Creeps and stalkers will often try to get a woman's contact info (email, phone, GPS) so that they can continue pursuit and evade scrutiny by the dating app's monitors, who are often very good at identifying and banning unscrupulous people who are not in it to win it, so to speak.
Of course, yes, a dating app's ultimate goal is meeting in person and striking up a real relationship. But anyone crossing that boundary had better be very sure that they've gotten to know the person and they really can trust that an encounter won't turn into a craigslist murder.
Interesting case in point. My erstwhile fiancee and I met on a MMORPG in 2008. She lived in Europe and I live in these United States. She inquired politely of our mutual friends and acquaintances and then promptly booked a flight to visit me. Then she applied firm feminine pressure and caused me to fly to Europe and visit her for a month. As it turns out, I was not ready for the kind of relationship she sought and we flamed out spectacularly. She could not have expected this after how it went on that MMORPG and based on the reputation I had there among the other gamers. But if she'd asked real-world friends... it might've been a different story.
How naive :)
Dating apps are many billion dollars businesses - users striking up a real relationship are lost customers and profits to them and they optimize their algorithms against it.
- attract new users; there's new 20 year olds every day.
- move into related niches, like finding friends, where it actually is fine to keep using the app after you meet someone. (Or polycules.)
- move into cheating, mistresses etc, where people will secretly keep using it and not tell anyone.
I think IAC/Match does try the evil way, but that only works as long as you can keep buying out new dating apps. It's not like there's a moat.
Users can be informed about all kinds of user-hostile behavior by dating sites/apps and still use them. Turns out companies don't go out of business because of screwing over their customers. Companies have been caught knowingly poisoning their customers and still they've stayed in business and are profitable.
Companies often put on a good show in their twitter feed but they don't actually fear customer backlash. If doing something evil is going to make a company money they will do it. We'll bitch about it on social media until we get distracted by something else, but we'll continue to accept their abuses over and over again. We'll even keep paying the company that did it to us.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/08...
https://money.com/match-com-is-being-sued-for-using-fake-pro...
https://www.denverpost.com/2021/10/21/denver-dating-co-lawsu...
https://theblogofdimi.com/meet-guy-behind-dating-sites-fake-...
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/scammers-a...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/dating-apps-bots-and-fake-profi...
https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2013/11/10/ashley_madiso...
Worth noting too that Bumble offers a lifetime subscription rather than yearly. There doesn't seem to be a misalignment of incentives there.
I worked at an online dating company. Matching people is fucking hard. It's hard enough predicting who will message who, much less who will actually date who. There's far more money in matching them well than stringing them along; if you had even a 10% success rate, you could get away with charging a silly amount of money.
> Of course, yes, a dating app's ultimate goal is meeting in person and striking up a real relationship. But anyone crossing that boundary had better be very sure that they've gotten to know the person and they really can trust that an encounter won't turn into a craigslist murder.
Too much caution and delaying IRL encounters for too long can be dangerous, though.
Disclaimer: I'm married and it's been long since I last was in the dating market, so these are quite old recollections from when Tinder wasn't a thing and people hooked up in ICQ, IRC and the like. This is also purely subjective.
I remember many women were extremely cautious, to the point of not dating in person until they had talked to a guy online for literally months, in some extreme cases even years. But the problem is that they talked to these guys without meeting them IRL for so long, that often idealization kicked in very hard. Because they didn't see the guy, they built an extremely rosy mind model of him and then trusted him too much when they finally met, when they shouldn't have. Sometimes they would even fall in love online. Manipulative guys often took advantage of these things: it's easier to get away with all sorts of shady tactics if they can't see you and everything is asynchronous.
So my advice as an internet dinosaur would be: sure, don't meet IRL before having at least some nontrivial conversation, and sure, take basic precautions (meet in a busy place, don't go to a total stranger's house, etc.). But don't go overboard postponing meeting in person, thinking that this will let you know the other person better and reduce risk. That can easily backfire. Once you've talked for 3-5 days, I think the risk mostly goes up from there, not down.
Perhaps no one is so cautious anymore so this doesn't apply anyway.
There's also a huge difference in how the genders experience the apps, despite a lot of us pretending it is the same. I heard someone say "men are dying of thirst in a desert. Women are dying of thirst in the ocean. Men look at the women and say 'at least they have water.'" Most women get far more matches (the ocean water) but often they are low quality (salinity), whereas most men have a lack of matches all together. If you're just looking to get laid, then there is definitely a power imbalance (an amplified version of what exists offline) and women "have it easier". But that's not what most people want. They do want deep meaningful connections, and in that respect there's no difference between trying to drink sand and trying to drink sea water. But because we're dying of different things it creates fundamentally different strategies. (one e.g. men being nonselective with swipes but selective with matches vs women being highly selective with swipes[0]) We have fundamentally different experiences on the apps. I don't know a single man who's admitted to sending a dick pic, but every woman I know has received one. It's too easy to paint with a broad brush with the paint of our experiences, especially the bad ones.
But I think a major issue of why these apps don't work is that we're so wrapped up in our experiences that we don't recognize those of others (classic human problem: "Everyone thinks like me and shares the same experiences."). It causes us to paint with too wide of a brush when seeking something that is by definition intimate and personal. I think the problem with apps is that it is hard to see the other person as a person. While I don't know if I'd ever do one of these profiles, but the goal seems straight forward: to be seen as a human and an individual. You're not just another box of cereal on the grocery store shelf, but an individual human being. I don't think this is backwards and I think it makes sense why people see this as an alternative. They've felt dehumanized by those apps (men and women in different ways) and want to be seen as a living person.
edit: [0], another example is men wanting to meet in person quickly to make the match real vs women often wanting to me more cautious. There are different selective pressures for these things and different societal norms. But it is silly to not attempt to understand the experiences of someone we want to intimately bond with.
I do agree with you that when in the app, there is an inherent lack of desire to really understand the other person. In my experience, however, that goes away when we are able to meet face-to-face and share our true selves more authentically. So, this desire is reasonable, I just think that trying to use technology again to try to solve it (google doc instead of hinge) really isn't very different, and we need to change modalities to actually get anywhere on this issue.
The people causing problems are generally people you already know, or people with existing relationships. The problem is largely hearsay and doesn't line up with the behavior people exhibit (if stranger danger is so big why use dating apps at all).
The entire notion falls flat the moment you look at the actions of women and men as a whole, and take a moment to remember what ideals 80s and 90s coming-of-age movies showed.
In other words, the 1/X statistic is conditioned on the average person's precautions (like not walking outside in a lightning storm), and by not applying on those precautions, you're using the statistic outside of the distribution that it applies to.
But I think there are also some complications you're missing. These lifestyles matches can be a form of luck. Maybe you're having a busy week. You're probably paying attention to the app less because of course you will. On the other hand if you're being set up by a friend then that friend can be like "hey, they're busy this week but let's set you up next" and there is more empathy involved.
A major problem with dating apps is that they are trying to be that friend that sets you up but they are doing a really terrible job at replicating what that friend is able to actually do.
Whether the statistics would be lower if women trusted strangers less doesn't matter. It's what they choose, despite being educated on the matter since youth, and having plenty of options available in general.
But the broader point is true that dating sucks for everyone, men end up feeling undesirable and women feel objectified and dehumanized.
They will somewhat know the dating candidate, and they will have skin in the game via their reputation to present somewhat viable options so it is not as high of a chance of rejection.
However, this depends on having access to vast (good) networks, either directly or indirectly.
Well, the other issue is that being lost at sea is much better than being lost in a waterless desert. You can't drink the seawater, but you don't die of thirst while you're lost at sea.
You say that as if I hadn't already pointed it out. Being unable to drink the water doesn't mean you die of thirst while at sea. There are many well-documented examples of people surviving at sea for much longer than it would take to die of thirst. It doesn't matter that you can't drink seawater; you can get water in other ways.
But in the desert, you'll die.
Also, I think you're just taking an analogy made way too literally. Analogies are messy but used to help illustrate a point. They do require one to read the intent of the speaker more than the literal words used.
Why do you think that?
You don't die of thirst when lost at sea. You can survive indefinitely there.
You can't drink straight seawater, but that doesn't matter because water is available by other means.
> Why do you think that?
Because
> You don't die of thirst when lost at sea. You can survive indefinitely there.
Is a objectively false statement that is trivial to verify by a quick google search or anyone who has spent any reasonable amount of time in or around an ocean.
> You can't drink straight seawater, but that doesn't matter because water is available by other means.
And those means are...? If you're floating in the ocean, good luck distilling the water. Idk if you've ever tried to distill water before, but it isn't as easy as the movies make it look. Trust me, I've done simulated survival exercises both on land and in the ocean. Or don't trust me and just google it.
The biggest thing that has helped me is to cater towards my "niche", which means I need to focus on presenting myself as artistic, meditative and adventurous. Those are strong sides of my personality. I need to dial down the logic/rational side, and dial up my playful side. That seems to work relatively well. Adjust on a case by case basis of course, also dial things back to normal when you get to know them for longer.
It's polarizing, but the matches I get are more up my alley immediately :)
Do you want to say that your interests are reading, traveling, living and laughing? Sure, go ahead. Do you want to write "tech"? Sorry, this app is for cool kids only.
I don’t even have my job on there. Most people don’t get programming, so I don’t want to steer the conversation there.
I write the fun stuff in my bio.
My point is: if you are a tech-minded person who likes tech for fun the apps will discourage you from showing it. Bumble's interest list [1] has ca. 200 interests including ~20 TV show genres, 30 sports, 10 types of traveling, and 15 personality traits. And yet there's exactly one mildly-tech-related interest, namely, "video games".
Being at my most generous I would read that as "geeks tend to make horrible dating profiles so Bumble steers them towards what's more likely to get them dates", but (as I said originally) I feel mildly insulted by the idea that "bringing my whole self" is something to discourage.
[1] https://eddie-hernandez.com/bumble-profile-template-prompts-...
The more vague your profile is, the less information people have to assess lifestyle choices, availability, financial security etc.
Also it's not like they deleted your profile if you mentioned being a programmer in any of the open text boxes. I've spotted several people that mentioned that in their profiles, and I was looking at women exclusively, so I didn't see it as often, but I did see it.
This was quite a few years ago though. Might be different now.
You can still type that in your profile prompts and bio. No one is stopping you from doing that.
If you want more interests listed, just contact Bumble. They are known to make relatively straightforward updates to the app like this.
I initiated by saying: I like your scarf-jacket combo. Did you match it on purpose?
Note: when giving a compliment, expect nothing in return. Simply know that you prefer a conversation but be ready to jump out at a moment’s notice when she isn’t feeling it.
Her: haha, no I always have this scarf
Me: even with a deep purple coat?
Her: even then…
Me: oh god… going to Berlin?
Her: yep, you?
Me: same, I think almost everyone is going to Berlin
Her: I guess yea
Me: so what are you up to there?
Etc.
People who think like this exude unattractiveness, no matter how old you luck or how smart and funny and talented you are in your non-dating life.
If you go online dating and end up making friends, you WON online dating, because now you have wingpeople IRL to want to hook you up with their friends.
Not all friends are the type to wing other friends. Especially not casual friends, which is still what a “friend zone” includes.
But the issue of hookups is odd. I don't know if most people find hookups objectionable. I know a lot of people probably want some kind of connection. I see that constantly in women's profiles. So how do we end up with hookups anyway in spite of no one wanting it? I mentioned elsewhere in this thread that in my experience, being upfront to women about wanting a serious relationship seems to scare them off. Why would that be?
One possibility is that women choose hookups in some cases or as a bargaining tool to get a relationship. My own thought is dating apps should probably discourage this instead of selling false hope to men. They could just limit the number of matches or maybe try to set it up so people go for relationships instead of a hookup.
>too many choice problem
This is a different issue I think but it is true. I think what happens is people assume they can do better always and that might not even be true. I could see how people would miss a good match hoping for a perfect one, then age, then face worse options and end up single and alone. I think this is a serious problem we're facing that we should confront.
Another issue I have experienced is that you realize too late that you aren't compatible. It's a lot of effort to get close to people and you end up building up all this attraction in the process. It's by design. Women won't talk to you, period, unless you build attraction. But then you start to learn about each other and realize ok wow this person is completely different and we have very different values.
If you tried this the other way around and put your values in your profile or start asking questions before any attraction is built up on these apps, the women don't respond well to it. It's too boring and dry for them.
> So how do we end up with hookups anyway in spite of no one wanting it?
I think this may be one aspect of the answer. If you're dying of thirst then you'll drink dirty water. But after you've hydrated yourself you think more about how dirty the water is. So you go on searching for clean water. Find yourself dehydrated again, and repeat. I don't think this is a male or female problem, but that we are sexual beings by nature. Even women have post-nut clarity. I'd say that there is even a post validation clarity too. I know when men go through sprints where they get no matches they just start matching with everyone to just get some sort of validation.[0]
But I think there are other issues too. This is definitely a complicated situation and I think the problems with the apps is that they are over simplifying the criteria that people match on. And let's be real here, there's not much incentive pressures to get these apps to actually match people. Dating businesses are weird because the end goal is to get rid of your user. If you're trying to maximize profits you aren't trying to maximize compatibility.
> Another issue I have experienced is that you realize too late that you aren't compatible. It's a lot of effort to get close to people and you end up building up all this attraction in the process. It's by design. Women won't talk to you, period, unless you build attraction. But then you start to learn about each other and realize ok wow this person is completely different and we have very different values.
Something from my perspective, that I don't think is by any means unique to me, is that I notice that someone becomes more physically attractive the more I mentally jive with them. I think this is what gimmicky shows that hide the potential matches exploit. But I'm not sure that's useful either. This really isn't a solution I can really see technology fixing. Physical attraction is definitely the bait in relationship forming but it isn't what reels people in (unless hookup or vanity seeking, which is a valid approach, just not mine). I'm sure I've missed potential matches that would have become exceedingly beautiful to me because the selection criteria is highly dependent on photos. But I don't think things are any better on OkCupid (tried years ago) where you can write a lot about yourself. There too are different selective pressures here because of match rates and this plays a big role in strategies. But I don't think we talk enough about our differing experiences.
[0] To further elaborate on this I've even noticed that when I delete and reinstall the app that the variance of the number of matches I get is extremely high. One reset can get me multiple matches a week for over a month. Another reset can get me zero matches for an entire month. There's a lot of variables at play here, but this is mentally taxing playing with this black box, and that's more what I'm trying to get with all this. Because maybe if we understand what is mentally taxing to each of us we can build better connections (empathy definitely plays an important role in match making)
definitely the business model is messed up though.
In retrospect I probably saw warning signs that I wasn't compatible with someone but ignored it because I just wanted a match. Maybe that is part of what was happening when I said I found out too late someone wasn't compatible. It's quite possible I was forcing something to happen. I have to think about that, it was months ago now.
You might be on to something describing the need for validation and desperation that happens. It's definitely making decisions with clouded judgement. A part of me thinks that people shouldn't make the matches themselves, they should be assigned after being checked for compatibility and attraction before any chatting happens. not sure there is a perfect way to do this though.
> In retrospect I probably saw warning signs that I wasn't compatible with someone but ignored it because I just wanted a match.
I think this is unfortunately what that failure causes. Men particularly are lonely (in different ways than women, see thirst analogy above) because social pressures tend to push us to not be as social. So we crave attention and will stay in bad relationships because the fear of loneliness is greater. As someone who has done this recently, I think it is often hard for us to talk about these things openly (social norms).
Both men and women are seeking validation and are desperate, but just in different ways. I really think an issue is that we're not listening to one another and assuming our realities are very similar. Empathy is one of the real things that make humans unique, but I think these apps remove that component and that's why I dislike them.
OTOH I think it goes nowhere if you write you want a serious stable relationship, maybe wife and children at some point. I am guessing but I think it scares some women off and it doesn't really build attraction with them. I have seen women write this in their profiles and when you mention you want something similar the conversation fizzles out real quick. I don't think there is any hard rule here though. A lot of factors can affect this.
It definitely was not similar for me. My relationships were in general with people I already knew somehow and seen them interact with others. I would not date someone with only such limited knowledge of. It did not seemed like a good idea.
I used to get lots of Tinder matches. Then I went about 2 months of nothing. I felt like it must be holding matches back. So I paid for a Tinder boost, where you become seen by more people for 30 minutes (or so they say). Within a few minutes I had like 2 new matches, within 30 minutes I had 6.
Now, if Tinder was doing what they claimed, why aren't they showing me to these people? Why don't they show me to people who have the same interests? Clearly there's more people that would match with me but they can only find them when you pay up money.
From a cynical business POV it's in a dating app's best interest to not let you find a relationship and keep you spending money/watching ads.
You could say they want you to have a relationship so you spread good words and bring in new users, but all my experiences go against that.
Gen N - whenever someone liked YOU, Tinder would immediately bring this person to the front of your like queue. This meant that if you hadn't used the app for say, in a day, then the first X persons presented would be people who liked you and you would get a bunch of matches.
Gen N+1 - Gen N was changed, such that maybe you'd get one match if you consistently liked the first 20 or so people in your queue. However, people who liked _you_ were not filtered out by the setting on your distance filter. So, you could set this filter to distance 1 KM, and basically get a list of matches to the forefront again.
Gen N+2 - the above hack was fixed, such that these likes would be filtered out as well (bastards). And then it felt like their algorithm became more and more hostile, post-poning presentation of people who liked you more and more. Basically, they really started to gamify the system, so that you would need to get these "power" boosts to get any matches at all apparently? I quit not long after this filter-hack was "fixed", so not sure what happened then.
Would anyone admit this publicly? That's a surefire way to destroy your career or getting sued.
Also begs the question for which performance indicators did you optimize if not engagement and retainment?
https://teddit.net/r/LokiList/comments/s0a0w6/why_i_made_lok...
https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/okcupid/whyyoushouldne...
I often hear from women dating men that they would have swiped left their partner on Tinder.
Online? Pretty much only ever resulted in a couple of dates with the person, or a one and done hookup.
Its anecdotal, and friends have had the opposite experience, so I can't draw much of a conclusion from it besides that I was not suited to online dating.
Why talking first? Well, for me:
P(attractive|interesting) >> P(interesting|attractive)
and by a few orders of magnitude (1000?). YMMV.
Texting or whatever is terrible. There's no way to convey sense of humor and text is rife with misunderstanding tone.
Online dating, every time I have tried it, has been such an awful experience that I decided I preferred celibacy. Oh, and it has only got worse as time has gone on. Frankly, I'm amazed our species manages to reproduce under these conditions.
I don't think so at all.
The thing about meeting IRL is that you get a ton of context just by how you meet. Where did you meet? How were they dressed? Were they with friends; what are their friends like?
And sure, there's a difference between online and IRL. But a big part of that is driven by the inherent structure of online dating. Without any sort of filters, there's nothing to stop extreme "r" style daters from drowning everyone else out.
I always took the approach you're advocating. Get off the site as quickly as possible, ideally only one message, and then meet in person. I didn't see much point in getting to know someone only to find there's no physical chemistry. That worked well in terms of just getting dates. At least back then, plenty of women felt the same way and weren't as overwhelmed by sheer numbers or as cautious, especially at that younger age, being I was still in my early 20s.
It's ironic, though, because I did meet my wife on OkCupid (granting she's my third wife, and I met the other two in school), but not in this way. They used to have social features in the pre-Match Group days, including the ability to post a personal journal and follow other people's journals. Before they also introduced discussion forums, this resulted in online communities of people who all followed each other, talking about basic issues of romance, but not necessarily actually dating since this was spread all over the country and even other countries, not local. At the time, I still lived in LA and my now wife lived in New York, so we "knew" other and talked plenty, but never had any plans to meet. I didn't meet her until years later when we both happened to move to Dallas independently. So assuming you're in to win it and not just to hit it, the only real "success" I ever had online dating was someone I didn't meet until six years after our first message exchange. Most of the people I immediately met never went past three dates.
My ideal dating app would just let me record short video questions/statements with a filter that makes them somewhat homogenous (no duck face/angle play, background replaced with something generic, etc), then let other people respond with their own similar videos, and an algorithm would order responses based on my past swiping history. This would make it sort of like a tiktok-esque video chat app for single people. If the video questions/responses were ephemeral That would eliminate a lot of the fakeness as well, unless you wanted to get made up for glamour videos every day.
A 'date me' profile feels like the opposite -- trying to get a bunch of data on someone before actually interacting with them in person. I think this is completely backwards and we need to lean in far more into IRL experiences.