Absolutely not. If you're looking for a partner in real life, you're working with a small, finite "dating pool" and you calibrate your expectations reasonably. In your office, there might be twenty women you like, five of them may be interested in you. Both sides go through a straightforward process to make up their minds, and that's it. Stuff like the 80% / 20% theory ultimately doesn't matter, because in that small cohort with no gender imbalances, almost every person naturally finds a mate - just not always their first pick.
In contrast, in online dating, you don't have an estimate of the dating pool, and it appears essentially infinite. This encourages two behaviors. First, you're spending very little time on individual profiles, often just swiping left or right in a matter of seconds - so individual decisions are made with much less fidelity. Second, it makes it really hard for both sides to calibrate expectations and to stop looking when they find a match that's good enough. If your date seems to like model trains a bit too much or needs to lose 20 pounds, there is a temptation to keep looking instead of trying to work with that.
In the end, if you go through thousands of profiles, then (a) the results probably won't be any better than with a smaller pool (see: the secretary problem); (b) you will be a lot more miserable for much longer; and (c) the purported "80% / 20%" split actually starts to matter a lot.
Look at Mr. Popularity here.
It's a mindset thing. People start from a place where nobody is worthy, and then actively only notice/seek things that make them more unworthy. As in, people only notice the bad stuff, never the good stuff. You can have 99 points of compatibility but that 1 you're incompatible on tips it over - because you're only looking at that 1, the 99 are invisible.
This pushes them toward casual things much more, and away from commitments (especially in places where it can complicate things, like at work). So only those couples get together at work that already have a very high "cohesion".
I did find that it was a bit better in several aspects.
Whereas on dating apps people will be speaking to many others and so it's much harder to find a long-term relationship.
I think a better solution would be letting people freely talk to eachother by communities / interests. But that is harder to monetise.
And you still have the fundamental issue that there are far more men than women.
If you go to the grocery store or any place with many people you could do the same thing as online.
What is interesting is the sociology of how guys will swipe right basically everyone online and basically no one in person even though the rejection % is going to be astronomically higher online. Rejection online even tends to be more rude. Getting rejected in person is almost always very polite.
What is even more interesting is how there hasn't been an overall adjustment in behavior when swiping right in person is so much more valuable because of the lack of people doing it.
Here's what will happen between men and women of different attractiveness levels (based on my experience and observations):
1. Man (same level of attractiveness) + woman (same level of attractiveness) = potential relationship
2. Man (higher) + woman (lower) = casual sex, situationships
3. Man (lower) + woman (higher) = friendzone, man does stuff for woman without sex
Of course there are outliers. But these are the most likely outcomes.
In physics, there is a concept of the lowest energy state. For example, a ball at the top of the hill wants to release all the energy and rest at the bottom of the hill.
The lowest energy state for a women is #3. The lowest energy state for a man is #2. In other words, a man naturally wants a ton of casual sex, if he can. A woman naturally wants a lot of attention, protection, resources, if she can.
A very attractive man will get a lot of #2. A very attractive woman will get a lot of #3.
On dating apps (and in real life), woman want either #1 or #3 in outcome. Men want either #1 or #2 in outcome.
Eventually, most will settle into #1 after learning where their personal attractiveness level is.
Well, obviously. Every guy wants a woman who's got some depth to her sole.
I have seen few experiments and it's even more unbalanced, in the order of top 2/3% getting 97% of the likes.
I don't think there is much to fix about online dating anyway personally, there are many different platforms with different focuses and it has worked for lots of people.
I don’t see this as evolutionary necessity.
Theoretically alpha male could father all the children.
You would need a group of alpha males to guarantee genetic diversity for future generations, or your little society will start having issues with inbreeding and maybe get killed by a rival tribe.
It's hard to say whether that would yield better results over monogamy after several generations. I wonder if this is an experiment evolution already tried over million of years or if it's a novel approach. Prehistoric men being of similar strength and not having tools would make it hard for an elite to get all women without rebellion. Nowadays, with a population which is mostly unarmed, it would be easier.
A woman can have children with as many different men as she likes (or your hypothetical alpha with no allegiance to her) and then use an army of state enforcers to secure a 20% income stream from each one after the relationship dissolves. If the enforcers can't get him to pay, no matter, IRS men with machine guns are sent to collect from everyone.
There's very little incentive compared to say 100 years ago to stay with your partner as a female, with divorce being initiated far more by women who can use this strategy.
Unless you meant alpha male as in furries, in which case furries fathering all the children is an interesting point of view.
Theoretically the goal is to pass on the best set of genes.
Also because predicting the most favored traits one or two generations down the line is difficult. Biologically you want as much genetic diversity as possible to ensure at least some have the right traits to survive the next cataclysmic event.
As a contrived example, if every man only went for women with big breasts that would be a real issue of a couple generations later swimming speed became important for survival
Online dating makes sense, logically. Absolutely nothing against it - I met my wife on FB of all places.
But in my dating days, I'd met more than one person who was using an app and ghosted a date because I asked them to do something, in person.
If you're tired of getting swiped the wrong way, just do it the old fashioned way.
idk. What you are describing here is a pretty specific dynamic created by a specific environment.
I mean.. some things will carry into other contexts but the "game theory" only plays out in an efficient, legible, high velocity context.
When I was in college, most casual hookups started drunkenly at dance bars. Looks played, for sure. But... The guys that shagged for medals were generally the most outgoing guys... the ones that made the most moves.
I might have tried hitting on a random girl once or twice per year. My housemate tried 10 times per week... or more.
Really, no. The paradox of choice is one of the biggest problems with online dating, one of the reasons why it never worked for me, and one of the reasons why it never worked for many people I know. It works for some, that's fine, and it's probably useful in semi-rural areas where meeting people is hard.
> The top 20% most attractive men get 80% of the likes
It's specifically this notion of "top 20%" that is flawed. While online dating is about searching for the "best match", real life is about committing to a person who you seem to get along with, embracing the unknown, and working on it together to make each other the best match for each other. If that work goes well, you end up being the best match for each other, and you don't regret not having swiped 500 more times in search of better.
I am not sure you're disagreeing with grandparent, it seems to me the what they're talking about is about getting that first date, while you're talking about establishing a relation past that.
this test probably wasn't valid due to the prevalence of foot fetishists. It might be hard to find an object that no one fetishists but one could pick something that isn't related to a common fetish.
Posts like the OP are just incels pushing an agenda.
You want one good, loyal one not a string of whores which is all attractiveness gets you in an environment like this.
There is no netflix and chill without birth control. We take birth control for granted now but the dynamics are so different if casual sex leads to children. It is an insane practice for both parties without birth control and isn't a thing.
We didn't have that figured out as a society and then we got both the internet and birth control.
Don Giovanni is supposed to be a myth about a guy sleeping with a 100 women because the idea was so crazy just a few generations ago.
Not that pregnancy really stops women anyway. I think the idea of contraception makes them a little more open to promiscuity but I personally know a number of married women who have had children with other men and these dating sites are full of single mothers.
Don’t know about Don Giovanni, men wanted to be him then and they still do now.
Since likes are virtually limitless, it allows the possibility to deceive. Most women on these apps have experienced matching with someone and then realizing he hasn't even read her profile. Many men don't even seem ashamed of deceiving women like this. Women don't want to be used or cheated on, and so many men are signaling that they will do so by starting off with lying to multiple women that they are interested. So of course women know that most likes are actually lies, and so women are very carefully looking for signs that a man isn't playing the field. The men who succeed are those who have profiles that manage to convince women that they will only express interest when it is honest and genuine.
It is almost impossible to fake your personality. The moment you meet person IRL it will become obvious that the fake Mr. Interesting life was created just to get chicks online. Those 20% are interesting, because they’re genuinely interesting IRL, not because “they’ve put effort into their online persona”.
I don't understand why so many people think that those who struggle to date must be not putting effort. Do you really think that in real life effort equals success?
Nearly everyone in this sphere of life is victim to such a fallacy. I know many men who put in high effort and are not rewarded. Meanwhile I’ve seen men who actively sabotage and have women throwing themselves at them.
The world is not fair. It’s so obvious with wealth - why can’t it be obvious with dating?
I don't like how that (decade?-)old OkCupid's blog post's conclusions keeps being thrown out over and over like it is fact and had reliable methodology that makes those findings generalizable. (Assuming that I am right in identifying that statement's provenance.)
I don't think anyone should base their dating strategy, or what it means to date and be in the dating market for them over that conclusion, and should actually come to their own conclusions based on their own experience, even if it might be as dismal as that finding.
Sure it might be secular but it's not scientific.
The top 20% most attractive men get 80% of the likes. Men of average attractiveness is out of luck on dating apps and they should not use dating apps.
Average men will swipe right on below average women (and above) - because it's easy and free to shoot your shot.
Therefore, even below average women will get seemingly unlimited likes.
These below average women will then pick and choose likes from the top 20%. These women will also wonder why they can't get these top 20% guys to commit to them or ask them out on a date. It's because these men have many options. These above average men will often only want something casual with below average women.
This is why women will say there are no "good" men on dating apps despite having thousands of likes. Eventually, these women will "settle" for someone less than what they hoped. In reality, these women are just settling for men of equal attractiveness to themselves.
>Imagine a CRM-like interface overlayed on Hinge, Tinder, and Bumble
This is "ideal" but in reality, women have no trouble getting likes on dating apps. Therefore, they won't put much effort into a dating app that creates too much friction. If you make your dating app use a CRM-like interface, you'll have a sausage fest. Hell, most women barely fill out their Hinge, Tinder, Bumble profiles. They do the absolute minimum and they still get thousands of likes. My female friend once experimented by putting up a picture of a shoe as her only dating profile. She still received many likes - some of them paid Super Likes.