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Never pay for online dating (2010)

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Re: Never pay for online dating (2010)

#221

Post by hahamrfunnyguy »

welshwelsh wrote: post #131
romankolpak wrote: post #82

Related personal anecdote: I am experimenting with Tinder subscription at the moment, and it feels incredibly exploitative. When you make a profile, matches are frequent and you can tell that you show up for people. However it gradually falls down with time, and the only predictable and obvious way to get back up is to pay for Boosts and/or Priority Likes. Right now my 6-month old profile gets ZERO likes outside of t…

Honestly, I am ok with this system. Paying a couple dollars for a matchmaking service isn't a big deal. If you go to bars instead you will pay way more. An introduction to a potential partner is worth at least $50 in my opinion, if anything Tinder is too cheap. There are too many guys on tinder and most of them are not serious, mindlessly swiping as a way of wasting time. If you filter out the free users and only mat…

I don't mind paying something, but their goal of selling boosts, super-likes, etc runs counter to the goal of the customer which is to meet a compatible person IRL and then (presumably) stop using the site.

My experience with boosts is that they were counter-productive. While the boosts yield likes, but a lot of them would be profiles I'd already left-swiped on, should have been excluded by my filters, or just low-effort profiles. The same profiles would keep showing up in my feed too after I had swiped.

As for your second point, I think women do exactly the same thing. There's just more guys on the site so women are just getting a higher ratio low-effort likes. I'd say a good 50% of the profiles don't have anything written in them except a series of emojis or statements like "I don't know what to write here." or other really low effort content. Even the gold profiles sending messages would initiate a conversation with the dreaded "Hi." These interactions were always a complete waste of time, I just stopped responding to them after a while.

Re: Never pay for online dating (2010)

#222

Post by michaelchisari »

welshwelsh wrote: post #131
romankolpak wrote: post #82

Related personal anecdote: I am experimenting with Tinder subscription at the moment, and it feels incredibly exploitative. When you make a profile, matches are frequent and you can tell that you show up for people. However it gradually falls down with time, and the only predictable and obvious way to get back up is to pay for Boosts and/or Priority Likes. Right now my 6-month old profile gets ZERO likes outside of t…

Honestly, I am ok with this system. Paying a couple dollars for a matchmaking service isn't a big deal. If you go to bars instead you will pay way more. An introduction to a potential partner is worth at least $50 in my opinion, if anything Tinder is too cheap. There are too many guys on tinder and most of them are not serious, mindlessly swiping as a way of wasting time. If you filter out the free users and only mat…

I agree, but a honest model has a flat subscription fee instead of promising matches for free and upselling through nudging and manipulation.

I haven't online dated in a long time, but if I ever do again, I'll go with a service that has a transparent pricing model with no free plan.

Re: Never pay for online dating (2010)

#223

Post by Ajedi32 »

So the main complaint here seems to be that eHarmony and Match.com only let subscribers talk to other subscribers? Is that still true? If so, that does indeed sound like a pretty terrible way of doing things. If I'm a paying customer I should be able to initiate a conversation with anyone who's willing. I don't want my prospective date to have to pay money just to talk to me!

In terms of the larger point about the overall incentive structure of dating sites, it seems to me there are a few possible solutions:

1. Sites should only allow "lifetime" subscriptions, eliminating the perverse incentive to keep people from having successful relationships.

2. Some sort of system for paying per successful match. Something like "I'll pay you $1k if I meet my wife through your service." That seems way harder to enforce, but would align the incentive structures almost perfectly if it could be achieved.

Re: Never pay for online dating (2010)

#224

Post by gnicholas »

robertlagrant wrote: post #70
jimbokun wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's why when you first start on any dating service, you're (typically) inundated with activity, so that you can always chase that high, and when you can't get it, you try to pay for it. It's striking how the business model is indistinguishable from how cocaine dealers were described to us as kids in the 80s.

Only two industries call their customers "users" (-:

I'm so tired of this line. The reason they're called "users" in tech is because unlike in many industries, they don't pay anything for access to the platform/app. If they all paid, they'd be called "customers".

Implying that tech companies and drug dealers are birds of a feather based on this is silly. If you want to say tech companies make addictive products, say that. But don't pretend that calling people "users" is evidence in furtherance of this argument.

Re: Never pay for online dating (2010)

#225

Post by throwaway289943 »

Cloudef wrote: post #142
mikepurvis wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you've already graduated university, aren't part of a religious community, and don't want to do the bar/club scene, what does that leave? Friends of friends, or family introductions? Activity groups like sports/dance? Your workplace, or the gym? Neighbours? Most of these are extremely hit and miss, and a lot of people have no interest in being hit on while trying to do their job or work out. Dating sites/apps abso…

Dating apps do not work because you are not actually present. You have the attention of hundreds of people at the same time, so unless you decide to meet up right away, the other party immediately loses interest. Most of the people are just looking for sex or something less serious, and the apps heavily paywall males. They are cancer. Meeting through friends is probably the safest, as that at least gives you some saf…

Another big reason why dating apps suck, is that people don't go on dates. People meet their partners in groups of friends of friends, at parties. Before dating apps, nobody would ask a stranger out for a date, and nobody wants to do that now either, so the apps is enabling something that people don't actually want.

It should be focused on getting together groups of friends of friends for parties instead.

Re: Never pay for online dating (2010)

#226

Post by gnicholas »

dheera wrote: post #159
idealmedtech wrote: post #15

The problem really happens when you do algorithmic price setting, which incentivizes you as the developer to get people addicted to the experience of swiping, regardless of whether or not the swiping has the desired outcome for the end user. A user base with just the right levels of dopamine from interactions and loneliness will probably end up buying one of the weekly promotional deals. That's why when you first sta…

Honestly, I wouldn't mind paying $10K for finding someone who actually becomes my life partner, let's say due upon 2 years of stable marriage. In such a system, user incentives would be fully aligned with the business. However -- this would be hard to enforce.

My brother posted on FB offering several thousand dollars for anyone who referred him a wife. No dice though. He met his wife a couple years later via one of the apps.

Re: Never pay for online dating (2010)

#227

Post by Arkhaine_kupo »

houstonn wrote: post #198
Arkhaine_kupo wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whats inconvinient to the pollitically correct narrative is people with 0 scientific literacy making bold claims about society based on surveys on extremely sampled social studies. Doing a study on how "dateable" black women are based on a specific dating app in 2010 is like making claims on everyones eating habits based on a survey on a Burger king drive through. It will probably not be a very good survey. They also…

Hypergamy is nonsense? I think you're confusing an opinion or desired reality with data and observed reality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypergamy

Why link a page and not read it?

In the "Mating preferences" blurb they discuss hypergamy as being reduced as gender equality reduces and even worse links to a study called "The end of hypergamy" where they discuss men stop dating down once women achieve educational parity.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5421994/

So yeah, if you come from a poor, unequal country women wanna marry and old rich university educated man. If you don't, they dont. So hypergamy is not natural or unavoidable its a sad reality of some societes.

Most people on dating apps swipe right on people with higher rating than them, the talking point about women being hypergamous and only liking the top profiles is not reproducible outside of dating apps, because it isn't real. Its a reflection of their userbase. If there are 1000 men sending 100 messages a day to 10 women, they all get rated highly, so they mostly see highly rated men profiles. And having attention from mediocre candidates outside of the app, they mostly interact with the most attractive counterparts online. This doubly skews the candidate pool women would interact with online in 2010, thus the findings are not proof of hypergamy, but okcupid being a sampled and incomplete group of people.

Re: Never pay for online dating (2010)

#228

Post by svnt »

I think the unstated issue is that there are predominantly hook-up apps that people also use to find life partners because good alternatives don’t exist.

With the assimilation of the ecosystem into Match some sort of alignment was inevitable, and a hook-up service is a ‘good’ SaaS service by classic metrics, while a matchmaking service does not fit the model well (at least yet).

Re: Never pay for online dating (2010)

#229

Post by claudiawerner »

noasaservice wrote: post #194
busterarm wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"incel" and "black pill" terminology didn't even exist in 2010.

It wasn't by those names, sure. But the "Forever alone" meme definitely was. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/forever-alone And the citation date: 2010. Or better yet, https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cultures/involuntary-celibacy... cites that: "On August 12th, 2005, the American television network G4TV released a satirical commercial for the online role-playing game World of Warcraft in which a woman introduces the gam…

The 'Forever alone' meme was originally a jab at oneself for having few partners; it didn't imply anything about one's mindset or opinion on others, nor an opinion on society as a whole. It was also used mostly in an ironic sense. I'm saying that the meme has nothing to do with the 'incel' movement, unless you want to throw in every online expression of loneliness as incel stuff.

Some namesakes remain, for example Reddit's r/ForeverAloneDating where people who haven't had much experience (if any) can make posts to solicit potential e-dates. Although the balance is skewed toward men, there are a good number of women posting there too, and it has nothing to do with incel/blackpill crap.

Re: Never pay for online dating (2010)

#230

Post by Cloudef »

throwaway289943 wrote: post #225
Cloudef wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dating apps do not work because you are not actually present. You have the attention of hundreds of people at the same time, so unless you decide to meet up right away, the other party immediately loses interest. Most of the people are just looking for sex or something less serious, and the apps heavily paywall males. They are cancer. Meeting through friends is probably the safest, as that at least gives you some saf…

Another big reason why dating apps suck, is that people don't go on dates. People meet their partners in groups of friends of friends, at parties. Before dating apps, nobody would ask a stranger out for a date, and nobody wants to do that now either, so the apps is enabling something that people don't actually want. It should be focused on getting together groups of friends of friends for parties instead.

Even if you do, it usually feels very unnatural as you don't really know each other yet. I agree that meeting in a group works better.
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