Well... kind of. Except that men also tend to all be looking at the same pool of younger women, while women tend to look for men closer to their own age, according to OKCupid's data.
https://www.businessinsider.com/dataclysm-shows-men-are-attr...
IIRC the OKCupid data showed that women rated most men poorly, but then still responded to their messages, so, like, it didn't matter.
The social dynamic exists independent of dating apps which monetize and exploit it.
The dynamic is the same in real life, for example at a nightclub where women drink for free, promoters who bring them get paid per girl, and lonely men pay $40 cover for a chance to shoot their shot
In some ways this is great because you don't waste your time, or their's, if there's a serious incompatibility. But I think it can also be used negatively when people are too picky. Sure, there are people who are too picky in real life, but those snap judgements are based just on what you can see. The absence of other information can make someone go, "Ok, I'll give them a shot even if they're average looking because maybe they're interesting/mysterious/etc".
I'm willing to bet that I could reliably predict 80%+ of whatever profile attributes you fill out online, with a 2 minute conversation and good look at you.
Hahaha—I have a pretty good track record at the game, "spot the software industry dude" on hiking trails. We have a certain look and demeanor. Our preference for conspicuously-expensive outdoor gear from the right brands (not "hick" or "red" brands) does make it relatively easy as such games go, though.
> The dynamic is the same in real life...
While I agree it isn't unique to OLD, it's vastly different to real life. In real life you can strike up a conversation with someone, become friends, develop feelings, and end up in a relationship weeks/months/years down the line.
Tinder would be more comparable to a swinger club in this regard. Swinger clubs will charge single dudes well over 100$ for that same chance, and those guys will have to try to get lucky with predominantly older couples. Usually these dudes will find that their success levels go up if they are bisexual too. (The reasons for that are left as an exercise for the reader)
But a gov-sponsored app? No way. It's bad enough they have your whole financial/employment history (IRS), but to add your health (medicare/aid) and now dating/sexual histories too? What's left that you can keep private? Sorry, bad idea there.
(And I would like to see government job boards, also, for basically the same reasons.)
But again the IRS, which deals with everyone most directly (more than say intel documents) is notoriously bad and behind the times at it’s computer systems.
MatchGroup might sell your data to a company for ads and the like, but it’s opt in, and one of several. When’s the last time government did something opt-in?
Who knows, the ads might be useful sometimes. Giving politicians and bureaucrats access to more information about you in another centralized db somewhere is a recipe for disaster, and even if they are angels, it’ll be a huge target for others!
Ultimately you decide who you want to date, but in scenarios where most people meet through apps, those apps have a lot of influence over who meets who. Nobody knows how the matching algorithms work, all we see is the effects and a mountain of anecdotal evidence that some men are having a difficult time finding partners.
I don't know the stats but on places like Blind there's a lot of anecdotes about the dating scene favoring men in NYC and favoring women in SF, due to the gender balances.
If you are a straight man, the NYC dating scene is heavily in your favor. Opposite in SF
Expanding user graphs for matches across multiple nodes isn’t just easy, it’s actually way more efficient too. Have nodes calculate match likelihood among their users and verify they’re using the same algorithm with a simple hash. Then you’ve reduced getting matches for user X from the entire population Y (calculating distance, applying filters, and then ordering by compatibility, all expensive tasks) to getting matches for user X from nodes N that are purposely geolocated nearby reducing the search space even more.
Basically not only could you do this open-source and decentralized, it would actually be more secure, safer, and way better both accuracy wise and cost wise at finding matches.
I've talked about it on other threads but where and how you earn your money matters. 300K per year as a lawyer = sexy and powerful. Even "don draper" vibes. 300K as a SWE? The moment you mention this at a bar the girl knows you went to university courses that averaged 9 men to 1 woman. They know you're likely on the ASD spectrum. The know "the odds are good but the goods are odd".
This is why blind is filled with posts by high earning folks who can't ever get a single date. It's hard out there and thinking that you can beta-bux your way out of it in a west coast city isn't going to work out for you.
It is not hard to get a date on the west coast on $300k as a tech person, as long as you have more to offer than just that.
There's endless science that supports why this happens though. In order to understand why this exists we have to go back in history. For every single man that reproduced, theres 10 other women that reproduced [1]. That means that a significant percent of the male population died without having any offspring, unlike the female population which could always find a partner. On the other hand, polyginy has always been practiced throughout the world universally pretty much everywhere in most cultures, especially by men of influence and power, unlike polyandry which is quite rare [2]
The theory goes that evolutionary speaking, women try to find the best mating partner (most well-off, most influencing, most powerful etc) in order to secure the best future for their offspring to grow up healthy, without any regard whether that man already has other offspring or partners. This is also supported by the fact that women 100% know that the offspring is in fact theirs since they gave birth to them, unlike men which have zero assurance that the kid is in fact theirs. And this is why for most of recorded history premarital sex for women in civilized societies was a big no no up until like the 1950s that started to change in the western world.
So dating apps create this perfect environment where choice is abundant, so men take their shot on everybody, and girls only choose the most handsomest, most well-off guys on there. Its similar to a big high school environment, where most of the popular pretty girls from all years and generations would date a dozen guys in the sports teams and just swap around every few months. In high school and college I was in a similar situation, and girls were in fact excited that I was so experienced and that I was seeing other girls at the same time.
On dating apps most men get somewhere like 0-4 matches a week and most women get somewhere like 100-1000. That’s a 25x difference best-case scenario and often it’s over 100x. Which is kind of insane considering there are about 50/50 men to women ratio in real life.
People say “the 20% top men get 80% of matches” but it’s worse than that. The 20% top men may get something reasonable like 3-4 matches a day, but your average women is getting something crazy like 1 match every 15 minutes.
Because a lot of men like to swipe right on nearly everyone and buy passes which get them unlimited swipes. And most women get extremely choosy and swipe right on only the super handsome nearly-perfect men, but you can’t even blame them when they have literally 1,000 matches.
So dating apps are a waste of time, much better to go out and talk to girls in real life and get yourself out of the synthetic environment apps like Tinder create. You'll have much easier time.
[1] https://psmag.com/environment/17-to-1-reproductive-success [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygamy
Given your self-description, you're probably not understanding the problem from the men side. The problem is - how, specifically, to go out and talk to girls in real life.
As Elon Musk says, let this sink in. We're talking here about modern times, where people have less opportunity to contact each other - and the problem existed way before, now it only became harder. The main chunk of the problem is that it's unclear how to arrange for a lot - enough - opportunities to talk to girls in real life so that the results would be sufficient.
But the fact is, there are thousands of ways to talk to girls, and millions of resources and guides and books on how to do it, yet people do it less and less thinking dating apps will produce results.
We should not forget that building a social circle, joining clubs or groups, and participating in activities that align with your interests are all great ways to meet new people. Additionally, working on building social skills and confidence can also help in real-life interactions. And not all dating apps are created equal, and some may have a higher success rate for men than others. Some apps or websites are geared towards specific interests or demographics, and targeting these may increase your chances of success.
tl;dr dating apps can be a useful tool, but they should not be the only way to meet potential partners. It's important to actively seek out opportunities to meet new people in real life and to put in the effort to build genuine connections.
If you observe the actual dating climate it’s nowhere near this bad and in larger cities like NYC it can even be closer to 1:1.
Rather than a social problem this is an economic problem, and as dystopian as it sounds I personally think the solution here is a non-profit or even govt sponsored dating app. It would be stupidly easy to do this and also add a whole lot more trust (bad actors may face real consequences), which is one of the other huge reasons why dating apps struggle with getting women into their app.