Online Dating Imbalances

The cluster discusses the severe gender imbalances in online dating apps like OKCupid and Tinder, where women receive far more attention and matches than men, leading to frustration for average men and references to attractiveness studies and site business models.

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Keywords

e.g SOME quillette.com VERY techcrunch.com DC okcupid.com FWIW I.e medium.com dating women men online matches tinder attractive messages profiles real life

Sample Comments

glial Feb 11, 2015 View on HN

OKCupid shows profiles of people who are roughly as attractive as you are. This means average-looking women don't even have the option of messaging great-looking guys, and are presumably more willing to message average-looking guys. I don't know whether Tender does this.

Beasting247 Oct 16, 2014 View on HN

I'm going to provide my ideas/feedback.Unlike a lot of the other people on here, I like the Facebook integration, provided of course nobody else on my Facebook can see that I've added this app. It saves the hassle of having to upload pictures and lowers the proportion of fake accounts.As a male (23 years old), I've completely written off online dating. Sites like OkCupid make total sense if you're a female because you don't actually have to do any work, but th

pranit10 Feb 10, 2023 View on HN

I think the stark contrast of a guys matches/inbox to a girls matches/inbox is whats demoralising to most guys. I once read an apt expression for this where the men are thirsty in a desert and the women are thirsty in an ocean. I have all but given up on online dating and simply socialize in person. If I meet someone I like, I would just ask them out. If it works out great. if not hopefully I made the other person feel better about themselves.

letonmorri May 5, 2021 View on HN

It seems about right if you are talking about dating apps.- https://techcrunch.com/2009/11/18/okcupid-inbox-attractive/ - https://quillette.com/2019/03/12/attraction-ine

vmception Dec 22, 2021 View on HN

be discerning like a hot person. even if it slows down how often you get matched at all. make it only possibly for consensus attractive people to match with you.the opposite than how I hear other guys use these apps.

benaston Mar 30, 2013 View on HN

My experience is mainly with OKCupid. I presume most other dating websites are variations on the same theme.The problem is that OKCupid is a geek's worldview distilled. Whether a girl is visible to you is largely based upon algorithmic analysis of a questionnaire, which in turn is based on nothing more than pseudoscience.So you have a questionnaire written by a team of computer programmers acting as gatekeeper to you contacting someone? Do you see the potential problem here? Who says the q

hal9000xp Feb 21, 2018 View on HN

About "8. Dating". I think over last 10 years, online dating has not been solved at all.Here are typical problems which nearly all dating sites run into:1. Women got way more attention than men. Such environment stimulates aggressive strategies on both sides. Men must spend a lot of effort to reach as many women as possible. Women must filter out males as hard as possible. Men are discouraged to carefully read profile of women because probability of particular woman responding a

evincarofautumn Mar 15, 2017 View on HN

Male here. I did online dating for a couple of years. Based on my narrow experience, it seems the odds are indeed dramatically stacked against men—I ended up generally not expecting a response from anyone.When I changed my profile to “bisexual” (which I am), I saw one reason why—scads of creepy, low-effort messages from men, sometimes with their profile set to “female” to attract more responses. The imbalance leads to slimy game tactics and drives down the quality of experience for everybody.

lsd_throwaway Jun 23, 2021 View on HN

Online dating is a skewed game (for M/F), if you're in the top 2% of attractiveness for men it's great - otherwise it's not worth it. This is compounded a bit by region, if your dating market is pretty even or skewed where there are more women than men (NYC/DC) it gets a lot better (I suspect actually for both men and women, but don't know) - in the bay area it's not worth it.Women get a lot of matches which while a lot better than no matches (can go on date

gorpomon Jun 5, 2017 View on HN

Just shared this with a friend who could use some help in this dept.I think with products like this, the first instinct is to play up the potential "ick" factor, or to view it as Silicon Valley enabling the idea of privileged people looking at prospective dating partners like objects instead of people. However, I'm really for these services! I think they're fun, and they can really help people who for whatever reason have issues with social interaction.We don't ber