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Show HN: Dating Site Without Pictures

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Re: Show HN: Dating Site Without Pictures

#151

Post by lsc »

dinkleberg wrote: post #32

I applaud the attempt to innovate in the dating world which tends to be solely focused on looks. But sexual attraction is an important part of relationships, so going in blind is inherently risky (from a time utilization perspective). With old school blind dates, your date is friend/family selected so some level of filtering is already done for you. I guess a good portion of dates are disappointing anyway and there a…

>But sexual attraction is an important part of relationships, so going in blind is inherently risky (from a time utilization perspective).

For most of us, there's also a very strong mental component to sexual attraction; I mean, sure, there's also a very strong physical component, but I personally think that the text a person generates is a fairly good indicator of how I will feel about the mental component, while dating site photographs, in my experience, tend to be much less representative of how physically attractive I will find the person once we meet. (note, my experience is old, but my experience is that I'm just as likely to find someone way more physically attractive in person than in a photograph as I am to find them way less physically attractive in person. My suspicion is that some people try to present their very best angle, others try to present their most representative side, while others don't put much effort into choosing a photograph at all.)

The other problem is that people make certain, ah, assumptions about me based on how I look. Assumptions that, well, probably will lead you to an incorrect idea as to my personality and values, I mean, more so than usual.

I mean, this is just my own experience. And mostly pretty old experience; I haven't had an online date in rather a long time, but the best online dates I've had were where we didn't exchange photographs ahead of time, either 'cause we met on a medium that didn't really support them, or because we met on dating sites but without uploading a photo. (and yes, sometimes there was, uh, nothing there, physically, but it was always at least an interesting evening.) - my experience was that on photo-focused sites, often I'd get the sort of 'total miss' - where someone would look at my photo and then make what are really pretty reasonable assumptions from looking at me and, uh, I was not at all what they were expecting.

Re: Show HN: Dating Site Without Pictures

#152

Post by ta999999171 »

quietbritishjim wrote: post #147
ithkuil wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"married with children" doesn't necessarily imply that at least two children come from that marriage; e.g. the spouse could have had a child from a previous marriage

To be fair, it doesn't make much sense to mention them unless they're from that relationship

Controversial.

Re: Show HN: Dating Site Without Pictures

#153

Post by clarry »

83hajfjeijg wrote: post #120
crca wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an ugly person I have a higher chance of scoring a date with someone attractive using this photoless site than I would have otherwise. Seems like a win.

You're assuming attractive people would use this site in the first place. At the very least, I'd expect the attractive to ugly ratio to look quite different on this site compared to other dating sites.

You're assuming attractive people just all want to be drooled at. Maybe they care about personality and are looking for a deeper relationship. In that case, putting up a profile pic is just going to gain them unwanted attention that doesn't further their goals.

Re: Show HN: Dating Site Without Pictures

#154

Post by tempsy »

It just seems like wasted time if you end up meeting and there’s no physical attraction. Perhaps something like this would make sense if you only saw pictures after mutually matching based on something both people liked about each other’s written profile.

Re: Show HN: Dating Site Without Pictures

#155

Post by vonseel »

tootahe45 wrote: post #150
ithkuil wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"married with children" doesn't necessarily imply that at least two children come from that marriage; e.g. the spouse could have had a child from a previous marriage

That is called paying to raise somebody else's children.

You know step-parents do exist that actually have a good relationship with their step-children and treat them as their own biological kids?

Re: Show HN: Dating Site Without Pictures

#156

Post by isoskeles »

sandoooo wrote: post #123
Guest0918231 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that case people would swipe on just the attractive users and on every bio without reading them. A simple fix would be to only allow users to swipe on 20% of the photos and 20% of the bios.

I am going to defeat your system by swiping on the top 20% looks and bottom 20% bios. And everybody else will follow suit once they realize it's an effective strategy. And you'll have a race to bottom.

I doubt the bottom 20% of bios would be distinct from the bottom 80%. So, good luck figuring out the difference.

Re: Show HN: Dating Site Without Pictures

#157

Post by vonseel »

rubidium wrote: post #124
devit wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They select on looks because that's all they have on dating sites. People (especially women in mainstream society) mostly ignore looks when they have already had a real-life pleasant interaction; however, it is very challenging to replicate that online, since it's very hard to give incentives to be genuine.

No women (and men) don’t. Looks matter. It’s eons of biology that’s too much to completely suppress. Looks always matter... but the degree can change.

The funny thing I noticed when living in Switzerland and traveling other European countries is due to the way lower obesity rate, most people are generally attractive.

The American obesity rate is something absurd like 40% among adults. A bunch of these people aren't actually half-bad looking if they were able to drop the weight.

Re: Show HN: Dating Site Without Pictures

#158

Post by yorwba »

iudqnolq wrote: post #110
disqard wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somebody archived them here [0] [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/gwern/comments/aapn1l/okcupid_blog_...

Thank you. The one top of chain was referring to was https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/okcupid/weexperimenton...

That doesn't seem to show that "Long conversations were instantly abandoned." The graph of "conversation life expectancy vs. normal" vs "where in the thread the photos came back on" does show a dip in life expectancy of 20%-30% if photos appeared after just a few messages, but the gap grows smaller the more messages had been exchanged.

In other words, the longer a conversation had been going on, the smaller the influence of learning what the other person looked like was.

Re: Show HN: Dating Site Without Pictures

#160

Post by INTPenis »

gamegoblin wrote: post #116
dinkleberg wrote: post #32

I applaud the attempt to innovate in the dating world which tends to be solely focused on looks. But sexual attraction is an important part of relationships, so going in blind is inherently risky (from a time utilization perspective). With old school blind dates, your date is friend/family selected so some level of filtering is already done for you. I guess a good portion of dates are disappointing anyway and there a…

Potential solution: make photos and text bios disjoint. That is, imagine a tinder-like app where 50% of the things shown to you are photos and 50% are bios. But they are all mixed up so you don’t know whose photo matches to whose bio. You only “match” with someone if you swipe right on their photo and their bio.

I'd rather make it like this: you only see the bio until you "like" the person. And only then can you message them or see their pictures.

You can unlike to prevent this from happening and it would be nice with a slight delay in notification to the person you liked so they're not swamped with likes and unlikes because people are trying to beat the system.

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