> When a 34-year-old biologist is asked what she is looking for in a man, she doesn’t respond with a height requirement or a hair color. She pauses for a moment, reflecting on a divorce and the French man who came after. He needs to be there for her; she has to be sure of him. But the most important thing, she says, as she points to her head: “It’s all up here.”
Yeah, but that's merely what the woman says she wants. That doesn't reflect what she might be impulsively attracted to.
It's like some of my female Asian friends who say they don't actively exclude Asian guys, yet their dating history pretty much is exclusively white guys (even in cities with plenty of Asian guys). Yet if I said that my small company only hires and interviews male engineers, I'm pretty sure people would criticize us for being sexist.
Furthermore, we can look at stats in online dating and compare rates of interracial marriage segmented by race and gender. What we find is that taller men absolutely have higher number of sexual partners compared to shorter men. We also find that Asian women and Black men marry out at a significantly higher rate than Asian men and Black women.
That being true, I am very leery even of the basic "doesn't respond with a height requirement" part of this anecdote.
I have seen a lot of dating profiles with things like "no short guys please", "minimum height 6 ft." etc; and have heard a lot of my female friends openly admit to "not liking short guys". For some reason, admitting that seems to be a lot more socially acceptable than a man admitting that he doesn't like women with a certain body type.
> Profiles ask you to include things like your job title and college
So, maybe not height, but apparently a prestigious college is important. Down here in Australia, mentioning your college like it's part of your personality is just plain weird. People mention what was studied as a matter of course, but where you studied it isn't a significant part of your personality.
I can see this format of dating site solving the problem of women getting unsolicited dick pics, but I don't see how it can solve the problem of less-attractive men getting some attention.
I remember reading that Netflix practically ignores what you rate shows when generating recommendations, that using what you actually watch is much more accurate. You may have gave A Clockwork Orange 5 stars, but you binge watches Jersey Shore.
I imagine the same applies here. You might say height isn't a factor, but only picked men over 6'.
"A Better Tinder", to me, would be one that actually supports its original function, of being "a hook-up app." There are plenty of dating apps; but Tinder was supposed to be a unique value offering: "like Grindr, but for more than just gay men." But it failed to be that, because there was nothing stopping people from making profiles "just looking for friends" or "just looking for long-term relationships", like in any other dating app. (Obviously the "game mechanics" of Tinder are completely at odds with those uses—why pick friends based on mutual physical-appearance attraction? But people still try.)
The best thing any social-networking app can do is to prune its userbase (i.e. ban people from the service) so that everyone who remains is actually using the service for its intended purpose. Then you don't need the initial extra step of both parties dancing around the question of "what are you on here looking for?"—if they're using the app, they're here for what the app is for.
> "A Better Tinder", to me, would be one that actually supports its original function, of being "a hook-up app."
For ages, there have been sites catering to people looking for casual hook-ups. And they all run into the same problem -- very few women sign up for them. We could debate why this happens (most women don't need an app to have casual sex? The risk of casual sex with a stranger is much higher for women? There is a social stigma of being a woman looking for casual sex?). Once a site embraces being a hook-up app (e.g., Ashley Madison, Craiglist's casual encounters, etc.), it invariably ends up a vast sea of desperate men fighting over scraps.
Certainly, some men and women do use Tinder as a hookup app. Numbers suggest that the vast majority of women are all swiping right on the same very small minority of very physically attractive men. Whether women are hoping for a relationship with these men or looking for casual sex, I think it's safe to assume Tinder leads to a lot of hookups for these guys.
In any case, by removing the social stigma, Tinder became popular among a much larger segment of women compared to previous dating sites. It's not unusual in Los Angeles to see models on Tinder, which you just didn't seen on dating sites of the '90s and '00s.
Who says just hooking up was Tinder's "original function"? This is something users attributed to it because some people who are successful in using it this way brag about it and spread that reputation. This doesn't mean it was designed specifically for that purpose, though it might do it well.
The Dating Ring, a Y Combinator-funded dating startup, was also involved in some interesting Hacker News drama regarding spamming OKCupid users. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8454405
The dating industry in general is iffy; it's hard to isolate what works better and what doesn't when everyone is reluctant to release data.
When a 34-year-old biologist is asked what she is looking for in a man, she doesn’t respond with a height requirement
The research on the topic is quite clear that across all ages, across all cultures, and across all races, heterosexual womens' unspoken but critically important criteria in mate selection is height.
> heterosexual womens' unspoken but critically important criteria in mate selection is height.
Your impression may be biased, in part, because it's easy to measure height and create studies based around it.
My friend is handsome and rather short, whereas I'm tall and average looking. Despite what the studies say, women throw themselves at him whenever we go out, and he has a ridiculous match rate on Tinder.
While height may be one of many factors influencing attraction, it is in no way an overriding critical factor as your statement suggests.
You're right, of course, but the article was talking about a specific woman there. It's very possible that women care about men's height, on average, but that particular woman does not.
Bumble’s landmark feature is that women must
take the initiative on all conversations
It's cool that they bake this into their platform. This was always how I approached online dating through OKCupid, and it worked out far, far better for me than messaging women. Perhaps not surprisingly, it seems that an average woman on OKC receives an order of magnitude more 'likes' and messages than I ever received (or more!). By only engaging with women who'd reached out to me in some capacity, it was much, much easier to actually meet people (like, e.g. my girlfriend of nine months).
Bumble is pretty lolworthy, ostensibly built on a fundamental misunderstanding of male/female dynamics. Good job raising money from naive investors though, uh, I guess.
Whether or not the premise makes sense, I've landed way more actual dates with much more attractive women (physically, and also in terms of personality, education, career, etc.) on Bumble than Tinder.
It might have nothing to do with male/female dynamics, and may just have something to do with a better UI/UX (which Tinder seems to have lifted heavily from in their last update), or a lack of spam bots (seriously, a third of my Tinder matches are spam bots linking to the same URLs over and over -- how is this still an issue??).
Investors are likely considering the growth, rather than the theory. Whatever the underlying reason, from one user's perspective, Bumble's growth seems very impressive.
The subtitle is "Why the best dating apps are founded by people who aren’t dicks." Does the article explain why the founders of other dating apps are dicks? Or is it just because they're men?
This is all but a sponsored post for Bumble that's basically just a long form advertisement masquerading as a think-piece.
Based just on what we know from OkCupid's excellent analytics blog back in the day, there's nothing about their business model that suggests they'll be successful. The founders are non-technical, the business model isn't data-driven, and there are lots of questionable design decisions throughout.
They're getting a large amount of positive press from people who share their apparent ideology, but there's no actual information being put out. They're closed source, privately held, and don't publish any meaningful usage statistics, so what do we know about them other than they have good PR people?
Building a "better" Tinder seems like writing a convincing email for the advanced fee scam.
It appeals to the wrong people. The Nigerian prince scam works because it effectively filters anyone who wouldn't send money to a stranger emailing them out of the blue. Making Tinder "better" would draw in people who are not interested in what is essentially a hook-up app.
They don't even have an Android app! I don't know how they expect to be taken seriously. They're doing a bunch of PR like this and appearing on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, but it doesn't seem like they're actually ready yet.
There are a number of things I disagree with in this piece. (I will mention that I think trying different approaches to online dating is a great idea in and of itself. I don't disagree with the app's existence, but rather the way it is being presented here.)
> The mainstream online dating technologies — OkCupid, Match.com, eHarmony — were all founded by men. So it’s no surprise that most popular dating products cater to male user problems.
The first part is true, but the second is non sequitur. I'd also like to ask: what is a "male user problem"? Although the wants of men and and women are somewhat different, I think it's probably a bad idea to paint genders with stereotypes in this way.
> Bumble’s landmark feature is that women must take the initiative on all conversations.
> He is most likely tired of reaching out blindly to women all the time,” she tells me. “Maybe he feels rejected. He feels ignored.”
This sounds very interesting, and good on the founders of the app for trying something new.
> Though she is extremely limited legally in talking about her experience at Tinder — they have since settled out of court — I wonder if her negative experiences there inform her dating theories now. Perhaps as a hint of Bumble’s influence, last week Tinder announced that users could now include details on education and work. [emphasis mine]
The author "wonders" if "perhaps" there is influence from Bumble on Tinder. In other words, this paragraph has no factual standing.
> If you are a male entrepreneur, approaching the problem of online dating from your point of view, the goal would be to provide male users with more women.
This statement seems presumptuous. It's not about males vs. females! It's about new ideas! Past platforms take a traditional view to dating, Bumble likes to change things up, and this is a novel thing. This piece turns a novel concept into gender politics and boils down entire companies to the gender of the person at their helm. Bumble won't succeed just because its founder is a woman: Bumble will succeed because it's a new concept from a different perspective, executed by someone who is smart and has experience. You're erasing Whitney Wolfe and writing "all women", which seems demeaning.
> This isn’t to say that all men approach online dating haphazardly, without goals or specific desires. But [...]
This comment isn't to say that this article is poorly written. But, look at all of the evidence above and think for yourself. (I mentioned another argument to look objective... but never gave it any evidence, so the reader will take my subjective perspective as fact.)
> But with these online dating innovations, the tech industry just might realize what they’ve long been ignoring: women’s experiences matter, too.
No one's ignoring women's experiences. The founders of the mainstream dating apps simply have their market and refuse to pivot because they have shareholders and investors that would rather they not change the model so immediately and drastically. What we have now is a result of a function of market forces rather than a function of gender.
I think the idea behind Bumble is very interesting, and I'm glad there are startups trying something new in the dating scene. I'd actually like to try one of these in due time. But this article just looks... bad. It turns independent, strong, intelligent people into the stereotype of "female entrepreneur".
>> If you are a male entrepreneur, approaching the problem of online dating from your point of view, the goal would be to provide male users with more women.
>This statement seems presumptuous. It's not about males vs. females! It's about new ideas!
Yours is a very generous comment on a highly misandrist statement. The fact that a dating app creator/founder/owner is male doesn't mean that they must therefore have designed the app "to provide males with more women".
Even if they are using "online dating" euphemistically to refer to hook-up apps then they're making the classic mistake of assuming females aren't interested in sex and males are solely motivated by acquiring a quantity of it. Sure, subsets of those populations exist that fit the bill but the reverse associations also exist at some level.
Does this mean the founders of Bumble want "to provide females with more men" above all else?
As you and the article mentioned, it did have a female co-founder. And she has since left Tinder and founded Bumble, the app the article mostly focuses on.
[+] [-] kazinator|10 years ago|reply
Yeah, but that's merely what the woman says she wants. That doesn't reflect what she might be impulsively attracted to.
[+] [-] colmvp|10 years ago|reply
It's like some of my female Asian friends who say they don't actively exclude Asian guys, yet their dating history pretty much is exclusively white guys (even in cities with plenty of Asian guys). Yet if I said that my small company only hires and interviews male engineers, I'm pretty sure people would criticize us for being sexist.
Furthermore, we can look at stats in online dating and compare rates of interracial marriage segmented by race and gender. What we find is that taller men absolutely have higher number of sexual partners compared to shorter men. We also find that Asian women and Black men marry out at a significantly higher rate than Asian men and Black women.
[+] [-] parennoob|10 years ago|reply
I have seen a lot of dating profiles with things like "no short guys please", "minimum height 6 ft." etc; and have heard a lot of my female friends openly admit to "not liking short guys". For some reason, admitting that seems to be a lot more socially acceptable than a man admitting that he doesn't like women with a certain body type.
[+] [-] vacri|10 years ago|reply
So, maybe not height, but apparently a prestigious college is important. Down here in Australia, mentioning your college like it's part of your personality is just plain weird. People mention what was studied as a matter of course, but where you studied it isn't a significant part of your personality.
I can see this format of dating site solving the problem of women getting unsolicited dick pics, but I don't see how it can solve the problem of less-attractive men getting some attention.
[+] [-] mtgx|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vkjv|10 years ago|reply
I imagine the same applies here. You might say height isn't a factor, but only picked men over 6'.
[+] [-] theseatoms|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] derefr|10 years ago|reply
The best thing any social-networking app can do is to prune its userbase (i.e. ban people from the service) so that everyone who remains is actually using the service for its intended purpose. Then you don't need the initial extra step of both parties dancing around the question of "what are you on here looking for?"—if they're using the app, they're here for what the app is for.
[+] [-] freyr|10 years ago|reply
For ages, there have been sites catering to people looking for casual hook-ups. And they all run into the same problem -- very few women sign up for them. We could debate why this happens (most women don't need an app to have casual sex? The risk of casual sex with a stranger is much higher for women? There is a social stigma of being a woman looking for casual sex?). Once a site embraces being a hook-up app (e.g., Ashley Madison, Craiglist's casual encounters, etc.), it invariably ends up a vast sea of desperate men fighting over scraps.
Certainly, some men and women do use Tinder as a hookup app. Numbers suggest that the vast majority of women are all swiping right on the same very small minority of very physically attractive men. Whether women are hoping for a relationship with these men or looking for casual sex, I think it's safe to assume Tinder leads to a lot of hookups for these guys.
In any case, by removing the social stigma, Tinder became popular among a much larger segment of women compared to previous dating sites. It's not unusual in Los Angeles to see models on Tinder, which you just didn't seen on dating sites of the '90s and '00s.
[+] [-] psychometry|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beaner|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] minimaxir|10 years ago|reply
The League, in particular, has received quite a few accusations of being elitist/racist because of its selectivity, and the culture that it implies: http://www.buzzfeed.com/jarrylee/tinder-for-elites
The Dating Ring, a Y Combinator-funded dating startup, was also involved in some interesting Hacker News drama regarding spamming OKCupid users. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8454405
The dating industry in general is iffy; it's hard to isolate what works better and what doesn't when everyone is reluctant to release data.
[+] [-] vox_mollis|10 years ago|reply
The research on the topic is quite clear that across all ages, across all cultures, and across all races, heterosexual womens' unspoken but critically important criteria in mate selection is height.
[+] [-] freyr|10 years ago|reply
Your impression may be biased, in part, because it's easy to measure height and create studies based around it.
My friend is handsome and rather short, whereas I'm tall and average looking. Despite what the studies say, women throw themselves at him whenever we go out, and he has a ridiculous match rate on Tinder.
While height may be one of many factors influencing attraction, it is in no way an overriding critical factor as your statement suggests.
[+] [-] brighteyes|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stoffie|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zobzu|10 years ago|reply
"I found myself having semi-intelligent exchanges with adult men. On a dating site. This was new!"
Etc.
Also it's an ad for bumble. There's some interesting points, but as usual tired of filtering the pages of pure and repetitive noise.
[+] [-] hugh4|10 years ago|reply
Bumble's PR people deserve a pat on the back (and the profession of modern journalism deserves a kick in the head).
[+] [-] aaronbrethorst|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rajacombinator|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freyr|10 years ago|reply
It might have nothing to do with male/female dynamics, and may just have something to do with a better UI/UX (which Tinder seems to have lifted heavily from in their last update), or a lack of spam bots (seriously, a third of my Tinder matches are spam bots linking to the same URLs over and over -- how is this still an issue??).
Investors are likely considering the growth, rather than the theory. Whatever the underlying reason, from one user's perspective, Bumble's growth seems very impressive.
[+] [-] anentropic|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rjeli|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freyr|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dr_tldr|10 years ago|reply
Based just on what we know from OkCupid's excellent analytics blog back in the day, there's nothing about their business model that suggests they'll be successful. The founders are non-technical, the business model isn't data-driven, and there are lots of questionable design decisions throughout.
They're getting a large amount of positive press from people who share their apparent ideology, but there's no actual information being put out. They're closed source, privately held, and don't publish any meaningful usage statistics, so what do we know about them other than they have good PR people?
[+] [-] trenta45|10 years ago|reply
It appeals to the wrong people. The Nigerian prince scam works because it effectively filters anyone who wouldn't send money to a stranger emailing them out of the blue. Making Tinder "better" would draw in people who are not interested in what is essentially a hook-up app.
[+] [-] kyrre|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whichfawkes|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RyanZAG|10 years ago|reply
[1] http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
[+] [-] striking|10 years ago|reply
> The mainstream online dating technologies — OkCupid, Match.com, eHarmony — were all founded by men. So it’s no surprise that most popular dating products cater to male user problems.
The first part is true, but the second is non sequitur. I'd also like to ask: what is a "male user problem"? Although the wants of men and and women are somewhat different, I think it's probably a bad idea to paint genders with stereotypes in this way.
> Bumble’s landmark feature is that women must take the initiative on all conversations.
> He is most likely tired of reaching out blindly to women all the time,” she tells me. “Maybe he feels rejected. He feels ignored.”
This sounds very interesting, and good on the founders of the app for trying something new.
> Though she is extremely limited legally in talking about her experience at Tinder — they have since settled out of court — I wonder if her negative experiences there inform her dating theories now. Perhaps as a hint of Bumble’s influence, last week Tinder announced that users could now include details on education and work. [emphasis mine]
The author "wonders" if "perhaps" there is influence from Bumble on Tinder. In other words, this paragraph has no factual standing.
> If you are a male entrepreneur, approaching the problem of online dating from your point of view, the goal would be to provide male users with more women.
This statement seems presumptuous. It's not about males vs. females! It's about new ideas! Past platforms take a traditional view to dating, Bumble likes to change things up, and this is a novel thing. This piece turns a novel concept into gender politics and boils down entire companies to the gender of the person at their helm. Bumble won't succeed just because its founder is a woman: Bumble will succeed because it's a new concept from a different perspective, executed by someone who is smart and has experience. You're erasing Whitney Wolfe and writing "all women", which seems demeaning.
> This isn’t to say that all men approach online dating haphazardly, without goals or specific desires. But [...]
This comment isn't to say that this article is poorly written. But, look at all of the evidence above and think for yourself. (I mentioned another argument to look objective... but never gave it any evidence, so the reader will take my subjective perspective as fact.)
> But with these online dating innovations, the tech industry just might realize what they’ve long been ignoring: women’s experiences matter, too.
No one's ignoring women's experiences. The founders of the mainstream dating apps simply have their market and refuse to pivot because they have shareholders and investors that would rather they not change the model so immediately and drastically. What we have now is a result of a function of market forces rather than a function of gender.
I think the idea behind Bumble is very interesting, and I'm glad there are startups trying something new in the dating scene. I'd actually like to try one of these in due time. But this article just looks... bad. It turns independent, strong, intelligent people into the stereotype of "female entrepreneur".
[+] [-] pbhjpbhj|10 years ago|reply
>This statement seems presumptuous. It's not about males vs. females! It's about new ideas!
Yours is a very generous comment on a highly misandrist statement. The fact that a dating app creator/founder/owner is male doesn't mean that they must therefore have designed the app "to provide males with more women".
Even if they are using "online dating" euphemistically to refer to hook-up apps then they're making the classic mistake of assuming females aren't interested in sex and males are solely motivated by acquiring a quantity of it. Sure, subsets of those populations exist that fit the bill but the reverse associations also exist at some level.
Does this mean the founders of Bumble want "to provide females with more men" above all else?
[+] [-] ocfx|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] facepalm|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whichfawkes|10 years ago|reply
I'd argue that Tinder doesn't work, and this probably won't either.
[+] [-] richard_mcp|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikkom|10 years ago|reply
(the founder of the advertised app is the female cofounder you speak of)