I’ve talked about this before, but the entire culture of dating apps feels like everyone is putting up a facade and you have to too if you want to play.
Once you get to know someone then it's a better time to talk about all the frustrations and disappointments of life.
My experience might be out of date though, from other comments it sounds like online dating has gotten harder in recent years.
I spent years going on dates and refining a charming persona, but that was the means to the end. Companionship is far more fulfilling than thin ego boosts, but you'll never find a partner unless you're willing to put in effort to become attractive to many potential partners and then attempting relationships. Sure, it's a facade and not who you are in your pure, unrefined, mammalian form, but it's a good version of yourself.
None of this is particularly revolutionary; it's just how courtship and mating works with mammals. Tinder is just the lubricant.
I think there’s a winnowing effect as you age out of the app. So it may not be that they’re all bad or good but rather that you have to seek your audience elsewhere as you age out of the apps. I think this is probably true for anyone looking for a relationship.
Sure some people are just looking for a fling but I’d be willing to bet money most people who date are looking for a relationship and eventually marriage.
Both men and women.
Those that wanted marriage and kids already have that.
I'm not a Tinder user, but the impression I get is that there is an epidemic of bots such that people have to start conversations with silly "Captcha" type tests. Is this impression correct and there is a bot problem? And if so, how has Tinder not fixed that already?! It's not a particularly hard problem to kill off all but the most determined bots. Or are they not motivated to do so due to it inflating user numbers?
It's a feature. All dating apps/websites go through the same 3 part lifecycle. At any given time, there is only one "hip" service that everyone is using and that attracts all of the tier 1 members (i.e. attractive women) to use exclusively. Right now, that app is Hinge. Before Hinge took off, it was Bumble. And before that it was Tinder. The app that occupies this top space is generally able to get there by optimizing for the female experience, to the complete detriment of the male experience because men will always go where the attractive women are, and they will put up with anything because of that.
As a new service comes along and takes all the tier 1 users, the previous front runner drops to the second part of its' lifecycle. This is where there's still a modicum of tier 1 users left, enough to give an impression of vitality to the community and continue pulling in the new users (desperate single men) who will pay for the service's extra features in hopes of finding someone. Bumble currently occupies this space. At this second part of the lifecycle, there becomes a strong incentive to start balancing out the UX optimization between male and female, because you're no longer in the growth stage and need to start extracting revenue.
Finally, once a new service again comes along that displaces the current number one, the original number one drops to the third part of its' lifecycle. This is where Tinder is now. At that point, it has completely lost relevance to all tier 1 users, but it's able to continue along in a zombified state based on its' previous reputation and the purposefully allowed proliferation of bots that create an illusion of vitality. This is honestly where dating apps make the most money, even if the service itself is terrible. You have no mandate to continue innovating or providing good customer service, and you can totally optimize for the male experience (which is far more profitable) because there are no real women left.
source: Worked for $large_dating_app in the mid-2010s
As an aside, I'm curious if there's still any dating websites worth spending time on (no phone app install required).
Most of bots pay Tinder, which is how they get the "unlimited likes", ability to change location and ability to pull those that "liked" them. Cleaning up bots will wipe out a significant portion of tinder revenue.
On top of you doing the math on how active a bot is verse regular humans, some additional probably related factors are: - Bot accounts use attractive photos - Bot accounts can claim to be anywhere - Bot accounts are often new accounts, and new accounts get boosted - The longer you use the app, you run out of actual people to swipe on, but the new bot accounts continue to pop up at the same rate - making their % of your total swipe pool increase over time. - Bots might just be masking the reality that there isnt many people in your area using the app lately.
All that said, in my region of NY I would not consider it a problem at all. maybe this is not a problem for me because my area is very populated, so there's a lot of actual people on the app.
Whether they're real or not is the user's problem. Worst case scenario, they get fed up and go to OkCupid, which has the same parent company, and the same dehumanizing swipe based UI. Or they could go to Match.com, which I think is the parent company.
Sad to hear that now it's a Tinder clone with swiping, forced real names, short profiles for mobile, and such.
Also funny how problematized dating outside of those approved channels has become.
It is, ultimately, monopoly control over human reproduction.
1. Create profile with hot babe pictures
2. Set search proximity to lowest setting
3. Swipe furiously until you find your friend
4. Wait for a match
5. Screencap the ensuing conversation
I did this to a couple guys in my platoon. The results were definitely worth the effort.
Hope there is a special place in hell for people who have cheap laughs at cost of emotional damage of others.
Just for clarity, I'm talking about adult males whose job description is essentially "jump out of planes and kill people." We're not made of quite such fragile stuff as, apparently, you are. It sounds like your life must be very difficult.
The level of well-I-never and pearl-clutching in these comments really speaks volumes about the HN commentariat.
However, if someone feels an equivalent amount of distress from having a convo with a fake person on a dating app as they would from thinking that some terrible accident happened to their kid at school, I believe they might have some larger personal problems to address first.
It would be like making the class walk through a math problems people did right and wrong.
It could have been a great team building exercise.
My concern here is that this kind of verification will become mandatory and will then be used to ban people from behaving the "wrong" way from a company perspective - not "engaging" enough with it, avoiding the dark patterns, not giving it the permissions it requests, etc.
But presumably you recommend it to others as a successful place to find a partner?
Tying that to a real ID would mean you'd need a new real identity and/or make fake documents which is illegal in most places.
When has that ever happened?
Isn’t the verification they are already doing sufficient type of voluntary verification?
The biggest problem with tinder, at the moment, seems to be people using the "passport" system. They pretend to be local, but really they're hundreds/thousands of miles away. I wish that was more explicit and obvious.
Yeah tell me about it :p I live in Norway and about the only people I regularly match with are people from South America. And in a way that’s neat, they are nice people and I want to go there some day. But I really wish I’d be shown to more people near me so I can actually meet someone IRL and have it turn into something meaningful. I cannot afford to travel right now and even if I could, COVID-19 is still making it difficult.
All I want is to meet some women, hang out with them and find someone that we both enjoy being around each other.
I’ve had very few matches with people actually from my country in the past year and in every year prior.
I’ve been to a grand total of one date in the past year. And I’ve had proper text conversations with maybe a handful of people from my country at most.
Maybe it’s a sign that I should earn some money that would allow me to leave this country for somewhere else, idk.
One thing is for sure, Tinder is just not my arena in this country. So I’ve uninstalled it for like the 20th time. We’ll see how long it goes before I install it again, so I can continue meaninglessly swiping on people from my country that are not going to even see my profile, just like it always is save for a few people a year.
It's a good feature, you can match with people a few weeks before going to another destination or on holiday etc.
It works the same in every country.
> Catfishing is a deceptive activity where a person creates a fictional persona or fake identity on a social networking service, usually targeting a specific victim.
