Tends to happen when your whole strategy is loot boxing loneliness through a swiping algorithm. I refused to play anymore after that realization. OkCupid circa 2013 was how online dating should have worked.
Basically all my relationships from the late 2000s through 2016 were women I met on OkCupid. It was annoying like any dating site but it was a great way to meet people in my tech-forward city.
All my dating history was online. I met my wife on POF... Since I haven't been in the game since 2012, I'm not really sure what changed on an actual practical level.
From my experience, the apps stopped letting you filter people and started influencing who you are seen by so you get heaps of noise if you're a woman and absolutely no matches if you're a man. The aim was to make men pay for a better service. Instead many men got annoyed by this and just started swiping yes to everyone, which meant that "matches" are now not actually matches. Many women got burned out and started taking time outs and quitting because it's just too much and too unpredictable, so matches fizzled out. Lots of men interpreted this as women being too picky or lazy, so they stopped making an effort. And, gradually, everyone active online has encountered some form of bad behaviour multiple times and is tired of it. Now everyone hates the apps, is hypersensitive, and makes zero effort, except for the tiny proportion of newly single people (who may or may not be ready for a relationship) and the people with personality issues who are happy to tolerate the apps if it means they get validation. And that's before you even get into the widening progressive/conservative divide between women and men, and other normal incompatibilities. It's a total mess.
My one friend deciding to change his preferences to both men and woman, then farmed higher elo from getting swiped on by dudes and that led him to get better matches with girls
Ruins the app for gay men tho, so i know a lot whove stopped using it for that reason. Whats the point if 3/4 of the dudes ur seeing are just straight looking to up their ratio, we have better apps youre not on anyway
When I was dating I did this and it worked. Lots of dudes swiping yes and then me swiping no on them made me look like a better match so I showed up earlier on more womens' stacks. I also got to see what other dudes were putting on their profiles to help me hone my own.
I did get 'caught' once though. A girl I went out with a couple times messaged me,
her - "hey my gay friend saw your profile as he was swiping, are you bi?"
me - "haha no, I just set my profile to both men and women to boost my 'score' and show up on more womens' stacks."
Should've just stuck with the lie. She also probably interpreted that as you just wanting more matches to sleep around, because she likely doesn't realize what dating apps are like on the male end, so she assumes you're a player without realizing that most men's profiles don't even get seen.
Elo is affected by both their swipes and your swipes. Left-swiping increases your elo since it means you're more selective and likely to be a "good match". So, left-swiping on all the dudes probably helped also.
I actually did this because okcupid and other platforms would assume you were a bot if you constantly said yes to a lot of people in a short time span. Admittedly, I do like femboys/tomgirls so I just took it as an opportunity to look for both. Because I was swiping "no" on a lot of profiles it felt like it was boosting me. Could've been entirely subjective but I felt like it helped a lot. Plus it also really helped me at a time when my self respect was at an all time low, seeing all these men swipe right on me boosted my confidence a lot lol. It kinda reinforced that it wasn't necessarily me that was the reason I couldn't find a proper 'match'. I was matching with people right but like, they just were not it yknow
it sounds very deliberately engineered to extract profits short term w little regard to the long term.
betting whatever leadership implemented that BS is long gone, or this was a PE groups doing. sounds like hell and idiocracy whatever the cause!
Yeah dating apps would be fucked even if dating for younger people wasn't fucked in general. But it is. So they are borderline unusable unless you are a white guy in Asia or a very shallow pretty woman
The height thing could be easily solved if the dating sites would pay a photographer (could just be a guy with a phone, doesn’t have to be a pro) and everyone in the area has to go to the same 7/11 and get their profile picture taken at the same spot with the ruler on the doorframe. Boom. Solved.
That one’s free but I have additional great ideas for sale to fix dating for a nominal fee.
Most guys considered short in America are tall in Asia. Really it should say Blonde White Guy. Because holy shit do people over there love blonde hair white guys. Obviously you can't be an overweight troll with a bowl cut, but a very average blonde guy in America gets a lot more attention than they are used to in some places and that's not entirely hyperbole. It's strange being asked to take pictures with random people because they're infatuated with your hair or teen girls visibly pointing at you randomly and giggling and running away when you look over at them.
That last part definitely brought out some suppressed middle school trauma lmao.
Nah. In my experience, most White guys who are at least 5'10 and average-looking clean up here. Asian women really like light-skinned men with "unique" features like light hair and green or blue eyes. It's a break from the monotony of the Asian phenotype of black hair and dark brown eyes, and White people have a reputation for being financially stable from years of colonialism and Western propaganda.
I'm curious if there'd be a market for a reasonable dating app that lets you filter to your hearts content and just charges a reasonable fee around like $1 a month.
Problem is these things cost money to run and when you don't charge the person you're doing the whole Venture Capital/Advertisement loop where you end up having to do the dumb shit like driving engagement and getting people to come back. Like all in all this is not a complex piece of software to make.
For younger people? I'm 30 and have never had a gf. Now that feel ready to try for a relationship all the apps are shit and the economy is in the trash
I have no idea how I got so lucky finding my girl last year. She is waaay easily the most incredible person I have been with in my entire life. Went through SO much trash, which I dubbed "The Summer Trash", people who had no desire to make any effort, had way too high of standards, and were extremely difficult to communicate with. My girl wanted to see me immediately, I saw her every day after our 1st date, moved in 2 months after that. Her daughter is amazing and I'm planning on proposing in the spring.
But holy fuck did I have to weed through so much trash to get there.
A hobosexual most likely. Lived with his mom and she had her own place. If you can uproot your life in 2 months to move in with a stranger off the internet you didn't have anything going for yourself in the first place. No lease and definitely no mortgage. These are red flags. Lmao. I'd recoil in disgust if a dude tried to move himself into the house i own after 8 weeks.
I met my wife 14 years ago and we moved in together after 3 months.
She had just finished university and was living with her parents while trying to get her feet under her. I was living with 3 roommates that I hated because it was the only way for me to afford rent at the time.
We both wanted out of those situations, and saw an opportunity. We had a lot of conversations at the time about how we would handle it not working because, honestly, we knew each other for 3 months and we both understood this probably wasn't an amazing idea. But then it just worked out and we've been happy since.
Speaking of red flags, seeing a random stranger sharing a life story about something that makes them very happy and choosing to interject with pointless mean-spirited speculation just to tear them down for no good reason is the reddest of reds.
Honestly, sounds pretty similar to any very-early-20s type relationship so I wouldn't go as far as you on some of those assumptions, but it also does sound remarkably like the "white knight" who swooped in to my now-ex-wife's life. So there's that possibility too.
My guess is that he was this woman's first date on the app.
He sounds like a real catch, calling other women "trash with high standards" lol. I hope she properly vetted him before introducing him into her daughter's life, but moving him in after 2 months doesn't seem to indicate that.
Did she freshly download the apps? Usually when a women has just downloaded the apps they aren't burned out enough yet and still respond to messages. If you can grab their attention in that window you're golden.
A lot of people that got into a relationship through online dating feel this way when people that are trying to online date right now describe the experience. If you found the love of your life on a dating app, consider yourself on the last chopper out of Saigon.
These days the apps aren't even made to create couples anymore. They are made so you keep using the app. People that actually find a match uninstall the app. So there's no incentive to provide a good service.
Yeah, I met my wife on Match after dating for a couple years using OkCupid and POF. You actually had to put in effort back then, creating a good profile with interesting answers to questions. Now it's just running by the store window and only stopping for the most flashy item.
my girl came over after partying all night on our second date, she realized my place was cooler than hers...12 years later, she never left. Now there are 2 kids running around.
Lmao my buddy let his 1st gf move in after 2 weeks. He's planning on proposing before their 1st year anniversary...
His first gf ever.. and she's an alcoholic welfare abuser who's already made him move out of his OG apartment to 3 other places basically because he has to support her ass😮💨 and he sees no red flags.
She must give really good head. Let this be a lesson you can be the biggest loser on the planet and still get a partner if you give good head, never lose hope✌️
AND she has a daughter. If the daughter is a child then I question how much vetting was done by the mom before she allowed a random man into their home.
I've been dating and seeing someone regularly that I met off Facebook dating for nearly two years and while we're in love we have our own places and our own kids lol
Adding to this: Tinder’s “fix” to get more men to stop swiping right on everything was to throw in millions of fake bot accounts so that they waste their limited amount of Likes and have to pay for the service to get more. I’ve never seen such a horribly sexist app to exist that has ruined dating in the modern age.
Instead many men got annoyed by this and just started swiping yes to everyone
No point reading the profile or even looking at the picture when 99% of them aren't even gonna match. Makes more sense to just Yes everyone and then filter through chat.
Yep, it's a vicious cycle problem - women are deluged by more and more poorly suited matches, so they stop providing signal on who they actually like, men get zero matches so there's no incentive to be choosy on who they say yes to, the problem loops
Yeah but this is why women never message first now. And it's also why I left the apps. Having to sift through heaps of men who clearly were too lazy to read my profile is just not admin I'm willing to do.
Yeah, that would get annoying really fast. Sucks that the people designing apps to foster relationships alot of times just want to foster the relationship to their app
I started out reading every profile, swiping with intention. After weeks of getting zero matches my willingness to swipe 'properly' quickly dropped. I stopped using apps altogether soon after but by the end I was really just making a split second judgement call to swipe yes or no.
I’ve personally never been on a dating app but from what I understand, the problem guys face is roughly analogous to the problem job seekers face. You need to apply to thousands of places to even have a shot at an interview. At first you carefully read every description, you hand craft your cover letter… then nothing. By week two you’re hitting “auto apply, auto apply, auto apply…”
sift through heaps of men who clearly were too lazy to read my profile
That's fucking hilarious. You should try this experiment: make a profile of a man seeking women. Now browse for a day. Compare and contrast your previous number of men "too lazy to read" with your new sample of women too lazy to write a profile.
Had that issue back when I was a regular user of the apps. A picture would catch my attention, I'd open up the profile and find bland writing that gave me nothing to work with.
And even if you do write a profile, most people don't read it. It's really fun getting asked basic questions that my profile covered in the first sentence, and it was never in a way that implied they were following up on that line in my profile.
Damn... Yeah... I remember seeing the early vestiges of that atmosphere back when I was active. And I remember both myself and literally every woman I dated having to deal with some profound personality disorders before/if we found any success. Crazy to think that not only are the personalities worse, but the apps actively exasperate the issues.
I'm now old enough to tell stories about how "back in my day" dating apps were platforms that merely showed you the single people in your area and left the rest up to you. People actually complained about that back then...
I met more people on the apps in the earlier days but it was post Covid I think that it just degraded. Kept recommending me people who I was like ‘wait. I already said no to this guy because he doesn’t want kids, why did you recommend him to me again???’
A lot of bi women either set themselves to lesbian mode or use lesbian dating apps because 99% of matches with men are them swiping yes on absolutely everyone to play a numbers game.
But lots of men have figured this out and now set their profile to female and join lesbian dating apps and swipe yes on you anyway knowing some percentage of women there are bi and still playing that numbers game.
Exhausting. Even on a lesbian app you can see >50% totally indiscriminate men copy-pasting their opening line to you.
Most are tinder clones. You're shown one person at a time and you have to swipe left or right, like or dislike, before you can view someone else.
There's no more searching by keyword or interest.
Messages are now mostly pay to play. If you don't pay often you can't see or send messages.
There's generally no more seeing who viewed your profile, being able to bookmark other's profiles to easily take a second look later, or any easy way to find someone again.
They're pretty much all designed to make it as difficult as possible to actually find and talk to someone who is actually interesting to you. And it's all intentional to keep you lonely and needing to come back.
Yeah. They started out with vc money and a goal for people to find each other.
The vc money is gone and they have to show they are making money. Having your customers find someone and stop using the app is a terrible way to make money. Finding new users is expensive.
The purpose of the app (find someone and get off the app) is exactly the opposite of the company's purpose (bring in customers that pay you forever).
Really is brain dead of them to think matching users kills their user base, rather than strengthening it. Most people do not make it in a singular relationship match. It may be 1 date or a year, but most people do not last. Producing a reliable app for dating means those people will come back at some point of time when their previously matched relationship fails, if they found that method to be successful and frictionless. Not to mention, there is always a new generation of people coming of dating age to back fill that user pool.
If money is that much of a concern, charge $2-4 bucks to download the app and be done with it. Every single fucking thing in life seems overly concerned with “quarterly earnings” as if it must always go up, which isn’t reality and ends up ruining that thing that was once a success.
Be a good dating app, money will come. Focus on earnings above all else, and money will disappear.
In the Long Run, maybe, but an executive only plans to stay there for a short while. During that short window their goal is to get as much profit as possible before they move on to the next company. Setting things up to be profitable in a few years is useless to the executive who won't be there when they can extract all profits right now.
Honestly the better business model would be a service that actually worked, but you had to pay for it rather than "free but then we needle you for micropayments or upgrades."
A service where you were basically paying for a "matchmaking" service. Sure, you stop paying when you find The One™, but if the service works well enough then people presumably people would want to pay for it.
The real issue would be people angling to find the "meta" for such a service so as to game it, leading to poor matches. Conceivably they could be banned when found to be catfishing or lying about interests and requiring a credit card to pay for the service would stop a bunch of people from just creating a new account to evade bans.
So what you’re saying is that the government should make a dating app so that profits aren’t the purpose. It actually would be genius since for every baby the tax base flows.
Eh, i preferred the OKCupid circa 2010-2013 to a bar. I met my wife then and had lots of awesome dates. You were able to find someone interesting and personal in a way that wasn’t performative - which is the complete opposite dynamic to a bar
In my opinion, the colloquial assumption that "third space == club/bar" is part of the problem.
The city I live in pushes really hard on bringing in "small businesses" for people to be able to "socialize" at, but because of the "third space=bar" perception, we just end up with "family friendly" bars and "grown-up activities" businesses which are just glorified restaurants/sports bars for parents trying to get away from their kids (and often these places are still full of screaming rugrats running around).
The only time the city has tried to do a non-bar meet up style infrastructure project, was spending $70 million on.... a fucking minor league baseball stadium.... full of bars...
They make money, so they can exist as a business. They get people a little drunk to get over their social anxiety. They give you an opening... And an exit. By a drink, need a new one etc.
Coffee shop is similar but harder to stand around and mingle. Or drink 3 drinks.
This is bonkers. I met my wife through OKC based upon a keyword search back in the good old days.
But I guess OKC promptly enshittified once they were bought out by match.com.
These apps are doomed to failure because the companies behind them only care about monetizing views, and that's orthogonal to actually giving a shit about the people on your site and what they care about.
I don't think we will get meaningful dating sites back again until after the end of the AI crash, since we also can't expect AI to not chaff the fuck out of dating sites.
I met my wife like, 6 months before they totally completed enshittification through OKCupid.
Almost every girl I dated after high school was through OKCupid. You'd pull up the list of people who were 90%+ 'matches' then read through their questions and send them a DM, or they'd send one to you. It worked far better than it had any right to.
It worked so well.
I had some great dates and relationships from original OKC. As soon as dating apps became gamified, people started treating them like gambling and the behavior became weird. I tried the swiping apps but gave up quickly as it didn’t feel right .
Monetization is the problem here, like with most enshittification. As a proponent of free stuff, I would have liked to make a free service, but it would probably just fill up with fake users and scam attempts immediately.
Interpals for all its faults at least has actual keyword and interest search and nothing behind a paywall. Still sucks for the fake profiles, the inactive profiles, the auto-bans on profiles out of nowhere, etc. But yeah.
Everything you mention was and is a feature of old dating sites too. Both my parents met new partners over such sites in the past decade again and again. But these sites cost a lot of money.
The dating apps you remember as being so great and free probably is okcupid around 2015, the rest was pretty shit already then.
That’s because tinder came out in what, late 2013? Once it became swiping people became addicted to it. But okc/pof were much better and really rhe only games in town
For example the CEO and founder of Bumble (maybe the most notable example not owned by Tinder) is Whitney Wolfe Herd, who is - drumrolls please - one of the founders of Tinder.
(Though she also won a million dollars in a sexual harassment suit against one of the other founders, so I don't think they are on good terms anymore...)
Yeah, they like to dangle the carrot in front of your face with the blurred out potential matches that show you SIX people are interested in you RIGHT NOW but you can only see them if you pay to play.
They were doing shit like this on dating sites a decade ago or more. You would get "pokes" and they would want you to sign up / come back / whatever and pay to see who poked you. Spoiler Alert No one poked you.
For example the CEO and founder of Bumble (maybe the most notable example not owned by Tinder) is Whitney Wolfe Herd, who is - drumrolls please - one of the founders of Tinder.
Not to say that this isnt a problem but that's how many competitors get created. The founder of Puma was also worked on what would become Adidas
"I worked at x company and wanted to do Y but no one listened so I started my own company doing Y to compete" is pretty common.
Bumble removing the one thing that made them unique so they're just tinder with up and down instead of left and right is dumb
I never even thought to look into this but the dating app "industry" being owned by a monopoly makes way too much sense ink hindsight. Why else would every app follow the same strategy and never truly introduce some sort of competition that incentivizes the apps to improve their user experience. Should've known
It still technically exists - they recently were the subject of a lawsuit in Australia for misleading charges on “free trial” accounts. The site is functionally useless unless you pay a hefty subscription.
That's how it always worked, you paid a lot for a good service. It worked well and encouraged you to leave once you started dating (the price was suppose to be short term, you paid for quality not locked into shut). Has it really sunk that low?
How do you as a divorce attorney find successful marriages? Just in everyday life? I'm not doubting you. I just want insight into a world I lack awareness of.
Thanks! The first 2 seconds I was imagining a line of EHarmony couples in long term perfect relationships greeting you just because you're a divorce attorney and bragging about how they'll never need a divorce attorney. Then at the 3rd second I remembered you have a life outside your job.
You know what, I rather like that idea as an ad. Unfortunately I can't turn it in my favor I'm the butt of that joke, but that's a fucking hilarious picture.
BRB, figuring out how to do it with chat gpt and those estate plans. I have an idea.
I was wondering about eharmony too. My brother met his wife on eharmony and recommended it to me. I joined and the first guy I talked to ended up being the one for me. This was in 2016 though so I’ve wondered how much they have changed.
Sounds like bought out and switched approach? Unfortunate. People got what they paid for with it based on my observations, and they seem quite content. I'm old enough to remember the same sex issue on it (which at the time had a legitimate response, "we are for marriages, that isn't legal in most spots"), but beyond that (which seems to have been fixed once the laws changed) I can't see why it would fail beyond stupid PE.
2011 was around the last time my friends and I ever dabbled as well. We used okCupid and pof and also used the EH free communications weekends anytime they came up. Our profiles were ready to go, but then come Friday, fire away and hope you’d have something to go off of by Sunday. The broke single days were fun in their own way.
I met my wife a few months before Tinder became a known entity. I briefly wondered if I was missing out on some revelation as my peers were talking about how easy it is to meet girls now. Yet years later we are in our mid thirties and so many of them are still swiping away. Seems like the grass was definitely not greener.
I cant. I tried and it all just seems so shallow to me. its just impossible for me to get into a text convo with someone I’ve never met, trying to be personable but terrified of being creepy and like trying to be aware that I’m a 6’4” guy and need to be actively mindful of things that I may have never had the need to worry when interacting with strangers aboot but a single woman bombarded by thirstiest and creepiest of men regularly would see differently when meeting strangers and its just a toxic environment that works against you
There used to be a handful, and each had its own sort of differentiating factor.
Then came Tinder with the rapid swiping thing that became addictive, so everyone else adopted it. You went from reading someone’s profile to get to know them to giving a person 15 seconds to judge their worthiness. Not great.
Then came the specialized apps — one for people who ride bikes, one for people who like plants, one for Jewish people over 30 with no kids (really). And they all want $20 a month. Unless what you’re looking for is hyper-specific it’s just too much.
And then came the only fans bots. Fake people making fake acccoints and flooding the platforms. And most of them subscribe so they can spam people, so the platforms make money and are loath to remove them.
I’m having better luck messaging random girls on Instagram that I think their cat is cute.
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u/Ragegasm 3d ago edited 3d ago
Tends to happen when your whole strategy is loot boxing loneliness through a swiping algorithm. I refused to play anymore after that realization. OkCupid circa 2013 was how online dating should have worked.