alt Hacker News> Controversial take, but have we considered that possibly dating apps don't suck, and that this perception is driven by a vocal minority of the people who have the worst experience on them?
Yes. The reality is well known. PlentyOfFish used to publish statistics. About 10% of dating app users are "date bacon" and find matches they like. Everyone else is a dissatisfied loser. The losers provide the repeat business and the profits, just like the gambling industry.
What women want is > 6' tall, over $100K a year, reasonably good looking, and reasonably young compared to the woman. This is about 1% of the US male population.
But a much higher fraction of dating service profiles. Two good-looking women I know have shown me their side of a dating app. Each had over 1000 matches, but the ones they met did not live up to their resume. (Fun fact: the organization of ex Navy SEALS says that there are at least 10x as many people claiming to be ex-SEALS as actually exist. There aren't that many of those guys. Only a few thousand. But on dating apps...)
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I thought the Navy Seal thing was to impress other men. Does it have sex appeal? Probably depends on your social circle.. but I'd think being ex-military as highly unattractive (more violent than the average person, and highly likely to have trauma)
Bro, women don't care about reasonably young, the vast majority of women want older men, the daddy and silver fox memes are real. For younger women, the preferred age gap is smaller, but the older the woman gets, the larger the age window above her gets. A lot of women in their early 30s are thirsting after men in their mid-late 40s with resources and their shit together.
> What women want
There are 4 billions women on this planet.
The average women as a concept is meaningless for someone looking for a person to date. Even if you could only find someone far in the metaphorical tail, variance and population size are so high we are talking millions of people. Lesbian manages to find people to marry for god sake.
This kind of weird generalisation really needs to die. It helps absolutely no one.
The only problem with this is its defeatist framing.
What most women who use dating apps are looking for, in a profile on that dating app, is essentially what you described, or at least a set of similarly rare attributes. Even worse, is the set of attributes that she is looking to avoid.
Dating apps are nothing but attributes. That's their core problem, and their core success. If you can get a small percentage (probably male) of users to attract a less-small percentage of (probably female) users, you end up with an infinite churn of "success" (read engagement).
The natural incentive in this situation is to show that small percentage of popular male profiles to as many users as possible. This gives you both profitable engagement and actual success metrics that you can brag about!
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So now that we understand the problem a little more, can we start working to solve it?
I think it’s true that most people have a bad experience, but I don’t think it’s caused by things like height, age, and income level…. But social skills, confidence, and emotional vulnerability, which are things almost anyone can develop with deliberate effort, and also lead to better and more stable relationships.
For me, developing vulnerability and risk taking caused me to go from completely unsuccessful, to being able to date pretty much anyone I wanted on these apps. Counter intuitively, the main thing I had to do was stop holding back the things I had previously been afraid to share about myself because I was afraid they made me seem unattractive, and instead confidently own who I really am. It’s very rare for a woman on these apps to encounter someone that seems genuine, unafraid, and vulnerable- and you will stand out like crazy.
It’s not just men having a hard time on these apps- despite the huge number of people, most women really struggle to find anyone that seems appealing, and most of the dates they do go on end up awful as the men are emotionally unavailable, nervous, and afraid to be vulnerable, which makes them impossible to connect with, no matter how tall and rich they may be.
It’s very appealing to believe that the problem is something outside of your control, but it’s rarely the case.