Match.com Used Fake Ads to Swindle Users, F.T.C. Says

That's why, for example, Photoshop used to cost $1000 (outrageous!) and now costs $20/month (outrageous!), and users hate it both ways. Or why electronics are less repairable than ever, and companies are optimizing for cheapness, and you can just buy a new one when it breaks. When you open the hood on your car you just see another hood, and you couldn't really work on your engine (it's a big noisy proprietary computer now) if you even could get to it, anyway.

This is simply how the economy works today. People complained yesterday about software patents being legal roadblocks to make easy things hard. Then they go back to writing proprietary APIs for closed-source web services, which are mostly just technical roadblocks to make easy things hard. Most of the work we do now is to serve the preservation of the capitalist system, not because it's actually useful work.

The images and the bio on a tinder profile has to so bad that women quite literally pick people whom women pretty much know will interact that way because even that is better than the alternatives.

You are on HN. There are hundreds of posts about negotiations and evaluation of available options. BATNA is thrown around in every one of them. I am baffled that people continue to pretend that it just does not magically apply to dating.

Your profile is your pitch deck. If no one wants to fund you, you should ask yourself if you need to change your pitch deck if you are convinced that your idea has a merit. Or maybe you can follow the HN startup advice and pivot to something else.

If doing the same thing over and over again does not achieve the desired result, one is ought to adjust approach.

It's also a very personal decision, perhaps more like picking movies or music you'd like. I don't generally trust any of my friends' movie or music recommendations.

Women aren't as looks-focused as a lot of frustrated men present them. Average is just fine, as long as your picture suggests somebody that they can engage with. "Below average" can also go a long way if you've chosen a picture that makes you look like what she wants, which might be "fun" or "family" or "kind". The men who think it's all about their looks are most likely the ones who only judge women by theirs. And while some women do that, the vast majority don't.

I can do you one better: if you look at history, whenever a society had large contingents of single, young men with little chance of entering into a relationship, that society invariably eventually went to war. Since most big players in the world have become so economically intertwined this is not really viable anymore, so yes, I'd say it is very possibly a factor.

> Care to place any bets on what will happen?

On the short-to-mid term? Nothing. Tech is vastly outpacing our ability as society to adapt. You see this with issues of privacy as well.

Long term? The pendulum probably swings in the other direction hard. Maybe men everywhere decide to adopt the Japanese way: with the insane pressure on young men there to perform in all aspects of life, a lot of them simply opt out of dating (which ultimately leaves women without relationships). Or maybe realistic, AI-driven sexbots become a thing: if you don't want kids and don't need a relationship, why deal with all the extraneous stuff? This again leaves women out in the cold.

To be clear: I wouldn't celebrate such a thing. We'd lose something very essential about ourselves if our whole dance of courtship and sex is permanently reduced to dating apps and sexbots.

But to continue, we're in a weird state of flux vis-à-vis male/female interaction. For example, most women prefer to date 'up' (having a good job on your dating profile leads to something like 85% more right swipes), but at the same time most universities are 40/60 men/women, plus women below 30 outearn their male peers. Obviously those two things are fairly at odds with each other.

You can also ask questions like: why are high schools still plastered in posters encouraging women to attend university when the numbers are already skewed? Surely, if back in the 90s 60/40 men/women was bad, the reverse should also be bad? Where is the promotional material to get more men into universities? Where are the special men-only scholarships? Or the effort to combat the male pay gap below 30?

Apologies for the long response- the overarching subject is something I take quite to heart.