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What really happens inside a dating app

425 points by polote 2y ago

jillesvangurp 2y ago
There are a lot of dating apps out there with very different audiences. I think the mistake made here is generalizing the conclusions for all these apps. Women date differently than men. And not always with men. Or only with certain types of men.
lifestyleguru 2y ago
What I hate about Tinder is that it has become the only way to find woman for sex and for relationship, even if with miserable probabilities. Even in my tiny non English speaking country. The man has to pay for the app. Women ending up on Tinder loathe how despicable the app is ("looking for a pearl in this cesspool", "don't believe I ended up here" etc.) while somehow don't notice that they make this place this way.
- jwagenet 2y ago
  While men having to pay is potentially no fun, I think it is definitely men that “make this place this way”. Men act entitled to whatever woman they find attractive. They accordingly act aggressively, don’t respect boundaries both on and offline, and frequently lie about themselves and their intentions to get the girl. Men should take a note from women and be more picky before they pursue (and stop when told no).
gwern 2y ago
Any idea which dating app Paul Gonsolin is talking about here? This is a lot of data.
- 383toast 2y ago
  it's probably a small niche one, he graciously provides y-vals in his graphs, so ~20k women and ~60k men (from rough counting)
- trashface 2y ago
  The image of profile pictures mid way through the article has a "Jubilee" water mark, and that name appears to associated with a dating app called "Nectar"
  - polote 2y ago
    Bad guess :)
thomasfromcdnjs 2y ago
This is really really cool insights into the industry and consumer behavior in general. Going to save it to my google docs so I never lose it.
parliament32 2y ago
My anecdotal user-end data-science-ish story about dating apps: A few years back I was single and on Hinge a fair amount. If you used Hinge back then, you'll remember some key differences between the platform and other dating apps: 1) when you "like"'d someone, you'd have to comment on a specific part of their profile (a photo, a prompt answer, etc), 2) these likes showed up in their inbox, independent of whether they liked you or not (as in, you didn't have to like each other mutually; the other end decided whether to reply or ignore after delivery), and 3) there was limit per day, you could like/message 8 profiles per day, no more. On average, swiping through my 8 per day, I'd generally get 1-2 new replies, which turned roughly into 3-4 first dates per month. One of the key elements is that the inbox was time-ordered: the most recent like you received was at the top. There was discussion on the Hinge subreddit about how girls would typically only click through the top few items in their inbox daily, and if you were lower down, you were doomed to drown under the mountain of new message they're getting on top. So I figured I'd solve for "what is the optimal time of day to be blasting out my likes to ensure I end up higher in the inbox?" You can probably see where this is going: I requested a GDPR data export, which happened to have all my conversations, time-stamped. Crunching through in Python there was something in the data I didn't really expect.. a disproportionate number of first-replies (replies to my initial like/message, that is) were around the 2-3pm bucket. Not what I would've expected (don't these people work?) but fair enough, I started doing all my swiping in those hours instead of in the evening as I usually did. And it worked. Good god did it work. I consistently started getting replies to 70-80% of my initial messages (from the ~10% before). I was drowning in conversations to the point where I wouldn't swipe at all for days for fear of yet another conversation to manage. Within a few months I ended up meeting my current girlfriend and haven't been back on since, but it was surprising how well something simple like time-of-day affected my reply rate.
- 65 2y ago
  This is the spirit of Hacker News. Now this is hacking!
- Horffupolde 2y ago
  https://xkcd.com/196/ https://xkcd.com/196/
carabiner 2y ago
He ends with a very interesting proposition to "fix" dating apps: > To me, the next revolution is really concepts that will make you meet other people without having much information about them. As a user, you will trust the algorithm to match you with the right people. And these concepts will be paying only > So to summarize, a concept where users pay and commit that they will meet people without knowing them before. So yes, it will take a few dates to really find someone that you like, but so is going every day in dating apps and meeting people that you don't like either. This is very close to the Dutch app Breeze: https://breeze.social/ https://breeze.social/. There's no chatting in the app. It's focused on meeting people as soon as possible. People pre-pay for dates (covers drinks) and the app partners with venues to check on the couples (they know their names). People who cancel dates get a badge on their profile saying that they have canceled. Ghosters get banned.
- bradlys 2y ago
  Breeze arguably is even more superficial than other apps. You don’t get the chance to talk or anything. You have to show up and make it work. For most women, you’re only going to do that with a guy you’re 100% physically attracted to from the get go. I wouldn’t recommend Breeze to any men who aren’t above average in looks. It will also quickly stop showing you people when you’re getting rejected a lot. An interesting aspect of the app. At least you’ll know where you stand after about a week or two. (Getting only 3 options a day says that it thinks you’re not going to ever get a match) Breeze is in NYC now. So, it’s making way into the US slowly.
  - carabiner 2y ago
    Thanks. These are really good points.
everybodyknows 2y ago
> ELO score What does ELO stand for?
- 383toast 2y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system
James_K 2y ago
> Guys that the girls think she wants to see but she will never like Brutal.
James_K 2y ago
> Among girls : 10% where lesbian, 84% were hetero and 12 % were interested in both genders > Among guys: 7% homo, 92% hetero and almost none were interested in both genders That's insane.
- nemomarx 2y ago
  I've heard that listing you're bi is considered a red flag on a guy's profile? maybe people are hiding it
  - guerrilla 2y ago
    Yes, I hide it. Based on surveys, it lowers your chances. No reason to play fair there when things are bad enough as they are.
- TZubiri 2y ago
  Possibly all the gays are going to gay specific apps like grindr
- bitwize 2y ago
  It tracks, actually. Men tend to pick a sexual orientation and be disgusted by the other sexual orientation[0]. Women are a lot more hetero- (and homo-) flexible. [0] It works both ways! A guy once told me and my wife that we made a cute couple despite how disgusting heterosexuality really was. And I was like... okay, thanks?
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    Not completely true. Most men are not disgusted by a lesbian couple. I don’t mean just men that fetishize about it. But many are disgusted or at least discomforted by seeing gay men being romantic. Thought experiment: if a wife in a heterosexual marriage told her husband that she previously had relationships with women, I know many men (including me) who would just shrug and move on and not really think about it. On the other hand, a man couldn’t just tell his wife most of the time that he slept with men before
nixpulvis 2y ago
Label your fucking axes!
- pimlottc 2y ago
  Yes, and give them meaningful titles too. I think sometimes "men" means "performance of male profiles" and at other times it means "behavior of male users"? It's not really clear. This data looks interesting but I'm not really sure what I'm looking at.
yosito 2y ago
> Can Dating apps be fixed? > What I meant by "fixed", is an app where: > It is possible for someone to reach out to anyone and get an answer, and discussion can be interesting from the start (at least as much as in real life) > Your looks, how you behave, the tone of your voice,... reflect what you look like in real life > It is easier to meet new people than attending local events > I don't think it can Well, as long as the metrics app builders are optimizing for are "retention" and "monetization", like this post obsesses over, and the people building the apps continue to refer to women as "girls", like they've never had a relationship with an adult woman, then I agree, dating apps are going to continue their process of enshittification.
bawolff 2y ago
Equal parts fascinating and dystopian. I'm even more convinced now that online dating has reached a local optima, but eventually someone is going to find a solution that is less shallow and predatory and blow it out of the water.
- mindwok 2y ago
  I’m more cynical. Dating apps are easy, and entertaining. Finding a good person to spend your life (or a prolonged period) with is hard. I’m not sure there is an external solution to this in the world we live in - it’s like getting fit. People need to suck it up and put in the work if they want results.
  - bawolff 2y ago
    My understanding is that dating apps just let you meet people. What you do after that and how much effort you put in is up to you.
  - thatguy0900 2y ago
    Picking that example when we're entering into the ozempic era is brave
    - mindwok 2y ago
      Hahaha I did think of that. Unfortunately as much as it helps, it won’t give you gains.
- ketzo 2y ago
  I think they’re pretty close to global max on “relationship-flavored entertainment app for single adults” Optima for “stable-relationship-forming app” are yet to be discovered — and also, I think, to really be sought at all
  - lowdest 2y ago
    OKCupid was doing pretty well at this until they were acquired.
TZubiri 2y ago
Has anyone noticed that the histograms have some spikes and valleys that are probably artifacts? My guess is that there's some rounding or floating point shannanigans going on. Yes this is what I have to contribute to the conversation, I cannot speak to the dating dynamics as I am an unexpert on that subject
- csours 2y ago
  Yes this bugged me too
- Terr_ 2y ago
  There's definitely something going on there that needs review or explanation. If it's not an error, perhaps it involves something where once your profile approaches certain cutoffs for liked/viewed ratio, the system changes how (and to whom) it presents your profile... Except the higher and lower outliers are not always adjacent either.
sonofhans 2y ago
> You would need to be a pro at user interviews to really get interesting feedback. (Well maybe this is the norm in B2C but at the end of the day user interviews were of no help). This shouldn’t be surprising. Interviewing humans is a skill. Doing so in a product context, and learning useful things from it, is not easy. I hope they don’t approach other things this way. “You’d need to be a professional plumber to stop water leaking out of this. Maybe that’s the norm but at the end of the day plumbing was no help.”
- HPsquared 2y ago
  "The trouble with market research is that people don't think what they feel, they don't say what they think and they don't do what they say."
  - sonofhans 2y ago
    Market research and observational/UX research are not the same. Market research looks for trends in bulk; UX research looks for individual actions and preferences. The difference is important, and it’s lost on the article’s author. In UX research you don’t ask people what they want or what they like, you (e.g.) put them in front of software/prototypes, give them tasks, and watch them work. What you learn in this context is _why_ people do things; it’s hard to get that from metrics. You also don’t get new product ideas from customers. There are aphorisms 100 hundred years old about that which everyone should know: “If I asked my customers what they wanted they would have said, ‘A faster horse.’”
nicebyte 2y ago
I already knew a lot of what was written here but for some reason reading this made me uninstall bumble.
philipwhiuk 2y ago
> More than 50% of men just never receive a like, and never means maybe 2 or 3 likes in the lifespan of several weeks Half the user base are patsies is basically the fundamental design.
- naveen99 2y ago
  Math checks out: if women use 4 criteria (face, body, money, iq) with a strict cutoff of even 55th percentile, they will reduce their like ratio to 4%. (0.45 ^ 4 =0.04) Men are using only 2 criteria (face and body) to get to 25% like ratio: need 50th percentile on both: (0.5 ^ 2 = 0.25)
potato3732842 2y ago
If this doesn't all make perfect sense and square with your observations you're not jaded enough.
thr0w 2y ago
Funny thing is that when dating apps used to be "browse profiles, send message", nobody had to debate inner workings. Users could self select people of interest, send them a message directly, and know there'd be a very good chance that their profile/message would at least be seen. Issue today is that apps control visibility, both in terms of profiles and likes. I've tried Hinge a few times. Did like a 4 month initial stint that had me consistently matching/meeting very attractive women (ones in the standouts section), tried it again a year later under a paid plan and had one mediocre match in 2 weeks (same photos and profile). Skimmed the article so maybe this was addressed, but there's dark patterns happening on these apps, or faulty algos, or both.
- beeflet 2y ago
  I really dread the idea of having social media algorithms decide who gets to talk to who. This "browse profiles, send message" actually how I met my first boyfriend on /soc/!
  - carabiner 2y ago
    "/soc/" Now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time. A long time...
  - thr0w 2y ago
    > I really dread the idea of having social media algorithms decide who gets to talk to who. We're getting there, whether that's dating apps controlling your stack of faces one at a time, or even seemingly innocuous things like this site's opaque comment ranking system. These things happen by inches.
- smelendez 2y ago
  I think Hinge was better when it was new. Probably people who try a new, non-sleazy dating app early on are more serious about meeting someone and more active, so you get more and better matches. One problem I’ve realized lately is that a lot of people are on dating apps because they feel like they have to be to meet someone, but they don’t actually enjoy chatting online and may not even be very good at it. Apps probably have a stage when they have a high percentage of “online” people who are just better at texting and, for better at worse, on their phones more.
kazinator 2y ago
The qualities that women find attractive in men cannot be captured in a static profile on a website ... plus most of the men in that site are there because they don't have those qualities. Let's just say that if you can open your mouth enough to say hi to a woman without hesitation, you are completely wasting your time on dating sites.
- frangfarang 2y ago
  [dead]
- SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
  You're relying on outdated stereotypes. Online dating is the most common way new couples meet and has been for years.
- jameslk 2y ago
  If you’re good looking, you’re not going to be wasting time on apps These days, saying hi seems to be risky for more reasons than rejection. Maybe more so if you’re not good looking. Hence the apps
  - selectodude 2y ago
    Nonsense. Looking good on dating apps is like fishing with dynamite.
    - jameslk 2y ago
      We’re in agreement there. I think my wording was a bit confusing in my sentence (“not wasting time” as in apps will be hella effective)
  - mimentum 2y ago
    Can confirm as a good looking male, I slay on apps compared to my peers. However I believe it also boils down to personality traits too. Saying "Hi" isn't enough. One needs to be creative to stand out from the field. Women get absolutely swamped on the apps.
jumploops 2y ago
We built a dating app and saw these same metrics. Our "twist" was that anyone could be a matchmaker, pairing other people (in addition to our recommendation engine). An interesting thing happened: lot's of people just like using dating apps in a voyeuristic way, with no intention of dating. Tinder eventually launched this feature, but it fell flat. I still think there's merit to human-based recs over "AI" matchmakers.
- cmdtab 2y ago
  Have you done any research on the type of users who use dating apps primarily? The article is really good on the product decisions but light on what kind of life and situation these users have.
  - jumploops 2y ago
    This was over 10 years ago, but iirc the primary demographic was what you might expect: 20s to mid-30s living in urban areas, skewing lower on that spectrum. Our data was almost identical to the article, showing the same imbalances.
    - cmdtab 2y ago
      I don't mean the generic demographic categories but rather similarity in behavioural patterns. Were these people terminally online, more or less attractive on average, had rich social life?
- kylehotchkiss 2y ago
  That makes me think of the in-person introductions my older friends have tried to arrange for me. It was a thoughtful gesture but really not a lot of consideration of what I would consider attractive.
  - jumploops 2y ago
    Yeah the idea was that peers could help bolster match acceptance, both parties would still need to agree, which is much different than a blind date where you aren't interested, but have to still have to go through the in-person charade. Candidly, assuming your gender based on your username, it would have been a net positive compared to the stats ;)
artful314w 2y ago
I really appreciate the writer sharing their insights, but I wish they had asked someone (or an LLM) to proof read their writing.
- kdmtctl 2y ago
  I'm starting to love when text is not perfect. So genuine!)
qingcharles 2y ago
I worked in this space briefly. This is a really good article in line with the conclusion of the OK Cupid! team which were scrubbed from their web site but are in this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dataclysm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dataclysm If you're a guy and you want to depress yourself, find a female friend who is signed to a dating app and see all the likes and messages she gets. When I was in this space, an attractive woman was getting on the order of 1000 messages a day. 95% of those messages were one-worders, "hi", "wassup". Basically a total tsunami of garbage. LLMs are going to change this space enormously as they are going to act as your agent to talk to the other person's agent. The world of online dating is going to be horrible. I already know people who have dozens of verified female dating app profiles staffed by LLMs and overseas operators that they use to trick men into clicking links to generate revenue. Enshittification all round.
- derbOac 2y ago
  The OK Cupid blog was on my mind as I read it as well. The thing interesting about that blog was — if I remember it correctly — they posted results of initiations by men and women. That suggested there was kind of an optimal strategy for men and women, in that there was kind of mismatching going on in terms of who reached out to who. IIRC, they were suggesting that it was good for women to reach out to very attractive men, because men in general were not getting contacted, including attractive men, but were responsive to being contacted, and a woman could take advantage of that, even if they were less attractive themselves. Men in contrast would do better to reach out to women who were slightly less attractive, because most of mens' attention collectively was focused on a very small group of very attractive women, and the women who were less attractive, even slightly so, were getting contacted much less often. Typing this out I think the distributions were very different from in the current article, but also I think they were analyzing different things. In that they were looking at actual initiations, and in this they're looking at likes. Also this article breaks things down a bit more in terms of goals in using the app, which plays into things as well in a big way. The complexity of it all increases quite a bit very rapidly.
jameslk 2y ago
Retention is at odds with the goals of the users of dating apps. I wonder if there’s a more aligned system that charges for premium features when there’s inactivity. Or you can only use the app’s premium features again after some period of inactivity if you pay Inactivity serving as a potential signal that you found a match, or you’re no longer in the market. Although the incentive system would have to ensure the app isn’t aligned to make the experience so annoying you stop using it either
steveoscaro 2y ago
I paid for a lifetime membership to Bumble premium a couple years ago, but as I noticed matches/likes declining for no apparent reason, I made a 2nd account with different credentials, paid for a week of premium, and had a bunch of matches (exact same profile as my other account). From my anecdotal experience, they have some algorithm that leads to diminishing returns in order to keep extracting money for boosts or whatever.
- tekno45 2y ago
  sounds like you're swiping through people inyour area faster than they join?
  - steveoscaro 2y ago
    I'm a digital nomad and changing locations frequently, so I have actually tried this A/B test a couple times when arriving in a brand new city. Same results.
    - CSSer 2y ago
      The author pointed out in the article that users who join are shown to users who have been on the platform the longest and are thus more likely to provide likes because they are more desperate.
omegadjc1978 2y ago
Dating apps are scams. The developer is out to make money, which happens through subscription renewals. Profile visibility means nothing. Messages mean nothing. You can send message after message after message, but unless you have spent enough money or are onenof the lucky ones that the system allows through, your profile is not shown to anyone but bots. Want to test this? Remove your image from your profiles on social media and remove your last name (i use my middle name as my surname on facebook). The key is to remove your profile image. Set your privacy to maximum, so other images of you cannot be searched. Try talking with someone. With no way to profile you, the chat bots used by the dating apps cannot have a "conversation." You will never be matched, conversations will hit walls and go in circles or you get ghosted because the chat bot has no data to use. After your first renewal - after you have spent more money - then you may actually get to talk to a real person. No. Never again.
- eudhxhdhsb32 2y ago
  Your complaints are highly exaggerated. Anecdotal, but more than enough data to disprove your point, over the last 8 years I've used multiple dating apps, never paid a dime, and have been on somewhere around 400 first dates. I'd also add that my match rate with bots or scammers is very low, certainly under 10%.
  - gizajob 2y ago
    Are you still on dating apps? And was your initial intention to find an amazing gf, or just play the field? Not poking just curious.
    - eudhxhdhsb32 2y ago
      Yes, I just enjoy meeting new people, not looking for anything longterm other than maybe friends.
coolThingsFirst 2y ago
it's as trivial as it gets. simplest CRUD. issue is either we are ugly or dark patterns make dating sites unusable.
ggm 2y ago
The advice to boys/girls felt very real. And also, objectively not equal. Girl: lower your standards. Boy: pay a photographer to look nicer. This double disadvantages women as I see it: Their standards are held to be unrealistic (downpoint) and they have to incur the dissatisfaction of beleiving it, and acting on it to lower their expectations. AND Boys are expected to glam up and project a demonstrably less real state of themselves, to get over this bar. So women have to accept lies, and tolerate reality. (63, in a longterm 40y relationship, not using the apps and not judging individuals here)
- dash2 2y ago
  If the advice had been "Boys: lower your standards, girls: pay a photographer" I wonder if you'd have said "guys just get to be dawgs, women have to spend money to beautify themselves".
  - ggm 2y ago
    I very much might have. Everyone brings their own bias to the table. But, remember the asymmetry in this space is large. The asymmetry of risk, of expectations, of outcome. It doesn't go to what you project as a hypothetical, it goes to the one I responded to. If you can show me a dating app with the right dynamics to demand the response you hypothesized, we can see how the numbers pan out. The one we have, it's the other direction of bias in expectation and behaviour. Ask yourself why the asymmetry in hinge/bumble about who initiates contact exist. With no intent of doxxing your bio page here says you're a social scientist. I'd welcome an understanding of if the current praxis in your field suggests the kind of cultural bias I projected isn't widespread, and if your field views this as "anti men" because I certainly didn't mean it to be, I simply think there is an inherent asymmetry to who has to act, and how they act, in the recommendations from this author in this space, which appears backed by data.
    - dash2 2y ago
      My view is it's mostly human nature not cultural bias. Sex differences in mating are cross-cultural (Donald Buss has done a lot on this). Whether either side can be said to be "disadvantaged" is a bit of a hard one. Compared to what hypothetical, and what's the measure of disadvantage? Having to hire a photographer seems like a bigger disadvantage than just lowering your standards: it costs money.
dash2 2y ago
Turns out even highly motivated professionals don't understand that correlation is not causality: > For girls, it is the number of likes sent; the number of likes received has no impact on retention, maybe a little bit but less than 1%. The number of likes sent has a huge impact; a user that liked no profile in her 100 first scrolls has a d30 of 12%, and 19% for girls that like 10 profiles and 16% for girls that liked 5 profiles. The d1 retention is almost 100% correlated to a girl sending 5 likes to active guys in the first 24 hours (the real thing is to get a match, but it is easy to get a match when a girl sends 5 likes). So to have the perfect d1 retention for girls, the only thing you should focus on is to get them to send 5 likes. And you have about 100 scrolls to do so.
- wavemode 2y ago
  If you read the article, it is very clear that the author understands that this correlation is not causation. He points out numerous times that the thing which causes girls to send likes is that their feed contains attractive men.
  - dash2 2y ago
    My point was that they misunderstood that sending likes does not necessarily cause later user retention just because it correlates with it.
nitwit005 2y ago
> There is also face detection that is now pretty advanced and can detect the face of celebrities, people on social media. Which naturally results in celebrities and models getting blocked from signing up periodically.
jokoon 2y ago
To me, it reveals that women are not really interested in dating. Women go on app when they feel a bit sad, when they need to feel a bit better. People want to stay single. Introversion is on the rise.
- guerrilla 2y ago
  I don't think it says that. I think it confirms that they are extremely picky and that these apps amplify that, making things worse for everyone except the apps... which is the point, to make money, not hook people up with healthy lasting relationships. This is yet another externality of capitalism.
  - jokoon 2y ago
    To me, being extremely picky rhymes with not wanting a relationship. I live in france and somebody said on the radio that the state family fund (CAF) should organize dancing ball for people to meet. Maybe the core problem is that dating apps should not make money, or at least find another way to make money.
jokoon 2y ago
Funny how he concludes that men should pay. Sounds like this article is just astroturfing with some tech data.
KurSix 2y ago
These apps optimize for engagement, not meaningful connections
RobotToaster 2y ago
[dead]
RobotToaster 2y ago
Retention is a terrible metric for a dating app. The "perfect" dating app would have a 0% retention rate since the first person you meet would be your "ideal partner". It's tantamount to measuring a hospital's performance by it's retention rate.
- wudu 2y ago
  This is mentioned in the article: > I don't think retention is a good metric for a dating app, unfortunately that's how VC evaluate performance of B2C apps. When we think about dating it is more about quality than quantity.
- TrackerFF 2y ago
  For long-term relationships, yes. For the people that exclusively use them for hookups and similar, those will "always" be there.
- _the_inflator 2y ago
  That's not a business model. Creating opportunities to mate, not to therapy. ;) Managed Dissatisfaction, FOMO, Abundance: And the users want it. That's what the data shows. Proof: essentially, every app is a dating app covered up as "social features." Apple just entered the dating app market.
  - palmotea 2y ago
    > Managed Dissatisfaction, FOMO, Abundance: And the users want it. That's what the data shows Correction: the users don't "want" it, but many of them aren't strong or wise enough to resist those features. The (presumably usage) data can't show what the users want, only what they do, and those often aren't the same thing.
  - felurx 2y ago
    I think users "want" it the same way smokers "want" cigarettes.
- palmotea 2y ago
  > Retention is a terrible metric for a dating app. The "perfect" dating app would have a 0% retention rate since the first person you meet would be your "ideal partner". A terrible metric for the users. For the shareholders, the perfect dating app is one where the users are strung along for their whole lives, paying for a subscription but never finding anything permanent.
feverzsj 2y ago
Women are selective in their very nature, while men are competitive.
- cultofmetatron 2y ago
  yes and no. I've been to a few countries where beautiful women are everywhere and being pretty doesnt afford you as many advantages as it does in america. If you come in with education, a sense of integrity and can carry a conversation, girls can and do get competitive with each other for your attention.
fluffybeing 2y ago
Having to do the same conversation again and again is just tiresome.
h1fra 2y ago
It's funny because you can tell they barely discussed with actual girls: > they are used to receiving a lot of likes, so you have to show them they get liked They hate that, most girls registering on Tinder get 1000 likes in a week. > Dating fatigue is bullshit See last point > Having a profile doesn't impact the app experience That's what changed the game, nobody bothers on Tinder because it's not mandatory whereas it works very well on Hinge.
Stratoscope 2y ago
My best dating apps lately have been Trader Joe's and Ducky's Car Wash. I wear aloha shirts every day, and nearly every time I go to TJ's, someone asks me where they can find a particular item. It may be a guy or a gal, but I am always happy to help a neighbor find what they need. That is not the reason I wear aloha shirts. I just love these shirts! Every spring I get the Cooke Street shirts at Costco, one of each new pattern. One time at the Menlo Park Trader Joe's I was talking with the guy restocking the freezer section. He said, "Nice aloha shirt! I bet people sometimes think you work here." Sure enough, a minute later a young lady walked up to me and asked if we had organic bread. I walked her over to the bread section and pointed out the organic breads. Later I caught up with the freezer guy again and told him "you were right!" Ducky's, for those unfamiliar, is a car wash with several locations on the SF Peninsula. Even if you just get an exterior wash, after you go through the tunnel they hand dry your car. There is a waiting area outside with a dozen chairs, and it takes 5-10 minutes before your car is ready. And you never know who you might run into there! The key to this, of course, is to be outgoing and friendly, and open to surprises.
- top_coder 2y ago
  Ok I understood the Aloha shirt —> people thinking you’re a TJ employee —> asking for help connections. I feel there is quite a gap between here —-> getting a date. How does that work?
  - halfmatthalfcat 2y ago
    You start vibing and based on vibes you ask them whether you wanna grab coffee/a drink sometime soon, exchange numbers, smile and continue shopping.
    - Stratoscope 2y ago
      You got it! The other thing is to be open to any kind of friendly interaction. Just yesterday I was at the Redwood City TJ's and a guy asked me where to find soy milk. I wasn't as familiar with the layout of that store, but an actual crew member was standing near us, and I said "I'm not sure, but I think this gentleman can help you." After he got his soy milk we ran into each other again, and he said "I'm sorry, I was sure you worked here. The shirt!" I told him, "No apology needed! It happens all the time. And sometimes it's a nice young lady who asks me where to find something."
yieldcrv 2y ago
> most guys don't open the profiles of a girl, and girls open much more often but more for discarding a user than for looking for more information this is a factor of why it is a loosing strategy to do dinner, drinks and coffee dates first the user experience is an arduous interview that is reliant on a “spark” that leaves too much to chance secondly, the ask is for somewhere you can hear each other, “get to know each other”, and have one foot out the door easily to leave on the woman’s side…. its the same as this article is saying: for disqualifying, not qualifying. for the guys side, whatever your goal is, would be accomplished by disregarding the woman’s preference. in reality, she likely did go on a more elaborate and rambunctious date, generated endorphins (the spark), got more intimate than her risk models dictate, and then realized she didn't know the guy. if you want any of that to happen, be like the other guy it is optimal to be like the 5% guy that is closing with women. if you cannot replicate that on dating apps, you may be able to with other in person approaches and date ideas
xn--yt9h 2y ago
Thanks for this detailed post. While I think most are aware of the broad situation, it's impressive to read it all laid out like that. And whenever the author tried to make a statement about guys, the gist of it was "we don't know, it doesn't matter, boys will stick around". Made me chuckle.
wutwutwat 2y ago
Dating apps are nothing more than window shopping. The lowest effort, most shallow, unlimited options buffet of meat sacks to choose from. When you have unlimited options, and a potentially better one is just a swipe away, people become disposable. Fuck or not fuck. Hot or not. Bang or pass. Where in the past someone might tolerate an insignificant quirk someone has, nowadays such a thing is often all that it takes to ghost and keep looking. The users that get a lot of matches often put in zero effort into talking. They expect you to do all the conversation, and often act uninterested, if you ever get a reply after the match at all. Matching and never getting a reply after contact is more common than not, regardless of how much thought and time is put into the first message. Profiles often read more like a list of demands, a quota that must be reached before you'll even be considered worthy. This is true for all the genders. "Make me laugh" is a demand that I've seen on countless profiles. Entertain me monkey, make me laugh. So many "Make me laugh"s that I've started to wonder if most of the profiles I see are actually bot/scammer accounts, because so many of them have slight variations of the same exact profile bios. AI is only going to make that shit show worse, and I'm sure many people are already trying to wine and dine an AI profile and have no clue. Let's also not forget about the clear "looking for a greencard" mail order bride profiles, and the weird as fuck profiles where each picture has a child as the focus of every picture, very intentionally so, in a way that I can't quantify but when you run across them, it just feels off, weird, saying something without saying something. Dating apps are all exactly the same anymore. Same fake profiles. Same gamification of attraction that you have to pay to win or have to grind every day against those who do. Dating apps are not there to match people. That would put them out of business. They are there to extract funds from wallets while keeping you hopeful that your perfect 10 is one more premium teir up the chain, one more swipe away, one more billing cycle in the future.
- naveen99 2y ago
  Make me laugh is just a proxy for iq.
  - C0d3G4rd 2y ago
    Not being on the apps is a proxy for iq
ramoz 2y ago
> To me, if you are a guy on a dating app and your pictures are not taken by a professional photographer then you are losing your time, and if you are paying you are also throwing your money. Don't do this. You need good pictures that convey attractiveness (looks, as well as personality). Using professional photos conveys neediness & a level of desperation hidden under a shell of an ego the shot tries to portray. So you end up relying on looks with a handicap. A good looking person doesnt need professional shots to show that. Sure, if you currently have mirror selfies, professional shots are better. Otherwise - if you are not a model who has magazine-published shots you're including in your profile, then don't go use or pay for professional shots. Figure out how to take canned shots on your own or pay a photographer for canned real shots (nothing highly edited).
- mettamage 2y ago
  I optimized heavily on good photos. It worked for me, YMMV.
  - bombcar 2y ago
    This is the correct answer. Only do dating apps as a way to do A/B testing. ;)
- ebiester 2y ago
  Don't get a professional headshot, of course! But you absolutely should have someone who knows how to make you look as good as possible in a natural environment. You should also have a woman friend critically evaluate your profile. (If you don't have a friend you trust, you should first make sure you can make trusted friends with women who will tell you the truth.)
  - gizajob 2y ago
    There should be an app where you can find a woman friend to assess your pictures for a dating app.
    - 2y ago
plants 2y ago
> Recommendation of profiles that you may like is a solved technical challenge at Tinder level and at mostly any dating app today. It’s hard to take the rest of the article seriously after reading this!
- 383toast 2y ago
  They know what you like, but that doesn't mean they will show you those profiles. Their goal is to maximize revenue, not maximize users finding good matches.
  - stanford_labrat 2y ago
    And at some places like Hinge, they'll identify your type so well that your "standouts" page (the one you have to pay to message people on) will be composed of 100% people you would probably like to speak to while your free feed will just be composed of people you have no interest in talking to!
- metalliqaz 2y ago
  I disagree. "The algorithm" is understood by everyone in 2025 to be a more-or-less perfect attention hoarder. TikTok, Insta, YouTube, etc. have proven they can definitely surface the content that users will like. I see no reason why profiles would be different.
  - Fogest 2y ago
    They know what you like, but remember they want to make money. You finding success means you are probably less likely to get desperate and pay for premium options on their app. They drip feed you as little success as possible to still keep you on the app, but make you desperate. It sucks, but a dating app doesn't want you successful, they want you to use their app for as long as possible.
- pgwhalen 2y ago
  I also had that reaction, but I kept reading and it was worth it. They mean it in a very narrow sense, and talk about the nuances and challenges of practical recommendation for much of the rest of the article.
Workaccount2 2y ago
The data here falls in line with the infamous OKcupid study (which got cancelled and taken down because men and women are identical, donchaknow?) The takeaway is that humans best date by meeting people in person through mutual acquaintances. Without the forced direct social interaction, women are only interested in the top 10% of guys, and guys are just aimlessly running at anything that moves regardless of their actual interest (i.e. liking and seeking sex from women they have no real interest in dating). Guys end up with no likes and no dates and women end up with mountains of disingenuous likes and dates with disingenuous men.
- brazzy 2y ago
  Men are dying of thirst in the desert and women are dying of thirst in the ocean. (not my analogy, but IMO very succinct)
  - lifestyleguru 2y ago
    More like dying of thirst in lake Baikal, if the analogy meant abundance of choice. Desert and ocean both contain no drinkable water.
    - nemomarx 2y ago
      the implication is that they have a lot of water but it's unpalatable or toxic most of the time and needs filtering I think - easy matches but most of them bad?
      - lifestyleguru 2y ago
        Most men are insane from frustration, not unpalatable or toxic.
        saagarjha 2y ago
        People generally do not want to have an insane, frustrated partner.
bongoman42 2y ago
Interesting data in the article though nothing unexpected for people who follow this space. Some notable points: > The other thing that interests you is the like ratio, or the openness, among 100 profiles that the user sees, how many of them does he like? (The median for men is 26% and for women is 4%.) >The like ratio of a girl is almost independent of the profiles she sees. For example, if a girl has a like ratio of 5% and you remove 50% of the profiles, even if you remove only the profiles she will not like, her like ratio will still be 5% (you can do that by removing very unattractive people for a guy that is very attractive, for example). It is funny to observe, but it seems like a girl has internal reasoning on a dating app, and they know they can only like x% of profiles whatever she sees (of course, it doesn't work if you show only ugly people). And lastly: >Whats interesting is that the more attractive the guys were ranked by girls the more they were looking for something not serious.
- marinmania 2y ago
  I have a theory for the swiping behavior of women. When they swipe right, it will most likely be a match, and they mentally don't want more than X active conversations at a time. This strikes me as rational and reasonable. For men, most swipes will not be a match, so less reason to ever think about swiping left to maintain a certain swipe pecentage. Just a theory!
  - mettamage 2y ago
    > they mentally don't want more than X active conversations at a time This is true. My cap was at 50 conversations at the same time. After that, my brain got fried (male here).
    - rqtwteye 2y ago
      My cap was maybe 5. Seems I have less capacity.
      - mettamage 2y ago
        To be fair, I was crazily driven and treated it like a job. Intimacy is crazy important to me Edit: interesting that I got at least 3 downvotes for that comment. I don't mind, genuinely. It's just interesting. Different world views and all that
the_sleaze_ 2y ago
There is a truly fascinating talk by a data scientist who "hacked" the "algorithm" of a dating site and became the most matched person in californina. Highly recommended. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJod9kRYyao https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJod9kRYyao
- mettamage 2y ago
  Yea, hacker mindset is what I applied with Tinder. It worked wonders, went from 1 to 100 matches per month. I feel like having a hacker mindset with dating in general works wonders. Oh, and not having social anxiety of course. It took a long time to not have that.
  - throwaway314155 2y ago
    Sorry but if I ever start growth hacking my fucking tinder profile promptly push me off a cliff. edit: Sorry for the inflammatory language. Not one of my finer moments.
    - mettamage 2y ago
      I get it man. A part of me feels the same way. The practical part of me however decided just to get on with it Online dating is toxic, and I fought it back with toxic and somehow through all of that I found my dream wife and I tol her all about what I did. She agreed that what I did was toxic, but that there's a "the means justify the end" ethics at play since we found each other With that said: I don't think the dating scene should work this way. It's too much based on being photogenic and having beautiful looks. And this comes from someone who knows the ins and outs of training charisma and finding a potential partner that way (still possible but not in the initial steps of online dating)
    - yieldcrv 2y ago
      This is what your competition has been doing for a decade Just leave the app if you don't want to participate Guys have to behave like attractive women do, which is discerning and the opposite of how guys use the apps, OP’s article gives the rubric
allenbina 2y ago
I'm not going to go into details as I don't want to create a throwaway account for HN, but I can attribute a lot of people's feelings in dating apps to a few things. I got an email from Bumble a few years ago that said I was in the top x percent of people swiped on. If you try to brute force stats your way to dating apps, you will fail.... to some extent. A lot of this comes down to looks that you can control, and looks that you cannot control. Some people are born better looking than others and when you spend less than a second filtering people, the first factor you use is looks. That said, not everyone is looking for the same qualities so ymmv, but better looking people find dating apps much easier. Throwing money at apps works. I'm not going to go into details because my opinion is not based on anything other than my opinion, but I found that the more I spent on the apps, the more dates I would get. Modern dating when compared to traditional dating offline is not even the same thing. Ghosting and talking romantically to multiple people is normal. You can't let yourself get emotionally attached to anyone until you actually know them or expect anything from them. I've heard horror stories from both men and women from online dating, and I've only had great exeriences from it. Some people find me attractive, and at the time I was very active and fit, so I usually got past the swipe test. I'm honest with myself and ok with my flaws. I'm also comfortable in social situations which helps me talk to new people. I think crunching the numbers in this style only looks at a binary 'reality' of dating apps and not what you can do to help yourself and other factors that can lead you to what you ultimately want from partnership, or relationships or physical comfort or whatever else lead you to online dating.
- semitones 2y ago
  > I got an email from Bumble a few years ago that said I was in the top x percent of people swiped on. Was this humble brag relevant to the rest of your point?
- ge96 2y ago
  What sucks nowadays is picture filters can't tell what's real I guess until you meet them
- mettamage 2y ago
  6 out of 10 male here (on looks), if that. Got about 300 matches, because I understand social systems and have a hacker mindset. Ultimately, met my wife after 30 dates. Didn't expect that. > Throwing money at apps works. I'm not going to go into details because my opinion is not based on anything other than my opinion, but I found that the more I spent on the apps, the more dates I would get. I've experienced that too. > Modern dating when compared to traditional dating offline is not even the same thing. Ghosting and talking romantically to multiple people is normal. You can't let yourself get emotionally attached to anyone until you actually know them or expect anything from them. Similar experience.
PaulHoule 2y ago
A great article that elicited a lot of thoughts. (1) I used to make those kind of non-informative scatter plots with xvgr when I was a grad student, this package does a great job for those kind of cases https://seaborn.pydata.org/generated/seaborn.relplot.html https://seaborn.pydata.org/generated/seaborn.relplot.html even if you don't use it you can copy its patterns to make designs that work (2) An obvious commercial offering for guys is a photography package. About 20 years ago I went to the biggest photog in my town and my publisher paid $100 for a headshot that was just a junior photog in the studio. If you were a bride you would get premium hair and makeup to go with your photography, even if you were appearing on TV you would probably get a little hair and makeup help. (3) With the right choice architecture you could control things such as "the percentage of people that you like" or "the number of likes that you receive". For instance if you were going just on looks it would be easy to show people a stack of 10 photos and have them sort them in attractiveness; you could also show pairs of profiles and pick an ELO for each one. If you look at it as a relative ranking process you can peel off whatever percentage off the top that you want. An obvious objection is that given such a choice the "hot" people will be the only ones that get chosen but a counter to that is that you can put an upper limit on how many "likes" somebody gets by not showing them to people. This contradicts some things he says later on about things that help the apps retain people, but from the viewpoint of making an app that "works", girls who are looking for commitment really aren't benefiting from seeing profiles from hot guys who get a lot of attention and provide nothing but casual sex.
- lmm 2y ago
  > from the viewpoint of making an app that "works", girls who are looking for commitment really aren't benefiting from seeing profiles from hot guys who get a lot of attention and provide nothing but casual sex. Well, sure, but you can lead a horse to water... . The less hot guys might be better options for those girls, but are they going to swipe on them? If you stop showing them the hot guys, will they stick around for the less hot guys or just switch to a different app?
underyx 2y ago
This is such a detailed article but it's giving me weird vibes. For instance there are all these drops to near-zero in the histograms at .28, .46, .56 for no clear reason, and the article doesn't even consider that noteworthy. The "Men Like ratio (y) vs ratio (x)" has an inexplicable wall around .33 which I could only explain with some sort of product limitation maybe? But I really wish it was explained what artifacts the product introduces.
- carabiner 2y ago
  Definitely points to some rounding error, aliasing in the data. It would be fixed by making the buckets larger. No reason for the buckets to be that small.
  - levocardia 2y ago
    Or just use a kernel density plot, goodness.
- edflsafoiewq 2y ago
  Since there's a spike followed by a drop, it seems like some of the data points are "misattributed" to the neighboring bucket. Since it happens at the same place in each graph (eg a spike at 0.28-0.29, followed by a drop at 0.29-0.30) I wonder if it's some kind of number-theoretic effect from the fact it's actually a ratio of integers. For example, with less than 20 views there's no way to get to the 0.29-0.30 bucket, but 4 ways to get into the 0.28-0.29 bucket. Hmm. Also notable that 0.56 is exactly twice 0.28.
impure 2y ago
I definitely noticed I was using the apps more for entertainment than for dating. Which is why I stopped using them.
- switch007 2y ago
  Agree. People are addicted to the dopamine hit of matches and message pings. I'm a pretty good judge now of whether someone is just bored at working passing time on the apps or whether they're serious about meeting. Oh and all the time wasters get really shirty if you call them out on it, so I stopped doing that long ago
imtringued 2y ago
I'm pretty sure the first four graphs alone already prove that dating apps don't work. Dating apps are supposed to match people, but desire to match up is very lopsided towards one gender, with the other gender having very little desire to match up. Having unrealistic expectations is one thing. Being the monkey paw that fulfills those wishes is on a wholly different level.
- potato3732842 2y ago
  They sure make money though.
jameslk 2y ago
> The likelihood to like and exchange inside homosexual groups is much higher than in heterosexual ones. > The like ratio of a girl is almost independent of the profiles she sees. For example, if a girl has a like ratio of 5% and you remove 50% of the profiles, even if you remove only the profiles she will not like, her like ratio will still be 5% These two statements sound like they would be at odds. It seems either the first statement is incorrect or women on dating apps are more choosy when it comes to men only. I’d be curious how the stats play out on lesbian dating apps
- nemomarx 2y ago
  Only at odds if you assume the behavior is gendered and not a response or effect of the dating community in general - homosexual sub communities could have lots of community effects that change this up, just like heterosexual communities differ.
  - thaumasiotes 2y ago
    Another assumption that doesn't really work is that there must be equal numbers of male and female homosexual groups. Assuming that male and female behavior doesn't change regardless of the partner they're seeking, it will still be true that the more groups are gay, the higher the acceptance rate will be, and it will also be true that gays are more interested in forming these groups than lesbians are.
- surfpel 2y ago
  > I will mostly ignore homosexual interactions.
- naveen99 2y ago
  Lesbian numbers are negligible. Pursuing women is a sport dominated by men. Even Trump won’t ban men (trans or not) from pursuing lesbian women.
bradlys 2y ago
> More than 50% of men just never receive a like, and never means maybe 2 or 3 likes in the lifespan of several weeks As someone in that more than 50%, it’s very annoying to constantly get told to get on the apps to meet women. I’m surrounded by men in the top 20% because I’m affluent, well educated, and spend a lot of time at the gym. Sadly, I’m just around these people and wasn’t born into the same kind of family. I’m an outsider. I was born poor and ugly. I’ve solved the poor thing but being ugly is incurable. I’m going to Beverley hills next week and getting more surgery to try to alleviate the ugliness but it’s pathetic what a man in his mid-30’s has to do now to even get a single like back on his profile. Women don’t need men anymore in the developed world. Men are luxury goods and women are completely happy to live without. A man isn’t needed but merely wanted and only wanted if he fits a very particular set of criteria.
- jfengel 2y ago
  Out of curiosity... what does "ugly" mean? Is it deformed, or just not conforming to a cultural beauty standard?
  - bradlys 2y ago
    Ugly by most standards is simply not being desired by anyone. You don't have to be an acid victim like two-face to be ugly. I'd say someone is definitely ugly if you swipe on a few hundred average looking people and get zero matches back. That's ugly.
    - jfengel 2y ago
      Understood. Thank you.
    - j1elo 2y ago
      > if you swipe on a few hundred average looking people and get zero matches back. That's ugly. What's ugly is using an anemometer to measure a distance. I mean, using number of matches in a dating app, to measure uglyness. Dating apps are products designed by psychologist and built by engineers to generate frustration and make people pay, not to serve as a measurement stick of the average person's attractiveness. Dating apps are utterly broken. Don't do that to yourself, or to anyone. Meeting women in the Real World through common acquaintances. That's where the moat is.
jamesbond009 2y ago
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jamesbond009 2y ago
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425 points by polote 2y ago

There are a lot of dating apps out there with very different audiences. I think the mistake made here is generalizing the conclusions for all these apps. Women date differently than men. And not always with men. Or only with certain types of men.

lifestyleguru 2y ago

What I hate about Tinder is that it has become the only way to find woman for sex and for relationship, even if with miserable probabilities. Even in my tiny non English speaking country. The man has to pay for the app. Women ending up on Tinder loathe how despicable the app is ("looking for a pearl in this cesspool", "don't believe I ended up here" etc.) while somehow don't notice that they make this place this way.

jwagenet 2y ago
While men having to pay is potentially no fun, I think it is definitely men that “make this place this way”. Men act entitled to whatever woman they find attractive. They accordingly act aggressively, don’t respect boundaries both on and offline, and frequently lie about themselves and their intentions to get the girl. Men should take a note from women and be more picky before they pursue (and stop when told no).

gwern 2y ago

Any idea which dating app Paul Gonsolin is talking about here? This is a lot of data.

383toast 2y ago
it's probably a small niche one, he graciously provides y-vals in his graphs, so ~20k women and ~60k men (from rough counting)
trashface 2y ago
The image of profile pictures mid way through the article has a "Jubilee" water mark, and that name appears to associated with a dating app called "Nectar"
- polote 2y ago
  Bad guess :)

thomasfromcdnjs 2y ago

This is really really cool insights into the industry and consumer behavior in general. Going to save it to my google docs so I never lose it.

parliament32 2y ago

My anecdotal user-end data-science-ish story about dating apps: A few years back I was single and on Hinge a fair amount. If you used Hinge back then, you'll remember some key differences between the platform and other dating apps: 1) when you "like"'d someone, you'd have to comment on a specific part of their profile (a photo, a prompt answer, etc), 2) these likes showed up in their inbox, independent of whether they liked you or not (as in, you didn't have to like each other mutually; the other end decided whether to reply or ignore after delivery), and 3) there was limit per day, you could like/message 8 profiles per day, no more. On average, swiping through my 8 per day, I'd generally get 1-2 new replies, which turned roughly into 3-4 first dates per month. One of the key elements is that the inbox was time-ordered: the most recent like you received was at the top. There was discussion on the Hinge subreddit about how girls would typically only click through the top few items in their inbox daily, and if you were lower down, you were doomed to drown under the mountain of new message they're getting on top. So I figured I'd solve for "what is the optimal time of day to be blasting out my likes to ensure I end up higher in the inbox?" You can probably see where this is going: I requested a GDPR data export, which happened to have all my conversations, time-stamped. Crunching through in Python there was something in the data I didn't really expect.. a disproportionate number of first-replies (replies to my initial like/message, that is) were around the 2-3pm bucket. Not what I would've expected (don't these people work?) but fair enough, I started doing all my swiping in those hours instead of in the evening as I usually did. And it worked. Good god did it work. I consistently started getting replies to 70-80% of my initial messages (from the ~10% before). I was drowning in conversations to the point where I wouldn't swipe at all for days for fear of yet another conversation to manage. Within a few months I ended up meeting my current girlfriend and haven't been back on since, but it was surprising how well something simple like time-of-day affected my reply rate.

65 2y ago
This is the spirit of Hacker News. Now this is hacking!
Horffupolde 2y ago
https://xkcd.com/196/ https://xkcd.com/196/

carabiner 2y ago

He ends with a very interesting proposition to "fix" dating apps: > To me, the next revolution is really concepts that will make you meet other people without having much information about them. As a user, you will trust the algorithm to match you with the right people. And these concepts will be paying only > So to summarize, a concept where users pay and commit that they will meet people without knowing them before. So yes, it will take a few dates to really find someone that you like, but so is going every day in dating apps and meeting people that you don't like either. This is very close to the Dutch app Breeze: https://breeze.social/ https://breeze.social/. There's no chatting in the app. It's focused on meeting people as soon as possible. People pre-pay for dates (covers drinks) and the app partners with venues to check on the couples (they know their names). People who cancel dates get a badge on their profile saying that they have canceled. Ghosters get banned.

bradlys 2y ago
Breeze arguably is even more superficial than other apps. You don’t get the chance to talk or anything. You have to show up and make it work. For most women, you’re only going to do that with a guy you’re 100% physically attracted to from the get go. I wouldn’t recommend Breeze to any men who aren’t above average in looks. It will also quickly stop showing you people when you’re getting rejected a lot. An interesting aspect of the app. At least you’ll know where you stand after about a week or two. (Getting only 3 options a day says that it thinks you’re not going to ever get a match) Breeze is in NYC now. So, it’s making way into the US slowly.
- carabiner 2y ago
  Thanks. These are really good points.

everybodyknows 2y ago

> ELO score What does ELO stand for?

383toast 2y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system

James_K 2y ago

> Guys that the girls think she wants to see but she will never like Brutal.

James_K 2y ago

> Among girls : 10% where lesbian, 84% were hetero and 12 % were interested in both genders > Among guys: 7% homo, 92% hetero and almost none were interested in both genders That's insane.

nemomarx 2y ago
I've heard that listing you're bi is considered a red flag on a guy's profile? maybe people are hiding it
- guerrilla 2y ago
  Yes, I hide it. Based on surveys, it lowers your chances. No reason to play fair there when things are bad enough as they are.
TZubiri 2y ago
Possibly all the gays are going to gay specific apps like grindr
bitwize 2y ago
It tracks, actually. Men tend to pick a sexual orientation and be disgusted by the other sexual orientation[0]. Women are a lot more hetero- (and homo-) flexible. [0] It works both ways! A guy once told me and my wife that we made a cute couple despite how disgusting heterosexuality really was. And I was like... okay, thanks?
- scarface_74 2y ago
  Not completely true. Most men are not disgusted by a lesbian couple. I don’t mean just men that fetishize about it. But many are disgusted or at least discomforted by seeing gay men being romantic. Thought experiment: if a wife in a heterosexual marriage told her husband that she previously had relationships with women, I know many men (including me) who would just shrug and move on and not really think about it. On the other hand, a man couldn’t just tell his wife most of the time that he slept with men before

nixpulvis 2y ago

Label your fucking axes!

pimlottc 2y ago
Yes, and give them meaningful titles too. I think sometimes "men" means "performance of male profiles" and at other times it means "behavior of male users"? It's not really clear. This data looks interesting but I'm not really sure what I'm looking at.

yosito 2y ago

> Can Dating apps be fixed? > What I meant by "fixed", is an app where: > It is possible for someone to reach out to anyone and get an answer, and discussion can be interesting from the start (at least as much as in real life) > Your looks, how you behave, the tone of your voice,... reflect what you look like in real life > It is easier to meet new people than attending local events > I don't think it can Well, as long as the metrics app builders are optimizing for are "retention" and "monetization", like this post obsesses over, and the people building the apps continue to refer to women as "girls", like they've never had a relationship with an adult woman, then I agree, dating apps are going to continue their process of enshittification.

bawolff 2y ago

Equal parts fascinating and dystopian. I'm even more convinced now that online dating has reached a local optima, but eventually someone is going to find a solution that is less shallow and predatory and blow it out of the water.

mindwok 2y ago
I’m more cynical. Dating apps are easy, and entertaining. Finding a good person to spend your life (or a prolonged period) with is hard. I’m not sure there is an external solution to this in the world we live in - it’s like getting fit. People need to suck it up and put in the work if they want results.
- bawolff 2y ago
  My understanding is that dating apps just let you meet people. What you do after that and how much effort you put in is up to you.
- thatguy0900 2y ago
  Picking that example when we're entering into the ozempic era is brave
  - mindwok 2y ago
    Hahaha I did think of that. Unfortunately as much as it helps, it won’t give you gains.
ketzo 2y ago
I think they’re pretty close to global max on “relationship-flavored entertainment app for single adults” Optima for “stable-relationship-forming app” are yet to be discovered — and also, I think, to really be sought at all
- lowdest 2y ago
  OKCupid was doing pretty well at this until they were acquired.

TZubiri 2y ago

Has anyone noticed that the histograms have some spikes and valleys that are probably artifacts? My guess is that there's some rounding or floating point shannanigans going on. Yes this is what I have to contribute to the conversation, I cannot speak to the dating dynamics as I am an unexpert on that subject

csours 2y ago
Yes this bugged me too
Terr_ 2y ago
There's definitely something going on there that needs review or explanation. If it's not an error, perhaps it involves something where once your profile approaches certain cutoffs for liked/viewed ratio, the system changes how (and to whom) it presents your profile... Except the higher and lower outliers are not always adjacent either.

sonofhans 2y ago

> You would need to be a pro at user interviews to really get interesting feedback. (Well maybe this is the norm in B2C but at the end of the day user interviews were of no help). This shouldn’t be surprising. Interviewing humans is a skill. Doing so in a product context, and learning useful things from it, is not easy. I hope they don’t approach other things this way. “You’d need to be a professional plumber to stop water leaking out of this. Maybe that’s the norm but at the end of the day plumbing was no help.”

HPsquared 2y ago
"The trouble with market research is that people don't think what they feel, they don't say what they think and they don't do what they say."
- sonofhans 2y ago
  Market research and observational/UX research are not the same. Market research looks for trends in bulk; UX research looks for individual actions and preferences. The difference is important, and it’s lost on the article’s author. In UX research you don’t ask people what they want or what they like, you (e.g.) put them in front of software/prototypes, give them tasks, and watch them work. What you learn in this context is _why_ people do things; it’s hard to get that from metrics. You also don’t get new product ideas from customers. There are aphorisms 100 hundred years old about that which everyone should know: “If I asked my customers what they wanted they would have said, ‘A faster horse.’”

nicebyte 2y ago

I already knew a lot of what was written here but for some reason reading this made me uninstall bumble.

philipwhiuk 2y ago

> More than 50% of men just never receive a like, and never means maybe 2 or 3 likes in the lifespan of several weeks Half the user base are patsies is basically the fundamental design.

naveen99 2y ago
Math checks out: if women use 4 criteria (face, body, money, iq) with a strict cutoff of even 55th percentile, they will reduce their like ratio to 4%. (0.45 ^ 4 =0.04) Men are using only 2 criteria (face and body) to get to 25% like ratio: need 50th percentile on both: (0.5 ^ 2 = 0.25)

potato3732842 2y ago

If this doesn't all make perfect sense and square with your observations you're not jaded enough.

thr0w 2y ago

Funny thing is that when dating apps used to be "browse profiles, send message", nobody had to debate inner workings. Users could self select people of interest, send them a message directly, and know there'd be a very good chance that their profile/message would at least be seen. Issue today is that apps control visibility, both in terms of profiles and likes. I've tried Hinge a few times. Did like a 4 month initial stint that had me consistently matching/meeting very attractive women (ones in the standouts section), tried it again a year later under a paid plan and had one mediocre match in 2 weeks (same photos and profile). Skimmed the article so maybe this was addressed, but there's dark patterns happening on these apps, or faulty algos, or both.

beeflet 2y ago
I really dread the idea of having social media algorithms decide who gets to talk to who. This "browse profiles, send message" actually how I met my first boyfriend on /soc/!
- carabiner 2y ago
  "/soc/" Now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time. A long time...
- thr0w 2y ago
  > I really dread the idea of having social media algorithms decide who gets to talk to who. We're getting there, whether that's dating apps controlling your stack of faces one at a time, or even seemingly innocuous things like this site's opaque comment ranking system. These things happen by inches.
smelendez 2y ago
I think Hinge was better when it was new. Probably people who try a new, non-sleazy dating app early on are more serious about meeting someone and more active, so you get more and better matches. One problem I’ve realized lately is that a lot of people are on dating apps because they feel like they have to be to meet someone, but they don’t actually enjoy chatting online and may not even be very good at it. Apps probably have a stage when they have a high percentage of “online” people who are just better at texting and, for better at worse, on their phones more.

kazinator 2y ago

The qualities that women find attractive in men cannot be captured in a static profile on a website ... plus most of the men in that site are there because they don't have those qualities. Let's just say that if you can open your mouth enough to say hi to a woman without hesitation, you are completely wasting your time on dating sites.

frangfarang 2y ago
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SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
You're relying on outdated stereotypes. Online dating is the most common way new couples meet and has been for years.
jameslk 2y ago
If you’re good looking, you’re not going to be wasting time on apps These days, saying hi seems to be risky for more reasons than rejection. Maybe more so if you’re not good looking. Hence the apps
- selectodude 2y ago
  Nonsense. Looking good on dating apps is like fishing with dynamite.
  - jameslk 2y ago
    We’re in agreement there. I think my wording was a bit confusing in my sentence (“not wasting time” as in apps will be hella effective)
- mimentum 2y ago
  Can confirm as a good looking male, I slay on apps compared to my peers. However I believe it also boils down to personality traits too. Saying "Hi" isn't enough. One needs to be creative to stand out from the field. Women get absolutely swamped on the apps.

jumploops 2y ago

We built a dating app and saw these same metrics. Our "twist" was that anyone could be a matchmaker, pairing other people (in addition to our recommendation engine). An interesting thing happened: lot's of people just like using dating apps in a voyeuristic way, with no intention of dating. Tinder eventually launched this feature, but it fell flat. I still think there's merit to human-based recs over "AI" matchmakers.

cmdtab 2y ago
Have you done any research on the type of users who use dating apps primarily? The article is really good on the product decisions but light on what kind of life and situation these users have.
- jumploops 2y ago
  This was over 10 years ago, but iirc the primary demographic was what you might expect: 20s to mid-30s living in urban areas, skewing lower on that spectrum. Our data was almost identical to the article, showing the same imbalances.
  - cmdtab 2y ago
    I don't mean the generic demographic categories but rather similarity in behavioural patterns. Were these people terminally online, more or less attractive on average, had rich social life?
kylehotchkiss 2y ago
That makes me think of the in-person introductions my older friends have tried to arrange for me. It was a thoughtful gesture but really not a lot of consideration of what I would consider attractive.
- jumploops 2y ago
  Yeah the idea was that peers could help bolster match acceptance, both parties would still need to agree, which is much different than a blind date where you aren't interested, but have to still have to go through the in-person charade. Candidly, assuming your gender based on your username, it would have been a net positive compared to the stats ;)

artful314w 2y ago

I really appreciate the writer sharing their insights, but I wish they had asked someone (or an LLM) to proof read their writing.

kdmtctl 2y ago
I'm starting to love when text is not perfect. So genuine!)

qingcharles 2y ago

I worked in this space briefly. This is a really good article in line with the conclusion of the OK Cupid! team which were scrubbed from their web site but are in this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dataclysm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dataclysm If you're a guy and you want to depress yourself, find a female friend who is signed to a dating app and see all the likes and messages she gets. When I was in this space, an attractive woman was getting on the order of 1000 messages a day. 95% of those messages were one-worders, "hi", "wassup". Basically a total tsunami of garbage. LLMs are going to change this space enormously as they are going to act as your agent to talk to the other person's agent. The world of online dating is going to be horrible. I already know people who have dozens of verified female dating app profiles staffed by LLMs and overseas operators that they use to trick men into clicking links to generate revenue. Enshittification all round.

derbOac 2y ago
The OK Cupid blog was on my mind as I read it as well. The thing interesting about that blog was — if I remember it correctly — they posted results of initiations by men and women. That suggested there was kind of an optimal strategy for men and women, in that there was kind of mismatching going on in terms of who reached out to who. IIRC, they were suggesting that it was good for women to reach out to very attractive men, because men in general were not getting contacted, including attractive men, but were responsive to being contacted, and a woman could take advantage of that, even if they were less attractive themselves. Men in contrast would do better to reach out to women who were slightly less attractive, because most of mens' attention collectively was focused on a very small group of very attractive women, and the women who were less attractive, even slightly so, were getting contacted much less often. Typing this out I think the distributions were very different from in the current article, but also I think they were analyzing different things. In that they were looking at actual initiations, and in this they're looking at likes. Also this article breaks things down a bit more in terms of goals in using the app, which plays into things as well in a big way. The complexity of it all increases quite a bit very rapidly.

jameslk 2y ago

Retention is at odds with the goals of the users of dating apps. I wonder if there’s a more aligned system that charges for premium features when there’s inactivity. Or you can only use the app’s premium features again after some period of inactivity if you pay Inactivity serving as a potential signal that you found a match, or you’re no longer in the market. Although the incentive system would have to ensure the app isn’t aligned to make the experience so annoying you stop using it either

steveoscaro 2y ago

I paid for a lifetime membership to Bumble premium a couple years ago, but as I noticed matches/likes declining for no apparent reason, I made a 2nd account with different credentials, paid for a week of premium, and had a bunch of matches (exact same profile as my other account). From my anecdotal experience, they have some algorithm that leads to diminishing returns in order to keep extracting money for boosts or whatever.

tekno45 2y ago
sounds like you're swiping through people inyour area faster than they join?
- steveoscaro 2y ago
  I'm a digital nomad and changing locations frequently, so I have actually tried this A/B test a couple times when arriving in a brand new city. Same results.
  - CSSer 2y ago
    The author pointed out in the article that users who join are shown to users who have been on the platform the longest and are thus more likely to provide likes because they are more desperate.

omegadjc1978 2y ago

Dating apps are scams. The developer is out to make money, which happens through subscription renewals. Profile visibility means nothing. Messages mean nothing. You can send message after message after message, but unless you have spent enough money or are onenof the lucky ones that the system allows through, your profile is not shown to anyone but bots. Want to test this? Remove your image from your profiles on social media and remove your last name (i use my middle name as my surname on facebook). The key is to remove your profile image. Set your privacy to maximum, so other images of you cannot be searched. Try talking with someone. With no way to profile you, the chat bots used by the dating apps cannot have a "conversation." You will never be matched, conversations will hit walls and go in circles or you get ghosted because the chat bot has no data to use. After your first renewal - after you have spent more money - then you may actually get to talk to a real person. No. Never again.

eudhxhdhsb32 2y ago
Your complaints are highly exaggerated. Anecdotal, but more than enough data to disprove your point, over the last 8 years I've used multiple dating apps, never paid a dime, and have been on somewhere around 400 first dates. I'd also add that my match rate with bots or scammers is very low, certainly under 10%.
- gizajob 2y ago
  Are you still on dating apps? And was your initial intention to find an amazing gf, or just play the field? Not poking just curious.
  - eudhxhdhsb32 2y ago
    Yes, I just enjoy meeting new people, not looking for anything longterm other than maybe friends.

coolThingsFirst 2y ago

it's as trivial as it gets. simplest CRUD. issue is either we are ugly or dark patterns make dating sites unusable.

ggm 2y ago

The advice to boys/girls felt very real. And also, objectively not equal. Girl: lower your standards. Boy: pay a photographer to look nicer. This double disadvantages women as I see it: Their standards are held to be unrealistic (downpoint) and they have to incur the dissatisfaction of beleiving it, and acting on it to lower their expectations. AND Boys are expected to glam up and project a demonstrably less real state of themselves, to get over this bar. So women have to accept lies, and tolerate reality. (63, in a longterm 40y relationship, not using the apps and not judging individuals here)

dash2 2y ago
If the advice had been "Boys: lower your standards, girls: pay a photographer" I wonder if you'd have said "guys just get to be dawgs, women have to spend money to beautify themselves".
- ggm 2y ago
  I very much might have. Everyone brings their own bias to the table. But, remember the asymmetry in this space is large. The asymmetry of risk, of expectations, of outcome. It doesn't go to what you project as a hypothetical, it goes to the one I responded to. If you can show me a dating app with the right dynamics to demand the response you hypothesized, we can see how the numbers pan out. The one we have, it's the other direction of bias in expectation and behaviour. Ask yourself why the asymmetry in hinge/bumble about who initiates contact exist. With no intent of doxxing your bio page here says you're a social scientist. I'd welcome an understanding of if the current praxis in your field suggests the kind of cultural bias I projected isn't widespread, and if your field views this as "anti men" because I certainly didn't mean it to be, I simply think there is an inherent asymmetry to who has to act, and how they act, in the recommendations from this author in this space, which appears backed by data.
  - dash2 2y ago
    My view is it's mostly human nature not cultural bias. Sex differences in mating are cross-cultural (Donald Buss has done a lot on this). Whether either side can be said to be "disadvantaged" is a bit of a hard one. Compared to what hypothetical, and what's the measure of disadvantage? Having to hire a photographer seems like a bigger disadvantage than just lowering your standards: it costs money.

dash2 2y ago

Turns out even highly motivated professionals don't understand that correlation is not causality: > For girls, it is the number of likes sent; the number of likes received has no impact on retention, maybe a little bit but less than 1%. The number of likes sent has a huge impact; a user that liked no profile in her 100 first scrolls has a d30 of 12%, and 19% for girls that like 10 profiles and 16% for girls that liked 5 profiles. The d1 retention is almost 100% correlated to a girl sending 5 likes to active guys in the first 24 hours (the real thing is to get a match, but it is easy to get a match when a girl sends 5 likes). So to have the perfect d1 retention for girls, the only thing you should focus on is to get them to send 5 likes. And you have about 100 scrolls to do so.

wavemode 2y ago
If you read the article, it is very clear that the author understands that this correlation is not causation. He points out numerous times that the thing which causes girls to send likes is that their feed contains attractive men.
- dash2 2y ago
  My point was that they misunderstood that sending likes does not necessarily cause later user retention just because it correlates with it.

nitwit005 2y ago

> There is also face detection that is now pretty advanced and can detect the face of celebrities, people on social media. Which naturally results in celebrities and models getting blocked from signing up periodically.

jokoon 2y ago

To me, it reveals that women are not really interested in dating. Women go on app when they feel a bit sad, when they need to feel a bit better. People want to stay single. Introversion is on the rise.

guerrilla 2y ago
I don't think it says that. I think it confirms that they are extremely picky and that these apps amplify that, making things worse for everyone except the apps... which is the point, to make money, not hook people up with healthy lasting relationships. This is yet another externality of capitalism.
- jokoon 2y ago
  To me, being extremely picky rhymes with not wanting a relationship. I live in france and somebody said on the radio that the state family fund (CAF) should organize dancing ball for people to meet. Maybe the core problem is that dating apps should not make money, or at least find another way to make money.

jokoon 2y ago

Funny how he concludes that men should pay. Sounds like this article is just astroturfing with some tech data.

KurSix 2y ago

These apps optimize for engagement, not meaningful connections

RobotToaster 2y ago

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RobotToaster 2y ago

Retention is a terrible metric for a dating app. The "perfect" dating app would have a 0% retention rate since the first person you meet would be your "ideal partner". It's tantamount to measuring a hospital's performance by it's retention rate.

wudu 2y ago
This is mentioned in the article: > I don't think retention is a good metric for a dating app, unfortunately that's how VC evaluate performance of B2C apps. When we think about dating it is more about quality than quantity.
TrackerFF 2y ago
For long-term relationships, yes. For the people that exclusively use them for hookups and similar, those will "always" be there.
_the_inflator 2y ago
That's not a business model. Creating opportunities to mate, not to therapy. ;) Managed Dissatisfaction, FOMO, Abundance: And the users want it. That's what the data shows. Proof: essentially, every app is a dating app covered up as "social features." Apple just entered the dating app market.
- palmotea 2y ago
  > Managed Dissatisfaction, FOMO, Abundance: And the users want it. That's what the data shows Correction: the users don't "want" it, but many of them aren't strong or wise enough to resist those features. The (presumably usage) data can't show what the users want, only what they do, and those often aren't the same thing.
- felurx 2y ago
  I think users "want" it the same way smokers "want" cigarettes.
palmotea 2y ago
> Retention is a terrible metric for a dating app. The "perfect" dating app would have a 0% retention rate since the first person you meet would be your "ideal partner". A terrible metric for the users. For the shareholders, the perfect dating app is one where the users are strung along for their whole lives, paying for a subscription but never finding anything permanent.

feverzsj 2y ago

Women are selective in their very nature, while men are competitive.

cultofmetatron 2y ago
yes and no. I've been to a few countries where beautiful women are everywhere and being pretty doesnt afford you as many advantages as it does in america. If you come in with education, a sense of integrity and can carry a conversation, girls can and do get competitive with each other for your attention.

fluffybeing 2y ago

Having to do the same conversation again and again is just tiresome.

h1fra 2y ago

It's funny because you can tell they barely discussed with actual girls: > they are used to receiving a lot of likes, so you have to show them they get liked They hate that, most girls registering on Tinder get 1000 likes in a week. > Dating fatigue is bullshit See last point > Having a profile doesn't impact the app experience That's what changed the game, nobody bothers on Tinder because it's not mandatory whereas it works very well on Hinge.

Stratoscope 2y ago

My best dating apps lately have been Trader Joe's and Ducky's Car Wash. I wear aloha shirts every day, and nearly every time I go to TJ's, someone asks me where they can find a particular item. It may be a guy or a gal, but I am always happy to help a neighbor find what they need. That is not the reason I wear aloha shirts. I just love these shirts! Every spring I get the Cooke Street shirts at Costco, one of each new pattern. One time at the Menlo Park Trader Joe's I was talking with the guy restocking the freezer section. He said, "Nice aloha shirt! I bet people sometimes think you work here." Sure enough, a minute later a young lady walked up to me and asked if we had organic bread. I walked her over to the bread section and pointed out the organic breads. Later I caught up with the freezer guy again and told him "you were right!" Ducky's, for those unfamiliar, is a car wash with several locations on the SF Peninsula. Even if you just get an exterior wash, after you go through the tunnel they hand dry your car. There is a waiting area outside with a dozen chairs, and it takes 5-10 minutes before your car is ready. And you never know who you might run into there! The key to this, of course, is to be outgoing and friendly, and open to surprises.

top_coder 2y ago
Ok I understood the Aloha shirt —> people thinking you’re a TJ employee —> asking for help connections. I feel there is quite a gap between here —-> getting a date. How does that work?
- halfmatthalfcat 2y ago
  You start vibing and based on vibes you ask them whether you wanna grab coffee/a drink sometime soon, exchange numbers, smile and continue shopping.
  - Stratoscope 2y ago
    You got it! The other thing is to be open to any kind of friendly interaction. Just yesterday I was at the Redwood City TJ's and a guy asked me where to find soy milk. I wasn't as familiar with the layout of that store, but an actual crew member was standing near us, and I said "I'm not sure, but I think this gentleman can help you." After he got his soy milk we ran into each other again, and he said "I'm sorry, I was sure you worked here. The shirt!" I told him, "No apology needed! It happens all the time. And sometimes it's a nice young lady who asks me where to find something."

yieldcrv 2y ago

> most guys don't open the profiles of a girl, and girls open much more often but more for discarding a user than for looking for more information this is a factor of why it is a loosing strategy to do dinner, drinks and coffee dates first the user experience is an arduous interview that is reliant on a “spark” that leaves too much to chance secondly, the ask is for somewhere you can hear each other, “get to know each other”, and have one foot out the door easily to leave on the woman’s side…. its the same as this article is saying: for disqualifying, not qualifying. for the guys side, whatever your goal is, would be accomplished by disregarding the woman’s preference. in reality, she likely did go on a more elaborate and rambunctious date, generated endorphins (the spark), got more intimate than her risk models dictate, and then realized she didn't know the guy. if you want any of that to happen, be like the other guy it is optimal to be like the 5% guy that is closing with women. if you cannot replicate that on dating apps, you may be able to with other in person approaches and date ideas

xn--yt9h 2y ago

Thanks for this detailed post. While I think most are aware of the broad situation, it's impressive to read it all laid out like that. And whenever the author tried to make a statement about guys, the gist of it was "we don't know, it doesn't matter, boys will stick around". Made me chuckle.

wutwutwat 2y ago

Dating apps are nothing more than window shopping. The lowest effort, most shallow, unlimited options buffet of meat sacks to choose from. When you have unlimited options, and a potentially better one is just a swipe away, people become disposable. Fuck or not fuck. Hot or not. Bang or pass. Where in the past someone might tolerate an insignificant quirk someone has, nowadays such a thing is often all that it takes to ghost and keep looking. The users that get a lot of matches often put in zero effort into talking. They expect you to do all the conversation, and often act uninterested, if you ever get a reply after the match at all. Matching and never getting a reply after contact is more common than not, regardless of how much thought and time is put into the first message. Profiles often read more like a list of demands, a quota that must be reached before you'll even be considered worthy. This is true for all the genders. "Make me laugh" is a demand that I've seen on countless profiles. Entertain me monkey, make me laugh. So many "Make me laugh"s that I've started to wonder if most of the profiles I see are actually bot/scammer accounts, because so many of them have slight variations of the same exact profile bios. AI is only going to make that shit show worse, and I'm sure many people are already trying to wine and dine an AI profile and have no clue. Let's also not forget about the clear "looking for a greencard" mail order bride profiles, and the weird as fuck profiles where each picture has a child as the focus of every picture, very intentionally so, in a way that I can't quantify but when you run across them, it just feels off, weird, saying something without saying something. Dating apps are all exactly the same anymore. Same fake profiles. Same gamification of attraction that you have to pay to win or have to grind every day against those who do. Dating apps are not there to match people. That would put them out of business. They are there to extract funds from wallets while keeping you hopeful that your perfect 10 is one more premium teir up the chain, one more swipe away, one more billing cycle in the future.

naveen99 2y ago
Make me laugh is just a proxy for iq.
- C0d3G4rd 2y ago
  Not being on the apps is a proxy for iq

ramoz 2y ago

> To me, if you are a guy on a dating app and your pictures are not taken by a professional photographer then you are losing your time, and if you are paying you are also throwing your money. Don't do this. You need good pictures that convey attractiveness (looks, as well as personality). Using professional photos conveys neediness & a level of desperation hidden under a shell of an ego the shot tries to portray. So you end up relying on looks with a handicap. A good looking person doesnt need professional shots to show that. Sure, if you currently have mirror selfies, professional shots are better. Otherwise - if you are not a model who has magazine-published shots you're including in your profile, then don't go use or pay for professional shots. Figure out how to take canned shots on your own or pay a photographer for canned real shots (nothing highly edited).

mettamage 2y ago
I optimized heavily on good photos. It worked for me, YMMV.
- bombcar 2y ago
  This is the correct answer. Only do dating apps as a way to do A/B testing. ;)
ebiester 2y ago
Don't get a professional headshot, of course! But you absolutely should have someone who knows how to make you look as good as possible in a natural environment. You should also have a woman friend critically evaluate your profile. (If you don't have a friend you trust, you should first make sure you can make trusted friends with women who will tell you the truth.)
- gizajob 2y ago
  There should be an app where you can find a woman friend to assess your pictures for a dating app.
  - 2y ago

plants 2y ago

> Recommendation of profiles that you may like is a solved technical challenge at Tinder level and at mostly any dating app today. It’s hard to take the rest of the article seriously after reading this!

383toast 2y ago
They know what you like, but that doesn't mean they will show you those profiles. Their goal is to maximize revenue, not maximize users finding good matches.
- stanford_labrat 2y ago
  And at some places like Hinge, they'll identify your type so well that your "standouts" page (the one you have to pay to message people on) will be composed of 100% people you would probably like to speak to while your free feed will just be composed of people you have no interest in talking to!
metalliqaz 2y ago
I disagree. "The algorithm" is understood by everyone in 2025 to be a more-or-less perfect attention hoarder. TikTok, Insta, YouTube, etc. have proven they can definitely surface the content that users will like. I see no reason why profiles would be different.
- Fogest 2y ago
  They know what you like, but remember they want to make money. You finding success means you are probably less likely to get desperate and pay for premium options on their app. They drip feed you as little success as possible to still keep you on the app, but make you desperate. It sucks, but a dating app doesn't want you successful, they want you to use their app for as long as possible.
pgwhalen 2y ago
I also had that reaction, but I kept reading and it was worth it. They mean it in a very narrow sense, and talk about the nuances and challenges of practical recommendation for much of the rest of the article.

Workaccount2 2y ago

The data here falls in line with the infamous OKcupid study (which got cancelled and taken down because men and women are identical, donchaknow?) The takeaway is that humans best date by meeting people in person through mutual acquaintances. Without the forced direct social interaction, women are only interested in the top 10% of guys, and guys are just aimlessly running at anything that moves regardless of their actual interest (i.e. liking and seeking sex from women they have no real interest in dating). Guys end up with no likes and no dates and women end up with mountains of disingenuous likes and dates with disingenuous men.

brazzy 2y ago
Men are dying of thirst in the desert and women are dying of thirst in the ocean. (not my analogy, but IMO very succinct)
- lifestyleguru 2y ago
  More like dying of thirst in lake Baikal, if the analogy meant abundance of choice. Desert and ocean both contain no drinkable water.
  - nemomarx 2y ago
    the implication is that they have a lot of water but it's unpalatable or toxic most of the time and needs filtering I think - easy matches but most of them bad?
    - lifestyleguru 2y ago
      Most men are insane from frustration, not unpalatable or toxic.
      - saagarjha 2y ago
        People generally do not want to have an insane, frustrated partner.

bongoman42 2y ago

Interesting data in the article though nothing unexpected for people who follow this space. Some notable points: > The other thing that interests you is the like ratio, or the openness, among 100 profiles that the user sees, how many of them does he like? (The median for men is 26% and for women is 4%.) >The like ratio of a girl is almost independent of the profiles she sees. For example, if a girl has a like ratio of 5% and you remove 50% of the profiles, even if you remove only the profiles she will not like, her like ratio will still be 5% (you can do that by removing very unattractive people for a guy that is very attractive, for example). It is funny to observe, but it seems like a girl has internal reasoning on a dating app, and they know they can only like x% of profiles whatever she sees (of course, it doesn't work if you show only ugly people). And lastly: >Whats interesting is that the more attractive the guys were ranked by girls the more they were looking for something not serious.

marinmania 2y ago
I have a theory for the swiping behavior of women. When they swipe right, it will most likely be a match, and they mentally don't want more than X active conversations at a time. This strikes me as rational and reasonable. For men, most swipes will not be a match, so less reason to ever think about swiping left to maintain a certain swipe pecentage. Just a theory!
- mettamage 2y ago
  > they mentally don't want more than X active conversations at a time This is true. My cap was at 50 conversations at the same time. After that, my brain got fried (male here).
  - rqtwteye 2y ago
    My cap was maybe 5. Seems I have less capacity.
    - mettamage 2y ago
      To be fair, I was crazily driven and treated it like a job. Intimacy is crazy important to me Edit: interesting that I got at least 3 downvotes for that comment. I don't mind, genuinely. It's just interesting. Different world views and all that

the_sleaze_ 2y ago

There is a truly fascinating talk by a data scientist who "hacked" the "algorithm" of a dating site and became the most matched person in californina. Highly recommended. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJod9kRYyao https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJod9kRYyao

mettamage 2y ago
Yea, hacker mindset is what I applied with Tinder. It worked wonders, went from 1 to 100 matches per month. I feel like having a hacker mindset with dating in general works wonders. Oh, and not having social anxiety of course. It took a long time to not have that.
- throwaway314155 2y ago
  Sorry but if I ever start growth hacking my fucking tinder profile promptly push me off a cliff. edit: Sorry for the inflammatory language. Not one of my finer moments.
  - mettamage 2y ago
    I get it man. A part of me feels the same way. The practical part of me however decided just to get on with it Online dating is toxic, and I fought it back with toxic and somehow through all of that I found my dream wife and I tol her all about what I did. She agreed that what I did was toxic, but that there's a "the means justify the end" ethics at play since we found each other With that said: I don't think the dating scene should work this way. It's too much based on being photogenic and having beautiful looks. And this comes from someone who knows the ins and outs of training charisma and finding a potential partner that way (still possible but not in the initial steps of online dating)
  - yieldcrv 2y ago
    This is what your competition has been doing for a decade Just leave the app if you don't want to participate Guys have to behave like attractive women do, which is discerning and the opposite of how guys use the apps, OP’s article gives the rubric

allenbina 2y ago

I'm not going to go into details as I don't want to create a throwaway account for HN, but I can attribute a lot of people's feelings in dating apps to a few things. I got an email from Bumble a few years ago that said I was in the top x percent of people swiped on. If you try to brute force stats your way to dating apps, you will fail.... to some extent. A lot of this comes down to looks that you can control, and looks that you cannot control. Some people are born better looking than others and when you spend less than a second filtering people, the first factor you use is looks. That said, not everyone is looking for the same qualities so ymmv, but better looking people find dating apps much easier. Throwing money at apps works. I'm not going to go into details because my opinion is not based on anything other than my opinion, but I found that the more I spent on the apps, the more dates I would get. Modern dating when compared to traditional dating offline is not even the same thing. Ghosting and talking romantically to multiple people is normal. You can't let yourself get emotionally attached to anyone until you actually know them or expect anything from them. I've heard horror stories from both men and women from online dating, and I've only had great exeriences from it. Some people find me attractive, and at the time I was very active and fit, so I usually got past the swipe test. I'm honest with myself and ok with my flaws. I'm also comfortable in social situations which helps me talk to new people. I think crunching the numbers in this style only looks at a binary 'reality' of dating apps and not what you can do to help yourself and other factors that can lead you to what you ultimately want from partnership, or relationships or physical comfort or whatever else lead you to online dating.

semitones 2y ago
> I got an email from Bumble a few years ago that said I was in the top x percent of people swiped on. Was this humble brag relevant to the rest of your point?
ge96 2y ago
What sucks nowadays is picture filters can't tell what's real I guess until you meet them
mettamage 2y ago
6 out of 10 male here (on looks), if that. Got about 300 matches, because I understand social systems and have a hacker mindset. Ultimately, met my wife after 30 dates. Didn't expect that. > Throwing money at apps works. I'm not going to go into details because my opinion is not based on anything other than my opinion, but I found that the more I spent on the apps, the more dates I would get. I've experienced that too. > Modern dating when compared to traditional dating offline is not even the same thing. Ghosting and talking romantically to multiple people is normal. You can't let yourself get emotionally attached to anyone until you actually know them or expect anything from them. Similar experience.

PaulHoule 2y ago

A great article that elicited a lot of thoughts. (1) I used to make those kind of non-informative scatter plots with xvgr when I was a grad student, this package does a great job for those kind of cases https://seaborn.pydata.org/generated/seaborn.relplot.html https://seaborn.pydata.org/generated/seaborn.relplot.html even if you don't use it you can copy its patterns to make designs that work (2) An obvious commercial offering for guys is a photography package. About 20 years ago I went to the biggest photog in my town and my publisher paid $100 for a headshot that was just a junior photog in the studio. If you were a bride you would get premium hair and makeup to go with your photography, even if you were appearing on TV you would probably get a little hair and makeup help. (3) With the right choice architecture you could control things such as "the percentage of people that you like" or "the number of likes that you receive". For instance if you were going just on looks it would be easy to show people a stack of 10 photos and have them sort them in attractiveness; you could also show pairs of profiles and pick an ELO for each one. If you look at it as a relative ranking process you can peel off whatever percentage off the top that you want. An obvious objection is that given such a choice the "hot" people will be the only ones that get chosen but a counter to that is that you can put an upper limit on how many "likes" somebody gets by not showing them to people. This contradicts some things he says later on about things that help the apps retain people, but from the viewpoint of making an app that "works", girls who are looking for commitment really aren't benefiting from seeing profiles from hot guys who get a lot of attention and provide nothing but casual sex.

lmm 2y ago
> from the viewpoint of making an app that "works", girls who are looking for commitment really aren't benefiting from seeing profiles from hot guys who get a lot of attention and provide nothing but casual sex. Well, sure, but you can lead a horse to water... . The less hot guys might be better options for those girls, but are they going to swipe on them? If you stop showing them the hot guys, will they stick around for the less hot guys or just switch to a different app?

underyx 2y ago

This is such a detailed article but it's giving me weird vibes. For instance there are all these drops to near-zero in the histograms at .28, .46, .56 for no clear reason, and the article doesn't even consider that noteworthy. The "Men Like ratio (y) vs ratio (x)" has an inexplicable wall around .33 which I could only explain with some sort of product limitation maybe? But I really wish it was explained what artifacts the product introduces.

carabiner 2y ago
Definitely points to some rounding error, aliasing in the data. It would be fixed by making the buckets larger. No reason for the buckets to be that small.
- levocardia 2y ago
  Or just use a kernel density plot, goodness.
edflsafoiewq 2y ago
Since there's a spike followed by a drop, it seems like some of the data points are "misattributed" to the neighboring bucket. Since it happens at the same place in each graph (eg a spike at 0.28-0.29, followed by a drop at 0.29-0.30) I wonder if it's some kind of number-theoretic effect from the fact it's actually a ratio of integers. For example, with less than 20 views there's no way to get to the 0.29-0.30 bucket, but 4 ways to get into the 0.28-0.29 bucket. Hmm. Also notable that 0.56 is exactly twice 0.28.

impure 2y ago

I definitely noticed I was using the apps more for entertainment than for dating. Which is why I stopped using them.

switch007 2y ago
Agree. People are addicted to the dopamine hit of matches and message pings. I'm a pretty good judge now of whether someone is just bored at working passing time on the apps or whether they're serious about meeting. Oh and all the time wasters get really shirty if you call them out on it, so I stopped doing that long ago

imtringued 2y ago

I'm pretty sure the first four graphs alone already prove that dating apps don't work. Dating apps are supposed to match people, but desire to match up is very lopsided towards one gender, with the other gender having very little desire to match up. Having unrealistic expectations is one thing. Being the monkey paw that fulfills those wishes is on a wholly different level.

potato3732842 2y ago
They sure make money though.

jameslk 2y ago

> The likelihood to like and exchange inside homosexual groups is much higher than in heterosexual ones. > The like ratio of a girl is almost independent of the profiles she sees. For example, if a girl has a like ratio of 5% and you remove 50% of the profiles, even if you remove only the profiles she will not like, her like ratio will still be 5% These two statements sound like they would be at odds. It seems either the first statement is incorrect or women on dating apps are more choosy when it comes to men only. I’d be curious how the stats play out on lesbian dating apps

nemomarx 2y ago
Only at odds if you assume the behavior is gendered and not a response or effect of the dating community in general - homosexual sub communities could have lots of community effects that change this up, just like heterosexual communities differ.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  Another assumption that doesn't really work is that there must be equal numbers of male and female homosexual groups. Assuming that male and female behavior doesn't change regardless of the partner they're seeking, it will still be true that the more groups are gay, the higher the acceptance rate will be, and it will also be true that gays are more interested in forming these groups than lesbians are.
surfpel 2y ago
> I will mostly ignore homosexual interactions.
naveen99 2y ago
Lesbian numbers are negligible. Pursuing women is a sport dominated by men. Even Trump won’t ban men (trans or not) from pursuing lesbian women.

bradlys 2y ago

> More than 50% of men just never receive a like, and never means maybe 2 or 3 likes in the lifespan of several weeks As someone in that more than 50%, it’s very annoying to constantly get told to get on the apps to meet women. I’m surrounded by men in the top 20% because I’m affluent, well educated, and spend a lot of time at the gym. Sadly, I’m just around these people and wasn’t born into the same kind of family. I’m an outsider. I was born poor and ugly. I’ve solved the poor thing but being ugly is incurable. I’m going to Beverley hills next week and getting more surgery to try to alleviate the ugliness but it’s pathetic what a man in his mid-30’s has to do now to even get a single like back on his profile. Women don’t need men anymore in the developed world. Men are luxury goods and women are completely happy to live without. A man isn’t needed but merely wanted and only wanted if he fits a very particular set of criteria.

jfengel 2y ago
Out of curiosity... what does "ugly" mean? Is it deformed, or just not conforming to a cultural beauty standard?
- bradlys 2y ago
  Ugly by most standards is simply not being desired by anyone. You don't have to be an acid victim like two-face to be ugly. I'd say someone is definitely ugly if you swipe on a few hundred average looking people and get zero matches back. That's ugly.
  - jfengel 2y ago
    Understood. Thank you.
  - j1elo 2y ago
    > if you swipe on a few hundred average looking people and get zero matches back. That's ugly. What's ugly is using an anemometer to measure a distance. I mean, using number of matches in a dating app, to measure uglyness. Dating apps are products designed by psychologist and built by engineers to generate frustration and make people pay, not to serve as a measurement stick of the average person's attractiveness. Dating apps are utterly broken. Don't do that to yourself, or to anyone. Meeting women in the Real World through common acquaintances. That's where the moat is.

jamesbond009 2y ago

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jamesbond009 2y ago

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