet their sample was incredibly biased despite it being large. A big set of data still churns out bad results.

Most of their blog posts did not show the data, how they normalised it, percentage of each group. They just run regression on it and anything with p<00.5 that seemed fun was published. Which was fun, but its not good science, its hardly science at all.

There is a reason why blog posts and published results have different standards (and also why most sociological/psychological results are impossible to reproduce having one of the largest reproduction crisis of any science)

> They just run regression on it and anything with p<00.5 that seemed fun was published.

How do you think science operates in actual practice? OkCupid at least has a sample large enough that you can commit all sorts of statistical sins and still produce halfway decent conclusions, unlike your run-off-the-mill n=10 study.

So, after sampling the interactions of 1.51 million people, and analysing the amount of messages an average tall woman receives compared to an average short woman, the conclusion that "taller women, on average, are less attractive to the average male than short women" is invalid?

Please, tell me how this is absurd, when it's basically what you see in real life. Or that men that make more money are more attractive to women, on average? This delusion of denying facts when it does not conform to your own sense of what is "fair" is just childish.

> Analysing the amount of messages an average tall woman receives compared to an average short woman, the conclusion that "taller women, on average, are less attractive to the average male than short women" is invalid?

It isn't invalid, but its also not science. If you have 1000 short girls and 3 girls over 6'4 well you got an issue of normalising values. Where variance of results are more affected near the edge cases than the median.

The problem is not the results, its that on a vaccum they are contextless, and that is what makes the silly fun data anlysis.

> Or that men that make more money are more attractive to women, on average?

Yeah because if they wanted to date someone broke they could find them outside. Online dating is a fraction of their total dating behaviour, therefore conclusions are not conclusive.

If you want actual studies about it, women prefer a stable job over wealth. Aka a dude with 100k normal salary has a better chance than an unemplyed dude with 1 million dollars. This is something that cannot be found through OkCupid cause networth isn't even a question or filter on their analysis.

> This delusion of denying facts

I am not denying facts, i have just done science past running a database through matlab.

because they're all people who signed up for okcupid, who were actively using okcupid to date at the time.

the amount of pressure this puts on the sampling is hard to understate. not only are you looking at a highly truncated set of interpersonal dynamics (what you can tell about someone based on a dating profile is far less than what you can tell by meeting real people in meat space), you're specifically selecting for people who have been as of yet unsuccessful IRL. you're also selecting for people who wish to take a fairly serious shortcut around personal interaction.

given these factors, it would be both crazy and stupid to believe you can generalize about human nature anything you get from a dating app.

as for "what you see in real life", might I suggest that you, yourself, are also constrained to a perspective that doesn't necessarily match other people's perspectives, and that maybe, just maybe, you are also seeing a biased sample of the world which is both the result and cause of difficulties with interpersonal interactions?

An analogy would be to conclude, after going to a Mensa meeting, that most smart people are socially inept :)

> the conclusion that "taller women, on average, are less attractive to the average male than short women" is invalid

I'd say it's premature given that a lot of women don't want to date men shorter than them, so I can see men messaging them less just because they'd assume they were wasting their time.

> nd yet their sample was incredibly biased despite it being large.

I gotta ask, in case what way is the sample of a few millions of people who want to date 'incredibly' biased?

Slightly biased I might buy, but how on earth can you make the leap that people looking for dates via a matchmaking site is not at least slightly representable of people looking for dates?

Online dating already mostly skews towards collage age. Secondly apps like OkCupid with long forms will self select the users who are not willing to disclose that information, don't wanna spend the time, or won't engage seriously with the form.

So you will have mostly a group of 20 year olds, who are willing to answer a lot of questions. It doesn't matter how big the pot is, thats not a random sample of society.

> So you will have mostly a group of 20 year olds, who are willing to answer a lot of questions. It doesn't matter how big the pot is, thats not a random sample of society.

Is that all? That doesn't make it "incredibly" biased.

I mean, looking at your example of "black women being the least desirable on OkCupid", it's easy enough to check if it applies only to 20 year olds who are willing to answer lots of questions or if that correlation actually exists outside of that group[1].

Your way, of simply dismissing it instead of regarding it as a data point that can be further investigated is the opposite of science.

[1] OkCupid certainly had the data, and on one of the blogs I recall seeing their distribution of ages, and it was not dominated by the 20-30 age group, even if they were a majority. It would have been easy for OkCupid to redo that desirability analysis for particular age groups.

The sample size is, honestly, mostly irrelevant for these 'headline' type analyses. A good sample of a few hundred will get you a strong estimate, while a biased sample of a few million will get you a bad one.

The classic illustration is the Literary Digest poll of the 1936 Presidential Election. They got over two million respondents and confidently predicted a heavy Roosevelt loss. George Gallup got a comparatively tiny but well sampled set of respondents and correctly estimated the Roosevelt victory. The magazine's problem was partly sampling bias (their readers were richer than the average American, amongst other things) and partly non-response bias (they got a return rate of ~25%, which is pretty good, but probably disproportionately from the most politically engaged of their readership, who hated Roosevelt).

I don't know how bad the sample is here for extrapolating to 'all those seeking dates', but the size is a distraction - the sampling is all.

(This isn't necessarily true if you're making individual profiles, searching for rare phenomena, or something else which is more in the 'big data' than 'social statistics' space, and which genuinely needs that much training data. It's also not true if you're studying the site members themselves, for whom the site members are a perfect (non-) sample. The latter is true for the in-house data science team themselves, but we shouldn't just assume their experience will extend to the rest of the world).

Why was OP flagged and mass reported?

You had a sensible reply but now most can’t even see the discussion. Dang really needs to get this place back on track

I would assume because it skirts quite close to some of the comment guideline rules

for example:

>Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies, generic tangents, and internet tropes.

I assume the use of orwellian, and the attempt at bringing in political correctness probably raised some flags.

I had a sensible reply but tbh I have discussed those blog posts multiple times in this site, so it gets to a point where 10 years in they are still being wrongly discussed you just wanna report and move on with your day.

It's back now, so I think it shows the system working. Controversial posts like this one used to just die and disappear forever but now with "vouch" option some things deserving come back to life. Not perfect obviously, but on the right track IMHO.

When do you get vouch capability?

I think it's over 500 karma?

Far from your Burger King straw men, there's even a very famous study, out of the UK if I'm not mistaken, that confirmed the thesis of black women being the least attractive group across the whole spectrum of major ethnic groups. I mean, there must be one group, out of all, that would score lower than the others ain't there? Reality doesn't have to be politically correct at the end of the day.

Source or it wont be discussed.

But aside from that, and the inherent assumption that beauty standards are universal and biological which is a pretty big assumption.

A slight societal preference does not lead to the conclusions people drew from the article.

To give an example, taller men have a higher chance of being promoted. Fortune 500 CEOs are disproportionately tall compared to the general population. As a society we still promote meritocracy, and working hard. Not telling people who are 5'4 to just give up and be unemployed cause they will never be the CEO of Ford Motor company.

> To give an example, taller men have a higher chance of being promoted. Fortune 500 CEOs are disproportionately tall compared to the general population. As a society we still promote meritocracy, and working hard. Not telling people who are 5'4 to just give up and be unemployed cause they will never be the CEO of Ford Motor company.

Now you're moving the goalposts, which shows you knew your original claim was wrong. "It didn't happen, and if it did they deserved it" indeed.

It's a first principal in liberal ideology that all races and genders are equally attractive , intelligent, and are equal in any other positive attribute imaginable and only differ in skin color and gender identity. Further, all people are roughly equal in all characteristics and the only thing that differentiates them is upbringing, access to opportunity and systemic discrimination toward or against them.

No amount of empirical data matters because it is a first principal which the whole rest of the political ideology relies upon. If someone does not accept this as a first principal and is willing to examine empirical data that contradicts it and draw the conclusion that all people are not equal, then they are no longer a liberal.

That’s not it at all. What people are saying is that attractiveness is subjective, and nobody’s preferences are more or less valid than others’. Where people get into trouble is when they start making blanket statement that the world does / should operate according to their preferences, at which point people who prefer differently start rolling their eyes.

It’s not acknowledging differences that are the problem. It is things like the assignment of value judgements and other stuff that people erroneously attribute to those differences.

Strangely, There doesn't have to be just one with a lower score than the others.

One of the weirdest things about being human is that our preferences are neither rational nor consistent. The classic example in behavioural economics is with ice-cream flavors. If I prefer chocolate to strawberry and strawberry to vanilla, it doesn't follow that I prefer chocolate to vanilla. The preferences aren't transitive, and there doesn't exist a total preferences order.

Thats a very interesting point that I've never considered. Where can I read more about that? Is there a study you can link me to?

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11483173/ is one such study.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/preferences/#Tra has an overview, note especially the paragraph about pair-wise comparisons.

But economists assume that preferences have a total order otherwise there wouldn't be a utility curve.

Economists assume a utility curve in the same way that physicists assume spherical cows. They are a useful abstraction which help explain many things, but don't reflect reality completely.

https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/BehavioralEconomics.html

"incel" and "black pill" terminology didn't even exist in 2010.

incel was coined in 1997. also the ideology was common well before it hit the mainstream, it just didnt have an official name. any guy in the forums in the early 2k can tell you this people were already there.

can confirm. 4chan was full of the stuff way before it became remotely politicized.

It wasn't by those names, sure.

But the "Forever alone" meme definitely was. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/forever-alone

And the citation date: 2010.

Or better yet, https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cultures/involuntary-celibacy... cites that:

"On August 12th, 2005, the American television network G4TV released a satirical commercial for the online role-playing game World of Warcraft in which a woman introduces the game to her boyfriend in order to prevent him from pressuring her to have sex."

The 'Forever alone' meme was originally a jab at oneself for having few partners; it didn't imply anything about one's mindset or opinion on others, nor an opinion on society as a whole. It was also used mostly in an ironic sense. I'm saying that the meme has nothing to do with the 'incel' movement, unless you want to throw in every online expression of loneliness as incel stuff.

Some namesakes remain, for example Reddit's r/ForeverAloneDating where people who haven't had much experience (if any) can make posts to solicit potential e-dates. Although the balance is skewed toward men, there are a good number of women posting there too, and it has nothing to do with incel/blackpill crap.

iirc the term incel was actually coined as part of a support group for folks that struggled to date; I have a vague memory of an interview with the lady who's credited with it's Genesis, and how she was shocked at where it ended up.

Hypergamy is nonsense? I think you're confusing an opinion or desired reality with data and observed reality.

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

Why link a page and not read it?

In the "Mating preferences" blurb they discuss hypergamy as being reduced as gender equality reduces and even worse links to a study called "The end of hypergamy" where they discuss men stop dating down once women achieve educational parity.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5421994/

So yeah, if you come from a poor, unequal country women wanna marry and old rich university educated man. If you don't, they dont. So hypergamy is not natural or unavoidable its a sad reality of some societes.

Most people on dating apps swipe right on people with higher rating than them, the talking point about women being hypergamous and only liking the top profiles is not reproducible outside of dating apps, because it isn't real. Its a reflection of their userbase. If there are 1000 men sending 100 messages a day to 10 women, they all get rated highly, so they mostly see highly rated men profiles. And having attention from mediocre candidates outside of the app, they mostly interact with the most attractive counterparts online. This doubly skews the candidate pool women would interact with online in 2010, thus the findings are not proof of hypergamy, but okcupid being a sampled and incomplete group of people.

Yeah, everybody knows that what guarantees a successful marriage is a man that earns half of his wife. Just close your eyes and think of allllll the couples, from friends to family, where this dynamic worked so amazingly well.

Males find females, that are healthy and young, attractive - since they are the most likely candidates to have healthy offspring.

Females find males, that are capable of getting enough resources to sustain the offspring, attractive. And in the case of males, there is no age barrier per se that impedes reproduction, so it's expected to see couples of younger females and older males.

It's true for humans, it's true for chimps, it's true for dogs. Reality does not change just because you want it to. And it doesn't matter if we're talking about India in the 19th century or California in 2022. Women, ON AVERAGE, will find a rich guy more attractive than a bum, and men, ON AVERAGE, would find a 21 year old waitress hotter than a 55 year old Hollywood starlet.

It is what it is.

1. Maybe the parent did read the page?

"In a 2016 paper that explored the income difference between couples in 1980 and 2012, researcher Yue Qian noted that the tendency for women to marry men with higher incomes than themselves still persists in the modern era."

Emphasis mine.

2. Reduced ≠ eliminated

And of course, it says that "some research supports that theory," of that reduction. (again, emphasis mine). When you take a theory that has some support and then extrapolate from that theory to an end-state and claim that end state as certainty, you are leaving the realm of evidence and drifting off into pure fantasy.

> women being hypergamous and only liking the top profiles is not reproducible outside of dating apps, because it isn't real.

Actually it is real, as all the evidence shows. Including genetic evidence, which has concluded that historically, only around half of males reproduce, whereas almost all women do (apparently 40% vs. 80%).

They're not surveys, and that's exactly the point. Surveys reveal how people claim to behave, which may nor not be how they actually think they behave, which may or may not be how they actually behave.

If they were surveys, your criticism would be valid.

Instead, this was about how people actually behave, so neither fooling themselves nor others.

whether it's a survey or not is a straw man, and you know it. it's bad faith to argue along these lines given that the primary criticism leveled was regarding sampling.

if you want to back up your point, speak to that. how does this show anything about the ~99% of people who have never used okcupid? on what grounds do you believe okcupid to be a representative sample?

> whether it's a survey or not is a straw man

No it's not. The post I replied to mentions "survey" four times, once per sentence. It mentions "sample" once.

> on what grounds do you believe okcupid to be a representative sample?

On what grounds do you believe okcupid to not be a sufficiently representative sample?

UPDATE: it was 4 times, not 3, so once per sentence.

Do we have reasons to think the non representativeness would have been relevant to these conclusions?

What if you're bi, but for a long term partner through match.com you're mostly interested in the opposite sex, vs your behavior other places for more casual hookups?

What if you're bi, but not that open about it so you mostly take the chance on the opposite sex on a public dating platform?

There must be so many other factors like these that at least should invalidate any broad claim by a company only seeing a small part of people's behavior and sexuality.

> What if you're bi, but for a long term partner through match.com you're mostly interested in the opposite sex, vs your behavior other places for more casual hookups?

Then why on earth would you put down "bi" in the profile?

Why would you not?

> Why would you not?

What kind of a stupid question is this?

If you only want interest from a particular gender, why advertise that you want interest from all genders?

Well, people at Okcupid. Back then. We don't know how well it generalizes.

I don't think anyone ever claimed this represented the overall population. It's clearly the data set for OkCupid users, which may be a decent proxy for online dating users. Unless there is any reason to doubt the accuracy of the data presented, I don't see the problem. Black women on OkCupid are not as desirable as white women. We may not like the results, but doesn't make it invalid.

To use your analogy, if 95% of people going through burger king drive through prefers Coke vs Pepsi, that's relevant data for that purpose.

I have seen people making that claim repeatedly on HN.

If the problem was that the results were inaccurate, there would be no need to suppress what the post originally said. Incomplete data is a fixable problem. No, the blog was a gaffe in the Kinsley sense: they accidentally said the truth.

Any examples? Their blog post on the dating economy being skewed away from black women seemed to match with economic and social realities.

They do have memory-holed some very inconvenient blog posts, such as this https://techcrunch.com/2009/11/18/okcupid-inbox-attractive/ (probably exists somewhere on archive.org)

> (probably exists somewhere on archive.org)

Yep!

https://web.archive.org/web/20091121080804/http://blog.okcup...

God I love archive.org

Me too. Please remember they are funded and can exist only through donations@

https://archive.org/donate/

I loved them when I trusted them to keep backups of things that were taken down like this, but the fact that they quickly removed KiwiFarms from their archive has dented my confidence a lot.

I was a regular reader of their blog. It was great. They had a bunch of data on how we data and they weren't afraid to let the data speak. This resulted in some ppl getting upset b/c they had to hear something that didn't fit their worldview.

They've memory-holed (i.e. deleted) their entire old blog, no? It's disappointing but I think it's a stretch to describe that as Orwellian (as the OP did). At some point they just discarded all their old content, it's not that much of a conspiracy.

Old content - that it still being discussed and would still be generating pageviews.

Entirely possible they don't care for the page views. Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending it, I think it's a shame that interesting content like that gets pulled down but it's usually for boring corporate reasons (don't want to maintain the blog any more, they don't benefit from the pageviews) than conspiratorial Orwellian reasons.

I don't think it's a orwellian conspiracy, they make money running a dating website and took down some old blogs that suggested online dating is really pretty rigged not in your favor for guys (their paying customers). You don't need some men in the shadows to explain why they took that down

The motivation is what matters for the folks calling it Orwellian.

If someone is deleting their posts because the facts don't align to the worldview of a religion, a political party, a corporation or some other powerful group, many people will be more concerned about that than if the posts had been deleted for more routine, functional business reasons.

Not sure why you're being downvoted for asking this, editing blog posts ought to be very easily traceable using archive.org.

Where was this?

The bisexual thing was pretty stupid and pretty revealing how much this blog post was bullshit, there was a bunch of reason why you would pick one gender as a bisexual, especially if online dating was just to meet more of the gender you wanted.

But a bi dude, in 2010 you simply wouldn't get match with women if you write bi and plenty of gay dude would turn you down as well, so you just wouldn't bother and write gay or straight eventually.

Edit: removed today

>But a bi dude, in 2010 (and still today) you simply wouldn't get match with women if you write bi

This is simply not true.

Maybe I'm just hot enough to overcome the queer disgust? I don't feel like I'm that hot.

> This is simply not true.

I removed the point about today since I haven't been dating in a few years, but I stand by the 2010 comment, you could find a few female stars being openly bisexual for example but it was incredibly rare for male stars, which is indicative of how hot it was perceived at the time.

My lived experience just completely disagrees with what you are saying. Perhaps it's an age difference thing. The gay men have had more of a problem with me than the straight ladies.

I gravitate towards bi/pan people anyways due to my androgynous features.

I don't know how old you are, but anyway it seems you are starting with a pretty good crowd, if you're not ugly, androgynous (sought after) and dating in an understanding pool, which is your own orientation. I see where you are coming from but it doesn't seem like it warranted the blanket dismissal you started with.

For what it's worth I found a blog post referring to that phenomenon from a few years ago which talks about a poll conducted in Glamour Magazine: https://web.archive.org/web/20160320094402/https://www.pride...

I guess I didn't realize how good I have it. Discussions about dating sites have always been confusing to me.

It's simple, you make a profile, talk to people, people talk to you... Why is that so hard?

Most (75%+) men on most dating sites only complete the first two items on your “simple” list.

Lol that is brutal.

No personal experiences here, but I observe that k-pop stars are more popular than ever and that yaoi is a thing. I believe you.

Depends on where you live and what age your dating pool is.

"Results indicated that heterosexual women rated bisexual men as less sexually and romantically attractive, less desirable to date and have sex with, and less masculine compared to straight men. No such differences were found for heterosexual and gay men’s ratings of female and male profiles, respectively. These results support previous research findings that indicate more negative attitudes toward dating bisexual men than bisexual women." https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15299716.2018.15...

"63% of women, however, say they wouldn't date a man who has had sex with another man" https://www.glamour.com/story/glamour-sexuality-survey

If you do some casual searches you can find qualitative and quantitative data supporting the idea that unfortunately for bisexual men, male-attracted women are not into them and you're incentivized to hide or downplay it if you want to appeal to the broadest group (though I'd argue you may as well focus on those that can accept male bisexuality if you're successful enough at dating).

I clearly remember seeing women's profiles on both okc and Tinder that outright stated that they were not interested in bi men, but it's become rarer and rarer as time passes

Depends on where you are. I'm still finding a lot of blatant hatred and bigotry from women against bisexual guys.

the gay guys have been fine. but over the years, the most hateful, vile comments have come from women.

I dont't think that it's becoming more rare, but the hateful ones are quieter about it. as son as you bring it up in a private conversation, they unleash on you and block you.

> “I’m bisexual.” REALITY: 80% of self-identified bisexuals are only interested in one gender

This isn't the slam dunk it appears to be. A dietary equivalent would be "X% of self-professed omnivores avoid vegetarian dishes". They are open to the idea, but still have preferences. Just because one is open to the superset, doesn't mean they assign each subset equal weight.

That does sound a more sensible interpretation to me. I know many in India (where vegetarian diets are prevalent) who eat meat occasionally when they suddenly crave for it, but are mostly inclined towards a veg diet. And they think of cannot eat non-veg foods for all three meals or even continuously every day for even a week unlike some others who can't do without meat in a meal. Perhaps bisexuality is also a spectrum rather than a 50-50 thing?

Or,

I eat $x at home, I am looking for $y on this service.

There are plenty of bisexual people I know that have open arrangements who are in relationships with a partner of one sex and are only permitted by that partner to date people of another sex by that partner (because fear of competition/jealousy reasons).

Some people only want romantic relationships with a partner of one sex while hookups with another. Some people have bi-cycles. Some people are attracted to a person of their own gender 80% of the time and another 20% of the time.

Many people, including myself, don't find the whole "cycles"/percentage thing attractive, though. Especially for a longer term relationship, why would you want to date someone who loved you for who you were only part of the time? Especially seeing as its something you can't change about yourself.

In reality I've generally found that many "bi" guys are just waiting for a "real" relationship with a chick, while doing guys on the side. Hell, even outside of relationships, most bi guys I've met would pick a chick over a guy 9 times out of 10. Some of that is due to the fact it's a lot rarer/harder for them to hook up with a chick vs a dude (latter being more open and free with sex).

If someone is bi, has a romantic/sexual preference for both and experiences periods where they really do prefer one or the other then a traditional relationship is probably not going to work best for them; something poly or very open seems like the batter option, where their partner is aware and agrees to it.

>"I’m bisexual.” REALITY: 80% of self-identified bisexuals are only interested in one gender.

>People who describe themselves as bisexual overwhelmingly message either one sex or the other, not both as you might expect.

Yes, I remember this. It was sad to see such basic logic errors from OKC. It seems a little like saying that heterosexuality is a myth because all "heterosexual" people prefer some women over others. Bisexual means you are attracted to both masculine and feminine people. It does not imply a 50 / 50 split, or that you want to date everyone equally. The Match.com Orwellian activity aside - that critique was always very odd.

> People who describe themselves as bisexual overwhelmingly message either one sex or the other, not both as you might expect.

I don't think you can draw the conclusions from this people seem to be. Think about it. If you are genuinely attracted to both genders, then you can choose. If you're pursuing a goal (like a relationship) you're going to have some ideal you're going after, so you're probably going to pick a gender to look for for any particular period of time. I think it would be actually very uncommon to actively seek both at the same time, especially since there are cultural/societal considerations tied up with this. If you genuinely like both deciding to pursue a particular gender doesn't invalidate the fact that you could just as genuinely pursue the other. Society dictates that pursing one or the other are of varying difficulty, but this has nothing to do with the legitimacy of how you feel about the other. Bi-sexual people I've known follow this pattern -- they'll pursue one gender for 6 months to the year, and then re-bound with the other, then maybe stick with that one for a while, rinse and repeat. Since most people only use dating services for a short while, this would probably look as described above in aggregate.

I use straight dominated apps for straight dating and gay dominated apps for gay dating so my usage would basically agree with their majority statistic.

It's how I use the tools not who I am, though.

Bi isn’t an all or nothing thing. Men are well known to enter same sex relationships when in restricted environments long term such as sailing ships or prison, but not everyone is that flexible.

Women do the same with a lesser known example being elderly women swapping because of the shrinking dating pool.

So, self identifying as bi shouldn’t be taken as having zero gender preferences nor should we assume peoples preferences are static through time. People may be in a committed relationship and seek partners of the a different gender etc.

There are multiple reasons why someone would prefer to date only one gender while actually bisexual. I know a person who is bisexual and only dates the opposite gender because they don't want to deal with backlash from their conservative family and because they prefer to start a traditional family one day. I do feel like that may be a popular issue so I wouldn't expect that a bisexual person would message both genders equally, like this article absurdly claims.

Cool data. Isn't there something more up to date?

That implication is not logical. It is unreasonable to expect bisexuals to seek 50/50 gender split.

First, even if the actual attraction is same for both genders, it would be reasonable to expect bisexuals to seek opposite gender partners way more. Pretty much anyone who wants bio children need opposite sex partner. Pretty much anyone who don't want to deal with stigma around gayness too kuch will prefer opposite gender partner.

Second, bisexuality does not mean the attraction is same. It it fairly normal for bisexual to be attacted toany people from one gender and few from the other. It is also fairly normal foe them to have periods where they go for one gender only (either as conscious decision or not).

Besides, what did they actually look at? According to a friend, it's a lot easier to get a male date, even if you're more interested in women. How would that affect the 80% figure?

Yeah, I'm gay & bi guys in the gay community complain that they're not as accepted, which to some degree is definitely true. But the number of "bi" guys who want to bang guys on the side while looking for a "real" relationship with a woman is staggering. I try to avoid them at all costs; I'm not a fleshlight/something to discard.

I feel like the gay community needs to treat bi guys better but at the same time bi guys need to take a look at themselves and consider if they're romantically bi, or just sexually bi because they just want to fulfil their sexual needs (which is much easier with guys obviously).

Can’t wait to see all our old private messages get leaked by some hack of the parent organization now too. Or for it all to just get sold to advertisers

I wish! After I met my (now-)wife on OkCupid, we deactivated our accounts so that we'd stop getting notifications. A few months later we wanted to revisit our first messages to each other -- only to find that OkC had already deleted them. I was pretty shocked at how eager they were to discard a few KB of potentially priceless ASCII. :(

I’m engaged now, and met my fiancée on a dating site. At the time, it made sense that I deleted my account, since we were exclusive, but now those first messages exist only as a memory. I’d love to have those again, but I’m happy that data is gone.

I had the foresight to screenshot the convo between my soon-to-be-fiancée before deleting my account. :)

I can't speak specifically to this case, but it's certainly not about saving KB, it's usually specifically to prevent people from messaging the same person multiple times a year for many months/years.

IIRC, OkC also removed the ability to bookmark profiles, presumably for the same reason -- everything moving to a more "ephermeral" experience to prevent anybody getting "obsessed" with certain accounts because of how creepy that gets. Since spam, stalking, and abusive messages are by far the #1 problem with any online dating service. (Yes blocking works, but it's even better when people don't have to block in the first place. If you have to block too much, you quit the app.)

Luckily I was able to dump the SQLite db that Tinder used in the past when I met my SO

On the other hand, deleting potentially compromising stuff once it is no longer needed is really good for former clients' privacy. In case of a hack, no one will be able to dig in decades of old erotic penmanship and blackmail people.

That probably makes sense, but I'm sad to find that out. I've been thinking of logging back in to see if I could read the first few messages between myself and my recently-deceased fiancée. But those were years ago and I'm sure they're gone.

Sorry buddy

Just because the enduser doesn't see the data anymore, doesn't mean the company doesn't have/use them anymore.

Match lets third parties access the extremely personal/private matching question answers from OKCupid.

Presumably this means advertisers.

I used OKC for years until the founders sold it (and my private data) to this shady company, then I was forced to delete.

Acquisitions are worse than breaches for end user privacy. GitHub sold your whole travel history (via client IP geolocation) to Microsoft.

Spoke to the OKC co-founder when he was working out of a co-working location making fun side project, he said that even they thought this was a bit too pretentious and very correlation vs causality issues.

I read that as "carnality issues".

This is what motivates people to seek out other people.

Match has turned all of its apps into tinder. That is, gambling-like "one more swipe" photo centric dating apps, where the artificial restriction of choice keeps every person starved. Tinder is casual hookups, okcupid is leftist tinder for relationships, Hinge is politically moderate tinder for traditionalists, and so on. Each is a different marketing segment, but the same basic idea that gets men to pay to meet women.

I would not say Hinge artificially restricts choice. You are limited in how many “likes” you can send each day, but it’s a different model where each like is actually a notification/puts you in someone’s “inbox”, so letting everybody like too much would make it too spammy to work.

That model is also quite good because you don’t need to pay for women to notice you. Those 10 people you like will notice you anyway, unlike other apps where you could like 1000 profiles and barely be seen by any of them.

I personally have found Hinge very effective compared to other apps without paying a cent. My like -> match -> date conversion rate was literally two orders of magnitude better than any other app.

I also found Hinge to have a much higher hit rate of conversations-per-profile-seen, and dates, than the other apps.

Match rates where true for me as well in comparison to other apps. However, what I found interesting is that I’d routinely run out of matches on my last month of being “premium”. As soon as the paid gig was up, all of a sudden, profiles of potential matches in my area that I had never seen prior are numerous. BUT.. to like or match, I have to resubscribe… hmm…

Another obvious manipulation by Hinge (and the other apps) is I’m almost 100% positive they artificially limit who they show you by stacking the deck with a bunch of profiles of women they know haven’t logged into the service in awhile. Basically priming the pump with “possibility” to keep you engaged; diluting the active profiles and spreading any likely match possibilities out over time.

It’s things like these two realizations that made me decide these apps are not in existence to help you find a match. They’re incentive is the same as Facebook, engagement. You matching means you no longer using the app and that’s bad for business.

Sounds like the same trend we se in other social media, which is that as soon as there's something new which against the odds has broken through, everyone rushes to copy it - the reason both YouTube and Facebook are pushing shorts so aggressively now.

> okcupid is leftist tinder for relationships

LOL

Some people are going to take this the wrong way, but I've never read a more true statement.

I'm a pretty liberal person (folks think I'm conservative because I think communism stinks), but my experience with OkCupid many years ago was that most of its users were self-proclaimed cultural Marxists or feminists with a bone to pick. My digital head was decapitated several times by women there just for introducing myself to them. I'd even been lectured a handful of times about how I was "misogynist" for the age range I specified on my profile included women 5 years younger than I was, which wasn't even low enough to include women of college age.

The day I saw an advertisement for OkCupid that actually used the initialism "DTF" was when I knew for sure I would never be returning to them ever again. It would surprise me if they still had any meaningful userbase since it was pretty much dead in the LA area the last time I used it.

> but the same basic idea that gets men to pay to meet women.

In which case men should just go to Seeking Arrangement.

>self-proclaimed cultural Marxists

(X) Doubt

"The term "Cultural Marxism" refers to a far-right antisemitic conspiracy theory which claims that Western Marxism is the basis of continuing academic and intellectual efforts to subvert Western culture" [0]

No one "self proclaims" that.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_th...

> okcupid is leftist tinder for relationships

Your experience may have location bias? I.e. where did you use OKC?

I used it in Europe (2010--2011, mostly Germany and Italy) and Asia (2011-2013, Hong Kong) and Europe again (2014--now mostly Berlin & Hamburg) and my experiences were/are very different.

People are from the full political spectrum. Very right people are the outlier though, admittedly.

In Berlin there is a leftist bias but this is pretty newish (wasn't like this at all, when I started using OKC again in Europe in 2014).

Edit: spelling

> the post was removed sometime between Jan 2011 [2] and Mar 2011 [3]. The rest of the blog was still up at the time [4].

Internet Archive is great for cases of self censorship like this. I assume that as part of the acquisition the author was compelled to take it down.

So there's still a void for a dating service to be filled?

Im tempted to make a service where you "deposit" some fee to subscribe, I then return part of the deposit to you on a monthly basis UNTIL you find a match on the site. If/once you find a match, I keep the rest.

That should align goals for both the company and the partner seeker.

EDIT: I'll be getting interest from the remainder your payment every month, as part of my profit scheme.

That's basically how many old human-labor matchmaking services work, insofar as the matchmaker gets a lump-sum payment at the beginning, and then spends an unbounded amount of labor doing the matchmaking until it works out. The matchmaker is incentivized to make a good match as efficiently as possible, as their profit-margin decreases linearly with the amount of time they spend on each "case."

That just sounds like the optimal solution is to do zero match-making labor.

If it was a one-time game, sure. If your game relies on future business, word-of-mouth advertising, and not being arrested for fraud, it’s a bad choice.

Eh maybe from an efficiency perspective on profit vs labor, of I can get one person to pay me $100 to matchmake for them, then do nothing, I've got an infinite return on my effort, but if I want to make a living doing this I need to have some success stories to keep the $100s coming, so some effort is needed.

I like the alignment of incentives here, but "match" would have to be defined better. If it's a literal match (mutual like) it would effectively be a per-pay-like and wouldn't work. Maybe something along the lines of "matched, chatted, met, stopped using the app for X period of time"?

Yep, I've thought something like that:

For every month that you use the app to a certain degree (number of viewed profiles, page loads or whatnot) I will give you back 1/nth (1/12th) of your deposit. If you don't use it enough, then I'll "keep" that month's budget as a subscription payment. The idea is that once you match with someone, you will stop using the app, and the rest of the money will slowly go to me.

I am convinced it could be a good model, of course as with everything, there are several things to be solved before making it a sound business.

I know your idea is very theoretical but what happens when I exhaust the deposit? Do I stay around and earn money or do you kick me out?

And if someone finds a match but doesn't inform the site you lose out, no? I expect a lot of people to be dishonest if it means getting a bunch of money back.

Cheapskate users will keep dating (or even just looking) even after finding a good match.

From an end-user perspective? Desperately so.

I think the biggest obstacle to solving the Dating App problem is the onboarding.

I’ve been married since before Tinder so never used it. But I think the “Dating App problem” is something of a head scratcher. The reason the apps all have problems is because Dating is the problem. It’s hard. Always has been. Finding a lifelong partner, very hard.

I might be wrong but these types of conversations about how bad the apps are make me think y’all are expecting some sort of technological easy button. It will never exist. These companies are probably making it worse because of their profit motive but there’s definitely a reason nobody has “solved” dating.

The problem is not dating, the problem is visibility. If you have tons of dates with tons of people you'll end up with someone who aligns with you (also will help you to learn what you really like) but these apps, as funny as it sounds, make you invisible by oversaturation. The amount of people is so huge that you spend less than a few seconds to decide if you want to match or not with someone and you never know about this person ever again.

I struggle to see how this is different than the real world of strangers. If you go out anywhere you are around people. Some you find attractive some that may find you attractive. Yet, you probably never even speak to each other.

The fact it’s a dating app, just means you have some expectations. You expect you may get a date. But you may not. You expect those other people are real profiles. They may not be. You expect those people that you do match with actual intend to have a conversation/go on a date. They may not have that intention.

Volume and effort.

Likes and such are distracting as they are attract the wrong people (attention seekers) or give off the wrong impression (false flags). The former is very prominent against men, the latter is very prominent against women.

Volume exasperates both this problem and the problem of choice. There are so many choices for so little effort, people are drowning in it and not investing enough to feel attached to their choices. Where before you had to invest more time into an individual person and your other options where far more limited, now you have far more choice for less effort when you're on the winning side of the market.

Some poster posted a few sources one time on a similar topic regarding the importance of investment and how people will generally stick together when invested. It's the initial investment which is missing. The fact ghosting as a concept didn't just come into existence, but is so omnipresent among both sexes, speaks for itself.

I believe this is correct. The vast majority of my modern "swipe era" dating experiences fall into either 1) Woman makes up excuse to bail within ~2 hours of planned date 2) Woman ghosts/un-matches just as conversation begins to gain momentum 3) Woman tells me she is "overwhelmed" by the attention she's getting from the app and is going to delete it, leaving behind her cell number. The effort/attention ratio for women on dating apps is literally unnatural. This ratio is tempered in the real world because it takes balls to approach a woman.

exacerbates

ghosting occurs because despite that people complain about it, they would resent even more being told that they don't make the cut. ghosting is a little disappointment each day, and it fades as the days accumulate.

and if you still don't like it, just accept that the other person does like it, and it's a kindness you could extend to them.

The difference is precisely what you mentioned, people there expect to have dates and find a partner. There could be other people trying to get something else (heck there are even scammers) but it's not your expectation to start a convo expecting to get somewhere, it's the goal of the app. This doesn't happen in real life, in fact, if you try the same approach, you'll be seen as creepy depending on the context. Dating apps should skip this initial uncertainty and technically make it easier to get to the point.

I guess dating for me always just was an activity without expectation. Or perhaps better said, without surprise. Meaning anything could happen. I might have fallen in love with someone on the night we met, the universe seemed aligned, we already got in some small talk face to face, maybe even got physical then - only to find out the next day they gave me the phone number for Pizza Hut and I’d never see or hear from them again. I couldn’t even Google them or DM them, it didn’t exist. Everyone was a ghost by default.

Honestly, the worst part about dating apps is that it's basically become the only way a lot of women want to meet men. And I'm not speaking from a disgruntled male perspective, I'm speaking from a friend of a lot of women who've essentially stated exactly that.

It's funny because most of my LTIR friends have met their significant others through more traditional means and the perpetually single are stuck on gamified apps.

The apps can definitely work so it's not all for naught but I think the privacy and low risk (emotionally) nature of them leads to an over reliance by a lot of people.

I highly doubt most women would reject a male asking for a date IRL but not in Tinder or whatever. I think the preference for online dating is simply convenience, taking the path of least resistance.

IMO taking this path of least resistance is a bad idea, especially much so for males who make up the vast majority of dating app users. Meeting people and asking them out takes some courage and makes you stand out from the crowd. That’s the main reason why it can work so well, in online dating you’re just one face among others.

Dating apps aren't about dates they are matchmaking apps.

Indeed. I met my girlfriend on a relatively novel dating site called The League.

It was recently purchased by Match.

What I used to love about OkCupid was how it would nudge you into writing a profile to tell who you are and what you care about. My profile had grown and it was a nice little place to present myself to the world and to talk to various women sometimes not even for dating but for the sake of an interesting conversation. Compare that with Tinder that won't even let you write more than small quantity of letters, come this is just text! There used to be an interesting thing where you would see who visited your profile and vice versa. Sadly the OkCupid website has been crippled into being unusable and the app is just a worse tinder now. Profiles are short, and mostly uninteresting.