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The dating app paradox

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Re: The dating app paradox

#341

Post by Retric »

Retric wrote: post #223
thriftwy wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

US conservatives have nothing to do with maintaining or returning to historic norms. From massive government subsidies and radical tax policies to wild spending sprees they’ve completely abandoned past stances only keeping the name. Similarly modern democratic politicians have no real connection to the glass of water theory and similar stances. Voters on each side are extremely diverse to the point there’s little uni…

To be clear I am not saying those stances are good or bad just different.

Historically heroine was legal and women couldn’t vote. That’s not part of what people mean by conservatives, it’s a modern political ideology.

Similarly, Democrats stances on tariffs etc have changed through the years. They aren’t particularly tied to 100+ year old ideas either.

Re: The dating app paradox

#343

Post by jstarfish »

golly_ned wrote: post #288
jstarfish wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I investigate these complaints for a living. Please don't date anybody you work with. We'll both be happier for it. The fun always starts after a breakup and the other party doesn't want to see you at work anymore. There is usually no penalty for falsely reporting anyone to HR for harassment "in good faith," and there are likely anti-retaliation policies protecting malicious claimants from punishment for "misrepresen…

About “asking to be made unemployed and homeless”: do you take punitive action against coworkers who are together or broken up?

They're never together at the time of the complaint, but I don't see it mattering-- if a dude is sending dick pics to anyone while on the clock then it's an issue.

So these investigations usually focus on verifying whether he sent them at the time she said he did. Timestamps get forged or omitted in phone screenshots and personal phones are beyond our forensic purview. It's all hearsay. If I can't discredit the evidence, it stands, and the accused is usually terminated. Welcome to Kangaroo Court.

I ate some shit recently when a guy was accused of emailing dick pics to his ex from his work email. I believed her story (men are pigs, right?) until a colleague looked deeper at the email headers; she saw that the ex was the one sending the pictures to him. The social media narratives we're told and the shit I've seen in the last decade could not be more opposite. Men do some seriously gross shit at work for real, just not anything surfaced by the reporting process. That pipeline has just been a torrent of bullshit.

For what it's worth it's not always a romance thing. Bad complaints are always filed by women, but their targets are evenly split across men and women. False claims ensnare bosses and colleagues just the same as icky exes.

Re: The dating app paradox

#344

Post by lazide »

kmstout wrote: post #342
lazide wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finally I can label that Hydrogen bomb I’ve been working on in my basement ‘organic’. Thanks!

Got carbon?

Pure, uncut Fogbank all the way baby. Look at all that C in those styrene chains! Organic all the way.

Re: The dating app paradox

#345

Post by ethbr1 »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #275
tomp wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a few European countries. But! Turns out it doesn't work. At all.

There should be an auction system for women to accept bids from the government to have kids. Might not get the type of parents society wants though. Or remove old age benefits, and make it so you might only get them directly from your kids if the kids are willing to support you. That would put long term consequences more into view and link costs and benefits.

> There should be an auction system for women to accept bids from the government to have kids. Might not get the type of parents society wants though.

I always thought this was closer to fair.

If (expected cost of child) >> (expected benefits for having child), are we really surprised that a lot of people decide not to?

If you want to look at the results when that changes to == or But... given the nature of a free market, I expect adjusting the benefits for higher-income people would be cost-prohibitive.

Re: The dating app paradox

#346

Post by jessriedel »

hnthrowaway6543 wrote: post #336
sweetro17 wrote: post #248

Former dating app founder here - lots of thoughts on the space - feel free to AMA High level though, there's a lot of human behavior which makes dating frustrating with or without apps. At it's core, even in the best case, dating has A LOT of rejection. Dating apps introduce more opportunity for incremental validation (you got liked!) but also incremental rejection (you got ghosted!) and the sheer number of interacti…

> Apps are more transparent and equitable with how they expose profiles to other users. Don't bias toward highly liked people to increase perceived "quality" and shadow-hide show profiles that aren't liked often (and then ask them to pay lol). Show people more randomly, to better represent the true cross section of people on the app. This won't work; if you do this, you'll expose that the average online dating user i…

> "online dating is only for the ugly and desperate"; the article points out that this is the way Gen Z perceives online dating already.

The article notes that Gen Z usage of dating apps is down, but it's not clear to me it's because they think it's low status. (Polo is unpopular, but it's high status.) Do you have more info on why Gen Z isn't using dating apps? It being low status is certainly possible, but lower over all interest in romance is too; Gen Z is famously having less sex.

I followed the "failing to woo Generation Z" link, and just got this PDF, which didn't help much: https://www.generationlab.org/_files/ugd/b2ee84_c2430c8256ff... (College students are using dating apps less than post-college 20-somethings, but I think that's always been true.)

Re: The dating app paradox

#347

Post by agnosticmantis »

BurningFrog wrote: post #217
not2b wrote: post #103

The fact that one company repeatedly bought out its competition and now owns, according the the article, 45 dating apps probably has a lot to do with why they suck. Instead of competing by trying to be better, just buy out the rivals, gut them, and make everything worse. As long as the dominant player has lots of capital to buy any upstarts and the regulatory environment lets them do it, it can be an easier way to ma…

By standard Economic theory, that is not a stable strategy, since it incentivises starting new dating apps. It only has to be moderately successful to ensure a profitable exit. Over time, Match would run out of money. Given that Economists overwhelmingly get these things right more than our intuitions, I'm really curious what explanations they have.

Dating apps have very peculiar dynamics (e.g. you need to somehow get women on the app and men will follow automatically). Also women may be conservative and they might not want to join the latest dating app that ranks 50th on the App Store. So it’s not like anyone can create an app and be successful enough to be worth acquiring. Very few will reach that threshold and then the monopolist can buy those few ones.

So standard economics don’t apply. Also, the statement “ Economists overwhelmingly get these things right more than our intuitions” needs a citation.

Re: The dating app paradox

#348

Post by atleastoptimal »

hnthrowaway6543 wrote: post #336
sweetro17 wrote: post #248

Former dating app founder here - lots of thoughts on the space - feel free to AMA High level though, there's a lot of human behavior which makes dating frustrating with or without apps. At it's core, even in the best case, dating has A LOT of rejection. Dating apps introduce more opportunity for incremental validation (you got liked!) but also incremental rejection (you got ghosted!) and the sheer number of interacti…

> Apps are more transparent and equitable with how they expose profiles to other users. Don't bias toward highly liked people to increase perceived "quality" and shadow-hide show profiles that aren't liked often (and then ask them to pay lol). Show people more randomly, to better represent the true cross section of people on the app. This won't work; if you do this, you'll expose that the average online dating user i…

That's true. The sad reality about dating is that, for 99% percent of people, the partner that would be ideal for their tastes is "out of their league" so to speak. Humans have dealt with this reality of dating acting somewhat like a marketplace via mores of commitment, dating within social classes, condemnation of promiscuity, etc., but the human nature is still there. 10's want 10's, but 5's don't want other 5's, they also want 10's.

The strategy most dating apps use has been to keep people in a perpetual cycle of heightened seeming possibility. You see the young, cool, attractive people, and perhaps one out of 100 times you'll strike out, and the unlimited options keep you feeling that such an opportunity could happen infinitely. For average hetero dudes, this obsession will drive purchasing premium, paying for swipes and super likes, etc.

I know it's controversial but I do believe that robotic/AI partners is the "ideal world" solution to this. You get someone who fulfills all your physical needs so you don't have to play the roulette in real life, or string along someone in your league because you believe you could get someone out of it. I'm sure in the future we'll see them similar to how we see sex toys today.

Re: The dating app paradox

#349

Post by bell-cot »

d_burfoot wrote: post #289
Exoristos wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As well as regulating them, Western governments might want to actually fund high-quality, not-for-profit dating systems of some kind. Improved health for citizens, lessened extremism, not to mention possibly boosted population growth could result.

I think colleges would be well-advised to create dating systems that encourage healthy relationships (keyword: healthy) between students. Students who marry someone they met at university are much more likely to become enthusiastic alumni. And hookup culture is a disaster for everyone.

Colleges are already too deep in stuff they can't handle with student relationships gone wrong (date rape, etc.). Pushing their names / reputations / liabilities further out there by creating student dating apps would be idiotic.

Re: The dating app paradox

#350

Post by ethbr1 »

shiroiushi wrote: post #331
romwell wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I've thought for a while now that it is a matter of national interest that your population couples up and has children Yeah, and many people in the US would be way more eager to do that had we had: - affordable housing - minimum wage that allows a single parent to support themselves - universal healthcare - mandated paid (and then, unpaid) parental leave - free childcare - substancial financial assistance to new par…

>- free childcare Where exactly are all the workers going to come from to support this one? There's already a labor shortage, and presumably you want to make sure child-care workers are highly vetted. On top of this, with an aging population, there's a greater need for care workers for seniors, and here there's a lot of problems with these workers abusing the seniors. >- walkable safe environments, transportation, an…

>>- free childcare

> Where exactly are all the workers going to come from to support this one?

This extends to most child-cost related issues: childcare, primary-education, activities, secondary-education, tertiary-education.

Scaling the child:child-cost-worker ratio up needs to be a huge part of this.

Which is going to require some out of the box thinking (e.g. cultural acceptance of MOOCs / online degrees).

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