Issue today is that apps control visibility, both in terms of profiles and likes. I've tried Hinge a few times. Did like a 4 month initial stint that had me consistently matching/meeting very attractive women (ones in the standouts section), tried it again a year later under a paid plan and had one mediocre match in 2 weeks (same photos and profile).
Skimmed the article so maybe this was addressed, but there's dark patterns happening on these apps, or faulty algos, or both.
One problem I’ve realized lately is that a lot of people are on dating apps because they feel like they have to be to meet someone, but they don’t actually enjoy chatting online and may not even be very good at it. Apps probably have a stage when they have a high percentage of “online” people who are just better at texting and, for better at worse, on their phones more.
I would have a 2-week rule: If we didn't meet in person (or setup something in the future) within 2 weeks, I would move on.
This helped filter out the people that weren't interested in actually meeting.
A lot of people join specific dating apps by the theme
So you get a large percent there just because of the pacing and look, and then a large percent of actual dates that are like “wait I thought casual hookups werent part of this app”
Why do you say so? IMO Hinge obscures all the relevant details of a persons profile into the tiny, horizontal scrolling thing. Age, location, family plans, etc. all crammed in here, and then the best real estate dedicated to stupid prompts that are almost invariably “I go crazy for… amazing food!” “One thing you should know about me… My ig @hotgirl”
We're getting there, whether that's dating apps controlling your stack of faces one at a time, or even seemingly innocuous things like this site's opaque comment ranking system.
These things happen by inches.
In fact I'd say being able to balance this gender imbalance is THE issue to solve for modern apps. Everything including monetization models is built around that.
Many women I know loved the attention and having the ability to choose.
The current model is clearly preferred as tinder made dating apps mainstream.
> The other thing that interests you is the like ratio, or the openness, among 100 profiles that the user sees, how many of them does he like? (The median for men is 26% and for women is 4%.)
>The like ratio of a girl is almost independent of the profiles she sees. For example, if a girl has a like ratio of 5% and you remove 50% of the profiles, even if you remove only the profiles she will not like, her like ratio will still be 5% (you can do that by removing very unattractive people for a guy that is very attractive, for example). It is funny to observe, but it seems like a girl has internal reasoning on a dating app, and they know they can only like x% of profiles whatever she sees (of course, it doesn't work if you show only ugly people).
And lastly:
>Whats interesting is that the more attractive the guys were ranked by girls the more they were looking for something not serious.
For men, most swipes will not be a match, so less reason to ever think about swiping left to maintain a certain swipe pecentage.
Just a theory!
We should do a study on that itself, because I think guys are having quality conversations, pulling teeth with an entitled beautiful woman they are prioritizing, and everyone else is waiting for the guy to lead and there is no bandwidth left! so guys spread themselves too thin to procedurally lead every new conversation after accumulating matches
while girls are particular on the matches
From my experience in online dating there are a lot of women who expect the guy to do everything. He needs to approach and then also carry the conversation. Out of maybe 10 initial messages I received from women there was maybe 1 that was more than “Hi”.
This is true. My cap was at 50 conversations at the same time. After that, my brain got fried (male here).
When I was using dating apps I kept a spreadsheet to track the response to like ratio, and indeed, the amount of women who liked me back in any given month was exactly 5% of those whom I liked.
Much as I wish that ratio was higher, data is data. The Tinder style matchmaking will always bring out this behaviour.
> Girls would say, red flag if a guy has shirtless pictures and then liking profiles where guys were shirtless.
This is surprising:
> In our case we had even acquisition in terms of male/female, but the retention of girls is lower than that of men, so you end up with 66% men and 34% women.
2:1 men to woman is a far better ratio than what most people claim (5:1 is usually thrown around with no evidence).
These points will ruffle feathers:
> But I think dating apps can currently be used at each women and men advantage, it is just necessary to have the right strategy:
> For girls you need to lower your standards and force you to go on a date with guys that you dont have the flame for (it is actually very hard to do that for a girl, very very hard)
> For guys, you need to pay a photograph (to get liked) and pay the premium plan (so that your profile is shown to other users). If you think a dating app has no incentive to show paying users to girls, then you didnt read this article ^^
I kind of didn't understand the logic behind how he got there. According to the article women get more matches then they know what to do with. Why would lowering your standards in such an environment be a good strategy?
> Only 50% of girls sent 10 likes in their account lifespan.
> 10% of girls that finish the onboarding never send any pass or like, ...
> We have plenty of girls that can scroll through 300 profiles and not like anyone and deleting their account saying "I dont like anyone" well
Hah, check out this claim 3 women to every 2 men. Of course there's no mention of what site/app it is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38059778
It's tantamount to measuring a hospital's performance by it's retention rate.
A terrible metric for the users. For the shareholders, the perfect dating app is one where the users are strung along for their whole lives, paying for a subscription but never finding anything permanent.
There are ways to fix it, but you have to fundamentally restructure how the app works. Instead of subscriptions, the app has to be paid upon success. Did the matches lead to marriage? Great, they get paid. Otherwise nope. Until incentives are aligned there is literally no financial incentive for them to do otherwise.
There is one app I'm aware of that works this way, but I won't link it so I don't end up sounding like a shill account. But as a user I really hope they succeed, because the current generation of dating apps aren't in anyone's interest except the people who run them.
> I don't think retention is a good metric for a dating app, unfortunately that's how VC evaluate performance of B2C apps. When we think about dating it is more about quality than quantity.
Managed Dissatisfaction, FOMO, Abundance: And the users want it. That's what the data shows. Proof: essentially, every app is a dating app covered up as "social features."
Apple just entered the dating app market.
Correction: the users don't "want" it, but many of them aren't strong or wise enough to resist those features.
The (presumably usage) data can't show what the users want, only what they do, and those often aren't the same thing.
Don't do this.
You need good pictures that convey attractiveness (looks, as well as personality). Using professional photos conveys neediness & a level of desperation hidden under a shell of an ego the shot tries to portray. So you end up relying on looks with a handicap. A good looking person doesnt need professional shots to show that.
Sure, if you currently have mirror selfies, professional shots are better. Otherwise - if you are not a model who has magazine-published shots you're including in your profile, then don't go use or pay for professional shots. Figure out how to take canned shots on your own or pay a photographer for canned real shots (nothing highly edited).
But you absolutely should have someone who knows how to make you look as good as possible in a natural environment.
You should also have a woman friend critically evaluate your profile. (If you don't have a friend you trust, you should first make sure you can make trusted friends with women who will tell you the truth.)
> Don't do this.
> pay a photographer for canned real shots (nothing highly edited).
So, instead of having my pictures taken by a professional photographer, you recommend that I pay a professional photographer to take my pictures?
I've heard of irrational bias against the passive voice, but this is extreme even in that genre.
Im saying dont do this: https://www.koby.photography/blog/2024/8/14/why-professional...
Do not pay for staged professional photos that convey exactly that.
If you do pay for photos, they should look _real_ like an actual photo taken with a phone while you are doing something. Way less processed, less uncanny vibes, less holding you suit button looking out into nowhere.
There's the "Sears" kind of photo where somebody unskilled works a camera installed in a studio which is not too expensive.
There's something a step up from that (maybe $100) where a pro photographer does the same thing.
I do environmental portraits, often with a 90mm or 135mm prime, sometimes with a wide zoom. Sometimes I discover places where I can get a great photograph of anybody in terms of lighting and background. It can be really special if you get a photo of somebody in an environment that's special to them but I don't think that's what you want for a dating site. But one of my generic environment shots would really be a winner, and I can shoot one in ten minutes inclusive of the walk to and from my office.
I'm not good at the people part of it. Some people photograph really well always (the alumni relations guy from my school, a disabled friend who might be high-functioning autistic) other people (me, my wife, my son) just don't. I can get a good photograph of somebody like that despite themselves but I have to try many sessions.
I've been doing sports photography seriously for about two years, lately I've come to see it as "people photography" and realized I do better if I think about it in terms of "getting pictures that make the players look great" as opposed to "following the ball". I am doing a volunteer gig that I'm treating as an audition for paying work and I'm planning to get a bunch of portraits out of it, so far as the technical stuff I went to the arena with my neurodivergent friend and used him as a stand-in. Now that I think about it I have two weeks to do something about the people side.
In your experience, to what extent would displaying these qualities negatively impact a woman on a dating app?
For an attractive person: not much impact, though I think there is still a bit of a handicap depending on the type of person they are trying to attract and how much confidence plays into a valued trait for the other person. The same goes for how much of it seems ego-driven vs genuine.
For the average person: I mean you're simply limiting your pool. And potentially attracting personalities that look to exploit emotionally vulnerable people (the type willing to drop a lot of money on a photoshoot in hopes of getting more dates). As opposed to attracting the people they want to be dating.
Instinctively, I agree with you, but might this actually not be true anymore? I've noticed how "accepted" it is to share lots of selfies today, while before that used to be very obvious signs for self-absorbed/narcissistic/superficial/etc people, so I'm wondering if maybe we're both wrong thinking this today.
Maybe like how selfies became part of the modern social interaction, getting professional photographs for dating services might be entering the same phase too?
- A mirror selfie of a man smiling
- A professional photo of the same man posing with a confident look (confidence is highly conflicted here imo)
Intuitively I don't think it's about norms vs general laws of attraction.
I wear aloha shirts every day, and nearly every time I go to TJ's, someone asks me where they can find a particular item. It may be a guy or a gal, but I am always happy to help a neighbor find what they need.
That is not the reason I wear aloha shirts. I just love these shirts! Every spring I get the Cooke Street shirts at Costco, one of each new pattern.
One time at the Menlo Park Trader Joe's I was talking with the guy restocking the freezer section. He said, "Nice aloha shirt! I bet people sometimes think you work here."
Sure enough, a minute later a young lady walked up to me and asked if we had organic bread. I walked her over to the bread section and pointed out the organic breads.
Later I caught up with the freezer guy again and told him "you were right!"
Ducky's, for those unfamiliar, is a car wash with several locations on the SF Peninsula. Even if you just get an exterior wash, after you go through the tunnel they hand dry your car.
There is a waiting area outside with a dozen chairs, and it takes 5-10 minutes before your car is ready.
And you never know who you might run into there!
The key to this, of course, is to be outgoing and friendly, and open to surprises.
Just yesterday I was at the Redwood City TJ's and a guy asked me where to find soy milk. I wasn't as familiar with the layout of that store, but an actual crew member was standing near us, and I said "I'm not sure, but I think this gentleman can help you."
After he got his soy milk we ran into each other again, and he said "I'm sorry, I was sure you worked here. The shirt!"
I told him, "No apology needed! It happens all the time. And sometimes it's a nice young lady who asks me where to find something."
Apparently you are good at wearing aloha shirts and finding products. ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯
And yes, you nailed what I may be good at.
I guess I am also good at having conversations with random strangers, male or female. I always smile at people - men or women - but never in a creepy way.
And I say hello if it seems appropriate. I never expect anything out of this, I just enjoy meeting my neighbors.
Our "twist" was that anyone could be a matchmaker, pairing other people (in addition to our recommendation engine).
An interesting thing happened: lot's of people just like using dating apps in a voyeuristic way, with no intention of dating.
Tinder eventually launched this feature, but it fell flat.
I still think there's merit to human-based recs over "AI" matchmakers.
And while I’m here, OKCupid when it existed as mostly a website around 2013 was probably the best actual dating app and attempt to provide a decent enough platform for people to express themselves, and the question answering section where it would then deliver a compatibility rating was really good. But then the churn and being bought by Match completely killed it. OKC was the first dating platform that seemed like it was genuinely designed to work.
(For the first part of your post I think I am not qualified to comment).
Candidly, assuming your gender based on your username, it would have been a net positive compared to the stats ;)
The article is really good on the product decisions but light on what kind of life and situation these users have.
Our data was almost identical to the article, showing the same imbalances.
Let's just say that if you can open your mouth enough to say hi to a woman without hesitation, you are completely wasting your time on dating sites.
These days, saying hi seems to be risky for more reasons than rejection. Maybe more so if you’re not good looking. Hence the apps
However I believe it also boils down to personality traits too.
Saying "Hi" isn't enough. One needs to be creative to stand out from the field. Women get absolutely swamped on the apps.
Women who are swamped on dating apps are not swamped with attention from men in real life.
They see this discrepancy, and instinctively interpret that as the dating site being a space where all the world's desperate losers have gathered.
You don't need to stand out, just not stand in that same place.
Its actually not, and that so many guys believe that just leaves the field unguarded
What women say online about not wanting to be approached practically anywhere is a vocal minority, and other women don't even see these conversations
Positive interactions with men are not even categorized as the ones that annoyed them, despite the interaction being the exact same. so it remains up to you to figure out where you are on that totem pole
This applies to when you approach girls cold. If you're really hot it's a different game, girls will just give you that look when you're walking around on the street, at the mall, etc, and if you walk up and say hi to them they will fuck you if you play it cool at all.
Highly recommended.
It took a long time to not have that.
1. Get the BEST possible pictures of you. If your picture doesn't look like the best picture you've taken all year, don't use it. Just know that online dating is more about being photogenic and looking good in the perceptions of others than actually looking good. However, if you're unattractive IRL, make sure you have a way to compensate for that. I am a really playful person during dates and that lightens the mood a lot to the extent that some women start to see me as attractive but that's simply positive vibes being associated to my looks
2. Rate your pictures. I use photofeeler.com, there's also rankpick.info. You need at least 3 8.5 pictures, I barely got them after 50 well crafted/taken photos. My friends got them way quicker (I'm a tough case due to a cleft lip and small shoulders)
3. How to start a conversation: make a comment based on her pictures. It's the best trade-off between being original and writing a fast conversation starter. The more imaginative and creative you are, the better
4. Don't be standard. No "what are your hobbies?" style type of conversation
5. If you write a bio it has to pop. If your bio doesn't pop, just keep it short. Stuff that I had:
Cuddle champion of 2019 <-- just a playful eye catcher
Meditation for 2 hours per day <-- wasn't true (I did 1 hour per day but aimed for 2. All is fair in love & war)
city 1/city 2/ city 3/ city 4 <-- city 1 = home city, city 2 = city I'm currently nomadding at, city 3 & 4 = the cities I plan to go to or cities that just sound hip
Shout out to:
- Group of people you like #1 (e.g. artists)
- Group of people you like #2 (e.g. geeks)
- Group of people you like #3 (e.g. ambitious people)
--> Give fun names to them such as: creative people with an imagination, board game lovers and people that want to conquer the world
edit: Sorry for the inflammatory language. Not one of my finer moments.
Just leave the app if you don't want to participate
Guys have to behave like attractive women do, which is discerning and the opposite of how guys use the apps, OP’s article gives the rubric
Online dating is toxic, and I fought it back with toxic and somehow through all of that I found my dream wife and I tol her all about what I did. She agreed that what I did was toxic, but that there's a "the means justify the end" ethics at play since we found each other
With that said: I don't think the dating scene should work this way. It's too much based on being photogenic and having beautiful looks. And this comes from someone who knows the ins and outs of training charisma and finding a potential partner that way (still possible but not in the initial steps of online dating)
My guess is that there's some rounding or floating point shannanigans going on.
Yes this is what I have to contribute to the conversation, I cannot speak to the dating dynamics as I am an unexpert on that subject
If it's not an error, perhaps it involves something where once your profile approaches certain cutoffs for liked/viewed ratio, the system changes how (and to whom) it presents your profile... Except the higher and lower outliers are not always adjacent either.
When you have unlimited options, and a potentially better one is just a swipe away, people become disposable. Fuck or not fuck. Hot or not. Bang or pass. Where in the past someone might tolerate an insignificant quirk someone has, nowadays such a thing is often all that it takes to ghost and keep looking.
The users that get a lot of matches often put in zero effort into talking. They expect you to do all the conversation, and often act uninterested, if you ever get a reply after the match at all. Matching and never getting a reply after contact is more common than not, regardless of how much thought and time is put into the first message.
Profiles often read more like a list of demands, a quota that must be reached before you'll even be considered worthy. This is true for all the genders.
"Make me laugh" is a demand that I've seen on countless profiles. Entertain me monkey, make me laugh. So many "Make me laugh"s that I've started to wonder if most of the profiles I see are actually bot/scammer accounts, because so many of them have slight variations of the same exact profile bios. AI is only going to make that shit show worse, and I'm sure many people are already trying to wine and dine an AI profile and have no clue.
Let's also not forget about the clear "looking for a greencard" mail order bride profiles, and the weird as fuck profiles where each picture has a child as the focus of every picture, very intentionally so, in a way that I can't quantify but when you run across them, it just feels off, weird, saying something without saying something.
Dating apps are all exactly the same anymore. Same fake profiles. Same gamification of attraction that you have to pay to win or have to grind every day against those who do.
Dating apps are not there to match people. That would put them out of business. They are there to extract funds from wallets while keeping you hopeful that your perfect 10 is one more premium teir up the chain, one more swipe away, one more billing cycle in the future.
I'm even more convinced now that online dating has reached a local optima, but eventually someone is going to find a solution that is less shallow and predatory and blow it out of the water.
Optima for “stable-relationship-forming app” are yet to be discovered — and also, I think, to really be sought at all
Half the user base are patsies is basically the fundamental design.
if women use 4 criteria (face, body, money, iq) with a strict cutoff of even 55th percentile, they will reduce their like ratio to 4%. (0.45 ^ 4 =0.04)
Men are using only 2 criteria (face and body) to get to 25% like ratio: need 50th percentile on both: (0.5 ^ 2 = 0.25)
> To me, the next revolution is really concepts that will make you meet other people without having much information about them. As a user, you will trust the algorithm to match you with the right people. And these concepts will be paying only
> So to summarize, a concept where users pay and commit that they will meet people without knowing them before. So yes, it will take a few dates to really find someone that you like, but so is going every day in dating apps and meeting people that you don't like either.
This is very close to the Dutch app Breeze: https://breeze.social/. There's no chatting in the app. It's focused on meeting people as soon as possible. People pre-pay for dates (covers drinks) and the app partners with venues to check on the couples (they know their names). People who cancel dates get a badge on their profile saying that they have canceled. Ghosters get banned.
For most women, you’re only going to do that with a guy you’re 100% physically attracted to from the get go.
I wouldn’t recommend Breeze to any men who aren’t above average in looks. It will also quickly stop showing you people when you’re getting rejected a lot. An interesting aspect of the app. At least you’ll know where you stand after about a week or two. (Getting only 3 options a day says that it thinks you’re not going to ever get a match)
Breeze is in NYC now. So, it’s making way into the US slowly.
A few years back I was single and on Hinge a fair amount. If you used Hinge back then, you'll remember some key differences between the platform and other dating apps: 1) when you "like"'d someone, you'd have to comment on a specific part of their profile (a photo, a prompt answer, etc), 2) these likes showed up in their inbox, independent of whether they liked you or not (as in, you didn't have to like each other mutually; the other end decided whether to reply or ignore after delivery), and 3) there was limit per day, you could like/message 8 profiles per day, no more. On average, swiping through my 8 per day, I'd generally get 1-2 new replies, which turned roughly into 3-4 first dates per month.
One of the key elements is that the inbox was time-ordered: the most recent like you received was at the top. There was discussion on the Hinge subreddit about how girls would typically only click through the top few items in their inbox daily, and if you were lower down, you were doomed to drown under the mountain of new message they're getting on top. So I figured I'd solve for "what is the optimal time of day to be blasting out my likes to ensure I end up higher in the inbox?"
You can probably see where this is going: I requested a GDPR data export, which happened to have all my conversations, time-stamped. Crunching through in Python there was something in the data I didn't really expect.. a disproportionate number of first-replies (replies to my initial like/message, that is) were around the 2-3pm bucket. Not what I would've expected (don't these people work?) but fair enough, I started doing all my swiping in those hours instead of in the evening as I usually did.
And it worked. Good god did it work. I consistently started getting replies to 70-80% of my initial messages (from the ~10% before). I was drowning in conversations to the point where I wouldn't swipe at all for days for fear of yet another conversation to manage. Within a few months I ended up meeting my current girlfriend and haven't been back on since, but it was surprising how well something simple like time-of-day affected my reply rate.
They do! 2-3 p.m. is around the time people get fidgety at work and start looking at the clock, checking their phones, and such. They are no longer at lunch. Whatever busywork they had to rush through in the morning is done.
You also need to be reasonably good at commenting (ie, don't be ugly).
I'm pretty confident though that it's just the after-lunch doldrums and people just.. sit around swiping at work? Best guess anyway
I would imagine there are huge differences between let's say 20,25,30 and 35+.
Did you happen to group by age bucket ?!
i remember reading about this rule of thumb but dang, i'm 35 and can't imagine dating someone that's 24-25 right now. no judgments here btw.
> The like ratio of a girl is almost independent of the profiles she sees. For example, if a girl has a like ratio of 5% and you remove 50% of the profiles, even if you remove only the profiles she will not like, her like ratio will still be 5%
These two statements sound like they would be at odds. It seems either the first statement is incorrect or women on dating apps are more choosy when it comes to men only. I’d be curious how the stats play out on lesbian dating apps
Assuming that male and female behavior doesn't change regardless of the partner they're seeking, it will still be true that the more groups are gay, the higher the acceptance rate will be, and it will also be true that gays are more interested in forming these groups than lesbians are.
From my anecdotal experience, they have some algorithm that leads to diminishing returns in order to keep extracting money for boosts or whatever.
For instance there are all these drops to near-zero in the histograms at .28, .46, .56 for no clear reason, and the article doesn't even consider that noteworthy.
The "Men Like ratio (y) vs ratio (x)" has an inexplicable wall around .33 which I could only explain with some sort of product limitation maybe? But I really wish it was explained what artifacts the product introduces.
Since it happens at the same place in each graph (eg a spike at 0.28-0.29, followed by a drop at 0.29-0.30) I wonder if it's some kind of number-theoretic effect from the fact it's actually a ratio of integers. For example, with less than 20 views there's no way to get to the 0.29-0.30 bucket, but 4 ways to get into the 0.28-0.29 bucket. Hmm.
Also notable that 0.56 is exactly twice 0.28.
It’s hard to take the rest of the article seriously after reading this!
It sucks, but a dating app doesn't want you successful, they want you to use their app for as long as possible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dataclysm
If you're a guy and you want to depress yourself, find a female friend who is signed to a dating app and see all the likes and messages she gets. When I was in this space, an attractive woman was getting on the order of 1000 messages a day. 95% of those messages were one-worders, "hi", "wassup". Basically a total tsunami of garbage.
LLMs are going to change this space enormously as they are going to act as your agent to talk to the other person's agent. The world of online dating is going to be horrible.
I already know people who have dozens of verified female dating app profiles staffed by LLMs and overseas operators that they use to trick men into clicking links to generate revenue.
Enshittification all round.
The thing interesting about that blog was — if I remember it correctly — they posted results of initiations by men and women. That suggested there was kind of an optimal strategy for men and women, in that there was kind of mismatching going on in terms of who reached out to who.
IIRC, they were suggesting that it was good for women to reach out to very attractive men, because men in general were not getting contacted, including attractive men, but were responsive to being contacted, and a woman could take advantage of that, even if they were less attractive themselves. Men in contrast would do better to reach out to women who were slightly less attractive, because most of mens' attention collectively was focused on a very small group of very attractive women, and the women who were less attractive, even slightly so, were getting contacted much less often.
Typing this out I think the distributions were very different from in the current article, but also I think they were analyzing different things. In that they were looking at actual initiations, and in this they're looking at likes. Also this article breaks things down a bit more in terms of goals in using the app, which plays into things as well in a big way.
The complexity of it all increases quite a bit very rapidly.
Women go on app when they feel a bit sad, when they need to feel a bit better.
People want to stay single. Introversion is on the rise.
I live in france and somebody said on the radio that the state family fund (CAF) should organize dancing ball for people to meet.
Maybe the core problem is that dating apps should not make money, or at least find another way to make money.
Dating apps are supposed to match people, but desire to match up is very lopsided towards one gender, with the other gender having very little desire to match up.
Having unrealistic expectations is one thing. Being the monkey paw that fulfills those wishes is on a wholly different level.
Inactivity serving as a potential signal that you found a match, or you’re no longer in the market. Although the incentive system would have to ensure the app isn’t aligned to make the experience so annoying you stop using it either
The takeaway is that humans best date by meeting people in person through mutual acquaintances.
Without the forced direct social interaction, women are only interested in the top 10% of guys, and guys are just aimlessly running at anything that moves regardless of their actual interest (i.e. liking and seeking sex from women they have no real interest in dating). Guys end up with no likes and no dates and women end up with mountains of disingenuous likes and dates with disingenuous men.
Not sure which of these you meant, but here's links for those who haven't read them:
The one blog post that got removed when match-dot-com (InterActiveCorp) bought OKC in 2011-Feb:
https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/okcupid/whyyoushouldneverpa...
The other OKC data analysis posts (archive link to 2011-Jan):
https://web.archive.org/web/20110126012317/http://blog.okcup...
Show all of the women to all of the men. From this you get numbers on which women are the most highly rated. Then, show women a) men who are at the same percentile as them or below and b) the smaller number of men who have already liked them.
The result is that 60th percentile women end up primarily liking 60th percentile men and so on, because they're the highest rated men they're typically shown, and they're going to pick the top 5% of whatever distribution you show them.
Then you end up with good matches, instead of having all the women match only with the 95th percentile players who don't want a serious relationship.
showing a 60 percentile woman, men that around 60 percentile is a sure way to drive women away from your app
The implication being that the 60th percentile women who don't like 60th percentile men would have liked 95th percentile men. But that's useless, because finding matches for those men was never your problem to begin with. And those men are also going to match with 95th percentile women and then choose them over the 60th percentile women anyway unless they're only looking for a hookup, so you're neither solving any problem for the platform nor any problem for the women.
> You have to be able to give women their "dream man" to retain them.
That's just a charade. The 60th percentile women on average can't actually land the 95th percentile men, but if you show them all the 95th percentile men then it reduces the rate at which they like the men they could actually land, which frustrates both the men and the women, because they're both looking for real matches that could actually go somewhere.
> showing a 60 percentile woman, men that around 60 percentile is a sure way to drive women away from your app
If you show them 95th percentile men then they like them but so do most other women, and then the men in that group will either not reply to most of them or will reply to all of them intending to ghost them after having sex or cheat on them, which... is a sure way to drive women away from your app.
Same strategy as attracting men: fake profiles and spambots.
The only way to meaningfully change this situation is by sorting/ranking after interpersonal interaction.
In theory you could just stop showing the top 5% of men to anyone, but that's pretty useless. Then the 90-95th percentile men would get all the matches and you haven't solved anything.
You could assign percentiles at random so that some 80th percentile women only see 40th percentile men and vice versa, but that seems less likely to work for obvious reasons.
The problem you need to solve is to get the 60th percentile women to go on a date with the 60th percentile men to begin with. What happens then is up to them, but at least you're putting people in a situation that could lead to something, instead of the one:many matching that sucks for everyone except the players.
(not my analogy, but IMO very succinct)
There is nothing invalid about wanting casual sex. The problem is failing to communicate that that is what you want. The result of that problem is "players" of "the game" devolving the entire situation into something that is fundamentally intractable for everyone involved.
It turns out that a significant percentage of women do want casual sex. The overwhelming majority of those women also don't want to be exclusively objectified and used, because that leads to poor quality sex, and a general lack of post-sex aftercare (which is important groundwork for good next-time sex). This situation is nearly always expressed by women with the same overgeneralized story that paints every man who has ever interacted with her as an abusive narcissist. The problem is that a woman's desire for casual sex is overwhelmingly catered to by men who ignore this story, and most of those men do so by behaving (intentionally or not) as abusive narcissists. Why? Because the men who do listen to this story are left with no meaningful room to make a move.
We have too much narrative focus on women telling men "don't". Obviously that's an important discussion to have, it just needs to be accompanied by women telling men what to "do", and "how". Most men really need to hear everything a woman is concerned about, good and bad.
Dating apps have involved themselves in this problem by replacing dating itself with advertising. If a woman has a real conversation with a man, then there is real room for her to lay out positive interest. On the other hand, if a woman advertises her positive interests, then she is effectively asking for both constructive and harmful interaction. So very few women actually communicate (on a dating app) any interest other than a desire for committed romance. Those who do are overwhelmed with men who finally found what they are looking for. Those who don't are overwhelmed with men who just want to check behind the curtain.
If a man wants to advertise himself as a thoughtful listener, there is no meaningful way for him to prove he is genuine. If a man wants to advertise himself as the best compromise (who will give you lazy sex, but be hot enough to make up the difference), then he must compete with the rest on a scale of immediate attractiveness and nothing more.
---
Like most of our social problems, the advertising model sits right at the heart of it. My answer to that is to do something about its foundation: eliminate (or significantly redesign) copyright.
this is a factor of why it is a loosing strategy to do dinner, drinks and coffee dates
first the user experience is an arduous interview that is reliant on a “spark” that leaves too much to chance
secondly, the ask is for somewhere you can hear each other, “get to know each other”, and have one foot out the door easily to leave
on the woman’s side…. its the same as this article is saying: for disqualifying, not qualifying.
for the guys side, whatever your goal is, would be accomplished by disregarding the woman’s preference. in reality, she likely did go on a more elaborate and rambunctious date, generated endorphins (the spark), got more intimate than her risk models dictate, and then realized she didn't know the guy.
if you want any of that to happen, be like the other guy
it is optimal to be like the 5% guy that is closing with women. if you cannot replicate that on dating apps, you may be able to with other in person approaches and date ideas
(1) I used to make those kind of non-informative scatter plots with xvgr when I was a grad student, this package does a great job for those kind of cases
https://seaborn.pydata.org/generated/seaborn.relplot.html
even if you don't use it you can copy its patterns to make designs that work
(2) An obvious commercial offering for guys is a photography package. About 20 years ago I went to the biggest photog in my town and my publisher paid $100 for a headshot that was just a junior photog in the studio. If you were a bride you would get premium hair and makeup to go with your photography, even if you were appearing on TV you would probably get a little hair and makeup help.
(3) With the right choice architecture you could control things such as "the percentage of people that you like" or "the number of likes that you receive". For instance if you were going just on looks it would be easy to show people a stack of 10 photos and have them sort them in attractiveness; you could also show pairs of profiles and pick an ELO for each one. If you look at it as a relative ranking process you can peel off whatever percentage off the top that you want.
An obvious objection is that given such a choice the "hot" people will be the only ones that get chosen but a counter to that is that you can put an upper limit on how many "likes" somebody gets by not showing them to people.
This contradicts some things he says later on about things that help the apps retain people, but from the viewpoint of making an app that "works", girls who are looking for commitment really aren't benefiting from seeing profiles from hot guys who get a lot of attention and provide nothing but casual sex.
Well, sure, but you can lead a horse to water... . The less hot guys might be better options for those girls, but are they going to swipe on them? If you stop showing them the hot guys, will they stick around for the less hot guys or just switch to a different app?
> For girls, it is the number of likes sent; the number of likes received has no impact on retention, maybe a little bit but less than 1%. The number of likes sent has a huge impact; a user that liked no profile in her 100 first scrolls has a d30 of 12%, and 19% for girls that like 10 profiles and 16% for girls that liked 5 profiles. The d1 retention is almost 100% correlated to a girl sending 5 likes to active guys in the first 24 hours (the real thing is to get a match, but it is easy to get a match when a girl sends 5 likes). So to have the perfect d1 retention for girls, the only thing you should focus on is to get them to send 5 likes. And you have about 100 scrolls to do so.
Brutal.
As someone in that more than 50%, it’s very annoying to constantly get told to get on the apps to meet women. I’m surrounded by men in the top 20% because I’m affluent, well educated, and spend a lot of time at the gym. Sadly, I’m just around these people and wasn’t born into the same kind of family. I’m an outsider. I was born poor and ugly. I’ve solved the poor thing but being ugly is incurable. I’m going to Beverley hills next week and getting more surgery to try to alleviate the ugliness but it’s pathetic what a man in his mid-30’s has to do now to even get a single like back on his profile.
Women don’t need men anymore in the developed world. Men are luxury goods and women are completely happy to live without. A man isn’t needed but merely wanted and only wanted if he fits a very particular set of criteria.
I’m not accusing you of being an incel (I’m really not trying to be sarcastic). But this has some real incel vibes.
Are you a 2 only trying to date 10s?
And I am not looking down from you from on high. I’m not wealthy. I’m doing okay. I’m definitely not tall. In my younger dating days I was in great shape (a part time fitness instructor) and if I weren’t out there as one of the few straight men without any feminine tendencies (is that a PC thing to say?) in a industry mostly with women and gay men, I wouldn’t have fared as well.
But I wasn’t 5 foot 4 trying to step to a 5 foot 10 supermodel.
Women in the west are choosing, quite reasonably, to hook up with the top 20% of men and ignore the rest. I'm not saying that as a blame thing - I don't blame them, I might make the same choice in their position. But the result is that the bottom 80% of men have practically no options - and no, lowering their standards doesn't help, it's not a problem of having potential partners they don't want, it's a problem of not having potential partners at all. I wish we could at least be honest about this rather than victim-blaming.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/10/05/rising-...
Yes I know that not all women are heterosexual. But I also didn’t include women who are in a heterosexual relationship but are not living with someone.
It’s statistically impossible for only 20% of the men to be in a relationship or having sex.
Ive been living abroad the past few years and it was night and day. in america, intimacy was a rare thing. outside the country, I've had zero issues finding partners who I find extremely attractive. Some of my well meaning friends back home warn me that they are "only interested in money" but I've never spent more than a meal at a decently priced restaurant for two. My current gf is significantly hotter than women who reject me back in the states and the only expensive thing about her is her love of instax photography. (that film ain't cheap, learn from me and do not get one of those cameras for your gf)
TLDR: if western women arent' interested in you, do everything you can to be able to sustainably live outside the bubble.
If a man was a solid laborer, upstanding citizen, and otherwise a dedicated family man - he would’ve done alright in certain periods of our history. But now, that’s not really that attractive. Women are much more susceptible to shifting societal trends. You can see this around the world. As women become more online, marriage rates plummet.
We’re moving further and further away from meeting your partners in real life. It’s going to be an uncommon way to meet in the future and what we will find isn’t that everyone just meets online - it’s that most people refuse to be together overall.
That's ugly.
What's ugly is using an anemometer to measure a distance. I mean, using number of matches in a dating app, to measure uglyness. Dating apps are products designed by psychologist and built by engineers to generate frustration and make people pay, not to serve as a measurement stick of the average person's attractiveness.
Dating apps are utterly broken. Don't do that to yourself, or to anyone.
Meeting women in the Real World through common acquaintances. That's where the moat is.
edit: This was harsh and inaccurate. I apologize.
You know why? Because the man or woman on the other end of it is a person with a whole lived experience, feelings and capacity for love. They deserve better than some bitter resentment at never getting something you were "owed by destiny".
Girl: lower your standards.
Boy: pay a photographer to look nicer.
This double disadvantages women as I see it: Their standards are held to be unrealistic (downpoint) and they have to incur the dissatisfaction of beleiving it, and acting on it to lower their expectations. AND Boys are expected to glam up and project a demonstrably less real state of themselves, to get over this bar. So women have to accept lies, and tolerate reality.
(63, in a longterm 40y relationship, not using the apps and not judging individuals here)
But, remember the asymmetry in this space is large. The asymmetry of risk, of expectations, of outcome. It doesn't go to what you project as a hypothetical, it goes to the one I responded to. If you can show me a dating app with the right dynamics to demand the response you hypothesized, we can see how the numbers pan out. The one we have, it's the other direction of bias in expectation and behaviour.
Ask yourself why the asymmetry in hinge/bumble about who initiates contact exist.
With no intent of doxxing your bio page here says you're a social scientist. I'd welcome an understanding of if the current praxis in your field suggests the kind of cultural bias I projected isn't widespread, and if your field views this as "anti men" because I certainly didn't mean it to be, I simply think there is an inherent asymmetry to who has to act, and how they act, in the recommendations from this author in this space, which appears backed by data.
> This double disadvantages ..women?
Sorry, I don't follow you.
Especially since women's unrealistic judgement is to blame. Women are, objectively, rating men all wrong:
https://www.stevestewartwilliams.com/p/how-men-and-women-rat...
(I just pulled the first article that has the famous Okcupid graph.)
I did say disadvantage. I own that word here. In fact, the situation disadvantages men just as much: either project an unrealistic version of yourself or be cast aside. But, thats the singular burden on men, because Women are being advised both to accept "less" and to believe the best they see, which is an artifact of professional portraiture. I've seen myself in candid shots and in pro shots and the pro shots are not me: I don't usually wear a shirt without food stains, and like George washington I am careful about my smile.
This shouldn’t be surprising. Interviewing humans is a skill. Doing so in a product context, and learning useful things from it, is not easy.
I hope they don’t approach other things this way. “You’d need to be a professional plumber to stop water leaking out of this. Maybe that’s the norm but at the end of the day plumbing was no help.”
In UX research you don’t ask people what they want or what they like, you (e.g.) put them in front of software/prototypes, give them tasks, and watch them work. What you learn in this context is _why_ people do things; it’s hard to get that from metrics.
You also don’t get new product ideas from customers. There are aphorisms 100 hundred years old about that which everyone should know: “If I asked my customers what they wanted they would have said, ‘A faster horse.’”
If you try to brute force stats your way to dating apps, you will fail.... to some extent.
A lot of this comes down to looks that you can control, and looks that you cannot control. Some people are born better looking than others and when you spend less than a second filtering people, the first factor you use is looks. That said, not everyone is looking for the same qualities so ymmv, but better looking people find dating apps much easier.
Throwing money at apps works. I'm not going to go into details because my opinion is not based on anything other than my opinion, but I found that the more I spent on the apps, the more dates I would get.
Modern dating when compared to traditional dating offline is not even the same thing. Ghosting and talking romantically to multiple people is normal. You can't let yourself get emotionally attached to anyone until you actually know them or expect anything from them.
I've heard horror stories from both men and women from online dating, and I've only had great exeriences from it. Some people find me attractive, and at the time I was very active and fit, so I usually got past the swipe test. I'm honest with myself and ok with my flaws. I'm also comfortable in social situations which helps me talk to new people.
I think crunching the numbers in this style only looks at a binary 'reality' of dating apps and not what you can do to help yourself and other factors that can lead you to what you ultimately want from partnership, or relationships or physical comfort or whatever else lead you to online dating.
How old are you / how long ago was this? I've been active on-and-off on the apps for the past year; and once you are over the hump of getting consistent matches I feel like the apps create poor behavior that really isn't measured by these companies.
I think being stuck in "situationships" is something that doesn't come out of the data but is caused by dating apps. It's very hard for me to get people to commit (or worse, just give me a hard no), which led me to casting a wider net. Potential partners are reluctant to tell me "I don't like you", and will either ghost or just keep playing along because it's something to do. I started to adjust my behavior by dating multiple people at a time - this eased the sting of wasting time on someone but then I became less sure if I wanted to commit to someone (e.g. I need a date to event X, I'll give Alice 2 weeks, and she doesn't respond so I ask Bobette day of, which pisses Bobette off because she feels like a second option).
I've also had issues where women rarely advertise upfront what they want is a hookup (for obvious reasons), but then I spend 2-3 weeks courting a woman who doesn't have the guts to tell me she didn't see a future with me.
If your goal is a long term relationship, even if you get matches, it's still a mess and I feel the whole rating curve distracts from that.
I am short. I have never been on a dating app. The first time I was single as an adult out of college was between 1996-2002 so they weren’t really a thing and the second time I was single between 2006-2011 and wasn’t looking at dating anyone.
Was this humble brag relevant to the rest of your point?
> Throwing money at apps works. I'm not going to go into details because my opinion is not based on anything other than my opinion, but I found that the more I spent on the apps, the more dates I would get.
I've experienced that too.
> Modern dating when compared to traditional dating offline is not even the same thing. Ghosting and talking romantically to multiple people is normal. You can't let yourself get emotionally attached to anyone until you actually know them or expect anything from them.
Similar experience.
Number of people I'm interested * Number of people who respond
(1 / 60) * (1 / 60) = 3600 people to get one match.
Times 300 = 1.08 million profiles I'd have to view.
Maybe you like 1 of 6? (is it that high, for most people I don' think so). And you manage to get a response from 1 of 10 (because I'd expect the other side to also be at best 1 of 6 + less likely to respond)
So, that's basically saying you went through a minimum of 18k profiles to get your 300 matches.
Did you get 300 matches or is that just a statement that you did well and the numbers aren't actual numbers?
What are those numbers? According to the article, those numbers should be (1 / 4) * (1 / 25) if we use the median man randomly matching with the median woman, respectively.
Those numbers will trend much higher, if both of them are attractive, of course. In the long tails plottet for the article, there are still quite a number of men 1 out of 3 woman will like, and there's plenty of woman 9 out of 10 men will like.
The matches and swipes are rough estimated, but are accurate enough
I don't know the statistics of the blog post, I'm just stating my experience
Which naturally results in celebrities and models getting blocked from signing up periodically.
This data looks interesting but I'm not really sure what I'm looking at.
Sounds like this article is just astroturfing with some tech data.
simplest CRUD.
issue is either we are ugly or dark patterns make dating sites unusable.
> they are used to receiving a lot of likes, so you have to show them they get liked
They hate that, most girls registering on Tinder get 1000 likes in a week.
> Dating fatigue is bullshit
See last point
> Having a profile doesn't impact the app experience
That's what changed the game, nobody bothers on Tinder because it's not mandatory whereas it works very well on Hinge.
What does ELO stand for?
Want to test this? Remove your image from your profiles on social media and remove your last name (i use my middle name as my surname on facebook). The key is to remove your profile image. Set your privacy to maximum, so other images of you cannot be searched. Try talking with someone. With no way to profile you, the chat bots used by the dating apps cannot have a "conversation." You will never be matched, conversations will hit walls and go in circles or you get ghosted because the chat bot has no data to use.
After your first renewal - after you have spent more money - then you may actually get to talk to a real person.
No. Never again.
Anecdotal, but more than enough data to disprove your point, over the last 8 years I've used multiple dating apps, never paid a dime, and have been on somewhere around 400 first dates.
I'd also add that my match rate with bots or scammers is very low, certainly under 10%.
> What I meant by "fixed", is an app where:
> It is possible for someone to reach out to anyone and get an answer, and discussion can be interesting from the start (at least as much as in real life)
> Your looks, how you behave, the tone of your voice,... reflect what you look like in real life
> It is easier to meet new people than attending local events
> I don't think it can
Well, as long as the metrics app builders are optimizing for are "retention" and "monetization", like this post obsesses over, and the people building the apps continue to refer to women as "girls", like they've never had a relationship with an adult woman, then I agree, dating apps are going to continue their process of enshittification.
Going to save it to my google docs so I never lose it.
> Among guys: 7% homo, 92% hetero and almost none were interested in both genders
That's insane.
And women are more likely to be attracted to many genders.
Men are more likely to be attracted to just men (and perhaps nonbinary people) or to just women (and perhaps nonbinary people)
But I think this is due to social conditioning more than something like biological predisposition. Social attitudes on men and masculinity are not very encouraging of same-sex attraction, it's very common for men to get lumped into "gay" or straight". Whereas I think women and non-binary people are more often encouraged to explore queer sexuality or even expected to (well, I suppose gender-queer people by definition have queer sexuality also). Men are also more conditioned to be more competitive in general, and to view other men as sexual/romantic competition.
I'm a man who's a little bit queer, and many of my friends are queer, so my experience is likely influenced by my crowd, but I know many more gender-queer, nonbinary, gender-fluid, and gender-nonconforming people than I know trans-men and trans-women. The AMAB people I know who aren't gay men, and have nevertheless recognized some degree of attraction to men, very often are not male-identified. But I think it's much more common for them to be gender-queer than to be women. But again, this may coincide with me knowing more NB people than binary trans people in general.
For AMAB people who acknowledge their attraction to men (but are not gay men), I do think this awareness of a sexual identity that, in men, is less socially encouraged/understood often leads to questioning the value of identification as a man entirely (especially since the male identity has so much baggage already).
[0] It works both ways! A guy once told me and my wife that we made a cute couple despite how disgusting heterosexuality really was. And I was like... okay, thanks?
Thought experiment: if a wife in a heterosexual marriage told her husband that she previously had relationships with women, I know many men (including me) who would just shrug and move on and not really think about it.
On the other hand, a man couldn’t just tell his wife most of the time that he slept with men before