You know, there's probably fewer perverse incentives with a government run dating service. Obviously I can imagine ways it could suck, but when I compare them to how commercial dating services are run it's hard to see how they could do a _worse_ job.
I contemplated whether to try to build a dating site a few times while I was single, and every time what stopped me was the perverse incentives. Making a financially viable dating service without actively making things worse on purpose is really hard.
E.g. at one point I spoke to a woman who told me she'd out of curiosity paid for a month of Tinder's premium sub to see how many had swiped right on her, and her queue was over 3000. She wasn't swiping much. The queue was basically perpetually growing, and the odds for any of the men swiping was accordingly low and dropping. Which was good for Tinder of course - a larger pool of people for men to swipe and get frustrated over lack of responses from, until some proportion pay.
If you're not dependent on frustrating your users into wanting to pay for priority, or getting people off the service because they've found someone is in fact your goal, it's trivial to fix this issue (and many others): Stop showing a profile when the queue gets too deep.
Same thing with not showing inactive profiles. Or actually trying to match profiles of people who are likely to match up (again there's a perverse incentive: you want to match up profiles that one side will like, but not match up profiles where both sides are interested too often; rack up the swipes but not the connections...)
That's the long way of saying I agree, and to get out some of the frustration from past years of using them (hopefully never again...). There are truly few types of services where the interests of users and commercial operators are so totally misaligned.
Stats consistently show that women only select about 5% of options displayed from online dating apps. Men select about 50%. And women disproportionately give their attention to the most conventionally attractive men. (To say: That 5% is not evenly distributed amoung men.) The bottom half of men (from attractiveness ratings) basically get zero matches... ever. Online dating is brutal.
I do not think that it is online dating that is brutal, but these dating sites.
I have been through a couple of online dating and personality usually came first, so by the time appearance was revealed, we already could not care much. She was not my type, I was not her type, but that affected nothing.
The reason it did not work out is financial and logistics (different country, I have MS, I am heavily dependent on healthcare, and so forth), not because of any moral failing or what have you.
I'd probably pick only the top 5% too if I was inundated by matches, so I'm not surprised.
And so while we can't fix that, guys can certainly improve their chances of being in that 5%. The thing is, what a picture shows on an online dating profile really is a lot down to you, irrespective of your actual appearance.
But men have a horrible ability to select pictures that are either incredibly low effort and poor quality, or the type of pictures that men would find other men cool in, rather than what will attract women, before even considering how you compete on actual appearance. When I spent some time figuring out my profiles back in the day, my match rate went up by a large factor.
> That 5% is static - individual guys can improve their chances of being in the 5%, but that pushes out others already in the 5%.
Why makes you think that? It seems much more likely to me that women are selecting whatever profiles that interest them, which would be >5% if potential matches made better profiles. I've seen the women experience of dating apps from women friends, and indeed men profile quality is abysmal (my bisexual and lesbian friends seem to swipe on a much higher proportion of women profiles FWIW), to the point that 5% even seems pretty high once you also take into account personal preferences.
I mean there is lot of research behind this. I read a book also by a guy who was founder of eHarmony or some similar portal, and this 5% statistic match real data from their site. Individual success stories are not replacement for hard statistical facts.
That isn't a rebuttal to the point made. You haven't differentiated between a fixed 5% on the part of women versus a fixed 5% on the part of how men present themselves. Both mechanisms can explain the observed outcome.
> individual guys can improve their chances of being in the 5%, but that pushes out others already in the 5%.
When everyone invests equally in getting to the top 5%, because of how competitive it is, then it results in people maintaining their same spots as before on the leaderboard.
Also you can't improve things like height which is one of the most important things women care about.
>there's very little you can do to make them look at the top 50% of men
Historically it's been solved using religion and families enforcing monogamy in society, like in the past 2000 years of human history, to ensure most men and women get to find a pair to make a family and giving them a relatively equal opportunity/stake in the future of society as an incentive to help maintain and defend it.
Without these traditional enforcement mechanisms, I guess we can explain them the math that if they wish to find happiness and not die alone surrounded by cats, then they can't all share the same top 5% of men, and so will need to settle for a realistic man in the same league as them, instead of waiting for gigachad because their biological hypergamy instincts tells them to.
> I guess we can explain them the math that if they wish to find happiness and not die alone surrounded by cats
Let me tell you, women are waiting with bated breath to hear you explain this to them.
Last I checked, most western societies don’t allow polygamy and most people still prefer monogamy. You don’t have to explain anything to anyone, women get it. They are just happier living by themselves than surrounded by dudes who make condescending remarks about them dying surrounded by cats. I guess maybe we can explain that to men.
>Let me tell you, women are waiting with bated breath to hear you explain this to them.
Are you saying women can't understand the basic arithmetic of demographics relationship pairing, on their own? That they don't understand they can't all realistically settle down with the top % of men, if they don't want to end up alone?
> They are just happier living by themselves
Says who? Polls and studies show a massive drop in womens' happiness since the 70s, along with a massive increase in use of alcohol, antidepressants and SSRIs, especially amongst childless women over the age of 40 in the present, because as it it turns out, human evolutionary biology engineered womens' bodies and brains to desire to have kids for a good reason(procreation of the species), and years/decades of feminist anti-natalist propaganda takes its biological toll on the mind eventually, no matter how hard the cope is that they're "happy alone". Is that what womens' "happiness alone" looks like to you, popping pills and getting drunk?
If you don't believe me then just Google it, ChatGPT it, Gemini it, etc. and see for yourself.
You can tell yourself and others whatever you want and what makes you feel better about yourself, but in the end, biology always wins, as it has for the past two thousand years of human existence and for the next two thousand years in the future, as people who are "happy alone" get selected out of the gene pool. Reproductive biology is the undefeated champion over everything else humans created.
> When everyone invests equally in getting to the top 5%, because of how competitive it is
Yes, but everyone isn't doing that. You'd think men would, but I suggest you ask around some women on their experience of the quality of mens dating dating profiles.
>You can punch far above your metaphorical weight very easily because most guys hardly tries.
Like? I haven't tried online dating in a long time, but all guys I knew had normal profiles and rarely got any matches let alone dates.
>most guys hardly tries
That's irrelevant. Women on dating apps are still only going to interact with the top guys that are above their league, let's say a 9/10. Whether there's more who don't even try, doesn't help you at all. Like if you now try and you go from a 4/10 to a 6/10, you're still below the 9/10 throeshold the top guys have set the bar at. Women don';t choose on statistical distribution, thinking that there's only a handful of guys at the top so they'll have to lower the bar to find a mate, meaning you'll have a chance by going to a 6/10.
> Like? I haven't tried online dating in a long time, but all guys I knew had normal profiles and rarely got any matches let alone dates.
"Normal profiles" for men typically means hardly trying. It means poorly lit pictures. It means bad angles. Often it means things that instantly puts most of the women off, like shirtless pics [1], and poorly written profiles.
I've never had any problems getting matches and dates, but I did have to work for it. That meant ensuring I had good quality pictures, and ensuring my profile matched what women on the given site that I might want to date said the were looking for.
I went from rarely if every getting matches and dates to getting a steady stream of them not by magically getting better looking, but by improving my profile.
Just fixing the writing multiplied the number of dates I got by a decent factor.
> That's irrelevant. Women on dating apps are still only going to interact with the top guys that are above their league, let's say a 9/10. Whether there's more who don't even try, doesn't help you at all.
The point is that those "9/10"'s also mostly don't try (I'd argue most 9/10's aren't on the dating sites, so really you're competing against "dating site 9/10's" who are mostly going to be relatively regular guys who know how to pick a good photo)
[1] Shirtless pics works if you're built - it worked for me after I'd spent 10 years in the gym powerlifting, it did nothing before that - and are posting on a hookup focused site like Tinder, and have a profile written to focus on giving off that vibe. It does not work well on a more "serious" dating site even if you're seriously muscular. But still if you look at the guys profiles, you'll still see a steady stream of them. Most men going on dating sites really ought to take a look at the competition, and then do pretty much the opposite of what most guys are doing.
>"Normal profiles" for men typically means hardly trying. It means poorly lit pictures. It means bad angles. Often it means things that instantly puts most of the women off, like shirtless pics [1], and poorly written profiles.
No, they had good pics. What then? When can we just admit short stature, ugly face, small, jawline, etc. are just not attractive to women on dating apps, and lighting conditions, angles and all that and everything is just cope.
BTW this whole "men have to improve themselves to be the top 5% of men" thing is literally eugenics. Thanks "AWFUL" (Affluent White Female Urban Liberal) women!
Wow, must be a US bubble. I've never heard of this in Germany, and I'd say iPhone vs Android seems to be more of a gender thing over here (although plenty of counterexamples as well).
I went on a date with a woman in Romania. During the date she commented that my phone wasn't an iPhone but that I had a fancy Sony mirrorless camera (as I was a tourist) so that made up for it.
Yes, it's more difficult - I'm old enough that there was a period I had regular dates by sending corny chatup lines on IRC and it worked so I know well how easy it used to be.
But my point was that most men are doing such a shit job at presenting themselves on their profiles that it isn't that difficult to massively improve your odds by making a profile that is better than average.
Spending more than 5 minutes ensuring you have a profile picture that is decently lit, taken from an angle that present you well, and that you look like you're capable of taking care of yourself is a good start, but judging from conversations with a lot of women while I was dating, that is a high bar to clear for most guys on dating sites.
Exactly. And then they complain about not getting matches.
It is still effort if you make a decent profile on places like Tinder, because Tinder is very much intentionally trying to frustrate you to make you pay, but even just having a female friend you could ask to help pick a photo that won't actively repel every woman that ever sees your profile ups your chances so much...
This is why women are very upset about the existence of bisexual men (and why casual biphobia is tolerated among straights and the rest of the LGT community). Women hate knowing how easy it is for a bisexual man to leave/cheat. They hate having far less "control".
Men need an equivalent to political lesbianism.
Gay men have excellent marriage/partnersahip statistics. They stay together, they don't (or tolerate/accept) "cheating", very low physical abuse, very happy/satisfying relationships etc statistics.
Lesbian women have literally the opposite. The memes about domestic violence and other serious problems among lesbian communities would be funny if they weren't so true.
When I see these sad "women are from Venus, men from Mars" style of comments, all I can feel is that this is a sad truth of the universe.
The men who enjoy showing off pictures of their fishing/hunting haul. The men who use android phones, the men who want to show themselves topless (even in contexts where this makes sense). These man are not "low quality" or even "less desirable" partners in any objective sense because their photography choices are not amicable to women's desires. Women account for like 80% of consumer spending and advertising/marketing folks know some extremely uncomfortable truths about group-think/hive-mind mentality among women. These men should celebrate that they are showing their authentic selves, not the contorted version they have to repeatedly summon to satisfy foids.
Basically, men should actively be proud of our achievements, and any who can ignore societies intense biphobia should lean into the masculine side of their desires, as their relationship satisfaction will likely go significantly up.
> These man are not "low quality" or even "less desirable" partners in any objective sense because their photography choices are not amicable to women's desires.
They are not objectively "low quality", but they are objectively less desirable to women if women find them less desirable for it.
You can enjoy leaning into those things all you want, but you are not owed anything from women. They have no obligation to look past how you present yourself. And so if how you present yourself reduces their interest in you, that is on you. If you're fine with that, then by all means go ahead.
For my part, it was a very small sacrifice to spend a couple of hours figuring out which parts of my personality women actually finds attractive, and how to signal that with my pictures and profile text.
> Gay men have excellent marriage/partnersahip statistics. They stay together, they don't (or tolerate/accept) "cheating", very low physical abuse, very happy/satisfying relationships etc statistics.
What.
Have you ever met a gay male? Maybe even talked to him?
Gay males are still males at the end of the day so they always land themselves in the most damaging relationships possible. Males already cause tons of harm by themselves, so sum them together and you get a truly dreary mess.
There's a reason there are so many gay males who are so homophobic they make Evangelicals seem like a Pride Parade Organizing Committee.
I was like that. I simply managed to realize that the problem wasn't homosexuality, but rather that it's always been males.
Dating males in general is a form of self-harm if I'm being honest with you. I'm bisexual and I do still feel attracted to males but I am at a good enough spot that I don't want to hurt myself that way.
No, all women get some attention using online dating apps. A bunch of YouTubers have created fake online dating profiles with incredibly ugly women (bad face or bad body), and they still get matches. This guy on X has run lots of these tests with hilarious results: https://x.com/MurrayHillGuy1
> Dating is brutal.
I can confidently say that dating was not brutal before the apps. (I am pretty old.) Before the apps, couples were mostly looks-matched: the ugos dated each other, the mids dated each other, and the best dated each other. Unless the guy was very personable/funny/rich, most people were looks-matched. Online dating has reduced everyone to a few photographs.
Women demonstrate incredibly different behaviour when "selecting mates" when comparing (1) familiar settings, like work, school, church/temple, friend/activity/hobby groups vs (2) unfamiliar settings, like bars, clubs, public places, and online dating. For (1), they find many more men attractive because they can evaluate them on more than looks. For (2), they can only evaluate on looks. If you ask women to rate strangers based only upon looks, they will rank only 20% as attractive. That is what makes online dating so awful for average men.
When young (average looking) guys tell me about their awful/non-existent dating lives at the office, I always recommend that they try approaching women in public more often. Ignore the shit you see on social media where the fake #MeToo women come on to put guys on full blast for approaching. Don't worry about them. They are awful people, and you don't want them. Yes, you will get rejected a lot (maybe 5-10% hit rate), but it is way better than online dating apps. You can approach in supermarkets, stores, cafes, festivals/concerts, gym, parks, etc. That way, plenty of other people are around, and she won't feel unsafe. And start by approaching ugos/low-mids. You only need to get their socials or chat app. Even if you have no serious interest in that woman, you can practice chatting with her. Once you build some confidence, approach average looking women. Eventually, you will find success. As long as you dress average/OK, groom (comb/style hair, etc.) and don't smell bad, they won't put you on full blast if she is not interested. She will politely decline, or give socials, but never reply to chats.
Please don't read this post as an attack on women. It is an attack on our current ecosystem of online dating apps.
Meeting people in public really is the answer, but I think shifting the focus from romantic to being genuine, friendly, and focusing on community in places where it’s not just guys is way more successful (for hetero men)
I met my girlfriend at a coffeeshop. I was a regular and just actively friendly to everyone. Our first date felt more like a second because we already had multiple conversations.
Men have a much greater emphasis on physical attraction than women which is why women need a much higher level of physical attraction when only using that. But building community lets us show off our other qualities which women put a much greater emphasis on.
Redpill is normalized/accepted by gen Z now. Trying to convince young men that the language used by 4chan /fit/ circa 2016 (-pilled, -maxxing, "mogging", etc) isn't the truth of this world will fail. Gen Z men have seen that the tactics described by these people objectively work.
The failed men are having less sex than ever. The successful chads getting swole and using test? They're cleaning up using red pill tactics because the gender ratio on college campus's is so favorable now that white men are so statistically underrepresented that they're doing actual affirmative action for them.
I was into the PUA thing, and I disagree the comment above is that.
The PUA scene was about gamifying or exploiting dating - hacking how you go about it for your own gains (getting laid)
Approaching women in public with good intentions and to feel more comfortable talking to women is not PUA. It’s one of the suggested things to do, but I think intentions matter a lot.
Maybe not how the term is used now, or for the last few years, but there's been several waves of it with very different styles.
After Neil Strauss "The Game" almost destroyed several of the early exploitative PUA companies, many of them survived by refocusing on "softer", more self-improvement focused material. You'd find "old school" PUA companies like Real Social Dynamic[1] suddenly pushing exercise, meditation, and other self-improvement focused programs alongside their old routine-based pickup bullshit.
The comment above fits into that era, I think - on one hand there's language that fit right into some of that eras PUA mindset, on the other hand it's mostly arguing for the "softer" self-improvement stuff.
I agree with you that the intentions matter a lot, though. But I think the comment above would've gone down a lot better if worded differently...
[1] RSD later totally imploded after a campaign targeting one of their trainers - Julien Blanc, who pushed the exploitative angle to dizzying new heights.
> I can confidently say that dating was not brutal before the apps. (I am pretty old.)
What? Dating been brutal and unforgiving for as long as I've been alive, but I wouldn't say I'm old (between 30 - 40). it was definitely harsh before the apps and had the exact same "everyone wants to date beautiful people, no one wants to date ugly people" "problem" that exists today, not sure what makes you say it's any different than today.
> Please don't read this post as an attack on women
I don't read your comment as an "attack" on anything, women or dating apps. But things like "women can only evaluate based on looks in bars, clubs, public spaces, etc" is wildly out of touch with reality, and makes your comment rightly seem out of touch rather than an attack on anything at all.
Encounter someone interesting? Chat more. Someone boring and not interesting? Don't chat so much. Speak to a whole bunch of people, a little bit, stay with less to speak more, like how its always worked.
You literally give the advice to "start by approaching ugos/low-mids. This entire post comes off as vain, but your disclaimer at the end doesn't absolve it of also being misogynistic.
You're telling men to use "conventionally" unattractive women as target practice, implying they will be more receptive to attention, presumably due to a general lack of it. Then your advice is to leave these women behind once you've gotten what you needed, and to then seek women more attractive to you.
> You're telling men to use "conventionally" unattractive women as target practice, implying they will be more receptive to attention, presumably due to a general lack of it. Then your advice is to leave these women behind once you've gotten what you needed, and to then seek women more attractive to you.
I dunno, this seems to be interpreting the comment in the worst way possible. Like, assuming bad faith.
The comment above suggested that guys approach less-attractive women until they "build some confidence". This is not about the woman's receptivity to attention, this is about the guy's confidence or lack thereof. It makes sense: when confidence is worse, the conversation is more awkward and stilted, and that awkwardness is more likely to reinforce the idea that talking to strangers is a waste of time.
The charitable interpretation would be this: that you practice talking to strangers in scenarios that feel safe. Gradually, work up towards your goal - making new friends, talking to people you want to date, etc.
I halfway agree with you. The comments underlying advice isn't that awful. But he really shot himself in the foot with the wording, and so I don't think it's weird that people take issue with the wording.
As I pointed out in another comment, he could've just argued for approaching people without expectations and intending it to go anywhere and suggested that a way of doing that is to approach people you're not attracted to.
In other words, make it about your intent and preference rather than about ranking women by appearance.
Indeed. It's literally lampooned, including the specific language, in a Big Bang Theory episode, because it fit perfectly to Howards creepy early-seasons personality.
Going out and desensitising yourself to anxiety over approaching strangers by talking to people without the intent or expectation of it going anywhere is the less offensive version, and one that works, without any need to rank people by appearance to do it.
What, exactly, is why the dating "marketplace" as ugly as it is? Is there actually a point you wanted to make, or was there just a vague notion of a point?
> Just wait until you hear what women actually say amongst themselves
1. You assumed without asking that I was male. This indicates an inherent bias on how you perceive and interact with others.
2. You assume I have a nascent understanding of how women think and feel, compared to yourself, who must be an expert on women.
3. You group all women into a single monolithic group with shared motivation and behaviors. This is textbook prejudice and misogyny.
4. You claim that women are even more misandrist than men are misogynist, implying a justification for OP's and your own misogynistic perspective. In actuality, you're only further expressing the depths of your own misogynistic attitude towards women.
5. You claim to know what they say amongst themselves while implying I don't have the same knowledge; Are you a woman? Or do you have hidden cameras on women? How else could you have possibly ordained this forbidden knowledge?
5. My partner, a woman, does not think or act the way you described. She does not engage in overt misandry with her friends.
6. I have encountered plenty of extremely misogynistic and legitimately creepy/abusive attitudes towards women at "Sunday school" and while receiving religious education. Every one of the many dozens of churches I've been to have had extreme misogynistic undertones, and often brazen overtones. If you are trying to establish a basis for what isn't misogyny, you couldn't have picked a worse target.
7. "But I'm not the only one who does it" has never, ever, ever been an excuse for prejudice.
8. Dating "marketplace"? What are you even talking about? Apps? Websites? Dating in general? I am not conventionally attractive by modern society's standards, I'm overweight, and outspoken. I have not had issues finding or attracting women. Determining long-term compatibility is much more difficult, but a lack of vanity or a misogynistic outlook was never the problem.
My advice? Touch grass, ask a woman what she actually thinks, and listen. You clearly are not currently in a position to give others advice on women; you are in need of advice.
Oh jeez someone in this thread who recognizes women are people, too. Reading this thread was so disheartening.
Every time I go online I try to remind myself that the majority of comments are coming from bots. The men in my life don't talk this way.
And where is this sentiment that women will only look at the same 5% coming from? One woman's 5% is going to look very different from another woman's 5%. Go outside and don't interact with just women, but a variety of people and a variety of different couples to see what normal relationships look like.
It seems in these conversations that the main concern for men is attracting women, but going by the way they talk about them, it doesn't sound like they respect them as fellow human beings. Some of the concerns women have during dating are: are they safe to be around (read: am I walking into a situation where I am going to get raped), am I going to be called a slut or a whore if I do x y and z? (Am I going to be called a slut if I don't?) It's what the internet talks about, and what media and your family will constantly warn you to be on the alert for.
A lot of people seem to think that attracting women involves changing superficial aspects of yourself so that they take the bait and discover you also have a huge, throbbing personality. Yet the very thought of entertaining such a superficiality speaks more about the shallowness of the man in this situation than the women.
Do women also engage in superficial behavior? Sure. Yet, I don't fault them for it. Women have been subjected to centuries of socially reinforced mass commercial and government propaganda, just like men. We are living in an age of manufactured consent and commodified personality traits. Gillette leveraging womens' magazines to convince women and men that body hair on women is not sexy. I hate what this culture of propaganda has done to us as social beings.
And yet, as you've described, the difference in experience between men and women is chilling. From how they perceive the world when walking alone at night, how they have to be more careful when consuming intoxicants at parties (and are socially shamed for failing to do this even when men are given a pass for getting so plastered they shit themselves), have to be more considerate of their presentation, their words, etc. And what is sad is that when you try to bring these things up as a man, you're often met with suspicion that you are against the entire concept of manhood. Which on its own is quite telling about how men subconsciously perceive themselves on a collective level.
The conversation seems unbalanced to many men because the world we live in is unbalanced, but many just don't see that because they see benefit in the status quo.
>
3. You group all women into a single monolithic group with shared motivation and behaviors.
<
You will be shocked, if you talk with men who are really able to analze their traits and talk openly about it, how SIMILAR and shared these are :-)
Men are quite simple on some layer. Especially this dating layer. Even if some claim not being part of these "mind & traits behaviour", nonetheless they mainly think the same.
Now we're also assuming that I don't know how men talk to each other, either? Is the assumption that I live in a box with no windows or doors?
You might be interested to know that "this is the way things are" is not a valid excuse for perpetuating learned prejudice. I in fact take issue with some of the collective behavior of both men and women. Shocking, right?
You can speak out against whatever is your desire. But more interesting is, why you think that whatever Babo in US would behave differently to whatever Babo in Europe vs against whatever Babo in Asia.
Men are simply >simple<. You do not have to accept this, even if its statisticly true.
And upon this adds men-specific behaviour with huge costs to society,but thats not part here.
Males are so used to holding all the cards and having everyone do their bidding that women having self-agency and making decisions feel like emasculating humiliations and an attack on the bases of masculinity.
They won't listen because they know what's at stake.
I guess you haven't met an actual misandrist. Actual misandry, like misogyny, is pathological. I assure you that my masculinity is not threatened by women making decisions and I fully support dismantling the patriarchy. Unfortunately, things seem to be sliding backwards.
I understand, and unfortunately pedantry becomes important here when we're agreeing upon and elevating shared ideals with the intention of establishing new institutions.
So for me, I understand and support the distinction you're making about how resistance to oppressive institutions is not hate or violence, "misandry isn't real" just doesn't tell enough of the story. The type of misandry I'm speaking of isn't systemic or institutional in the way misogyny is. It's much more pathological and individual. I haven't met many people like this and it is definitely an outlier, whereas misogyny in men is commonplace. Humans, of course. The spider dating scene is a whole different conversation.
I'm curious what in particular you meant by one of the biggest roots of the problem facing the world today. The patriarchy, or something else?
> I doubt the 50% is evenly distributed either and men for sure disproportionately give attention to conventionally attractive women.
It's not evenly distributed, for sure, but the stats say that almost every women get 1 or more interested men, while only about 5% of men get 1 or more interested women.
Seems to track that way in RL too, not just online dating, so yeah, I agree that online dating tends to speedrun to the conclusion.
You should try AFK dating sometime, it's even worse! Out of all the women I've met, only 0.00000001218% been interested enough to date and marry me, and I didn't even touch any of the apps! Brutal.
> You should try AFK dating sometime, it's even worse! Out of all the women I've met, only 0.00000001218% been interested enough to date and marry me, and I didn't even touch any of the apps! Brutal.
It’s only brutal because heteronormativity and beauty standards have made certain promises to boys, that they’ve grown expecting to be kept as men - and our society is entirely unable / unwilling to deliver on that promise. “It’s okay, everything will work out,” we hear as boys, and then as men, have our faces rubbed in, “of course it’s not okay, it was never okay, you have to work it out yourself, nobody owes you anything!”
It’s whiplash for a lot of guys, and that’s if you’re even savvy enough to clock it.
I don’t think it needs to be any more of a brutal realization than say the existence of say Santa, and yet here we are.
To run a business you either need to show ads, have everyone pay, or have a freemium model where it can be used for free but some portion of users pay.
It’s easy to imagine making a better service by removing all of the parts that fit what I just described. I could make a better Instagram if it didn’t show any ads and was free for everyone. I don’t think my developers or hosting providers would want to work for free though.
The reason dating apps have this freemium model is because building a large pool of users is important to their success. Most people will not pay for an app if a free alternative exists. Most people hate ads. So the product which wins will always be the one lets people get started without paying, bringing in the largest dating pool.
There have been many dating app businesses that tried models where everyone pays the same flat fee. Most either converted to freemium or disappeared. There are still some niche social apps that use their expense and difficulty of getting an invite as a selling point, but they target very niche audiences because they’ll never be mainstream.
Your friend just discovered one of the harder realities of dating apps: Your odds of getting a response from an individual profile is very low. Swiping on a lot of profiles is necessary. For people who get easily frustrated by these odds and who get angry at having to pay for anything they’re going to be generally very frustrated with the apps in general.
Dating apps are one of the most poignant examples of a service that provides a lot of value relative to alternatives (you’ll spend more on a single drink at a bar or even on transport to a restaurant to meet someone) yet the nominal charge still makes users scoff. It’s hard to sell apps to consumers.
> To run a business you either need to show ads, have everyone pay, or have a freemium model where it can be used for free but some portion of users pay.
True, but there are still alternatives.
This would be niche, but a self-hosted solution could be made for the more technically minded to use and network. The dating-net. Where efficiency and getting off the app are the priority. no profit seeking, no ads, no perverse incentives.
I recently married, and when registering the person at the registry office asked which dating site we met via, and was surprised to hear it was an "old school" one (Badoo) rather than Bumble or Hinge. The notion that it might not have been a dating site wasn't in the cards at all.
Yes, we know why. The problem is that the incentives this creates for dating apps are among the worst around. Many sites have business models where they paywall is locking away content or functionality that is desirable, but few other types of sites benefit nearly as much not by just locking away content or features, but by actively making the site functionality worse for everyone - including for the paid users, who may get e.g. priority access but are still wading through a sewer of zombie profiles and other effects of the user hostile monetisation.
As for ads being such a big problem, I'm not convinced - we've had several reasonably successful dating sites that did well with ads instead of or in addition to freemium.
The biggest challenge to that model flourishing is that Match Group tends to buy them and start locking away the features and pushing more towards the subscriptions. E.g. Plenty of Fish was mostly ad funded until Match Group bought them, OkCupid more mixed, but then Match Group bought them.
I'm not blaming the founders of those. If I started a site like that and Match Group offered to throw money at me, I'd probably sell too, knowing I'd gotten their attention and they'd probably do their best to clobber me if not.
You will get more limited growth if ad funded compared to what you can squeeze out of maximally frustrated men. And as a result you'll be a more attractive acquisition target for Match Group to snatch up at a bargain knowing they can drive up margins by enshittifying you, and you'll have lower margins to fight them with if you don't sell.
This reminds me of a black comedy movie called The Lobster, People are essentially forced into confinement into a hotel until they find a romantic partner, otherwise they will be transformed into an animal of their choice.
If you couple up with someone you are evaluated in a compatibility period to which if you argue you get given a child, if you argue again, you get given a second child haha.
It’s just the latest new tech right wing obsession (see Elon Musk ranting about it on twitter, meanwhile no Tesla has middle seat LATCH). In a couple of years they’ll move on to something else.
I do think society would be better off in many ways if more people had kids but the current dialogue about it is offputting.
If I wouldn't have to deal with the legal liabilities around moderation and user data, I would love to make a non-profit dating site that was truly optimized towards some benevolent goals.
The original OKCupid was the best dating site and the only one that I enjoyed using. It has since been gobbled up by the Match.com behemoth and is now basically useless.
Amen to that. OKC back in the day was wonderful, for nerds like myself who loved answering questions and data in general.
The great thing was that it was self-selecting -- the less compatible types answered very few questions and stumbled over anything involving basic general knowledge, logic or ethics. The compatible ones added thoughtful or witty freeform comments to their answers. You could essentially clear all the usual first-few-dates compatibility dances just by running through people's answers.
I met many wonderful people via that site, and I never went on a bad date with OKC; we always had heaps to talk about. I thankfully found my perfect match for all time via OKC nine years ago, just before match.com ripped up the matching algorithm and the questions and destroyed the site entirely.
It is not a good business model to match people well, and match.com clearly knows that.
Match Group also knows that buying sites that match people well is good business because there's so much room to juice the profits by applying the lessons from their other sites to them, and the valuations will be relatively low relative to user numbers...
Owned by Match? Yes, along with Hinge, Meetic, Tinder, and several smaller ones. The only big player outside of Match is Bumble (which also owns Badoo).
Of the two, Bumble seems to be the slightly less evil one (fun tidbit: Bumble at least used to value a lifetime premium subscription at roughly the same amount as 6 individual months subscription, which tells us something about the expected lifetime value of their users...), but their both of course profiting wildly of exploitative practices.
If people are oriented towards traditional relationships, then pairing people up younger probably leads to higher overall fertility rate in the population, so I could see governments with existentially declining fertility rates (read: almost all of them) taking an interest in actually providing a successful service here (unlike the commercial dating apps).
Of course, a lack of a match is not the only thing that prevents people from having kids, but I'm curious what the impact of an optimal matching service would be on fertility rates.
edit: I think governments might do well to provide funding for dating apps (whether privately or publicly owned) based on how many matches from the app actually lead to children. Completely flip the classical incentives on their head. Should be easy enough to ask if newborns were a product of a participating app as part of the birth certification process.
At least in the US, the declining fertility rate seems to be entirely caused by a combination of fewer people getting married and fewer people having children out of wedlock. Between 2007 and 2023, the percentage of reproductive-age women who were married fell from 42% to 37% and the births/1,000 unmarried women fell from 41.0 to 30.3, but the births/1,000 married women actually went up a bit from 102.3 to 107.4. See https://read.dukeupress.edu/demography/article/63/2/695/4092...
It is important to remember governments aren’t living things with their own agency. The people at the top running the governments are usually all dead in 30 years tops. They have no long term incentives. Put them in charge of a dating app and they will run it to enrich themselves just like all the other ones.
Every platform. Just being authenticated by government ID doesn’t change the issue. You still have fraud and inauthentic behavior.
India is a billion plus people. Google says that the dating app user base is 100mn, which is much lower than the total number of people who would use a government match making app.
That’s why the question regarding scale. That assumption makes a 10 person firm for a nation viable or impossible.
> You could make an app for a whole country with a company of less than 10 people.
Perhaps you could do it for Singapore, I’d love to know how those 10 people would be split across functions, and how they would handle the fraud and safety issues that crop up.
In practice it would be 10 managers and in-between contractor types siphoning all allotted money and then an unexperienced dev building a terrible overburdened service that noone wants to use.
depends on the country. this type of corruption is guaranteed in some countries, less so in others. Singapore is usually good at avoiding it. Their online services are very good.
the government can switch up the incentives and for example make payment contingent on people actually using the platform as well as opening the tender to startup teams (usually they are locked out).
Sure it's easier to keep eyes on in a tiny country like Singapore, but basically all major western countries struggle with stuff like this because politics is way too spread out and ingrained with too many local interests. Strong federalism is the cradle of corruption, but if you can walk across your country in a day there's simply not enough room to federalize. OTOH federalism is necessary if your seat of government is 500 miles away, because there is no way for them to effectively govern local issues anymore.
The UK had some success with GDS. Not all IT in bigger countries is failures.
I honestly think that labeling corruption as corruption and a popular sentiment towards slamming a few people in jail for it would go a long way towards fixing these problems.
Instead even among the general public the sentiment is "government is just incompetent" which helps soften the reaction to it and thus indirectly encourages it to get worse.
There's no shortage of countries around the world that have dug themselves a corruption hole they struggle to get out of. It's easier to fix it starting from here than there but we don't want to end up there.
I think it's unlikely for your worst case scenario to be realized. Underspecified objectives can cause unexpected results, but it can also lead to desired results. Fortunately experimentation is relatively cheap and tuning optimization metrics is the norm for most apps.
The modern trend of most families with 0-2 kids isn’t sustainable. We don’t need to go back to 5+ being the norm but a self stable society needs to be able to offset non parents thus requiring 3+ children families to be quite common.
Well I mean the whole discussion was about "why is the fertility rate so low it should not be so low".
So that does sound like it is very much an issue. To someone, anyway.
I don't really care. I have no horse in this race.
__
To cover the expected pedantic reply:
Of course technically it's everyone's problem. But just because it technically affects you doesn't mean that you have to emotionally involve yourself in stupid online discussions that don't comprehend systemic views and mistake them for personal whining.
This is very much a worst case. It assumes three children, each with their own bedroom, and two work from home parents each with their own office.
Why do you need an entire room each for an office? I work in a corner of a bedroom, and have previously had a desk in a living room. I know lots of people who do the same. I know few families where both parents work from home. Where more than one person works from home they can share an office.
If people work from home to a large extent, less office space is required, so the cost of land should go down. It does not because most people are not working from home.
Yes, but, as said, there are probably also a lot of people that decide either against children at all or against having +1 of them due to these constraints.
No one said that one cannot make do. One can always make do.
That still works up to like age 7. It really is needed for that age up to ~18, which means you can get with providing that service for ~15 years (multiple children) and then going back to smaller apartments.
Or you can keep the smaller apartments and make boarding schools more common. Small kids all live in the same room while the ones old enough to need their own space move out completely to a boarding school. Depending on the specifics, may be a much better solution overall.
I actually attended high school in that way in Poland, despite it being very rare here. I was 15 when I started. While I think it was great for me, I would not recommend doing it for younger people - you need some basic emotional maturity and safety.
Even then, it would not solve any problems here, really.
It is not about preference, but because of regulation. Nowadays the government demand is that each child needs to have a separate studying and sleeping area. If a sliding wall in a room counts as a separate area is up to the officials' discretion.
On one hand, all of this is understandable, but on the other hand these policies do indeed raise the cost of having children.
That was never traditional anywhere. It was possible in the 1950s in a few places. Anyone thinking it was traditional is seriously undervaluing women's work.
For a time, everywhere people typically had homes and cars and families it was required that they could afford it all on a single person's income because women were property, and not allowed to work outside the home (at least after marriage), or get an education, or own anything.
Exact times do vary by country, but female 'emancipation' is largely starting around WWI, whereas the middle class lifestyle you're suggesting doesn't arise until after WWII.
In the early 20th century, most women in the United States did not work outside the home, and those who did were primarily young and unmarried. In that era, just 20 percent of all women were “gainful workers,” as the Census Bureau then categorized labor force participation outside the home, and only 5 percent of those married were categorized as such. (https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-history-of-womens-wor...)
A marriage bar is the practice of restricting the employment of married women. Common in English-speaking countries from the late 19th century to the 1970s, the practice often called for the termination of the employment of a woman on her marriage, especially in teaching and clerical occupations. Further, widowed women with children were still considered to be married at times, preventing them from being hired, as well. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_bar)
> the middle class lifestyle you're suggesting doesn't arise until after WWII.
Most US families owned a car before WWII. 60% in 1929.
Around half of the people in the US owned their home in 1890. They actually owned the homes too. Before 1934 Americans typically paid off their homes in just 3-5 years. After that the 15 and 30 year mortgage had a strong majority of Americans in houses, but they were actually owned by the bank for decades.
I thought it was clear from context that I was referring to people who want to have kids with a romantic partner (I suppose for fertility rate purposes it doesn't even necessarily need to be with just one romantic partner, or within a monogamous relationship).
Lots of people don't want kids these days relative to 50 years ago, but even among those who do, they're delaying the process, often to the point where it becomes less ideal due to age. Many people who wanted kids when they were younger end up not having them as a result (and many who want them haven't had them yet).
Having a partner (or partners) to do it with is a significant factor for many, among other factors like concerns about affording food and housing for oneself, let alone for additional dependants.
The government also wants stable couples (divorce are costly to society) and non-toxic relationship (because these too are costly), which is also what the users desire.
How do we know that divorces are more "costly" to society than people being stuck together even if they aren't happy together? Would seem like the opposite to me.
Both are bad, and I actually put the later in the “toxic relationship ” category above.
There are many situations for which a divorce is better than staying in a bad mariage, but divorce are still obviously costly for society: it drives the housing demand up, the legal process is costly and encumbers courts, single-mom households are more prone to poverty and its negative effects, etc.
The key point is that ideal for individuals (a couple that is happy together) is also the ideal for governments.
That's a different question though. It's in society's interest to ensure couples (or at the least couples who have children) are compatible enough long-term to not end up divorcing/separating.
The societal costs otherwise aren't just the obvious direct costs - there are other things like (in divorces where there are children involved) negative effects on labour force mobility.
Maybe better to put it as "emotionally unhealthy relationships" are costly to society. Singlehood is also less economically 'optimal' than partnerships, and divorce combines some of both.
I give it about a month before they start gaming the algorithm to pair people who are likely to be on government benefits with people who can support them.
You make $150k, congratulations all your matches are McDonalds crew members.
You make $200k, the same but now they're all mentally ill because the algorithm deems you capable of supporting thyat too.
As long as you're going dystopian, maybe the government decides that it'll be better for the country if they raise a generation of super-babies and secretly pivots to eugenics as a service.
Yeah, the precedent for the idea of a .gov dating service is Plato’s Republic along with comments in the Timaeus/Critias which make it clear that Plato envisioned a rigged service designed for eugenics. Central control over matchmaking is incentivized to eugenics.
I think its inevitable, especially if we get to artifical wombs. Think about the other side of the coin: you dont want to breed stupid and ugly people, right? Or maybe you want people who will immediately go on welfare and are genetically predisposed to vote reliably for the right party?
The nice think about artificial wombs is that they can solve some problems with the abortion issue (provided embryos can be safely transplanted). Fathers who want to keep their child when mothers want to abort could have the fetus develop in an artificial womb and pick the kid up once it's "born". Signing away your rights/responsibility to the child and leaving your embryos to be "birthed" and raised by the state could replace many abortions.
>Signing away your rights/responsibility to the child and leaving your embryos to be "birthed" and raised by the state could replace many abortions.
For a given quality of "output" at age 18 it takes a certain amount of input to get there, at least at a macro level.
Even assuming that you can figure something out that doesn't suck and produce way to high of a ratio of shitty non-productive people the way the current foster care system does, where is the surplus that the state can seize to raise these kids gonna come from?
A lot of the people crying about low birth rates aren't the least bit concerned about how affordable raising those children will be for families. Why should it matter to them how affordable raising children is for the state?
If artificial wombs will get them to stop forcing women to have children they don't want or can't afford, that should have many economic advantages.
Consider for example, if we didn't force 13 year old rape victims to give birth and raise children (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/14/mississippi-ab...). The pregnant child could focus on healing from what she went through, complete her education, get a well paying job and be a stronger contributor to the economy. The infant wouldn't be raised by a traumatized and impoverished 7th grader which could help raise the "quality of output" as you put it. To be honest though, I suspect they really just want an underclass to exploit so "quality" isn't a metric they're worried about.
First off your argument is just the "women in the workforce will make us all richer" argument but with Epstein island demographics of women.
Second, I wasn't even looking at it on that level. I was just looking at the high level economics. I'm saying that it takes certain amount of material plenty to get a kid from vagina to workforce. You've got food, clothing, the labor of educators, etc, etc, etc. None of that is free. Current foster care system costs do not scale. Our society is simply not wealthy enough to afford that for any sizable fraction of children. You could perhaps cheapen it up but I don't see much potential there since the outcomes are already sub par. You could perhaps make it more efficient, but what form would that take?
Unless we commit to walking back the standards of acceptable levels of investment in children by 70-100yr there's just no way rich western countries are gonna have more kids. Even if you pop them out of artificial wombs the whole rest of the "infant to workforce" pipeline is a mess.
This is the primary worry with governments getting involved with dating apps, is it not?
Many of our countries are just one election cycle away from the politicians mandating that the official government dating app only incentivise Anglo-Saxon baby-making...
>This is the primary worry with governments getting involved with dating apps, is it not?
<insert bad faith comment about how it's ok because they're not literally sterilizing anyone and you can opt out of you want>
(bonus points if it's from an account that has a bunch of comments whining about interface defaults and algorithmic nudges matter in technical contexts)
As long as that government is benevolent enough to avoid demographic engineering. Singapore is a fine melting pot, but I'd probably avoid using a closed source government-run dating app in both my home (EEU) and my current (WEU) country.
I think that's a bit too reductive, but the incentive mismatch is real. Commercial apps generally benefit from people staying on the app; a government service theoretically benefits if people pair off and leave.
It's an interesting question, because on one hand the government goals will remove a lot of the perverse incentives. E.g. having people who aren't going to answer in the pool of profiles shown is mostly a negative. Doing actual, well thought out matches makes sense where for a commercial app favouring one-sided matches that keep one side wanting and not getting frequent answers can be better.
But on the other hand, if it appears "too limited" because the most desirable people disappear off quickly because of a successful match, maybe they'll still struggle to keep the users coming back to it even if they're actually doing a better job at matching people up...
Really depends whether the track record (assuming its good) becomes known enough to people, I'd guess.
On the other side you got a fresh supply on both sides from kids growing up to be adults and from adults divorcing and even if your matchmaking is perfect and divorce culturally shamed against, people still die which leaves widow(er)s behind, of whom a certain amount will want a new relationship.
Dating apps are a race to the bottom. They're collecting a tax on the lonely and desperate of dwindling populations. Ironically it's not sustainable over the long term.
> Ironically it's not sustainable over the long term.
The entire idea of just wanting MRR and be done with it is a huge, huge part why the world is so screwed. So much of the economy is just devolved into rich people seeking rents.
A dating app with an MMR score for the players is an interesting idea, with matchmaking done based on MMR similarity. Then there could be an annual dating tournament for the best players.
I don’t think that a market for lemons is the right analogy or how it relates to your other claims. A market for lemons is one where buyers cannot distinguish between high and low quality goods (eg used cars). I think people are mostly ok at judging the ‘quality’ of romantic partners and the problem you describe is a different thing.
That's half of it. The other half is make people think they have a chance of pairing up but try to avoid them actually pairing up because, as Plenty of Fish once wrote in a blog post, it's not just that your users leave you, it's that they leave your service in pairs
Tinder side-stepped this issue when they changed to be a hookup site. The downside, of course, is you end up with a bunch of one-night stands instead of stable families producing babies.
If you do a good job - all the people find partners, and leave, and you need to find new people to join
If you do a bad job - all the people see it as desparate, and leave, and you need to find new people to join
It's a high churn environment so there's no real way to make money from... er... bums on seats.. so there's no real choice but to make some sort of barrier forcing people to spend money
Spending a couple decades with the government putting it's thumb on the scale trying to get people who score high on government metrics to pair up with other people who score high on government metrics seems like a great way to start a civil war a couple generations down the line.
But I'm sure the marriages will be stable all the way there so there's that.
I think this would be better than commercial services, which have all the wrong incentives.
I would think just a coarse sorting would do, paired with a free meal. Every couple of weeks, you go for a random date with a somewhat well paired person, and see what happens. Maybe you don't meet the love of your life, but you will meet someone roughly your age living in the same society, a perspective worth having regardless of whether you're compatible.
However, if you know anyone from Singapore, you must think this is a rather small plaster on a gaping wound.
Singapore is like a permanent examination hall. Everyone is competing to do well on exams, and then they try to get the best internships, and then the best jobs. It's not exactly conducive to starting a family. You'll lose a step in the rat race, and then your kid will need to join this rat race.
I want to agree, but the fact it's state-run / promoted gives me the ick. Or, it gives me a lot of conflicted feelings / opinions, let's put it that way.
Like, here in Europe we've got right-wing parties on the rise that have this conspiracy theory that the foreigners are moving here en masse to replace the locals (because of ??? they never explained, our jobs, benefits and women I suppose). So they spend a lot of time and effort fearmongering about the for'ners coming here and bring in laws and policies to keep them out.
Meanwhile they don't seem to be doing anything about those that already live here - you'd think these right-wing, own-people-first types would do anything to ensure people living here would thrive and reproduce. But no free child care, no major economic reform to allow single incomes to buy a house, none of that. Because ultimately it's not about foreigners or "own people first", it's about self-enrichment, got mine fuck you.
Not if you think that your government isn't looking out for your best interests. A well run state is exactly what we need, but rarely what we have. Right now we see rising authoritarianism, less transparency, open bribery, more frequent and blatant lying, less accountability, more corruption, democratic backsliding, attacks on civil rights. etc. All that stuff is going to breed skepticism, and it really should. Eroding people's trust in government by actively working to corrupt it and impede it from functioning properly has been a very successful strategy.
Exactly. Eroding trust is such a successful strategy because it weaponizes confirmation bias. Once people are primed to be skeptical, they often come to conclusions irrationally first, and then (knowingly or not) seek only to prove themselves right.
Also the more successful the corruption and break down of government and its institutions are, the more necessary skepticism becomes. For example, you might have faith in the experts at the CDC and the FDA until those agencies get taken over and run by people who compromise its mission and the workers with integrity resign or get fired or get censored and suddenly you've got states scrambling to create things like the West Coast Health Alliance and the Northeast Public Health Collaborative to try to get the actual work done and get real information out to a public that's being misinformed.
The longer the feedback loop continues, and the more people are hurt, the more difficult it will be and the longer it will take to restore faith.
You're right, and you'd think seeing all the ways our government is vulnerable to these problems would result in reforms to fix and prevent those issues, but it seems like a lot of people have given up even trying. Learned helplessness I guess.
>That’s an irrational reaction, probably conditioned by ideology.
And yours isn't?
Like it doesn't take much beyond a room temperature IQ to look at the arc of just about every government these days and make an estimation of where it's going without some substantial unforeseen change of course. The state of the world should merit a little pause and/or self doubt there.
>A well-run state has been perhaps one of the most successful enabling factors for human flourishing in human history.
Historically the states that have dabbled in this area of policy area has been "well run" in only the most dishonest "they accomplished their short term goals" sense of the phrase.
Many people trust the government for policing, military, central banking. Some not.
Many trust them for health care and education, many not.
Very very few don’t trust the government for anything. So for this random example, a dating service, it feels like it’s ideological conditioning (otherwise the OP would explain why it feels bad for them).
>careful, we have a very intelligent individual over here
If you want to take it as a well deserved slight in your direction that's fine but the point was the opposite. Just about anyone can make the insight I did. You don't have to be a genius to see what's going on here.
Are you implying that there aren't a massive number of foreigners moving to Europe? roughly 10% of the people living in the EU were born outside of it.
Gale-Shapley, used in this service, has the property that one side ("proposing" side) is guaranteed their most advantageous stable match while the other side is guaranteed their worst possible stable match.
I've never heard this discussed or mentioned as a drawback because it's Nobel Prize winning and "stable" is a shorthand for "fair". Even though there's many unique stable matches that each offer participants different utilities even if individual participants don't have incentives to change their pairing.
In practice, the more powerful party seems to be the proposing side, e.g. hospitals are the "proposing side" when using Gale-Shapeley to match w/ med school students and get their ideal students.
I wonder if anyone who works on dating apps knows if men or women are the preferred side? And is there any research on stable matching that ensures equity (or ideally arbitrary distribution of utility) between the two groups in their stable matches?
> I've never heard this discussed or mentioned as a drawback because it's Nobel Prize winning and "stable" is a shorthand for "fair".
You've never seen this discussed as a drawback? I've seen it mentioned quite a bit. For instance, it came up on the last big thread on this just the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49915825
Given how women initiate most divorces, it's probably best to set it up so they are the proposing side.
But this isn't raw Gale-Shapley-- the participants aren't ranking all hundreds/thousands of others. In particular, the preference matrix is based on identical mutual compatibility scores, so there's a unique stable solution (not multiple stable ones!), and there's no "side" that benefits, since the solution is identical no matter who does the "proposing".
If stats from dating websites are to be believed, all women tend to flock on all the same tiny percentage of men and ignore the rest. If women initiate, I’m afraid you will see only a few men getting any pairing. Men are likely to be less picky as we see in the wild.
> If stats from dating websites are to be believed, all women tend to flock on all the same tiny percentage of men and ignore the rest
This is absolutely not an accidental phenomenon, this is the optimal outcome for dating apps, because that's the only way to prevent women from finding what they are looking for too quickly (and then leaving the app).
I have been in the space for several years - believe me:
NO dating executive thinks like "women leaving too early because they found what they searched". This sentence does not exist in any of the teams.
Instead, they fear that women are leaving too early because of traffic they bought and that they have a bad experience and leaving, so they are no more a magnet to other males to swiper their credit card for a new subscription.
> If stats from dating websites are to be believed, all women tend to flock on all the same tiny percentage of men and ignore the rest.
These are on platforms where you have profile pics and jobs, front and center on your profile, and the algorithm learns from your preferences based on that. The questions on this platform seem to suggest that the algorithm matches based on anything but that, so perhaps we have different, more open-minded outcomes on what a good partner for someone is like rather than who the ideal man/woman is like.
In the UK male plus joint is roughly the same as female.
You also need to take the reasons into account as well as why. There are multiple reasons for this. The better off partner has more to lose from divorce, women tend to get custody of children, they might have different feelings of obligation to keep a marriage going (I cannot extrapolate this to other men, but I felt an obligation not to file for divorce until I had exhausted all other possibilities), social pressures and responses are different, etc.
If the goal is successful relationships, then probably?
If I have 10/10 love for Halle Berry, and she has 4/10 love for my Jeff-Bezos-looking ass, it's the 4/10 that's going to dictate whether we live happily ever after. So our mutual compatibility is probably well below 10/10.
I don't think you can measure love at all, and certainly not guess it based on some info you can type into your phone, so that's rules out before we even get started.
Are there keywords to search for to read more? This is the first time I've heard about this! This is super interesting, what are a few well known other stable matches people deeper into this talk about?
The problem is it's a lattice and not fully ordered. There are cases where there are two or more pairings that are worse for women and better for men, but we cannot determine which pairing is superior to the other overall.
This metric/logic equation does not exist in any dating company, also I highly suspect that anyone working there has hear of the term.
Here is why:
A dating sites primary KPI are mainly "new signups per day" and "subscriptions signed per day". For a lot of reasons listed above,dating sites in general _cant_ever_ work for the majority of people.(yes,there is this one neighbour who is happily married, they exist, sure, but this is not the majority)
Integrating something like Gale-Shapley would require your company to focus on othe matching part and integrate it somehow - but there is no reason for you to do so, because if you keep the primary KPI in the correct range, you are printing money, regardless if your matching algo is scientic sophisticated or not. So why bother?
Apart from that - also this algo cant check for chemical compatibility and friendship compatibility.
> In short, stable matches mean nothing when nobody is committed and the best options might exist outside of the matchmaking pool
This is wrong. Stable matches still mean something, and in fact probably mean quite a lot.
You are given a much better match than a random pairing. If you still aren't interested, you can decline. If you go on a date and it doesn't work out, you can decline.
Nothing forces you to use this process, it is just an offer of a significantly better than random matching to what you might prefer.
It doesn't even need to account for preferences not covered by the questionnaire.
I dont see how a goverment-run dating service would solve the issue that social-media had made hypergamy run on steroids and that people today have much higher demands on their partner than ever before.
In sweden we have one semi popular dating site with minimal amount of matching algoritms and swiping and such and its no easier there to find a partner than on tinder.
> people today have much higher demands on their partner than ever before.
"People"? For heteros, it is mostly women who have raised their demands. Seriously, are men raising their standards? For men under 30, they are probably lowering their standards!
The best summary I have seen: Average women are no longer interested in average men. More details: Since women became economic equals to men, they are no longer interested in their economic equals. They want men who earn (much) more money than them, and that makes those men very rare.
Specific to Sweden, is it really true that women now approach men? I heard about this trend in Denmark and Netherlands, but I am a bit suspicous because it is mostly anecdotal.
>The best summary I have seen: Average women are no longer interested in average men. More details: Since women became economic equals to men, they are no longer interested in their economic equals.
I'm honestly baffled at these affirmations. I have lived in small and big cities, and this were never true anywhere I looked. Most of my friends are dating and most of them are not rich or richer than their partners. I go out and see a lot of couples. Are all these men making much more money than their partners? I have used dating apps as an average man and it sucks. But I got better at taking care of my looks and got some matches regularly. Not a lot, but enough to meet some women. I would have a harder time if dating apps didn't exist.
I'm not trying to minimize these experiences, though. I just never saw that happening as much as they say.
Obviously you're wading into hot water by even outlining this analysis. Personally I'm tempted to buy it (if it's true, it's true!) but recently I saw an interesting argument that softened me up a bit to the feminist line. It's that the traditional deal between the sexes has been broken. Before, women would suffer the hardship and danger of childbirth, and in return men would take on the physical perils of war. In modern society, of course, conflict mostly means playing video games in an armchair. And yet bearing children remains a stubbornly physical chore. Hence a latent feeling of injustice that may balance out the real one you describe.
I think that overplays the role of war. men did other things in general, such as going out to work and also dealing with other dangers. Even in developed economies male work related death rates are far higher than women's.
Childbirth might remain physical, but it is also extremely safe by historical standards. In the Uk the rate is just over one maternal death per 10,000 births including deaths shorty afterwards, compared to close to 50 in Victorian times (I think excluding subsequent deaths, although i am not sure).
Bearing children might remain physical, and bringing them up is hard work and goes on far longer than bearing them. IMO the solution it to change social expectations so men participate in raising children more. I see this is happening. its best of everyone: less of a load on women, men participate in the joy of having children properly, and kids grow up with better parental relationships and more parental attention in total.
> Before, women would suffer the hardship and danger of childbirth, and in return men would take on the physical perils of war.
The problem with this view is that the VAST majority of deaths in war are civilian deaths, which do not bound themselves by gender. It's only in recent decades that it's possible to contemplate conflicts with as few as 1 civilian death per combatant death, and even then, that's the extreme exception, not the rule.
In non-state warfare, the civilian casualty ratio is even worse--imagine living in "Eastern Europe in World War 2"-style casualty rates as the baseline of your existence. The typical battle in such circumstances isn't "two opposing armies meet on a battlefield, one army emerges victorious;" it's "we're going to sneak into your village, set fire to all your food stores, rape some of your women (maybe steal them for brides), and maybe whack off several of your children."
> In modern society, of course, conflict mostly means playing video games in an armchair.
I rather think most Ukrainian soldiers would disagree with you here.
> and in return men would take on the physical perils of war.
Oh common. Those wars were not for the benefit of women. They were for the benefit of decision making men, the men who ruled. Which were not women. And the men in power sometimes used women as argument for why you should go invade this or that country, but then again appeal to patriotism was even stronger. There are limited situations, like Ukraine today which is defending where the "for other women and children" claim can kinda be made. And even there, fighers are motivated by more then just that.
Traditionally, you was fighting for your male ruler.
The war thing is not deal between sexes. Even today, men are more likely to support invasions, to support parties that lead country to wars.
Countries ruled by woman also go to war, and have done going back for millennia: Boadicea, Cleopatra, Catherine the Great, etc.
I would like to see data supporting the idea that men are more likely to support parties that lead to wars, and if its true the reasons why.
In less safe societies and situations men were pressured to take the risks to shield women. "Women and children first". That definitely was to the advantage of women and the detriment of men.
I did not said that countries run by women would never go to war. I made statement about majority of actual real world past wars. Men were dominating the leadership, the leadership made decision to go to war for reasons unrelated to womanhood, so the war it was. The fight was not "for women". Also, actual real world fathers and husbands preferred not to go to war. Their wifes also preferred them not to go to war.
> I would like to see data supporting the idea that men are more likely to support parties that lead to wars, and if its true the reasons why.
Men are more likely to support fascists - both in runup to WWII and now. You can see it in data. Large part of its appeal is warrior aesthetic and aggression. Also, men are more likely to vote republicans who are more hawks and start wars. The pro war parties and groups are dominated by men, because some men display their masculinity by endorsing wars. They think manly men should support war, they think it makes them manly, so they do. See Hegseth - he is basically a caricature of such man.
> In less safe societies and situations men were pressured to take the risks to shield women. "Women and children first". That definitely was to the advantage of women and the detriment of men.
When the plan crashes or there is a fight, there is no "women and children first". In actual ships wrecks, men were more likely to survive (so no, women had no precedes).
When the men are going to fight away, that is when they die more often. Men were obligated to stay in Ukraine while women and kids were allowed to stay. Men did major of Chernobyl work too. But, men complaining about "women and children first" they have seen in books, are no where near any situation where it might happen to them.
Besides, here is what I reacted to:
>Before, women would suffer the hardship and danger of childbirth, and in return men would take on the physical perils of war.
No, there was no such "deal" made. Childbirth being safer now does not change it, drones dont change it and world having more peaceful period last decades dont change it.
Who are the current fascist parties you are referring to?
> Also, men are more likely to vote republicans who are more hawks and start wars
So you are basing this on the current voting pattern in one country at one point in history! Its not even consistently true - maybe at the last US election, but not consistently true.
> But, men complaining about "women and children first" they have seen in books
My point is that it was historically true.
> Childbirth being safer now does not change it, drones dont change it and world having more peaceful period last decades dont change it.
its a historical fact that women were at significant risk fo dying in childbirth, and men were at higher risk of dying in war or occupational accidents.
That is what Richars Evans wrote in his article about women and nazism. Who is an actual historian. Women vote might have been up, but men voted for them more. And men were literal members and activists. Women were more religious and voted more for different conservative party.
More importantly, right now if you look at current statistics, men are more likely to vote far-right.
> Who are the current fascist parties you are referring to?
AfD, Trump and Miller party, Farrage ... should I go through them all worldwide?
> its a historical fact that women were at significant risk fo dying in childbirth, and men were at higher risk of dying in war or occupational accidents.
1.) This is about "reasons for going to war" and deal between genders. Men do NOT go to war because of women or for women. They also do not go to die in war as some kind of compensation for childbirth.
2.) Women get killed in war. When those men leave the home for war, they kill women and children as much as civilian men. In modern wars, civilian causalities outnumber military ones.
3.) Now you are adding "occupational accidents" which is different category and completely unrelated. But also, people who oppose female soldiers, cops etc ... are men. Because they perceive her as encroaching on their territory.
> So you are basing this on the current voting pattern in one country at one point in history! Its not even consistently true - maybe at the last US election, but not consistently true.
It is consistently true for western world across elections. The only way to not see it is to not look at statistics. I am not saying it must be so due to some inherent biological difference. Historically, it did not mattered that much what population thought or what women thought - there were rules, those were mostly men and that was it. But right now, in our culture, the support for starting war is gender biased toward men.
Afd maybe.Calling Reform fascist is ridiculous hyperbole. In a two party system like the US people have to pick the least bad option given bundles of policies. Even with multiple parties.
Far right parties often oppose wars too. Where do these parties stand on involvement in Ukraine or Iran wars? Trumps first term was one of the most unaggresive US preidencies ever.
I was quoting an actual historian too.
> modern wars, civilian causalities outnumber military
but we are talking about historical wars. Being a soldier is still far riskier than being a civilian, and always was.
> In a two party system like the US people have to pick the least bad option given bundles of policies.
"Least bad option" can be anything and evolve itself into this or that. Conservatives intentionally evolved it into fascism. Which consistently happens to be supported more by men then by women. Importantly, that include wars.
And overall, men support wars more then women support wars.
> I was quoting an actual historian too.
Your historian is not opposing what Evans said. That quote does not imply women voted for men more then men overall. And your wiki ends with following "In terms of voting patterns however, a higher proportion of male voters supported the Nazi party compared to female voters".
Nazi started with low female vote and high male vote. Then it was changing and the difference between genders became smaller.
> but we are talking about historical wars. Being a soldier is still far riskier than being a civilian, and always was.
In the historical wars, civilians died more then soldiers. This goes especially for WWII. Being civilian where the war is means a lot of death. Especially physically weak people - old, children, women, sick. Soldiers happen to kill a lot of civilians, turns out.
In even older historical wars, soldiers lived literally from what they stole from the land. They were not carrying food for few weeks with them, they took it from locals. With violence and rape, obviously. At the time, food was actually expensive, people were able to grow around how much they needed. All that robbing meant additional deaths due to food missing. In addition to civilians killed to get that food or out of general frustration.
Wars happen where people live. They do not happen in some remote people-free empty fighting rings. They happen in cities, villages etc, because that is the stuff soldiers were sent to take over. And in the past, because that is where the food was.
Except that, women with college degrees and in higher socioeconomic groups marry as much as before. It poor people, poor women who stay single.
If your theory was true, it would be other way round. Poor women would be marrying and richer women would refuse marriage. That is not what we see in data.
Hypergamy is real. "I need to have a baby, but eew this guy is a dork, I'm not giving him my womb, and look at all these cool guys on insta" is a real conversation I've had.
Had one drop me for a professional DJ.
A friend of mine was convinced she was going to marry a famous basketball player.
You can guess how these "relationships" went.
Super average women with one or two OUTSTANDING characteristics (get it.)
It's a real problem.
Fortunately, I already had kids when we were both younger and dumber which might ultimately be the solution: keep humans off social media until they're grandparents.
Haha, this made me laugh and made me think of an absurd analogy.
Women are buying call options (hedge against rising prices) on men and the premium is the emotional damage that occurs when the market price on the guy falls below the strike price (turns out the man is a dud) and the woman refrains from pursuing the guy (no marriage).
It's poor in taste but I just can't unsee the similarity...
Commercial dating apps are a market for lemons - as a woman, you can't quickly assess whether a partner will be compatible with you or not without investing substantial time and effort. Hypergamy is the expected equilibrium - if you're not sure about the long-term compatibility, you might as well go off of looks or cues of status alone. I would expect the outcome distribution of an app with a much better matching algorithm to be drastically less concentrated in the upper tail. Moreover, a state-run dating app lacks the perverse incentive to keep you swiping, frustrated and jealous.
I don't assume that. The supply of men on dating apps is greater than the supply of women, and they tend to be less picky and more open to short-term mate-seeking behavior. This means that the dynamic of these apps is more fundamentally shaped by aggregate preferences of women.
I think the algorithm is almost a distraction here. Gale-Shapley works nicely when preferences are reasonably well-defined and participants are actually committed to the matching process. Dating has neither property. People are terrible at predicting who they'll have chemistry with, and everyone has outside options.
If women were (legally allowed and required ) to be paid upfront for delivering and raising children, the market would sort things out. We would probably get some professional mothers who would have 6-12 children.
Men would obviously the buyer…. Most would need financing… (baby mortgage)
Would probably need a Fannie / Freddie cousin if the market got overheated and a bubble pop happened.
theoretically some women could pay some quality fathers for coparenting , but it would be rare.
Why would men be buyers? If the women are raising children what do they get out of it? Will be women and children be living with them? If so they would be parenting so need to be paid too.
It sounds like your idea is that women get paid to have the joys of being a parent, while men pay to get nothing in return.
If the woman and children do live with the man then essentially you are recreating the idea of a male provider married to a housewife, except more transactional and unequal.
Men get a child. Yeah, it’s almost all doable in current legal landscape. Just not so socially accepted. the default parenting contract could be per child…
What do you mean "get a child". Do they get to live with the child? Do they get the child's love? Do they get the child's company? Do they get to play with the child? Do they get the joy raising a child?
This honestly sounds dystopian. The foster care system does not point to "people who are in it for the money" as the best people to raise children. The market is not the best solution for everything, and working on structural barriers to family raising for people who would like to raise a family seems like a worthwhile effort. I do not know enough about Singapore to say if this dating app will help, but I like seeing efforts like this; hopefully in addition to daycare, education investment, and family leave policies.
Foster care is for other people’s children. I think having her genes in the children would make a professional mother a little more attentive to her children. Also better quality parenting would allow her to charge more…
The current situation artificially limits supply of mothers because it requires relative exclusivity of the father. It’s like nimby people not wanting apartments in their cities to limit supply. Except imagine if nimby’s were able to ban apartments all over the world. That’s the situation with motherhood. It’s single family zoning world wide…
Of course it sounds dystopian and is not about to happen anytime soon. Because cartel’s don’t give up policies that limit supply so easily…
Tangent: I’ve often wondered why governments don’t provide a ‘dating’ service for employers and employees, or even better some kind of career development and management service for citizens. Use a bit of institutional wisdom to help people make the best of themselves from school age onwards, help people with similar or complementary skills and interests to connect … that kind of thing.
> I’ve often wondered why governments don’t provide a ‘dating’ service for employers and employees, or even better some kind of career development and management service for citizens.
Don’t they? Here in the UK at least participation in programs like that is a requirement of unemployment benefits. One has to attend a job center where one is given advice, sometimes training can get enrolled in trainung and etc. Not saying that they do a great job of it but they seems to at least try to do what you describe. At least nominally.
The author's final recommendation about investing in offline third places is very true in modern Singapore
Modern dating problem comes from too many online platforms trying to sell you a lifestyle and tell you what you should have. People do not need another online platform to solve the problem caused by online platforms
You know what's are great goverment run (or supported with money) dating programs? University. Erasmus. Things like Americorps. Even if the literal match is on the apps I feel like those sorts of environments are great.
Interesting the different takes different nations take over dropping birth rates. I posted a story here on the Lisdoonvarna dating festival in Ireland. This is a village with a lot of bars wanting to encourage tourism. It has had so much success that the government is now sponsoring it. Quite different than America where the government mandates something as opposed to funding something that has proven successful in a given area.
Social media had a story on an American lady disappointed with dating choices in her city who went over there for fun, met an Irishman and in less than a year of transatlantic dating got married.
Bet you have just as much a chance of finding a life partner there than any online dating service, probably much better.
> Team sunrise, or team “it’s 2am and I’m still up”? (close-ended)
Why so weirdly binary? Sleeping at 11pm and getting up well after sunrise is not an option anymore?
> What kind of traveler are you, really? (close-ended, with options like adventure junkie, culture seeker, and I don’t travel much)
Isn't this the type of question that should be open ended? How about being a dynamic kind of traveller? Happy to go if someone else is organizing the trip and happy to stay if I have to do it.
Such a typical Singaporean approach - even fun has to be funnelled into MCQs.
I think governments should work on making their citizens more dateable.
Schools should try to teach kids better social skills as well as how to cultivate a healthy romantic relationship. You might say society and culture should be the ones doing this, and you’d be right, but they’ve failed at that.
Kids need to know how to make introductions (not just introduce themselves but introduce other people), how to show someone you’re interested in them, how to engage in small talk with a stranger and escalate it to deeper and more meaningful conversation, and even when and how to kiss someone. There used to be schools for elites to teach some of these things. It’s time to bring them back but for everyone.
It's almost as though "economic freedom" (whatever that means) and the government schmutzing in citizens' personal affairs are completely unrelated things!
Entirely dismissing how important looks, vibes, personality are in relationships. Not even dating -- if someone smells, you're not going to be incentives to make friends with them. This seems to me to just be trodding the same pseudoscientific route as MBTI personality tests, trying to condense a person into a list of multiple choice questions. That will never work. No algorithm can do it. Social interaction is not a solved game.
I think this is the key point. Put differently: Vibe matters. I cannot tell you how many times that I match for a date online, then less than ten minutes after meeting them, you think: "Oh, this will never work." Example: Photos are heavily photoshopped or old/out-of-date, overweight, weird/odd body language, etc. Humans are infinitely sensitive to a million different things that are impossible to authentically transmit via primarily photography-based online dating.
If I met them in real life first (cafe, supermarket, park, etc.), you can politely disconnect and move on if something seems off. The more that I do online dating, the more that I see this "vibe wall". Since third spaces aren't really coming back, I'm pretty sure that speed dating (or assisted group dating) is key. Sure, it is uncomfortable to meet many people so quickly (say an hour or two), it helps to get over the vibe wall. It could act like an artificial third space, but with a romantic intent.
I have an idea for a dating app: What if people could only make videos using in-app video recorder (and clipper)? This would completely remove the problem of photoshopping/filters. Plus, video can much better transmit "vibe" compared to photos and "profile". Example of something fun: Show a short video that is trending on TikTok (hand picked by staff), then ask someone to react to it. You can do the green screen effect, just like TikTok. It could be a nice way to visit someone's personality and check their vibe.
It's a shame that they deduce your ranking just from the questions. I think the algorithm would be perfect if paired with a manual ranking by the user.
Yes, but someone who looks, vibes and smells right can still be totally wrong for you. I often thought that online dating was inefficient because my eyes, ears and nose can rule out most potential mates without even thinking, but it works the other way too: I've had many partners I've enjoyed being physical with but would never want to settle down and start a family or anything (then again, I'm not a breeder at all, so take that with a pinch of salt). So it's six of one, half a dozen of the other. You need all things to be right, and this surely can only be better than e.g. Tinder, where you see only pictures.
Glad to see that it requires cooperative partners, and not just parents. And that the matched partners are not automatically engaged.
Let's see what other, more "progressive" governments will think about that. Lots of possibilities in government-run partner matching for out future AI overlords.
There are lots of overweight and/or tatt'ed people in Singapore! In general, I have found people get a lot fatter once you travel from Thailand/Cambodia/Laos to Peninsular Malaysia/Singapore/Indonesia. I don't know if it genetics, food, or "lifestyle". And loads of Singaporeans are up to their eyes in debt because they want to look flashy when they are young -- designer clothes, jewelry, bags, shoes, cars, etc. For me, the quickest way to know if a Singaporean is broke is if they are young, have a mid-to-shit job, but are wearing flashy clothes.
> This checklist of things is, in my view, one of the biggest issues with online dating, in that it tends to amplify and exacerbate our personal biases rather than inviting us to step outside of them.
The elephant in the room I found on most of the dating site I've seen so far. I can only conclude that the makers of those sites have a transactional view of dating and everything connected with it. But there are also users with this attitude and that's where it gets really frustrating.
The biggest issues in Korea dating is young men either (1) don't have enough money to date (because local women expect men to paying for everything) or (2) women reject men with old-fashioned social views. In my personal experience, comparing the most developed places in Asia (Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hongkong, Singapore), young Korean men are the most like their fathers with out-of-date social views.
If a young Korean woman wants to have a few kids, without living in grueling poverty - is that possible with a husband who's not in the top 1% of earners? If not - then ignoring the 99% may be a want-to-be-mom's least bad strategy. :(
From a few comments in the article and here, I'm wondering how viable Singapore is as a country for typical residents (vs. the 1%) to have children.
If (say) both would-be parents in a couple have to work long hours to afford their own food, housing, & such - yeah, NO. They obviously can't have many kids.
Middle class life is pretty reasonable in Singapore. You can have two working parents with boring, average corporate jobs (the economy is very strong in Singapore), then you live in modestly priced public housing, ride public transit everywhere, and send your kids to public schools. It seems fine to me. And the middle class isn't something rare in Singapore; it is most of Singapore. You can also hire a cheap domestic helper to cook most of your meals, clean your home, and shuttle the kids to and from school and activities. This is a very common pattern in Singapore.
How might things look if a couple has 3+ kids, and perhaps only one parent working outside the home? Because if Singapore actually wants to reach break-even from where their numbers are now, that needs to be a realistic scenario for a whole lotta people.
> How might things look if a couple has 3+ kids, and perhaps only one parent working outside the home?
Why is it important to only have one working parent? In most rich countries, two working parents is pretty normal now. In Singapore, you can hire a domestic helper or two.
Singapore is so rich and desirable that it can import highly educated people forever. Plus, it is diverse by default/design, so people are quite open to having diverse neighbors.
Where you don't have extended families living together, mom being able to afford to "work" full-time as a parent/homemaker is a pretty traditional benchmark for being able to afford having several kids.
And are those domestic workers part of the population pool that you're trying to boost the fertility of?
How many people see their ideal match and get humbled (or emboldened) by surprising results? How many of these try immediately to change something about themselves?
Since the match pool will never be exactly 1:1, do you do anything at all about the least matchable people?
Would it become possible to gauge whether changed answers are efforts to widen one's net or legitimate personal growth and/or a bit of self-reflection?
If the dating service detects deceptive answering, is it correct to just pair these people with other dishonest users?
Can you gather any feedback from unsuccessful dates and apply a "Je n'sais quoi" Factor to positively/negatively weight their chances when calculating their compatibility with future matches?
If you take this idea to the extreme, can you start to distrust negative date feedback if the feedback provider is shown to be unreliable? (Person A doesn't like anybody, their feedback shouldn't matter.)
Are there detectable signals of someone's Je ne sais quoi Factor in their profile metadata, including profile photo(s) and answering habits? (i.e. People answering the full survey in less than 15 minutes at 3 a.m. are 28% less desireable on average.)
While it's good to grow together with a partner, it doesn't always work out that way. How would such an algorithm be able to determine that an ambitious (broadly: likely to dramatically change) person will not be paired with a long-term apathetic, set-in-stone person? (I do realize they have the, "always working on yourself?" question, but there's so much this question leaves unanswered.)
Is this a ploy to get more applicants to join the government staff, if the pilot remains closed to the public?
(tying together "least matchable people" and "government staff") Do you start monitoring the extreme ends of matchability to see if there's a link between perceived social agreeableness and job performance? What was that again about detecting dishonesty and limiting the pool to government workers?
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One detail I particularly liked about early OKCupid was the ability to rank how much someone's answer mattered. For instance, I don't particularly mind someone's exercise and organization preferences, and it's fine if we didn't match because they DO have expectations from me in these areas which I fail to meet. I would hope the Singapore service would implement this as well, although a description of FirstDate in The Straits Times suggests this nuance isn't there.
Another thing the Singapore dating service has in common with OKCupid is at least a few poorly worded questions: "What’s a country that’s ruined all other countries for you?" is akin to OKC's "In a certain light, wouldn't nuclear war be exciting?" You can't split hairs as a Yes/No response in OKC, "sure: I would understandably have tons of negative excitement, a sudden spike in anxiety/dread, instantaneous long-term shift in priorities, etc.; although the use of atomic weapons thoroughly horrifies me," just like you can't explain whether the country that "ruined others" did so via greatness (Spain with its social and expressive population, food, beaches, siestas, and music) or by causing a loss of faith in humanity (Ireland, due to a stolen laptop plus being verbally threatened by a primary school-aged child while I was walking with a baby stroller).
My personal take on the nuclear war question? I just tried to optimize (cast the widest net) and decided, "Anyone willing to misunderstand this one question while also prioritizing and demanding its response is less likely to be someone whose company I value," and left the question unanswered + unimportant to me.
Now if only my local government had a "friends group" service, so I don't end up hanging out with other parents just by virtue of also being a parent and needing to be around them in the same places at the same times...
>> The truth is that we don’t really know what exactly makes love work, such that we can articulate and implement it on a societal scale. It’s too messy, too complex, too idiosyncratic, and too human. Anyone who claims otherwise probably has a course to sell you on negging and pickup artistry.
The author, who is a gay man, obviously didn't study any pickup material since if he would he'd realize how wrong he is. If he'd study pickup material and the surrounding works he'd realize that what women write in these preferences is completely meaningless so his example of meeting a guy as a guy on this website is completely useless for men meeting women, since women do not work like that.
All of these algorithmic matching will become totaly useless and wrong depending on the behaviour of the male. In a completely mismatched pair the women will fawn over the guy if his behaviour is congruent with what attracts females. And even on a complete match the women will run away in panic if the guy is a total tool sexual-behaviour-wise to what (dis)attracts women.
Also: nothing will solve marriage problem as long as women are in the workforce.
Look up books by Rollo Tomassi, he has a blog and has written on these topics if you are one of those "citation needed" people.
The marriage rates of these countries is not really the issue. Much of the remaining difference between East/Southeast Asia and the West is actually births out of wedlock, which the region still heavily stigmatizes.
As Singaporean commenters have said, I think this is more of a positive eugenics scheme.
I thought incels are white right wingers, first time I see this
term in a non-white context. Southern Poverty Law Center is listing them as a hate group for example so by definition incels can’t be black.
There is an amusing irony in this approach to marriage promotion: who isn't already married in Singapore? I've been told that the city's 30 year old gay and lesbian crowd is treated to a lot of fancy dates at public expense.
> with government workers set to be the first batch of daters
Oh yeah, the government workers, a group of people known for their prolific dating and people skills. This will go so well.
"Any hard Nos for you?", well, those who ignored the calls to their number is a no brainer big No, and also those who don't know how to fill their SMFF-29f-A form, which is different from SMFF-29F-A. Everyone here hates people who don't know the difference between SMFF-29f-A and SMFF-29F-A.
You know, there's probably fewer perverse incentives with a government run dating service. Obviously I can imagine ways it could suck, but when I compare them to how commercial dating services are run it's hard to see how they could do a _worse_ job.
I contemplated whether to try to build a dating site a few times while I was single, and every time what stopped me was the perverse incentives. Making a financially viable dating service without actively making things worse on purpose is really hard.
E.g. at one point I spoke to a woman who told me she'd out of curiosity paid for a month of Tinder's premium sub to see how many had swiped right on her, and her queue was over 3000. She wasn't swiping much. The queue was basically perpetually growing, and the odds for any of the men swiping was accordingly low and dropping. Which was good for Tinder of course - a larger pool of people for men to swipe and get frustrated over lack of responses from, until some proportion pay.
If you're not dependent on frustrating your users into wanting to pay for priority, or getting people off the service because they've found someone is in fact your goal, it's trivial to fix this issue (and many others): Stop showing a profile when the queue gets too deep.
Same thing with not showing inactive profiles. Or actually trying to match profiles of people who are likely to match up (again there's a perverse incentive: you want to match up profiles that one side will like, but not match up profiles where both sides are interested too often; rack up the swipes but not the connections...)
That's the long way of saying I agree, and to get out some of the frustration from past years of using them (hopefully never again...). There are truly few types of services where the interests of users and commercial operators are so totally misaligned.
I do not think that it is online dating that is brutal, but these dating sites.
I have been through a couple of online dating and personality usually came first, so by the time appearance was revealed, we already could not care much. She was not my type, I was not her type, but that affected nothing.
The reason it did not work out is financial and logistics (different country, I have MS, I am heavily dependent on healthcare, and so forth), not because of any moral failing or what have you.
I'd probably pick only the top 5% too if I was inundated by matches, so I'm not surprised.
And so while we can't fix that, guys can certainly improve their chances of being in that 5%. The thing is, what a picture shows on an online dating profile really is a lot down to you, irrespective of your actual appearance.
But men have a horrible ability to select pictures that are either incredibly low effort and poor quality, or the type of pictures that men would find other men cool in, rather than what will attract women, before even considering how you compete on actual appearance. When I spent some time figuring out my profiles back in the day, my match rate went up by a large factor.
> And so while we can't fix that, guys can certainly improve their chances of being in that 5%.
That 5% is static - individual guys can improve their chances of being in the 5%, but that pushes out others already in the 5%.
IOW, if women are only looking at the top 5% of men, there's very little you can do to make them look at the top 50% of men.
> That 5% is static - individual guys can improve their chances of being in the 5%, but that pushes out others already in the 5%.
Why makes you think that? It seems much more likely to me that women are selecting whatever profiles that interest them, which would be >5% if potential matches made better profiles. I've seen the women experience of dating apps from women friends, and indeed men profile quality is abysmal (my bisexual and lesbian friends seem to swipe on a much higher proportion of women profiles FWIW), to the point that 5% even seems pretty high once you also take into account personal preferences.
I mean there is lot of research behind this. I read a book also by a guy who was founder of eHarmony or some similar portal, and this 5% statistic match real data from their site. Individual success stories are not replacement for hard statistical facts.
That isn't a rebuttal to the point made. You haven't differentiated between a fixed 5% on the part of women versus a fixed 5% on the part of how men present themselves. Both mechanisms can explain the observed outcome.
> individual guys can improve their chances of being in the 5%, but that pushes out others already in the 5%.
When everyone invests equally in getting to the top 5%, because of how competitive it is, then it results in people maintaining their same spots as before on the leaderboard.
Also you can't improve things like height which is one of the most important things women care about.
>there's very little you can do to make them look at the top 50% of men
Historically it's been solved using religion and families enforcing monogamy in society, like in the past 2000 years of human history, to ensure most men and women get to find a pair to make a family and giving them a relatively equal opportunity/stake in the future of society as an incentive to help maintain and defend it.
Without these traditional enforcement mechanisms, I guess we can explain them the math that if they wish to find happiness and not die alone surrounded by cats, then they can't all share the same top 5% of men, and so will need to settle for a realistic man in the same league as them, instead of waiting for gigachad because their biological hypergamy instincts tells them to.
> I guess we can explain them the math that if they wish to find happiness and not die alone surrounded by cats
Let me tell you, women are waiting with bated breath to hear you explain this to them.
Last I checked, most western societies don’t allow polygamy and most people still prefer monogamy. You don’t have to explain anything to anyone, women get it. They are just happier living by themselves than surrounded by dudes who make condescending remarks about them dying surrounded by cats. I guess maybe we can explain that to men.
>Let me tell you, women are waiting with bated breath to hear you explain this to them.
Are you saying women can't understand the basic arithmetic of demographics relationship pairing, on their own? That they don't understand they can't all realistically settle down with the top % of men, if they don't want to end up alone?
> They are just happier living by themselves
Says who? Polls and studies show a massive drop in womens' happiness since the 70s, along with a massive increase in use of alcohol, antidepressants and SSRIs, especially amongst childless women over the age of 40 in the present, because as it it turns out, human evolutionary biology engineered womens' bodies and brains to desire to have kids for a good reason(procreation of the species), and years/decades of feminist anti-natalist propaganda takes its biological toll on the mind eventually, no matter how hard the cope is that they're "happy alone". Is that what womens' "happiness alone" looks like to you, popping pills and getting drunk?
If you don't believe me then just Google it, ChatGPT it, Gemini it, etc. and see for yourself.
You can tell yourself and others whatever you want and what makes you feel better about yourself, but in the end, biology always wins, as it has for the past two thousand years of human existence and for the next two thousand years in the future, as people who are "happy alone" get selected out of the gene pool. Reproductive biology is the undefeated champion over everything else humans created.
It's amazing how males can't conceptualize life without them.
Oh no, how will we ever deal without billions upon billions of abusers and molesters.
I'm sure calling all men on the planet as "billions of abusers and molesters" makes you agreeable in your own bubble.
Have you tried touching grass or better yet, professional therapy to cope with your misandrist traumas?
> When everyone invests equally in getting to the top 5%, because of how competitive it is
Yes, but everyone isn't doing that. You'd think men would, but I suggest you ask around some women on their experience of the quality of mens dating dating profiles.
>You'd think men would,
THe top % are. Which is the yardstick you're being judged on, even when you're not in the top %.
> individual guys can improve their chances of being in the 5%
And that was exactly my point. You can punch far above your metaphorical weight very easily because most guys hardly tries.
> IOW, if women are only looking at the top 5% of men, there's very little you can do to make them look at the top 50% of men.
I didn't come even close to suggesting otherwise.
>You can punch far above your metaphorical weight very easily because most guys hardly tries.
Like? I haven't tried online dating in a long time, but all guys I knew had normal profiles and rarely got any matches let alone dates.
>most guys hardly tries
That's irrelevant. Women on dating apps are still only going to interact with the top guys that are above their league, let's say a 9/10. Whether there's more who don't even try, doesn't help you at all. Like if you now try and you go from a 4/10 to a 6/10, you're still below the 9/10 throeshold the top guys have set the bar at. Women don';t choose on statistical distribution, thinking that there's only a handful of guys at the top so they'll have to lower the bar to find a mate, meaning you'll have a chance by going to a 6/10.
> Like? I haven't tried online dating in a long time, but all guys I knew had normal profiles and rarely got any matches let alone dates.
"Normal profiles" for men typically means hardly trying. It means poorly lit pictures. It means bad angles. Often it means things that instantly puts most of the women off, like shirtless pics [1], and poorly written profiles.
I've never had any problems getting matches and dates, but I did have to work for it. That meant ensuring I had good quality pictures, and ensuring my profile matched what women on the given site that I might want to date said the were looking for.
I went from rarely if every getting matches and dates to getting a steady stream of them not by magically getting better looking, but by improving my profile.
Just fixing the writing multiplied the number of dates I got by a decent factor.
> That's irrelevant. Women on dating apps are still only going to interact with the top guys that are above their league, let's say a 9/10. Whether there's more who don't even try, doesn't help you at all.
The point is that those "9/10"'s also mostly don't try (I'd argue most 9/10's aren't on the dating sites, so really you're competing against "dating site 9/10's" who are mostly going to be relatively regular guys who know how to pick a good photo)
[1] Shirtless pics works if you're built - it worked for me after I'd spent 10 years in the gym powerlifting, it did nothing before that - and are posting on a hookup focused site like Tinder, and have a profile written to focus on giving off that vibe. It does not work well on a more "serious" dating site even if you're seriously muscular. But still if you look at the guys profiles, you'll still see a steady stream of them. Most men going on dating sites really ought to take a look at the competition, and then do pretty much the opposite of what most guys are doing.
>"Normal profiles" for men typically means hardly trying. It means poorly lit pictures. It means bad angles. Often it means things that instantly puts most of the women off, like shirtless pics [1], and poorly written profiles.
No, they had good pics. What then? When can we just admit short stature, ugly face, small, jawline, etc. are just not attractive to women on dating apps, and lighting conditions, angles and all that and everything is just cope.
BTW this whole "men have to improve themselves to be the top 5% of men" thing is literally eugenics. Thanks "AWFUL" (Affluent White Female Urban Liberal) women!
"6 feet, 6 inches, 6 figures", "ewww he's got an ANDROID? ick!" - Eugenicists.
No, it's "men put in so little effort, that if you put in just a little bit your odds improve dramatically".
It's perfectly valid for women to want men who are willing to put in more effort than the barest minimum.
> "6 feet, 6 inches, 6 figures", "ewww he's got an ANDROID? ick!"
None of those things are why you can’t get a date.
> Thanks "AWFUL" (Affluent White Female Urban Liberal) women!
This is though.
Women, who first check out your... phone? I honestly can't (and don't) believe that's a thing.
There are so many examples of this yet I get gaslit about this not existing everytime I bring it up on HN:
https://www.npr.org/2024/03/28/1241473453/why-green-text-bub...
https://leafandcore.com/2019/08/24/green-bubbles-are-a-turn-...
https://mindingthecampus.org/2025/05/01/30876/
https://blog.seeking.com/the-green-bubble-deal-breaker
https://gizmodo.com/im-buying-an-iphone-because-im-ashamed-o...
https://thetab.com/2026/02/27/expert-reveals-shocking-reason...
Some people sure, but its hardly universal if you go and talk to people about it
Wow, must be a US bubble. I've never heard of this in Germany, and I'd say iPhone vs Android seems to be more of a gender thing over here (although plenty of counterexamples as well).
I went on a date with a woman in Romania. During the date she commented that my phone wasn't an iPhone but that I had a fancy Sony mirrorless camera (as I was a tourist) so that made up for it.
Back in the day, I would send a message and ask something I thought was interesting about their profile.
6/10 would get a response and some, dates.
The apps make it so there's no conversation and it's all about your profile.
Way more difficult to get noticed.
Yes, it's more difficult - I'm old enough that there was a period I had regular dates by sending corny chatup lines on IRC and it worked so I know well how easy it used to be.
But my point was that most men are doing such a shit job at presenting themselves on their profiles that it isn't that difficult to massively improve your odds by making a profile that is better than average.
Spending more than 5 minutes ensuring you have a profile picture that is decently lit, taken from an angle that present you well, and that you look like you're capable of taking care of yourself is a good start, but judging from conversations with a lot of women while I was dating, that is a high bar to clear for most guys on dating sites.
I was flabbergasted scrolling Tinder on a female friend’s phone.
90% of the guys had a photo of them with their pickup truck, a pic of them drinking heavily, and a pic of them giving the middle finger.
Not in a particularly redneck or rural area either. Lowest effort possible.
Exactly. And then they complain about not getting matches.
It is still effort if you make a decent profile on places like Tinder, because Tinder is very much intentionally trying to frustrate you to make you pay, but even just having a female friend you could ask to help pick a photo that won't actively repel every woman that ever sees your profile ups your chances so much...
This is why women are very upset about the existence of bisexual men (and why casual biphobia is tolerated among straights and the rest of the LGT community). Women hate knowing how easy it is for a bisexual man to leave/cheat. They hate having far less "control".
Men need an equivalent to political lesbianism.
Gay men have excellent marriage/partnersahip statistics. They stay together, they don't (or tolerate/accept) "cheating", very low physical abuse, very happy/satisfying relationships etc statistics.
Lesbian women have literally the opposite. The memes about domestic violence and other serious problems among lesbian communities would be funny if they weren't so true.
When I see these sad "women are from Venus, men from Mars" style of comments, all I can feel is that this is a sad truth of the universe.
The men who enjoy showing off pictures of their fishing/hunting haul. The men who use android phones, the men who want to show themselves topless (even in contexts where this makes sense). These man are not "low quality" or even "less desirable" partners in any objective sense because their photography choices are not amicable to women's desires. Women account for like 80% of consumer spending and advertising/marketing folks know some extremely uncomfortable truths about group-think/hive-mind mentality among women. These men should celebrate that they are showing their authentic selves, not the contorted version they have to repeatedly summon to satisfy foids.
Basically, men should actively be proud of our achievements, and any who can ignore societies intense biphobia should lean into the masculine side of their desires, as their relationship satisfaction will likely go significantly up.
> These man are not "low quality" or even "less desirable" partners in any objective sense because their photography choices are not amicable to women's desires.
They are not objectively "low quality", but they are objectively less desirable to women if women find them less desirable for it.
You can enjoy leaning into those things all you want, but you are not owed anything from women. They have no obligation to look past how you present yourself. And so if how you present yourself reduces their interest in you, that is on you. If you're fine with that, then by all means go ahead.
For my part, it was a very small sacrifice to spend a couple of hours figuring out which parts of my personality women actually finds attractive, and how to signal that with my pictures and profile text.
> Gay men have excellent marriage/partnersahip statistics. They stay together, they don't (or tolerate/accept) "cheating", very low physical abuse, very happy/satisfying relationships etc statistics.
What.
Have you ever met a gay male? Maybe even talked to him?
Gay males are still males at the end of the day so they always land themselves in the most damaging relationships possible. Males already cause tons of harm by themselves, so sum them together and you get a truly dreary mess.
There's a reason there are so many gay males who are so homophobic they make Evangelicals seem like a Pride Parade Organizing Committee.
I was like that. I simply managed to realize that the problem wasn't homosexuality, but rather that it's always been males.
Dating males in general is a form of self-harm if I'm being honest with you. I'm bisexual and I do still feel attracted to males but I am at a good enough spot that I don't want to hurt myself that way.
I doubt the 50% is evenly distributed either and men for sure disproportionately give attention to conventionally attractive women.
Dating is brutal.
Online dating seems like it perhaps speed-runs that a bit, but I don’t think it dramatically changes the essence.
No, all women get some attention using online dating apps. A bunch of YouTubers have created fake online dating profiles with incredibly ugly women (bad face or bad body), and they still get matches. This guy on X has run lots of these tests with hilarious results: https://x.com/MurrayHillGuy1
I can confidently say that dating was not brutal before the apps. (I am pretty old.) Before the apps, couples were mostly looks-matched: the ugos dated each other, the mids dated each other, and the best dated each other. Unless the guy was very personable/funny/rich, most people were looks-matched. Online dating has reduced everyone to a few photographs.Women demonstrate incredibly different behaviour when "selecting mates" when comparing (1) familiar settings, like work, school, church/temple, friend/activity/hobby groups vs (2) unfamiliar settings, like bars, clubs, public places, and online dating. For (1), they find many more men attractive because they can evaluate them on more than looks. For (2), they can only evaluate on looks. If you ask women to rate strangers based only upon looks, they will rank only 20% as attractive. That is what makes online dating so awful for average men.
When young (average looking) guys tell me about their awful/non-existent dating lives at the office, I always recommend that they try approaching women in public more often. Ignore the shit you see on social media where the fake #MeToo women come on to put guys on full blast for approaching. Don't worry about them. They are awful people, and you don't want them. Yes, you will get rejected a lot (maybe 5-10% hit rate), but it is way better than online dating apps. You can approach in supermarkets, stores, cafes, festivals/concerts, gym, parks, etc. That way, plenty of other people are around, and she won't feel unsafe. And start by approaching ugos/low-mids. You only need to get their socials or chat app. Even if you have no serious interest in that woman, you can practice chatting with her. Once you build some confidence, approach average looking women. Eventually, you will find success. As long as you dress average/OK, groom (comb/style hair, etc.) and don't smell bad, they won't put you on full blast if she is not interested. She will politely decline, or give socials, but never reply to chats.
Please don't read this post as an attack on women. It is an attack on our current ecosystem of online dating apps.
Meeting people in public really is the answer, but I think shifting the focus from romantic to being genuine, friendly, and focusing on community in places where it’s not just guys is way more successful (for hetero men)
I met my girlfriend at a coffeeshop. I was a regular and just actively friendly to everyone. Our first date felt more like a second because we already had multiple conversations.
Men have a much greater emphasis on physical attraction than women which is why women need a much higher level of physical attraction when only using that. But building community lets us show off our other qualities which women put a much greater emphasis on.
Yes, but it is exactly that sort of interaction that has declined.
This is a boilerplate redpill comment.
Redpill is normalized/accepted by gen Z now. Trying to convince young men that the language used by 4chan /fit/ circa 2016 (-pilled, -maxxing, "mogging", etc) isn't the truth of this world will fail. Gen Z men have seen that the tactics described by these people objectively work.
Don't like redpill? Make it stop working.
Gen Z men are having less sex than ever, so not sure this is making the kind of point you think it is
Redpill is ‘working’ as it always has, as an obvious red flag
The failed men are having less sex than ever. The successful chads getting swole and using test? They're cleaning up using red pill tactics because the gender ratio on college campus's is so favorable now that white men are so statistically underrepresented that they're doing actual affirmative action for them.
https://theweek.com/culture-life/the-gender-education-gap-is...
https://www.the-independent.com/us/money/dating-struggles-wo...
https://edworkingpapers.com/sites/default/files/ai25-1199.pd...
https://mindingthecampus.org/2025/10/23/college-students-in-...
Indeed. Back in the day he would have been classified as "PUA" /s
I was into the PUA thing, and I disagree the comment above is that.
The PUA scene was about gamifying or exploiting dating - hacking how you go about it for your own gains (getting laid)
Approaching women in public with good intentions and to feel more comfortable talking to women is not PUA. It’s one of the suggested things to do, but I think intentions matter a lot.
Maybe not how the term is used now, or for the last few years, but there's been several waves of it with very different styles.
After Neil Strauss "The Game" almost destroyed several of the early exploitative PUA companies, many of them survived by refocusing on "softer", more self-improvement focused material. You'd find "old school" PUA companies like Real Social Dynamic[1] suddenly pushing exercise, meditation, and other self-improvement focused programs alongside their old routine-based pickup bullshit.
The comment above fits into that era, I think - on one hand there's language that fit right into some of that eras PUA mindset, on the other hand it's mostly arguing for the "softer" self-improvement stuff.
I agree with you that the intentions matter a lot, though. But I think the comment above would've gone down a lot better if worded differently...
[1] RSD later totally imploded after a campaign targeting one of their trainers - Julien Blanc, who pushed the exploitative angle to dizzying new heights.
> I can confidently say that dating was not brutal before the apps. (I am pretty old.)
What? Dating been brutal and unforgiving for as long as I've been alive, but I wouldn't say I'm old (between 30 - 40). it was definitely harsh before the apps and had the exact same "everyone wants to date beautiful people, no one wants to date ugly people" "problem" that exists today, not sure what makes you say it's any different than today.
> Please don't read this post as an attack on women
I don't read your comment as an "attack" on anything, women or dating apps. But things like "women can only evaluate based on looks in bars, clubs, public spaces, etc" is wildly out of touch with reality, and makes your comment rightly seem out of touch rather than an attack on anything at all.
> can only evaluate based on looks in <
then, you are entering a place with loud music - how else apart from looks are you judging to speak some words to?
Encounter someone interesting? Chat more. Someone boring and not interesting? Don't chat so much. Speak to a whole bunch of people, a little bit, stay with less to speak more, like how its always worked.
You literally give the advice to "start by approaching ugos/low-mids. This entire post comes off as vain, but your disclaimer at the end doesn't absolve it of also being misogynistic.
You're telling men to use "conventionally" unattractive women as target practice, implying they will be more receptive to attention, presumably due to a general lack of it. Then your advice is to leave these women behind once you've gotten what you needed, and to then seek women more attractive to you.
This is a perverse way to approach people.
> You're telling men to use "conventionally" unattractive women as target practice, implying they will be more receptive to attention, presumably due to a general lack of it. Then your advice is to leave these women behind once you've gotten what you needed, and to then seek women more attractive to you.
I dunno, this seems to be interpreting the comment in the worst way possible. Like, assuming bad faith.
The comment above suggested that guys approach less-attractive women until they "build some confidence". This is not about the woman's receptivity to attention, this is about the guy's confidence or lack thereof. It makes sense: when confidence is worse, the conversation is more awkward and stilted, and that awkwardness is more likely to reinforce the idea that talking to strangers is a waste of time.
The charitable interpretation would be this: that you practice talking to strangers in scenarios that feel safe. Gradually, work up towards your goal - making new friends, talking to people you want to date, etc.
I halfway agree with you. The comments underlying advice isn't that awful. But he really shot himself in the foot with the wording, and so I don't think it's weird that people take issue with the wording.
As I pointed out in another comment, he could've just argued for approaching people without expectations and intending it to go anywhere and suggested that a way of doing that is to approach people you're not attracted to.
In other words, make it about your intent and preference rather than about ranking women by appearance.
Indeed. It's literally lampooned, including the specific language, in a Big Bang Theory episode, because it fit perfectly to Howards creepy early-seasons personality.
Going out and desensitising yourself to anxiety over approaching strangers by talking to people without the intent or expectation of it going anywhere is the less offensive version, and one that works, without any need to rank people by appearance to do it.
And this is exactly why the dating marketplace is as ugly as it is.
Just wait until you hear what women actually say amongst themselves, this dudes comments will sound like Sunday school talk.
> what women actually say amongst themselves
Once a girlfriend "invited" me to those conversation by giving some examples, so ..yeeessss. :-D
What, exactly, is why the dating "marketplace" as ugly as it is? Is there actually a point you wanted to make, or was there just a vague notion of a point?
> Just wait until you hear what women actually say amongst themselves
1. You assumed without asking that I was male. This indicates an inherent bias on how you perceive and interact with others.
2. You assume I have a nascent understanding of how women think and feel, compared to yourself, who must be an expert on women.
3. You group all women into a single monolithic group with shared motivation and behaviors. This is textbook prejudice and misogyny.
4. You claim that women are even more misandrist than men are misogynist, implying a justification for OP's and your own misogynistic perspective. In actuality, you're only further expressing the depths of your own misogynistic attitude towards women.
5. You claim to know what they say amongst themselves while implying I don't have the same knowledge; Are you a woman? Or do you have hidden cameras on women? How else could you have possibly ordained this forbidden knowledge?
5. My partner, a woman, does not think or act the way you described. She does not engage in overt misandry with her friends.
6. I have encountered plenty of extremely misogynistic and legitimately creepy/abusive attitudes towards women at "Sunday school" and while receiving religious education. Every one of the many dozens of churches I've been to have had extreme misogynistic undertones, and often brazen overtones. If you are trying to establish a basis for what isn't misogyny, you couldn't have picked a worse target.
7. "But I'm not the only one who does it" has never, ever, ever been an excuse for prejudice.
8. Dating "marketplace"? What are you even talking about? Apps? Websites? Dating in general? I am not conventionally attractive by modern society's standards, I'm overweight, and outspoken. I have not had issues finding or attracting women. Determining long-term compatibility is much more difficult, but a lack of vanity or a misogynistic outlook was never the problem.
My advice? Touch grass, ask a woman what she actually thinks, and listen. You clearly are not currently in a position to give others advice on women; you are in need of advice.
Oh jeez someone in this thread who recognizes women are people, too. Reading this thread was so disheartening.
Every time I go online I try to remind myself that the majority of comments are coming from bots. The men in my life don't talk this way.
And where is this sentiment that women will only look at the same 5% coming from? One woman's 5% is going to look very different from another woman's 5%. Go outside and don't interact with just women, but a variety of people and a variety of different couples to see what normal relationships look like.
It seems in these conversations that the main concern for men is attracting women, but going by the way they talk about them, it doesn't sound like they respect them as fellow human beings. Some of the concerns women have during dating are: are they safe to be around (read: am I walking into a situation where I am going to get raped), am I going to be called a slut or a whore if I do x y and z? (Am I going to be called a slut if I don't?) It's what the internet talks about, and what media and your family will constantly warn you to be on the alert for.
A lot of people seem to think that attracting women involves changing superficial aspects of yourself so that they take the bait and discover you also have a huge, throbbing personality. Yet the very thought of entertaining such a superficiality speaks more about the shallowness of the man in this situation than the women.
Do women also engage in superficial behavior? Sure. Yet, I don't fault them for it. Women have been subjected to centuries of socially reinforced mass commercial and government propaganda, just like men. We are living in an age of manufactured consent and commodified personality traits. Gillette leveraging womens' magazines to convince women and men that body hair on women is not sexy. I hate what this culture of propaganda has done to us as social beings.
And yet, as you've described, the difference in experience between men and women is chilling. From how they perceive the world when walking alone at night, how they have to be more careful when consuming intoxicants at parties (and are socially shamed for failing to do this even when men are given a pass for getting so plastered they shit themselves), have to be more considerate of their presentation, their words, etc. And what is sad is that when you try to bring these things up as a man, you're often met with suspicion that you are against the entire concept of manhood. Which on its own is quite telling about how men subconsciously perceive themselves on a collective level.
The conversation seems unbalanced to many men because the world we live in is unbalanced, but many just don't see that because they see benefit in the status quo.
> 3. You group all women into a single monolithic group with shared motivation and behaviors. <
You will be shocked, if you talk with men who are really able to analze their traits and talk openly about it, how SIMILAR and shared these are :-)
Men are quite simple on some layer. Especially this dating layer. Even if some claim not being part of these "mind & traits behaviour", nonetheless they mainly think the same.
Now we're also assuming that I don't know how men talk to each other, either? Is the assumption that I live in a box with no windows or doors?
You might be interested to know that "this is the way things are" is not a valid excuse for perpetuating learned prejudice. I in fact take issue with some of the collective behavior of both men and women. Shocking, right?
What i was saying:
Men around the world are functioning the same way,esp. on some levels like dating. Like it or not :-)
I clearly don't like it, and am speaking out against it, so what's your point?
You can speak out against whatever is your desire. But more interesting is, why you think that whatever Babo in US would behave differently to whatever Babo in Europe vs against whatever Babo in Asia.
Men are simply >simple<. You do not have to accept this, even if its statisticly true.
And upon this adds men-specific behaviour with huge costs to society,but thats not part here.
damn, way to make my point.
I asked if you had a point and you still have yet to provide one.
I wish misandry were real.
Males are so used to holding all the cards and having everyone do their bidding that women having self-agency and making decisions feel like emasculating humiliations and an attack on the bases of masculinity.
They won't listen because they know what's at stake.
I guess you haven't met an actual misandrist. Actual misandry, like misogyny, is pathological. I assure you that my masculinity is not threatened by women making decisions and I fully support dismantling the patriarchy. Unfortunately, things seem to be sliding backwards.
> I guess you haven't met an actual misandrist.
Of course I know them. It's me! (joshing)
Don't take it as an attack on you, by the way. But we have to recognize one of the biggest roots of the problems facing the world today.
I understand, and unfortunately pedantry becomes important here when we're agreeing upon and elevating shared ideals with the intention of establishing new institutions.
So for me, I understand and support the distinction you're making about how resistance to oppressive institutions is not hate or violence, "misandry isn't real" just doesn't tell enough of the story. The type of misandry I'm speaking of isn't systemic or institutional in the way misogyny is. It's much more pathological and individual. I haven't met many people like this and it is definitely an outlier, whereas misogyny in men is commonplace. Humans, of course. The spider dating scene is a whole different conversation.
I'm curious what in particular you meant by one of the biggest roots of the problem facing the world today. The patriarchy, or something else?
looks-matched, ugos, fake #MeToo women, low-mids
I think whatever website you’re getting this jargon from is hurting you
Sounds like one of these "blue-red-pill-men"-channels on YT?
#MeToo women do exist, they used to gang up on men out in public who were alone and scream at them to not approach women.
This is reality they're talking about, outside of work and home. Your inability to accept this doesn't make these trends any less observable.
> I doubt the 50% is evenly distributed either and men for sure disproportionately give attention to conventionally attractive women.
It's not evenly distributed, for sure, but the stats say that almost every women get 1 or more interested men, while only about 5% of men get 1 or more interested women.
Seems to track that way in RL too, not just online dating, so yeah, I agree that online dating tends to speedrun to the conclusion.
> Online dating is brutal.
You should try AFK dating sometime, it's even worse! Out of all the women I've met, only 0.00000001218% been interested enough to date and marry me, and I didn't even touch any of the apps! Brutal.
> You should try AFK dating sometime, it's even worse! Out of all the women I've met, only 0.00000001218% been interested enough to date and marry me, and I didn't even touch any of the apps! Brutal.
Sampling bias. How many did you ask?
It’s only brutal because heteronormativity and beauty standards have made certain promises to boys, that they’ve grown expecting to be kept as men - and our society is entirely unable / unwilling to deliver on that promise. “It’s okay, everything will work out,” we hear as boys, and then as men, have our faces rubbed in, “of course it’s not okay, it was never okay, you have to work it out yourself, nobody owes you anything!”
It’s whiplash for a lot of guys, and that’s if you’re even savvy enough to clock it.
I don’t think it needs to be any more of a brutal realization than say the existence of say Santa, and yet here we are.
We need to do better about teaching our kids.
> until some proportion pay.
To run a business you either need to show ads, have everyone pay, or have a freemium model where it can be used for free but some portion of users pay.
It’s easy to imagine making a better service by removing all of the parts that fit what I just described. I could make a better Instagram if it didn’t show any ads and was free for everyone. I don’t think my developers or hosting providers would want to work for free though.
The reason dating apps have this freemium model is because building a large pool of users is important to their success. Most people will not pay for an app if a free alternative exists. Most people hate ads. So the product which wins will always be the one lets people get started without paying, bringing in the largest dating pool.
There have been many dating app businesses that tried models where everyone pays the same flat fee. Most either converted to freemium or disappeared. There are still some niche social apps that use their expense and difficulty of getting an invite as a selling point, but they target very niche audiences because they’ll never be mainstream.
Your friend just discovered one of the harder realities of dating apps: Your odds of getting a response from an individual profile is very low. Swiping on a lot of profiles is necessary. For people who get easily frustrated by these odds and who get angry at having to pay for anything they’re going to be generally very frustrated with the apps in general.
Dating apps are one of the most poignant examples of a service that provides a lot of value relative to alternatives (you’ll spend more on a single drink at a bar or even on transport to a restaurant to meet someone) yet the nominal charge still makes users scoff. It’s hard to sell apps to consumers.
> To run a business you either need to show ads, have everyone pay, or have a freemium model where it can be used for free but some portion of users pay.
True, but there are still alternatives.
This would be niche, but a self-hosted solution could be made for the more technically minded to use and network. The dating-net. Where efficiency and getting off the app are the priority. no profit seeking, no ads, no perverse incentives.
When I was single and before apps like Tinder, I used dating sites. I met lots of women this way and would at least get some responses.
Now that it's a much bigger business, it makes it much more difficult to actually meet someone.
None of the women I met on these sites worked out long-term. I met my wife through a meetup group where we were friends for a few years first.
As a counterpoint, most of the weddings I've attended recently started on dating sites.
I don't think I can accept the idea that having a larger population of users makes it less likely for people to find matches.
I recently married, and when registering the person at the registry office asked which dating site we met via, and was surprised to hear it was an "old school" one (Badoo) rather than Bumble or Hinge. The notion that it might not have been a dating site wasn't in the cards at all.
Yes, we know why. The problem is that the incentives this creates for dating apps are among the worst around. Many sites have business models where they paywall is locking away content or functionality that is desirable, but few other types of sites benefit nearly as much not by just locking away content or features, but by actively making the site functionality worse for everyone - including for the paid users, who may get e.g. priority access but are still wading through a sewer of zombie profiles and other effects of the user hostile monetisation.
As for ads being such a big problem, I'm not convinced - we've had several reasonably successful dating sites that did well with ads instead of or in addition to freemium.
The biggest challenge to that model flourishing is that Match Group tends to buy them and start locking away the features and pushing more towards the subscriptions. E.g. Plenty of Fish was mostly ad funded until Match Group bought them, OkCupid more mixed, but then Match Group bought them.
I'm not blaming the founders of those. If I started a site like that and Match Group offered to throw money at me, I'd probably sell too, knowing I'd gotten their attention and they'd probably do their best to clobber me if not.
You will get more limited growth if ad funded compared to what you can squeeze out of maximally frustrated men. And as a result you'll be a more attractive acquisition target for Match Group to snatch up at a bargain knowing they can drive up margins by enshittifying you, and you'll have lower margins to fight them with if you don't sell.
Fixed them:
- we get paid for date $1
- we get paid for second date $10
- we get paid for proposal $100
- we get paid for marriage $1000
- we pay for divorce $1500
- we get paid for first child $500
- we get paid for second child $1000
- we get paid for nth child $2000 * (n - 2)
This reminds me of a black comedy movie called The Lobster, People are essentially forced into confinement into a hotel until they find a romantic partner, otherwise they will be transformed into an animal of their choice.
If you couple up with someone you are evaluated in a compatibility period to which if you argue you get given a child, if you argue again, you get given a second child haha.
Congrats! Dating apps are now actively lobbying to make birth control illegal. /s
Slightly off-topic, but what is it with the number of people on HN demanding that everyone have more kids?
I wasn’t demanding anyone have kids, just using those as markers for what some folks would deem success from the dating app.
It’s just the latest new tech right wing obsession (see Elon Musk ranting about it on twitter, meanwhile no Tesla has middle seat LATCH). In a couple of years they’ll move on to something else.
I do think society would be better off in many ways if more people had kids but the current dialogue about it is offputting.
If I wouldn't have to deal with the legal liabilities around moderation and user data, I would love to make a non-profit dating site that was truly optimized towards some benevolent goals.
The original OKCupid was the best dating site and the only one that I enjoyed using. It has since been gobbled up by the Match.com behemoth and is now basically useless.
[edit] mixed up Plenty of Fish with OKCupid
Amen to that. OKC back in the day was wonderful, for nerds like myself who loved answering questions and data in general.
The great thing was that it was self-selecting -- the less compatible types answered very few questions and stumbled over anything involving basic general knowledge, logic or ethics. The compatible ones added thoughtful or witty freeform comments to their answers. You could essentially clear all the usual first-few-dates compatibility dances just by running through people's answers.
I met many wonderful people via that site, and I never went on a bad date with OKC; we always had heaps to talk about. I thankfully found my perfect match for all time via OKC nine years ago, just before match.com ripped up the matching algorithm and the questions and destroyed the site entirely.
It is not a good business model to match people well, and match.com clearly knows that.
Match Group also knows that buying sites that match people well is good business because there's so much room to juice the profits by applying the lessons from their other sites to them, and the valuations will be relatively low relative to user numbers...
I think it still had a lot of fairly abhorrent experiences for female users, and suffered from the inability to screen messages at all.
>[edit] mixed up Plenty of Fish with OKCupid
Na,this should be true for both brands these days?
Owned by Match? Yes, along with Hinge, Meetic, Tinder, and several smaller ones. The only big player outside of Match is Bumble (which also owns Badoo).
Of the two, Bumble seems to be the slightly less evil one (fun tidbit: Bumble at least used to value a lifetime premium subscription at roughly the same amount as 6 individual months subscription, which tells us something about the expected lifetime value of their users...), but their both of course profiting wildly of exploitative practices.
> [edit] mixed up Plenty of Fish with OKCupid
That's okay - keeping track of all the sites Match Group have bought and trashed is difficult.
If people are oriented towards traditional relationships, then pairing people up younger probably leads to higher overall fertility rate in the population, so I could see governments with existentially declining fertility rates (read: almost all of them) taking an interest in actually providing a successful service here (unlike the commercial dating apps).
Of course, a lack of a match is not the only thing that prevents people from having kids, but I'm curious what the impact of an optimal matching service would be on fertility rates.
edit: I think governments might do well to provide funding for dating apps (whether privately or publicly owned) based on how many matches from the app actually lead to children. Completely flip the classical incentives on their head. Should be easy enough to ask if newborns were a product of a participating app as part of the birth certification process.
At least in the US, the declining fertility rate seems to be entirely caused by a combination of fewer people getting married and fewer people having children out of wedlock. Between 2007 and 2023, the percentage of reproductive-age women who were married fell from 42% to 37% and the births/1,000 unmarried women fell from 41.0 to 30.3, but the births/1,000 married women actually went up a bit from 102.3 to 107.4. See https://read.dukeupress.edu/demography/article/63/2/695/4092...
It is important to remember governments aren’t living things with their own agency. The people at the top running the governments are usually all dead in 30 years tops. They have no long term incentives. Put them in charge of a dating app and they will run it to enrich themselves just like all the other ones.
Nice idea in principle but (in the case of private) too long a time horizon for typical corporations to care about, sadly.
Dating Apps don’t need to be corporate. You could make an app for a whole country with a company of less than 10 people.
If there was no fraud and abuse and legal issues and ...
No, even with that. 10 people are a lot, actually.
From people who deal with the trust and safety side of things, at a national scale of a few billion people, 10 people is definitely not enough.
What size of population are you considering for this hypothetical nation?
Which problems do you see that would require all of this, given that it is a nation platform where you are authenticated via your government ID?
And which nations are scaled to a few billion people?
And they all date? Every single one of them? The married couples? The children and the elderly?
Every platform. Just being authenticated by government ID doesn’t change the issue. You still have fraud and inauthentic behavior.
India is a billion plus people. Google says that the dating app user base is 100mn, which is much lower than the total number of people who would use a government match making app.
That’s why the question regarding scale. That assumption makes a 10 person firm for a nation viable or impossible.
This conversation was not about "every platform" though.
OK, sure. The dating platform that the Singapore govt has built.
Singapore's population is 6 million, about 1.7 million are aged between 16 and 40.
That's 1000 times smaller than your "few billion" scale, before you remove those already in partnerships or those who don't want to.
The gp comment said:
> You could make an app for a whole country with a company of less than 10 people.
Perhaps you could do it for Singapore, I’d love to know how those 10 people would be split across functions, and how they would handle the fraud and safety issues that crop up.
In practice it would be 10 managers and in-between contractor types siphoning all allotted money and then an unexperienced dev building a terrible overburdened service that noone wants to use.
depends on the country. this type of corruption is guaranteed in some countries, less so in others. Singapore is usually good at avoiding it. Their online services are very good.
the government can switch up the incentives and for example make payment contingent on people actually using the platform as well as opening the tender to startup teams (usually they are locked out).
Sure it's easier to keep eyes on in a tiny country like Singapore, but basically all major western countries struggle with stuff like this because politics is way too spread out and ingrained with too many local interests. Strong federalism is the cradle of corruption, but if you can walk across your country in a day there's simply not enough room to federalize. OTOH federalism is necessary if your seat of government is 500 miles away, because there is no way for them to effectively govern local issues anymore.
The UK had some success with GDS. Not all IT in bigger countries is failures.
I honestly think that labeling corruption as corruption and a popular sentiment towards slamming a few people in jail for it would go a long way towards fixing these problems.
Instead even among the general public the sentiment is "government is just incompetent" which helps soften the reaction to it and thus indirectly encourages it to get worse.
There's no shortage of countries around the world that have dug themselves a corruption hole they struggle to get out of. It's easier to fix it starting from here than there but we don't want to end up there.
Amazon (and Tesla) famously had very patient shareholders, and they are both private companies.
If playing the super long game, the app could get a consistent fraction of tax revenue from generated new taxpayers.
Which would fit with PAP values, historically.
Hell no. Sorry for the reaction, but market optimization under current market principles, will result in the narrowest interpretation of the goal.
As a worse case example, you could succeed by matching people least likely to abort, but most likely to have multiple partners.
I think it's unlikely for your worst case scenario to be realized. Underspecified objectives can cause unexpected results, but it can also lead to desired results. Fortunately experimentation is relatively cheap and tuning optimization metrics is the norm for most apps.
I’ve been on the safety end of those metrics and optimizations. Heck no.
Even without my personal experience being used, we see the outcomes and decisions made by dating firms.
Firms have to satisfy their investors/shareholders.
What is a traditional relationship? Fathers selling their daughter off?
People having “large” numbers of children.
The modern trend of most families with 0-2 kids isn’t sustainable. We don’t need to go back to 5+ being the norm but a self stable society needs to be able to offset non parents thus requiring 3+ children families to be quite common.
For that, one prerequisite would be housing that can house such families.
Which, in times of working from home, means 4 bedrooms, 2 offices, 1 living room.
Ideally with walls not built from paper mache, so that they can actually be used for encapsulation of different requirements.
Not everyone works from home. But if you do, you can live in unexpensive areas of your country, so it's a non-issue.
Until you get laid off or they do RTO, then it’s move back to the big city
Well I mean the whole discussion was about "why is the fertility rate so low it should not be so low".
So that does sound like it is very much an issue. To someone, anyway. I don't really care. I have no horse in this race.
__
To cover the expected pedantic reply:
Of course technically it's everyone's problem. But just because it technically affects you doesn't mean that you have to emotionally involve yourself in stupid online discussions that don't comprehend systemic views and mistake them for personal whining.
This is very much a worst case. It assumes three children, each with their own bedroom, and two work from home parents each with their own office.
Why do you need an entire room each for an office? I work in a corner of a bedroom, and have previously had a desk in a living room. I know lots of people who do the same. I know few families where both parents work from home. Where more than one person works from home they can share an office.
If people work from home to a large extent, less office space is required, so the cost of land should go down. It does not because most people are not working from home.
Yes, but, as said, there are probably also a lot of people that decide either against children at all or against having +1 of them due to these constraints.
No one said that one cannot make do. One can always make do.
Traditionally families often just had one bedroom for children. That's what things like bunkbeds are for.
As someone who ho grew up in a smalll bedroom with multiple siblings until I was 19…
Fuck that.
That might very well be, but now people evidently seem to prefer not doing that, so what is your point?
"Just stop preferring that"? Good luck enforcing that.
That still works up to like age 7. It really is needed for that age up to ~18, which means you can get with providing that service for ~15 years (multiple children) and then going back to smaller apartments.
Or you can keep the smaller apartments and make boarding schools more common. Small kids all live in the same room while the ones old enough to need their own space move out completely to a boarding school. Depending on the specifics, may be a much better solution overall.
I actually attended high school in that way in Poland, despite it being very rare here. I was 15 when I started. While I think it was great for me, I would not recommend doing it for younger people - you need some basic emotional maturity and safety.
Even then, it would not solve any problems here, really.
Hm. Indeed that is an idea, but I'm not sure if that doesn't come with other downsides that might be undesirable.
I guess this will work for something like 10-20%? Maybe? (Speaking from a very german cultural background)
So like, the idea of traditional family is "have kids raised by an institution, have them visit you once in a while"?
It is not about preference, but because of regulation. Nowadays the government demand is that each child needs to have a separate studying and sleeping area. If a sliding wall in a room counts as a separate area is up to the officials' discretion.
On one hand, all of this is understandable, but on the other hand these policies do indeed raise the cost of having children.
I have never heard of a government demanding that. Where does that happen?
Where I live, even when government does make demands, as in the case of foster parenting, they still allow two boys or two girls to share a room.
What government does that? That's something new to me.
So, in your opinion it is not possible to have kids unless you have 7(!) rooms?
Possible for sure, but not necessarily pleasant, which is for sure a significant part of the reasons why people decide against having (more) children.
If we want them to have 3+ children, we need to reduce these sources of friction of doing so.
I'm not sure what your problem is with sheetrock, but you can achieve pretty high levels of sound isolation with sheetrock walls.
Maybe we can also go back to the "traditional relationship" where a single person's income can pay for a house, a car, and support 7+ people.
That was never traditional anywhere. It was possible in the 1950s in a few places. Anyone thinking it was traditional is seriously undervaluing women's work.
Was there a time when an average single person could do that and support did not meant "they live in abject poverty"?
Lots of people did it in the 1970s. Maybe not one income, but one fill time income and one part time income.
For a time, everywhere people typically had homes and cars and families it was required that they could afford it all on a single person's income because women were property, and not allowed to work outside the home (at least after marriage), or get an education, or own anything.
What time do you think that was?
Exact times do vary by country, but female 'emancipation' is largely starting around WWI, whereas the middle class lifestyle you're suggesting doesn't arise until after WWII.
In the early 20th century, most women in the United States did not work outside the home, and those who did were primarily young and unmarried. In that era, just 20 percent of all women were “gainful workers,” as the Census Bureau then categorized labor force participation outside the home, and only 5 percent of those married were categorized as such. (https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-history-of-womens-wor...)
A marriage bar is the practice of restricting the employment of married women. Common in English-speaking countries from the late 19th century to the 1970s, the practice often called for the termination of the employment of a woman on her marriage, especially in teaching and clerical occupations. Further, widowed women with children were still considered to be married at times, preventing them from being hired, as well. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_bar)
> the middle class lifestyle you're suggesting doesn't arise until after WWII.
Most US families owned a car before WWII. 60% in 1929. Around half of the people in the US owned their home in 1890. They actually owned the homes too. Before 1934 Americans typically paid off their homes in just 3-5 years. After that the 15 and 30 year mortgage had a strong majority of Americans in houses, but they were actually owned by the bank for decades.
You'll have to do that over the dead bodies of everyone who benefits from all those things being expensive.
That's a lot of bodies.
I thought it was clear from context that I was referring to people who want to have kids with a romantic partner (I suppose for fertility rate purposes it doesn't even necessarily need to be with just one romantic partner, or within a monogamous relationship).
Lots of people don't want kids these days relative to 50 years ago, but even among those who do, they're delaying the process, often to the point where it becomes less ideal due to age. Many people who wanted kids when they were younger end up not having them as a result (and many who want them haven't had them yet).
Having a partner (or partners) to do it with is a significant factor for many, among other factors like concerns about affording food and housing for oneself, let alone for additional dependants.
The nice thing is that the government has no reason to keep you swiping forever
Its only motivator is to get you and someone else to start making babies as soon as possible. Which is often what the users want too.
The government also wants stable couples (divorce are costly to society) and non-toxic relationship (because these too are costly), which is also what the users desire.
divorce are costly to society
Maybe they should have a Rebound app as well.
How do we know that divorces are more "costly" to society than people being stuck together even if they aren't happy together? Would seem like the opposite to me.
Both are bad, and I actually put the later in the “toxic relationship ” category above.
There are many situations for which a divorce is better than staying in a bad mariage, but divorce are still obviously costly for society: it drives the housing demand up, the legal process is costly and encumbers courts, single-mom households are more prone to poverty and its negative effects, etc.
The key point is that ideal for individuals (a couple that is happy together) is also the ideal for governments.
That's a different question though. It's in society's interest to ensure couples (or at the least couples who have children) are compatible enough long-term to not end up divorcing/separating.
The societal costs otherwise aren't just the obvious direct costs - there are other things like (in divorces where there are children involved) negative effects on labour force mobility.
Maybe better to put it as "emotionally unhealthy relationships" are costly to society. Singlehood is also less economically 'optimal' than partnerships, and divorce combines some of both.
> Which is often what the users want too.
Or at least to start practicing how to make babies.
There's plenty of other motivators.
I give it about a month before they start gaming the algorithm to pair people who are likely to be on government benefits with people who can support them.
You make $150k, congratulations all your matches are McDonalds crew members.
You make $200k, the same but now they're all mentally ill because the algorithm deems you capable of supporting thyat too.
As long as you're going dystopian, maybe the government decides that it'll be better for the country if they raise a generation of super-babies and secretly pivots to eugenics as a service.
Yeah, the precedent for the idea of a .gov dating service is Plato’s Republic along with comments in the Timaeus/Critias which make it clear that Plato envisioned a rigged service designed for eugenics. Central control over matchmaking is incentivized to eugenics.
I think its inevitable, especially if we get to artifical wombs. Think about the other side of the coin: you dont want to breed stupid and ugly people, right? Or maybe you want people who will immediately go on welfare and are genetically predisposed to vote reliably for the right party?
The nice think about artificial wombs is that they can solve some problems with the abortion issue (provided embryos can be safely transplanted). Fathers who want to keep their child when mothers want to abort could have the fetus develop in an artificial womb and pick the kid up once it's "born". Signing away your rights/responsibility to the child and leaving your embryos to be "birthed" and raised by the state could replace many abortions.
>Signing away your rights/responsibility to the child and leaving your embryos to be "birthed" and raised by the state could replace many abortions.
For a given quality of "output" at age 18 it takes a certain amount of input to get there, at least at a macro level.
Even assuming that you can figure something out that doesn't suck and produce way to high of a ratio of shitty non-productive people the way the current foster care system does, where is the surplus that the state can seize to raise these kids gonna come from?
A lot of the people crying about low birth rates aren't the least bit concerned about how affordable raising those children will be for families. Why should it matter to them how affordable raising children is for the state?
If artificial wombs will get them to stop forcing women to have children they don't want or can't afford, that should have many economic advantages.
Consider for example, if we didn't force 13 year old rape victims to give birth and raise children (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/14/mississippi-ab...). The pregnant child could focus on healing from what she went through, complete her education, get a well paying job and be a stronger contributor to the economy. The infant wouldn't be raised by a traumatized and impoverished 7th grader which could help raise the "quality of output" as you put it. To be honest though, I suspect they really just want an underclass to exploit so "quality" isn't a metric they're worried about.
First off your argument is just the "women in the workforce will make us all richer" argument but with Epstein island demographics of women.
Second, I wasn't even looking at it on that level. I was just looking at the high level economics. I'm saying that it takes certain amount of material plenty to get a kid from vagina to workforce. You've got food, clothing, the labor of educators, etc, etc, etc. None of that is free. Current foster care system costs do not scale. Our society is simply not wealthy enough to afford that for any sizable fraction of children. You could perhaps cheapen it up but I don't see much potential there since the outcomes are already sub par. You could perhaps make it more efficient, but what form would that take?
Unless we commit to walking back the standards of acceptable levels of investment in children by 70-100yr there's just no way rich western countries are gonna have more kids. Even if you pop them out of artificial wombs the whole rest of the "infant to workforce" pipeline is a mess.
> and secretly adds eugenics as a service
This is the primary worry with governments getting involved with dating apps, is it not?
Many of our countries are just one election cycle away from the politicians mandating that the official government dating app only incentivise Anglo-Saxon baby-making...
>This is the primary worry with governments getting involved with dating apps, is it not?
<insert bad faith comment about how it's ok because they're not literally sterilizing anyone and you can opt out of you want>
(bonus points if it's from an account that has a bunch of comments whining about interface defaults and algorithmic nudges matter in technical contexts)
As long as that government is benevolent enough to avoid demographic engineering. Singapore is a fine melting pot, but I'd probably avoid using a closed source government-run dating app in both my home (EEU) and my current (WEU) country.
person > ever married?
the major> No, I figure if the Marines wanted me to have a wife they would have issue'd me one!
-Major Payne
edit: isn't a government run dating site like a more gentle handmaid's tale basically?
Demonizing shacking up together is like justifying your own insecurities.
I’ve been married for 20 years.
Aren't commercial dating sites as a whole summarized as:
Keep supply of women high because men will pay anything for a chance?
I am very curious how this will be changed in this government platform. Maybe it won't LOL
I think that's a bit too reductive, but the incentive mismatch is real. Commercial apps generally benefit from people staying on the app; a government service theoretically benefits if people pair off and leave.
> Aren't commercial dating sites as a whole summarized as:
> Keep supply of women high because men will pay anything for a chance?
Grindr has a different fix.
It's an interesting question, because on one hand the government goals will remove a lot of the perverse incentives. E.g. having people who aren't going to answer in the pool of profiles shown is mostly a negative. Doing actual, well thought out matches makes sense where for a commercial app favouring one-sided matches that keep one side wanting and not getting frequent answers can be better.
But on the other hand, if it appears "too limited" because the most desirable people disappear off quickly because of a successful match, maybe they'll still struggle to keep the users coming back to it even if they're actually doing a better job at matching people up...
Really depends whether the track record (assuming its good) becomes known enough to people, I'd guess.
It's also a market for lemons: Every match that leads to a long-term, exclusive relationship is two customers gone for good.
It's a self-depleting market. The optimum is, a la Big Pharma, to keep 'em in "dating" limbo.-
> It's a self-depleting market.
On the other side you got a fresh supply on both sides from kids growing up to be adults and from adults divorcing and even if your matchmaking is perfect and divorce culturally shamed against, people still die which leaves widow(er)s behind, of whom a certain amount will want a new relationship.
But where's your infinite growth in MMR coming from in your scenario.
> infinite growth in MMR
Dating apps are a race to the bottom. They're collecting a tax on the lonely and desperate of dwindling populations. Ironically it's not sustainable over the long term.
> Ironically it's not sustainable over the long term.
The entire idea of just wanting MRR and be done with it is a huge, huge part why the world is so screwed. So much of the economy is just devolved into rich people seeking rents.
A dating app with an MMR score for the players is an interesting idea, with matchmaking done based on MMR similarity. Then there could be an annual dating tournament for the best players.
I don’t think that a market for lemons is the right analogy or how it relates to your other claims. A market for lemons is one where buyers cannot distinguish between high and low quality goods (eg used cars). I think people are mostly ok at judging the ‘quality’ of romantic partners and the problem you describe is a different thing.
The divorce rate has entered the chat.
selling the illusion of a chance is just as good
You can try to replace women with bots, as those Chinese dating apps showed a few years ago:
https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-42609353
That's half of it. The other half is make people think they have a chance of pairing up but try to avoid them actually pairing up because, as Plenty of Fish once wrote in a blog post, it's not just that your users leave you, it's that they leave your service in pairs
Tinder side-stepped this issue when they changed to be a hookup site. The downside, of course, is you end up with a bunch of one-night stands instead of stable families producing babies.
If you do a good job - all the people find partners, and leave, and you need to find new people to join
If you do a bad job - all the people see it as desparate, and leave, and you need to find new people to join
It's a high churn environment so there's no real way to make money from... er... bums on seats.. so there's no real choice but to make some sort of barrier forcing people to spend money
>t's hard to see how they could do a _worse_ job
Spending a couple decades with the government putting it's thumb on the scale trying to get people who score high on government metrics to pair up with other people who score high on government metrics seems like a great way to start a civil war a couple generations down the line.
But I'm sure the marriages will be stable all the way there so there's that.
I think this would be better than commercial services, which have all the wrong incentives.
I would think just a coarse sorting would do, paired with a free meal. Every couple of weeks, you go for a random date with a somewhat well paired person, and see what happens. Maybe you don't meet the love of your life, but you will meet someone roughly your age living in the same society, a perspective worth having regardless of whether you're compatible.
However, if you know anyone from Singapore, you must think this is a rather small plaster on a gaping wound.
Singapore is like a permanent examination hall. Everyone is competing to do well on exams, and then they try to get the best internships, and then the best jobs. It's not exactly conducive to starting a family. You'll lose a step in the rat race, and then your kid will need to join this rat race.
I want to agree, but the fact it's state-run / promoted gives me the ick. Or, it gives me a lot of conflicted feelings / opinions, let's put it that way.
Like, here in Europe we've got right-wing parties on the rise that have this conspiracy theory that the foreigners are moving here en masse to replace the locals (because of ??? they never explained, our jobs, benefits and women I suppose). So they spend a lot of time and effort fearmongering about the for'ners coming here and bring in laws and policies to keep them out.
Meanwhile they don't seem to be doing anything about those that already live here - you'd think these right-wing, own-people-first types would do anything to ensure people living here would thrive and reproduce. But no free child care, no major economic reform to allow single incomes to buy a house, none of that. Because ultimately it's not about foreigners or "own people first", it's about self-enrichment, got mine fuck you.
> but the fact it's state-run / promoted gives me the ick
That’s an irrational reaction, probably conditioned by ideology.
A well-run state has been perhaps one of the most successful enabling factors for human flourishing in human history.
> That’s an irrational reaction
Not if you think that your government isn't looking out for your best interests. A well run state is exactly what we need, but rarely what we have. Right now we see rising authoritarianism, less transparency, open bribery, more frequent and blatant lying, less accountability, more corruption, democratic backsliding, attacks on civil rights. etc. All that stuff is going to breed skepticism, and it really should. Eroding people's trust in government by actively working to corrupt it and impede it from functioning properly has been a very successful strategy.
Exactly. Eroding trust is such a successful strategy because it weaponizes confirmation bias. Once people are primed to be skeptical, they often come to conclusions irrationally first, and then (knowingly or not) seek only to prove themselves right.
Also the more successful the corruption and break down of government and its institutions are, the more necessary skepticism becomes. For example, you might have faith in the experts at the CDC and the FDA until those agencies get taken over and run by people who compromise its mission and the workers with integrity resign or get fired or get censored and suddenly you've got states scrambling to create things like the West Coast Health Alliance and the Northeast Public Health Collaborative to try to get the actual work done and get real information out to a public that's being misinformed.
The longer the feedback loop continues, and the more people are hurt, the more difficult it will be and the longer it will take to restore faith.
The solution for your food being spoiled is to get rid of it, and get something fresh. Not to stop eating food.
You're right, and you'd think seeing all the ways our government is vulnerable to these problems would result in reforms to fix and prevent those issues, but it seems like a lot of people have given up even trying. Learned helplessness I guess.
>That’s an irrational reaction, probably conditioned by ideology.
And yours isn't?
Like it doesn't take much beyond a room temperature IQ to look at the arc of just about every government these days and make an estimation of where it's going without some substantial unforeseen change of course. The state of the world should merit a little pause and/or self doubt there.
>A well-run state has been perhaps one of the most successful enabling factors for human flourishing in human history.
Historically the states that have dabbled in this area of policy area has been "well run" in only the most dishonest "they accomplished their short term goals" sense of the phrase.
> And yours isn’t?
Many people trust the government for policing, military, central banking. Some not. Many trust them for health care and education, many not.
Very very few don’t trust the government for anything. So for this random example, a dating service, it feels like it’s ideological conditioning (otherwise the OP would explain why it feels bad for them).
> room temperature IQ
careful, we have a very intelligent individual over here
> arc of just about every government
do you mean the US government?
>careful, we have a very intelligent individual over here
If you want to take it as a well deserved slight in your direction that's fine but the point was the opposite. Just about anyone can make the insight I did. You don't have to be a genius to see what's going on here.
>do you mean the US government?
It's one of many dozens on the list.
how about you make the insight about the difference between the state and the government :)
Are you implying that there aren't a massive number of foreigners moving to Europe? roughly 10% of the people living in the EU were born outside of it.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Gale-Shapley, used in this service, has the property that one side ("proposing" side) is guaranteed their most advantageous stable match while the other side is guaranteed their worst possible stable match.
I've never heard this discussed or mentioned as a drawback because it's Nobel Prize winning and "stable" is a shorthand for "fair". Even though there's many unique stable matches that each offer participants different utilities even if individual participants don't have incentives to change their pairing.
In practice, the more powerful party seems to be the proposing side, e.g. hospitals are the "proposing side" when using Gale-Shapeley to match w/ med school students and get their ideal students.
I wonder if anyone who works on dating apps knows if men or women are the preferred side? And is there any research on stable matching that ensures equity (or ideally arbitrary distribution of utility) between the two groups in their stable matches?
> I've never heard this discussed or mentioned as a drawback because it's Nobel Prize winning and "stable" is a shorthand for "fair".
You've never seen this discussed as a drawback? I've seen it mentioned quite a bit. For instance, it came up on the last big thread on this just the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49915825
Given how women initiate most divorces, it's probably best to set it up so they are the proposing side.
But this isn't raw Gale-Shapley-- the participants aren't ranking all hundreds/thousands of others. In particular, the preference matrix is based on identical mutual compatibility scores, so there's a unique stable solution (not multiple stable ones!), and there's no "side" that benefits, since the solution is identical no matter who does the "proposing".
If stats from dating websites are to be believed, all women tend to flock on all the same tiny percentage of men and ignore the rest. If women initiate, I’m afraid you will see only a few men getting any pairing. Men are likely to be less picky as we see in the wild.
> If stats from dating websites are to be believed, all women tend to flock on all the same tiny percentage of men and ignore the rest
This is absolutely not an accidental phenomenon, this is the optimal outcome for dating apps, because that's the only way to prevent women from finding what they are looking for too quickly (and then leaving the app).
I have been in the space for several years - believe me:
NO dating executive thinks like "women leaving too early because they found what they searched". This sentence does not exist in any of the teams.
Instead, they fear that women are leaving too early because of traffic they bought and that they have a bad experience and leaving, so they are no more a magnet to other males to swiper their credit card for a new subscription.
For initiating, men are less picky.
For marrying: I suspect they are about as picky?
> If stats from dating websites are to be believed, all women tend to flock on all the same tiny percentage of men and ignore the rest.
These are on platforms where you have profile pics and jobs, front and center on your profile, and the algorithm learns from your preferences based on that. The questions on this platform seem to suggest that the algorithm matches based on anything but that, so perhaps we have different, more open-minded outcomes on what a good partner for someone is like rather than who the ideal man/woman is like.
Monogamy is half the reason this is stable on paper.
> Given how women initiate most divorces
In the UK male plus joint is roughly the same as female.
You also need to take the reasons into account as well as why. There are multiple reasons for this. The better off partner has more to lose from divorce, women tend to get custody of children, they might have different feelings of obligation to keep a marriage going (I cannot extrapolate this to other men, but I felt an obligation not to file for divorce until I had exhausted all other possibilities), social pressures and responses are different, etc.
In the USA 70% of divorces are women initiated. When filtered to those with a college degree it's 90%
Does US law require one person to initiate the divorce? That will mean that in many cases in which both want a divorce on has to initiate it legally?
> When filtered to those with a college degree it's 90%
Interesting, but why? I suspect the answer is economics.
You’re saying of all the female divorce initiators, 90% have a college degree?
Or that out of all the initiators with college degrees, 90% are women?
does mutual divorce figure into this, and if so, how is one party be both parties having a college degree counted?
I think a third option. Of all the women with college degrees who took part in a divorce, 90% were first to file.
But I dunno. Divorce stats tend to be reported with less meaningful stats that are easy to calculate, but don't mean much.
> the preference matrix is based on identical mutual compatibility scores
Is that modeling the problem correctly? It seems pretty rare for two partners to have equal amounts of love for each other.
If the goal is successful relationships, then probably?
If I have 10/10 love for Halle Berry, and she has 4/10 love for my Jeff-Bezos-looking ass, it's the 4/10 that's going to dictate whether we live happily ever after. So our mutual compatibility is probably well below 10/10.
I don't think you can measure love at all, and certainly not guess it based on some info you can type into your phone, so that's rules out before we even get started.
Are there keywords to search for to read more? This is the first time I've heard about this! This is super interesting, what are a few well known other stable matches people deeper into this talk about?
The set of stable matches for a given problem seems to be called the lattice of stable matching.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lattice_of_stable_matchings
The problem is it's a lattice and not fully ordered. There are cases where there are two or more pairings that are worse for women and better for men, but we cannot determine which pairing is superior to the other overall.
That is how being the active party works.
“The active salesman got better sales than the person that just sat there and accepted offers? Outrageous!!!”
This metric/logic equation does not exist in any dating company, also I highly suspect that anyone working there has hear of the term.
Here is why:
A dating sites primary KPI are mainly "new signups per day" and "subscriptions signed per day". For a lot of reasons listed above,dating sites in general _cant_ever_ work for the majority of people.(yes,there is this one neighbour who is happily married, they exist, sure, but this is not the majority)
Integrating something like Gale-Shapley would require your company to focus on othe matching part and integrate it somehow - but there is no reason for you to do so, because if you keep the primary KPI in the correct range, you are printing money, regardless if your matching algo is scientic sophisticated or not. So why bother?
Apart from that - also this algo cant check for chemical compatibility and friendship compatibility.
Why is it a drawback, though? A stable match is a stable match. Do you lie awake at night wondering if your partner is really the best you could do?
Make no mistake, some people definitely do this
> In short, stable matches mean nothing when nobody is committed and the best options might exist outside of the matchmaking pool
This is wrong. Stable matches still mean something, and in fact probably mean quite a lot.
You are given a much better match than a random pairing. If you still aren't interested, you can decline. If you go on a date and it doesn't work out, you can decline.
Nothing forces you to use this process, it is just an offer of a significantly better than random matching to what you might prefer.
It doesn't even need to account for preferences not covered by the questionnaire.
I dont see how a goverment-run dating service would solve the issue that social-media had made hypergamy run on steroids and that people today have much higher demands on their partner than ever before.
In sweden we have one semi popular dating site with minimal amount of matching algoritms and swiping and such and its no easier there to find a partner than on tinder.
The best summary I have seen: Average women are no longer interested in average men. More details: Since women became economic equals to men, they are no longer interested in their economic equals. They want men who earn (much) more money than them, and that makes those men very rare.
Specific to Sweden, is it really true that women now approach men? I heard about this trend in Denmark and Netherlands, but I am a bit suspicous because it is mostly anecdotal.
>The best summary I have seen: Average women are no longer interested in average men. More details: Since women became economic equals to men, they are no longer interested in their economic equals.
I'm honestly baffled at these affirmations. I have lived in small and big cities, and this were never true anywhere I looked. Most of my friends are dating and most of them are not rich or richer than their partners. I go out and see a lot of couples. Are all these men making much more money than their partners? I have used dating apps as an average man and it sucks. But I got better at taking care of my looks and got some matches regularly. Not a lot, but enough to meet some women. I would have a harder time if dating apps didn't exist.
I'm not trying to minimize these experiences, though. I just never saw that happening as much as they say.
Obviously you're wading into hot water by even outlining this analysis. Personally I'm tempted to buy it (if it's true, it's true!) but recently I saw an interesting argument that softened me up a bit to the feminist line. It's that the traditional deal between the sexes has been broken. Before, women would suffer the hardship and danger of childbirth, and in return men would take on the physical perils of war. In modern society, of course, conflict mostly means playing video games in an armchair. And yet bearing children remains a stubbornly physical chore. Hence a latent feeling of injustice that may balance out the real one you describe.
I think that overplays the role of war. men did other things in general, such as going out to work and also dealing with other dangers. Even in developed economies male work related death rates are far higher than women's.
Childbirth might remain physical, but it is also extremely safe by historical standards. In the Uk the rate is just over one maternal death per 10,000 births including deaths shorty afterwards, compared to close to 50 in Victorian times (I think excluding subsequent deaths, although i am not sure).
Bearing children might remain physical, and bringing them up is hard work and goes on far longer than bearing them. IMO the solution it to change social expectations so men participate in raising children more. I see this is happening. its best of everyone: less of a load on women, men participate in the joy of having children properly, and kids grow up with better parental relationships and more parental attention in total.
> Before, women would suffer the hardship and danger of childbirth, and in return men would take on the physical perils of war.
The problem with this view is that the VAST majority of deaths in war are civilian deaths, which do not bound themselves by gender. It's only in recent decades that it's possible to contemplate conflicts with as few as 1 civilian death per combatant death, and even then, that's the extreme exception, not the rule.
In non-state warfare, the civilian casualty ratio is even worse--imagine living in "Eastern Europe in World War 2"-style casualty rates as the baseline of your existence. The typical battle in such circumstances isn't "two opposing armies meet on a battlefield, one army emerges victorious;" it's "we're going to sneak into your village, set fire to all your food stores, rape some of your women (maybe steal them for brides), and maybe whack off several of your children."
> In modern society, of course, conflict mostly means playing video games in an armchair.
I rather think most Ukrainian soldiers would disagree with you here.
> I rather think most Ukrainian soldiers would disagree with you here.
In modern society, of course, most soldiers are not Ukrainian (or Russian).
> and in return men would take on the physical perils of war.
Oh common. Those wars were not for the benefit of women. They were for the benefit of decision making men, the men who ruled. Which were not women. And the men in power sometimes used women as argument for why you should go invade this or that country, but then again appeal to patriotism was even stronger. There are limited situations, like Ukraine today which is defending where the "for other women and children" claim can kinda be made. And even there, fighers are motivated by more then just that.
Traditionally, you was fighting for your male ruler.
The war thing is not deal between sexes. Even today, men are more likely to support invasions, to support parties that lead country to wars.
Countries ruled by woman also go to war, and have done going back for millennia: Boadicea, Cleopatra, Catherine the Great, etc.
I would like to see data supporting the idea that men are more likely to support parties that lead to wars, and if its true the reasons why.
In less safe societies and situations men were pressured to take the risks to shield women. "Women and children first". That definitely was to the advantage of women and the detriment of men.
I did not said that countries run by women would never go to war. I made statement about majority of actual real world past wars. Men were dominating the leadership, the leadership made decision to go to war for reasons unrelated to womanhood, so the war it was. The fight was not "for women". Also, actual real world fathers and husbands preferred not to go to war. Their wifes also preferred them not to go to war.
> I would like to see data supporting the idea that men are more likely to support parties that lead to wars, and if its true the reasons why.
Men are more likely to support fascists - both in runup to WWII and now. You can see it in data. Large part of its appeal is warrior aesthetic and aggression. Also, men are more likely to vote republicans who are more hawks and start wars. The pro war parties and groups are dominated by men, because some men display their masculinity by endorsing wars. They think manly men should support war, they think it makes them manly, so they do. See Hegseth - he is basically a caricature of such man.
> In less safe societies and situations men were pressured to take the risks to shield women. "Women and children first". That definitely was to the advantage of women and the detriment of men.
When the plan crashes or there is a fight, there is no "women and children first". In actual ships wrecks, men were more likely to survive (so no, women had no precedes).
When the men are going to fight away, that is when they die more often. Men were obligated to stay in Ukraine while women and kids were allowed to stay. Men did major of Chernobyl work too. But, men complaining about "women and children first" they have seen in books, are no where near any situation where it might happen to them.
Besides, here is what I reacted to:
>Before, women would suffer the hardship and danger of childbirth, and in return men would take on the physical perils of war.
No, there was no such "deal" made. Childbirth being safer now does not change it, drones dont change it and world having more peaceful period last decades dont change it.
> Men are more likely to support fascists - both in runup to WWII and now
Can you point me to the stats for that? There were lots of other differences in who voted for the Nazis for example, and the strongest is this: https://ajps.org/2017/08/10/who-voted-and-didnt-for-hitler-a...
And apparently plenty of women did vote for the Nazis:
> NSDAP had been gaining proportionately more support from women than from men from 1928 onwards
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_Nazi_Germany
Who are the current fascist parties you are referring to?
> Also, men are more likely to vote republicans who are more hawks and start wars
So you are basing this on the current voting pattern in one country at one point in history! Its not even consistently true - maybe at the last US election, but not consistently true.
> But, men complaining about "women and children first" they have seen in books
My point is that it was historically true.
> Childbirth being safer now does not change it, drones dont change it and world having more peaceful period last decades dont change it.
its a historical fact that women were at significant risk fo dying in childbirth, and men were at higher risk of dying in war or occupational accidents.
That is what Richars Evans wrote in his article about women and nazism. Who is an actual historian. Women vote might have been up, but men voted for them more. And men were literal members and activists. Women were more religious and voted more for different conservative party.
More importantly, right now if you look at current statistics, men are more likely to vote far-right.
> Who are the current fascist parties you are referring to?
AfD, Trump and Miller party, Farrage ... should I go through them all worldwide?
> its a historical fact that women were at significant risk fo dying in childbirth, and men were at higher risk of dying in war or occupational accidents.
1.) This is about "reasons for going to war" and deal between genders. Men do NOT go to war because of women or for women. They also do not go to die in war as some kind of compensation for childbirth.
2.) Women get killed in war. When those men leave the home for war, they kill women and children as much as civilian men. In modern wars, civilian causalities outnumber military ones.
3.) Now you are adding "occupational accidents" which is different category and completely unrelated. But also, people who oppose female soldiers, cops etc ... are men. Because they perceive her as encroaching on their territory.
> So you are basing this on the current voting pattern in one country at one point in history! Its not even consistently true - maybe at the last US election, but not consistently true.
It is consistently true for western world across elections. The only way to not see it is to not look at statistics. I am not saying it must be so due to some inherent biological difference. Historically, it did not mattered that much what population thought or what women thought - there were rules, those were mostly men and that was it. But right now, in our culture, the support for starting war is gender biased toward men.
Afd maybe.Calling Reform fascist is ridiculous hyperbole. In a two party system like the US people have to pick the least bad option given bundles of policies. Even with multiple parties.
Far right parties often oppose wars too. Where do these parties stand on involvement in Ukraine or Iran wars? Trumps first term was one of the most unaggresive US preidencies ever.
I was quoting an actual historian too.
> modern wars, civilian causalities outnumber military
but we are talking about historical wars. Being a soldier is still far riskier than being a civilian, and always was.
> In a two party system like the US people have to pick the least bad option given bundles of policies.
"Least bad option" can be anything and evolve itself into this or that. Conservatives intentionally evolved it into fascism. Which consistently happens to be supported more by men then by women. Importantly, that include wars.
And overall, men support wars more then women support wars.
> I was quoting an actual historian too.
Your historian is not opposing what Evans said. That quote does not imply women voted for men more then men overall. And your wiki ends with following "In terms of voting patterns however, a higher proportion of male voters supported the Nazi party compared to female voters".
Nazi started with low female vote and high male vote. Then it was changing and the difference between genders became smaller.
> but we are talking about historical wars. Being a soldier is still far riskier than being a civilian, and always was.
In the historical wars, civilians died more then soldiers. This goes especially for WWII. Being civilian where the war is means a lot of death. Especially physically weak people - old, children, women, sick. Soldiers happen to kill a lot of civilians, turns out.
In even older historical wars, soldiers lived literally from what they stole from the land. They were not carrying food for few weeks with them, they took it from locals. With violence and rape, obviously. At the time, food was actually expensive, people were able to grow around how much they needed. All that robbing meant additional deaths due to food missing. In addition to civilians killed to get that food or out of general frustration.
Wars happen where people live. They do not happen in some remote people-free empty fighting rings. They happen in cities, villages etc, because that is the stuff soldiers were sent to take over. And in the past, because that is where the food was.
Except that, women with college degrees and in higher socioeconomic groups marry as much as before. It poor people, poor women who stay single.
If your theory was true, it would be other way round. Poor women would be marrying and richer women would refuse marriage. That is not what we see in data.
Hypergamy is real. "I need to have a baby, but eew this guy is a dork, I'm not giving him my womb, and look at all these cool guys on insta" is a real conversation I've had.
Had one drop me for a professional DJ.
A friend of mine was convinced she was going to marry a famous basketball player.
You can guess how these "relationships" went.
Super average women with one or two OUTSTANDING characteristics (get it.)
It's a real problem.
Fortunately, I already had kids when we were both younger and dumber which might ultimately be the solution: keep humans off social media until they're grandparents.
Haha, this made me laugh and made me think of an absurd analogy.
Women are buying call options (hedge against rising prices) on men and the premium is the emotional damage that occurs when the market price on the guy falls below the strike price (turns out the man is a dud) and the woman refrains from pursuing the guy (no marriage).
It's poor in taste but I just can't unsee the similarity...
> Had one drop me for a professional DJ.
Sorry, no offense, but what are you doing, if I may ask?
Maybe she was still in her party age/too young?
(I know there are some DJs who are famous and millionaires, but most of them Ive met live a life that is more or less out of control)
This app in particular attempts to overcome it by using a very clever sorting algorithm - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gale%E2%80%93Shapley_algorithm
Commercial dating apps are a market for lemons - as a woman, you can't quickly assess whether a partner will be compatible with you or not without investing substantial time and effort. Hypergamy is the expected equilibrium - if you're not sure about the long-term compatibility, you might as well go off of looks or cues of status alone. I would expect the outcome distribution of an app with a much better matching algorithm to be drastically less concentrated in the upper tail. Moreover, a state-run dating app lacks the perverse incentive to keep you swiping, frustrated and jealous.
> as a woman, you can't quickly assess whether a partner will be compatible with you or not without investing substantial time and effort.
I... don't understand. Why do you think this is true for women but not men?
I don't assume that. The supply of men on dating apps is greater than the supply of women, and they tend to be less picky and more open to short-term mate-seeking behavior. This means that the dynamic of these apps is more fundamentally shaped by aggregate preferences of women.
I think the algorithm is almost a distraction here. Gale-Shapley works nicely when preferences are reasonably well-defined and participants are actually committed to the matching process. Dating has neither property. People are terrible at predicting who they'll have chemistry with, and everyone has outside options.
Current world news are mostly Orwellian, Kafkaesque and Lemian, but this one is a refreshingly Huxleyan one.
If women were (legally allowed and required ) to be paid upfront for delivering and raising children, the market would sort things out. We would probably get some professional mothers who would have 6-12 children.
Paid by whom?
Who pays men for their role in raising children? Some men are primary parents, and increasingly so.
Men would obviously the buyer…. Most would need financing… (baby mortgage) Would probably need a Fannie / Freddie cousin if the market got overheated and a bubble pop happened.
theoretically some women could pay some quality fathers for coparenting , but it would be rare.
Why would men be buyers? If the women are raising children what do they get out of it? Will be women and children be living with them? If so they would be parenting so need to be paid too.
It sounds like your idea is that women get paid to have the joys of being a parent, while men pay to get nothing in return.
If the woman and children do live with the man then essentially you are recreating the idea of a male provider married to a housewife, except more transactional and unequal.
Men get a child. Yeah, it’s almost all doable in current legal landscape. Just not so socially accepted. the default parenting contract could be per child…
What do you mean "get a child". Do they get to live with the child? Do they get the child's love? Do they get the child's company? Do they get to play with the child? Do they get the joy raising a child?
Same as currently, jointly negotiated
It sounds like skipping marriage and going straight to being divorced with kids.
Yes
This honestly sounds dystopian. The foster care system does not point to "people who are in it for the money" as the best people to raise children. The market is not the best solution for everything, and working on structural barriers to family raising for people who would like to raise a family seems like a worthwhile effort. I do not know enough about Singapore to say if this dating app will help, but I like seeing efforts like this; hopefully in addition to daycare, education investment, and family leave policies.
Foster care is for other people’s children. I think having her genes in the children would make a professional mother a little more attentive to her children. Also better quality parenting would allow her to charge more…
The current situation artificially limits supply of mothers because it requires relative exclusivity of the father. It’s like nimby people not wanting apartments in their cities to limit supply. Except imagine if nimby’s were able to ban apartments all over the world. That’s the situation with motherhood. It’s single family zoning world wide…
Of course it sounds dystopian and is not about to happen anytime soon. Because cartel’s don’t give up policies that limit supply so easily…
That’s a disgusting idea.
Tangent: I’ve often wondered why governments don’t provide a ‘dating’ service for employers and employees, or even better some kind of career development and management service for citizens. Use a bit of institutional wisdom to help people make the best of themselves from school age onwards, help people with similar or complementary skills and interests to connect … that kind of thing.
> I’ve often wondered why governments don’t provide a ‘dating’ service for employers and employees, or even better some kind of career development and management service for citizens.
Don’t they? Here in the UK at least participation in programs like that is a requirement of unemployment benefits. One has to attend a job center where one is given advice, sometimes training can get enrolled in trainung and etc. Not saying that they do a great job of it but they seems to at least try to do what you describe. At least nominally.
Sounds like a job center to me.
So how do you know this term? ;-) ;-)
The author's final recommendation about investing in offline third places is very true in modern Singapore
Modern dating problem comes from too many online platforms trying to sell you a lifestyle and tell you what you should have. People do not need another online platform to solve the problem caused by online platforms
You know what's are great goverment run (or supported with money) dating programs? University. Erasmus. Things like Americorps. Even if the literal match is on the apps I feel like those sorts of environments are great.
Yes, for most countries. But people are quite young when they go to uni and change a lot between 18-25.
The number one indicator of love is proximity.
Interesting the different takes different nations take over dropping birth rates. I posted a story here on the Lisdoonvarna dating festival in Ireland. This is a village with a lot of bars wanting to encourage tourism. It has had so much success that the government is now sponsoring it. Quite different than America where the government mandates something as opposed to funding something that has proven successful in a given area.
https://matchmakerireland.com/
Social media had a story on an American lady disappointed with dating choices in her city who went over there for fun, met an Irishman and in less than a year of transatlantic dating got married.
Bet you have just as much a chance of finding a life partner there than any online dating service, probably much better.
> Team sunrise, or team “it’s 2am and I’m still up”? (close-ended)
Why so weirdly binary? Sleeping at 11pm and getting up well after sunrise is not an option anymore?
> What kind of traveler are you, really? (close-ended, with options like adventure junkie, culture seeker, and I don’t travel much)
Isn't this the type of question that should be open ended? How about being a dynamic kind of traveller? Happy to go if someone else is organizing the trip and happy to stay if I have to do it.
Such a typical Singaporean approach - even fun has to be funnelled into MCQs.
I think governments should work on making their citizens more dateable.
Schools should try to teach kids better social skills as well as how to cultivate a healthy romantic relationship. You might say society and culture should be the ones doing this, and you’d be right, but they’ve failed at that.
Kids need to know how to make introductions (not just introduce themselves but introduce other people), how to show someone you’re interested in them, how to engage in small talk with a stranger and escalate it to deeper and more meaningful conversation, and even when and how to kiss someone. There used to be schools for elites to teach some of these things. It’s time to bring them back but for everyone.
Strange how the country that consistently tops the Economic Freedom Index also has a government-run dating service.
It's almost as though "economic freedom" (whatever that means) and the government schmutzing in citizens' personal affairs are completely unrelated things!
Technically it falls under "Size of Government", so it would deduct points in theory, though in practice it's probably too small to move the needle.
Dating services should be run by private foundations that receives public grants. More foundations competing would be good too.
Related:
Singapore govt dating app uses Gale-Shapley stable marriage algorithm
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49906432
A very interesting solution to the problem. Surely this data will not be repurposed, right?
But if it helps likeminded people to find each other, then it absolutely has some value.
person previously dating in singapore - this is awesome! wish i had
mfw the 4chan "state-mandated girlfriend" meme[1] becomes reality
[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/state-mandated-girlfriend
Reminds me of that movie "The Lobster"
Entirely dismissing how important looks, vibes, personality are in relationships. Not even dating -- if someone smells, you're not going to be incentives to make friends with them. This seems to me to just be trodding the same pseudoscientific route as MBTI personality tests, trying to condense a person into a list of multiple choice questions. That will never work. No algorithm can do it. Social interaction is not a solved game.
The point isn't to be a complete solution to social interaction, the point is to provide a significantly better than random sampling and pairing.
You can then still apply your usual filters afterwards, such as smell, looks, vibes.
If I met them in real life first (cafe, supermarket, park, etc.), you can politely disconnect and move on if something seems off. The more that I do online dating, the more that I see this "vibe wall". Since third spaces aren't really coming back, I'm pretty sure that speed dating (or assisted group dating) is key. Sure, it is uncomfortable to meet many people so quickly (say an hour or two), it helps to get over the vibe wall. It could act like an artificial third space, but with a romantic intent.
I have an idea for a dating app: What if people could only make videos using in-app video recorder (and clipper)? This would completely remove the problem of photoshopping/filters. Plus, video can much better transmit "vibe" compared to photos and "profile". Example of something fun: Show a short video that is trending on TikTok (hand picked by staff), then ask someone to react to it. You can do the green screen effect, just like TikTok. It could be a nice way to visit someone's personality and check their vibe.
It's a shame that they deduce your ranking just from the questions. I think the algorithm would be perfect if paired with a manual ranking by the user.
There are obvious deal breakers, and then as you grow older you develop “taste”.
These are well defined criteria which can be queried upon.
However the ranking only works if both sides are honest.
Yes, but someone who looks, vibes and smells right can still be totally wrong for you. I often thought that online dating was inefficient because my eyes, ears and nose can rule out most potential mates without even thinking, but it works the other way too: I've had many partners I've enjoyed being physical with but would never want to settle down and start a family or anything (then again, I'm not a breeder at all, so take that with a pinch of salt). So it's six of one, half a dozen of the other. You need all things to be right, and this surely can only be better than e.g. Tinder, where you see only pictures.
Glad to see that it requires cooperative partners, and not just parents. And that the matched partners are not automatically engaged.
Let's see what other, more "progressive" governments will think about that. Lots of possibilities in government-run partner matching for out future AI overlords.
There is no weight/debt/tattoos filter... Then again, maybe those are not a problem in Singapore?
There are lots of overweight and/or tatt'ed people in Singapore! In general, I have found people get a lot fatter once you travel from Thailand/Cambodia/Laos to Peninsular Malaysia/Singapore/Indonesia. I don't know if it genetics, food, or "lifestyle". And loads of Singaporeans are up to their eyes in debt because they want to look flashy when they are young -- designer clothes, jewelry, bags, shoes, cars, etc. For me, the quickest way to know if a Singaporean is broke is if they are young, have a mid-to-shit job, but are wearing flashy clothes.
> This checklist of things is, in my view, one of the biggest issues with online dating, in that it tends to amplify and exacerbate our personal biases rather than inviting us to step outside of them.
The elephant in the room I found on most of the dating site I've seen so far. I can only conclude that the makers of those sites have a transactional view of dating and everything connected with it. But there are also users with this attitude and that's where it gets really frustrating.
Thank you
tinder by gov ?
Interesting that when I ctrl-f the linked article and the previous discussion (463 comments), not once is the word "trust" found.
That's the actual problem, though (a lack of it)! Above all else, you'll probably overlook a lot and still commit long-term to someone you can trust.
Trust for the first date or long term? For the first date you already must supply your government id
Welcome to Korea 2.0
The biggest issues in Korea dating is young men either (1) don't have enough money to date (because local women expect men to paying for everything) or (2) women reject men with old-fashioned social views. In my personal experience, comparing the most developed places in Asia (Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hongkong, Singapore), young Korean men are the most like their fathers with out-of-date social views.
If a young Korean woman wants to have a few kids, without living in grueling poverty - is that possible with a husband who's not in the top 1% of earners? If not - then ignoring the 99% may be a want-to-be-mom's least bad strategy. :(
From a few comments in the article and here, I'm wondering how viable Singapore is as a country for typical residents (vs. the 1%) to have children.
If (say) both would-be parents in a couple have to work long hours to afford their own food, housing, & such - yeah, NO. They obviously can't have many kids.
Anyone here familiar, to comment?
Middle class life is pretty reasonable in Singapore. You can have two working parents with boring, average corporate jobs (the economy is very strong in Singapore), then you live in modestly priced public housing, ride public transit everywhere, and send your kids to public schools. It seems fine to me. And the middle class isn't something rare in Singapore; it is most of Singapore. You can also hire a cheap domestic helper to cook most of your meals, clean your home, and shuttle the kids to and from school and activities. This is a very common pattern in Singapore.
How might things look if a couple has 3+ kids, and perhaps only one parent working outside the home? Because if Singapore actually wants to reach break-even from where their numbers are now, that needs to be a realistic scenario for a whole lotta people.
Singapore is so rich and desirable that it can import highly educated people forever. Plus, it is diverse by default/design, so people are quite open to having diverse neighbors.
Where you don't have extended families living together, mom being able to afford to "work" full-time as a parent/homemaker is a pretty traditional benchmark for being able to afford having several kids.
And are those domestic workers part of the population pool that you're trying to boost the fertility of?
I have so many questions of my own:
How many people see their ideal match and get humbled (or emboldened) by surprising results? How many of these try immediately to change something about themselves?
Since the match pool will never be exactly 1:1, do you do anything at all about the least matchable people?
Would it become possible to gauge whether changed answers are efforts to widen one's net or legitimate personal growth and/or a bit of self-reflection?
If the dating service detects deceptive answering, is it correct to just pair these people with other dishonest users?
Can you gather any feedback from unsuccessful dates and apply a "Je n'sais quoi" Factor to positively/negatively weight their chances when calculating their compatibility with future matches?
If you take this idea to the extreme, can you start to distrust negative date feedback if the feedback provider is shown to be unreliable? (Person A doesn't like anybody, their feedback shouldn't matter.)
Are there detectable signals of someone's Je ne sais quoi Factor in their profile metadata, including profile photo(s) and answering habits? (i.e. People answering the full survey in less than 15 minutes at 3 a.m. are 28% less desireable on average.)
While it's good to grow together with a partner, it doesn't always work out that way. How would such an algorithm be able to determine that an ambitious (broadly: likely to dramatically change) person will not be paired with a long-term apathetic, set-in-stone person? (I do realize they have the, "always working on yourself?" question, but there's so much this question leaves unanswered.)
Is this a ploy to get more applicants to join the government staff, if the pilot remains closed to the public?
(tying together "least matchable people" and "government staff") Do you start monitoring the extreme ends of matchability to see if there's a link between perceived social agreeableness and job performance? What was that again about detecting dishonesty and limiting the pool to government workers?
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One detail I particularly liked about early OKCupid was the ability to rank how much someone's answer mattered. For instance, I don't particularly mind someone's exercise and organization preferences, and it's fine if we didn't match because they DO have expectations from me in these areas which I fail to meet. I would hope the Singapore service would implement this as well, although a description of FirstDate in The Straits Times suggests this nuance isn't there.
Another thing the Singapore dating service has in common with OKCupid is at least a few poorly worded questions: "What’s a country that’s ruined all other countries for you?" is akin to OKC's "In a certain light, wouldn't nuclear war be exciting?" You can't split hairs as a Yes/No response in OKC, "sure: I would understandably have tons of negative excitement, a sudden spike in anxiety/dread, instantaneous long-term shift in priorities, etc.; although the use of atomic weapons thoroughly horrifies me," just like you can't explain whether the country that "ruined others" did so via greatness (Spain with its social and expressive population, food, beaches, siestas, and music) or by causing a loss of faith in humanity (Ireland, due to a stolen laptop plus being verbally threatened by a primary school-aged child while I was walking with a baby stroller).
My personal take on the nuclear war question? I just tried to optimize (cast the widest net) and decided, "Anyone willing to misunderstand this one question while also prioritizing and demanding its response is less likely to be someone whose company I value," and left the question unanswered + unimportant to me.
Now if only my local government had a "friends group" service, so I don't end up hanging out with other parents just by virtue of also being a parent and needing to be around them in the same places at the same times...
>> The truth is that we don’t really know what exactly makes love work, such that we can articulate and implement it on a societal scale. It’s too messy, too complex, too idiosyncratic, and too human. Anyone who claims otherwise probably has a course to sell you on negging and pickup artistry.
The author, who is a gay man, obviously didn't study any pickup material since if he would he'd realize how wrong he is. If he'd study pickup material and the surrounding works he'd realize that what women write in these preferences is completely meaningless so his example of meeting a guy as a guy on this website is completely useless for men meeting women, since women do not work like that.
All of these algorithmic matching will become totaly useless and wrong depending on the behaviour of the male. In a completely mismatched pair the women will fawn over the guy if his behaviour is congruent with what attracts females. And even on a complete match the women will run away in panic if the guy is a total tool sexual-behaviour-wise to what (dis)attracts women.
Also: nothing will solve marriage problem as long as women are in the workforce.
Look up books by Rollo Tomassi, he has a blog and has written on these topics if you are one of those "citation needed" people.
I think this is good, yes there can be improve but the idea is good
especially for country like korea and japan ???? Yeah bro they need it
The marriage rates of these countries is not really the issue. Much of the remaining difference between East/Southeast Asia and the West is actually births out of wedlock, which the region still heavily stigmatizes.
As Singaporean commenters have said, I think this is more of a positive eugenics scheme.
I thought incels are white right wingers, first time I see this term in a non-white context. Southern Poverty Law Center is listing them as a hate group for example so by definition incels can’t be black.
It appears you have the incorrect definition of incel.
There is an amusing irony in this approach to marriage promotion: who isn't already married in Singapore? I've been told that the city's 30 year old gay and lesbian crowd is treated to a lot of fancy dates at public expense.
> There is an amusing irony in this approach to marriage promotion: who isn't already married in Singapore?
I don't understand your question.
The govt pays for the date??
honestly that seems like a great way to spend public funds
> with government workers set to be the first batch of daters
Oh yeah, the government workers, a group of people known for their prolific dating and people skills. This will go so well.
"Any hard Nos for you?", well, those who ignored the calls to their number is a no brainer big No, and also those who don't know how to fill their SMFF-29f-A form, which is different from SMFF-29F-A. Everyone here hates people who don't know the difference between SMFF-29f-A and SMFF-29F-A.